Eden and the Fall – the Fallacies of Radical Ecological History
- ISBN-10
- 0987062824
- ISBN-13
- 9780987062826
- Category
- Deep ecology
- Pages
- 516
- Language
- English
- Published
- 1999
- Publisher
- Matt Buttsworth
- Author
- Matthew Buttsworth
Description
Radical ecology claims to be a new movement at the cutting edge of social change offering a solution to current social and ecological problems through the rejection of reformist ecological politics in favour of a radical restructuring of industrial and especially Western society. The claim to have discovered the historical cause of current ecological and social problems plays a key role in validating this radical approach. Although numerous interpretations of the historical origins of existing social and ecological problems exist within radical ecology, three main variants have been identified. This thesis critically examines the three main variants of radical ecological history - the belief in primal harmony, the belief in the civilisation of the goddess and its destruction by a Kurgan invasion, and the view that the rise of capitalism and the mechanistic world view was responsible for the ecological and social crises of today. In so doing it also examines a number of key questions central to radical ecological history - when did violence and hierarchy begin in human history, is it possible to argue that today’s ecological crisis has a religious cause, and can the scientific, technological, and commercial revolutions be truly described as purely Western phenomena? The main findings of this thesis are that each of these variants of radical ecological history is chronically flawed. In addition to numerous empirical errors, each of these historical interpretations is based on an extremely simplistic, Eurocentric reading of the past based on the use of archetypal stereotypes of good and evil, that have little or no historical foundation. While these interpretations of history vary profoundly, they are all based on the same underlying model of history whose origins lie in the Judeo-Christian apocalyptic tradition, and ultimately in Zoroastrianism. While some of the flaws of radical ecological history are a result of poor scholarship, it is argued that it is the use of t
Get the book
Similar books
-
Cultures Merging: A Historical and Economic Critique of Culture
By Eric L. Jones" So begins the first chapter of Cultures Merging, in which Eric Jones--one of the world's leading economic historians--takes an eloquent, pointed, and personal look at the question of whether culture determines economics or is instead ...
-
Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture
By Carolyn MerchantThis work shows how the drive to conquer nature, explore and settle the globe, springs from a utopian pastoral impulse throughout Western history.
-
Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West
By Sara DantIn Losing Eden award-winning historian Sara Dant debunks the myth of the American West as “Eden” and instead embraces a more realistic and complex understanding of a region that has been inhabited and altered by people for tens of ...
-
Zheng He
By Matt ButtsworthAnd yet, at the peak of his unparalleled success, the decision was made to destroy his Great Fleet. Why? This is the gripping story of Zheng He's life. And Fate.
-
Peace: A Tale of the Latter Days
By Matthew ButtsworthHis chance to change the world comes when a nuclear bomb is exploded by Iraqi terrorists in Vienna. But the world does not want to be changed and reacts violently. By the end of the book nothing remains remains the same.
-
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge
By E. O. WilsonIn Consilience (a word that originally meant "jumping together"), Edward O. Wilson renews the Enlightenment's search for a unified theory of knowledge in disciplines that range from physics to biology, the social sciences and the humanities ...
-
The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy
By Murray BookchinThe Ecology of Freedom, his most exciting and far-reaching work yet. This engaging and extremely readable book's scope is downright breathtaking. Using an inspired synthesis of ecology, anthropology, philosophy and...
-
Toward an Ecological Society
By Murray BookchinThis edition also includes a new foreword by Dan Chodorkoff, someone who was with Bookchin at the founding of his Institute for Social Ecology and who understand his work better than anyone.
-
Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction
By Natania Meeker, Antónia SzabariThe trajectory of speculative fiction which this book traces offers insights into the human relationship to animate matter and the technological mediations through which we enter into contact with the material world.
-
Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence
By Timothy MortonTimothy Morton argues that ecological awareness in the present Anthropocene era takes the form of a strange loop or Möbius strip, twisted to have only one side.