Damian White and Gideon Kossoff Anarchism and Environmental Thought (original) (raw)

Reinventing Hierarchy: The Political Theory of Social Ecology

Proponents of social ecology claim that the human domination of nature arises from the domination of human by human. They argue that to create an ecological society, we must eliminate hierarchy and domination within human societies. This opposition to hierarchy and domination is shared by anarchist doctrines. However, many social ecologists also argue in favour of various forms of democratic government. The question that arises is whether you can have a government without hierarchy and domination. I argue that the political proposals put forward by various social ecologists entail hierarchical structures of political authority incompatible with the social ecological ideal of non-hierarchical, non-dominating community. Anyone committed to that ideal should therefore reject these proposals.

Journal of Political Ecology -- Special Issue on Alternative and Non-Capitalist Political Ecologies

The articles in this special section, by offering ethnographically grounded reflections on diverse strains of economic activism, begin to articulate a non-capitalocentric political ecology that we think can help scholaractivists politicize, reimagine, and recreate socio-ecological relations. In this introductory article, we offer a useful vision of how scholar-activists can engage with and support more just and sustainable ways of organizing human-human and human-environment relations. Specifically, we argue that engaged researchers can significantly contribute to a meaningful "ecological revolution" by (1) examining the tremendously diverse, already-existing experiments with other ways of being in the world, (2) helping to develop alternative visions, analyses, narratives, and desires that can move people to desire and adopt those ways of being, and (3) actively supporting and constructing economies and ecologies with alternative ethical orientations. Each article in this collection attempts one or more of these goals, and this introductory article provides a conceptual grounding for these ethnographic studies and a synthesis of some of their primary contributions. We begin by describing why critique is analytically and politically inadequate and explain why we think a non-capitalocentric ontology offers an essential complement for engaged scholarship. We then turn to the work of J.K. Gibson-Graham and the Community Economies Collective in order to explain how ideas of overdetermination, diverse economies, and performativity better equip the field of political ecology to contribute to alternative futures. And finally, we discuss how the articles in this volume reconceptualize values, politics, and scale in a manner that illuminates our scholarly and activist efforts.

The Struggle for Nature. A Critique of Radical Ecology. London and New York: Routledge, 1998

The Struggle for nature charts the scientific traps and the social pifalls of current environmental philosophies, such as deep ecology, social and political ecology, eco-feminism and eco-anarchism and argues for a 'post-naturalistic' turn in environmental philosophy. Jozef Keulartz presents a critique of environmental philosophy from two complementary angles. First, he examens the theory of power outlined in the work of Foucault and Donzelot and demonstrates how environmental philosophy can contribute to a strengthening of bio-power. Second, the author explores the philosophy of language developed in the writings of Habermas and Lyotard and shows how current environmental philosophy can form a threat to communicative power.

THE COMING ECOLOGICAL REVOLUTION Pt 6 Environmentalism as Politics

This part argues that realising the potential for a new ecological modus vivendi requires a new set of political practices and institutions. These practices and institutions affirm the co-construction of nature and culture through the practical reappropriation of the human powers alienated to the state and capital and the common control and comprehension of these powers as social powers. This creates the foundation for a renewal of public agency within public life and for popular identification with environmental and related public policies. This part pays particular attention to the notion of community self-regulation. To keep the above and the below in an interactive, organic fusion means going back to the grassroots and tapping into the social and human and natural roots that feed a genuinely Green politics. This requires that Greens start organising, campaigning and talking face to face, door to door, street to street, building a Green social identity neighbourhood by neighbourhood, community by community. A functioning social order requires extensive public spaces for social learning and cognitive praxis. A public life worthy of the name creates opportunities for citizen discourse and interaction, a civic solidarity in which citizens share social knowledge, discussing freely and critically the issues of common concern, the problems that confront all individuals collectively within communities and societies. Effective political engagement on the part of new and environmental movements is also an involvement in a public life on the part of individuals who have an "ecological consciousness". To nurture this ecological sensibility so that it contributes to cultural transformation requires a number of supportive conditions and social innovations generated by ecological praxis.

Ecocriticism and the Politics of Representation

Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, 2014

This paper argues that the primary literary-theoretical challenge for ecocriticism is not the representation of nature, but the politicization of environment; or, in other words, how to make complex socio-ecological interactions socially visible as political concerns. My path to an answer involves a return to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the mass-distributed 1963 book that galvanized nature and health concerns into a recognizable social movement that politicized ecology. Silent Spring tends to be evoked within the humanities for its moral statements about the value of nature, or “the web of life.” I argue that the achievement of Silent Spring, however, was its politicization of ecology: its demonstration that the study of ecological relationships had significance for public affairs. I further place ecocriticism within the social democratic demand—clearly and forcefully expressed by Carson in Silent Spring—for the creation and revitalization of political spaces and collectives for articulating demands for ecological justice. This argument is framed by a discussion of Douglas Coupland’s 2006 comic novel JPod, which closes with a scene where climate change itself is made into a commodifiable spectacle. JPod, I suggest, should lead ecocritics to consider what modes of critique and action can be adequate to describe and respond to this farcical cultural moment when environmental knowledge circulates so readily but is dissociated from any particular political project of social change.

