While the historical development of symbolic power has benefitted humanity enormously, there is an insidious and seldom recognised price that goes beyond environmental degradation and cultural disintegration. With insights from both social and natural sciences, this book explores the changing character of subjectivity in contemporary life.

David Kidner worked as a process design engineer in the petroleum industry before turning to social science with a PhD in psychology from London University. For the past three decades he has taught critical social science and environmental philosophy in Britain and the USA, and is currently at Nottingham Trent University, UK. He is the author of Nature and Psyche: Radical Environmentalism and the Politics of Subjectivity (2001), and numerous academic papers.