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Global Environmental Politics provides an up-to-date introduction to the most important issues dominating this fast-moving field. Going beyond the issue of climate change, the text also introduces readers to the pressing issues of desertification, trade in hazardous waste, biodiversity protection, whaling, acid rain, ozone-depletion, water consumption, and over-fishing. Importantly, the text pays particular attention to the interactions between environmental politics and other governance issues, such as gender, trade, development, health, agriculture, and security. Adopting an analytical approach, the text explores and evaluates a wide variety of political perspectives, testing assumptions and equipping readers with the necessary tools to develop their own arguments and, ultimately, inspiring new research endeavours in this diverse field.

This book provides an accessible introduction to environmental politics through a powerful, discourse-centred approach which analyzes how environmental affairs are constructed and interpreted through language. It recounts developments beginning with the arrival of environmental crisis in the late 1960s, which yielded dire warnings about global shortages and ecological collapse. It moves through subsequent decades to the Paris Agreement on climate change, the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, and the anti-environmental backlash of denial and “Gray Radicalism”. The book develops an innovative approach to understanding contemporary environmental discourses, covering ecological limits and planetary boundaries, pragmatic problem-solving, sustainability, ecological modernization, and green radicalism, as well as radical anti-environmentalism. It analyzes key developments in environmental affairs alongside many examples that illustrate how discourses shape past and current debates on the environment. It concludes by examining the radical implications of the Anthropocene concept.