Description

We are facing an environmental crisis that some say is ushering a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, one that threatens not only a great deal of life on the planet but also our understanding of who we are and our relation to the natural world. In the face of this crisis it has become clear that we need a more sustainable culture. In fact the language of sustainability has become pervasive in our culture and has deeply ingrained itself in our understanding of what living a good life would entail. “Sustainability,” however, is a contested word, and it carries with it, often implicitly and unacknowledged, deep philosophical claims that are entangled with all kinds of assumptions and power relations, some of them very problematic. This book attempts to set this urgent goal of sustainability free from its more reductive and harmful interpretations and to thereby apply a more thoughtful environmental ethics to current and emerging technologies, particularly those involving reproduction and the harnessing of energy that dominate our elemental relations to sun and air, wind and water, earth and forest.


The book is divided into 4 sections: (1) Sustainability: A Contested Term, (2) Sustainability and Renewable Technologies: Sun, Air, Wind, Water, (3) Sustainability and Design, and (4) Sustainability and Ethics. The first section sets the context for our studies and opens a space for thinking sustainability in a more thoughtful way than is often the case in contemporary discussions. The next two sections are the heart of our contribution to postphenomenology and technoscience, and the essays, here, turn to concrete examinations of particular technologies and questions of technological design in the light of our environmental crisis. The fourth section closes the book by drawing some more general implications for ethics from the intersection of the foregoing themes.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Sustainable Technologies in the Anthropocene

Dan Bradley


Part One: Defining Sustainability

1. Sustainability: a Single Word and a World of Meanings

Cristina Pontes Bonfiglioli

2. Is This the End?

Jan Kyrre Berg Friis


Part Two: Sustainability and Renewable Technologies: Sun, Air, Wind, Water

3. Is it Too Late to “Let the Sun Shine in”?

Don Ihde

4. Talking Weather from Ge-rede to Ge-stell

Babette Babich

5. Water and Oil: Global Struggles in Sustainability

Trish Glazebrook

6. The Ontogenesis of Wind Turbines and the Question of Sustainability

Róisín Lally


Part Three: Sustainability and Design

7. We’re in this Together: Climate Change and Reproductive Technology in the Age of Ge-stell

Dana S. Belu

8. An Alternative to Technological Instrumentalism: Considering the Aesthetic Dimension of Sustainable Energy

Brendan Mahoney

9. Digital Cultural Sustainability

Galit Wellner


Part Four: Sustainability and Ethics

10. Sustainable Futures: Ethico-Political Dimensions of Technology

Lars Botin

11. Beyond Naturalism: A Personalist Integral Humanism

Thomas Jeannot

12. The Ethics of Sustainability, Instrumental Reason, and the Goodness of Nature

Daniel Bradley

Product details

Published Apr 29 2019
Format Hardback
Edition 1st
Extent 250
ISBN 9781498584227
Imprint Lexington Books
Illustrations 1 b/w photos;
Dimensions 230 x 160 mm
Series Postphenomenology and the Philosophy of Technology
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Anthology Editor

Róisín Lally

Róisín Lally is Assistant Professor of Philosophy…

Contributor

Don Ihde

Contributor

Babette Babich

Contributor

Róisín Lally

Róisín Lally is Assistant Professor of Philosophy…

Contributor

Dana S. Belu

Contributor

Brendan Mahoney

Contributor

Galit Wellner

Contributor

Daniel Bradley

Contributor

Lars Botin

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