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Morin's thoughts on environmental destruction flow from the perspective of a metatheorist of political ecology. His early writings emphasize the interaction of nature and culture; his 'acentric' interpretations of systems theory challenge ecological theorists who overemphasize centralized programming as a remedy for destructive patterns of subsystem interaction. Morin also criticizes defenders of 'sustainable development' who fail to see system-renewing potential in cultural diversity. As an environmental metatheorist, he offers not rules for a new green ethic, but a way of thinking designed to enhance respect for pluralism, ambiguity, and natural complexity. KEYWORDS: Authoritarianism, Descartes, ecocentrism, ecology, hominisation, sustainable development, systems theory.

Several personalities in the French political ecology movement have espoused the concept of ecosocialism. Rene Dumont and Andre Gorz pioneered the efforts during the 1970s while Pierre Juquin and Felix Guattari advocated relativist ecosocialism during the 1980s. The most recent efforts made by Paul Deleage and Alan Lipietz dealt with a contractual form of ecosocialism that is committed to an egalitarian pluralism.

I argue that Arendt's understanding of 'society' deepens Green critiques of productivism. By avoiding subjectivist or objectivist modes of thought, Arendt uncovers hidden links between life-sustaining labor and a world-destroying drive to consume. Checking environmentally destructive desires to produce and consume requires structuring communities around an optimal configuration of public deliberation, work and labor. I conclude that an Arendt-inspired ecological politics stresses the interdependence of human values and an all-encompassing natural order.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty rejects both liberalism and Marxism because both systems assert a universality that promote violence and repression of any opposition. Liberalism rests on a belief in universal reason which does not take seriously the otherness of the opposition. Marxism regards the meaning of history as already established and because of this suppresses opposition. Merleau-Ponty, in an essay on Malraux, points toward a new liberalism based on a universality that is contingent, open and grounded in perception.

In systems theory, nature appears as an intricate interweaving of homeostatic processes - processes that mankind disrupts at its own peril. For many non-French ecologists, only respecting nature's 'intrinsic value' will avert catastrophe. Such reasoning is rare in France. In its place, theorists like Edgar Morin and Michel Serres promote a systems-inspired ecologism that skirts the problematic dualism of nature and humanity by questioning skeptically how we understand both the world and ourselves., 'The age of a finite earth has begun,' declares one of France's leading green theorists, Alain Lipietz (1989, p. 61). For the physicist-historian Jean-Paul Deleage (1992, p. 2), this means [...]