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have to go where the mouths have indicated – we need an ecological discipline to go along with green rhetoric. More talk, then, will not in itself give us ecological discipline. Emphasizing the need for a different system of political economy will not give us ecological discipline – “Marxist polemic” will not by itself change the world as such. Democracy, and democratization at the local level, will provide effective tools for ecological discipline – most of the positive effects of democracy, however, will be because democracy empowers (ecologically-conscious) people to operate locally to support local ecosystems. Education can instill ecological discipline, yet this will only come to pass with the active support of students. (Educational institutions typically have little understanding of how contingently they “control” the students they have enlisted.) Appeals to policy, as the savior of civilization against its environmental problems, miss the disciplinary core of the present-day capitalist social structure. Policy, however, may yet serve in a transitional role, by clearing the ground for the development of an ecological discipline. Ultimately, ecological discipline will be the product of individuals, as its main connector to discipline per se (what Foucault called “governmentality”) will lie at the level of selfdiscipline. As the contradictions between capitalist discipline and ecosystem stability widen, we can, however, predict that more and more people will choose to “side with” the cause of ecosystem resilience. References Baldoz, R., C. Koeber, and P. Kraft. (eds.). 2001. The Critical Study of Work: Labor, Technology, and Global Production. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Bello, W. 2008. Capitalism At Stake in Climate Crisis. Asia Times Online (4/11). Brennan, T. 2003 Globalization and its Terrors. London and New York: Routledge. Dryzek, J. 1987. Rational Ecology: Environment and Political Economy. London: Blackwell. Foucault, M. 1979. Discipline and Punish (Trans. Alan Sheridan). New York. Random HouseVintage. -----. 1980. Power/Knowledge (Ed. Colin Gordon). New York: Random House. Friedman, T. L. 2007. The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux-Picador. Harre, R., J. Brockmeier and P. Muhlhausler. 1999. Greenspeak: A Study of Environmental Discourse. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Hornborg, A. 2001. The Power of the Machine. Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Hutchinson, F., M. Mellor and W. Olsen. 2002. The Politics of Money. London: Pluto. Johnston, J. 2003. Who Cares about the Commons. Capitalism Nature Socialism 14(4), December: 1-42. Kovel, J. 2007. The Enemy of Nature. 2nd Edition. London: Zed. Leiss, W., S. Kline and S. Jhally. 1986. Social Communication in Advertising. Toronto: Methuen, 1986. Li, M. 2008. An Age of Transition; The United States, China, Peak Oil, and the Demise of Neoliberalism. Monthly Review (April). Lynas, M. 2008. Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet. Washington DC: National Geographic. Martinez-Alier, J. 1987. Ecological Economics. Oxford: Basil Blackwel.
ISSN 1941-0948
doi: 10.3903/gtp.2008.2.7