Most ecological philosophers and social activists belong to that school of thought but none of them has quite shown how our highly complex global society on its heavily inhabited planet can transition to a mainly rural low-energy state without going through a massive almost "Extinction Level" crisis.
In order to prevent a collapse of the supporting mechanisms of mankind, such a transition would have to take place very gradually, over several decades during which the current rush to industrialization, urbanization and greater consumption would have to be reversed and at present no human agency is powerful enough to mandate and enforce such a change of course.
If we leave out the extreme choices made by some minorities to return to a pre-industrial existence, thereby reverting to the condition still experienced by hundreds of millions in Asia, Africa and Latin America, we will find that attempts to recreate some conditions of the past are carried out at two levels, that of states trying to recapture lost greatness, from both nostalgia and necessity and that of smaller entities inspired by charismatic and influential thinkers who draw from a national or universal spiritual and political tradition.
1-The resistance of nation-states and the return of Empires
Various authors have noticed that while nation-states, some of them quite recent, are fighting the dominant trend of globalization and world federalism in order to keep their hard won liberties, there is a revival of some of the age-old empires that ruled most parts of the world in previous centuries. In China, the USA, Russia, Brazil, Indonesia and India the two notions: nation and empire, are almost inseparable due to historic and geographic realities, such as size and physical, ethnic and cultural diversity but those continental states are threatened by fissiparous tendencies in regions that claim to have a distinct national identity justifying independence.
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