434 Localized Food Systems
propose it does question the longevity of what Buttel (2000) refers to as the more
established rational frameworks of the ‘treadmill of production’ and the ‘growth
machine’ which have by no means completely disappeared. Arguably, however,
they are in many places less in their ascendancy and subject to internal and exter-
nal crisis tendencies (such as food scares, legitimization and ethical concerns, pol-
lution incidents and long-term health problems, and not least the increasing and
uneven global regulation of greenhouse gases), as well as deep structural tendencies
which are seen as increasingly contradictory. Despite these internalized problems in
the governmentality of a strictly economic rationality, it does not seem to reduce the
possibility of strong reactive (‘backlash’) politics from taking ground back from the
ecologically modernizing agenda. This is, for instance, one interpretation of the US
Bush administration and its arguments against the signing of the Kyoto agreement,
and the renewed faith in the domestic exploitation of oil reserves (Watts, 2002).
Nevertheless, social-ecological debates and discourses are gaining ground in different
guises and through different types of social, political and economic practices. While
these may confront the former structural changes, associated with globalization of
corporate capital, for instance, they are by no means simply marginal or subject to
the marginalization effects of corporate states, firms and their social and political
logics. Rather, and from a rural perspective, they may suggest a new centrality for
many of the features of rural life that the industrially based modernization process
tended to marginalize – for instance, aspects of agroecological development as part
of rural development (see Rannikko, 1999; Jokinen, 2000), the development of
decentralized and more sustainable rural communities as a central part of settlement
hierarchies, and more mobile and information and communication technology-
based sharing of experiences in rural and urban areas (Andersen, 2002). Indeed, we
might suggest that one central element of ecological modernization is the very redef-
inition of the spatial and social balances between the more mobile urban and rural
living experiences and frameworks; and about the realignment, more specifically,
between nature, quality, region and locale, producers and consumers, for a more
ecological rural resource base.
Some may see these notions as going too far. Moreover, we have to recognize
that there are significant distinguishing features between what Christoff (1996)
and Toke (2002) depict as forms of ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ ecological modernization;
suggesting a caution about both the direction and pace of ‘autonomous ecologism’.
Nevertheless, we need to analytically explore these modalities between the eco-
nomic and ecological rationalities, on the one hand, and the uneven development
of ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ ecological modernization tendencies on the other. In addi-
tion, this challenges us to provide ecological modernization with a more robust
theoretical basis, one which deepens the political-sociological perspective of eco-
logical modernization such that the way forward would at least include not just:
empirical debates over the potentials and limits of environmental engineering and
industrial ecology, but rather to deepen the links to political-sociological literatures
which will suggest new research problems and hypotheses (Buttel, 2000, p64).