[lbo-talk] Natural Capitalism

Damian White damianfwhite at gmail.com
Sat Apr 30 06:02:23 PDT 2011


I wrote a left-green-ish critique/review of the debate around Natural Capitalism and Factor Four about a decade ago. (D.F.White,2002 'A Green Industrial Revolution? Sustainable Technological Innovation in a Global Age', Environmental Politics 11(2): 1–26).I’ll happy dig out the pdf and send on to whoever wants it. It’s a problematic text in many, many ways. The social science underpinning the text is lite - standard market friendly green management written for sunny business school types mixed with a bit of technological determinism . As Gar suggests, it’s all stripped of any interest in the politics of technology and design that Commoner (and Bookchin brought to the debate in the 60s and 70s. Lovins is nevertheless an interesting figure and he and his co-authors in the book length version did a good job of popularizing industrial ecology and a range of other eco-tech and eco-design possibilities that are perfectly sane and should be incorporated into any viable leftist future project. It’s a shame that so much of the ecological left today is still so mired in various modes of Malthusianism, catastrophism, technophobia or social reductionism that it can’t make intelligent recuperative critiques of this literature.

Damian White

Associate Professor of Sociology,

Department of History, Philosophy and the Social Sciences,

The Rhode Island School of Design,

http://departments.risd.edu/hpss/White.html

damianfwhite at gmail.com



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