Down to Earth?: A Crisis of the Environmental Crisis (original) (raw)

"Ecological Thinking and the Crisis of the Earth"

Journal of Environmental Thought and Education

This text was originally written for the tenth anniversary issue of the Journal of Environmental Thought and Education (Japan). This is an expanded and revised version (June 20, 2018). Links to several earlier versions are included.

Meaning Crisis’ in Environment: A Modernist Perspective

Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities

The phenomena, processes and states related to the field of environment have been developed within complex contexts. Similarly, the meanings given to concepts in the context of environment too have gone into problematic situations. This leads to a dispute over meanings between environmentalist and philosophers within the same school of philosophy and among different schools such as western and eastern thoughts. This, further, has led to crippling of both the national and the international programs and plans that have been aimed at solving environmental problems and conserving the environment. The broader objective of this paper is to inquire theoretical and historical evolutionary process of the concept of environment in the field of philosophy. In particular, this study discusses theoretical positions that were created in the history of philosophy in the context of modernity. In conclusion, this paper problematizes some issues which create ‘crisis in meaning’ in the context of envi...

Rethinking our Relationship to our Environment

When environmental issues are raised people response differently with theological cycle. Some believe that the natural environment is eventually going to be destroyed and there is nothing that can be done about that, therefore there is no need to care for the environment. They claim that it is synonymous to “mending a death man’s coat” who will eventually die. This therefore provides reason why the environment is eventually not cared for and misused. Moreover they claim that, “All that we see is meant to serve man, and for the benefit of man and nothing more.” This therefore promotes a culture of wastefulness and mismanagement of the environment. This paper calls for a rethinking, environmental crisis is not just a scientific problem, but also a moral issue.

Humanity at the crossroads: The globalization of environmental crisis

Globalizations, 2005

The present-day global set of local sovereign states is not capable of saving the biosphere from man-made pollution or of conserving the biosphere's non-replaceable natural resources Will mankind murder Mother Earth or will he redeem her? This is the enigmatic question which now confronts (sic) Man. (Toynbee, 1976, pp. 593, 596) The facts are plain and uncontestable: the biosphere is finite, nongrowing, closed (except for the constant input of solar energy), and constrained by the laws of thermodynamics. Any subsystem, such as the economy, must at some point cease growing and adapt itself to a dynamic equilibrium, something like a steady state. (Daly, 2005, p. 80) As described in this special issue, the world is facing a series of environmental crises that reach into every corner of the globe. This is primarily due to the unprecedented growth of the human population and the world economy over the past 60 years. In the 50 years between 1950 and 2000 the world economy grew 2.5 times in terms of GDP. This was mostly driven by the exceptional population growth pushing humanity's number from 2.5 billion in 1950 to over 6 billion in 2000 (McNeill, 2000, pp. 6-8). The environmental, social and economic challenges that this poses are all interconnected and can not be treated separately. To help to understand the profound changes that are affecting the global environment, the authors in this special issue of Globalizations provide a rich palette of topics addressing the variety of environmental crises now facing humanity. Humanity at a crossroads Humanity, and with it all life on earth, stands at a crossroads. That was the message of a recent special issue of the Scientific American (2005) devoted to the global state of the environment and the future prospect of avoiding environmental catastrophe. These authors, discussing population pressure, poverty, species diversity and environmental economics, among other issues, warn that if we continue to ignore the signs of serious

The thing called environment: What it is and how to be concerned with it

Oxford …, 2010

This paper wants to think beyond the science-politics divide that is omnipresent in sustainability discourse. With Bruno Latour, we investigate if and how decomposing matters of fact and recomposing them back as matters of concern can open up a scientific-political space in which sustainability challenges can be addressed in an adequate manner. By connecting Latour's constructivist account of science in action with Rudolf Boehm's concept of topical truth, we aim to lighten up the normative-political entanglement between science and politics, facts and values. Rather than conceiving of knowledge in terms of representations of the world, a constructivist topical perspective emphasises the socio-material practices from and within which these representations arise. Such a view then also changes the way we think about ourselves and our place in the world in fundamental ways: the world now becomes something that we are embedded in and part of rather than something we are detached from and merely observers of, as representationalism suggests. In this way, decomposing environmental matters of fact such as climate change, which have never been a human-independent entity out there to begin with, allows to adequately recompose them as societal matters of concern, which they have been from the very beginning.

