Tag Archives: Gus Speth

is democracy good for sustainability?

February 23rd, 2009
Sustainability Salute - Green Olympic Volunteers, Beijing China_0050

Sustainability Salute from the Green Olympic Volunteers

I’m teaching a course in religion and the environment this term, and my students are preparing to debate this very question: is democracy good for sustainability?

By way of background, they have been reading Judith Shapiro’s book Mao’s War Against Nature, which forcefully details the way that Maoist ideology trumped scientific reason in charting China’s development in the twentieth century, resulting in famine, population explosion, and environmental disaster. (More…)

the end of environmentalism?

December 1st, 2008

By James Miller

In October I was invited to participate in a symposium on International Perspectives on Nature and Culture organized by the Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. I was on a panel responding to a paper by the French philosopher Augustin Berque. His most recent book is called La pensée paysagère (Paris: Archibooks 2008), and it articulates a fundamental distinction between “thinking of the countryside” or “la pensée du paysage” and “country thinking” or “la pensée paysagère.” In modernity, he claims, we have ideas about “nature” or “the environment,” but we do not have ideas that are grounded in nature as a biophysical reality or which express themselves in the flourishing of nature. We have too much “pensée du paysage” and not enough “pensée paysagère.” The contradiction of modernity is that the theorization, symbolization and fetishization of nature as a concept proceeds apace and at the very same time as the annihilation of nature as a biophysical reality. (More…)