In The Resurgence of the Real Charlene Spretnak presents a blistering attack on the dynamics of modernity and a delineation of its philosophical corrective-ecological postmodernism. Under the rubric of progress, the body in the past has been seen as a biological machine, nature has been "a mere externality in modern economics," and place has been nothing more than a stage for grandiose projects. In the 1990s these three areas — the knowing body, the creative cosmos, and the complex sense of place — have become the linchpins for ecological postmodernism.
With the same intellectual adventurism and spiritual clarity she demonstrated in her 1991 book States of Grace: The Recovery of Meaning in the Postmodern Age, Spretnak fires off sallies against globalized mass culture, the pre-eminence of technology in contemporary education, and the continuing gap between the rich and the poor. She celebrates the early resistance movements to modernity including the Romantic movement, the Arts and Crafts movement, cosmological and spiritual quests in schools of painting, Gandhi's Constructive Program, and the counterculture. Today the offspring of these protests live in grassroots efforts to support environmental protection, democratic reform, community-based economies, human rights, spiritual renewal, nonviolent conflict resolution, and the end of militarism. Spretnak concludes this visionary book with her own story of a heartland city that incorporates elements of ecological postmodernism.