Overview

There have been various thinkers who have attempted to explain the Earth-altering (even ecocidal) features in modern life. Jacques Ellul, for instance, a French intellectual, became famous for his exposition of technique. But technique does not adequately address the institutional context out of which technique itself arises. In these essays, Paul Gilk stands on the shoulders of two American scholars in particular. One is world historian Lewis Mumford, whose work spans fifty years of scholarship. The other is classics professor Norman O. Brown, who brought his erudition into a systematic study of Freud. From these intellectuals especially, Gilk concludes that the accelerating ecocidal characteristics of globalisation are inherent manifestations of perfectionist, utopian, predatory institutions endemic to civilisation. Our great difficulty in arriving at or accepting this conclusion is that civilisation contains no negatives it is strictly a positive construct. We are therefore incapable of thinking critically about it. A corrective is slowly emerging from Green intellectuals. Green politics, says Gilk, is not utopian but eutopian. It is not aimed at perfectionist immortality but, rather, at earthly wholeness. Yet the ethical message of Green politics confronts a society saturated with utopian mythology. The question is to what extent, and at what speed, ecological and cultural breakdown will dissolve civilised, utopian certitudes and provide the requisite openings for the growth of Green, eutopian culture.

Full Product Details

Author:   Paul Gilk
Publisher:   James Clarke & Co Ltd
Imprint:   Lutterworth Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.30cm , Height: 1.60cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.381kg
ISBN:  

9780718891831

ISBN 10:   071889183
Pages:   254
Publication Date:   26 February 2009
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Available To Order  
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Table of Contents

Introduction. 1. E. F. Schumacher: Utopian or Eutopian? 2. In Imitation of the Gods. 3. The Mass-Hallucinatory Fantasy. 4. The Perfectly Camouflaged Temple. 5. Preliminary Thoughts on Green Education. 6. Suspended in Civilized Values. 7. A Green Critique of Socialist Agriculture. 8. The Meaning of Green Agriculture. 9. Victory over Dirt. 10. A Landscape Disfigured. 11. A Sea Change of Red-Green Babies. 12. Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy: An Unanticipated Future. 13. Green Thoughts on Economic Theory. 14. The Conscious Id. 15. Toppling the Sexual Avengers. 16. The Dangerous Female. 17. Masculine Politics. 18. A Baroque Apotheosis of Geopolitical Cretinism. 19. Domestic Stability Problems in the Alpha-Male Den. 20. Carried Away by Joy. 21. The Deferment Pit. 22. The Conundrum Green Politics Is In. 23. The Vision Thing. 24. Preface to Fearful Energies. 25. Their Fearful Energies. 26. Keeping the Lid on Jesus' Coffin. 27. Eutopian Postscript. 28. A Gardener's Afterword. Bibliography.

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Author Information

Paul Gilk is an independent intellectual who lives in the woods of northern Wisconsin. A long practitioner of ""voluntary poverty"", he chose a life of deliberate retreat by building and living in a small cabin for nearly twenty years before reconstructing a nineteenth-century log house, both homes without electricity or running water. He is married to a Swiss citizen, Susanna Juon. Between them, they have seven grown children.

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