Wednesday 2 March 2011

Prof.Timothy O’Riordan - A Sustainability Renaissance through the Depression

We seem to be passing through four phases:
• Rejection of the scale of the crisis and a misguided response, which underlaid the Lehman Brothers collapse in September of last year. This profoundly destabilizing beginning period, which is nearly over, exacerbated the crisis.
• Restoration of the old economic order but with more hands-on regulation. Such restoration will not be possible in a world of depleted ecosystem services and diminishing natural resources, yet it is the primary aim of the G20 process.
• Revelation that some completely new “art of living” must be created, beyond belt-tightening. Speculative examples of how to move forward are just beginning to surface in the media and special reports.1
• Renaissance in the form of a progressive establishment of a new eco-economy that feeds individual well-being and the common good. This phase is barely sketched out but has a distinguished intellectual history.