QUESTION # 1: Global Limits and their Denial Within The Politics of the Earth: Environmental Discourses Dryzek utilizes four aspects of the discourses in order to conduct a discourse analysis: basic entities recognized or constructed, assumptions about natural relationships, agents and their motives, and key metaphors and rhetorical devices. The survivalism, promethean, and more recently planetary boundaries discourses are critical in shaping the political spectrum of environmental issues. Within this paper, I refer to Dryzek’s analysis in order to compare and contrast the “limits and survival”, “planetary boundaries”, and the “Promethean” discourses of environmentalism, and assess their respective strengths and weakness. In this analysis …show more content…
While planetary boundaries doesn’t necessarily address this as it makes a simple argument for the discourse itself, we see that survivalism and prometheanism have clear ideas of what may happen. Survivalism anticipates a large degree of conflict seeing that resources would be very scarce, it also forces a potential hierarchy in order to redeem control. Prometheanism views this aspect in a different fashion, rather than viewing it as humans against one another, this discourse frames it as a fight with nature and prospects a hierarchy of humans over everything else, which isn’t far off from our current system. This discourse also sees the potential for competition between humans that would lead to the innovations in order to deal with the problems being faced (Dryzek, 2013, pg. 61). These scenarios, being hypothetical, provide no tangible argument for the discourses themselves, however, it allows for a better grasp on the perspective held by the …show more content…
Survivalists, in seeing humankind as a “problem to be controlled” (Dryzek, 2013, pg. 62), views elites as having the conceivable motivation and agency to act. The promethean discourse believes that everyone as an economic actor has the ability to act and that the drive of people to do so would come from a “material self-interest” (Dryzek, 2013, pg. 63). These are both interesting interpretations that further reinforce the conflicting ideals both discourses