Livable Planet - Human Rights in the Global Economy

Madison Powers addresses a cluster of causally intertwined ecological crises that threaten our ability to maintain a livable planet, which deplete natural resources, degrade the environment, and destabilize planetary systems. He explains how a targeted human rights approach can counteract global economic conditions that cause or exacerbate these crises. These human rights protect ecological conditions that sustain human life and make possible the satisfaction of basic needs, and they give right-holders more control over their ecological futures. These rights are strategically important for combatting ecologically unsustainable, economically predatory market practices, especially those involving the acquisition, control, and use of land, energy, and water resources.

List of contents

• 1. Our Ecological Predicament


• 1.1. Convergent Crises


• 1.2. Summary of Chapters


• 2. Sustainability and Political Economy


• 2.1. Conceptions of Sustainability


• 2.2. The Logic of Capitalism


• 2.3. Psychological Explanations


• 2.4. Economic Growth


• 2.5. The Consequences of Inequality


• 2.6. Practical Implications


• 3. Market Fundamentalism


• 3.1. Market Fundamentalism and Neoliberal Policies


• 3.2. Three Rationales for Market Fundamentalism


• 3.3. The Non-interference Conception of Freedom


• 4. Human Rights and Ecological Goals


• 4.1. The Normative Framework of Human Rights


• 4.2. Rights, Duties, and Structural Inequality


• 4.3. Three Problems of Application


• 4.4. Rights, Duties, and Violations


• 5. Market Power and Legal Advantage


• 5.1. The Consolidation of Market Power


• 5.2. The Realignment of State Power


• 5.3. Gaming the System of States


• 5.4. Control over Capital Investment


• 6. Land Use and its Consequences


• 6.1. Farmland and Food Security


• 6.2. Impacts Beyond Land


• 6.3. Forests and Biosphere Integrity


• 6.4. Land and Human Rights


• 7. Water and Social Organization


• 7.1. The Management of Scarcity


• 7.2. The Political Economy of Water Resources


• 7.3. The Privatization of Essential Services


• 8. Energy Transition Pathways


• 8.1 False Hopes


• 8.2. False Starts


• 8.3. Path Dependencies


• 8.4. Human Rights and Alternative Pathways


• 9. Control over the Future


• 9.1 Wealth and Power


• 9.2. Sovereign States and Global Problems


• Index

About the author

Madison Powers is Professor Emeritus, Georgetown University, and former Senior Research Scholar in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, where he served as Director from 2000-2009. He is a Fellow of the Hastings Center, and recipient of a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Investigator Award. He is co-author of two books with Ruth Faden, Social Justice: The Moral Foundations of Public Health and Health Care Policy (OUP, 2006), and Structural Injustice: Power, Advantage, and Human Rights (OUP, 2019). Before his career as a philosopher, he practiced law, primarily in health and environmental law.

Summary

Humanity faces an ecological predicament, consisting of a cluster of concurrent, mutually reinforcing crises. They are causally intertwined and resistant to resolution in isolation. In addition to climate disruption, the cluster includes land-system change, loss of biodiversity and biosphere integrity, alteration of biogeochemical cycles, and decreased freshwater availability. Madison Powers argues for a targeted human rights approach to the resolution of our predicament. He assigns priority to a bundle of rights strategically important for counteracting ecologically unsustainable, economically predatory market practices. These practices exhaust natural resources or degrade the environmental conditions essential for a livable planet. Their harmful ecological effects result from or are exacerbated by the structure of the global political economy, especially institutions that influence the acquisition, control, and use of land, energy, and water resources. These institutions shape the economic decisions that have transformed every region of the globe and altered the planetary conditions that support life on Earth.

A livable planet thus requires changes in humanity's relation to the rest of nature, which in turn, requires transformation of our economic relationships and the political and economic ideals underpinning them. Specifically, the balance of power between states and markets should be reversed by implementing an enforceable institutional bulwark against market practices that subvert the ecological conditions essential for the secure realization of human rights. These practices enable the powerful to hoard economic opportunities, crowd out sustainable alternatives, extract resources from vulnerable communities, shift environmental and economic burdens, dodge political and market accountability, and hijack public institutions for private purposes.

Additional text

Powers offers a novel and bold approach to climate governance. Many want to score small victories first and then tackle more complex, entrenched issues later. Powers offers a compelling critique of this low hanging fruit approach on both ethical and political grounds. He argues that we must first address the most serious practices that violate safe operating margins and thereby pose the greatest risk of destabilizing planetary systems. His approach is grounded on the priority that should be given to socioeconomic and human rights and structural ecological rights. Powers deftly brings the notions of sustainability, resilience, and social justice together, and shows that the priority targets of climate governance should be those that are the most damaging and unjust.

Product details

• Authors: Madison Powers, Madison (Francis J. Mcnamara Jr Professor Powers, Powers Madison
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 19.06.2024
• EAN: 9780197756003
• ISBN: 978-0-19-775600-3
• No. of pages: 328
• Subjects: Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Philosophy: general, reference works; PHILOSOPHY / Social, PHILOSOPHY / Political, PHILOSOPHY / Ethics & Moral Philosophy, The environment, Social & political philosophy, Ethics & moral philosophy, social and political philosophy, Ethics and moral philosophy, Science / Environmental Science