Environment and Utopia
Environment and Utopia

Author: Robert Brownstein

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 146158597X

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to imagine and innovate with our ability to comprehend and manipulate natural and social forces. We must produce constructive contact between our visions of hope and our scientific knowledge of the physical and social environment. This work is an effort to further that contact. We seek to focus upon the future relationship between man and his environment. Specifically, we attempt to synthesize two distinct approaches to this issue: environmental theory and utopian speculation. These two perspectives have rarely, if ever, been deliberately focused upon one an other. We believe that each suggests new questions and hopefully new an swers that would not normally be revealed through the separate insights of the other discipline. Both perspectives have existed in one form or another for centuries. Yet today, there is an increased urgency for their mutual development and interaction. This century, to its loss, has tended to abandon utopian specu lation. We witness "a retreat from constructive thinking about the future in order to dig oneself into the trenches of the present. It is a ruthless elim ination of future-centered idealism by today-centered realism. We have lost the ability to see any further than the end of our collective nose. " 2 At the same time, contemporary research on the environment suggests an urgent need for change in basic patterns of human behavior, for the for mation of new institutions and social structure.

Green Utopias
Green Utopias

Author: Lisa Garforth

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2017-11-10

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 0745684777

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Environmentalism has relentlessly warned about the dire consequences of abusing and exploiting the planet's natural resources, imagining future wastelands of ecological depletion and social chaos. But it has also generated rich new ideas about how humans might live better with nature. Green Utopias explores these ideas of environmental hope in the post-war period, from the environmental crisis to the end of nature. Using a broad definition of Utopia as it exists in Western policy, theory and literature, Lisa Garforth explains how its developing entanglement with popular culture and mainstream politics has shaped successive green future visions and initiatives. In the face of apocalyptic, despairing or indifferent responses to contemporary ecological dilemmas, utopias and the utopian method seem more necessary than ever. This distinctive reading of green political thought and culture will appeal across the social sciences and humanities to all interested in why green utopias continue to matter in the cultivation of ecological values and the emergence of new forms of human and non-human well-being.

Utopias and the Environment
Utopias and the Environment

Author: Geoffrey Berry

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-10-02

Total Pages: 127

ISBN-13: 1317383699

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Utopias and the Environment explores the way in which the kind of ‘dreaming’, or re-visioning, known as the ‘utopian imaginary’ takes environmental concerns into account. This kind of creative intervention is increasingly important in an era of ecological crisis, as we witness the failure of governments worldwide to significantly change industrial civilization from a path of ‘business as usual.’ In this context, it is up to the artists – in this case authors – to imagine new ways of being that respond to this imperative and immediate global issue. Concurrently, it is also up to critics, readers, and thinkers everywhere to appraise these narratives of possibility for their complexities and internal conflicts, as well as for their promise, as we enter this new era of rapid change and adaptation. Because creative and critical thinkers must work together towards this goal, the idea of the critical utopia, coined by Tom Moylan in response to the fiction of the 1970s, is now ingrained in the common argot and is one of the key ideas discussed in this book. This development in the genre, which combines self-reflexivity and multiple perspectives within its dreaming, represents the postmodern spirit in its most regenerative aspect. This book is testament to such hopes and potential realities. This book was originally published as a special issue of Green Letters.

Utopia in the Anthropocene
Utopia in the Anthropocene

Author: Michael Harvey

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-06-03

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 0429859562

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Utopia in the Anthropocene takes a cross-disciplinary approach to analyse our current world problems, identify the key resistance to change and take the reader step by step towards a more sustainable, equitable and rewarding world. It presents paradigm-shifting models of economics, political decision-making, business organization and leadership and community life. These are supported by psychological evidence, utopian literature and inspirational changes in history. The Anthropocene is in crisis, because human activity is changing almost everything about life on this planet at an unparalleled pace. Climate change, the environmental emergency, economic inequality, threats to democracy and peace and an onslaught of new technology: these planetwide risks can seem too big to comprehend, let alone manage. Our reckless pursuit of infinite economic growth on a finite planet could even take us towards a global dystopia. As an unprecedented frenzy of change grips the world, the case for utopia is stronger than ever. An effective change plan requires a bold, imaginative vision, practical goals and clarity around the psychological values necessary to bring about a transformation. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the environmental humanities, sustainability studies, ecological economics, organizational psychology, politics, utopian philosophy and literature – and all who long for a better world.

Food Utopias
Food Utopias

Author: Paul V. Stock

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-01-09

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1317657721

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Food is a contentious and emotive issue, subject to critiques from multiple perspectives. Alternative food movements – including the different articulations of local, food miles, seasonality, food justice, food knowledge and food sovereignty – consistently invoke themes around autonomy, sufficiency, cooperation, mutual aid, freedom, and responsibility. In this stimulating and provocative book the authors link these issues to utopias and intentional communities. Using a food utopias framework presented in the introduction, they examine food stories in three interrelated and complementary ways: utopias as critique of existing systems; utopias as engagement with experimentation of the novel, the forgotten, and the hopeful in the future of the food system; and utopias as process that recognizes the time and difficulty inherent in changing the status quo. The chapters address theoretical aspects of food utopias and also present case studies from a range of contexts and regions, including Argentina, Italy, Switzerland and USA. These focus on key issues in contemporary food studies including equity, locality, the sacred, citizenship, community and food sovereignty. Food utopias offers ways forward to imagine a creative and convivial food system.

