Are industrialization and sustainabiity are incompatible? Charles Shaw searches for the answer with a comparison of the ideas of William McDonough, green architect and designer, and Derrick Jensen, environmentalist and philosopher.
"To be, or not to be -- that is the age-old question, and civilization today faces its own dire version of it. As the negative social and ecological effects of 150 years of industrialization are becoming impossible to ignore, people are asking whether we can maintain our standards of living. But very few are asking if we should.
There are, however, two contemporary thinkers for whom this question is primal: William McDonough, green architect and designer, and Derrick Jensen, neo-tribal environmentalist and philosopher. They epitomize the vanguard of the new green zeitgeist. They are the elemental planners of a future sustainable society...
Though these two men share a common belief -- that industrial civilization, with its outrageous fortune, is killing the planet, plunging all life into a veritable sea of troubles -- they represent two sides of the most important question of our age: Is civilization worth saving?..
McDonough sees civilization as a good thing, something worth saving, and chalks up our current environmental crisis to a kind of growing-pain mentality...
Derrick Jensen believes the current "civilization" -- a system of sprawl, consumerism, monoculture, industry, war, empire, and a near-total disregard for non-human life that relies on finite resources and is predicated on unlimited growth -- is, in a word, insane."
Read the full story: The Priest and the Prophet
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