ABSTRACT
The essential thing that I have been trying all this long to thresh out is that environmental problems are no paranoid imaginings of environmental-ist doomsayers, but constitute a real existential crisis for all of us; that the historical root of the crisis is the institutionalization of squandering of natural wealth and human lives by some people in power; that to stop this process of waste, we need a thorough change in the current social order and the prevalent mode of thinking. It is already too late to rescue much of the natural world, and to redeem the lost productive potentials of billions of people. Yet, a great deal of nature may still be saved, and billions of people may still be salvaged from suff ering, if there is collective will and concerted action to build a sustainable society. Th is means urgent governmental and community action as well as an ethical reorientation of society toward inter-generational environmental justice, opposing the prevalent ideology that treats environment as something out there to be either capitalized on squandered.
