The activists' strategies … reflect both the importance of new social media and the shifting constraints under which civil society must operate in an authoritarian state.

Wilderness lovers like to speak of the equal rights of all species to exist. This ethical cloaking cannot hide the truth that green missionaries are possibly more dangerous, and certainly more hypocritical, than their economic or religious counterparts.

The grand social and ideological systems that people construct for themselves invariably carry large consequences, for the environment no less than for more strictly human affairs. Among the swirl of ideas, policies, and political structures of the twentieth century, the most ecologically influential were the growth imperative and the (not unrelated) security anxiety that together dominated policy around the world. … By 1970, however, something new was afoot.