"Classic texts of the 1960s and '70s, including Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and E. F. Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful, took a sort of acetic posture as they warned about the ecological risks posed by technology, industry, and development. They asked societies and individuals to live more simply, consume less, and go-grow-more slowly. As Kingsnorth sees it, the ideological landscape began to change in the '80s and '90s, when ecologically minded people embraced the idea that global industrialization could continue at its breakneck pace."
"This account of mainstream environmentalism is more than a little reductive, at times even a caricature. Kingsnorth unfairly downplays the many individuals and organizations who do still have views mostly in keeping with his own degrowth perspectives. But his polemic does capture a change that I have been, and that I think more than a few of my students were, quietly unsettled by:"
Classic environmentalism of the 1960s and 1970s urged limits, simplicity, and skepticism toward technology, industry, and growth, calling for reduced consumption and slower expansion. By the 1980s and 1990s a dominant approach embraced sustainable development, treating continued global industrialization as compatible with environmental goals through greening technologies. That shift marginalized degrowth-minded perspectives and weakened enthusiasm for firm limits. Some observers call the account reductive while noting many still hold limit-focused views. The change unsettled students and educators drawn to earlier ethics of restraint and prompted reevaluation of mainstream environmental priorities.
Read at The Atlantic
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