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p. 34).
Daly notes that the first law of thermodynamics states that we do not
produce or consume anything, we merely rearrange it so we cannot
produce resources, we can only use them, and they will eventually run
out. The second law that of entropy has it that our rearrangement
implies a continual reduction in potential for further use within the
system as a whole (Daly, 1977b, p. 109). This also implies that there is a
limit to the use we can make of scarce resources, as well as pointing out
that waste (high entropy) is a necessary product of the extraction and
use of resources (low entropy). The limits to growth notion is thus the
practical reason, as it were, why greens argue for the necessity of a
sustainable society. They also present social and ethical reasons
(Daly in Ekins, 1986, p. 13), which will be pursued as the chapter pro-
gresses. Now, though, we are in a position to outline the parameters
within which dark-greens believe any picture of the sustainable society
would have to be drawn.
Possible positions
Various responses to the problem of sustainability are possible, both in
political-institutional terms and also in terms of the social and ethical
practices that a sustainable society would need to follow. By no means
all of the solutions that have been presented over the years are green in
the sense in which I think we ought to understand the word i.e. in the
sense in which ecologism has become a political ideology in its own
right. In drawing the boundaries for ecologism, we find ourselves
excluding from its meaning a number of political postures that have
been wrongly associated with it. This has the effect, of course, of nar-
rowing down the range of thoughts and practices that we can link with
radical green politics, and thus makes clearer the territory within which
it most properly moves.
To my mind no one in this context has been able to (or has had
to) improve upon the typology provided by Tim O Riordan in his
book Environmentalism (1981, p. 307). O Riordan suggests that in
The sustainable society 63
political-institutional terms there are four possible positions. First,
there is the possibility of a new global order , arranged so as to deal
with the problems of global coordination presented by the international
nature of the environmental crisis. Supporters of this position typically
claim that the nation-state is both too big and too small to deal effect-
ively with global problems and bemoan the lack of efficacy of the
United Nations, which, nevertheless, seems to be the kind of organiza-
tion on which they would base their new global order. O Riordan refers
to people like Barbara Ward and René Dubos (1972) as supporters of
this view, to whom we might now add Gro Harlem Brundtland, after
her Brundtland Report of 1987. The United Nations Earth Summit of
1992 and its Rio+10 successor in South Africa in 2002 have been the
most spectacular examples to date of UN-sponsored attempts to deal
with global environmental problems, and more governments than ever
before were brought together to discuss the issues. Although the 1992
Summit s success was equivocal (Grubb et al., 1993), and environ-
mental movements were critical of the lack of commitment by govern-
ments after the 2002 Summit, global order enthusiasts have drawn
some succour from the fact that these meetings took place at all.
The second position is described as centralized authoritarianism .
This position also takes seriously the existence of an environmental
crisis, and its supporters believe that, because no one is likely to suc-
cumb voluntarily to the measures needed to deal with it, they will have
to be made to do so. The locus of authority is generally seen as the
governments of nation-states, and in this respect no major political-
institutional changes are held to be necessary. Governments would
merely decide upon a course of action leading to sustainability (perhaps
protectionism, rationing, population control and restriction of immi-
gration) and put it into effect (for a recent contribution on some of
the implications of this approach see Simms, 2006). O Riordan refers
to William Ophuls ( whatever its specific form, the politics of the sus-
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