The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960-2000 Paperback - 2003 - 1st Edition

First line

The French, in the decades between 1960 and 2000, encountered a choice that they could never quite bring themselves to make.

From the rear cover

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.

Media reviews

Citations

• Choice, 07/01/2004, Page 2113