ABSTRACT
The transformation of the unseen side-eff ects of industrial production into global ecological trouble spots is … not at all a problem of the world surrounding us – not a so-called ‘environmental problem’ – but a farreaching institutional crisis of industrial society itself. … What previously appeared ‘functional’ and ‘rational’ now becomes and appears to be a threat to life, and therefore produces and legitimates dysfunctionality and irrationality. … Just as earlier generations lived in the age of the stagecoach, so we now and in future are living in the hazardous age of creeping catastrophe. What generations before us discovered despite resistance, and had to shout out loud at the world, we have come to take for granted: the impending ‘suicide of the species’.
