Dennis C. Pirages

Dennis Clark Pirages (July 30, 1942 – October 1, 2020) is an American political scientist, environmentalist and former Harrison Professor of International Environmental Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park, known for his work on the environment and sustainability questions.

Biography Born in Davenport, Iowa, Pirages obtained his BA from the State University of Iowa in 1964, and his PhD from Stanford University in 1969.

In 1975 Pirages was appointed Professor at the University of Maryland.

Work Pirages is known for his political work on the environment, which according to Kassiola (1990), has long been a neglected field in political science. Notable exceptions however are William Ophuls, Lester W. Milbrath, Lynton K. Caldwell, Harold and Margaret Sprout, and Pirages, who all wrote extensively on the environment. Levallois (2010) summarized, that: "...Georgescu-Roegen argued that their envisioned society (which he would prefer to call the Bioeconomic Society, or else the Society for Environmental Economics, S.E.E.) should develop strong ties with the American Economic Association, because In the last analysis, our ulterior aim should be to make AEA SEE..." This concept was defined as "a mental image of social reality that guides expectations in a society."

Pirages and Ehrlich (1974) further explained: "... A DSP is the socially relevant part of a total culture. Different societies have different DSPs. A social paradigm is important to society because it helps make sense of an otherwise incomprehensible universe and to make organized activity possible. It is an essential part of the cultural information that is passed from generation to generation as it guides the behavior and expectations of those born into it. The world view of each individual is somewhat different from that of every other, as are the shared world views of members of different families, classes, and so forth." Pirages (1977;10) started, that:

"Sustainable growth is a difficult concept with which to deal, but it seems to be the best guide to the future that we have at present. It means economic growth that can be supported by physical and social environments for the foreseeable future. An ideal sustainable society would be one in which all energy would be derived from current solar income and all nonrenewable resources would be recycled."

Around the same time Robert L. Stivers had also published a pioneering work on the sustainable society. Another notable definition of the sustainable society was given by James C. Coomer According to Faber et al (2005) both perceptions of a sustainable society are static, and have the shortcoming that they don't take into account possible changes of the physical and social environments.

According to Pirages (1989) The atypical four-hundred-year stretch of recent history dominated by the industrial revolution has given rise to a culture or predominant world view that could best be called exclusionist. This world view permeates social life and consciousness as well as academic enterprise in the industrial world. It is manifest in the beliefs that human beings exist apart from nature and that they are destined to dominate it, that the last four hundred years of growth and progress will be followed by a similar stretch of good fortune."

Selected publications Dennis Clark Pirages, Paul R. Ehrlich, ARK II: Social Response to Environmental Imperatives. 1974. Dennis C. Pirages, Sustainable society: implications for limited growth. 16 papers, 1977. Dennis Pirages (ed.), Building Sustainable Societies: a blueprint for a post-industrial world., M. E. Sharpe, 1996. Dennis Pirages; Theresa Manley DeGeest (2004). Ecological Security: An Evolutionary Perspective on Globalization. Rowman & Littlefield Dennis Pirages, Farooq Sobhan, Stacy D. VanDeveer and Li Li. Ecological and Nontraditional Security Challenges in South Asia. June 2011.