An Integral Ecology - Ecological Writings
I will begin with a message sent to me by process philosopher Arran Gare:
Dear Peter Critchley,
I have recently realized that we have very similar interests and concerns, and your work will save me from having to do it.
Best, Arran Gare
That’s praise indeed from an esteemed professor known for his work in environmental philosophy, the philosophy of science, the philosophy of culture, and the metaphysics of process philosophy. I range widely, too, taking in politics and economics as well as ethics and aesthetics, what has been rather inelegantly described as ‘aesthethics.’ I affirm the wisdom of Socrates-Plato in making beauty the supreme political category for the way it lights the way to truth and invites the heart to follow. My work is all about issuing that invitation, inciting the common moral reason. This is a world away from the psychic manipulation of ‘nudge.’ The truth cannot simply be passively given or told but must be actively willed, sought, assimilated, lived, and loved.
I have been working on the principles and the moral and socio-institutional conditions of an integral ecology for a number of years. From 2010 onwards I started to outline the philosophical, moral, social, and political parameters of an ecological society as a viable civilisation. I refer to this in various ways, as a Green Republicanism or an Ecopolis. Most of all, I have sought to establish the interactive and reflexive relation between contemplation and action, between theoretical reason and practical reason, between our knowledge of the external world - objectivity, the realm of fact, science and how we act on that knowledge - why, and to what end in the realm of values, virtues, motivations, interests and stakes. If the ecological society is not for the asking, neither is it for the telling, something which defaults to authoritarian imposition and austerian regulation.
The metaphysics, morals, and metaphorics of ecological transformation are developed throughout these writings, setting nature within the civic and moral environment of creative, knowledgeable human agents. This approach accents truth and moral knowledge, modes of communication and persuasion, and emphasises the embedding truth in habits, virtues, and practices in order to cultivate the inner motive force. This approach is offered as a far richer, more humane, and more enduring alternative to that offered by various vanguards (autocrats and psychocrats) seeking to engineer change from above and outside through the manipulation and manipulation of human beings.
I have written a lot, which is disadvantageous when time and resources are constrained and increasingly so. People interested in practice are interested in clarity of diagnosis and solution most of all and philosophising not at all. It is for this reason that they tend routinely to engage in a most inorganic and unecological form of politics and ethics, combining an institutional, legal, and regulative approach from above with a crude behaviourism from below. Far from constituting a coherent alternative to the process of megamechanical encroachment on the planetary ecology, such engineering and design ‘from above’ and ‘from without’ is an integral part of that very process. Under the sway of scientism, people who think themselves proceeding from ecological principles embrace the most unecological form of politics, an authoritarianism born of a deficiency in politics and ethics.
Writing so many works, most of which are lengthy and dense with involved argument, creates a problem of accessibility. People ask for a definitive work and a concise statement of views on my part. My work isn’t broken up into discrete parts in that way but is interrelated around a common thread. There are different emphases in different works, but no clear ranking in order of significance. These works are variations on the theme of Being and Place.
I have tried to be more accessible, even attract interest, shedding a grand and pompous title for something that catches a roving eye. When I issued The Coming Ecological Revolution I was advised to change the title. I was warned that the word ‘revolution’ would serve to antagonise and deter potential readers, entrenching divisions against my express wishes to encourage people to come out of the trenches to explore commonalities in a process of mutual learning and growth. I was hoping to catch the eye of people who don’t normally read with that title. In choosing that title I had some well known book titles in mind, ‘The Next Green Revolution,’ The Long Green Revolution,’ and a book from 1970 by Charles A. Reich entitled The Greening of America, a book which wasn’t actually about what we now understand as ‘green,’ but was about social and cultural renewal. In many respects, my book constituted a critique of ‘the Green Revolution’ as a scientistic and technocratic approach to politics. I was thinking along the lines of the coming Age of Ecology, hoping to establish that age on the voluntary principle as opposed to having to involuntarily accept necessity, whether in institutional or physical form. In the end, there is no substitute for the hard work of reading and thinking.
The nearest I have to a definitive statement of my views on ecology is Being at One: Making a Home in the Earth's Commonwealth of Virtue (2016). This itself was merely a first sketch of my more ambitious ‘Being and Place’ programme. That programme has yet to be written up into book form. The main stumbling block proved to be metaphysics and morals – for all the wealth of materials I gathered from the fields of biology, ecology, neuroscience, physics, and evolutionary psychology, none of it amounted to a genuine ethics and metaphysics even when laid end-to-end – the facts of material existence simply lacked appetitive quality and motivational significance. The failure of environmentalists to grasp that deficiency lies behind the paralysis of ecology as politics, its tendency to revert to authoritarian information and imposition. I define a very different kind of ecology, an integral ecology that intertwines all aspects of life as lived in the relation between the human social metabolism and the universal metabolism of nature. If I had to sum-up my politics, I would describe it as a civic communitarianism, a Republicanism; if I had to sum up the philosophical anthropology upon which this is based, I would describe it as a sensible transcendence. I affirm the infinite superiority of Tolkien’s natural anarchy over the mad manipulative mechanarchy of the modern world.
I shall present my key writings on ecology below, with abstracts and tables of contents, in the hope that people can see the connections and even explore in depth.
Abstract
In this book I argue for a concept of ecological virtue as a condition for constituting a flourishing earthly commonwealth. I establish the virtues as qualities for successful living within specific social relations, putting character formation and social formation together to deliver a common control of collective forces that is based upon personal (co)responsibility. In conceiving these qualities along ecological lines, then ‘successful living’ takes shape as sustainable living in the ecological society. At this point it becomes possible to call back the old eudaimonistic notion of flourishing well. The book therefore needs to be set against the background of Owen Flanagan’s book The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World (2007), where Flanagan writes of ‘eudaimonistic scientia’, or ‘eudaimonics’ for short, which he defines as the ‘empirical-normative inquiry into the nature, causes, and conditions of human flourishing.’ Establishing these conditions in terms of the institutions, structures, practices and relations in which human and planetary flourishing go hand in hand, I seek to recover the ancient unity of ethics and politics in an ecological context, thereby outlining the contours of the Ecopolis of the future. Plenty of the arguments in Being at One come from MacIntyre and Nussbaum in philosophy, Flannery in ecology, Wilson in biology, Robert Wright on the non-zero sum society, (The nonzero-sum moment - our welfare is crucially correlated with the welfare of the other etc.), Stuart Kauffman on the self-organising creative universe, and many more. The originality of this thesis lies in the way these sources are brought together in an integral framework concerning the dialectic of natural dependency, moral independence and social and ecological interdependence. I take what is useful from all of these authors whilst making the distinctiveness of my own position clear.
Contents
1 INTRODUCTION:
The Ethic of Ends; Holism, awareness and the web of life; A Transformation of Consciousness; The call for a new ethical vision; Lives lived appropriately to reality; The Ecopolis; Civic Environmentalism; The Ecopolis as an Urban/Ecological Public; Person, Place and ‘the Political’; A common ethic and practice and the need for a social identity; A common ethic as binding; The need to create context for the common good; The integration of reason and emotion;
2 ONE EARTH, MANY WORLDS:
We are One; Oneness and Ethics; Oneness and connectedness; The need to find common ground; Two worlds; The separation of the social world from the natural world; Worlds in collision – human and biotic; Making the one world; Purposeless materialism and the recovery of purpose; Social evolution - the interrelatedness of people and all other life-forms; The critique of Radical Environmentalism; The premodern world was not benign; The rejection of foundational authority; Ecology as religion
3 AUTONOMY AND DEPENDENCY:
Dependent rational animals – whether reason can rule; The ideal of rational self-sufficiency and the facts of natural dependency; Capabilities and the form of human life; Animal resemblances and commonality; Facts of dependence as central to the human condition; Human animality; The virtues of acknowledged dependence.
4 COMMON GROUND:
The Earth and human well-being; Oneness – rootedness and interdependency; The connection to land, landscapes and associated ecosystems; Underlying sense of spiritual connection to the Earth; The commonwealth of life; The constant cooperation of all the forces of nature and history; Oneness with the natural world; The ecological partnership with the earth; The community of life; Biospheric politics; Interlocking web of life; Re-envisioning our place in the world; The commonwealth of virtue; Living organisms constantly co-operate to remake the whole environment for the benefit of life; The commonwealth of life; A common ancestry; Biophilia; The threats to our existence; The genetic unity of life; Biophilia and ethics; Gaia’s intelligent elite; The Partnership Ethic; The cooperation of human and nonhuman nature as active agents; The need for a standpoint – an ethical framework; Experience and personality.
5 ETHICS AND POLITICS
Morality - canalising behaviour; Intertwining of ethics and politics; Flourishing; Social being and virtue; Normative judgements; Culture and division; Essentialism; Our participation in culture; Aristotle and flourishing - an active, positive form of co-operation.
6 THE COMMON GOOD:
Rational Freedom vs Libertarian Freedom; Privatisation as the corporatisation of public life; Rational freedom and the common good; Aristotle, the good city and the community of all; City, scale and symmetry; Ethics, universality and proximity; The biological basis – reciprocity; Proximity and eco-patriotism.
