Political Ecology

SYSTEM CHANGE NOT CLIMATE CHANGE! The cry reverberated throughout the streets of Paris during tense 2015 COP21 climate negotiations. It was as much a demand as it was an indictment of the failure of existing political institutions to respond to our world’s ecological crisis. In an era of slow-motion apocalypse, with over 3,500 international environmental agreements to date, where did everything go wrong?

In this new and greatly expanded edition of his 1991 classic, Dimitrios Roussopoulos delves into the history of environmentalism to explain the failure of the State management of the ecological crisis. He summarizes the various responses of civil society and explores the prospects of channelling environmentalist aspirations into political alternatives, emphasizing the ideas of social ecology and the central role of democratic neighbourhoods and cities in developing alternatives. Ecologists, Roussopoulos argues, aim for more than simply protecting the environment they call for new communities, new lifestyles, and a new way of doing politics.