All public movements of thought quickly produce a language that works as a code, useless to the extent that it is abstract. It is readily evident, for example, that you can’t conduct a relationship with another person in terms of the rhetoric of the civil rights movement or the women’s movement – as useful as those rhetorics may initially have been to personal relationships. The same is true of the environment movement. The favorite adjective of this movement now seems to be ‘planetary.’ This word is used, properly enough, to refer to the interdependence of places, and to the recognition,
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