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CSUDH Habermas UWP
Paradigm Shift to Alterity

California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: April 5, 2001
Latest update: April 5, 2001
jeannecurran@habermas.org

Don't let the title's emphasis on economy fool you. Political, social, and legal systems are all caught up in sociology. Globalization is a "buzz" word these days. A recent text by Brian Milani explores other postindustrial alternatives. I would like to consider the text for our course in Transformative Discourse next Fall. The course will be the fourth in our series of Love and Peace. I have sent for a copy, and will share it with you when it comes. Meanwhile, I'd appreciate if you would look at the reviews, consider this essay, and comment on your feelings about using this text. jeanne, April 5, 2001.

E-mail Announcement from Rowman and Littlefield Publishers:

Designing the Green Economy:
The Postindustrial Alternative to Corporate Globalization

by Brian Milani
with a Foreword by Thomas Berry

"Current trends toward corporate globalization and Casino Economics have been endowed with the mantle of inevitability and economic progress. The dollar-driven Information Economy has been assumed to be "postindustrial". But is the current capitalist economy so progressive or inevitable, or is it actually a decadent dinosaur desperately trying to find ways to repress growing social and ecological potentials?

"Brian Milani argues that, not only are there alternatives to corporate capitalism, but that growing human potentials can be expressed only through a new paradigm of economic development--the Green Economy--based in a fundamental redefinition of wealth: from quantitative to qualitative, from accumulation to regeneration. This redefinition presumes a basic shift in progressive social change strategy from opposition to alternatives--something we are already seeing, but which must become more conscious and explicit.

"Part 1 looks at the development of industrial society and its increasingly ambivalent response to growing human potentials-- through the Great Depression, the Fordist Waste Economy, and the contemporary global Casino economy. It highlights industrial capitalism (and state socialism) as systems necessarily based in scarcity and materiality; and it demonstrates the key role of waste in artificially maintaining scarcity and class relationships.

"Part 2 outlines principles of green economic development, and practical potentials for postindustrial regenerative development in key sectors of the economy: the built- environment; the energy sector; manufacturing and resource use; and money & finance. The final chapter discusses the role of the state, and possibilities for decentralized community- based regulation. It concludes with frank discussion of priorities for economic conversion and the implications for social change strategy. Community-design pattern languages, Green Municipal Utilities, Eco-Industrial Parks, the Carbohydrate Economy, community currencies, Citizen Assemblies and much more are reviewed in this synthesis of green development strategies."

Link to text description at publisher's site:

Designing the Green Economy Includes a Table of Contents and Reviews. Scroll to the bottom of the file and link on the appropriate button.