Whats a “postmodern” environmental philosophy?
The postmodern critique is that modernism is associated with the arrogance of a small elite of white-male Europeans and a kind of rationalism that is not the way human beings really work. It’s essentially anti-democratic. It’s top-down planning by an elite. There is a lot to that critique. On the other hand, when you are living in America – where land-planning is anathema and we just destroy our land with chaotic, profit-driven, exploitive, extractive development – planning means having some social control, some social thought, some social benefit connected with urban growth. That is the great idea behind modernist growth. If you could combine that with democratic input, you’d really have something. Where do you stand ideologically? I’ve always liked calling myself a Marxist, because as a kid I grew up in a country in which to say that was to be a pariah. But my leftism is very much a Bay Area/California leftism in which, for a very long time, communists, anarchists, feminists, and env
