Climate Capitalism Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Update: If you'd like to watch an accurate, funny, and brief take on Eco-Nihilism, please go to #wisecrack on Youtube: Did South Park Turn Anti-Capitalist, where the central argument from Eco-Nihilism is quoted at several junctures:... more
Update: If you'd like to watch an accurate, funny, and brief take on Eco-Nihilism, please go to #wisecrack on Youtube: Did South Park Turn Anti-Capitalist, where the central argument from Eco-Nihilism is quoted at several junctures:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_MglOKUFRg.
I may not have made South Park directly--but Wisecrack--close enough!!
Wendy Lynne Lee
This is the preface for Eco-Nihilism: The Philosophical Geopolitics of the Climate Change Apocalypse.
Lexington Books (Rowman and Littlefield), February 2017.
Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel, The Road, tells the story of a dying father’s heroic effort to protect his child from starvation, violence, and disease as they struggle to cross the devastated landscape of a post-apocalyptic America. We don’t know what’s happened to bring about so tragic and terrorizing a circumstance, but we’re nonetheless drawn to the stark images McCarthy evokes and, though we work feverishly to deny that such a tragedy could befall us, we can imagine it.
Indeed, for Syrian refugees, Niger Delta villagers, Northwest Kenyan pastoralists, Chukchi Sea coastal fishermen, Ecuadorian rainforest dwellers, Mexican fishermen, Pennsylvania farmers, indigenous Sengwer, the citizens of Kiribati Island’s thirty-two atolls, and many more, fables like The Road reek of a reality already poisoned nearly beyond repair and foreshadow future crises—environmental, economic, geopolitical, social, and moral—for which the prospect of recovery seems little more than fiction.
Such crises are as predictable as are the implications of an economic system, namely, neoliberal or conquest capitalism, whose objectives and governing logic are, I’ll argue, inherently incompatible not only with the just, the good, or the beautiful—but with life itself. Conquest capital devours and digests values, ethical, civic, and aesthetic, reducing each to that single value without which it can neither replicate itself nor grow: exchange. In so doing it generates a state of affairs that can only rightly be described as pathologically nihilistic: capitalism destroys its own existential conditions through the wholesale commodification of the finite ecosystems upon which it depends. It cannot do otherwise and be capitalism. Hence, to continue down this road guarantees a future disfigured by the violence consequent on abject desperation and subjugation not only to domination by multinational corporations, but ultimately to more prosaic though terrorizing prospects—like thirst.