Turning Western Modernity Upside Down
La Belle Verte, Island and the Making of Non-capitalist Ecologies
abstract
Through a contrast between primitivist classless utopias and the modern world, Coline Serreau’s film La Belle Verte and Aldous Huxley’s book Island suggest modern ‘progress’ obstructs the creation of healthier relations with our own bodies, with other humans and non-human nature, and how self-sufficiency, voluntary austerity and non-hierarchical mutual aid relations produce the opposite effect. Ensuring environmental protection and human freedom in non-capitalist ecologies will involve the rejection of (and the creation of alternatives to) the pillars of Western modernity.