{"id":618,"date":"2018-01-09T09:50:21","date_gmt":"2018-01-09T09:50:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/?p=618"},"modified":"2018-01-09T09:50:21","modified_gmt":"2018-01-09T09:50:21","slug":"steven-quilley-environmentalism-on-the-margins-exploring-possibilities-for-alternative-modernity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/?p=618","title":{"rendered":"Steven Quilley | Environmentalism on the Margins: Exploring Possibilities for Alternative Modernity"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last year, Steven Quilley of the University of Waterloo, Ontario, joined us to talk about \u201cEnvironmentalism at the Margins: Exploring existing possibilities for an alternative modernity\u201d. There&#8217;s a lot of fascinating ideas about how society is organised, where the world is headed and where it might go instead. Here&#8217;s the video &#8211; enjoy!<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Environmentalism on the Margins | Steven Quilley\" width=\"625\" height=\"352\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/ee2FzcZr7lM?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Understood as a complex adaptive system and through the lens of Holling\u2019s Panarchy heuristic, modern industrial capitalism is a \u2018deep basin of attraction\u2019. The global consumer society has proved itself to be a profoundly resilient system \u2013 resilient, but nevertheless biophysically limited.\u00a0 As the metabolism of global civilization begins to breach significant thresholds and transgress \u2018planetary boundaries\u2019 humanity is approaching social-ecological \u2018tipping points\u2019.\u00a0 Experiencing the concatenating effects of collapsing economies, degraded ecosystems, social crisis, political chaos, communal violence and war, failed and failing states are tracing the outlines of an undesirable basin of attraction defined by collapse.\u00a0The challenge facing humanity amounts to a rather simple wicked dilemma: is it possible to reconcile technological and socio-political modernity (and all the requisite flows of materials, energy and information) with biosphere integrity and sustainable global life support systems. In this paper, we argue that the alternative modernity defined by this wicked problem should be envisaged as a \u2018third basin of attraction\u2019 i.e. the often-vaunted political economy of the \u2018third way\u2019 construed through the language of systems theory. In this paper, we explore the outlines of such an \u2018attractor\u2019 in terms of political economy, technological prerequisites and problems of culture\/ontology. We explore some of the prefigurative possibilities evoked by various \u2018environmentalisms at the margins\u2019 i.e. counter-cultural lifestyles, intentional communities, disruptive technologies and practices, and alternative social commitments. These are building niches in diverse settings that could begin to contour space for a new kind of modernity, one that could enable socially and technologically complex human societies to thrive without compromising long-term ecological integrity.\u00a0 Specifically, we investigate how community-based health systems, micro-fabrication and Maker culture, and new religious movements at the periphery of the environmental movement may contribute to a developing \u2018third basin of attraction\u2019 \u2013 an alternative to the primary basin of attraction of consumer capitalism and the all too near second basin of societal collapse.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last year, Steven Quilley of the University of Waterloo, Ontario, joined us to talk about \u201cEnvironmentalism at the Margins: Exploring existing possibilities for an alternative modernity\u201d. There&#8217;s a lot of fascinating ideas about how society is organised, where the world is headed and where it might go instead. Here&#8217;s the video &#8211; enjoy! Understood as [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36,105],"tags":[42,167,166,62],"class_list":["post-618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-events","category-videos","tag-environmentalism","tag-modernity","tag-quilley","tag-video"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=618"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":619,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618\/revisions\/619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}