Framing an Ecology of Hope (original) (raw)
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Stories of Hope: Towards Radical Ecological Democracy
Common Voices , 2011
Across the world, communities and other actors are innovating solutions to the myriad problems of unsustainability, hunger, thirst, inequities, shelter, disease, and illiteracy. Such stories of hope are still small compared to the dominant economic-political system they are confronting, but they provide the seeds of an alternative future.
Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times
2016
Conclusion: Thinking as the Stuff of the World mornings in the unknown future. Who shall repair this. And how the future takes shape too quickly. The permanent is ebbing. Is leaving (Jorie Graham, "Sea Change") Just a few lines from Jorie Graham's poem "Sea Change" evoke anxiety about unpredictable futures that arrive too soon, in need of repair. The abrupt departure of a sense of permanence may provoke the desire to arrest change, to shore up solidity, to make things, systems, standards of living, "sustainable." The call in the last chapter to contemplate one's shell on acid and dwell in the dissolve needs to be contextualized as a radical departure from the most influential version of "environmentalism" of the last several decades-that of sustainability. Having worked in the environmental humanities and sciences studies for more than a decade and having served as the Academic Co-Chair for the University Sustainability Committee at the University of Texas of Arlington for several years, I have been struck by how the discourse of "sustainability" at the turn of the 21 st century in the U.S. echoes that of "conservation" at the turn of the 20 th century, especially in its tendency to render the lively world as a storehouse of supplies for the elite. Gifford Pinchot, Theodore Roosevelt's head of forestry, defined forests as "manufacturing plants for wood," epitomizing the utilitarianism of the conservation movement of the Progressive era, which saw nature as a resource for human use. By the early 20 th century Pinchot's deadening conception of nature jostled with other ideas, such as those of aesthetic conservation and the fledgling science of ecology. Pinchot was joined by the Progressive Women Conservationists who claimed, as part of the broader "Municipal Housekeeping" movement, that women had special domestic talents for conservation, such as "turning yesterday's roast into tomorrow's hash." i Many Progressive Women Conservationists not only bolstered traditional gender roles, but wove classism and racism into their conservation mission, as "conservation" became bound up with conserving their own privileges. The anthropocentrism of the Progressive Women Conservationists is notable. As one participant at the First National Conservation congress stated in 1909, "Why do we care about forests and streams? Because of the children who are to be naked and bare and poor without them in the years to come unless you men of this great conservation work do well your work." During their conventions, the discourse of conservation was playfully and not so playfully extended to myriad causes, including conserving food, conserving the home, conserving morals, conserving 'true womanliness,' conserving 'the race,' conserving 'the farmer's wife,' and conserving time by omitting a speech. ii The U.S. frenzy to conserve, at the turn of the 20 th century, was, in part, driven by the desire to demarcate the country's resources as belonging to some groups and not others, as waves of immigrants came ashore. The current mushrooming of the term "sustainability," may be fueled by anti-immigration fervor as well as by the desire to entrench systemic inequalities during a time of economic instability. At the start of the 21 st century, anti-immigration movements focusing on the Southwestern border of the U.S. are complemented by anxious glances toward the East, as the economies of China, East Asia, and India expand. Fear lurks behind the proliferating, sanitized term "sustainability," as news reports worry that economies, national debts, personal debt, the housing market, food systems, the Eurozone and all manner of more trivial matters, are not "sustainable." Although the concept of sustainability, emerges, in part, from economic theories that roundly critique the assumption that economic prosperity must be fueled by continual growth, the term is frequently invoked within economic and other news stories that do not, in any way, question capitalist ideals of unfettered expansion. iii Like "conservation," sustainability has become a plastic but potent signifier, meaning, roughly, the ability to somehow keep things going, despite, or rather because of, the fact we suspect economic and environmental crises render this impossible. In othe words, "sustainability" reveals the desire for inertia, which is propelled by denial. John P. O'Grady points out the irony here: "That nothing stays the same is the very basis of
American Political Science Review, 2024
Eco-miserabilism—the thought that it is already too late to avert the collapse of human civilization—is gaining traction in contemporary environmentalism. This paper offers a “reparative” reading of this post-apocalyptic approach by defending it against those who associate it with defeatism and fatalism. My argument is that authors like Roy Scranton and the members of the Dark Mountain collective, while rejecting mainstream activism, remain invested in a specific kind of (radical) hope. Eco-miserabilists, hence, promote an affective politics for our climate-changed world that is both negative and iconoclastic. Without offering blueprints for a desirable future, they critically interrogate reality and disenchant the “cruel optimism” (Lauren Berlant) behind reformist plans for a “good Anthropocene.” The ultimate target of the eco-miserabilist position is the illusion that groundbreaking innovations, either in the realm of science and technology or of ordinary representative politics, could redeem us on an environmentally ravaged planet.
