Customer Reviews

Hijacking Sustainability

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If you're looking for a dialectical response to the nauseatingly pro-business wing of the sustainability movement, you'll find many gems in this book. The familiar cadences of postmodern critique of contemporary culture--including a rehashing of the Truman Show's hyperreality, and discourse on malls and big box retail as "junkspace"-- are punctuated by truly original perspectives on the paradoxes inherent in sustainability. How to authentically create community enmeshed in local production and local culture, when all around us the power structures and corporate megaliths are co-opting the message of environmental responsibility? And indeed, to negotiate in a rights-based movement, sustainability advocates must necessarily use the leverage of multi-lateral, global engagement, despite their desire to empower the particular and the local. Parr's analysis of all of this is cutting and a propos.

So the book begins promisingly, but it quickly becomes a disjointed compendium of the author's previous articles. She doesn't create a successful overarching structure that can handle topics as disparate as the Jimmy Carter solar panel controversy, the 2007 Green Oscars and burgeoning megaslums in the developing world. The reader is inspired by Parr's engaging and admittedly sententious prose style-- this is someone who is adamantly opposed to the military, won't stomach even a minute of greenwashing and doesn't pull punches from her attack on Wal-Mart, BP and the rest. But ultimately the sustainability movement must be about action, and Parr doesn't provide any kind of blueprint for escaping the so-called "hi-jacking."