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Green Politics and the Greening of Society

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F2N8DQBT/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0

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https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F254HFVT/ref=sr_1_1

We’re in the midst of a profound civilizational turning point. It’s becoming clear that the millennia-long trajectories of growth and “development” (which have gone parabolic since the industrial revolution) are socially and ecologically unsustainable. We’ve arrived at a point where the hypertrophy of the institutions and technologies of modernity have resulted in a malaise of powerlessness, disorientation, and alienation for the vast majority of people. Within the context of what Lewis Mumford calls “the social megamachine,” community life withers and work for The System loses all sense of reciprocal personalistic satisfaction.

It should be clear by now that mass society is failing to realize progressive aspirations for democracy, equality, peace, and ecological responsibility. Whether the means of production are owned privately or collectively it is failing to address the modern crisis of overdevelopment and overshoot. So a re-direction — toward what Steven Welzer calls “the greening of society” — is badly needed.

The recognition of such dates to the ferment we associate with “the Sixties.” In its wake came the establishment of the transformational movements for eco-communitarianism at the “micro” level (bioregionalism, ecovillages, Transition Towns) and Green politics at the “macro” level.

Our problems have been developing over millennia, so a radical turning of the ship of state will figure to play out over an extended “Long Emergency” period encompassing many generations. But the re-direction that’s being initiated in our time heralds a hopeful eventual “settling-back” into ecological righteousness and social sanity.