It’s the Development, Stupid ! or How Can we Modernize Modernization ?

Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s book has somewhat infuriated their fellow conservationists, but it tackles just the right set of philosophical questions about the psycho social limis to be put on the notions of limits to growth and to development. The paper follows the authors in their exploration of the right set of political passions necessary to extract political ecology from its obsession with nature. It argues that it is not at the moment when humans and non humans finally clearly come into the same arenas that the notion of environment should be revived to distinguish again between a natural realm to be protected and a human realm to be shamed for its past deeds. In effect, the question is to resume modernization by accepting to take up the burden that the first modernizations had simultaneously created and denied.