ABSTRACT
In January 1972, in advance of the first United Nations environmental summit, the British magazine the Ecologist devoted an entire issue to what the editors called a Blueprint for Survival.1 This was one of the first sweeping efforts following the onset of the environmental crisis to imagine a radically alternative geography to the long-dominant nation-state.2 The writers’ program called for a “stable-state society” characterized by minimum disruption of ecological processes and maximum conservation of materials and energy. Such a society was to be achieved through sweeping efforts to relocalize economies whose unbridled global consumption of natural resources had grown unsustainable. Key to the Blueprint’s radicalism, then, was a revision of the hierarchically nested spatial scales that had come to characterize the social construction of geographical space during the modern era. The authors of the Blueprint warned that failure to relocalize would provoke increasing climatic instability as complex ecosystems began breaking down under the pressure of human exploitation.
