Planet Dialectics: Explorations in Environment and Development

Amid the hubbub of daily life and the seemingly endless bounty of capitalism, it’s easy to forget that all human action must be played out within our planet’s limitations. Any hope of infinity—of infinite growth, infinite prosperity, and the like—is an illusion. Yet that very acknowledgment of the earth’s limits, highlighted by environmentalists for decades, has been assimilated almost seamlessly into the rhetoric, dynamics, and power structures of development.
Wolfgang Sachs predicted as much nearly twenty years ago in Planet Dialectics, his now-classic collection of trenchant and elegant explorations of the crisis inherent in the West’s relationship to nature and social justice. Looking specifically at such key concepts as efficiency, speed, globalization, sustainability, and development, Sachs shows that our current economic system is utterly incompatible with true sustainability and the quest for justice among the world’s people. Only by taking back the concepts of sustainability and justice, and acknowledging that they demand wholesale change to the West’s growth-obsessed economics, can we make real change for good in the world.