The Green Light: A Self-Critique of the Ecological Movement

Description

The Green Light (‘Le Feu Vert’) offers an original and profound exploration of the roots of environmental philosophy and the Anthropocene. Bernard Charbonneau situates the wellspring of the ecological movement in the dialectics of Nature and Freedom, and their needful but uneasy joining against the totalizing system of technological society that threatens them both. Using this paradoxical tension as a yardstick, he probes the ways in which concepts of Nature have developed as industrialization became second nature and jeopardized the original, taken for granted until its advent. This allows Charbonneau to explain how movements and policies claiming to deal with this issue have gone wrong. A spirited critique of how the environmental movement has taken shape in relation to philosophy, politics, theology and contemporary culture, this book written in 1980 is representative of an oft-overlooked strand of French environmentalist thought, as a look back on its first decade in the public eye by a man who had originated political ecology half a century earlier. Charbonneau can be said to have prepared the way for many current concerns within environmental thought: the tension between liberalism and ecologism in green political theory; the wider question of the compatibility of ecological imperatives with supposedly foundational freedoms under capitalism; the discussions over how to balance existing democratic structures with environmental goals; the tensions between radical and reformist strategies within green movements; the controversy over the core values of ecological politics in a world transformed by climate change and peak everything; and the proper attitude of environmental movements to institutional science. This ground-breaking work should be front and centre of the debates that he anticipated, while giving a timely perspective on the interconnected questions of nature and human freedom. This first English translation of a work by Bernard Charbonneau provides not only a vivid account of environmental philosophy, but an introduction to this important author’s thought. Cover Half Title Series Title Copyright Contents Foreword Introduction Preface Part One Seeds: The origins of the ecological revolt Chapter One Origins Prehistory of the ecological movement A great silence Chapter Two Ecology, Year One Where the thesis, that is, science and America, generates its own antithesis The Green Light in France Chapter Three The various constellations of the ecological nebula At the centre and on the margins of the maelstrom Where Nature switches from Right to Left Communal microcosms and silent majority Part Two Roots: Foundations of the ecological movement Chapter Four Nature or freedom? Nature Freedom The contradiction between nature and freedom Chapter Five Nature and freedom Nature and man united in the human environment: Town and country Nature and freedom united in the existence of each human being Nature and freedom associated in history Chapter Six Nature and Christianity The rupture of Creation Incarnation Christianity and the ecological movement Part Three Diseases and poisons: Contradictions and shortcomings of the ecological nebula Chapter Seven Nature, freedom and the ecological movement The temptation of naturist fundamentalism A critique of ecologism The libertarian temptation A critique of the ecological movement’s anarchistic and non-violent strand Beyond the ecological right and left Chapter Eight A fruit still green Ecology without a doctrine Weak points of ecological thinking Shortcomings in economic and especially social reflection Chapter Nine Recycling Creation or recyclable social by-product? Recycling through fashion and fashionistas Recycling through technostructure Recycling through spectacle Chapter Ten Recycling through politicization–depoliticization From political commitment to withdrawal from politics Recycling through depoliticization Recycling through politicization Part Four Fruits: Sketch of an ecological politics Chapter Eleven Topical utopia Ecological conversion A mediation between opposites A revolution for that which exists Chapter Twelve The ecological community The personal basis Language and ecological reason Ecological society and meetings The ecological order Chapter Thirteen Ecological politics Ecology and power Elements of ecological tactics in politics A non-economist economic policy Self-management and ecological self-sufficiency Agricultural policy and the dis-organization of leisure Envoi Index