7 REASON, FREEDOM AND THE COMMONS:
Ecological crisis requires collective action; Recovering common benefits; Rational constraint and freedom; The tragedy of the commons; Free rational collective action; Rethinking our approach to climate change; Rational thinking and collective action – markets, individuals and public goods; Individual and collective action problems; Managing the global commons.
8 GAMES THEORY AND THE COOPERATIVE SOCIETY:
Egoism and altruism – competition and cooperation; Nature via Nurture; Games theory and the cooperative society; The Prisoners’ Dilemma: introduction; The cooperative society; The innate disposition to evolve co-operative strategies; Altruistic behavior as behavior which benefits others; The Parable of the Tribes.
9 COMMONING – RECLAIMING THE COMMONS:
Community and commoning – the recovery of close interpersonal relations; Community action – policies that can draw communities together; Managing the commons; The recovery of close interpersonal relations; Toward a Culture of Solidarity and a Just Economic Order; The social and moral matrix; Socially embedded markets; Sharing and managing common resources; The institutions of government and property.
10 DEMOCRACY AND RESTRAINT:
Being in the environment – politics and the claims of nature; The Ecopolis and Ecological Regionalism; Environmental stakeholding; Environmental Politics; Problem of liberal democracy; A constrained freedom; Democracy and limits; The Problem Defined; Cooperating with the future; The strong state and strong democracy; Politics and Practical Reasoning; Truth and the need to be practical; Democracy is judicious; Democracy, truth and judicious reasoning.
11 ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS:
Green spirituality and ecological virtues; Environmental ethics and politics – against anthropocentrism; Environmentalism and moral monism; Interests, values and priorities; Monism and ethical pluralism and political pragmatism; Epistemology and ethics – one earth and a plurality of values; Pragmatism – rejection of foundationalism; Refounding ethics; Need for practical philosophy - escaping academic confines; Actions and values; Environmentalism and plural values; Politics and decision making; Pragmatism over philosophical purity; Pragmatism, truth and real world problems; Integrating democratic values and processes; Beyond anthropocentrism and ecocentrism; Pragmatism and weak anthropocentrism; Pragmatism and intrinsic value; A public mode of deliberation and reasoning; All types of knowing and valuing; The pluralist model of environmental value and action embedded in natural systems; Public commitments and the civic spirit.
12 CITIZEN SCIENCE, PRAXIS AND PUBLIC LIFE:
Methodology - against constructivism; Environmentalism, postmodernism and social constructionism; Science, truth and values; Science as social construct – reality and context; The defence of objective truth against praxis/pragmatism; Citizen science and eco-praxis; Social knowledge; Joining scientific and social rationality; The New Ecological Paradigm; The experiment; Intersubjective and relational notions; The need to bridge the worlds of theoretical reason and practical reason; Civic Science; Science and the public domain; Critical and contextual science; Knowledgeable agency; The human impact; Environmentalism and naturalism; Ecology supplemented with ethics – beyond objectivity and positivism; A world laden with values; Fact and value; Environmentalism and ethical naturalism; The naturalistic fallacy.
13 ECO-PRAGMATISM:
The future as unknowable; Altering constraints; Practical motivations in ethics; Pragmatism, policy and environmental ethics; The rejection of simple foundationalism - experience over mirroring; A public mode of deliberation and reasoning; Pluralism requires second order principles – integrated worldview; Environmental knowledge and values and priorities; The limitations of knowledge; The limits of our knowledge of environmental problems; The transition from theory to practice; The need for embodiment; Eco-community; The epistemic, moral and political worth of the community; Human scaled communal life; Place.
14 ETHICS:
The failure of ethical theory; Innate and Universal Moral Grammar; Reason and the emotions; Innatists and culturalists; Innate moral grammar and the natural law; The Loss of an Overarching Moral Framework; The bankruptcy of modern morality; The overarching moral framework.
15 MORAL THEORY:
The return to Aristotle and virtue theory; Virtue, character, the nature of the human good; Beyond morality as duty, obligation, rightness; The grounding of morality in human nature; What Is Virtue?; Why Are the Virtues Important?; Character and the social process; Some Advantages of Virtue Ethics; Feminism, virtue ethics and revaluing the private sphere; The Incompleteness of Virtue Ethics.
16 ECOLOGICAL VIRTUE:
Ecological Virtue and Dependence; eudaimonia stands in need of good things from outside; Integrating moral philosophy; Virtue as an exercise in participation in the whole order of being; The exercise of reason to restrain the passions; Participation in the civic life of the community; Virtues to live in equilibrium with the world; Moral ecology and the sense of eco-community.
17 THE CAPABILITIES APPROACH:
What are people actually able to do and to be?; Participation and flourishing; From alienation or anomie to creativity and spontaneity; Power and Flourishing; Flourishing as wholeness – being in place.
18 ECOLOGICAL CITIZENSHIP AS A MORAL EDUCATION :
Ecological citizenship; The greening of political theory; Habits as an ecological moral education; Habits to check materialism and individualism; After Virtue – rationality, means and ends; Moral Truth vs Moral relativism; Truth and objective reality; Ecological virtue and citizenship; Ethical naturalism – the natural virtues; Character, virtue and eco-citizenship.
19 POLITICAL COMMUNITY:
Against economic abstraction, for community commitments; The habits of the heart; Township democracy – civic engagement; Community collaboration; Collective action and cooperation; Decentralism – bioregionalism and localism; The need for a global politics; The Public Good: The conception of a just society; Social and moral ecology in the participatory universe; Conceptions of the Public Order; Sustainability and Livable Communities; Community and Place; Common assumptions, conceptual frameworks, and movement-building strategies; Linking movements and constructing a vision; Place-based focus; The construction of a common vision.
20 SPIRITUALITY
The holistic mileu; Mechanicism - nature as a purely quantitative phenomenon; Rational calculation; the abstract economy undermines a sense of mutual interdependence by its overemphasis on rational principles of control and utility; Earth-centred spirituality focused on the immanent divine; Earth community - law of the integral functioning of the Earth; Bounds of balance, order and harmony in the natural world; Ethos of the Cosmos; Directly experienced reality over disconnected abstract theories; Beyond the dualism of human and biotic worlds; Spiritual reality; Participation in the flow of creation; The relationship between our ethical norms and the world of nature; Taoism; Hinduism; Buddhism and ecological virtue; An ethic of interconnectedness and mutual responsibility; Non-destructiveness or harmlessness; Christianity - beyond anthropocentrism and man's metaphysical uniqueness; Beyond Life-As and Subjective Life; The virtuous life and the embedded life; The unfolding, evolving cosmos within progressive spirituality; Partners in the process of creation; The sacralization of nature - a renewed vision of the divine presence within the natural order; The self and the evolutionary unfolding of the cosmos.
21 HOLISM:
Organic holism and planning; That the underlying dynamic of the cosmos is benevolent, that everything is connected and that there is meaning; The moral imperative of the global village; Holism and emergence; The whole picture – patterns over pieces; Connected and ever changing; Emergence and interplay of natural systems; Ecological morality is holistic; We are developmental beings – the human journey.
22 ECOLOGICAL HEALTH AND HAPPINESS:
Community and the breakdown of collective feeling; The lack of common identity and involvement; Housing the sacred, housing mystery; Letting the object in; The ethical and the emotional; A common Weltanschauung; Putting reason and emotion together; Existential needs – rootedness, relations, power; Housing and belonging; The community of the soul; Housing our egos - belief as the ground we stand upon; Relationships and good health; Human health in the context of the total human environment; Health and well-being; The need for a central ethical framework.
23 THE EVOLUTION OF UNIVERSAL COMMUNITY:
The obligation to join with others; The nonzero-sum moment - our welfare is crucially correlated with the welfare of the other; Emergence of a global civil society and global governance grounded in social proximity, communities of character and practice, and small scale practical reasoning; A fully networked global community; The Global Human Superorganism; Gaia’s intelligent elite; Humans as indispensible elements in the Earth system; Planetary politics and ethics – strategies for survival – the need for knowledge; The green enlightenment; The Gaian future.
24 UNIVERSAL PLANETARY ETHIC:
Universal responsibility, identifying ourselves with the whole Earth community as well as our local communities; Recognition of our environmental interdependence - a wider rationale of unity; Planetary interdependence demands that the functions are now seen to be world-wide and supported with as rational a concept of self-interest; Social movement and interconnections among ecological, economic and equity issues; A bond that recognizes the sanctity of the Earth; Principles for a common moral and institutional framework; A common ethic and inner orientation; A common ethic as a guide; The Principles of a Global Ethic; The need for new mentalities and modalities; The Need for an Appropriate Ethical Framework; The overarching ethical system; Construction of a global ethic; Common ground across our diverse traditions; Ethical frameworks; Common ethic and tribal loyalty; Explanatory Remarks Concerning a Common Ethic; A shared global ethic; A common, uniting framework; Avoiding cultural imperialism.
25 THE POETRY OF EARTH:
The Unfolding Cosmos; Felicity as the goal and natural term of all life; The visionary materialism of William Blake.
