ABSTRACT
The three decades following the end of the Second World “War are remarkable for their reshaping of global patterns of control over resources, the rapid growth in mass production and consumption, the associated human impacts on environments and the emergence of unprecedented concerns about the finite and fragile nature of the Earth’s environment. The first part of this chapter addresses the changing patterns of control over resources, explaining the ideological and geopolitical contexts which supported new ways of organizing an increasingly globalized system of production. The second part of the chapter investigates some of the environmental consequences of this rapid and uneven process of development through a comparative study of productivist rural environments in the UK and former Soviet Union. The third part of the chapter considers the rise of environmentalism as part of a more general challenge to the dominant ideologies of the late modern world system.
