The displaced costs of success

Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (Q. Hoare & G. Nowell Smith, Eds. & Trans.). International Publishers. Source ↗

In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci describes social rule as operating through both coercion and hegemony: a dominant group can secure “spontaneous” consent through institutions, intellectual activity and social relations that give its direction prestige and authority. He also treats ordinary people as participants in conceptions of the world rather than as non-intellectuals. His discussions of “common sense” describe everyday consciousness as historically formed, heterogeneous and often contradictory: assumptions inherited from social life can reproduce an existing order, while experience can also contain elements capable of being made more coherent and critical.

Dorninger, C., Hornborg, A., Abson, D. J., von Wehrden, H., Schaffartzik, A., Giljum, S., Engler, J.-O., Feller, R. L., Hubacek, K., & Wieland, H. (2021). Global patterns of ecologically unequal exchange: Implications for sustainability in the 21st century. Ecological Economics, 179, 106824. DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2020.106824 ↗

Dorninger and colleagues test the theory of ecologically unequal exchange using environmentally extended multi-regional input-output data for 170 countries between 1990 and 2015. They trace materials, energy, land and labour embodied in international trade and compare these biophysical flows with monetary value added. The study finds a persistent pattern in which high-income countries are net appropriators of embodied materials, energy and labour while lower-income countries are disproportionately net providers, although patterns differ by resource and country group. Monetary returns are also unequal: high-income economies obtain substantially more value added per unit of embodied material or labour. The authors describe the results as evidence consistent with ecologically unequal exchange rather than definitive proof of every proposed mechanism.

Ruwanpura, K. N., Cederlöf, G., & Ramasar, V. (2025). Decolonising polycrisis: Southern perspectives on interlocking crises. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 57(6), 697–703. DOI: 10.1177/0308518X251345308 ↗

Ruwanpura, Cederlöf and Ramasar argue that contemporary polycrisis discussion often begins from a Euro-American experience in which overlapping crises appear newly exceptional. They begin instead from global South histories in which ecological shocks, debt, unequal development and political-economic dependency have long interacted. Pakistan’s 2022 floods and debt burden provide an opening example: climate-related destruction increased fiscal pressure while debt constrained the resources available for recovery and climate response. The authors place such interactions within longer histories of colonial extraction, uneven development, unequal exchange and global governance, while also insisting that proposed causal connections should be empirically tested rather than assumed.

Chancel, L. (2022). Global carbon inequality over 1990–2019. Nature Sustainability, 5, 931–938. DOI: 10.1038/s41893-022-00955-z ↗

Chancel reconstructs the distribution of greenhouse-gas emissions across global income and wealth groups from 1990 to 2019, combining distributional data with environmental input-output information and country-level estimates. The analysis attributes emissions not only to household consumption but also to private investment and government expenditure, and includes emissions embodied in international trade. For 2019, it estimates that the bottom half of the global population was responsible for roughly 12% of emissions while the top 10% accounted for about 48%. The study also finds that carbon inequality increasingly exists within countries rather than simply between rich and poor countries, and that investment accounts for a particularly large share of the footprint of the highest emitters.

Ukeles, M. L. (1969). Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! Proposal for an exhibition “CARE” [Manifesto]. Source ↗.

Ukeles’s manifesto sets “Development” and “Maintenance” beside one another as two systems of activity. Development is associated with making the new, change, progress and individual creation; maintenance consists of preserving, sustaining, renewing and repeating what development produces. Ukeles connects the low cultural status of maintenance to domestic and low-paid work, then declares her own washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing and supporting to be art. Her proposed exhibition CARE would place personal maintenance, other people’s accounts of maintenance, and “Earth Maintenance” inside the exhibition itself, making the work of sustaining things publicly visible.

Fraser, N. (1998). Social justice in the age of identity politics: Redistribution, recognition, and participation. In G. B. Peterson (Ed.), The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (Vol. 19, pp. 1–67). University of Utah Press. Source ↗

Fraser argues that social justice cannot be reduced either to economic redistribution or to cultural recognition. In her account, maldistribution deprives people of the resources needed to participate as peers, while misrecognition subordinates people through institutionalised patterns of cultural value. These dimensions are analytically distinct but often reinforce one another. She proposes “participatory parity” as a standard for diagnosing injustice: social arrangements should allow members of society to interact with one another as peers, which requires addressing both economic structures that deny resources and status orders that deny equal standing.

Plumwood, V. (1991). Nature, self, and gender: Feminism, environmental philosophy, and the critique of rationalism. Hypatia, 6(1), 3–27. DOI: 10.1111/j.1527-2001.1991.tb00206.x ↗

Plumwood argues that Western rationalism has organised a family of hierarchical dualisms—human/nature, reason/body, masculine/feminine, reason/emotion—in which one side is treated as primary and the other as inferior or instrumental. She describes an “excluded sphere” whose members and activities are backgrounded and represented as lacking ends of their own. Against both an atomistic self separated from nature and versions of deep ecology that dissolve difference into merger, she develops a relational account of self that recognises dependence and continuity while preserving the distinctness of others.

