A great deal of environmentalism and environmental scholarship is about change: not only how to achieve desired changes in the context of environmental problems, but what sort of change we need.
Source: Change
Featured image credits: Tipping Point (Kathy Hinde)
I’ve been introducing readers to my EcoTypes project here via brief excerpts. Now we get into quick glimpses of each EcoTypes axis: the first one is change. To read the full version with references and related resources, take the EcoTypes survey or email me!
A great deal of environmentalism and environmental scholarship is about change: not only how to achieve desired changes in the context of environmental problems, but what sort of change we need.…Running through many discussions about change is a fundamental debate over whether or not this change can happen incrementally. Many scholars believe that, ultimately, some very big changes need to take place if we wish to successfully address environmental issues; but it’s quite possible that we can achieve these changes step by step.…
Incremental change could also be supported via notions of tipping points…, whereby certain small changes result in social epidemics similar to disease outbreaks. Tipping points have reportedly been observed in a wide range of phenomena ranging from crime reduction to the popularity of a novel.…
Yet there can be several possible critiques of this incremental change approach, which suggest that more radical change is needed. The most obvious critique of step by step change is that, like many politically expedient approaches, it may not accomplish much, and in fact may lull us into a business-as-usual approach that avoids more fundamental changes. In this respect, critiques of incremental change are similar to critiques of individual-scale action…in arguing that political formations such as neoliberalism constrain our imagination of what is possible and needed.
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