Throughout his life, prophetic American philosopher Murray Bookchin created social ecology as a comprehensive social program for the challenges of our present era. Through tireless teaching, speaking, organizing, and writing, Bookchin presented a humanist vision of ecology based on community, direct democracy, and the better promises of the Enlightenment, showing how we could transform our society into one that is free and egalitarian. Enlightenment and Ecology is an international collection of commemorative essays by scholars and activists who have each incorporated the ideas of social ecology into their own work. This book also examines how the Kurdish freedom movement is using the Bookchin's utopian ideas. In a time of urgent need for radical change, these essays provide both precious historical lessons and a transformative road map.

This is a unique and agenda-setting interpretation of nature and ecology that will become the essential reference in any debate on environmental politics and sociology.

Beck examines the politics of the risk society. He starts from the assumption that the ecological issue, considered politically and sociologically, is a systematic, legalized violation of fundamental civil rights and, from this position, adduces that the ecological conflict, politically speaking, is the successor to the industrial conflict. One of his central concerns is to illustrate just how the establishment, but expressing as much concern over the environmental issues as the radical groups who first raised them, has endeavored to take over the debate and then effectively stifled it. Beck argues that the vested interests have developed a strategy of avoiding discussion of accountability by bringing mega-risks to the foreground so that containable risks are hidden in their shadow. He concludes by arguing that only by bringing the discussion back to the accountability issue as informed by social sciences can the political initiative be wrested back from the vested interests.

In Encounter with Enlightenment, Robert E. Carter puts forth the East, and specifically Japan, as a source of possible solutions to the world's social, economic, and environmental problems. Not only is the book a sustained scholarly analysis of both the religious and philosophical roots of Japan's distinctive ethical approach to life, but it also provides the Western reader with a context for understanding Eastern values—values that although familiar to the West tend to be deemphasized. Encounter with Enlightenment begins a horizontal fusion between East and West, and establishes a common ground for mutual understanding and for working toward an ethical approach that could resolve some of the earth's difficulties.

Introduction: film as freedom: the meaning of film as philosophy -- Implicating the narrator, implicating the audience: Waltz with Bashir and Apocalypto -- How to represent a past we would rather forget: Hiroshima mon amour and Last year at Marienbad -- Learning from conceptually impossible versions of our world: Never let me go and The road -- When melancholia is exactly what is called for: Melancholia and Solaris -- Gravity's arc; or gravity: A space odyssey -- The fantasy of absolute safety through absolute power: The lord of the rings trilogy and Avatar -- Conclusion: what have we learnt?

A much-needed account of what has gone wrong in our thinking about the environment. Val Plumwood argues that we need to see nature as an end itself, rather than an instrument to get what we want.

Inspired by the philosophy of Wittgenstein and his idea that the purpose of real philosophical thinking is not to discover something new, but to show in a strikingly different light what is already there, this book provides philosophical readings of a number of ‘arthouse’ and Hollywood films. Each chapter contains a discussion of two films—one explored in greater detail and the other analyzed as a minor key which reveals the possibility for the book's ideas to be applied across different films, registers, and genres. The readings are not only interpretive, but they offer a way of thinking and feeling about, with, and through films which is genuinely transformative. Rupert Read’s main contention is that certain films can bring about a change in how we see the world. He advocates an ecological approach to film-philosophy analysis, arguing that film can re-shape the viewer’s relationship to the environment and other living beings. The transformative 'wake-up call' of these films is enlightenment in its true sense. The result is a book that ambitiously aims to change, though film, how we think of ourselves and our place in the world, at a time when such change is more needed than ever before.