This paper is a summary of philosophy, theory, and practice arising from collective writing experiments conducted between 2016 and 2022 in the community associated with the Editors’ Collective and more than 20 scholarly journals. The main body of the paper summarises the community’s insights into the many faces of collective writing. Appendix 1 presents the workflow of the article’s development. Appendix 2 lists approximately 100 collectively written scholarly articles published between 2016 and 2022. Collective writing is a continuous struggle for meaning-making, and our research insights merely represent one milestone in this struggle. Collective writing can be designed in many different ways, and our workflow merely shows one possible design that we found useful. There are many more collectively written scholarly articles than we could gather, and our reading list merely offers sources that the co-authors could think of. While our research insights and our attempts at synthesis are inevitably incomplete, ‘Collective Writing: The Continuous Struggle for Meaning-Making’ is a tiny theoretical steppingstone and a useful overview of sources for those interested in theory and practice of collective writing.

This critique of inherent flaws in today's growth-driven natural capitalism argues its key contradictions and basic conflicts can be typified by the cultural politics and political economy found in the environmental advocacy of Al Gore Jr, especially in his Nobel Prize winning activities on global climate change in works like An Inconvenient Truth. In such criticism he aims neither to dismiss the dangers of global climate change nor to derogate the findings of ongoing scientific research, like that done by the co-awardees of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, namely, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Rather, it is meant to begin a more pointed reassessment of how today's global climate-change debates are too entwined in the reproduction of most existing power relations and global market exchange. At best, Gore's work seems essentially to ‘greenwash’ existing networks of corporate organization and expert technocracy with renewed institutional legitimacy that only rinses today's unsustainable economic status quo in the refreshing, but not fully cleansing, waters of sustainable development ideology. While there is a need for systemic reforms in economic production, government regulation, technological innovation, and social distribution to mitigate climate change, Gore's many engagements with big business, venture capital, and global media do not appear to offer such a radical transformation. Instead, his basic project of decarbonizing the commodity chain mainly would appear to be a new program for further economic development that might not even retard, much less fully reverse, current climate-change trends.

Climate change is represented as an increasingly conventionalized cluster of signs, symbols, and stories. This symbolic formation typically is cast in various graphic and tabular presentations of how greenhouse gases are disrupting Nature and its environments. The essentially contested quality of this imaginary, and its conflicting characteristics, force one to re-examine how mediated, constructed, and rhetorical these depictions are. Such aesthetic constructs are a risky art in which climate change images can circulate as illusion, ideology, and invention as well as factual and functional scientific findings. Rather than being simple presentations of Nature as such, these efforts are often complex representations of social forces with political agendas. Presentations of these imaginaries as well as reactions to them leave one pondering how the images serve many purposes: to discredit or validate the still emerging sciences for modeling, monitoring, and managing climate change; to legitimize or forestall ongoing debates about climate change and its causes; or to aestheticize or paralyze thinking about global warming as the sheer immensity, root uncertainty, and clear complexity of taking any action grip both the elites and publics.

For nearly two decades, a few thinkers and movements, which are regarded as being ‘progressive’, or even on the traditional ‘left-wing’, in the US, have gravitated toward visions of an ‘eco-socialism’ and/or ‘green statism’ in their policy thinking. In fact, some groups accept these ideological formulae as action programs for answering the serious policy challenges of many contemporary environmental crises first identified during the 1950s and 1960s. Since the neoliberal 1990s, many more voices also have been touting the merits of a ‘green’ or ‘natural’ capitalism. The 2000s have seen quite a few politicians and environmentalists casting it as a one size-fits-all panacea for ‘breaking through’ an older dead environmentalism to develop workable policy solutions for today's environmental crisis. These voices frequently ask policy-makers to revisit the New Deal years in the US for the inspiration to launch a Green New Deal during the twenty-first century. How can we explain this ‘green’ turn, and what are the limits and possibilities for the policy responses implied by working towards a Green New Deal in the current political context?