This paper contrasts the emergence of positive environmentalist agendas with the decline of scientific-technological programs for confronting increasingly global environmental challenges. The newest wave of environmental practices, programs, and policies is best characterized as an emergent “green civilization,” in that it addresses a broad spectrum of scale and scope: from mundane domestic behavior to international institutions, and from identity and local community to cosmological narratives about place and purpose. Viewing the sum of environmental theory and practice as an emergent civilization enables us to see a whole that combines its otherwise bewilderingly diverse parts, and combats increasingly pervasive pessimism among environmentalists. This paper will trace the evolution of environmentalism, the challenge it now presents to the existing scientific-technological civilization, and its salience for nationalism, religion, economics, and other contemporary human systems. The urgency associated with climate change is offered as a potential catalyst for the emergence of “green civilization.”
