ABSTRACT
By definition, human society is at the root of the heterogeneity of problems described in the last two chapters. Human-caused, or “anthropogenic “environmental crisis is, after all, humanly caused. Society, more than nature, is thus environmentalism’s most important problem. Ecological modernization highlighted this fact; Al Gore, William Ruckelshaus, Paul Hawken, and Amory and L.Hunter Lovins saw environmental crisis as a civilizational or social-structural problem.1 Others, more radical than these, have also agreed with ecological modernization on this point. Thus, for example, the eco-Marxist John Bellamy Foster commences a book on environmental crisis by arguing that: “we must begin by recognizing that the crisis of the earth is not a crisis of nature, but a crisis of society. The chief causes of the environmental deterioration that faces us today…are social and historical, rooted in the productive relations, technological imperatives, and historically conditioned demographic trends that characterize the dominant social system.”2 Richard Hofrichter argues that
even the term “environmental problem” is “already a capitulation,” ignoring “an underlying historical narrative that links health and ecology to the social order.”3 Kicking off this widespread shift to the socialsystemic analysis of environmental crisis was the controversial 1972 book, The Limits to Growth. In it, Donella Meadows and her colleagues depicted global crisis as a social-systemic problem, one that resulted from economic and population growth. Recently, Meadows and her colleagues held, this problem had become so severe (and measurable) that it was leading demonstrably toward a near-term global environmental meltdown. To meet this challenge, Limits to Growth called for fundamental societal change and a “Copernican revolution of the mind.”4
