This book examines how the way we conceive of or measure the environment changes the way we
interact with it. Thomas Smith posits that environmentalism and sustainable development have
become increasingly post-political characterised by abstraction and quantification to an
unprecedented extent. As such the book argues that our ways of measuring both the environment
such as through sustainability metrics like footprints and Payments for Ecosystem Services and
society through gross domestic product and wellbeing measures play a constitutive and
problematic role in how we conceive of ourselves in the world. Subsequently as the quantified
environmental approach drives a dualistic wedge between the human and non-human realms in its
final section the book puts forward recent developments in new materialism and feminist ethics
of care as providing practical ways of re-founding sustainable development in a way that firmly
acknowledges human-ecological relations. This book willbe an invaluable reference for scholars
and students in the fields of human geography political ecology and environmental sociology.
