Political Ecology The classical sovereign nation-State is [‌] itself becoming irrelevant and impotent as the world rapidly coalesces into supranational, superregional trading blocs whose main purpose and passion is neither to foster direct democracy input nor to address the festering and even worsening problems of environmental degradation. 24 — David Ames Curtis
Introduction Today ecology is emerging as major concern and as an answer to the contemporary growth-based politico-economic model that is responsible for the creation of tangible environmental crisis and rapidly unfolding climate change. From as early as the beginning of the 19th century a concern for the environment arose within western societies, such as the romanticists, sparked by the pollution caused by the Industrial Revolution. Nowadays it is being expressed in theories like degrowth and social ecology, as well as in the form of popular struggles against consumerist culture and capitalist extractivist projects, harmful to the environment, human health and local autarchy. Ecology played major role in the thought of Cornelius Castoriadis
24 David Ames Curtis: The Castoriadis Reader, Oxford, Blackwell Publishers, 1997. ppXi-Xii 39