Urban Utopias
Urban Utopias

Author: Malcolm Miles

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2007-11-21

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 1134185758

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Utopia tends to generate a bad press - regarded as impracticable, perhaps nostalgic, or contradictory when visions of a perfect world cannot accommodate the change that is necessary to a free and self-organizing society. But people from diverse backgrounds are currently building a new society within the old, balancing literal and metaphorical utopianism, and demonstrating plural possibilities for alternative futures and types of settlement. Thousands of such places exist around the world, including intentional communities, eco-villages, permaculture plots, religious and secular retreats, co-housing projects, self-build schemes, projects for low-impact housing, and activist squats in urban and rural sites. This experience suggests, however, that when planning and design are not integral to alternative social formations, the modern dream to engineer a new society cannot be realized. The book is structured in four parts. In part one, literary and theoretical utopias from the early modern period to the nineteenth-century are reconsidered. Part two investigates twentieth-century urban utopianism and contemporary alternative settlements focusing on social and environmental issues, activism and eco-village living. Part three looks to wider horizons in recent practices in the non-affluent world, and Part four reviews a range of cases from the author’s visits to specific sites. This is followed by a short conclusion in which a discussion of key issues is resumed. This book brings together insights from literary, theoretical and practical utopias, drawing out the characteristics of groups and places that are part of a new society. It links today’s utopian experiments to historical and literary utopias, and to theoretical problems in utopian thought.

Utopianism for a Dying Planet
Utopianism for a Dying Planet

Author: Gregory Claeys

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2024-12-10

Total Pages: 608

ISBN-13: 0691236682

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How the utopian tradition offers answers to today’s environmental crises In the face of Earth’s environmental breakdown, it is clear that technological innovation alone won’t save our planet. A more radical approach is required, one that involves profound changes in individual and collective behavior. Utopianism for a Dying Planet examines the ways the expansive history of utopian thought, from its origins in ancient Sparta and ideas of the Golden Age through to today's thinkers, can offer moral and imaginative guidance in the face of catastrophe. The utopian tradition, which has been critical of conspicuous consumption and luxurious indulgence, might light a path to a society that emphasizes equality, sociability, and sustainability. Gregory Claeys unfolds his argument through a wide-ranging consideration of utopian literature, social theory, and intentional communities. He defends a realist definition of utopia, focusing on ideas of sociability and belonging as central to utopian narratives. He surveys the development of these themes during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries before examining twentieth- and twenty-first-century debates about alternatives to consumerism. Claeys contends that the current global warming limit of 1.5C (2.7F) will result in cataclysm if there is no further reduction in the cap. In response, he offers a radical Green New Deal program, which combines ideas from the theory of sociability with proposals to withdraw from fossil fuels and cease reliance on unsustainable commodities. An urgent and comprehensive search for antidotes to our planet’s destruction, Utopianism for a Dying Planet asks for a revival of utopian ideas, not as an escape from reality, but as a powerful means of changing it.

Dystopias and Utopias on Earth and Beyond
Dystopias and Utopias on Earth and Beyond

Author: Douglas A. Vakoch

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-04-29

Total Pages: 137

ISBN-13: 1000376354

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Caught as we are in a grave climate crisis that seems more irreversible with every passing year, our literary portrayals of the future often feature the dystopian collapse of the world as we know it. Science fiction explores how we got here, while pointing toward a more hopeful path forward. From an ecofeminist perspective, a core cause of our current ecological catastrophe is the patriarchal domination of nature, playing out in parallel with the oppression of women. As an alternative to dystopian futures that seem increasingly inevitable, ecofeminist science fiction helps us conjure utopias that promote environmental sustainability based on more egalitarian human relationships. Dystopias and Utopias on Earth and Beyond: Feminist Ecocriticism of Science Fiction explores the fictional worlds of such canonical novelists as Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing, and Joan Slonczewski, as well as those of lesser-known science fiction writers, as they collectively probe humanity’s greatest existential threats. Contributors from five continents provide compelling analyses of far future dystopias on Earth that are all too easy to imagine becoming reality if humankind’s current trajectory continues, as well as provocative insights into science fiction utopias set on idyllic planets orbiting distant stars, which offer liberatory alternatives that might someday be actualized in the real world. By examining the links between the destruction of the environment and the domination of women, Dystopias and Utopias on Earth and Beyond provides the tools to counteract those intertwined oppressions, helping create a foundation for a truly habitable world.

The Landscape of Utopia
The Landscape of Utopia

Author: Tim Waterman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-02-27

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 1000538494

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A collection of short interludes, think pieces, and critical essays on landscape, utopia, philosophy, culture, and food, all written in a highly original and engaging style by academic and theorist Tim Waterman. Exploring power and democracy, and their shaping of public space and public life, taste, etiquette, belief and ritual, and foodways in community and civic life, the book provides a much-needed critical approach to landscape imaginaries. It discusses landscape in its broadest sense, as a descriptor of the relationship between people and place that occurs everywhere on land, from cities to countryside, suburb to wilderness. With over fifty black and white illustrations interspersing the twenty-six chapters, this is a book for professionals, academics, and students to dive into and spark discussion on new modes of thinking in the wake of unfolding global crises, such as COVID-19, climate change, fascism 2.0, and beyond.

Ecological Utopias
Ecological Utopias

Author: Marius de Geus

Publisher:

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13:

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What, if anything, can the ecological utopias found in the history of philosophy contribute to our present quest for ecological responsibility?