Pragmatic Paths to Environmental Sustainability
2007
Hickman, Larry A
After summarizing what I take to be the main contribution of Norton's book--his proposal for a new vocabulary for public discourse as it pertains to environmental stability--I attempt to locate his work among some of the current debates regarding sustainability and public policy. I detail some of the ways in which this work constitutes a further development of themes he presented in 1991 in Toward unity Among Environmentalists. I discuss his prescriptions for defusing confrontations regarding environmental policy by functionalizing issues in ways that cut across historically entrenched interest groups. From the standpoint of method, I argue that Norton has stacked a Habermas- type proceduralism on top of a pragmatic experimentalist platform (and I add that if he had constructed his method the other way around it would not have worked.) In all this I find Norton's proposals both imaginative and full of promise.
显示更多 [+] 显示较少 [-]