Pathways to Sustainability: Industry, Development, Business, Agriculture, Economy, and Politics

Val Plumwood (2002 ) writes that our current global crisis may be characterized as a radical discontinuity between humans and nature. This discontinuity is expressed as deep cultural and institutional crises as well as pathway dependencies in economics and politics that are threatening the existence of humans and many other species within the wider Web of Life. Patel and Moore (2017 ) examine how the historical invention of ‘Nature’ as separate from ‘Society’ in the 17th Century made possible new powerful systems of control. Select groups of powerful men imagined themselves as society apart from nature, and then exercised mastery over the rest of the web of life, including ‘natural’ subjects of women, landless men and colonial peoples.