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But we must not overstate the compatibility between sustainability and other social and political ideals. As we shall see in the chapters that follow, critics have called for restrictions on important liberties in the interest of sustainability, have suggested that democracy is complicit in the environmental crisis and so must be limited or replaced, and have called for an end to the sovereign state in the interest of more effectively governing earth systems. Some visions of the sustainable society threaten ideals of equality and justice, or dramatically restrict individual agency. Were sustainability the only social and political ideal, or one that was universally viewed as taking priority over all other such ideals when they conflicted, it would be relatively easy to advance. Resources that would otherwise be used to advance other ideals could be devoted toward sustainable energy or transportation infrastructure. Powers that are constrained by ideals of democracy or sovereignty, or by consideration of the rights of persons or peoples, could be mobilized on behalf of rapid technological development or change. An environmental leviathan (to borrow an image from Hobbes) could identify and address the many obstacles that now prevent our transition to a sustainable society, working single-mindedly and purposefully.

Where we recognize multiple and (sometimes) incommensurable ideals, the pursuit of any one of them can be constrained by the existence and imperative nature of the others. We want our political system to be democratic, but also to be able to take actions necessary to avoid catastrophic climate change. We want to create resilient cities, but must respect the rights and liberties of their residents. We want to protect biodiversity, but struggle to do so in the face of a view of progress for which it gets in the way. As we shall explore in these pages, these can take the form of a dilemma: suggesting that we must choose between democracy and sustainability, or between a free society and a sustainable one. Since these ideals and the values they represent are not commensurable, we lack a clear method for prioritizing one over another. Both are important, and indeed neither could be sacrificed for the sake of the other without generating serious objections. How are we to move forward, though, when such conflicts arise (or appear to arise)?

The need to balance competing imperatives is hardly unique to contemporary politics, even if the appearance of sustainability as a new imperative has introduced new conflicts with older ideals. To consider only one of many such examples, liberty and equality are often seen as competing with one another. We know that allowing a kind of market freedom will lead to significant economic inequality over time, which in turn can undermine legal and political equality as those with more income and wealth translate these into forms of power that confer advantages with legislatures and in courts. Conversely, maintaining a strict economic equality would conflict with influential conceptions of freedom. Constructively resolving a dilemma like this one requires a normative theoretical method that allows us to appreciate the value of both horns of the dilemma, to understand the historical origins and evolution of the relevant concepts, to propose balancing points in areas of unavoidable tension, while identifying means of reducing those tensions where they are unnecessary.

These powers of political theory – combined with an orientation that counsels epistemological humility in understanding such ideals as constructions that cannot readily be reconstructed at will, but instead call for critical challenges that can only come through collective and political action, rather than words in a book – enable this method of political inquiry to generate insights into the historical trajectory of environmental politics that would not be available to scholars or students of other disciplinary perspectives.

Must we choose to confer absolute priority to one ideal over the other whenever they conflict? Few libertarians are prepared to scrap legal equality (or equality before the law) in pursuit of the variety of liberty that they otherwise favor, and few strict egalitarians would so restrict individual freedom that voluntary simplicity (or the voluntary choice of leisure over more material possessions) would be banned as an affront to material equality. We seek to resolve such conflicts by balancing competing ideals, rather than granting one absolute priority over the others, and, while the libertarian and strict egalitarian may each identify a quite different balance, they both aim to do what will be our goal in the chapters of this book: to strike some balance between ostensibly competing ideals (sometimes by reinterpreting one or both to minimize the tension between them), and then to defend these interpretations and this balancing point. This art of balancing, along with the associated arts of appreciating points of tension in ideas as well as understanding the historical origins and normative force of each source of tension, allows the mode of inquiry used in this book to assist our comprehension of what is needed to usher in the kinds of changes that will allow us to maintain our noblest and most considered aspirations.

Canonical texts in political theory reveal the origins of and major developments in the prevailing social and political ideals, as visionary historical thinkers wrestled with value conflicts or to accommodate important events or changes in the world. Understanding how various and often competing conceptions of key social and political ideals emerge, exert influence, and either become institutionalized or give way to new conceptions can assist our understanding of how an ideal like sustainability, an event like the environmental crisis, or a discovery like ecological limits has shaped our received ideals as well as been shaped by them, and how their evolution in adaptation to the constraints of ecological limits or imperatives of sustainability might occur. In understanding human history and environmental change through environmental political theory, we can gain a unique perspective on how and why we as a species organized into societies and, influenced by their constitutive ideas and ideals, got to where we are today, and can better appreciate our possible human and social futures, what they hold for those residing in them, and how social and political ideas and institutions can in some sense help to determine those futures. It is to this task that we now turn, following a chapter on the idea of ecological limits, and the several possible reactions to it in shaping the sustainability ideal and generating its imperatives.