Localized Responses to Unsustainable Growth

As another IPCC report about the causes and effects of climate change is under consideration by decision-makers everywhere, many question the scale of action best able to bolster resilience in the face of environmental crises and the always contested tragedy of the commons. How can individuals and societies live well under the constraints of a finite environment? This question points to the entanglement between local and global dynamics, endogenous and exogenous factors, and the intensification of multi-scale experiments in how to interpret and implement the slogan “think globally, act locally.”

Three recent books attempt to provide responses in this debate. In The Localization Reader: Adapting to the Coming Downshift, editors Raymond De Young and Thomas Princen gather a collection of interdisciplinary historic and contemporary texts to advocate for the downscaling of human activities and the necessity of preparing for the consequences of downscaling through “positive localization.” Also focused on the local, Robert Scruton, in How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism, puts forward a conservative response to environmental problems, rooted in territorial attachment and homescape. Finally, in Citizen Participation in Global Environmental Governance, Mikko Rask, Richard Worthington, and Minna Lammi contribute detailed accounts of a specific case of place-based citizen mobilization with regard to influencing environmental global policy-making, the 2009 World Wide Views on Global Warming (WWViews). All three books ascertain the root of the environmental crisis, propose solutions, and address challenges that may arise.

The Localization Reader contextualizes and reframes the changing relationship between humans and the finite planet they inhabit. It opens an interdisciplinary conversation about designing and transitioning to a resource-constrained future based on “positive localization.” Simply defined as “a process of social change pointing towards localities” (p. xvii), positive localization is centered on place specificity and the everyday. More important, the editors use the concept of localization to demonstrate that consumerism and commercialism cannot continue to grow in the face of finite resources, and to facilitate the necessary and already ongoing sustainable adaptation of institutions and individuals to the limits of natural systems. The edited volume not only relies on scholars from various disciplines, including sociology, political science, geography, biophysics, psychology, and landscape architecture, but also features writings by field analysts, practitioners and policy-makers, as well as environmental entrepreneurs and even farmers. All but three contributions have been adapted from previously published works. But far from being irrelevant, the assemblage of readings, covering over a century of scholarship on place-based sustainability, allows the reader to trace the intellectual trajectory of the philosophical movement, as well as become acquainted with contextualized experiments that have delved into the practical aspects of the localization transition over time. From the oldest (Josiah Royce’s 1908 piece on the province as the appropriate scale for sustainability) to first publications on the practices of ecovillages throughout the world, the bounded system of fossil fuel dependence, and the final invitation to adopt the principles of localization that concludes the book, the volume establishes a compelling correspondence among numerous readings over time. It is a valuable addition to the literature, particularly suited to newcomers to the debate and practices of the localization project.

In How to Think Seriously about the Planet, Roger Scruton also rejects centralized large-scale and top-down projects as inadequate to solving contemporary environmental challenges. He invites environmentalists to consider conservatism as the perspective able to trigger environmental justice and individual intergenerational accountability. Backed by his interpretation of a remarkably rich and abundant set of historical, literary, artistic, and philosophical references, from Kant and Rawls to Stendhal and Rilke, Scruton centers his Burkean critique of the radical environmental movement around the concept of home and love of home, oikophilia. He uses this concept to further explore concepts in the...