Environmental policies fail in conspicuous and egregious ways to sustain the natural resource base and protect citizens from production-generated risky exposures. In her engaging study, Sustainable Failures, Sherry Cable asks, why does environmental policy seem to be a contributing cause rather than a partial solution to environmental problems? Melding a biophysical science perspective of environmental processes with sociological insights into human behaviour, Cable examines the people, policies and issues of petrochemical dependence and broader environment questions.
She insists that our present policies around the manufacture and use of petro products violate rudimentary ecological principles-and do so in complicated ways. Sustainable Failures is a blistering wake-up call to what is at stake not only regarding the failure of policy outcomes and grievous natural resource depletion and pollution, but also democracy and ecological survival, and, eventually, potentially, the existence of our species.
Preface
Part I: Rationale For Environmental Policy
1 The Shape of Sustainable Environmental Policy
2 Modes of Human Subsistence, Environmental Impacts, and Environmental Policies
3 The Poisoning of the Biosphere: The Petro-dependent Mode of Subsistence
Part II: The United States: Prototype Petro-Dependent Society
4 Petro-dependent Environmental Policies
5 Violations of Ecological Principles: Resource Depletion and Pollution
6 Living in the State of Denial: Conflict and the Contamination of Workplaces, Communities, and Citizens
7 Broken Promises: Environmental Injustices
8 Petro-dependent Obstacles to Sustainable Policies: The Corporate State and its Institutional and Cultural Reflections
Part III: Environmental Policy In The Petro-Dependent Empire
9 International Environmental Policymaking
10 Global Environmental Problems: Overpopulation, Peak Oil, and Climate Change
11 Sustaining Unsustainability: The Transnational Corporate State
Part IV: And Soe
12 Once There Was a Planet in the Milky Way Galaxy
Bibliographic Sources
Appendix A: Websites and Mission Statements