On Sustainabilization: Global Inequalities, Digital Habitats, and Material Governance - A Critical Ecology

Abstract

This paper explores how the recent turn to the Anthropocene in many environmental and political debates appears, first, to mystify the characteristics of the humans who are transforming the planet Earth on a biophysical scale in geological time, and, second, to justify the importance of new planetary eco–managerial interventions to administer the costs and benefits of these ecological events in the most efficient manner possible. As a result, the discourses of sustainability and resilience amid these worldwide changes appear to operate with increasingly conservative political agendas. On the one hand, they legitimate a strange fusion of ecological sustainability and economic development in green modernization programs, which could considered new policies for “sustainabilization.” Yet, on the other hand, these codes of green performativity also work to preserve the historically inequitable distribution of wealth, technology, and power for those social forces that have caused the most ecological destruction around the world over the past 250 years.