Changing our Environment, Changing Ourselves

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xvii

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2. Introduction: Changing Our Environment, Changing Ourselves

   • James S. Ormrod

   Pages 1-12

3. The Work of Peter Dickens

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 13-13

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   2. Peter Dickens: Late Capitalism, Nature, and Mental Life

      • Ted Benton

      Pages 15-35

   3. Defragmenting Nature: Themes in Peter Dickens’s Work

      • James S. Ormrod

      Pages 37-78

4. Philosophical and Theoretical Debates

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 79-79

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   2. Environmental Alienation

      • Kate Soper

      Pages 81-99

   3. Marx’s Universal Metabolism of Nature and the Frankfurt School: Dialectical Contradictions and Critical Syntheses

      • John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark

      Pages 101-135

5. Emerging Issues

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 137-137

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   2. Metabolic Rift Theory and the Crisis of Our Foodways

      • Graham Sharp

      Pages 139-169

   3. Satellite Farming, Food, and Human Wellbeing

      • James E. Addicott

      Pages 171-214

   4. Computers and the Alienation of Thinking: From Deep Blue to the Googlemobile

      • Kathryn Dean

      Pages 215-256

   5. Society, Nature, and Experience: Jouissance on the Margins

      • Peter Dickens

      Pages 257-287

6. Back Matter

   Pages 289-315

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In this book, a celebration of the work of the sociologist Peter Dickens serves as the catalyst for exploring the relationship between human ‘internal nature’ (our health and psychological well-being) and ‘external nature’ (the environment on which we depend and which we collectively transform). Across contributions from Ted Benton, James Ormrod, Kate Soper, John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, Graham Sharp, James Addicott, Kathryn Dean and Peter Dickens himself, the book draws attention to alienation associated with the promotion of different knowledges in late capitalist production. But it also highlights the possibilities for generating less alienated relations with our environment in the future. As well as discussing the philosophical and theoretical issues involved, the book contains contemporary case studies of ultra-processed food, satellite farming, computerised thinking and dark tourism.

• Environmental Sociology
• Ecosocialism
• Labour
• Alienation
• Environment
• Environmental Geography

• School of Applied Social Science, University of Brighton School of Applied Social Science, Brighton, United Kingdom

  James S. Ormrod

James S. Ormrod is a Principal Lecturer in Sociology, University of Brighton, UK. His research interests are in social movements and the relationships human beings have with their environment and the universe in general. He is the author of Fantasy and Social Movements (2014) and, with Peter Dickens, Cosmic Society (2007).

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