Postmodernism and the Environmental Crisis

1995

Reflection on the postmodern condition and reflection on the environmental crisis have much in common. They both involve efforts to understand the culture of modern civilization and how it has come to its present state. Most of those attempting to understand the postmodern condition, like those attempting to understand the roots of the environmental crisis, see Western civilization as oppressive, and are striving to create new or resurrect old ways of experiencing, thinking and living. It is arguable that the postmodern condition, associated as it is with a loss of faith in modernity, progress and enlightenment rationality, reflects people's awareness that it is just these cultural forms which are propelling humanity to self-destruction. Proponents of postmodernist politics occasionally endorse ecological resistance along with feminist activism as a new form of politics. But the fragmentation of experience, disorientation and loss of overarching perspectives and grand narratives associated with postmodernity are threats to the efforts of environmentalists who are struggling to develop and proselytise a global perspective on environmental destruction. Clearly postmodernism and environmentalism are of great significance to each other. Yet very little effort has been made to relate the discourse on postmodernity with the discouse on the environmental crisis. The failure to relate these two discourses exemplifies the disjunction between the 'two cultures', literature and science. Reflection on the postmodern condition revolves around the study of literature and popular culture, despite the part that architectural theory and reflections on recent developments in science have played in popularizing the term 'postmodernism.' Reflection on the environmental crisis, on the other hand, has revolved around reflections on science, technology and occasionally economics. Books on postmodernism are found in bookshops on shelves devoted to the theory of literature, while books on the environment tend to be found along with books on science. Postmodernism is discussed in journals of art, literature and the media, while environmental problems are discussed mainly in journals of popular science. In this work I will show that to properly address either the issues raised by the postmodernist condition or the environmental crisis, this disjunction will have to be overcome. Once analyses of postmodernity and modernity are conjoined with analyses of the roots of the global environmental crisis, it will become clear that what we are facing is a unique historical event. In the middle of the nineteenth century Karl Marx argued that '... only rarely and under quite special conditions is a society able to adopt a critical attitude towards itself.' The situation we are in is one of those quite special conditions in which not merely a society but the whole of modern civilization is being forced to adopt a critical attitude towards itself, a critical attitude even more profound than the critique by Marx of capitalism in the nineteenth century. The course this essay will take is to first characterize the postmodern condition, then to examine the philosophical ideas associated with it. After showing the nature of the conflict between both conservative and radical proponents and opponents of postmodern culture, these ideas will be evaluated in terms of how they illuminate the way in which environmental problems are being generated and how such problems might be surmounted. It will be argued that while the poststructuralists, the thinkers most closlely aligned with postmodernism, have highlighted many of the root causes of oppression in the modern world, when measured against the environmental crisis they are totally inadequate as guides for political action or for how to live. Both revisionists of mainstream culture and Marxists are more adequate to this task. Nevertheless, the poststructuralists have revealed what kind of cultural politics to avoid if the causes of the environmental crisis are not to be reproduced by efforts to overcome it. This analysis will reveal what is required to address the the environmental crisis: a 'postmodern' cosmology. To this end, proposals for a postmodern science will be examined, and it will be shown how the reconception of humanity and of its place in nature though such a science can effect the required cultural transformation. The essay will conclude by showing how a new ethics, political philosophy and economics can be, and are being built upon this cosmology, and how they are able provide the foundations for an effective environmental movement.

