Gar Lipow on eco-optimism

Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema crdbronx at erols.com
Fri Aug 10 07:37:53 PDT 2001


I can see this in much green thinking, but there is a problem --

James Heartfield wrote:


>
> I think this blurs the point. There is something in the green philosophy
> that causes contempt for working people to re-occur as a theme. Green
> thinking is anti-mass, anti-industrialisation. It is hardly surprising
> that that tends to merge into hostility to the popular mass and the
> industrial classes.

Doesn't green thinking also oppose suburban sprawl, and the incoherent development of rural areas? Unrestricted capitalist development has its own anti-mass component. This aspect of environmentalism would seem counter to it. After all, assuring that working people would live in compact geographical areas and have to use more cooperative forms of transportation seems to serve both environmental ends and also to counter the corporate élites' long-standing social/political strategy of pushing individual home and car ownership as a way to integrate working people into a conservative consensus.

Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema



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