Abstract:
An awareness that the material bases of life on the planet are finite, are running out or are being contaminated is increasingly present in the local, regional and international public sphere. This is due both to a use of scarce resources above nature's ability to reproduce and regenerate them, as well as to an excessive concentration of it as private property. The text is based on the notion of the public sphere as a place for disputes over controversial themes in democracies. Before, however, addressing the risk arising from the destruction of the physical environment, it recovers another period of crisis, that was also high mobilizing, and the way it was faced: the risk of social disruptions as a result of the negative effects of an accelerated industrialization within a capitalist logic – which ironically is at the root of the current risk. At the same time, it highlights how even against resistance, parallel to questionable discursive formations about a supposed “sustainable development”, a civil society resists and articulates itself in order to regenerate and protect both the material bases of life as well as the democratic institutions fundamental to society.
Keywords:
Public sphere; Environment; Risk; Civil society; Sustainable development