Fruit of a Long Experience

Actually as anyone should know, book abstracts come after a long period of polishing--and even longer writing of the whole book when you look back and ask yourself "just what is this I have written?" How do you categorize the uncategorizable, something that links "Nonfiction" with "Government" and with "Health" and with "Environment"? You know, how the real world interacts outside the bookseller's publishing world of nearsightedness squared?

Even if the following rolls off the tongue now and is now sealed in place on a back cover like it was born there with a silver spoon in its mouth, it was the Fruit of a Long Experience. Below is a pithy description of the book, from the back cover. As I said, I'm a down to earth kind of guy....

If it interests you, click on the image on the right of the page. It will take you to Amazon.com where it is available and where I have posted another more lengthy description of the book.

Until I get that link working, here's this link.


Book Description
Environmental sociologist Mark D. Whitaker is a comparative historical researcher on the politics of environmental degradation and sustainability. Toward A Bioregional State is his novel approach to development and to sustainability. He proposes that instead of sustainability being an issue of population scale, managerial economics, or technocratic planning, an overhaul of formal democratic institutions is required. This is because environmental degradation has more to do with the biased interactions of formal institutions and informal corruption. Because of corruption, we have environmental degradation. Current formal democratic institutions of states are forms of informal gatekeeping, and as such, intentionally maintain democracy as ecologically “out of sync”. He argues that we are unable to reach sustainability without a host of additional ecological checks and balances. These ecological checks and balances would demote corrupt uses of formal institutions by removing capacities for gatekeeping against democratic feedback. Sustainability is a politics that is already here—only waiting to be formally organized.