Political Ecology

Dimitrios I. Roussopoulos is a political activist, writer, editor, publisher, community organizer and public speaker. Since the late 1950s, he has been active in peace initiatives, ecology projects, and in the cooperative movement. Since 2001, he leads the Taskforce on Municipal Democracy of the City of Montreal. He is also involved in the World Social Forums, and continues to advance the need for an extraparliamentary opposition in Canada.

Political Ecology explains the history of environmental politics and its prospects for the future. This highly readable classic is now available in a revised and expanded edition. Political Ecology opens by presenting the history of the state management of the environment, then moves to an overview of the great variety of popular responses to the ecological crisis, before finally discussing the main political tendencies offered by the ecology movement. Ecological activists, Roussopoulos argues, aim for more than protecting the environment; they call for new communities, new lifestyles, and a new way of doing politics.



The concluding sections explore how we can channel the aspirations of environmentalism into such political alternatives, and they provide a set of striking examples of successes inspired by social ecology. This edition is updated with a new postscript reflecting on Paris COP21.