The Coming Ecological Revolution: The Principles and Politics of a Social and Moral Ecology

2011

THE COMING ECOLOGICAL REVOLUTION This book has now been published and is available for purchase. Abstract Part 1 The Emerging Ecological Consciousness This part connects the contemporary environmental crisis with the wider societal crisis. The environmental crisis is considered to be the product of a wider system failure. The perspective taken is that one civilisation is in the process of decay and another in the process of emerging. A fundamental critical self-examination of ourselves and our communities of struggle is necessary to locate and situate the choices, possibilities and strategies with respect to the circumscribed options within the system and the feasible alternatives to that system. This part examines the nature of the environmental crisis, paying particular attention to climate change and global poverty and inequality. Social and environmental justice are shown to be mutually supportive, the low-carbon economy which is a condition of the survival of civilised life also being socially just, egalitarian and democratic. The emergence of an ecological consciousness is shown to be part of the process of revolutionizing society, restructuring power, changing culture and emphasising the quality of individual lives over the quantity of material accumulation and possession. Part 2 The Coming Revolution in Economic Thought The environmental crisis is related to the crisis in economic thought and practice. The crisis in vision in economics is related to the economic system in general. This part exposes economics to be an ideology in the critical sense, that is, as not knowledge as such but a distorted knowledge concerning appearances which serves to conceal contradictions, material interests and power relations to the benefit of the dominant class. Conventional economics treats ‘the economy’ as an abstraction which functions independently of the political, social, moral and ecological context. This part restores economics to its true status as a means. Part of dealing with the future orientated problem of ecology involves examining in what direction economic thought must go in order to once more become relevant to human beings. The ecological problem is related to the globalisation of economic relations and the ‘free market’ economy. A distinction is made between price and value to reassert use value embedded in communities to the exchange value pursued on the market. The question of morality within market societies is addressed in terms of the need to secure the building blocks of a viable civilisation. The view is taken that the individual of Anglo-American liberalism an abstraction of market relations, a fictional person who exists only in the figure of homo economicus. Real individuals are shown to exist and flourish within a social matrix of reciprocal relations and trust. Part 3 Society as a Learning Mechanism Notions of knowledge and social transformation need to be reworked to take account of genuine change as a process rather than as event. It is a process because the new society only functions and flourishes if the individuals constituting it have developed their moral, political, intellectual and organisational capacities. In this sense, a social and ecological praxis is a form of capacity building which develops the know-how required to constitute the new social order. The argument draws upon the emergence of grass roots organisations and community organisations across the world and seeks to value the contributions that social movements can make not only to social provision but to urban governance. This part is organised around concerns for community, communication and the common good. Part 4 Political Philosophy and Ethics This part examines the emancipatory potentialities of reason and freedom to constitute the good life for human beings. The argument considers politics as creative human self-realisation to possess an ineliminable normative dimension concerning the appropriate regiment for the good. Green political theory is analysed in the context of a philosophical concept of ‘rational freedom’ drawn from the work of Aristotle, Plato, Rousseau, Kant and Hegel. Part 5 Ecological Praxis This part goes from principles to practice to examine how the emerging ecological consciousness can be embedded in social practices and institutions. This is a question not only of how the ecological society can be created, but governed and made to work. This part looks at critical political issues and constructive models, identifies key tasks in organising for political change. Particular attention is paid to the political boundaries of change and the changing boundaries of politics. Part 6 Environmentalism as Politics This part argues that realising the potential for a new ecological modus vivendi requires a new set of political practices and institutions. These practices and institutions affirm the co-construction of nature and culture through the practical reappropriation of the human powers alienated to the state and capital and the common control and comprehension of these powers as social powers. This creates the foundation for a renewal of public agency within public life and for popular identification with environmental and related public policies. This part pays particular attention to the notion of community self-regulation. To keep the above and the below in an interactive, organic fusion means going back to the grassroots and tapping into the social and human and natural roots that feed a genuinely Green politics. This requires that Greens start organising, campaigning and talking face to face, door to door, street to street, building a Green social identity neighbourhood by neighbourhood, community by community. A functioning social order requires extensive public spaces for social learning and cognitive praxis. A public life worthy of the name creates opportunities for citizen discourse and interaction, a civic solidarity in which citizens share social knowledge, discussing freely and critically the issues of common concern, the problems that confront all individuals collectively within communities and societies. Effective political engagement on the part of new and environmental movements is also an involvement in a public life on the part of individuals who have an "ecological consciousness". To nurture this ecological sensibility so that it contributes to cultural transformation requires a number of supportive conditions and social innovations generated by ecological praxis.

Environmentalism and the Domination of Nature

SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory

This chapter examines critical theory’s conceptualization of capitalism’s domination over nature, from Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Alfred Schmidt to the work of contemporary scholars like John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett. This literature situates domination over nature in social mediation, specifically that labor mediates and determines the human relationship to nature. However, the narrative of domination over nature as reflected by these scholars is also incomplete. In particular, each of these scholars roots domination over nature in an anthropological notion of labor, a notion of labor per se. In doing so, these scholars examine labor in capitalism one-dimensionally. Yet, as Karl Marx points out, what makes capitalism historically-unique is that labor has a dual-dimensionality, that labor is not merely concrete but also abstract. As Norbert Trenkle and Moishe Postone point out, the abstract dimension of labor in capitalism has a socially-mediating character that produces an abstract form of social domination. It is in analyzing this abstract dimension that what is historically-unique about capitalism’s domination over nature can be unveiled.