Although climate change has become the dominant concern of the
twenty-first century, global powers refuse to implement the changes
necessary to reverse these trends. Instead, they have neoliberalized
nature and climate change politics and discourse, and there are
indications of a more virulent strain of capital accumulation on the
horizon. Adrian Parr calls attention to the problematic socioeconomic
conditions of neoliberal capitalism underpinning the world's
environmental challenges, and she argues that, until we grasp the
implications of neoliberalism's interference in climate change talks and
policy, humanity is on track to an irreversible crisis.
Parr not only exposes the global failure to produce equitable political
options for environmental regulation, but she also breaks down the
dominant political paradigms hindering the discovery of viable
alternatives. She highlights the neoliberalization of nature in the
development of green technologies, land use, dietary habits,
reproductive practices, consumption patterns, design strategies, and
media. She dismisses the notion that the free market can solve
debilitating environmental degradation and climate change as nothing
more than a political ghost emptied of its collective aspirations.
Decrying what she perceives as a failure of the human imagination and an
impoverishment of political institutions, Parr ruminates on the nature
of change and existence in the absence of a future. The sustainability
movement, she contends, must engage more aggressively with the logic and
cultural manifestations of consumer economics to take hold of a more
transformative politics. If the economically powerful continue to
monopolize the meaning of environmental change, she warns, new and more
promising collective solutions will fail to take root.