26 THE CREATIVE UNIVERSE:
The self-organizing universe; The participatory universe; Self-organisation, emergent properties, and the creative and participatory universe; Spontaneous self-organizing dynamics of the world; The co-production of the world; The emergent creativity in the universe; The self-organising universe beyond positivism; Metaphysical reconstruction – the creative universe; The creative processes of nature as energy flows up the biotic pyramid; The participatory universe; Ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, biosphere, and human cultures; God as the natural creativity in the universe; Spiritual Revolution; metaphysical reconstruction - lives lived appropriately to reality; Beyond technical fixes and natural self-regulation; Living into mystery; One as the whole - purpose and meaning – mystery and unanswerable questions; knowledge and loss of meaning; Ultimate questions and the need to picture; Need for the integral approach; The ever building of ourselves as fully human; be-ing as the persistent becoming of culture, science, the economy, knowing, doing, and inventing; The human personality emerges out of the matrix of communal functions and activities; Unity and meaningfulness of all life; the outer world and the inner self are one; Participation in the commonwealth of life; The limits of reason and the need to reunite our full humanity; Prometheus and Orpheus; The spiritual underpinning to our ecological consciousness; intuitive awareness of our relationship to the environment - ethical obligation to our planetary home; Partially knowing and understanding, but flowing; be-ing as the persistent - the ever building of ourselves as full humans.
27 BEING AND BELONGING:
The emergence of a new understanding of the Earth; futures - After a long period of psychological disruption stability will return only with the emergence of a new understanding of the Earth; The inner and the outer; the holiness of life - membership one of another - community of soil, soul and society; to stimulate a change of 'psychology, status and motivation – fostering an ecological citizenship; Mode of being in the world; a radically desacralised cosmos – to be an avid participant in an animate universe; Making community - setting virtuous cycles in motion; Community as being, doing and having together; being as the ever-deepening beauty that transcends ego - the great work of humanisation; Ontological connection; life, faith, hope; Self-realisation; Community of soil and soul; John O’Donohue on belonging and virtue; Transpersonal community; consciously or otherwise, we are bound up with and in one another at the most profound level of reality; Cycle of belonging – becoming alive to the aliveness of life; Responsibility; A sense of place is our grounding on Earth; The roots of life and what gives it meaning.
28 PROPHECY AND HOPE:
Reason and hope; The essential grammar of harmony; A more balanced way of looking at the world, and more harmonious ways of living; Grounds for pessimism; Against the ecology of fear; Reclaiming the Ground of Hope; Prophecy and Hope; The emerging future is not predestined; The collapse scenario - abandoning hope.
29 HOPE BEYOND PROGRESS:
Abandoning utopias and avoiding dystopias; The end of the foundational assumptions of modernity; Honesty, resilience, appreciation of beauty and scale, and stability; Mystery, psychic depths and reason; Regrounding the human condition; Metaphysical reconstruction and the world of politics, economics and technology; Being receptive to a new mind and a new heart; Imagining the future; Soulcare and grounding the human condition.
30 CONCLUSION : PAN AND LOVE
Abstract
This book is composed of research notes mapping future directions in my work. The approach affirms the need for a book that makes the connections across disciplines and social roles. This work sketches my ideas for that book, and explains the rationale at work.
Contents
1 Introduction; 2 Crisis And Catastrophe The Environmental Crisis; 3 Climate Change; 4 Existential Crisis; 5 Collective Action As Rational Restraint; 6 Crisis, Inertia, And Contradictory Dynamics; 7 Crisis As Decision; 8 The Slow Apocalypse; 9 Crisis And The Need For Transformation; 10 Responsiveness And Responsibility (Individual And Co-); 11 Crisis, Action, Response, And Rationality; 12 The Alternative; 13 Philosophical Foundations; 14 Nature And Culture; 15 The Creative Universe; 16 Rational Freedom; 17 Ethics; 18 An Integral Approach; 19 Environmental Sociology; 20 Eco-Praxis; 21 Knowledge And Worldviews; 22 The Dialectics Of Hope; 23 Existential Crisis – Meaning And Moral Depth; 24 New Ecological Paradigm; 25 Being And Place; 26 Social Movements And Constituting Commonality; 27 Politics - The Republic; 28 Economics; 29 Planetary Politics Versus An Abstract And Empty Globalism; 30 Concluding Rationale
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.
Contents
Part 1: PRAXIS AND CONSCIOUSNESS
The emerging ecological consciousness
1 THIS IS THE REVOLUTION:
Power and Control; Disorder, corruption, hypocrisy, war; The artificiality of work and culture; Absence of community; Loss of self
2 THE NATURE OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS
The problem and its solution; The danger of global warming and the response; Climate Science.
3 THE ECOLOGICAL CRISIS AND ECONOMICS
4 ENLIGHTENED SELF-INTEREST AND THE ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS
Market Economics And Denial; The Long Term Planning Framework; Enlightened Self Interest; The Ecological Wager.
5 COGNITIVE PRAXIS
Ethical values; The Dictatorship of the Possible; Power.
6 RATIONAL RESTRAINT AND GAMES THEORY
Games Theory; Games Theory and Ethics; Transactional Encounters
Part 2 THE COMING REVOLUTION IN ECONOMIC THOUGHT
7 THE CRISIS OF VISION IN ECONOMICS
The Critique of economic science;
8 THE FREE MARKET, GLOBALISATION AND ECOLOGY
The free market and ecology; Price and Value in the market economy; Globalisation and the reaction against the market economy
9 UNIT IDEAS THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF CIVILISATION
Markets, Morality And Modernity; Political Will And Citizenship; Democracy In The City; Nostalgia; Modernity And Morality.
10 PRIVATE VICES PUBLIC VIRTUES
Markets And Morality; Public Goods and Private Power; Public Goods Turn Bad.
11 CITIZEN AND CONSUMER DEMOCRACY
Consumer Idiocy; The end of homo economicus; Principles of Political Economy/
12 PUBLIC ECONOMICS
Business, Labour, And The State; The Public Realm And The Capital System.
13 WEALTH, QUANTITY AND QUALITY
From Quantity To Quality; Ecological Debt
14 GLOBAL ECOLOGY
The Commons; Marx against Thefts of Timber
Part 3 SOCIETY AS A LEARNING MECHANISM
15 COMMUNITY, COMPETITION AND COMMERCE
Revolution As Process; Community And Commerce; Marx On Community; Marx, Competition And The Common Good
16 CULTURAL AND SOCIAL CAPITAL
Social Capital And Local Culture; ICT And Community
17 SCIENCE, LEARNING AND CIVILISATION
Technics, potentialities and social relations; A broader perspective science and technology in politics
Part 4 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AND ETHICS
18 THE GOOD SOCIETY
19 GREEN POLITICAL THEORY: The Countermovement As A Civic Public
20 THE CONCEPT OF RATIONAL FREEDOM: Four key ideas
21 THE COGNITIVE PERSPECTIVE
22 THE TRANSCENDENT ASPECT OF REASON
23 OBJECTIVE MORALITY
24 THE REASON OF ANCIENT GREECE: Plato on justice and virtue; Aristotle; Aristotle And Liberty; Aristotle: the association of friends; Aristotle: Licence And Liberty
25 CITIZENS AND ARTIFICIAL SOCIETY: Citizens Of The World; The Artificial People Of Hobbes
26 ROUSSEAU AND THE COMMON GOOD
27 SPINOZA
28 KANT AND RATIONAL FREEDOM:
Peace And Freedom Under Law; Natural Teleology And Human Praxis; The Republican Constitution; Kantian Rationalism
29 HEGEL’S SYSTEM OF THE ETHICAL LIFE
30 COMMUNITARIANISM: Jurgen Habermas – system world and lifeworld
Part 5 ECOLOGICAL PRAXIS
31 CRITICAL ISSUES AND CONSTRUCTIVE MODELS:
The Imperatives Of The Present; Identifying the Critical Issues; Constructive Models
32 TASKS AND PRINCIPLES
Tasks Facing The Greens; Basic Principles Of Green Social Theory; The New Holistic Paradigm; Green Principles And Institutional Requirements; Neither Left Nor Right But In Front; Holistic politics; Act locally, think globally; The anti-party party.
33 NEW POLITICS AND POLITICAL CHANGE
Hitting a moving target; explaining political change; What is the 'new' politics?; Political Change As Culture Shift; Structural models of change; New Politics but a new party type?; The Greens As Left Libertarians; Synopsis.
34 ORGANISING FOR POLITICAL CHANGE
The Political Boundaries Of Change And The Changing Boundaries Of Politics; New parties but persistent?; Organising For Radical Change; Some Strategic Considerations; The Constraints Of Party Systems On Political Change; The Radical Predicament Revisited But Resolved?
35 GREEN POLITICS AND VISION
Radical Vision And Pragmatic Politics
Part 6 ECOLOGY AS POLITICS - FROM PRINCIPLE TO PRACTICE
36 ENVIRONMENTALISM AND ECOLOGY AS POLITICS
Political And Electoral Objectives; From Tensions To Regimes; Monological And Dialogical Forms
37 ECOLOGICAL PRAXIS AND COMMUNITY SELF REGULATION
Ecological Praxis; Communities; Communes; Green Community Self-Regulation.
