Lorna Salzman - Politics as if Evolution Mattered : Darwin, Ecology and Social Justice

http://www.lornasalzman.com/collectedwritings.html

In this scientifically authoritative essay collection, Salzman, a seasoned and provocative environmentalist, demonstrates how evolutionary theory penetrates nearly all aspects of human society. She faults social justice movements for their short-sighted focus on human needs to the exclusion of nonhuman nature and stresses the potential of evolutionary thought for replacing religious and secular ideologies with an ecological paradigm for broad social change. Salzman's special concern is the resurgence of irrationality, anti-intellectualism and anti-science attitudes.. She explodes the myth of genetic determinism promoted in popular media, discrediting the belief that natural selection involves violence. In place of the arbitrary "economism" of socialists and the free marketeers' faith in untrammeled economic growth, she envisions a human society modeled on interdependent self-regulating natural systems.

A graduate of Cornell University, Lorna Salzman has been an environmental activist, writer, lecturer and organizer for forty years. In the early 1970s, under the auspices of Citizens for Local Democracy, co-founded by the late Walter Karp, she edited a Brooklyn Heights NY community paper, The Township, dedicated to neighborhood government and political decentralization.

Later she was hired by the late David Brower, founder and president of Friends of the Earth (FOE), as the regional representative of FOE and held that position for nearly ten years, concentrating on anti-nuclear work and on coastal zone and wetlands protection on eastern Long Island.

Read more about Lorna Salzman : http://www.lornasalzman.com/bio.html