Political Ecology

Political Ecology: Beyond Environmentalism explains the history of environmental politics and its prospects for the future. This classic work is now available in a new, greatly expanded edition.

Political Ecology opens by presenting the history of the state management of the environment, then moves to an overview of the great variety of popular responses to the ecological crisis, before finally discussing the main political tendencies offered by the ecology movement. Ecological activists, Roussopoulos argues, aim for more than protecting the environment; they call for new communities, new lifestyles, and a new way of doing politics.

The concluding sections explore how we can channel the aspirations of environmentalism into political alternatives, and they provide a set of striking examples of successes inspired by social ecology. Cities, Roussopoulos argues, are not only central to the global economic system and its crises, but are also key to developing social and ecological alternatives to this system.