Increasingly, the most powerful voices on the planet - heads of state, corporation, global economists - are speaking in the name of environmentalism. Strange and scary days for an ecology movement that was conceived in fierce opposition to power. Fractured, as ever, by divisions and competing agendas, the movement must now confront the dangerous tendency of those in power to invoke nature's laws as a model for social well-being. Partly as a result of ecology's influence, biologism is back, and the specters of social Darwinism and Malthusian ideas about natural scarcity have begun to reinforce, if not translate into, calls for a reduction in rights and freedoms in civil society. This book of social and cultural criticism questions the evangelical asceticism of much environmentalist thought, and calls for a renewal of the libertarian, post-scarcity tradition. Opening with an essay on the ethnic and socio-economic bases of cultural nationalism in the Pacific Islands, it assesses the continuing historical appeal of ecological romanticism, long associated with Polynesian peoples, and central today to a tourism industry that is the new mode of Third World development.
Turning to home, the book analyzes the 1993 bombing of New York's World Trade Center in the ecological context of urban development that has made the city a capital both of global finance and of new immigrant cultures. In a response to the bombing and environmental terrorism of the Gulf War, it goes on to explore the "ecology of images" that characterized the media's role in that war's carnage and in the mounting collateral damage of the New World Order. A fourth chapter discusses the much-hyped men's movement as a response to debates among eco-feminists. The book concludes with a sweeping critique of the new world view being ushered in by geneticists and the biotechnology industry - a philosophy of biological determinism that Andrew Ross describes as "the Chicago gangster theory of life. With an eye on the crucial cultural phenomena of the times, Ross's take on the contradictions of green politics is tempered by his commitment to dispel the ecology movement's public image as an anti-libertarian politics that always "says no", and preaches self-limitation rather than promising social fulfillment.
He sees an ecological future of public affluence and not voluntary poverty, a world where nature is a participant in social plans, and not an authority locking us into some incontrovertible fate.
- ISBN10 0860914291
- ISBN13 9780860914297
- Publish Date 3 October 1994
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 8 February 1996
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Verso Books
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 320
- Language English