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EcoTypes: Exploring Environmental Ideas

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Future

FIRST PUBLISHED December 30, 2016

Future

Is our ecological future most likely one of looming crisis, or of possibility for positive change?

Related main theme: Action (Small/Big)

 


Survey Items


Survey Results


Deep Dive

What sort of future awaits us? The EcoTypes Future axis addresses our underlying sense of hopelessness vs. hope, of apocalyptic vs optimistic views, as we face our collective future on this planet.

Survey Items

EcoTypesAxisArrow-GreenNoVert

Crisis Pole

  • It is hard to imagine a way out of severe environmental crisis in future.
  • Future ecological disaster is almost a certainty at this point, no matter what people try to do.

Possibility Pole

  • There are many opportunities for us to solve environmental problems in future; crisis is not inevitable.
  • I’m an optimist about possibilities for people to solve environmental problems and avert disaster in future.

Survey Results

This histogram shows the overall distribution of averaged responses, from fall 2018 to now, to the survey statements above. Which side are most responses on? Is there general agreement or disagreement among responses so far?

How do your own responses compare with these overall results? To answer this question, find the personal report you received by email and compare your average response to this axis.

Do most respondents agree with you? Disagree with you? Are most responses to the right or the left of you? What does this say about your responses as compared with overall responses?

Deep Dive

Extended Overview
Cited References
Extended Overview

Proclamations of impending crisis have been central to North American environmentalism since its reawakening in the 1960s and 1970s. Best-selling books such as The Population Bomb (Ehrlich 1968) and The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1974) predicted upcoming tragedy on a massive scale unless appropriate measures were taken immediately. These major contributors to the early environmental movement have often repeated their proclamations of doom in recent years (e.g., Ehrlich and Ehrlich 2013), and some have gone so far as to claim that we are already in the times of severe crisis they earlier predicted (Meadows et al. 1992; 2004).

Yet there has always been a more hopeful tone to environmentalism as well, providing recommended actions for saving the planet from this impending crisis. As one example, early calls for sustainable development (WCED 1987) are by now mainstream discourse (Redclift 2005), and the popularity of the very notion of sustainability suggests possibilities for a brighter future. And some commentators have even asserted that our ecological future is much less gloomy than classic environmentalists feared (Simon 1996; Lomborg 2001).

This EcoTypes axis concerns the span of hopeful (“cornucopian“) to apocalyptic senses of the future. (The term apocalypse actually denotes the uncovering or revealing of a hidden truth, but it has become synonymous with a sense of impending future crisis.) The tension between these two poles has been a recurrent theme in environmental thought, with one famous early story being the wager between environmentalist Paul Ehrlich and economist Julian Simon (known simply as The Bet; see Sabin 2013) over the potentially rising price of metals in the 1980s as a measurable indicator of future crisis—a wager Ehrlich lost.

It is perhaps no surprise that environmentalism has generally remained on the apocalyptic side of this axis: from its early embrace of Malthusian proclamations of resource scarcity to recent claims of imminent climate crisis (e.g., Gore 2005), environmentalism seems to represent the broader sense of end times that has pervaded modern societies, even standard political discourse (Žižek 2010, Swyngedouw 2013). The apocalyptic tendencies of environmentalists have been documented empirically for some time (e.g., Cotgrove 1982, Proctor and Berry 2011), and an apocalyptic sense of the future is understood as key to environmentalism in standard typologies (Dunlap et al. 2000; see the typologies page for an overview), which include statements such as “If things continue on their present course, we will soon experience a major ecological catastrophe.”

Yet there are legitimate grounds for discussion and debate over the potential for a hopeful vs. apocalyptic future. As one recent example, the ecomodernism movement has flatly rejected an apocalyptic sense of the future, arguing in releasing its manifesto that “…both human prosperity and an ecologically vibrant planet are not only possible, but also inseparable.…we embrace an optimistic view toward human capacities and the future” (see also e.g. DeFries et al. 2012). Perhaps there is still reason to be hopeful about our ecological future, no matter how dire the predictions of environmentalists in past.

Cited References
371577 future items 1 author asc https://jimproctor.us/ecotypes/wp-content/plugins/zotpress/
DeFries, Ruth S. et al. 2012. “Planetary Opportunities: A Social Contract for Global Change Science to Contribute to a Sustainable Future.” BioScience 62 (6): 603–6. https://doi.org/10.1525/bio.2012.62.6.11.
Dunlap, Riley E., Kent D. Van Liere, Angela G. Mertig, and Robert Emmet Jones. 2000. “New Trends in Measuring Environmental Attitudes: Measuring Endorsement of the New Ecological Paradigm: A Revised Nep Scale.” Journal of Social Issues 56 (3): 425–42. https://doi.org/10.1111/0022-4537.00176.
Ehrlich, Paul R. 1968. The Population Bomb. London: Ballantine Books.
Ehrlich, P. R., and A. H. Ehrlich. 2013. “Can a Collapse of Global Civilization Be Avoided?” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 280 (1754): 20122845–20122845. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2012.2845.
Gore, Al. 2006. An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do about It. New York: Rodale. https://books.google.com/books?id=93M6C24ac9MC.
Lomborg, Bjørn. 2001. The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Meadows, Donella H., Dennis L. Meadows, and Jørgen Randers. 1992. Beyond the Limits: Confronting Global Collapse, Envisioning a Sustainable Future. Post Mills, VT: Chelsea Green PubCo.
Meadows, Donella H., Jørgen Randers, and Dennis L. Meadows. 2004. The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update. Post Mills, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing.
Meadows, Donella H., Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William W. Behrens. 1974. The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. New York: Universe Books.
Proctor, James D., and Evan Berry. 2011. “Ecotopian Exceptionalism.” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 5 (2): 145–63. https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.v5i2.145.
Redclift, Michael. 2005. “Sustainable Development (1987-2005): An Oxymoron Comes of Age.” Sustainable Development 13 (4): 212–27. https://doi.org/10.1002/sd.281.
Sabin, Paul. 2013. The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble over Earth’s Future. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Simon, Julian Lincoln. 1996. The Ultimate Resource 2. Rev. ed. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Cotgrove, Stephen F. 1982. Catastrophe or Cornucopia: The Environment, Politics, and the Future. Chichester: Wiley.
Swyngedouw, Erik. 2013. “Apocalypse Now! Fear and Doomsday Pleasures.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 24 (1): 9–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2012.759252.
WCED. 1987. Our Common Future: Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development. New York: Oxford University Press.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2010. Living in the End Times. London: Verso.

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