An economic tail wagging an ecological dog? : Well-being and sustainable development from the perspective of entangled history

Abstract

The historical approach to planetary well-being provides an understanding of how environmental problems and climate crises run over time, entangled with chronic social (mal)developments and path dependencies. As humans and the nonhuman world are entangled in larger webs of life, human political and economic action is deeply affected and is amplified by natural processes. Consequently, understanding well-being anthropocentrically has guided political decision-making in ways that have magnified the negative human impacts on eco- and climate systems. Environmental history invites us to ask how well-being has been defined in different historical contexts, on what grounds these definitions are made and who gets to define well-being in the first place. It enables an analysis of the social, cultural, and economic path dependencies that have retarded the realization of a less anthropocentric and more systems-oriented understanding of well-being. This chapter analyses the understanding of well-being in the European Union’s and the Finnish and German Green Parties’ conceptualizations of sustainable development. In the 1980s and 1990s, a more anthropocentric understanding of well-being replaced the previous holistic emphasis. This chapter sheds light on the different path dependencies and long-term incentives that have kept planetary well-being at bay in contexts of political action.