Plato's Revenge: Politics in the Age of Ecology

In this provocative call for a new ecological politics William Ophuls starts from aradical premise: "sustainability" is impossible. We are on an industrialTitanic fueled by rapidly depleting stocks of fossil hydrocarbons. Making thedeck chairs from recyclable materials and feeding the boilers with biofuels is futile. In the end the ship is doomed by the laws of thermodynamics and by the implacable biological and geologicallimits that are already beginning to pinch. Ophuls warns us that we are headed for a postindustrialfuture that however technologically sophisticated will resemble the preindustrial past in manyimportant respects. With Platos Revenge Ophuls author of Ecology andthe Politics of Scarcity envisions political and social transformations that will lead toa new natural-law politics based on the realities of ecology physics andpsychology. In a discussion that ranges widely -- from ecology to quantum physicsto Jungian psychology to Eastern religion to Western political philosophy -- Ophuls argues for anessentially Platonic politics of consciousness dedicated to inner cultivation rather than outwardexpansion and the pursuit of perpetual growth. We would then achieve a way of life that ismaterially and institutionally simple but culturally and spiritually rich one in which humanityflourishes in harmony with nature.