ECOHUM I / NIES X "Rethinking Environmental Consciousness"

ECOHUM I / NIES X: "Rethinking Environmental Consciousness" symposium booklet This symposium sought to provide a fruitful series of cross-disciplinary conversations that could help suggest renewed or innovative theorizations of what it means to be environmentally conscious in the world today, as well as in our shared pasts and common futures. The symposium "Rethinking Environmental Consciousness" aimed to engage a number of provocative upheavals in and reassessments of the ways we think about ecologies, identities, communities, nationalities, borderlines, interactions, temporalities, spatiality, nostalgia, risks and agencies, to name some of the preoccupations that have driven new waves of scholarship, theory and criticism within the wider field of environmental humanities. The following three sub-themes provided a structure within which the interdisciplinary contributions to the symposium might be contained and contextualized: the Anthropocene, material ecocriticism, and transnational environmental consciousness. As the Anthropocene concept has already inspired and necessitated a thorough rethinking of environmental consciousness, this symposium sought to explore many varied and rapidly multiplying iterations of this concept. As Ursula Heise argues, the Anthropocene represents a watershed moment in environmentalism, a time in which we might cease longing for pristine situations of the past to which we hope to return, and instead begin to think about the possible futures of a nature that, for good or ill, will include the human. Other critics are more pessimistically concerned that the very vastness and vagueness of the concept of the Anthropocene may lend it too easily to usurpation into the discourse of the status quo. The central premise of material ecocriticism – the vibrancy of matter, or matter’s agency – has already inspired several ecocritics to look into underexplored aspects to the interplay between humans and the nonhuman world. Of equal importance is the dawning awareness that there are exchanges of agentic matter washing across the membranes in the cells of human bodies, as succinctly articulated in Stacy Alaimo’s concept of “transcorporeality.” Material ecocritical concepts open up for new ways of approaching issues of environmental justice, of addressing the temporal and spatial complexities of slow violence (to use Rob Nixon's influential metaphor), of understanding our porous bodies in their tactile intra-actions with our immediate and extended environment, of engaging with the particular risk scenarios of the Anthropocene, and, as Alaimo asserts, for rethinking our ethical commitment and orientation in the world in posthuman terms. In a historical perspective, the long unfolding of environmental consciousness has to a large extent taken place as a transnational exchange. Europe for its part has been home to some of the most influential philosophers inspiring environmental thought, from Heidegger to Arne Næss, whose concept of deep ecology has crossed and recrossed the Atlantic in steadily multiplying iterations and perhaps more than any other philosophical current animated the first wave of ecocritics. However, the transnational (or in these cited cases the trans-Atlantic/Pacific) must also be understood as a site of contestation and division, a space where environmental initiatives break down, and political action is as liable to founder as flourish. In recent years, while exchange of ideas concerning the environment has been substantial and ongoing internationally, so have disagreements and the divergences in environmental consciousness, behavior and policy in all hemispheres of the planet. ORGANIZING COMMITTEE CONFERENCE PLANNERS AND CONVENORS Steven Hartman, Professor of English, Coordinator of The Eco-Humanities Hub (ECOHUM) and Chair of the Nordic Network for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies (NIES) Christian Hummelsund Voie, PhD Candidate in English Anders Olsson, Docent in English Reinhard Hennig, PhD Researcher in Environmental Humanities, English and ECOHUM DOCTORAL ASSISTANTS Michaela Castellanos, PhD Candidate in English Nuno Marques, PhD Candidate in English .

Reconsidering the Paradigm Shift from Environmental Philosophy to Global Environmentalisms

Filozofia, 2024

The Earth has arrived at such a point that the speed of human change has had effects that are now irreversible. This picture tells us that the crises in nature are not the crises of nature but the crises of the societal system as the socio-political system ruled by political leaders, opinion-makers, and liberal extremists. The current discussions on climate change, both among environmental philosophers and in international assemblies, represent how the human-nature interaction became a complex crisis in environmental ethical dilemmas and in political and economic practices. This paper offers an examination of the validation of some classical concepts of environmental philosophy after the paradigm shift to global environmentalisms in terms of sustainability.