The Environmental Endgame
Mainstream Economics, Ecological Disaster, and Human Survival
Publication Year: 2006
In this groundbreaking book, Robert L. Nadeau warns that we have moved menacingly close to a global environmental catastrophe and that to evade this fate we must stop drawing a distinction between issues that are "environmental" or "scientific" and those that reside in the sphere of "real life." Although scientists have attempted to bring ecological concerns to the forefront of global issues, problems are rarely communicated in ways that can be readily understood by those outside the scientific community.
Bringing together perspectives from a variety of disciplines, including economics, politics, biology, and the history of science, The Environmental Endgame articulates the concerns of scientists in a way that they become the real-life, tangible concerns of people around the world. Nadeau asserts that we have entered a new phase of human history that cannot be one of separation and division but must be one of cooperation and mutual goals.
Nadeau demonstrates that our current governmental and financial institutions, based on neoclassical economics, lack the mechanisms for implementing viable solutions to large-scale crises. Such steps cannot be taken without moving beyond the power politics of the nation-state system. The book concludes with a call to view the natural world as part of humanity, not separate from it. This unifying worldview would be a catalyst for implementing the international government organizations necessary to resolving the crisis.
The Environmental Endgame is an ambitious and timely book that will change the way we think about our economy, our government, and the environment. It should be read by everyone who cares about the pervasive neglect and abuse of planet Earth and wants to know what can be done about it.
Published by: Rutgers University Press
Title Page, Copyright
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pp. i-iv
Contents
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pp. vii-
Introduction
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pp. ix-xv
This book convincingly demonstrates that the crisis in the global environment is rapidly becoming a zero-sum endgame in which the winners or losers could be all of the humanity, but it also promises to reveal how this game can be won. Obviously, this discussion is not the final word on what will be required to resolve this crisis, and any author who claims to...
Chapter 1: The Making of the Godgame: Winners Take All
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pp. 1-21
The “Godgame,” the in-group term for an online computer game that over one hundred software engineers are developing at Electronic Arts, the industry leader in the computer game business, is not designed for use by testosterone-driven males under the age of twenty-five. The designated players are social scientists, and their interactive playing field is a virtual...
Chapter 2: Godgames at the Pentagon: The New Terms of Human Survival
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pp. 22-45
It is well known that strategic planners at the Pentagon use some of the most sophisticated computer systems in the world to play war games. These interactive games, which are similar in design and function to the Godgame described in the previous chapter, simulate armed conflicts between sovereign nation-states. The challenge to the players is to minimize threats...
Chapter 3: A New View of Nature: Parts and Wholes in Biological Reality
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pp. 46-60
Imagine that a computer game like the Godgame described in the first chapter is available for home use. Assume that the players of this game can view interactions between human and environmental systems from the same godlike perspective in outer space and can zoom in and out at will to observe these interactions from the global to local levels. If a user zooms...
Chapter 4: The Amazing Gift of Language: The Emergence of Fully Conscious Humans
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pp. 61-80
Suppose that you are still playing the Godgame described at the beginning of the previous chapter on your home computer and the following question appears on the screen: “What adaptive trait allowed one species among the millions that have existed on this planet to live in environments that were not species-specific, increase its numbers to 6.4 billion...
Chapter 5: The Gods of the Soulless Machine: Newtonian Physics, Metaphysics, and Natural Laws
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pp. 81-101
Let us now imagine that you have been playing the Godgame on your home computer for some time and have now have arrived at the phase of the game where the players are challenged to coordinate large-scale human activities in environmentally responsible ways on a global or planetary scale. At this point, another question appears on the screen...
Chapter 6: The God with the Invisible Hand: Neoclassical Economics and Mid-Nineteenth-Century Physics
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pp. 102-123
The causes of the crisis in the global environment may be staggeringly complex, but the most effective way to deal with it in economic terms seems rather obvious. We must use scientifically valid measures of the damage done to the global environment by large-scale economic activities as a basis for assessing the costs of this damage, and we must develop...
Chapter 7: A Green Thumb on the Invisible Hand: Environmental Economics and Ecological Economics
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pp. 124-145
The prospects of displacing neoclassical economics with an environmentally responsible economic theory would be greatly enhanced if mainstream economists were willing to recognize and come to terms with a scientifically valid truth—there is no basis in the neoclassical economic paradigm for realistically assessing the environmental costs of economic activities...
Chapter 8: An Unnatural Religion: The Telos of the Market Consensus
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pp. 146-164
The eighteenth-century authors of new narratives about democratic systems of government and free-market economies posited the existence of two sets of natural laws that they viewed as ontologically equivalent to the laws of Newtonian physics. They assumed that one set of natural laws governed the movement and interaction of people in political reality and...
Chapter 9: The Endgame: Resolving the Crisis in the Global Environment
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pp. 165-187
The business-as-usual approach to resolving the environmental crisis is predicated on the following list of now familiar assumptions: (1) the lawful or lawlike dynamics of free-market systems can resolve virtually all environmental problems; (2) these dynamics will necessarily result in technological solutions; (3) governments should deal only with those environmental...
Notes
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pp. 189-200
Index
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pp. 201-211
About the Author
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pp. 213-
Robert Nadeau is an interdisciplinary scholar who has attempted throughout his career to bridge the gap between the two cultures of humanists-social scientists and scientists-engineers. He has published books in the humanities, the social sciences, and the hard sciences in areas as diverse as artificial intelligence computing, quantum physics, biology...
E-ISBN-13: 9780813539393
E-ISBN-10: 0813539390
Print-ISBN-13: 9780813538129
Page Count: 232
Publication Year: 2006
