About ME
Biography
William Ophuls is the professional name of Patrick Ophuls. He served for eight years as a Foreign Service Officer in Washington, Abidjan, and Tokyo before receiving a PhD in political science from Yale University in 1973. After teaching briefly at Northwestern University, he became an independent scholar and author. He has published three books on the ecological, social, and political challenges confronting modern industrial civilization. When not at his writing desk, he spends his time rambling in nature, either in his native California or in the mountains of Europe.
My Publications
Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, W. H. Freeman & Co., 1977
Winner of the American Political Science Association’s Gladys M. Kammerer Award 1977 for best book on American public policy and of the International Studies Association’s Harold and Margaret Sprout Award 1977 for best book on environmental problems and international affairs. Revised in 1992 by A. Stephen Boyan, Jr. as Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity Revisited.
Requiem for Modern Politics: The Tragedy of the Enlightenment and the Challenge of the New Millennium , Westview Press, 1997
Plato’s Revenge: Politics in the Age of Ecology, MIT Press, 2011
Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail, Ind. Published , 2012
Sane Polity: A Pattern Language, Ind. Published, 2013
Apologies to the Grandchildren: Reflections on Our Ecological Predicament, Its Deeper Causes, and its Political Consequences, Ind. Published , 2018
Electrifying the Titanic: The Shipwreck of Industrial Civilization, Bite-Sized Books, 2021
The Tragedy of Industrial Civilization: Envisioning a Political Future, Ind. Published, 2023
Slouching Towards Barbarism: The End of the Colombian Age, Ind. Published, 2026