38 PUBLIC SPACES FOR COGNITIVE PRAXIS
Building Bridges, Making Spaces; Raising Sights Understanding Collaboration; The Alternative Centre Ground; The Associational Civic Public
39 BUILDING BRIDGES AND SUSTAINING ACTION
Movement And Party; Subpolitics And The Need For Global Action; Scale Accountability Responsibility; Building And Sustaining Action; Institutions And Coalitions For Action; The Democratic Corporation; Individuals, Firms, Communities: The Power Of Example; Individual Action: Identifying Opportunities And Motivating Action; Political Pressure And Public Opinion; Movementism And Coalition Politics; Participatory Planning And Green Municipalism.
40 ENVIRONMENTAL RULES AND REGULATION
Environmental Policies And Practices; New Rules And Regulation; Postindustrialism And Ecology; Alternatives - The Emergent Productive Forces
41 THE INSTITUTIONS OF AN ECOLOGICAL SOCIETY
The Low Carbon Economy; The Transition To A Low Carbon Economy; Economic Conversion And (R)Evolutionary Strategy.
42 EFFECTIVE POLICY
Arguments And Analyses; Criteria For Public Policy; Policies To Reduce Emissions; Communities, Urban Design And Public Transport; Designing Markets For Regenerative Exchange; Ecological Tax Reform; The Alternative Economy; A Socially Useful Third Sector; Initiative And Solidarity: The Community Synthesis.
43 PLANETARY TRANSFORMATION
Beyond The Bioregion Planetary Transformation; International Institutional Structures; The Need For Political Leadership.
44 THE WAR OF THE ENVIRONMENT
45 TOWARD A RADICAL HUMANISM
Abstract
This book identifies the contemporary environmental crisis as a call to create a new biocentric civilisation. Proceeding from the identification of the constants of civilised life, the argument seeks to build constructive ecological models by relating Green politics to philosophy and ethics. This approach seeks to develop a practical, institution building orientation out of fundamental Green principles. In the process, the gap between the 'is' of the real world and the 'ought to be' of philosophy is closed via notions of cognitive praxis and ecological praxis. Ensuring the unity of subject and object is a way of recovering the original meaning of politics as creative human self-realisation. Eudaimonia in Aristotle and conatus in Spinoza are identified as crucial to human flourishing, identified as definitive of the good life. Reason is shown to be central to this conception of happiness and the constitution of the common good. The book criticises market society and its atomistic relations as a reversion to the lowest form of reasoning in the Prisoner's Dilemma. In relating ecological praxis to civilisation, the book calls for the extension of communicative and cooperative structures in order to foster and embed the rational restraint crucial to long term freedom for all in social relations and institutions.. The contributions of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Kant, Hegel, Marx and Habermas to this view are all emphasised.
Contents
Unit Ideas; Nostalgia; The Human Species, Environment And Civilisation; Constructive Models; Tasks Facing The Greens; Basic Principles Of Green Social Theory; Green Principles And Institutional Requirements; Holistic Politics; Act Locally, Think Globally; The Anti-Party Party; Communes; Movement And Party; Cognitive Praxis; Ecological Praxis; The Public Realm And The Capital System; The Global Ecology Movement; Green Politics And Vision; Movementism And Coalition Politics; Political And Electoral Objectives.
Ecology And Political Philosophy; Aristotle And Flourishing; Spinoza; The Good Life; Kant And The ‘How’ And ‘Why’ Questions; Rational Restraint; Ecological Sensibility; Markets And Morality.
Power And Civilisation; Violence And Destruction; Ecological Praxis And Civilisation; Science, Learning And Civilisation; Green Political Theory; Marx On Community; Private Vices Public Virtues; Marx, Competition And The Common Good; Games Theory; Plato On Justice And Virtue; Games Theory And Ethics; Aristotle And Liberty; Markets, Morality And Modernity; Habermas – System World And Lifeworld; Modernity And Morality; Aristotle Association Of Friends; Aristotle Licence And Liberty; Consumer Idiocy; Transactional Encounters; Hegel; Cultural And Social Capital; ICT And Community; Community And Commerce; Revolution As Process.
Abstract
Arguing that a principled standpoint is a condition for any person or movement seeking to effect real social change, this book foregrounds social and environmental justice as against economic imperatives based on accumulation, profit and endless growth. If the world's resources are to be saved for future generations, the world's citizens will have to assume a standpoint based on a set of ethical considerations and principles which are directly opposed to the overarching imperatives of the global economy. But these principles will also have to be in favour of something, confronting the world with a positive vision of change in order to inspire and motivate effort.
This book argues that the reality of environmental crisis and the prospect of future social transformation challenges our science and our values. Whilst it is plain that change is normal in the history of the planet and that human beings, as change agents, are very adept at responding to change, the nature of the contemporary environmental crisis is the uncertainty with respect to the levels, character and timings of changes. And the evidence is that the rates of change may well be increasing, with a whole number of practical implications.
The book examines the key questions within the many-sided predicament concerning the factors influencing environmental change and how to respond to that change: How is nature conceived and how should nature be conceived? What should human beings do and how should human beings act? What are the objects and what principles should action be guided by? In putting these questions the paper is concerned to relate Green politics not only to the scientific analysis of the environmental crisis but above all to moral, cultural and psychological states and attitudes.
This implies that ecologists need to discover and advance answers to the moral, social and political questions that are of most concern to individuals. This comes with the corollary that ecologists in politics should leave most of their scientific capital behind and address individuals on the level of the issues that most concern them. What kind of world do people want to live in? What kind of social and natural landscape fits this world? What contribution can people make and what can people do to move that part of the world in which they live and work in this direction, whether as individuals alone or as part of a collective project? Of course, the life support systems of planet earth is a universal cause which gives some substance to notions of the common good. Humankind as a whole has a common interest in protecting life on this planet. Ecology as politics can therefore envisage the inclusive politics that has been pursued by the great religions and the grand narratives of politics, but which has continued to prove elusive. The elusive character of the general interest and the universal ethic should warn anyone thinking that building consensus is easy. In pursuing the common good, human beings are approaching the universal from very uncommon ground.
So the goal of an inclusive environmentalism involves a re-thinking of ethics, one capable of integrating a diversity of social movements in a common moral cause. The goal is to act and make a contribution so as to create a liveable and sustainable world for all, humans and nonhumans alike.
The main challenge is not technical and institutional but moral and psychological, the way that the human personality has been moulded to fit the system. For the best part of a century, a long succession of thinkers, politicians and advertisers have urged individuals to throw off moral, psychic and communal restraint to act on impulse, yield to desire, and abandon measure in self-gratification. The result is an inability to think for the long term common good.
These observations are shown to point to the need to embed a cognitive praxis within the institutional framework of government and politics so that actions and outcomes are more closely connected, greater cooperation and coordination is achieved between actors, greater clarity is expressed with regard to decision making results, and insight into long term ends comes to inform short term choices.
Rather than concentrate on achieving predictability within existing modes of thought, action and organisation, the argument of this book is that the emphasis should be upon increasing adaptability through the innovation of new modes on the basis of immanent lines of development. This makes the affirmation of ecological and social capacity building as at least a much a part of Green politics as campaigns for votes and office. The position emphasises human beings as makers, as doers, as change agents capable of assuming ethical and political control of a world which is in large part self-made. This argument is developed in terms of concepts and values, mentalities and modalities, which allow for a plurality of meanings, institutions and practices which are adaptable in face of new developments and unforeseen events — and which also facilitate positive and coherent responses to change. This commitment to praxis as the means by which human agents reclaim the ethical content of a self-made world is considered worthy in its own right, as well as being an integral part of dealing with the challenges presented by climatic change.
Contents
1 How Common Principles And Goals Can Save The World's Resources; 2 The Nature Of The Environmental Crisis; Optimism And Pessimism; 3 The Distinction between Environmentalism And Ecologism; 4 The Ecological Crisis And Economics; 5 The Scale Of Risk And Uncertainty; 6 The Ecological Wager; 7 Cognitive Praxis; 8 The Dictatorship Of The Possible; 9 Knowledge And Self-Regulation; 10 Science, Learning And Civilisation; Ecological Civilisation; 11 Green Political Philosophy And Praxis; 12 The Crisis Of Vision In Economics; The Free Market And Ecology; 13 Unit Ideas; 14 Markets, Morality And Modernity; 15 Egoism And Altruism; 16 Consumer Idiocy; 17 Transactional Encounters; 18 Cultural And Social Capital; 19 Human Species Environment And Civilisation; 20 Dwelling In The Fourfold; 21 The Human Relationship To Nature; 22 Humanity And Nature Harmony; 23 Ecological Praxis As An Eco-Pragmatism; 24 Ecological Praxis And Sensibility; 25 Ecological Praxis; 26 Flourishing And The Individual Contribution; 27 Ecological Praxis And Civilisation; 28 Ecological Sensibility; 29 Constructive Models; 30 Principles And Tasks; 31 Greens And The Conventional Political Sphere; 32 Conventional Politics And Green Politics; 33 Act Locally, Think Globally; 34 Revolutionary Agency And ‘The People’; 35 Ecology As Science And Ecology As Politics; 36 Green Transformation Of ‘The Political’; 37 Politics As A Necessary Evil; 38 The Anti-Party Party; 39 The Social Content Of Green Politics; 40 New Politics; 41 Structural Models Of Change; 42 Synopsis; 43 Political Organisation For Social Change; The Political Boundaries Of Change And The Changing Boundaries Of Politics; 44 The Constraints Of Party Systems On Political Change; 45 Some Strategic Considerations; 46 Realism And Fundamentalism; 47 The Radical Predicament; 48 The Need For Politics; 49 Green Politics And Vision; 50 Ecology As Politics; 51 Political And Electoral Objectives; 52 Ecological Praxis; 53 Eco-Cities And Eco-Communities; 54 Green Community Self Regulation; 55 Subpolitics And The Need For Global Action; 56 Building And Sustaining Action; 57 Ecological Planning And Green Municipalism; 58 Public Spaces For Cognitive Praxis; 59 The Alternative Centre Ground; 60 Arguments And Analyses; 61 The Ecological Society; 62 Environmental Policies And Practices; 63 Alternatives The Emergent Productive Forces; 64 New Rules And Regulation; 65 New Economics; 66 The Commons; 67 The Alternative Economy; 68 The Low Carbon Economy; 69 Policies To Reduce Emissions; 70 Communities, Urban Design And Public Transport; 71 Designing Markets For Regenerative Exchange; 72 Ecological Tax Reform; 73 A Planetary Transformation - A Global Social Compact.
