Person / Planet: the Creative Disintegration of Industrial Society

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 hypothesis: 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."