The Age of Ecology: The Environment on CBC Radio's Ideas

Simon Dalby is a research associate at the Centre for International
Studies at Simon Fraser University.

Through the latter part of the 1980s and into 1990 Cayley made a series
of radio documentaries about ecology for the CBC radio program
“Ideas.” Now he has collected the transcripts of some of the best of
these innovative broadcasts and edited them into an easy-to-read volume.
The chapter formats reflect their various origins: some are in-depth
conversations with a particular thinker, others draw on contributions
from a number of people to explore a particular theme or environmental
issue.

While the subject matter varies from tropical rain-forest preservation
to innovative designs for sewage treatment plants, each of these
chapters reflects Cayley’s determination to push beyond the
environmental management approach to ecology. He argues that this widely
prevalent approach to the discussion of the contemporary global crisis
squeezes out the important ethical, political, and philosophical
implications of the situation. Without these intellectual dimensions,
and the actions they inspire, ecology is in danger of being reduced to
green consumerism and technical fixes to preserve the current
unsustainable economy.

To support these contentions Cayley has interviewed many of the most
far-sighted and innovative thinkers in North America and much further
afield. In these pages we hear the voices of Vandana Shiva on women and
ecology in India, John Todd on using high-technology ecological
technology in conjunction with traditional practices, Jose Lutzenberger,
who subsequently became Brazil’s environment minister on the Amazon
rain forest, Wolfgang Sachs from Germany on the ambivalent meanings of
the word ecology, and many more.

The radio-transcript format makes the presentation of these ideas a
little disjointed in places. Some of the interviewees appear in more
than one chapter; an index would have helped keep track of them. But
because the material has been edited carefully—initially for radio,
and subsequently for publication—the essentials of what these many
important thinkers have to contribute are presented in a clearly
comprehensible text.

Anyone wishing to start an investigation of ecological thinking beyond
the simplicities of green consumer guides and newspaper headlines would
do well to begin with this book.