Environmental politics has many faces and operates at multiple scales: it preoccupies individuals as well as governments, drives local agreements as well as international treaties, results in minor business changes as well as wholesale business decisions, and fluctuates between a politics of protest and one of accommodation.
In this Very Short Introduction Andrew Dobson offers a lively and comprehensive commentary on the many facets of environmental politics today. Looking towards the future, he asks whether environmental politics will be comfortably accommodated by mainstream politics, or whether the advent of the Anthropocene – a whole new geological epoch driven by human impact on the environment – will herald a break with the politics of growth that has dominated social life since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
Introduction: What is environmental politics?
1: Origins
2: Ideas
3: Movements, parties, policies
4: Local and global, North and South
5: Environmental futures
Further reading
Index
Professor Andrew Dobson taught politics, political theory, and environmental politics at Keele University and the Open University. He is an internationally-recognised authority on environmental politics, and his work has been translated into Spanish, Greek, Korean, Mandarin Chinese and Japanese. Previous books include Citizenship and the Environment (OUP, 2003) and Listening for Democracy: Recognition, Representation, Reconciliation (OUP, 2014).