ABSTRACT
This introductory chapter opens with the central paradox of modernity: while we live in a disenchanted world governed by the limits of scientific rationality, we are finding it increasingly difficult to live within the actual limits of this world. This is in part because those limits are not readily perceptible to our ordinary senses and our common timescales, but also because the same scientific modernity bequeathed the power to constantly push against those natural limits, and the injunction to transcend our finitude. This is particularly true for the model of economics that dominates our lives, with its compulsion of perpetual growth. The rest of the chapter lays out the fundamental concepts for thinking through this dilemma: ecological limits, sources and sinks, stocks and flows, ecological footprint, sustainability and overshoot. Taking as an example the familiar case of climate change, it prepares for the argument that will be developed more fully in Chapter 5.
