Radical Ecology’s Mindfulness

This chapter argues that radical ecology offers less a rebuke to neo-idealism than a hyperbolic extension of its crucial conceits. One can begin by noting the large number of its practitioners who believe that ecology's task is to raise not merely human awareness of ecosystems but consciousness as such. In the view of these ecologists, the environment, if not quite sentient, confers a heightened sentience on persons. The chapter also details a dramatic example of the period's tendency to look to the past in the enthusiasm of many ecologists for what can be called the “paleo-republic.” For such thinkers, the future of civilization was not merely the preindustrial but the preagricultural past, an era before malignant overpopulation and bureaucratic inertia steered our species off its evolutionary path.