Jonas, H. (1984). The imperative of responsibility: In search of an ethics for the technological age (H. Jonas & D. Herr, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. Source ↗

Jonas argues that modern technology has changed the scale, duration and reach of human action enough that inherited ethical frameworks, largely oriented toward proximate acts among contemporaries, are no longer sufficient. Technological power can produce cumulative and potentially irreversible effects on humanity and nature, so responsibility must extend toward the conditions of future human life and the environment on which it depends. The book develops principles for acting under uncertainty, gives special weight to avoiding consequences that could foreclose a viable human future, and closes by applying this expanded responsibility to technological progress and utopian politics.

Parvinen, K. (2005). Evolutionary suicide. Acta Biotheoretica, 53(3), 241–264. DOI: 10.1007/s10441-005-2531-5 ↗

Parvinen reviews “evolutionary suicide,” a class of evolutionary models in which natural selection moves a viable population toward traits that eventually make the population unable to persist. In these models extinction is not simply an external catastrophe that adaptation fails to prevent; the direction of adaptation itself carries the population toward an extinction boundary. The paper compares models in which evolutionary suicide occurs and reviews the theoretical conditions behind the phenomenon.

Le Guin, U. K. (1973). The ones who walk away from Omelas. In R. Silverberg (Ed.), New Dimensions 3. Nelson Doubleday.

Le Guin’s story begins by inviting the reader to imagine Omelas as a joyful, prosperous city celebrating its summer festival. The narration then reveals the condition on which this flourishing is said to depend: a single child is kept in degrading confinement and misery, and the citizens are taught that helping the child would destroy the happiness of the city. Most residents, after learning of the child and experiencing distress, come to accept the arrangement. A small number refuse it by leaving Omelas alone, walking toward a destination the narrator cannot describe.

Whyte, K. P. (2017). Indigenous climate change studies: Indigenizing futures, decolonizing the Anthropocene. English Language Notes, 55(1–2), 153–162. DOI: 10.1215/00138282-55.1-2.153 ↗

Whyte describes Indigenous climate change studies as a field grounded in Indigenous peoples’ living heritages, knowledges, governance and long histories of adapting to environmental change. He argues that contemporary climate change is often experienced by Indigenous peoples as an intensification of environmental disruption already imposed through colonialism, capitalism and industrialisation. A second strand of the essay concerns the renewal of Indigenous knowledges as the renewal of relationships among humans, nonhumans and ecosystems for Indigenous peoples’ own self-determined planning, rather than as information to be extracted for outside science. Its final section links present action with ancestors and the continuance of future generations.

Mauss, M. (2016). The gift: Expanded edition (J. I. Guyer, Trans.). HAU Books. (Original work published 1925).

Mauss compares systems of exchange across ethnographic and historical materials to ask why gifts that appear voluntary nevertheless create obligations. He identifies interlocking duties to give, receive and make return, and argues that exchange can bind law, economy, religion, status, alliance and morality together as “total social” phenomena. His conclusion treats reciprocity, cooperation and generosity as forces that persist in modern societies rather than belonging to a vanished pre-market past. The gift in Mauss is therefore neither simply free nor necessarily egalitarian: it can create relationship, obligation and status at the same time.

Lyons, O. (2008, April 17). Looking toward the seventh generation [Presentation]. American Indian Studies Program, University of Arizona. Source ↗.

In this presentation, Onondaga Faithkeeper Oren Lyons describes Haudenosaunee governance as carrying responsibilities beyond the present generation. Recounting instructions attributed to the Peacemaker, he says leaders should deliberate for the welfare of the people without centring themselves, their families or even their own generation, but with the seventh generation to come in view. He places that temporal responsibility within wider relations to land, water and other forms of life, and connects decision-making with gratitude, protection and responsibility.

Kimmerer, R. W. (2024). The serviceberry: Abundance and reciprocity in the natural world. Scribner. Source ↗

Kimmerer begins with harvesting serviceberries and develops “gift” as a way of describing a relationship to what sustains life. In her Potawatomi-language framing, receiving what the living world provides is connected with gratitude, reciprocity and responsibility rather than ownership alone. She contrasts economies organised around scarcity, competition and accumulation with gift relations in which abundance circulates and “enough” has social and ecological meaning. The serviceberry’s relationships with soil, pollinators, birds and people become part of an account of wealth measured through the quality of relationships and the capacity to give, receive and return.

Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants. Milkweed Editions.

In “The Gift of Strawberries,” Kimmerer uses wild strawberries to describe gift as an ongoing relationship rather than a free transfer: receiving creates obligations to give, receive and reciprocate, while commodity exchange can close a transaction through payment. “The Honorable Harvest” develops related practices of taking from living systems under conditions of need, restraint, gratitude, respect and return. Kimmerer then asks how such principles might be carried into forms of consumption in which people are separated from the living sources of what they use, while acknowledging that people do not have equal freedom or resources to choose how they participate in those economies.