William Ophuls
The origins of the modern environmental movement took place in the United States with the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which pointed out the perils of pesticide use and rallied concern for the environment in general.
Eckersley (1992) argued that, "...although Ophuls has since moderated his position by placing a greater emphasis on the need for self restraint than on the need for external coercion, he continues to maintain that the latter must be resorted to if calls for the former are unsuccessful.
Climate change is slow, relative to political cycles of leadership in electoral democracies, which impedes responses by politicians who are elected and re-elected on much shorter timescales.
The international political community is presently based on liberal principles that prioritize individual freedoms and capitalist systems that make quick and ambitious climate responses difficult.
Ophuls (1977) posits that liberal democracies are unfit to address environmental problems, and that the prioritization of these challenges would involve a transition to more authoritarian forms of government.
[14]: xi Furthermore Ophuls argued, that ... virtually all the philosophies, values, and institutions typical of modern society are the luxuriant fruit of an era of apparently endless abundance.
Already the complex systems that sustain industrial civilization are seen by some as perpetually hovering on the brink of breakdown; the computer and other panaceas for coping with complexity appear to have been vastly oversold; and current management styles - linear, hierarchical, economic - appear to be grossly ill adapted to the nature of the problem.... there are no technical solutions to the dilemmas of environmental management, and policy decisions about environmental problems must be made politically by prudent men, not by scientific administrators.
In short, excessive or premature specificity about the institutions of the steady-state society is either not very useful or a positive hindrance; again, metanoia is the key, for it will almost automatically engender concrete, practical arrangements that are congruent with it.
He argues that "we are on an industrial Titanic, fueled by rapidly depleting stocks of fossil hydrocarbons.... we are headed for a postindustrial future that, however technologically sophisticated, will resemble the pre-industrial past in many important respects.
"[16] In response to the 2011 publication of Plato's Revenge, Thomas Homer-Dixon wrote the following endorsement: For decades, William Ophuls has been among the world's most original thinkers about the implications of our global ecological crisis for freedom, democracy, and political order.
In Plato's Revenge, he goes to the essence of this crisis: the deep, tacit, and widespread beliefs that nature and society are nothing more than machines, that the state should play no role in cultivating citizens' virtue, and that self-interested individuals should rely solely on reason to guide their lives.
Ophuls weaves together the ideas of some of history's greatest thinkers to argue that humankind's future lies in small, simple republics that cultivate their citizens' virtue through natural law.
[17]Robert Paehlke described Ophuls' work as attempt "to rethink how present and future societies might be organized given the array of environmental and sustainability challenges that we face.
