DEEP ECOLOGY: GROUNDING A CONTEMPORARY ARGUMENT FIELD
International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy
ISSN: 0144-333X
Article publication date: 1 January 1990
Abstract
To those concerned with challenges and challengers to conventional wisdom, the entirely credible perception of ours as a planet in the midst of a deep environmental crisis offers fruitful grounds for analysis. Crises stimulate those who have, in the existence of the crisis, firm proof that the wisdom which girds the status quo is deficient and/or those who apply it are. This is particularly true when the crisis is perceived to be grave and dread‐laden. Skin cancer due to the depletion of the ozone layer is on the increase. Large, at times devastating, climate changes are loose upon the planet. Whether given quasi‐ scientific names like the “greenhouse effect” or lumped together in a melange of “acid rain”, “toxic waste” and “industrial cancers”, the result is the same. Rational citizens of the everyday‐person‐on‐the‐street sort feel threatened. The threat is given shape and substance by the mass media. The environmental crisis is a credible crisis. One need not list radical political activism as one's vocation to list the environmental crisis as one of one's fears as we enter the 1990's.
Citation
Wexler, M.N. (1990), "DEEP ECOLOGY: GROUNDING A CONTEMPORARY ARGUMENT FIELD", International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, Vol. 10 No. 1, pp. 47-70. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb013085
Publisher
:MCB UP Ltd
Copyright © 1990, MCB UP Limited