Abstract
This book approaches the contemporary environmental crisis as a crisis of civilisation and as a call to generate a new way of life. The purpose of the book is to bring philosophical perspectives concerning reason and freedom to bear upon the moral, economic and ecological crisis of modernity with a view to constituting the good life. The book proceeds from a commitment to the good, the true and the beautiful as established by Pythagoras and developed by Plato. The attempt is made to overcome the bifurcation of culture and nature to show reason as the realisation of nature.
Contents
1 The Concept Of Rational Freedom: The Problems Of Philosophy; 2 Four Key Ideas; 3 Reason; 4 Objective Morality; 5 The Cognitive Perspective; 6 The Reason Of Ancient Greece; 7 Pythagoras And Harmony: The Three Lives; A Philosophy Of Whole Systems; 8 Plato On Justice And Virtue; 9 Aristotle And The Good Life; Aristotle And Liberty: Aristotle Association Of Friends; Aristotle Licence And Liberty; 10 The Artificial People Of Hobbes; 11 The Joy Of Spinoza; 12 Rousseau And Freedom In Association.
13 Kant And Rational Freedom; Reason As The Realisation Of Nature; Peace And Freedom Under Law; Natural teleology And Human Praxis; Republican Constitution; Kantian Rationalism.
14 Hegel And The Ethical Life; 15 Political And Ethical Theory; 16 Habermas – System World And Lifeworld; 17 Communitarianism; 18 Green Political Theory: The Countermovement As A Civic Public
Abstract
Putting reason on a rational basis through the social and discursive constitution of the city makes it possible to develop the ecological implications of “rational” principles of scale and justice. This volume shows that a genuine rationalisation is characterised by the interpenetration of social and environmental justice facilitating the integration of communities in their ecological community. Recreating the symbiotic relationship between nature and culture ensures that reason no longer takes irrational (anti-human/anti-ecological) forms.
Contents
1 REASON AND NATURE
Biosphere Politics; Security; Reason and nature
2 SECURITY AS SECURING THE WORLD
The Shattering of the Organic-Holistic World View
3 URBAN ECOLOGY
4 TECHNOLOGICAL UNREASON
5 ECOLOGICAL MARXISM
6 THE STATIONARY STATE OF JOHN STUART MILL
7 MARTIN HEIDEGGER ONTOLOGY AND ECOLOGY
8 BIOSPHERE AND BEING
The recovery of Being; Global Warming; Limits to economic growth; The local and the global – the universal and the particular – biosphere; Local and global – biosphere; Biosphere; Ecologizing the Dialectic; Anarchism and Ecology
9 SOCIAL ECOLOGY
Bookchin’s Re-Enchanting Humanity (1995)
10 ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE AND THE CITY
11 PROXIMITY: PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY
Ecology and the urban public sphere
12 GREENING THE CITY
13 ECO-COMMUNITY
14 CONCLUSION CONSTITUTING PUBLICITY
Rationalising Cityspace
The Economics of Flourishing (2019)
Abstract
This book is a collection of essays on the theme of economics, ethics, happiness and the virtues. The essays the connections between economics, ethics, virtuous behaviour, and happiness as flourishing. Throughout I refer to my larger Being and Place project. I have published substantial works on this theme already. Here, I shall also be referencing work that is still to come.
Contents
1 Economics as Eudaimonics
New Ideas and Stories; The Concept of Genuine Wealth; Happiness is social and can be contagious!; The centrality of the Virtues; The Concept of Genuine Wealth and The Economics of Happiness; Towards an Economy of Genuine Happiness; Creating flourishing Communities of Well-being; Happiness as The Ultimate Economic Indicator; What is Genuine Wealth;
2 Economics, Ecology and Ethics
Wars Over Natural Resources
3 The Economics of the Good : Adam Smith, Ethics and the Character of Virtue
Economic Thought Before Adam Smith
4 Markets and Morality: Where do public virtues come from?
5 The Madness of Capitalist Reason
The Cruel, Topsy-Turvy Economics of Collapse
6 Reform and Reformation
Marx, ecological rift and the social metabolic order; Karl Marx: The first ecological sociologist?; ecology and the social metabolic order; Marxism and the Dialectics of Ecology; Six Theses on Saving the Planet; Changing Societies through Urban Commons Transitions.
8 We have to learn to Collaborate and Share
9 Commoning Together
10 The Economics of Purpose - E.F. Schumacher and R.H. Tawney
11 Socially Useful Production - a New Lucas Plan
A New Lucas Plan For The Future; Architect or Bee? A discussion about the Lucas Aerospace Workers’ Plan
12 Workers of all lands unite - and build the cooperative commonwealth
13 Aspects of Green Economics
The Qualitative Conception of Wealth; Radical Vision and Pragmatic Politics; Technics, potentialities and social relations; Globalisation; The New Holistic Paradigm; From quantity to quality; Postindustrialism and ecology; Alternatives: the emergent productive forces.
14 Green Economics and Sustainable Living; 15 Amory Lovins and Natural Capitalism; 16 Real Growth and Qualitative Development; 17 Prosperity Without Growth; 18 The New Path to Prosperity; 19 Apocalypse
If I had to sum-up my philosophical anthropology, I would describe it as a sensible transcendence. The next couple of works elaborate on what that entails.
Cultivating the Morality of the Senses (2016) 141 52,790
Abstract
An excursus into a sensuous ecology, what may be called a sensible transcendence.
Contents
1 The Wise Man's Materialism; 2 The Call of the Wild; 3 A Place in Space; 4 Earth Spirits, psyche, energy; 5 Why are we born? Whence we come? Whither we go?; 6 Extinction; 7 Reason and its social mediation; 8 Dynamic interrelationism against mechanistic materialism; 9 Experimental and experiential; 10 The poetry of earth - poetry will save the earth; 11 The aliveness of life within a sea of energies; 12 To walk again with the moon and the stars;13 Where does value lie?; 14 Returning to our senses; 15 Falling in love outward; 16 Rationalisation and estrangement; 17 The morality of the senses; 18 All Knowledge is Carnal Knowledge; 19 Wild Ethics Rationale; 20 A Relational Environmental Ethic; 21 Animism, Perception, and Eco-Phenomenology; 22 Under the Enchantment of Alien Power; 23 The Earthly (or Material) Symbolic; 24 Commonality and Kinship in the animate Earth; 25 Eco-phenomenology – returning reason to the Earth; 26 Earth’s Imagination; 27 Educating for Gaia; 28 Restoring and restorying; 29 The Autonomous Human Zone; 30 Life and Depth; 31 The Perceptual Implications of Gaia; 32 Gaia and Perception; 33 Merleau-Ponty and the Reciprocity of Perception; 34 The Moral Ecology of the Senses; 35 Towards a Psychological Ecology; 36 Merleau-Ponty and the Voice of the Earth; 37 The Visible – de-intellectualizing transcendence; 38 Nature; 39 Logos; 40 The Lebenswelt Logos; 41 Waking Our Senses: Language and the Ecology of Sensory Experience.
