Person/planet: The creative disintegration of industrial society

by Theodore Roszak

We live in a time when the very private experience of having a personal destiny to fulfill has become a subversive political force of major proportions. And this (perhaps) is the way the industrial world comes to an end, in a noisy celebration of social deviance and personal defiance.In Person/Planet, Theodore Roszak, founder of the ecopsychology movement and author of such internationally acclaimed works as The Making of a Counter Culture and The Voice of the Earth, brings together the insights of deep ecology and humanistic psychology. The result is a powerful reassertion of Personalism, the philosophy that has most stubbornly resisted the dehumanizing forces of industrial society. Drawing his inspiration from such thinkers as Lewis Mumford, Thomas Merton, Emmanuel Mounier, Martin Buber, and Fritz Schumacher, Roszak explores the emerging congruency between environmental enlightenment and spiritual need. As bleak as the environmental fate of the Earth may seem, Person/Planet offers a daringly original and hopeful that the Earth herself is already working in the depths of the human psyche to heal our troubled urban-industrial culture. "The needs of the planet," Roszak believes, "are the needs of the person. The rights of the person are the rights of the planet."

Genres: Philosophy

Hardcover

First published April 5, 1979

About the author

Theodore Roszak was Professor Emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay. He is best known for his 1969 text, The Making of a Counter Culture.

Roszak first came to public prominence in 1969, with the publication of his The Making of a Counter Culture[5] which chronicled and gave explanation to the European and North American counterculture of the 1960s. He is generally credited with the first use of the term "counterculture".

Reviews

[Sue Lyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book had the most profound effect on me when I read it in 1982. I still use quotations from the book with students. Rosak is right - we cannot think about the planet as somehow separate or 'a=part' from us as humans - what's good for the planet is good for people too.