Praise for Mobilizing the Green Imagination
A refreshing perspective for reinventing a livable future. Weston challenges us to expand our imagination to create a better world one based on practical and equitable approaches for devising new solutions. This book describes alternative ways to frame the challenges before us and move forward with audacity and courage. Weston invites us to think outside the box and re-connect with what has meaning and purpose.
Andrs R. Edwards, Author, Thriving Beyond Sustainability and The Sustainability Revolution
In Mobilizing the Green Imagination, the uncommon sense that has established Anthony Weston as one of the most persuasive and unfettered voices in environmental philosophy catches fire. Incandescent with hope, this manifesto delights in an excess of technological and moral possibility, without trivialising the challenges to be faced. Leaving diatribe and doomsaying to one side and technocratic myopia to the other, Weston moves in wild leaps of imagination that enlarge the field of environmentalist practice and theory. The result is a vision of sustaining futures that are provokingly unfamiliar from a visionary who embraces our wounded world with rare empathy.
Aidan Davison University of Tasmania
Radical social re-imaginings can only occur if we possess creative guides and teachers. Weston demonstrates that this creativity is his forte. Whether you wholly embrace his ideas or are merely entertained by them, they contain a creative spark often absent from contemporary environmental writing. As he admits late on in the book, the details dont matter in the end but the openings, just possibly, mean everything.
Christopher Preston, Associate Professor of Philosophy University of Montana, and author, Saving Creation and Grounding Knowledge
From revisioning recycling, building design and on to communicating with other beings on land and Sea, Westons skillful verve demonstrates the possibilities and reality for Green creativity. He enlivens our awareness to practices that harmonize with the Earth, and its great diversity of cultures, communities and life forms. These are great and inspiring explorations of a new green spirit from a scholar and teacher, who acts, walks and sings his insights. He takes readers from the tiny and local, to the regional, global and cosmic.
Dr. Alan Drengson, Emeritus and Adjunct Professor, University of Victoria, and author, Wild Foresting and Beyond Environmental Crisis
In his new book, Anthony Weston cultivates the rich philosophical ground necessary to design a resilient future for humanity. By illuminating interconnections between sustainability, transportation, cosmology, space travel, and our relationship with the more-than-human world, he paints a comprehensive vision to help us pragmatically and systemically address the worlds interconnected problems. Like Allan Savorys Brown Revolution and Gunter Paulis Blue Economy, Westons Mobilizing the Green Imagination stands to become a critical component of the spectrum of ecological perspectives that signal the next stage of our collaborative evolution.
David McConville, President, The Buckminster Fuller Institute www.bfi.org
MOBILIZING the GREEN IMAGINATION
an Exuberant Manifesto
ANTHONY WESTON
Copyright 2012 by Anthony Weston. All rights reserved.
Cover design by Diane McIntosh. Image iStock (Renphoto)
Printed in Canada. First printing January 2012.
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-86571-709-1
eISBN: 978-1-55092-504-3
Inquiries regarding requests to reprint all or part of Mobilizing the Green Imagination should be addressed to New Society Publishers at the address below.
To order directly from the publishers, please call toll-free (North America) 1-800-567-6772, or order online at www.newsociety.com.
Any other inquiries can be directed by mail to:
New Society PublishersP.O. Box 189, Gabriola Island, BC V 0R 1X0 , Canada(250) 247-9737
New Society Publishers mission is to publish books that contribute in fundamental ways to building an ecologically sustainable and just society, and to do so with the least possible impact on the environment, in a manner that models this vision. We are committed to doing this not just through education, but through action. The interior pages of our bound books are printed on Forest Stewardship Council-registered acid-free paper that is 100% post-consumer recycled (100% old growth forest-free), processed chlorine free, and printed with vegetable-based, low-VOC inks, with covers produced using FSC-registered stock. New Society also works to reduce its carbon footprint, and purchases carbon offsets based on an annual audit to ensure a carbon neutral footprint. For further information, or to browse our full list of books and purchase securely, visit our website at: www.newsociety.com
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Weston, Anthony, 1954Mobilizing the green imagination : an exuberant manifesto / Anthony Weston.
Includes index. isbn 978-0-86571-709-1
1. Green movement. 2. Sustainable living. 3. Environmentalism Philosophy. I. Title.
JA75.8.W38 2012 320.58 C2011-908459-7
Contents
Preface ix
1. Where is the Vision? 1
2. Other Worlds are Possible 13
3. Way Beyond Recycling 29
4. After Transportation 45
5. Adaptation with Sass 63
6. A More-Than-Human World 81
7. Fellowship with Animals 99
8. The Worlds Great Liturgies 115
9. To the Stars 133
Chapter Notes 151
Return of Thanks 167
Index 171
About the Author 175
Preface
How did we ever allow ourselves to be convinced that the only possible green future must be cold, dark and drab? That the very best we can hope for is a little cleverer or more desperate tinkering with our cars and our recycling programs and maybe even our Gods to make them sustainable enough we hope to get by?
It is not going to work. Tinkering and patching will not change enough things enough, not with the necessary urgency. Not that we wont need every desperate stopgap measure we can get, too but stopgaps are not answers.
Look two steps deeper, moreover, and you cannot help but suspect that the very things we are trying to patch up are part of the problem itself. We ramp up recycling programs at the same time that we produce ever more megatons literally of nondegradable, one-time-use Stuff. Hybrid engines give us a slightly cleaner way of sustaining a transportation system that nonetheless blights ever more land, air, time and lives. Vegetarianism goes mainstream while an ever-thicker curtain descends between us and the rest of the animate world.
There is no way around it: we need to ask more fundamental questions. Not how to recycle more Stuff, for example, but literally and finally what should take its place: how we can make things that are too precious to throw away (as if there were such a place) or recycle. Or things that just turn back into fertilizer overnight. Not how to raise the dikes or build more floodgates in cities on the edge of the rising seas, but how to welcome