Ecological Humanism (2016)
Philosophy, life, and the world beyond rationalisation, abstraction, distortion, and distraction
Contents
The Philosopher in the Conceptual Prison; Universalism and abstraction; Universalism and Organic principles; The philosopher in the modern age; Reason and the Personal Life; Free riders and the enclosure of the global commons; Ecological Humanism and the shift from the rational, autonomous Self; Bringing reason back to reality; The Conception of Moral Ecology; A Moral Ecology teaches the principle of the whole; Moral ecology against the historicism and naturalism of the 'Life-Force'; Human ecology and the insurgency of life – an active materialism; Technological Progress, Abstraction from life and Ecological Humanism; The Capital System as a Denaturalisation and a Dehumanisation; The Garden and the City; Limits and Possibilities; Re-humanisation; The Need for Moral Transformation; Principles for the Future – acting in accordance with an ecological humanism; The society of reason depends upon appropriate social forms; The Buried Life by Matthew Arnold; The virtuous environment; Responsibility, co-responsibility, and co-respondence.
https://www.academia.edu/41206409/The_Ecological_Comedy_The_Case_for_an_Existential_Literary_Ecology
Abstract
Human beings are story making animals. Before homo faber came homo symbolicus. Ecological restoration is a restorying. Transitioning to a new world is always a matter of being between stories. We may call these worldviews, standpoints or paradigms, articulating norms and values. We are moving from one view, the materialist, mechanistic and reductionist understanding of the world as some objective datum to a view which sees the world as creative, participatory, animate, and interconnected. In between stories, however, our lives express a certain schizophrenia. We lurch between contrary positions, recognising the right thing to do whilst continuing with practices that, deep down, we know to be wrong. We have bifurcated identities, split from the world, from others and, ultimately, from our own whole natures. Estranged from the Earth, we struggle to see the world that enfolds and sustains us as a sacred community, carrying on with practices that we know to be harmful and exploitative. The problem is that, socially and structurally, we are locked within those destructive patterns of behaviour. We need a new story, one that integrates the material and spiritual dimensions our lives within new patterns of behaviour. This story will not just enlighten and inform but inspire, enthuse, and enliven, motivating people to change their behaviours and reorient their practices for the new Age of Ecology based upon union between the human and earth communities.
Contents
1 Narrativity; 2 Robinson Jeffers and the Poetry of Place; 3 Poetry and the Moral Sense of Place; 4 The Poetry of Earth; 5 Notes for A Poetics of Earth; 6 Song of the Earth; 7 In the World of Waldo Williams; 8 Samuel Palmer: Mysterious Moonlit Dreams; 9 Marc Chagall: Art as a State of Soul; 10 Ecopoetics, disclosing the Hidden God in Nature; 11 Finding Meaning Through Metaphor; 12 Ecological Restoration as a Restorying; 13 The Springs of Action - Making Facts Existentially Meaningful; 14 Tolkien and the Ethics of Enchantment; 15 Natural Anarchy; 16 The imagination is truly the enemy of bigotry and dogma; 17 The Light Within; 18 For lovers of William Blake – because he kept the divine vision in time of trouble; 19 The Unveiling of a Gravestone to William Blake; 20 Dante and Marx - Contextualizing Marx's Criticism of Commercial Society; 21 Fire and Ice: where would Dante place all of us who are borrowing against this Earth…?; 22 Dante’s Sweet Symphony of Paradise; 23 Notre Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo; 24 Sic Transit Gloria Civilization; 25 Ruins; 26 Sigurd F. Olson and the Singing Wilderness.
An excursus on ‘the environment.’
Contents
The Environment; Towards a Philosophy of Environment; Eco-philosophy - meaning not definition – paradigms and perceptions; Reason and intuition; Two sides, one fake coin; The Environment and the Self; The dualism of subject and object; Paradigms – against scientific transcendence; Beyond the mechanarchy; Ersatz communities; Language, reason, and silence; Does philosophy offer a way out?; Pan alive; Unchaining the World; Re-inheriting the Dis-inherited Mind; Balance; Between you and reality is a pile of books; Wittgenstein and limited wholeness; Environment, emptiness and wholeness; The environment and the political – abstraction and alienation; The poetry of Earth; Language and life; The World We Could Have Had; The End.
Abstract
In this book I shall develop the urban regional thought of Lewis Mumford in terms of a civic environmentalism concerned with the achievement of a public life fitted to the contours of an ecological civilization. I shall examine Mumford’s conception of ecological regionalism, democratic planning and the regional garden city as giving us both the ideal of a decentralized, balanced and humanly-scaled eco-public, and the means to achieve it. I shall show how Mumford sought to reconstruct public community aesthetically, politically and ecologically, integrating the urban and rural environments in the process. Defining Mumford’s view in terms of civic environmentalism, I connect the task of ecological restoration and preservation to a reinvigorated public life constituted by a democratic pluralism and civic mindedness. I will argue that the writings of Lewis Mumford on the garden city and regional planning suggest a conception of Ecopolis sustained by a vision of civic environmentalism. I will show how Mumford developed a planning intervention that not only countered the destructive consequences of over-urbanization but served also strengthen the civic capacity of the community and infuse political culture with an active democratic content. Mumford’s ecological regionalism combines planning, design and a biocentric understanding of natural processes within a politically grounded and civic-minded environmentalism. His work expresses a commitment to restore the health of democratic public life in the process of tackling the problems of urban life. I will therefore develop Mumford’s idea of regional planning and ecological regionalism in terms of a political or civic concern with environmentalism, in the process lifting the question of the human relation to nature out of academic confines and locating it in the public realm. In fine. Mumford envisions an Ecopolis constituted and sustained by a civic environmentalism.
Contents
1 Introduction To The Book; 2 Introduction To Lewis Mumford; 3 Mumford And Jane Jacobs; 4 Mumford’s Organic Holism; 5 Person, Place And ‘The Political’; 6 Regionalism; 7 Community And Place; 8 Organic Holism And Planning; 9 Socialization; 10 Environmental Ethics And Civic Environmentalism; 11 Democratic Planning; 12 Regional Planning, Implementation And Participation; 13 Power, Place And The City; 14 Place, Polity And Neotechnics; 15 Mumford Today
Abstract
This book traces the connection of ecology, regionalism and civilisation in the life's work of Lewis Mumford. The argument demonstrates Mumford's ecological regionalism as being grounded in a moral sense of place, Mumford offering an ecological civilisation as an alternative to the false imperatives of the megamachine. Mumford is shown to offer an alternative future based on organic plenitude as against the 'aimless dynamism' of endless material quantity within the megamachine. The book seeks to develop the moral and critical purpose at work behind the varied writings of Lewis Mumford. The attempt is made to identify the contours of Mumford’s ideal city as a city of human dimensions enabling and encouraging a vigorous reciprocity and interaction between inhabitants as citizens; a city which brings the touch, sense and smell of the countryside into the core market life of the city, brings neighbourhoods in close connection with each other, brings all city dwellers within close walking distance of parks and green spaces. Mumford’s objective, it is shown, is to make the city a communal theatre, a collective experience in which city dwellers are actors rather than mere spectators in the unfolding drama of urban life. Mumford is shown to offer a unique insight into the myriad political, social, cultural, urban, moral, psychological and ecological problems of a rationalised modernity. Reason has not brought freedom in the modern world. In many ways, human beings have come to be enslaved to their own powers, institutions and ideas. Mumford offers a means of explaining this paradox of bondage through liberty. The solutions that Mumford articulates bring the soundest features of past cities to bear upon present forms. The awareness of the past enables Mumford to address the fundamental problems of rational modernity. Although Mumford wrote on a wide variety of topics, his purpose possessed a unifying thread concerning the mode of life within modern technological society. This book emphasises Mumford's concern to put the constituents of modern urban life on a sustainable basis in relation to new technologies and techniques. The key to Mumford's vision is the scaling of social life to human dimension and proportion, thus producing a life of balance and harmony with respect to the moral and technical capacities of human beings.
Contents
1 Large Views In The Abstract And In The Concrete; The Influence Of Kropotkin; The Influence Of Patrick Geddes; Mumford’s Regionalism; 2 Mumford’s Critical Utopianism: The Story Of Utopias; 3 Reconnecting Place: Sticks And Stones And The Golden Day; The Golden Day; 4 The Culture Of Cities; 5 The City In History; 6 Regions – To Live In: The RPAAa And Regionalism; The Principle Of Regional Decentralisation; 7 The Regional City; 8 Cityscape – The Urban Prospect; 9 Technics And Civilisation: The Tyranny Of The Clock; Art And Technics; 10 The Myth Of The Machine; 11 The Pentagon Of Power; 12 Personality And Technology; 13 Mumford’s Green Republic; 14 Conclusion
An examination of Anne Conway's philosophy as an alternative to the mind-body, reason-emotion dualisms of the dominant Western tradition.
Abstract
This book is Part Two of Of Gods and Gaia. The book examines the case for a planetary engineering and management that seeks to redefine and reorganise environmentalism around nuclear power, biotechnology, GM food and geoengineering. This amounts to moral and political disarmament of the environmental movement and can be resisted. This book examines what these proposals amount to and what kind of thinking – and politics – lies behind them.
The people that I refer to as planetary engineers and managers do not revalue the dignity of human beings as moral beings capable of assuming responsibility for their powers and exercising choice. Instead, they equate power with technology. This is the Faustian delusion at its most crude. Far from resolving our predicament, Brand and Lynas do not even recognise it. They cannot see that the price for Faustian pacts is now being demanded. Instead, they still think that our technology, reliance upon which has brought us to this predicament, will save us. It soon becomes apparent that what Lynas and Brand and the planetary engineers and managers are offering is a massive gamble dressed up as a technological fix. The irony is that the claims made for technology are pitched at such a high level, overriding so much within culture and politics and ethics, that they are likely to rebound.
