Reviews for Economic Growth, the Environment and International Relations: The Growth Paradigm

The average rating for Economic Growth, the Environment and International Relations: The Growth Paradigm based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-07-25 00:00:00 Christina Veltema I found this book to be quite frustrating. On the one hand, the author comes across as being sincere, passionate, well-intentioned, and kind (also confused and wounded), and I totally agree with her basic premise: our modern, industrial, consumerist society is pathological (destroying the environment, engaging in wars, encouraging apathy and anomie, etc.), to the extent that many of its citizens suffer from at least some degree of dysfunction (addictions, depression, abuse, workaholism, fractured families, interpersonal conflict). So I really wanted to like this book and perhaps even find some inspiration in it. Instead, I found myself picking apart sloppy arguments and getting annoyed at her assumptions. Glancing over reader reviews here and at Amazon, I can see that many people have really connected with this book, and felt it has helped them to heal and renew their connection to nature. However, it's safe to say that I am clearly not the right audience for this book. For one thing, the author is a therapist, and I'm not a big fan of psychology. I found the recovery/therapy metaphor to be a bit heavy-handed, and I don't believe that all of us modern folk are suffering from post-traumatic stress. A lot of the theories she mentions (including the reliability of recovered memories) are controversial or simply out of date. On the other hand, if the recovery paradigm resonates with you, you may respond to this book much more favorably than I did. Second disclosure: I am a historian by training, which means I value documented, verifiable facts in an argument. For instance, I was curious what aspects, exactly, of "Western Civilization" she found so problematic, and why. It turns out that she has a bone to pick with civilization, western or otherwise, tracing the roots of our pathology to the adoption of agriculture and pastoralism, and the end of the paleolithic era. She praises "nature-based" societies, which she equates with hunter-gatherer tribes, and sees anything else as something unnatural and traumatic which has been inflicted upon us. And...that's not exclusively Western, is it? Just off the top of my head, I can think of several societies--the ancient Chinese, the Aztecs and Mayans--who developed stratified, agricultural societies, complete with wars and atrocious human rights violations, without any influence from Western Europe whatsoever. Perhaps her title should have been My Name is Chellis and I'm in Recovery from the Neolithic Era. Speaking of which, I found her discussions of "nature-based" societies to be equally imprecise. She states that she does not want to idealize tribal, indigenous cultures, and then proceeds to do just that, depicting all of them as peaceful, democratic, egalitarian, completely sustainable, in which all members are equally competent, valued, and satisfied. Obviously, we can only speculate, based on scant paleontological evidence, what the earliest hunter-gatherer societies were actually like, and can't state with any certainty that these early peoples were free of unhappiness or pathology. As for historical or current indigenous peoples, many aren't hunter-gatherers (e.g., they practice agriculture or herding) and aren't entirely peaceful (some were positively feared by their neighbors.) Nor did they always live harmlessly on the Earth; the Australian aborigines, for example, hunted the large, flightless birds of that continent to extinction. Don't get me wrong--I am very respectful of native cultures, and would love to know more about their ways of perceiving the world. But they are/were not perfect, and if you try to tell me otherwise, I have to call BS. Finally, towards the end of the book, she seems to imply that only native peoples are qualified to have a real connection to nature or participate in mystical experiences. In fact, she mentions a talk where a member of the audience asked, What about European paganism and Goddess traditions, and was basically told that those are irrelevant. To be honest, out of everything that was problematic in this book, that was probably the one thing that annoyed me the most. Not all of us of European descent feel estranged from nature, uncomfortable with transcendent experiences, or ashamed of our origins. To imply that we are (or should be) seems awfully arrogant. In sum: there's some interesting content here, and the author seems like a great person, but I can't really recommend this book (unless you are really into psychology).

Review # 2 was written on 2007-12-18 00:00:00 Andrew McColgan One of the big themes that I took away from this book is the idea of "dissociation." Chellis talks about the similarities between dissociation and post-traumatic stress (forging a link between personal healing and the healing of our relationship with the Earth). Dissociation involves a fragmenting of what Chellis calls the "primal matrix": the interconnectedness we inherently share (as worldly beings) with the natural world as well as the psychological wholeness that constitutes personal integrity (so, for example, a Cartesian mind/body split is an instance of a dissociated self; another example is a fragmented identity). In the first part of her book, Chellis talks in detail about the psychological and social characteristics of nature-based people which nurture a self that is engaged with the primal matrix. She also describes the process of our historic dissociation from nature beginning with the advent of agriculture and moving up to our present, mass technological society. People who have experienced trauma enter into a state of dissociation (which can be mended; Chellis describes her own ongoing process of weaving herself back into the primal matrix). But even people who have not experienced major psychological trauma are compelled to participate in our widely-dissociated and fractured society, and that also constitutes a state of oppression and denial. In our society, we are prevented from knowing, from a very early age, our true place and purpose, our real belonging, intertwined with the web of life. In the latter section of the book, Chellis introduces some ideas for solving this dilemma. She notes that such a solution cannot take place on a merely individual psychological level; that it must involve interwoven restoration efforts on personal, social, and ecological scales. I'm running out of time here, so in summary - I highly recommend this book. It's a seminal work of eco-psychology, well-researched, on point, intelligently and poignantly written.