Description

By William B. Meyer

Ecomodernism: Technology, Politics and the Climate Crisis by Jonathan Symons (2019), 224pp., £50 (hardback), £15 (paperback) Polity Press, Cambridge, ISBN: 978-1-509-53120-2

Ecomodernism is a highly ambitious book. Jonathan Symons, a senior lecturer in politics and international relations at Australia’s Macquarie University, defines and defends an ‘ecomodernist’ understanding of the relations between the environment and human society. He then uses that framework to construct a programme for responding to the most threatening, far-reaching, and seemingly intractable of contemporary environmental problems: global climate change resulting from the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. To any reader who accepts current categories, paradigms and alignments as given, the book may seem hopelessly muddled and self-contradictory. But the reader who approaches Ecomodernism with an open mind may find that, by the end, it is the accepted categories that seem inconsistent. Indeed, they may seem worse than that, actual barriers to an accurate understanding of one of the world’s most urgent challenges and to an effective response to it.

page: 205 – 210
Prometheus: Critical Studies in Innovation Volume 37, Issue 2
SKU: 370212