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Combined Academic Publishers represents North American university presses, including McGill-Queen’s, in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. This year CAP has launched Books Combined, a collaborative blog project with their member presses, developed to highlight our authors and the books that influenced their work. From the blog:
Better than anyone, we think scholars understand books’ potential, and how books, as repositories for ideas, can change us, and our perspective on the world. In bookscombined.com we’re asking scholars to write about the books that have had a significant impact on their lives – the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Anders Hayden, author of When Green Growth Is Not Enough, is the latest MQUP contributor to the Books Combined Blog.
Here’s an excerpt from his blog post, “Visions of Sufficiency“, where he writes about the various sources that led to his research and work on climate change and green growth.
Even as a young boy, I was concerned about our environmental challenges. Many of the key themes – questions of limits to growth, the importance and limits of environmental technologies, and the excesses of a consumerist society – that appear in my recent book, When Green Growth is Not Enough have been on my mind since then.
I grew up in the Canadian province ofAlberta in the 1970s, when it was emerging as a major oil producer against a backdrop of rising global energy prices. At the time, the Club of Rome’sLimits to Growth report was a global bestseller, with some 30 million copies sold in more than 30 languages. It foresaw the possibility of a collapse of industrial society in the 21st century as a result of non-renewable resource depletion. With such ideas being discussed around me, I pondered with some trepidation what the world would be like if we ever ran out of oil; however, for other Albertans, resource scarcity meant economic opportunity. Extraction of bitumen from Alberta’s tar sands was becoming economically and technologically viable, raising hopes of Saudi-Arabia-like riches ahead.
My conservative father’s work as an engineer occasionally took him north to the tar sands, leaving him appalled by the environmental impacts of the extraction process. Indeed, he also had a foot in the emerging world of renewable energy. At the time, thinkers such as Amory Lovins were outlining a “soft energy path” focused on renewables and energy efficiency. Such ideas came to have some influence on my own thinking, although I have concluded that such eco-technological solutions are only one part of what is needed.
As Alberta grew wealthier, my hometown of St. Albert sprawled. Nearby farmland disappeared, new homes grew larger, and automobile dependence was hard-wired into the landscape. In later years, I even had a dream that Canada’s federal government opened a museum of suburbia in my hometown. In the early 1980s, what was then the world’s largest shopping mall opened its doors about a 15-minute drive from our suburban home in my family’s oversized, 10 miles-per-leaded-gallon station wagon. (Alternatively, it took about 40 minutes through a bleak, bicycle-unfriendly landscape on my ten-speed.) I had a summer job there as “submarine captain,” guiding tourists through the display of sharks, dolphins, and other marine life under the waters of an indoor, fake lake. At the time, it was a point of pride that the world’s biggest anything could exist in my corner of the prairie hinterlands. READ MORE
More Books Combined blog posts by MQUP authors
Joan Coutu on place & identity in literature
Jan Beveridge on the book that paid a ransom
Michael Ross on George Orwell and books about advertising
By Anders Hayden
A systematic and thorough comparison between Canada’s and Britain’s actions on climate change.
Is the pursuit of endless economic growth compatible with the deep reductions in greenhouse gas emissions required to avoid the worst extremes of climate change? In When Green Growth Is Not Enough, Anders Hayden analyzes the political battle between three competing approaches to this question and how it has played out in Canada and Britain.
Defenders of the “business-as-usual” approach reject climate action as too costly and in conflict with economic growth, while downplaying the severity of climate change. Supporters of ecological modernization, or “green growth,” on the other hand, aim to use technology and efficiency to delink economic expansion from emissions and find business opportunities through environmental action. While mainstream debate has focused on these two pro-growth models, Hayden pays particular attention to the struggles and limited inroads of a third, more radical perspective: the idea of sufficiency, which challenges the continued growth of production and consumption in the already-affluent global North and asks, how much is enough?
Drawing on interviews, participation in climate-related events, and analysis of key documents, When Green Growth Is Not Enough is a lively account of the theory and real-world politics of climate action.
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