The modern environmentalist movement has recognized this and exploited it with its austere downsizing appeal. The Greens offer a manifestly Platonist reply to Aristotle’s world of technology, individual desire, and convenience, by stressing collective responsibility, self-sacrifice, and moral rather than material comfort and consumer choice.§ And whatever their empirical scientific merits or demerits, climate change gurus and advocates of the Gaia thesis do point to an important truth: that a world built on getting and spending is not enough. There are other values, spiritual needs that also
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