Article Archive

The problems which many people face today in “defining” themselves, in knowing “who they are”–problems that feed a vast psychotherapy industry–are by no means personal ones. These problems exist not only for private individuals; they exist for modern society as a whole. Socially, we live in desperate uncertainty about how people relate to each other. [...]

One of the most persistent of human frailties is the tendency of individuals and groups to fall back, in times of a terribly fragmented reality, onto obsolete, even archaic ideologies for a sense of continuity and security. Today we find this not only on the right, where people are evoking the ghosts of Nazism and [...]

Published in Society and Nature, vol. 1, no. 3 (1993)

Takis Fotopoulos: It is generally recognized that the Green movement is in crisis. This is indicated not just by its failure to appeal to the electorate but, more important, in terms of its failure to project a new vision of society, an [...]

There is very little I can add to the outstanding criticism Brian Morris levels at deep ecology. Indeed, Morris’s contribution to the debate around eco-mysticism generally has been insightful as well as incisive, and I have found his writings an educational experience hat hopefully will reach a very wide audience in the United States in [...]

As featured in Synthesis/Regeneration #3 (Spring 1992)

For too long, feminism has lacked a global, ecological focus. In the 90′s, as reproductive technologies, fundamentalists, and ecological poisoning are on the rise, women’s health and self-determination around the world are on a steady decline. Thinking globally about women’s health is vital if feminism is to transform [...]

Originally published in Left Green Perspectives (formerly Green Perspectives) A Social Ecology Publication

Number 22 May 1991

I would like to recall a Left That Was–an idealistic, often theoretically coherent Left that militantly emphasized its internationalism, its rationality in its treatment of reality, its democratic spirit, and its vigorous revolutionary aspirations. From a retrospective [...]

Perhaps the greatest single failing of movements for social reconstruction–I refer particularly to the Left, to radical ecology groups, and to organizations that profess to speak for the oppressed–is their lack of a politics that will carry people beyond the limits established by the status quo.

Politics today means duels between top-down bureaucratic parties for [...]

This article originally appeared in Green Perspectives No. 20 November 1990.

Few arguments have been used more effectively to challenge the case for face-to-face participatory democracy than the claim that we live in a “complex society.” Modern population centers, we are told, are too large and too concentrated to allow for direct decision-making at [...]