ABSTRACT
More than twenty-five years later, things haven’t changed that much. The basic dysfunction of industrial cultures remains, proven again and again by various political disasters – that George W. Bush was able to occupy the White House for eight years, that climate change-denying Tea Party candidates were able to be taken seriously in the United States, that Conservatives who generally place climate change low on their list of priorities have become a strong force in Britain and Canada,1 and by political and social setbacks in many other parts of the world as well. No industrial culture has truly sworn off fossil fuels and made dramatic progress toward sustainability. The fixation with material consumption and definitions of “progress” as equal to growth of economic production is found almost everywhere around the world, including large developing nations such as China and India, which between them are home to 2.5 billion people.
