How Much Should A Person Consume?

How Much Should A Person Consume?

Product ID: 19312

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Author: Ramachandra Guha
Publisher: Permanent Black
Year: 2008
Language: English
Pages: 262
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8178242206

Description

This book presents a provocative comparative history of environmentalism in two large, ecologically and cultural diverse democracies, India and the United States.

The book takes as its point of departure the dominant environmental philosophies in the two countries, here identified as agrarianism in India and wilderness thinking in the USA. It then proposes an integrative, inclusive theoretical frame work that goes beyond these partisan and partial ideologies. Named social ecology, this framework is here applied in the analysis of environmental thought, and in understanding the trajectory of controversies over large dam, state forests, and wildlife reserves.

Profiles of three exemplary social ecologist-Lewis Mumford, Chandi Prasad Bhatt, and Madhav Gadgil-follow. The concluding chapter poses what Guha regards as the fundamental environmental question-how much should a person or country consume?-and explores various answers to it.

Based on research done over two decades, and written with the author’s characteristic verve and flair, this book ranges widely over a vast intellectual terrain. It brims with ideas and information on environmental histories, environmental philosophies, environmental scholars, and environmental activists. Guha offers trenchant critiques of privileged and isolationist proponents of conservation, persuasively arguing the case for biospheres that care as much for human as for the other species with which they share the earth.

How Much Should a Person consume? is a deeply felt summation of one pioneering and globally influential scholar’s views on environmentalism. Like everything else by Ramachandra Guha, this book wears its immense learning lightly. It will be necessary reading within the academy even while attracting a large general readership outside it.

Contents

PREFACE

History sans Chauvinism
The Indian Road to Sustainability
Three Environmental Utopias
Democracy in the Forest
Authoritarianism in the Wild
The Historical Social Ecology of Lewis Mumford
The Subaltern Social Ecology of Madhav Gadgil
How Much Should a Person Consume?

INDEX