Nature and Culture

This article explores the hidden, suppressed elements of New Orleans leading up to and immediately following Hurricane Katrina. The article is juxtaposed with excerpts from Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities in order to provide a lens through which to ask questions not typically raised by government officials, city planners, and science and technology experts. This uncovers aspects of New Orleans that must not be overlooked in the rebuilding process. If policy, culture, and technology render aspects of New Orleans invisible, then only by revealing these aspects can one ascertain the truth of the city.

The concept of ecological democracy has been employed to illustrate how rapid ecological and environmental change poses significant problems for existing democratic structures. If the term is to prove useful, however, it must be better conceptualized and empirically tested. This article addresses this challenge by first outlining key empirical intersections of environment and democracy, then providing a working definition of ecological democracy. Four plausible research hypotheses are also recommended to guide future analyses of ecological democracy.

The death of American environmentalism has recently been proclaimed by some commentators (Schellenberger and Nordhaus 2005). Such declarations tend to be limiting because they fail to explore and evaluate the historical context of international, national, and regional social forces and social changes that shaped the American environmental movement over the past century. In this essay, I propose to explore the important question of the decline of American environmentalism within the context of a recurring theme pursued by the American movement: the protection of places wherein we dwell. David Brower has called this the practice of Conservation, Preservation, and Restoration, or CPR (Brower 1995).

This article assesses the cornucopian theory of the mastery of plastic nature. Serious deficiencies are found, especially the theory's complacent faith in economic rationality and its underestimation of nature's capacity for unexpected emergent disturbances. Conclusions about the real state of the world and realistic expectations for the future must take into account not only present trends, but also the findings of research into disasters and societies that have collapsed. Learning from the analysis of such discontinuities and breaking points will help to avoid simplistic presumptions of safety based on extrapolating time-series trends of present well-being in wealthy societies into the distant future. It is precisely disaster research and studies of collapsed societies that can teach us about failures of foresight concerning nature's dynamics, about the material consequences of such errors, about the uncertainties involved in foreseeing nature's emergent dynamics, and about social barriers to learning from the prompts of nature. Although apologetics for business-as-usual, full-steam-ahead practices that masquerade as realism should be rejected, a deeper realism that has learned to expect the unexpected from nature is necessary. Such a critical realist perspective for investigating prompts from nature has been elaborated in this article.

Dark ages is a familiar, if untheorized, term of world history. We propose to generalize that concept, and to reinterpret it as "ages of reorganization." We do this by viewing the two major periods of past dark ages as phases of world community formation—this being one of a cascade of processes that make up world system evolution. This reconceptualization allows us to see contemporary developments as the onset of another millennial age of readjustment, understood also as a world system mechanism of self-organization. It is a means whereby the threatening features of earlier developments—those of the preceding ages of concentration—are reined in automatically, as it were, to contain the dangers that they might harbor. We propose to take up these themes, recently opened up by Sing Chew in two recent papers (2002a, 2000b), and will review the following questions in response (in the light of the recently consolidated "World Cities" database): (1) How robust is the concept of dark ages? (2) Have dark ages been features of world system history? (3) Are there grounds to assume the workings of an evolutionary process? (4) Have we already entered upon the modern age of reorganization?