Global ecology and sustainability

What does global ecology mean? When and why did the notion emerge? And what is its connection with an idea that has come to be closely associated with it, namely sustainability? The first section dwells on the environment as a problem of government. Of relevance here is Michel Foucault’s account of the transformation of modes and purposes of governing that began in the late eighteenth century, and subsequent elaborations of this account. The entry then considers the rise of ecology, in around 1970, to the status of a public issue, as a comprehensive crisis affecting the relationship between human societies and their biophysical milieu. The next section deals with the responses elicited by the proclamation of this crisis. It is in this context that the idea of sustainability became established, in the late 1980s, as the point of reference for political action. Successes in improving resource efficiency have proven ultimately ineffective in addressing ecological degradation. The last section dwells on the most recent evolution of the environment into a global political question, in a context of growing socio-ecological instability and related anxieties. Pivotal inthis case are the notions of Anthropocene and Gaia, as antithetical, yet also ambiguously related, accounts of human agency vis-à-vis planetary dynamics. The conclusion raises some open questions.