"Questions of socio-environmental sustainability are fundamentally political questions revolving around attempts to tease out who (or what) gains from and who pays for, who benefits from and who suffers (and in what ways) from particular processes of metabolic circulatory change. Such politicisation seeks answers to questions about what or who needs to be sustained and how this can be maintained or achieved. This includes naming socioenvironmental trajectories, enrolling them in a political process that is radically differentiated and oppositional. Clearly, Bush’s notion of and desire for sustainability is not that of a Chinese peasant, a maquiladora woman worker or a Greenpeace activist. It is important to unravel the nature of the social relationships that unfold between individuals and social groups and how these, in turn, are mediated by and structured through processes of socioecological change. In other words, environmental transformation is not independent from class, gender, ethnic, or other power struggles. Socio-ecological ‘sustainability’ can only be achieved by means of a democratically (in the sense of a genuine political space) organised process of socio-environmental (re)-construction. The political program is to enhance the democratic content of socio-environmental construction by means of identifying the strategies through which a more equitable distribution of social power and a democratically more genuine mode of the production of natures can be achieved. A radical socio-environmental political programme, therefore, has to crystallise around imagining new ways to organise processes of socio-metabolic transformation. This requires first of all a radical re-politicisation of the ‘economic’ as it is exactly the latter that structures socio-metabolic processes. But this is predicated upon traversing the fantasy that the ‘economic’ is the determining instance of the political. Recapturing the political mains foregrounding the political arena as the decisive material and symbolic space, as the space from which different socio-environmental futures can be imagined, fought over, and constructed. This, of course, turns the question of sustainability radically to a question of democracy and the recuperation of the horizon of democracy as the terrain for the cultivation of conflict and the naming of different socio-environmental futures."
Posted on: Sun, 06 Oct 2013 05:42:29 +0000
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