“A Reenchanted World: The Quest for a New Kinship With Nature” by James William Gibson and “Conservation Refugees: The Hundred-Year Conflict between Global Conservation and Native Peoples” by Mark Dowie: Reviews by Roger S. Gottlieb
2010
Disaster in the Gulf: A Plague to Warn Us to Change Our Relationship to the Earth
|
Instead of messing around with partial measures, President Obama should transform our approach to the environment by orienting it around this key idea: the earth is not a “resource” to be used for private profit.
2010
Spirituality in a Time of Crisis
|
It’s not self-sacrifice but liberation that the Tao and all deep spiritual wisdom offer us.
Facing climate change, we must free ourselves or collapse.
2010
Naturalism as Mastery?
|
Traditional environmentalists’ “humility” is overrated: we have all too often made the world’s
poor and powerless pay for our environmental progress.
2003
Food for Thought
|
For three days in June, the Bush administration, the State of California and the City of Sacramento collectively spent millions of dollars pitching genetically engineered foods and industrial agricultural methods to some of the world’s poorest nations at the Ministerial Conference and Expo on Agricultural Science and Technology, June 23-25.
2001
Clinton’s Environmental Legacy
|
When Jimmy Carter was inaugurated, he said that he would spend every day of his presidency thinking about how to reduce the threat of nuclear war. Four years later, the United States and the former Soviet Union possessed more nuclear weapons in their arsenals than before Carter’s arrival in the White House. What was Carter thinking about on those long afternoons in the Oval Office?
2000
The Challenge of the Twenty-First Century
|
As our century draws to a close, we are facing a whole series of global problems which are harming the biosphere and human life in alarming ways that may soon become irreversible. Concern with the environment is no longer one of many “single issues”; it is the context of everything else–of our lives, our businesses, our politics. The great challenge of our time is to build and nurture sustainable communities–social, cultural, and physical environments in which we can satisfy our needs and aspirations without diminishing the chances of future generations.
1996
Toward a Meaningful Ecological Politics
|
The word “ecology” comes from the Greek root oikos, meaning “home.” The idea is that the earth is a place of close relationships – that plants, animals, minerals, and humans matter to each other and together constitute an integrated whole. Ecology, as a scientific discipline, studies the interconnections between species and habitat. It arose from the insight that nature’s character could not be understood by merely concentrating on individual parts but that one must also focus on nature’s mutualities and interdependencies.