Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence of Growth, Progress, Industry and Stuff
Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence of Growth, Progress, Industry and Stuff by Leigh Phillips
English | 2015 | ISBN: 1782799605 | 304 pages | EPUB | 2 MB
English | 2015 | ISBN: 1782799605 | 304 pages | EPUB | 2 MB
Modernity is not the cause of our ecological woes. Only through a deepening of our modernity can we save the planet.
Economic growth, progress, industry and, erm, stuff have all come in for a sharp kicking from the green left and beyond in recent years. Everyone from black-hoodied Starbucks window-smashers to farmers’ market heirloom-tomato-mongers to Prince Charles himself seem to be embracing ‘degrowth’ and anti-consumerism, which is nothing less than a form of ecological austerity. Meanwhile, the back-to-the-land ideology and aesthetic of locally-woven organic carrot-pants, pathogen-encrusted compost toilets and civilisational collapse is hegemonic.
Yet modernity is not the cause of climate change and the wider biocrisis. It is indeed capitalism that is the source of our environmental woes, but capitalism as a mode of production, not the fuzzy understanding of capitalism of Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben, Derrick Jensen, Paul Kingsnorth and their anarcho-liberal epigones as a sort of globalist corporate malfeasance.