The light-green society: ecology and technological modernity in France, 1960-2000

This book includes forty-three pages of footnotes, an exhaustive list of printed sources, a huge bibliography divided into an environmental section and a general section, and a very useful index of terms, notions, authors, and persons quoted within the text.The body is divided into four parts, sixteen chapters, and several figures, mainly advertisements and posters.The purpose of the book is to give a historical perspective on environmentalism in France in the postwar period.According to the author, the French society has seen a "gradual commingling, over several decades, of these two antagonistic ideological currents--the greens and the technological enthusiasts--to produce something new: the partial greening of the mainstream, in which neither side emerged wholly satisfied, not utterly dismayed, but in which a whole new complex of discourses and institutions nonetheless came into being" (p.4).The first half of the book focuses on how these transformations occur, parts 1 and 2 being respectively dedicated to technological and environmental features.The second half explains how these features cohabit (part 3) and how they may predictably change (part 4).The first chapter is centered on technological modernization, its pieces of evidence, trends, and explanations.France does not have a positive image in the world of green activists because it bears, since the early postwar period, a sustained consensus on technology, a "passionate love affair with large-scale, high profile technology in general,