A Livable Planet

Madison Powers is Professor Emeritus, Georgetown University, and former Senior Research Scholar in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, where he served as Director from 2000-2009. He is a Fellow of the Hastings Center, and recipient of a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Investigator Award. He is co-author of two books with Ruth Faden, Social Justice: The Moral Foundations of Public Health and Health Care Policy (OUP, 2006), and Structural Injustice: Power, Advantage, and Human Rights (OUP, 2019). Before his career as a philosopher, he practiced law, primarily in health and environmental law.

The manuscript is extraordinary in its novelty of view, breadth of discussion, detailed scholarship, and ambition. I know of nothing like it, certainly not in philosophy, nothing that takes the Anthropocene itself as the focus of sustained book-length policy discussion... Moreover, it claims that politics and policies that put human rights first are the best, perhaps the only way, to halt political and economic movement towards environmental catastrophe. The centrality and necessity of a human rights approach is novel.

• 1. Our Ecological Predicament1.1. Convergent Crises1.2. Summary of Chapters 2. Sustainability and Political Economy2.1. Conceptions of Sustainability 2.2. The Logic of Capitalism2.3. Psychological Explanations2.4. Economic Growth2.5. The Consequences of Inequality2.6. Practical Implications 3. Market Fundamentalism3.1. Market Fundamentalism and Neoliberal Policies3.2. Three Rationales for Market Fundamentalism3.3. The Non-interference Conception of Freedom 4. Human Rights and Ecological Goals4.1. The Normative Framework of Human Rights4.2. Rights, Duties, and Structural Inequality4.3. Three Problems of Application4.4. Rights, Duties, and Violations 5. Market Power and Legal Advantage5.1. The Consolidation of Market Power5.2. The Realignment of State Power5.3. Gaming the System of States5.4. Control over Capital Investment 6. Land Use and its Consequences6.1. Farmland and Food Security 6.2. Impacts Beyond Land6.3. Forests and Biosphere Integrity6.4. Land and Human Rights 7. Water and Social Organization7.1. The Management of Scarcity7.2. The Political Economy of Water Resources7.3. The Privatization of Essential Services 8. Energy Transition Pathways8.1 False Hopes8.2. False Starts8.3. Path Dependencies8.4. Human Rights and Alternative Pathways 9. Control over the Future9.1 Wealth and Power9.2. Sovereign States and Global ProblemsIndex