Political Ecosystems: Modernity, Complexity, Fluidity and the Eco-Left. This item is unavailable.Political Ecosystems: Modernity, Complexity, Fluidity and the Eco-Left

Political Ecosystems is an unusual and highly original appeal to left-progressives and environmentalists and those sympathetic to those movements. It urges them to engage in more thorough self-examination, to assess more realistically their strengths, weaknesses and blind spots, and to learn to look at the darkened American political panorama through a variety of far more sophisticated lenses, and with a broader, longer, more nuanced view of history, culture and social change. A modest yet deeply informed account of the current state of eco and social justice activism and its adherents, Harpignies invites us to engage in a rigorous, but entertaining, and ideally rejuvenating, set of ideological calisthenics.

J.P. Harpignies, a radical “new left” student activist in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the U.S. and Europe, has been involved with many environmental causes. A former program director at the New York Open Center and contributing editor to itsmagazine, Lapis, he is an associate producer of the annual Bioneers environmental conference as well as a program consultant and conference producer for other organizations. He is the author of Double Helix Hubris (Cool Grove, 1997), a polemical critique of genetic manipulation, and co-editor (with Kenny Ausubel) of the first two titles in the Bioneers book series: Ecological Medicine and Nature’s Operating Instructions (both Sierra Club Books, 2004). He is also a long-time instructor of Taijiquan based in Brooklyn, NYC.