David Pepper

Assessing the Undergraduate Dissertation

This paper reports on a study of assessment of undergraduate dissertations in the seven departments which constitute the School of Social Sciences and Law at Oxford Brookes University. Information was gathered from documented material and interviews regarding criteria used in assessment of dissertations. This was analysed to identify the range of criteria across disciplines. Criteria were also examined by administration of a questionnaire asking staff to define commonly listed criteria. Finally, a content analysis of completed assessment forms was undertaken to gauge the extent to which identified criteria were actually applied and to gain insight into those that were implicit. The study revealed considerable ambiguity as regards use, meaning and application of criteria. The paper concludes by outlining the policies and practices that are now being developed in the School in the light of these findings, and situates the study in the UK national context of concern to establish graduate threshold standards.

Ecological modernisation or the ‘ideal model’ of sustainable development? Questions prompted at Europe's periphery

Some commentators see ecological modernisation as little more than a techno‐managerialist discourse legitimating the neoliberal free trade and modernisation agenda; others as having more radical potential presaging green social democratic government and strong sustainability. But on either reading, this discourse, forming the basis of EU environmental policies, contains weaknesses and contradictions. These emerge when examining the operationalisation of sustainability policies at Europes periphery, in Ireland. In practice, the Single Markets tendency to emphasise core‐periphery economic contrasts encourages pnoritisation of approaches to economic growth that neglect and inhibit stronger sustainability conditions. Attempts to achieve wealth redistribution and economic democracy via structural and cohesion spending are offset by the tendency of the EUs economic agenda to concentrate wealth. Attempts to reform institutional and business perspectives on sustainability are frustrated by the exigencies of gl...

On Contemporary Eco-socialism

The chapter aims to offer a critical appraisal of contemporary eco-socialism in the West. As a radical homocentric (not ecocentric) application of socialist analysis and prescriptions to environmentalism, a major development for eco-socialism in recent years is that it is more willing to acknowledges the complexity of the modern globalising world and thus to move away from that crude economism which has disillusioned many would-be Marxist theorists and practitioners in the past. A further development in eco-socialism has been growing interest in manifestations of the practical side of eco-socialist theory and envisioning, constructing alternatives to capitalism which are dominated by social and environmental considerations and by the principle of production for social need rather than profit through consumerism. These alternative forms are diverse and together form a community economy of alternative spaces within capitalism, although the transgressive potential of such ‘transitional forms’ could perhaps be limited making see notes above them become a force for the status quo.

Anthropocentrism, humanism and eco‐socialism: A blueprint for the survival of ecological politics

In searching for a more coherent politics, ecologism should turn towards Marxism, rather than away from it. Marxism has valuable perspectives to shed on some of the questions about social justice which ecologism increasingly poses. The Marxist view of the society‐nature relationship is relevant to the mass of people, since it is fundamentally anthropocentric and humanist, not (like so‐called ‘deep’ ecology) ‘biocentric’ and tending towards anti‐humanism. However, since it is also in a sense monistic, Marxisms dialectical view of the society‐nature relationship is also inherently green. An eco‐socialism based on both Marx and Morris can claim to be able to meet human material and spiritual needs without destroying non‐human nature or producing alienating environments. In sketching out the practical details of an eco‐socialist society, however, eco‐socialism will have to show how it can reconcile some potential contradictions ‐ particularly that between a desire for autarky and the need to build a sophisti...

Book Reviews : Green history: a reader in environmental literature, philosophy and politics. By D. Wall. London, Routledge. 1993. 273 pp. £12.99 paper. ISBN 0 415 07924 1 and 0 415 07925 X

For anyone remotely involved in environmentalism, Derek Wall has produced a book to be bought and kept to hand for moments of enjoyable browsing. He has amassed about a hundred generally short or very brief extracts from the works of an assembly of authors, from Plato to Starhawk, deemed to be relevant to ’Greens’. They illustrate links between contemporary Green radicalism and, among others, scientific ecology, holistic philosophy, quasi-religious movements, paganism and the occult, romanticism, Utopian socialism and indeed any voices that have been raised against progress and the Enlightenment project, materialism and economic growth. Inevitably, I was bored by some of the selection and fascinated and excited by others. I particularly savoured John Evelyn’s horrendous account of pollution in seventeenth-century London, A. Hassel’s scary catalogue of the metal additives in Victorian food, J. Nriagu and J. Donald Hughes on how Romans poisoned themselves with lead and wasted hundreds of animals in sadistic brutality, Alex Walker on the FBI’s massacre of the MOVE in 1985, the Webbs in praise of Soviet communism’s transformation of Nature, Shelley on vegetarianism, Engels on dialectics (how clearly he wrote), Gilbert White on earthworms, Emerson on Nature, Marx on the division of labour, Winstanley’s Declaration from the poor, oppressed people of England, and, of course, Thoreau in praise of the simple life. The book appears a labour of love: Wall