ABSTRACT
The theories of the relation between risk and modernity proposed by Perrow, Hughes, Giddens, and Beck, among others, foreground how experiences of risk are imbricated in far-flung ecological, technological, economic, and social systems that operate across a variety of scales from the local to the planetary. 1 Beck's concept of the “world risk society,” indeed, represents one of the most important recent ways of imagining the global from an environmentalist perspective. 2 Lawrence Buell has gone so far as to envision Beck as the latter-day counterpart of James Lovelock, in that Beck turns Lovelock's theory of Planet Earth as a self-sustaining, harmoniously balanced feedback system upside down into a theory of a world thrown permanently off-balance by the unintended and uncontrollable consequences of technological development. 3 Considering the lasting influence of the Gaia hypothesis on environmentalist thought and culture, one would expect such an inversion of global vision to have similar reverberations in the realm of the local and the everyday.
