from Part I - Our World
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 October 2022
Sustainability has become the privileged way businesses, NGOs, and governments think about actions they might take to remediate environmental problems and be good actors vis-à-vis natural resources and our shared climate. In turn, the way that sustainable actions are accounted for is in the language of “impacts” in which various accounting schemes seek to tabulate and communicate the degree to which some sustainable action has an effect in the world. The purpose of generating a quantifiable, representable impact is so that consumers might decide that it makes a company or product more worthwhile and more deserving of a consumer’s money on a market. On a market, a consumer has the ability to decide that other qualities (price, brand, convenience, etc.) could potentially outweigh good environmental action. The purpose of explaining all this is to show just how limited a utilitarian approach (one in which goods are measured, weighed, and seen as interchangeable) to fixing environmental problems is. What Archer demonstrates is that by tracking environmental action in terms of comparable, fungible impacts, one allows corporate actors to count their pollution or bad action, and continue to do it anyway, both masking it behind impact measures and abdicating any final responsibility to consumers. At the close of the paper, Archer offers a different way of thinking about sustainable environmental action, one that draws on various strands of indigenous thinking to illustrate what it would look like and how much more effective things would be if we understood good environmental action in terms of nonnegotiable values (in philosophy language, a “deontological” approach).
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.