
Environment and Utopia
A Synthesis
Robert Brownstein(Author)
Springer (Publisher)
Published on 25. November 2012
Book
Paperback/Softback
X, 284 pages
978-1-4615-8599-2 (ISBN)
Description
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.
More details
Series
Edition
Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 1977
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Research
Illustrations
X, 284 p.
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 17 mm
Weight
432 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-4615-8599-2 (9781461585992)
DOI
10.1007/978-1-4615-8597-8
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
06/1977
Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers
€109.13
Article exhausted; check different version
Content
I: Conceptual and Philosophical Background.- 1 Environmental and Ecological Thought.- 2 Utopias and Utopian Thought.- II: Case Studies of Optimal Communities.- 3 The Oneida Community.- 4 The Israeli Kibbutzim.- 5 The New Town of Columbia, Maryland.- 6 B. F. Skinner's Walden II.- III: A Synthesis of Environmental and Utopian Perspectives.- 7 An Environmental Perspective on Utopia.- 8 A Utopian Perspective on the Environment.- 9 Toward a Political Ecological Utopia.- Author Index.