This gamble can be refused. What Jacques Ellul identified decades ago as ‘the technological bluff’ can be called. We can refuse the bribe of the megamachine. The promise of salvation through technology has never been rendered so bare. The basic rationale of the gamble urged on us by Lynas and Brand is not the pull of a better life but the push of environmental necessity. The old promise of science and technology has never sounded so weak.
In this second part of Of Gods and Gaia, I set the case for planetary engineering and management within a broader philosophical discussion of human power and progress. Above all, I call for the integration of our moral and technical capacities so as to achieve a balanced development of the human ontology. This also requires a deeper understanding of the human essence and how it flourishes only when we find our true place within nature. Forget the "men as gods" delusion. "It's our limitations that keep us sane." (Dr. Bertha Simos).
Abstract
In the past couple of years there have been growing demands that ‘the greens’ abandon certain principles and policies with which they are most identified and embrace the contributions that certain new technologies can make to resolving the environmental crisis.
This book examines the case for planetary engineering and management that seeks to redefine and reorganise environmentalism around nuclear power, biotechnology, GM food and geoengineering. This amounts to moral and political disarmament of the environmental movement and can be resisted. This book examines what these proposals amount to and what kind of thinking – and politics – lies behind them.
Stewart Brand opens his book Whole Earth Discipline with the quote: ‘We are as gods and HAVE to get good at it.’ Mark Lynas follows suit and entitles his book The God Species.
These books focus almost exclusively on technology and offer technological solutions to the environmental crisis. There is nothing on morality, an explicit repudiation of ‘ideology’, little on social practices, and a disdain of politics which always seems to slant against socialism and the left.
There is a basic flaw running through these books and the clue is there in the references to god and gods. The environmental crisis ought to have concentrated minds and caused us to take the notion of natural limits and planetary boundaries more seriously. However, far from coming to terms with the Faustian bargains which lie at the heart of modernity, the inversion of means and ends, the enlargement of means at the expense of ends, the planetary engineers come to invest our technologies with a divine power. Brand and Lynas do not revalue the dignity of human beings as moral beings capable of assuming responsibility for their powers and exercising choice. Instead, they equate power with technology. This is the Faustian delusion at its most crude. Far from resolving our predicament, Brand and Lynas do not even recognise it. They cannot see that the price for Faustian pacts is now being demanded. Instead, they still think that our technology, reliance upon which has brought us to this predicament, will save us. It soon becomes apparent that what Lynas and Brand and the planetary engineers and managers are offering is a massive gamble dressed up as a technological fix. The irony is that the claims made for technology are pitched at such a high level, overriding so much within culture and politics and ethics, that they are likely to rebound.
This gamble can be refused. What Jacques Ellul identified decades ago as ‘the technological bluff’ can be called. We can refuse the bribe of the megamachine. The promise of salvation through technology has never been rendered so bare. The basic rationale of the gamble urged on us by Lynas and Brand is not the pull of a better life but the push of environmental necessity. The old promise of science and technology has never sounded so weak.
Against assertions that our divinity is located in our technology, this book retorts:
God does not play Dice with Gaia.
Which brings us to James Lovelock and his Gaia thesis. It is worth wondering why, when the environmental crisis has allowed us to recall the name of Gaia, the goddess of the Earth, from the ancient past, divinity remains firmly and exclusively male in these books emphasising our technological power. For all of the talk of gods in the books by Lynas and Brand, there is one single solitary reference to ‘goddess’, by Brand, and even then it is a passing reference to Lovelock’s Gaia, in parenthesis. Lovelock’s Gaia, it has to be made clear, is not the Gaia of myth but a Gaia of science. Lovelock is proud that Gaia is a scientific theory and he loathes any New Age associations. Fine. Except that Gaia as proposed by Lovelock is a machine rather than an organism. Lovelock believes that Nature is alive, but he admits he can’t offer any scientific proof to back his intuition. Strictly speaking, the Gaia that James Lovelock presents scientifically is a self-regulating machine more akin to cybernetics than organicism. So, in addition to the books by Lynas and Brand, it is worth also examining James Lovelock’s book from 2009 The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning. In the arguments of technocrats, Gaia has vanished already. And perhaps she was not even present in Lovelock’s argument from the start. Gaia the Earth Goddess seems to be no more than the ghost in ‘the machine.’
I develop my case in three parts.
In the first part I examine Lovelock’s Vanishing Face of Gaia, Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline and Lynas’ The God Species in turn. I shall take these books on with respect to specific points, examining the cases made for nuclear energy, biotechnology, GE food and geoengineering. In addition, I take issue with the mode of argumentation adopted in these books. Far from being a balanced discussion of the arguments, the authors display a highly tendentious approach, exhibiting a tendency to set up straw men, to stereotype and caricature, to adopt of selective approach to the evidence, to pose false antitheses, and portray alternative views in the worst possible light. I also comment on the books as a concealed, covert politics, a politics which hides behind the supposed neutrality of science and technology and which expresses itself in a series of casual sneers at ‘environmentalists’, ‘greens’, ‘leftists’, ‘extremists’, ‘anarchists’. It all amounts to a consistent repudiation of ‘the left’ in politics and a denigration of the connection of the Greens with the Reds.
In the second part I shall set the books by Lovelock, Brand and Lynas within a broader philosophical discussion of human power and progress. Above all, I call for the integration of our moral and technical capacities so as to achieve a balanced development of the human ontology. This also requires a deeper understanding of the human essence and how it flourishes only when we find our true place within nature.
In the third part I address the anomaly that whilst the new ecological sensibility is developing under the auspices of Lovelock’s Gaia thesis, the arguments are of a piece with H.G. Wells’ old fantasy of ‘Men as Gods’. Men? Gods? Mark Lynas writes of human beings as ‘the god species’. Why not the Goddess species? Brand says we are as gods and so must get good at being as gods. Machines and men, men and gods, gods and monsters. It’s the Frankenstein tale writ large. To become as gods, it is as well to know where we have come from. To have a future, we need to remember our origins. We can easily rewrite Brand’s quote to gain a fuller sense of who we are and what we need to do: ‘we have been as gods for too long, but now we HAVE to get good as being goddesses’. So I want to know whatever happened to the Goddess and all the other goddesses.
To make things very clear from the start, this does not involve rejecting patriarchy for matriarchy, for tearing down technological urban civilisation and going ‘back to Nature’. It seems so obvious that as the ancient world of the goddess was overthrown by monotheistic world of the single white male, men dominated over women, war replaced peace, civilisation suppressed nature. Go back to nature and peace and harmony will reign once more. If only things were so simple. The world of ‘the Goddess’ was never so benign. It was a world where natural necessity and biological imperatives rule. The danger is this, if we fail to assume conscious control of our technics, we will be driven by the social necessity of an expansionary techno-industrial civilisation to transgress planetary boundaries and as a result be thrown back into a world of harsh natural necessity. That’s the Gaia that Lovelock threatens us with.
Unravelling this little riddle lies at the heart of the critique I offer and the principles I outline.
Contents
1 GAMBLING WITH GAEA
2 THE RESURRECTION OF GAIA:
The human relationship with Gaia; The Need For An Environmental Ethic; Mechanical science and organic nature; Gaia, immanent purpose and God
3 LOVELOCK’S FINAL WARNING
Scepticism, pessimism and the ‘dismal science’; Gaia’s ‘intelligent elite’; Lifeboat ethics and politics; Energy sources and energy policy; Energy and the city; The History Of Gaia Theory; To Be Or Not To Be Green (the right and wrong kinds of green); Gaia and ethics; The religious dimensions of Gaia.
4 STEWART BRAND – GETTING GOOD AT BEING GODS:
The Moral and Intellectual Foundations; Civilisation and Infrastructure; City Planet; Urban Promise; Nuclear – a necessary evil or a good?; Biotechnology; Science, reason and politics; Romanticism and Scientism; It's All Gardening; Planet Craft; Geopolitics and geoengineering; Planetary Engineering and Politics
5 MARK LYNAS AND THE GOD SPECIES:
Planetary Boundaries; The Gap between Technical and Moral Capacities; The God Thesis; Human beings as planetary killer apes; The price on Nature’s head; Climate Change; Nuclear is Green; Energy and economic imperatives; Genetic Engineering; GM Food; Why There Is Famine In The Midst Of Abundance; The control of the food supply; The destruction of food; Who gains?; Famine and aid; Famine is part of the system, not a part of nature; The solution; The growing wrath; Land Use; The Economics of Water; The Toxicity of Nuclear; Pragmatism and Purism; The Politics of Pusillanimity; Managing The Planet.
6 CONCLUSION – ENGINEERING OR ENVIRONMENTALISM?
PART TWO THE POLITICS OF GAIA
7 TECHNOLOGICAL FIXING AND GAIAN GAMBLING
Science and Ethics; The Moral Fabric – the Ought and the Is; Hubris; Gaea; The Age of Ecology
8 GAIAN POLITICS
Hardball Climate Politics; The Politics of the Technological Fixers; Sustainable Living as the Politics of Hope; The Metaphysics of Hope; Knowledge and Ignorance; Scientific arrogance, ignorance, and burdens of proof; The Feasible Alternative Future; World-changing and People-changing; The Flourishing of the Most Loving
9 BACK TO THE DAYS BEFORE TOMORROW COMES
The shadow of primeval nature; Utopia and happiness; Cellphone World, Cellophane Utopia; The Utopian impulse in twentieth-century politics; H. G. Wells’ Search for Utopia; Technocracy in the service of capital; The Reaction against ‘The Machine’; The End of Utopia; Reclaiming the Future
10 KNOWLEDGE, KNOW-HOW AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION
The Capital System; The Canalisation of Science and Technology by Social Relations; The Structuring of Social Knowledge and Know-How; Social Transformation; Social Knowledge and Know-How as Catalysts of Social Transformation.
