A Livable Planet

Madison Powers is Professor Emeritus, Georgetown University, and former Senior Research Scholar in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, where he served as Director from 2000-2009. He is a Fellow of the Hastings Center, and recipient of a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Investigator Award. He is co-author of two books with Ruth Faden, Social Justice: The Moral Foundations of Public Health and Health Care Policy (OUP, 2006), and Structural Injustice: Power, Advantage, and Human Rights (OUP, 2019). Before his career as a philosopher, he practiced law, primarily in health and environmental law.

1. Our Ecological Predicament
1.1. Convergent Crises
1.2. Summary of Chapters

2. Sustainability and Political Economy
2.1. Conceptions of Sustainability
2.2. The Logic of Capitalism
2.3. Psychological Explanations
2.4. Economic Growth
2.5. The Consequences of Inequality
2.6. Practical Implications

3. Market Fundamentalism
3.1. Market Fundamentalism and Neoliberal Policies
3.2. Three Rationales for Market Fundamentalism
3.3. The Non-interference Conception of Freedom

4. Human Rights and Ecological Goals
4.1. The Normative Framework of Human Rights
4.2. Rights, Duties, and Structural Inequality
4.3. Three Problems of Application
4.4. Rights, Duties, and Violations

5. Market Power and Legal Advantage
5.1. The Consolidation of Market Power
5.2. The Realignment of State Power
5.3. Gaming the System of States
5.4. Control over Capital Investment

6. Land Use and its Consequences
6.1. Farmland and Food Security
6.2. Impacts Beyond Land
6.3. Forests and Biosphere Integrity
6.4. Land and Human Rights

7. Water and Social Organization
7.1. The Management of Scarcity
7.2. The Political Economy of Water Resources
7.3. The Privatization of Essential Services

8. Energy Transition Pathways
8.1 False Hopes
8.2. False Starts
8.3. Path Dependencies
8.4. Human Rights and Alternative Pathways

9. Control over the Future
9.1 Wealth and Power
9.2. Sovereign States and Global Problems
Index