num_pages: 304
description: Economic growth progress industry and erm stuff have all come in for a sharp kicking from the green left and beyond in recent years. Everyone from black-hoodied Starbucks window-smashers to farmers' market heirloom-tomato-mongers to Prince Charles himself seem to be embracing 'degrowth' and anti-consumerism which is nothing less than a form of ecological austerity. Meanwhile the back-to-the-land ideology and aesthetic of locally-woven organic carrot-pants pathogen-encrusted compost toilets and civilisational collapse is hegemonic.Yet modernity is not the cause of climate change and the wider biocrisis. It is indeed capitalism that is the source of our environmental woes but capitalism as a mode of production not the fuzzy understanding of capitalism of Naomi Klein Bill McKibben Derrick Jensen Paul Kingsnorth and their anarcho-liberal epigones as a sort of globalist corporate malfeasance.In combative and puckish style science journalist Leigh Phillips marshals evidence from climate science ecology paleoanthropology agronomy microbiology psychology history the philosophy of mathematics and heterodox economics to argue that progressives must rediscover their historic Promethean ambitions and counter this reactionary neo-Malthusian ideology that not only retards human flourishing but won't save the planet anyway.We want to take over the machine and run it rationally not turn the machine off.
language: English
title: Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-porn Addicts: A defence of growth, progress, industry and stuff
publisher: Zero Books