| Climate change is investigated as a political issue, focusing on the international agreement by the United Nations to address this problem. Climate change constitutes a contemporary global environmental crisis whose greatest impacts lie in the future. Due to anthropogenic releases of 'greenhouse gases,' primarily from fossil fuel combustion, future generations, communities, ecosystems, and ecological entities will suffer the consequences of climate change impacts. In response, the international community has forged the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, focusing on efforts by nation states to limit greenhouse gas emissions. However, as both the causes of anthropogenic climate change and the international response are the outcomes of modernity, the attempt at global environmental governance is contradictory. It is argued that, by creating an agreement built upon positive scientific knowledge, social organization featuring liberal democracy, and the goal of global environmental management, this contradiction restricts its efficacy and effectiveness. Accordingly, the crisis of climate change marks the limits of the project of modernity. To date, postmodernity has been understood as lying beyond modernity and offering little support for environmental interests or the cause of 'ecological justice.' It is offered that postmodernity can now be interpreted as having an ecological definition, whereby it marks the onset of the condition wherein the environmental limits of modernity have been reached, beyond which positive science, liberal democratic governance, and global environmental management are redundant as the exclusive tools for addressing the crisis of climate change. Accordingly, that set of Nature-society relations and associated modalities of practice that characterize modernity have drawn to a close. This condition is described as 'ecological postmodernity.'... |
