Books by John M Meyer
Multi, Inter-, Transdisciplinary are perennial topics in our attempts to address environmental ch... more Multi, Inter-, Transdisciplinary are perennial topics in our attempts to address environmental challenges. How do we actually work together across our disciplinary borders? What are the promises and pitfalls of such work?
Environmentalism is dead; long live environmentalism! In recent years, there have been many-and d... more Environmentalism is dead; long live environmentalism! In recent years, there have been many-and disparate-internal criticisms of environmentalism in the postindustrial societies of North America, Europe, and Australasia: it is too reliant upon technocratic policy, its constituency is too white, male, and middle class, its rhetoric and framing is too gloomy, its concerns are expressed too abstractly, its solutions too focused on individual consumer choices and the individualization of responsibility. These expressions of dissatisfaction, proclamations of death, and calls for transformation have been expressed by both movement activists and scholars. Despite differences among these criticisms, they have generated distinctive ways of confronting challenges of environment and sustainability and also highlighted new ways of analyzing and understanding them.
This book addresses a central dilemma facing efforts to promote environmental sustainability: whi... more This book addresses a central dilemma facing efforts to promote environmental sustainability: while environmental challenges including climate change threaten the very fabric of our lives, ambitious efforts to address these rarely resonate with the everyday concerns and ideas most pressing to citizens. The book analyzes both the opportunities and constraints facing such efforts to promote environmental sustainability. I first theorize an approach to “contested materiality” and then draw upon this to engage values embedded in everyday practices – including land use, automobility, and householding – in affluent postindustrial societies. The aim is to open up new ways of thinking about property, freedom, and citizenship that might foster a more resonant and expansive political imagination.
Our editorial team has commissioned over forty authors, most internationally prominent. We antic... more Our editorial team has commissioned over forty authors, most internationally prominent. We anticipate a volume that will become both a standard reference and an exploration of the directions that the field might pursue in the future. As a whole, the handbook will reflect environmental political theory’s interdisciplinary character, its engagement with canonical theorists and contemporary political problems, its diversity of theoretical approaches, and its attention to the intersection of the environmental and the political from the local to the global.
The idea of sacrifice is the unspoken issue of environmental politics. Politicians, the media, an... more The idea of sacrifice is the unspoken issue of environmental politics. Politicians, the media, and many environmentalists assume that well-off populations won’t make sacrifices now for future environmental benefits and won’t change their patterns and perceptions of consumption to make ecological room for the world’s three billion or so poor eager to improve their standard of living. The Environmental Politics of Sacrifice challenges these assumptions, arguing that they limit our policy options, weaken our ability to imagine bold action for change, and blind us to the ways sacrifice already figures in everyday life. The concept of sacrifice has been curiously unexamined in both activist and academic conversations about environmental politics, and this book is the first to confront it directly. The chapters bring a variety of disciplinary perspectives to the topic. Contributors offer alternatives to the conventional wisdom on sacrifice; identify connections between sacrifice and human fulfillment in everyday life, finding such concrete examples as parents’ sacrifices in raising children, religious practice, artists’ pursuit of their art, and soldiers and policemen who risk their lives to do their jobs; and examine particular policies and practices that shape our understanding of environmental problems, including the carbon tax, incentives for cyclists, and the perils of green consumption. The Environmental Politics of Sacrifice puts “sacrifice” firmly into the conversation about effective environmental politics and policies, insisting that activists and scholars do more than change the subject when the idea is introduced.
Contributors: Peter Cannavò, Shane Gunster, Cheryl Hall, Karen Litfin, Michael Maniates, John M. Meyer, Simon Nicholson, Anna Peterson, Thomas Princen, Sudhir Chella Rajan, Paul Wapner, Justin Williams
Journal articles and Book Chapters by John M Meyer
The Environmental Politics of Sacrifice, 2010
Oxford Handbook of Political Theory, 2006
This article examines the relation between political theory and environmental policy. It describe... more This article examines the relation between political theory and environmental policy. It describes characteristics that seem to distinguish contemporary environmental political theory and evaluates how the project of environmental political theory might be usefully construed in the future. It suggests that the work of contemporary environmental political theory is to grapple with the relative merits of a wide variety of potential strategies for reconciling forms of democracy and environmentalism. It explains that the question of democracy's relationship to environmental concern is a multifaceted one that has no easy, self-congratulatory answers.
Critical analysis of Shellenberger and Nordhaus' *Break Through* book. Originally prepared for e... more Critical analysis of Shellenberger and Nordhaus' *Break Through* book. Originally prepared for edited book that was never published. An revised and updated version of my analysis of postmaterialism appears as Chapter 3 in Engaging the Everyday.
