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Centerfor Sustainable
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CSS Lecture Series "After Sustainability"Lecture by Prof. Frank Biermann, 6th July, 6:30 PM (Berlin Time)From Environmental Policy to Earth System Governance?
29 June 2021, by CSS
Photo: unsplash
We are very pleased to announce that Prof. Frank Biermann (Utrecht University / founder of the Earth System Governance Project) will contribute to our new Lecture Series with a talk dealing with the question: "From Environmental Policy to Earth System Governance?".
When: Tuesday, July 6th, 6:30 PM (Berlin time)
Where: via Zoom Webinar, please register via css.wiso"AT"uni-hamburg.de for dial-in link.
Abstract: The mainstream “environmental policy“ paradigm can no longer capture the myriad transformations and interconnections of our planetary systems. Which new concepts are available? What are the central questions for the social sciences to “navigate the Anthropocene”? In this talk, Frank Biermann of Utrecht University develops his vision of new governance to cope with the Anthropocene challenges of the 21st century, covering important issues such as planetary justice, planetary boundaries and the role of the Sustainable Development Goals, the need to decolonize sustainability discourses, and the dangers of the increasing normalization of geoengineering.
You can find the abstract and flyer for the talk here [pdf].
You can find more up to date information on the lecture series here.
"After Sustainability. What if we stopped pretending?"
A CSS Lecture Series
Fifty years after the Stockholm conference on the Human Environment ushered the creation of environmental ministries around the world, thirty years after the Rio Earth summit gave birth to international conventions on climate change, biodiversity and desertification, environmental policy and its associated language of preservation and precaution has failed (Biermann et al. 2019). It failed to formulate an adequate political diagnosis of the multiple crises societies face in the Anthropocene (Bonneuil& Fressoz2016). It also failed to deliver on the measures needed to limit global warming or biodiversity loss to non-dangerous levels, or to buy enough time for an orderly, smooth transition to an ecologically viable future. The sustainability paradigm has become obsolete, because it is too late for sustainability.
This is the starting point for the lecture series. Over the next year, we will explore different aspects of this theme, together with a series of distinguished guest speakers. The aim is to disorient and disenchant current ecological debates and go beyond techno-and marketfixesor highly uncertain technological gambles. Instead, we will point dilemmas and contradictions in discussions on decarbonisationand green growth, and center instead on the day-to-day practices of unsustainability in economic policies, infrastructure planning, consumption patterns and global financial markets. On this basis, we wish to engage a discussion on how to re-build and reassemble a horizon for contemporary ecological thinking. Starting from an honest assessment of the current situation and our ecological entanglements, what would a possible way forward look like? How can ecological thinking be at the same time critical and empowering, to support a politics of transformation that is not rooted in magical thinking?
Confirmed guests of the lecture series are Nigel Clark (Lancaster University), Frank Biermann (Utrecht University), Sabine Schlacke (WBGU) and Pierre Charbonnier (CNRS).
