There are many "signs" to suggest an emerging crisis in global ecology. The Marxist idea of crisis visualizes the possibility of a whole system of activity collapsing as a consequence of some internally generated contradictory process. The focus of this thesis is on the process of modernization and the modality by which systems of knowledge that co-evolved with the project of modernity have provided an ideological service in preventing our recognition of the crisis. Modernization is the Cartesian method applied to both societies and eco-systems. The ecological crisis is a dialectically generated response to the growth of liberal-capitalism as the practical embodiment of modernity. The internally generated contradictory property of this activity refers to the intensely anti-ecological paradigm of ceaseless growth. An ecological perspective challenges the paradigm of growth. What is called progress and development conceals a well established trend toward general system failure, for which the idea of entropy is used. The analysis discusses how dominant ideologies became incorporated into the theory and practice of science so that science is deeply intertwined in the social physics of the growth paradigm. Ideologies of science are critiqued using arguments from the philosophies of language and social science in preparation for the analysis of modernization theory as ideology. An ecological framework is proposed and used to critique both the paradigm for growth and lo purge the language of ecology itself from ideological constructions that transform ecology into an environmental management science.
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