Geoffrey Holland–Paul, you say that “History has entered the Planetary Phase of Civilization”. What was the origin of this concept? What does it mean?
Paul Raskin–The seeds lie with discussions in the 1980s among a few of us involved in the preparation of Our Common Future, the Brundtland Commission’s influential report that moved “sustainable development” to the center of the international policy agenda. We, dissidents, argued that the Commission framed the sustainability challenge too narrowly, essentially treating it as a technical problem requiring market adjustments and policies to promote green technology and alleviate poverty.
The Commission’s “tech fix” strategy became and remains, the mainstream approach. Yet it treats the symptoms, not the underlying disease. Left unexamined are such structural drivers of unsustainability as the growth imperative of capitalist economies, consumerist culture, the state-centric geopolitical order, and a model of “development” in which poor societies converge toward rich country patterns. A strategy that operates on proximate rather than ultimate causes might slow social-ecological descent but cannot quench it. Relying on incremental policy tweaks to counter these powerful forces is like trying to walk up a down escalator.
