Neo‐Modern Ecology |
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| Authors: | ALAIN TOURAINE |
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| Affiliation: | One of Europe's foremost social theorists. He is presently director of the Institute for Applied Sociology at the Center for the Study of Man in Paris. His most recent book is The Return of the Actor. In the following comments Touraine cautions against an ecological consciousness which discards the achievements of modernity. This first appeared in NPQ in 1987. |
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| Abstract: | If the 20th Century was the century of physics, the 21st Century is the century of cybernetics, biology and ecology. Technological advance has both crossed new frontiers and discovered old limits. Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine broke new ground with his understanding that nature, including its human component, seeks to establish order out of chaos by “self‐organizing,” not only according to pre‐determined laws, but through random creative choices as well that are responsible for the endless novelty and potentiality of being. The technologically‐armed purposive role of humans in the Anthropocentric Age thus takes on a new significance: “What we do today depends on our image of the future rather than the future depending on what we do today” as Prigogine puts it. “The equations of the future are written in our actions as well as in nature. Time becomes construction.” Nowhere is this truer than in the new science of genomics, which touches the soul, and in the effort to preserve the ecological balance that has enabled humanity to flourish within the narrow band of earth's livable climate. In this section we bring together leading thinkers, scientists and technologists of our age to address these issues of mankind's fate. |
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