The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960-2000 (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780226044187)

The accelerating interpenetration of nature and culture is the hallmark of the new "light-green" social order that has emerged in postwar France, argues Michael Bess in this penetrating new history. On one hand, a preoccupation with natural qualities and equilibrium has increasingly infused France's economic and cultural life. On the other, human activities have laid an ever more potent and pervasive touch on the environment, whether through the intrusion of agriculture, industry, and urban growth, or through the much subtler and more well-intentioned efforts of ecological management.

The Light-Green Society limns sharply these trends over the last fifty years. The rise of environmentalism in the 1960s stemmed from a fervent desire to "save" wild nature-nature conceived as a qualitatively distinct domain, wholly separate from human designs and endeavors. And yet, Bess shows, after forty years of environmentalist agitation, much of it remarkably successful in achieving its aims, the old conception of nature as a "separate sphere" has become largely untenable. In the light-green society, where ecology and technological modernity continually flow together, a new hybrid vision of intermingled nature-culture has increasingly taken its place.

Author: Michael Bess
ISBN-10: 0226044181
ISBN-13: 9780226044187
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Language: English
Published: 11/15/2003
Pages: 369
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.17lbs
Size: 9.28h x 5.90w x 0.83d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 07/01/2004 pg. 2113