The politics of actually existing unsustainability

"Going against both the naive techno-optimism of 'greening business as usual' and a resurgent 'catastrophism' within green thinking and politics, The Politics of Unsustainability offers an analysis of the causes of unsustainability and diminished human flourishing. It makes a case for seeing that it is profound and deepening unsustainability and growing injustice that characterises the modern world, and that therefore the focus of green or other progressive thinking should shift from its current framing in terms of 'sustainability', 'sustainable development', and 'theories of justice'. The book locates the causes of unsustainability in dominant capitalist modes of production, debt-based consumer culture, the imperative for orthodox economic growth, and the dominant ideology of neo-classical economics. At the level of developing a progressive and critical theoretical understanding of unsustainability, it argues for the importance of integrating vulnerability, which has been largely neglected by both mainstream western political theory and analyses of the current global ecological crisis. It suggests that valuable insights into the causes of and alternatives to unsustainability can b