Political Ecology andSustainability.

Environmental scientists and ecological economists agree that there is an impending global environmental crisis in the making. The scientific foundations of this claim are broad-based, and the economic response turns on the idea of a steady-state economy that would conceive of growth in terms other than producation and consumption. These scientific and economic arguments have culminated in a series of international conferences around the idea of sustainability. In this paper, I wish to consider the political consequences of sustainability and the political sphere as the locus of change necessary to achieve sustainability. The conceptual or theoretical result of this interation between politics and the natural world is what I term political ecology. In elaborating on the importance of political ecology I turn to the work of Aristotle and Hannah Arendt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]