ABSTRACT
This chapter criticizes the trade-off theory and suggests a different approach to environmental politics. Trade-off theory leds a significant fraction of the environmental movement to call for such unpopular and self-defeating notions as a return to preindustrial ways. Cost/benefit ratios are obviously unfavorable if industry as such must be sacrificed for environmental quality. The common view, holds that it would be better to adjust to the risks rather than surrendering all the advances of modern life out of exaggerated fears of remote disasters. Deterministic applications of trade-off theory serve not only to challenge environmentalism but many other technological reforms. Revolutions represent themselves as fully real in the future and criticize the present from that imagined outcome. The French revolutionary Saint-Just asked what "cold posterity" would someday have to say about monarchy even as he called for its abolition.
