Environmental Change and the World's Futures

This collection investigates the changing socially-based perceptions of uncertain futures through the lenses of ecologies, ontologies and mythologies from a variety of cultural perspectives involving different ways of understanding. The main themes are intellectual and speculative engagements with ecological change, the politics of engagement, environmental change in specific places and cultures, body and psyche, and technological mythology. While climate change looms large in the global context, for farmers in Nepal the most important immediate factor is the quality of the soil. Governance is considered in relation to management of tuna fisheries and Jungian psychology is brought to bear on death and apocalyptic visions. I found two of the most interesting essays by Marshall, the first on ecological complexity and ethics of disorder where I was surprised to find an extensive discussion of the ethics of Albert Schweitzer, who recognised the importance of an ethical attitude in the face of the uncertainty and disorder of the natural world. We ourselves are participants in a larger process that cannot simply be controlled. This theme of control reappears in the second essay on geo-engineering within current free market cultural complex where it is supposed that it is easier to control the natural world than to change society - an attitude subjected to more radical criticism in the book immediately below. Formulating issues in terms of problems invites thinking in terms of solutions for avoidance through imagining. It is indeed questionable whether the free market can resolve all the challenges created by itself, since it privileges its own particular structure of thinking.