Although climate change has become the dominant
concern of the twenty-first century, global powers
refuse to implement the changes necessary to reverse
these trends. Instead, they have neoliberalized nature
and climate change politics and discourse, and there are
indications of a more virulent strain of capital
accumulation on the horizon. Adrian Parr calls attention
to the problematic socioeconomic conditions of
neoliberal capitalism underpinning the world's
environmental challenges, and she argues that, until we
grasp the implications of neoliberalism's interference
in climate change talks and policy, humanity is on track
to an irreversible crisis. Parr not only exposes the
global failure to produce equitable political options
for environmental regulation, but she also breaks down
the dominant political paradigms hindering the discovery
of viable alternatives. She highlights the
neoliberalization of nature in the development of green
technologies, land use, dietary habits, reproductive
practices, consumption patterns, design strategies, and
media. She dismisses the notion that the free market can
solve debilitating environmental degradation and climate
change as nothing more than a political ghost emptied of
its collective aspirations. Decrying what she perceives
as a failure of the human imagination and an
impoverishment of political institutions, Parr ruminates
on the nature of change and existence in the absence of
a future. The sustainability movement, she contends,
must engage more aggressively with the logic and
cultural manifestations of consumer economics to take
hold of a more transformative politics. If the
economically powerful continue to monopolize the meaning
of environmental change, she warns, new and more
promising collective solutions will fail to take
root.
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