ABSTRACT
We live in an age when a combination of technological change and global economic restructuring means that environmental risks—especially those associated with ionising radiation, toxic pollutants and carbon dioxide emissions—are increasingly exceeding society’s capacity to predict, control, geographically locate and causally attribute (Beck 1992a). At the same time, the growing reach of communications technology seems to be offering the possibility of a global civil society, a public space for debate, concern and action in relation to environmental and humanitarian issues of global scale or global distance (see, for example, Keane 1991:135 ff.). The widespread, mediated awareness of global environmental risks, and the capacity for environmental groups to organise and communicate at the global level, has laid the grounds for a cultural ‘remoralisation’ in which individuals think and act in relation to global categories and values ( Beck 1998b:75; Albrow 1996:83–4). A global civil society thus seems to be emerging as a conscious reaction and antidote to the growth of global corporate capitalism and environmental destruction.
