Below are links to and brief descriptions of my published essays on the deficiencies of environmentalism as a philosophy and politics.
The Critique of Environmentalism: Nature Fetishism and the Case for Metaphysical Reconstruction. 2023, 115,415
This book is a collection of essays which examine environmentalism as a naturalism in two - reified - aspects. In the first instance, there is naturalism as a scientism, with natural scientific methods extended over all areas of life and its understanding; in the second there is naturalism as a Romanticism. Whilst apparently contradictory, the dominant form of environmentalism expresses both wings, the one futuristic, aiming at planetary management, the other reactionary and nostalgic, lamenting a lost innocence. Alongside the fetishism of fact and knowledge, therefore, there is also a planetary fetishism. Both wings interpret nature in abstraction from the social forms, relations, and practices that mediate between the social and natural metabolisms.
The Critique of Eco-Authoritarianism: Revaluing Democracy In Face Of Climate Necessity. 2022. 94,954
The Critique of Eco-Authoritarianism is a comparative analysis of the relative merits of Democratic Governance and Authoritarian Governance in light of the crisis in the climate system. The analysis examines the principal claims made for authoritarian forms of government and finds them to be unwarranted. The case is thus made for a dual transformation: the ecological transformation of 'the political' being accompanied by the political transformation of the ecological - thus bridging the gap between theoretical reason (objectivity, natural science, fact, scientific knowledge) and practical reason (ethics and politics, subjectivity, values, human agency within the motivational economy).
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Environmental Science, Politics, and Practical Reason. 2022. 94,301
In this collection of essays, I explain the lack of response to the scientific facts of climate change in terms of a distinction between the fields of theoretical reason and practical reason. Theoretical reason refers to our knowledge of the external world – the realm of science, fact, nature, and objectivity; practical reason refers to what we do and how we act in light of that knowledge – the realm of ethics and politics, values, motivations, will, artifice, the society of class relations, stakes, interests, subjectivity. I argue that environmentalism goes down a cul-de-sac when it takes its stand on scientific knowledge and technological know-how alone, detached form the motivational economy of human beings. The essays in this book are thus concerned to identify what it takes to inspire environmental action, on both the personal and social levels.
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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. The book considers this class of managerialists to be integral to the extension and entrenchment of the corporate form in every dimension of public and private life. This new class exploits crisis as the vehicle of their gaining and maintaining power, eradicating the norms, values, and practices of democratic governance.