Environmental Politics, 2011
The shifting relationship between environmental political theorists and liberalism is examined, m... more The shifting relationship between environmental political theorists and liberalism is examined, moving from a total critique to an increasingly nuanced engagement. The argument here is neither for nor against the possibility of ‘greening' liberalism per se. Instead, it is argued that the preoccupation with ‘liberalism' in this context is a category mistake based upon the reification of liberalism as not just a political philosophy, but a characterisation of citizen values and practices in contemporary liberal democratic societies. A different way of thinking about the role and task of environmental political theory and social criticism is proposed. The key is to ask whether a theoretical argument resonates with citizens, not whether it can be reconciled with liberalism.
Environmental Politics, 2008
This article examines the challenges and opportunities faced by US environmental movements, in li... more This article examines the challenges and opportunities faced by US environmental movements, in light of contemporary efforts to address climate change. The author identifies and describes two discourses, which he terms paternalism and populism. These need not describe distinct movements, but reflect differing impulses and ways of engaging the public that are available to environmentalists of various stripes. Discourses are explored through their divergent notions of both environmentalist identity and the relation of environmental concern to the experiences of everyday life.
Political Theory, 2009
An absolutist concept of property has the power to shape and constrain the public imagination. Li... more An absolutist concept of property has the power to shape and constrain the public imagination. Libertarian theorists normatively embrace this concept. Yet its influence extends far beyond these proponents, shaping the views of an otherwise diverse array of theorists and activists. This limits the ability of environmentalists, among others, to respond coherently to challenges from property rights advocates in the U.S. I sketch an alternative concept-rooted in practice-that understands private property as necessarily embedded in social and ecological relations, rather than constrained by these relations. I argue that this concept can prefigure a more robust environmentalism.
Environmental Values in a Globalizing World (Book)
The Occasional Papers of the School of Social Science are versions of talks given at the School's... more The Occasional Papers of the School of Social Science are versions of talks given at the School's weekly Thursday Seminar. At these seminars, Members present work-in-progress and then take questions. There is often lively conversation and debate, some of which will be included with the papers. We have chosen papers we thought would be of interest to a broad audience. Our aim is to capture some part of the cross-disciplinary conversations that are the mark of the School's programs. While Members are drawn from specific disciplines of the social sciences-anthropology, economics, sociology and political science-as well as history, philosophy, literature and law, the School encourages new approaches that arise from exposure to different forms of interpretation. The papers in this series differ widely in their topics, methods, and disciplines. Yet they concur in a broadly humanistic attempt to understand how, and under what conditions, the concepts that order experience in different cultures and societies are produced, and how they change.
Journal of Political Philosophy, 2000
A DRAMATIC change is under way in the crops farmers grow and hence the food we all eat. At the co... more A DRAMATIC change is under way in the crops farmers grow and hence the food we all eat. At the core of this change is the emergence into the mainstream of transgenic plants and animalsÐthose that have been engineered to include the genetic material of more than one species. This change is taking place with breathtaking rapidity. To understand and evaluate this change requires that we situate it within the philosophy of the liberal state that has fostered its development. While the science of genetic engineering itself is not necessarily dependent upon a liberal regime, both its head-spinningly swift development and many of its particular applications are largely a consequence of the practice of granting exclusive private property rightsÐpatentsÐto genetically engineered life forms. These patents represent a signi®cant extension of the reach of an absolutist conception of liberal property rights, an extension that for the ®rst time subjects forms of lifeÐnot merely individual plants and animalsÐto ownership and commodi®cation in the dominion of the market.
Polity, 1997
Later interpreters have usually described Gifford Pinchot and John Muir as defining two different... more Later interpreters have usually described Gifford Pinchot and John Muir as defining two different conceptions of nature: "conservationism" and "preservationism." While the difference between these conceptions is significant, it plays a much less central role in guiding practical proposals than is typically assumed. This article highlights the independent influence and importance of contrasting conceptions of politics, and of the appropriate division between public and private worlds, to shaping the arguments and proposals of these two early environmentalist leaders. This new understanding permits a reinterpretation of the commonalities and disagreements between Muir and Pinchot and raises a new set of questions for environmentalism and American political thought.
Other essays by John M Meyer
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, 2008
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Books by John M Meyer
Contributors: Peter Cannavò, Shane Gunster, Cheryl Hall, Karen Litfin, Michael Maniates, John M. Meyer, Simon Nicholson, Anna Peterson, Thomas Princen, Sudhir Chella Rajan, Paul Wapner, Justin Williams
Journal articles and Book Chapters by John M Meyer
Other essays by John M Meyer
Contributors: Peter Cannavò, Shane Gunster, Cheryl Hall, Karen Litfin, Michael Maniates, John M. Meyer, Simon Nicholson, Anna Peterson, Thomas Princen, Sudhir Chella Rajan, Paul Wapner, Justin Williams