Hope for a Cause as Cause for Hope: The Need for Hope in Environmental Sociology
The American Sociologist, 2007
Hope is a crucial component of agency involving the setting of goals, visualization of obstacles, and increasing willpower in the effort of achieving a desired goal. This hope is not simply optimism and is potentially a bridge between structure and agency. Yet, the powers of hope in sociology have been greatly unexplored including the ability of collective hope to create social change. This lack of hope is particularly poignant in environmental sociology as the sub-discipline looks for solutions to some of the greatest challenges humanity and the planet faces. This article discusses the undercurrent of pessimism in environmental sociology and calls for the integration of hope as it is necessary for generating potential social environmental change.
Hope in the Age of the Anthropocene
2019
Today we are faced with all the traditional reasons to despair: poverty, loneliness, loss, tragedy, death, and the like. And, for many, this despair is exacerbated by either the modern disenchantment of the world, or a postmodern suspicion regarding grand narratives (especially those speculating about transcendence), or both. The news of the day sounds a relentless drumbeat of woe. As I write these words on a rainy morning in southern California—itself a depressing reminder of the apocalyptic drought my state is suffering, and the anthropogenic climate change that is likely to make such droughts more common and more severe—the headlines include: the ongoing brutality of the “Islamic State” in Iraq and Syria; increasing tensions between Russia and the West, including frightening near-misses involving unregistered military aircraft; the stillsmoldering catastrophe of Ebola Zaire in West Africa (and parallel, though much less publicized, stories of MERS and H5N1, either of which, in a ...
Hope in the Anthropocene: Agency, Governance and Negation, 2024
In this chapter I intended to show how the modernisation produced a world that tends to trigger entropy in three different dimensions: psychic, social and environmental. Modernisation and its time oriented toward progress and better futures, its expansion of technical interventions over all dimensions of life and over the globe, produced an experience of the world marked by mental illness, social violence and environmental collapse, mainly for non-white people in poor situations. When future is cancelled and the present conditions are already drastically degraded, hope is not about better futures but it is the affect that is enacted by actual actions and events that make possible a different way of inhabiting the present. With inspiration of indigenous cosmologies, I point towards forms of ecological recomposition of these three interrelated dimensions of our lives – mind, society and environment – that could contribute to this kind of engagement.
Reimagining the Way to an Ecological Civilisation
2011
The political uprisings and social upheavals ‘happening’ throughout the world, highlighted by the Arab Spring and Occupy movements, represent ‘an explosion of political and social creativity’, and reveal a revolution within the socio-political and economic world order (Žižek, 2011). Emerging from deep within these social and political conflicts is a transcultural field of discontent that transcends national borders and is driven by a strong determination for dignity, human rights and economic justice. A transformation is taking place articulated through the ‘spatial realities of globalization’ (Robinson, 2009). Identified by the collective struggle for autonomy right across the world, this transcultural field – the 99% – embodies society’s reaction to modernity’s betrayal of humanity. The global capitalist system, it is argued, is both in a stage of fatal decline and incapable of effectively addressing the convergent crises that confront humanity today – the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances within the system itself, and the growth of social divisions and inequality. Coinciding with this transformation in society is a second revolution in science, which promises to do more than advance the natural sciences but inform the development of social organizing systems as well, such as complexity. In the present day, revolutions in society and science combine to provide the basis for humanity to redress her metaphysical, epistemological, and ontological foundations. It is proposed that by reconceiving the enlightenment narrative cast in the tradition of the Radical Enlightenment, processes of emergence, configuration, and reconfiguration can be found that inspire the quest for liberty, and that accord with an ecological view of the world – in cultivating a ‘new global ethic’ to form the basis for an ecological civilization.
'The poisons are already in here with us:' framing for ecological revolutions from below
Globalizations, 2023
Below is a transcribed talk by Peter Gelderloos. This talk emerges from the book tour for The Solutions are Already Here: Strategies for an Ecological Revolution from Below. This talk polemically recapitulates themes within the book, advocating for an anti-authoritarian ecological revolution and, consequently, chastising the terms 'climate crisis' and Anthropocene. The lecture extends beyond the book's content. Confronting the audience and challenging its reader, the lecture delves into how authorities administer ecological crisis, which extends to criticizing the dominant institutions and science. This includes exploring how people are disembodied and separated from their habitats, thinking 'like a state' or planner, and, consequently, stifling their imaginations and working against revolutionary futures. This lecture also discusses the important qualities and directions for a decentralized ecological revolution from below, what to avoid, ideas to consider, and outlining a general direction for collective struggle.