PART 3 THE GODDESS SPECIES
11 THE RENASCENT GODDESS
The Witches Ride Again; The Eudaimonistic Perspective; The Re-enchantment of the World; The Animal Shadow; The Iron Cage.
12 EARTH ENERGIES AND THE MAINTENANCE OF FERTILITY
The Vital Spirit of Nature; The Numinous; The Intelligible Reality; Co-evolution
13 FROM EARTH GODDESS TO SKY GOD
Francis Bacon and the Scientific Priesthood; From Cosmic Organism To World Machine
14 GOD AND GAIA
15 NATURE ALIVE AND NATURE DEAD: The Death of Pan
16 GAIA ECOFEMINISM AND THE EARTH: Social Ecofeminism; First Word Last;
17 WHERE ON EARTH ARE WE GOING?
Progress – are we there yet?; The Prophets of Progress; Immanence and Transcendence in Harmony; Questioning the Techno-Fixers and Fetishizers; A Warning.
https://www.academia.edu/70272394/Affirming_Freedom_and_Democracy_and_Resisting_the_Authoritarian_Temptation_The_Allure_of_Eco_Authoritarianism_under_the_Sign_of_Climate_Necessity
Abstract
Assessing the relative merits of Democratic Governance and Authoritarian Governance in light of converging crises.
Contents
1 Authoritarianism and Political Legitimacy; 2 The Rise of Environmental Authoritarianism; 3 The Allure of Enlightened Despotism; 4 Authoritarian Governance vs Democratic Governance; 5 Authoritarian Governance and Democratic Governance Compared; 6 China?; 7 Resisting the Temptations of Enlightened Despotism - Defending democracy; 8 The Seductive Effectiveness of the Environmental Commander; 9 Foundational Legitimacy and Contingent Legitimacy; 10 The Covid Regime as The Model for the Climate Controlled Polity; 11 The Desperate Damnation of Democracy (anthropological pessimism); 12 The Unwinnable Climate War; 13 Naturalism, Reductionism, and Rationalisation; 14 Theoretical and Practical Reason; 15 The Slenderest Knowledge of the Highest Things; 16 Authoritarian Capacity; 17 The Emergency of Effects – critique; 18 The Emergency of Action – critique; 19 Climate Action and Regime Legitimacy; 20 The Techno-Bureaucratic Universal Class; 21 The Authoritarian Wish-List; 22 Political Economy (and the missing critique); 23 A System of Arbitrary and Coercive Power; 24 Climate Change as a Wicked Problem; 25 Ross Mittiga’s conclusion; 26 Conclusions on Eco-Authoritarianism; 27 Rational Freedom and Authority; 28 Reconciling Autonomy and Authority – the Critique of Libertarianism and Authoritarianism; 29 The Politics of Fear; 30 The Fear of Freedom; 31 The Restitution of Power and Freedom; 32 Beyond Leviathan; 33 Striving for Truth in Love; 34 Dante’s Revolution of Love
Abstract
The critique of environmentalism as a naturalism and scientism. These essays pay attention to the loss of metaphysics and the need for metaphysical reconstruction, viewing naturalism as a bad metaphysics and scientism as the dominant temper of environmentalism, possessing debilitating implications for practical reason (politics and ethics).
Contents
1 The Case for Metaphysical Reconstruction; 2 Science and Spirituality; 3 Transcending the Existential Self-Hatred that Consumes the World; 4 Naturism, Romanticism, and Technocracy; 5 Skepticism vs The New Idolatry; 6 Pushing Back Against the Anti-Politics that is Tearing Society Apart; 7 Leadership; 8 The Best of People; 9 Don’t Wake Up – Keep Looking Down; 10 The Environmental Problem is Political, and so is the solution; 11 When Naturalism Becomes an Inhumanism; 12 The Blight of Essentialism-Hunting; 13 The Loss of God is the Loss of Humanity; 14 Beyond Immanence to Transcendence; 15 Cleaving to the Transcendent Divine.
https://www.academia.edu/44725764/Affirming_Democracy_and_Politics_against_Techno_Bureaucratic_Managerialism
Abstract
An examination of the 'classless' 'non-political' politics of the class that dare not speak its name; the techno-bureaucratic class of would-be planetary managers as the globalisation of Hegel's state bureaucracy as the 'universal class.' This class claims an independence of capital and labour but, in truth, derives its power and resources from both in seeking to impose a false universalism.
Contents
Introduction; Greta Thunberg’s Apoliticism; Environmentalism as a ‘Non-Politics’; Rebellion and Class; The Universal Class; Class Dynamics; The Economics of the Common Good; New Class Pretensions of Classless Independence; The State Bureaucracy as the Universal Class; The Techno-Bureaucratic Managerial Class; The Elitism and Authoritarianism of a Visceral Class Politics; Socialism and the ‘Global Technocratic Elite’; Austerian Environmentalism and the Inversion of Leftist Politics; Environmental Religiosity; Globalisation; ‘The Science’; The Non-Watermelon Class; Vanguardism against Democracy; Ersatz Communities and the Dictatorship of the Officials and the Experts; Globalisation and Globalism; Against Homo Superior; Naturism, Romanticism, and Technocracy
Abstract
A critique of the language of 'crisis' and 'necessity' and the use of 'fear' in environmental politics. A defence of hope and confidence against negativity and demoralisation. An affirmation of the need for environmentalism to develop a properly political and ethical view and throw off its dominant modes of scientism and naturalism.
Contents
1 Introduction; 2 Surviving Heart Attack and Heart Break; 3 Heart Attack December 2016; 4 Heart Break December 2019; 5 Sweet Darkness; 6 Democrats vs Autocrats; 7 Against The Ecology of Fear; 8 Naturalism as an Inhumanism; 9 Time; 10 The Gift of New Life; 11 Inner Motive Force as against External Regulation; 12 Flourishing Well; 13 The Totalitarian Temper and Temptation; 14 Knowing History, Politics, and Human Beings; 15 The Motivational Economy; 16 Resisting the Psychocrats; 17 Rational Freedom against Repression; 18 Socialization vs Social Isolation; 19 Confronting Pathology, Restating Sociality; 20 Existential Crisis; 21 Love, Beauty, and Forgiveness overcoming Forgetfulness; 22 The Love that Seeketh Not its Own; 23 An Easter Prayer; 24 In Defence of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful; 25 The Ecology of the Human Heart; 26 The Failures and Fallacies of Fear; 27 The Politics of Fear and the Politics of Hope; 28 The Pathology of a Perverted Religiosity; 29 The Recourse to Fear; 30 The Blight of Permanent Activism Supplanting Politics; 31 A little more conversation, a little less action, please; 32 Environmentalism as Techno-Bureaucratic Managerialism; 33 Social Restitution against Techno-Bureaucratic Managerialism; 34 The Dangers of Environmental Overspill and Appropriation; 35 The Clashing Realities of Climate Politics; 36 The Question of Climate Lockdown; 37 Infantilism and Narcissism; 38 Reclaiming the Political and Ethical Commons.
Abstract
This book consists of a collection of essays written in response to the climate mobilisation that has followed in the wake of Extinction Rebellion (XR) and Greta Thunberg’s global climate strike. The need for substantial climate action to address ecological degradation and looming destruction is now plain. XR and Thunberg have struck a chord with many. But beyond publicising the need for climate action, what, in precise institutional, policy, and financial terms, is the end game? The 'apolitical' stance and general 'humanitarian' appeal may work to attract support, but is this merely a passive radicalism that diverts energies into system-preservation rather than the system change that addressing the converging crises of the age requires?
Contents
1 Rebellion against whom and for what?; 2 Green Republicanism vs Anti-Political Extremism; 3 Laying the Bogey of Eco-Authoritarianism to Rest; 4 Coercive Environmental Collectivism advancing the Corporate Form; 5 Insidious Ideology; 6 Thoughts on Extinction Rebellion; 7 Seeing through the encroachment of the Environmental Megamachine; 8 Extinction Pacification; 9 The Price of Political Deficiency; 10 Re-politicizing the Environment; 11 Politicizing the Environment, Repoliticizing the World; 12 Turning Green Gloom into Green Growth; 13 Tell The Truth - The Capital System is the Problem; 14 System Change and Social Transformation; 15 Politics for the Restoration of Ecological Hope; 16 Time for a Transformation; 17 Class, Capital, Climate Change, and the Common Good; 18
The Unity of Social Formation and Character Formation; 19 The End of Civilisation or the End of the Capital System; 20 Affirming a Democratic Ecology against the Ecology of Fear; 21 Conclusion.
