ABSTRACT
This chapter is the Introduction to Empires of Sustainability. The first section focusses on the environmental crisis emphasising climate change, destruction of life and worldwide contamination as key threats. The second section argues that a widespread shift from denial to action us underway and that solutions agreed and implemented over the coming decades will remake society in their image. This section closes by making the point that the environmental crisis is one of relations between people and planet. The challenge, therefore, is to replace dysfunctional relations with more harmonious ones. The third section builds on the first and second by making the case for analysing the crisis, denial and action as political economic phenomena. More specifically, it argues that they are bound up with the forces of control and profit and dynamics of new imperialisms which foretell the building of one or more Empires of Sustainability over the decades ahead. The fourth section suggests that a more diverse World of Caring Places, built by expanding caring relations in place, is a viable and better alternative. The fifth and final section sets out the book's overall approach and provides an overview.
