The Ecocentrists

A History of Radical Environmentalism
Erscheinungsjahr 2018
ISBN: 978-0-231-16588-4
Verlag: Columbia University Press

Buch, Englisch, 392 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 164 mm x 236 mm, Gewicht: 763 g

Disenchanted with the mainstream environmental movement, a new, more radical kind of environmental activist emerged in the 1980s. Radical environmentalists used direct action, from blockades and tree-sits to industrial sabotage, to save a wild nature that they believed was in a state of crisis. Questioning the premises of liberal humanism, they subscribed to an ecocentric philosophy that attributed as much value to nature as to people. Although critics dismissed them as marginal, radicals posed a vital question that mainstream groups too often ignored: Is environmentalism a matter of common sense or a fundamental critique of the modern world?

In The Ecocentrists, Keith Mako Woodhouse offers a nuanced history of radical environmental thought and action in the late-twentieth-century United States. Focusing especially on the group Earth First!, Woodhouse explores how radical environmentalism responded to both postwar affluence and a growing sense of material limits. While radicals challenged the material and philosophical basis of industrial civilization, they glossed over the ways economic inequality and social difference defined people’s different relationships to the nonhuman world. Woodhouse discusses how such views increasingly set Earth First! at odds with movements focused on social justice and considers the implications of ecocentrism’s sweeping critique of human society for the future of environmental protection. A groundbreaking intellectual history of environmental politics in the United States, The Ecocentrists is a timely study that makes a case for the role of skepticism and doubt in environmental thought.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Woodhouse, Keith Makoto

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte
• Geowissenschaften Umweltwissenschaften Denkansätze und Ideologie der Umweltschützer
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Alte Geschichte & Archäologie Umweltgeschichte & Umweltarchäologie

Über Autor(innen)

Keith Mako Woodhouse is an assistant professor at Northwestern University, where he teaches in the History Department and the Environmental Policy and Culture Program.