Theories of Post-Industrial Sustainability

1. Theories of Post-Industrial Sustainability

2. Ecological Modernization Ecological modernization is a social/political theory that has come to provide the contextual framework for policy design around sustainable development in several advanced nations.

3. Ecological Modernization

4. Ecological Modernization The past few hundred years of Anglo-European history can be divided into three relatively distinct phases beginning with a pre-modern phase.

5. Ecological Modernization Pre-modernity—extending in much of northern and western Europe until the latter portion of the eighteenth century—was primarily characterized by agrarian systems of production,…

6. Ecological Modernization Relatively small-scale, artisan crafted production,...

7. Ecological Modernization And comparatively low levels of urbanization.

8. Ecological Modernization The industrial revolution began to gather momentum during the latter decades of the eighteenth century—first in England and then throughout other European countries and elsewhere.

9. Ecological Modernization The predominance of agrarian lifestyles began to give way to industrial production and associated modes of living.

10. Ecological Modernization Industrial cities like Manchester, Leeds, and Birmingham began to develop as important manufacturing centers and pre-modernity started to recede as the modern era took hold.

11. Ecological Modernization Urbanization gathered momentum as people migrated from rural hinterlands to the growing industrial cities.

12. Ecological Modernization These processes of industrialization and population concentration brought about the emergence of new environmental problems—the so-called “design flaws” or “side-effects” of modernity. London (circa 1850)

13. Industrial Revolution It is inaccurate to view the industrial revolution as a single, continuous event. Rather the industrial revolution was comprised of at least three separate smaller industrial revolutions.

14. Industrial Revolution The first industrial revolution occurred between about 1750 and 1825 and was largely premised on technological advances in textile production in northern England.

15. Industrial Revolution These were the “dark, satanic mills” described by poet William Blake, an image that continues to inform much of our understanding of the early years of the industrial revolution.

16. Industrial Revolution It also merits observing the slow pace of any substantive mitigation to address the horrid health conditions created by early European (and American in later years) industrialization.

17. Industrial Revolution For instance, the British Parliament was not compelled to take action on London’s chronic sewage problem until 1858 when the House of Commons was evacuated due to the fetid odors emanating from the River Thames.

18. Industrial Revolution Manchester in the 1840s

19. Industrial Revolution The second industrial revolution was primarily motivated by scientific developments in metallurgy and chemistry in Germany.

20. Industrial Revolution Indeed, the establishment of technical (or polytechnical) institutes like NJIT was prompted by an economic need to transplant this knowledge to the United States.

21. Industrial Revolution The third industrial revolution, starting at the onset of the twentieth century, has been organized around electrical engineering and began with the telephone and eventually spread to the development of computers.

22. Industrial Revolution What now? Or what’s next?

23. Ecological Modernity Pre-modernity Modernity Ecological Modernization

24. Precursors of Ecological Modernization The theory of ecological modernization in many respects is an extension of several prior conceptions of post-industrial transformation.

25. Walter Rostow (1916-2003)

26. Rostow’s Linear Stage Theory of Development High-mass consumption Maturity phase Take-off phase Transitional phase Traditional society

27. Rostow’s Linear Stage Theory of Development

28. Simon Kuznets (1901-1985)

29. Kuznets Curve

30. Environmental Kuznets Curve

31. Environmental Kuznets Curve

32. Nikolai Kondrotieff (or Kondrottiev) (1892-1938) Nikolai Kondratieff (1892-1938)

33. Kondrotieff Waves

34. Kondrotieff Waves

35. Joseph Schumpeter (1883 -1950)

36. Schumpeter’s Theory of Creative Destruction Schumpeter is most famous today for observing that capitalistic economic systems where characterized by regular “gales of creative destruction.”

37. Kondrotieff/Schumpeterian Waves

38. A New Industrial Revolution? Ecological modernity will be characterized by a new industrial revolution organized around advanced environmental technologies that will correct the “design flaws” or “side-effects” of modernity.

39. A New Industrial Revolution? These technologies will be fundamentally different from the sorts of largely mitigative approaches to which we have been accustomed.

40. A New Industrial Revolution? Rather the new generation of environmental technologies will fundamentally transform industrial production by generating zero waste and achieving several-fold improvements in energy and materials efficiencies.

41. A New Industrial Revolution? The ultimate objective is to “decouple” economic growth from environmental performance and to allow value added to increase while reducing energy and materials inputs.

42. A New Industrial Revolution? Countries at the forefront of earlier industrial revolutions were able to achieve significant comparative economic advantages and nations that are the pioneers of ecological modernity will reap similar benefits.

43. A New Industrial Revolution? In this sense, the prospect of this “new industrial revolution” poses a very different vision of the future than conventional (so-called Small is Beautiful) theories of environmental reform predicated upon calls for demodernization.

44. A New Industrial Revolution? Instead, proponents of a “new industrial revolution” propose that we need to move forward rather than backward. Many of the same forces that gave rise to modernity will power us into ecological modernity.

45. A New Industrial Revolution? Ecological modernization thus presents a radically different view of the future than is conventionally advanced by many mainstream environmentalists in the United States and elsewhere.

46. Ecological Modernization as Policy Practice Over the past twenty years, ecological modernization has become an increasingly central (and relatively uncontroversial) feature of European sustainability policy making.

47. American Voices for a New Industrial Revolution Ecological modernization has made decidedly less progress in the United States, in part because of a lack of political capacity to formulate coherent industrial policies and to forge linkages across different policy domains.

48. American Voices for a New Industrial Revolution Amory Lovins Bill McDonough Stewart Brand Ray Kurzweil Peter Senge

49. American Voices for a New Industrial Revolution New York Times Columnist Thomas Friedman