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Reviewed by:
  • Global Ecopolitics: Crisis, Governance, and Justice by Peter J. Stoett
  • Stephanie Rutherford
Peter J. Stoett, Global Ecopolitics: Crisis, Governance, and Justice (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2012)

The sixth extinction. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Peak oil. Peak soil. The Arctic ozone hole. Catastrophic climate change. Widespread deforestation. This is the lexicon of our current environmental moment. Each of these concerns, among many others, is described in Peter J. Stoett’s Global Ecopolitics: Crisis, Governance, and Justice, a book which demonstrates both the dramatic failure and sometimes inspirational successes of global environmental governanace. I finished reading Global Ecopolitics on a long car ride from my home in Toronto to my cottage in the Gatineau Hills of Western Quebec. It is a horrible drive along the highway corridors that characterize much of southeastern Ontario, one that demonstrates some of the worst excesses of our fossil fuel-dependant culture and consumer lifestyle. But it is also a drive that ends in one of Canada’s most stunning landscapes. As I read, it was hard not to see the connections to Stoett’s text. In [End Page 405] this book, Stoett threads a narrative that is at once both depressing and optimistic. It charts the challenges in global environmental governance while at the same time suggesting pathways for change that are neither romantic nor unrealistic. In the end, the book offers a valuable primer about the nature of ecopolitics and how we might act for change.

The main argument of Global Ecopolitics is that when dealing with the global environmental challenges we presently face, there is need for multilayered adaptive governance based on “information, flexibility, responsiveness, and legitimacy,” (22) and predicated on environmental and social justice. To make this argument, Stoett examines a broad cross-section of issues in global environmental politics, with substantive chapters on biodiversity and wild-life, deforestation and desertification, climate change, damage to marine environments, hazardous waste, war and the environment, and invasive species. Each issue chapter is loosely framed by Stoett’s four-fold indicators of success in global ecopolitics: “institutional and legal development; ecological improvement, cognitive impact, and democratic legitimacy and environmental justice.” (40)

One of the real strengths of this book is its focus on the last indicator. Stoett insists on using environmental justice as a frame to evaluate global ecopolitics. It allows him to reframe some of the same subjects that are found in every textbook in global environmental politics in a new light, offering a different register of analysis not only in terms of how these problems are made but what tools are needed for their amelioration. So while the book is largely synthetic, this emphasis on questions of power, resource use, and justice lends something disctinctly new to the debates and set it apart from competing texts in the field.

In my view, while each issue chapter presents an accomplished survey of the field, the best are found toward the latter half of the book: Chapter 8 on ecocide, or the environmental impacts of militarism, and Chapter 9 on the need for a convention around invasive alien species. The strength in these chapters is that they diverge from what is commonly found in such survey books, opening up different conversations around what can and should be included in the purview of global environmental politics. This is particularly the case with the short chapter on militarism and ecocide, which he frames within the context of environmental justice. Stoett convincing elaborates on the ways in which the Reponsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine might be recast to consider the prevention environmental harm as part of a state’s obligation to its citizens. As such, this chapter offers something new to the terrain of global environmental governance. Similarly, Chapter 9 is strong because it concerns itself with an issue which, for a long time, was on the margins of global environmental policy: invasive alien species. Thought to be covered by myriad treaties like the Convention on Biological Diversity or the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures, Stoett demonstates that the problem of bioinvasion is bigger than any of these efforts in international governance. In doing so, he...

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