This work provides a reflective assessment of recent developments, social relevance and future of environmental political theory, concluding that although the alleged pacification of environmentalism is more than skin deep, it is not yet quite deep enough. This book will appeal to students and researchers of social science and philosophers with an interest in environmental issues.

Two models of environmentalism are considered. One — hard line environmentalism — is a theory which unites environmental ethics and political theory; the other — soft environmentalism — is a package of the two as two distinctive levels of moral reasoning. It is argued that hard‐line environmentalism is a‐democratic, rests on wrong methodological assumptions, and is friendly to the environment just so long as being so serves a sought‐after ‘psychological revolution’. Soft environmentalism is to be (...) preferred also because its idea of democracy must be national and international rather than local. Since in the ‘new’ Europe people will move very often and will therefore fail to develop a sense of ‘place’ which is local, it may be a waste of time to emphasise ‘localism’ as part of environmentalism. (shrink)

The relationship between ecology and democracy has a complex history and an uncertain future. Ecological crises threaten all forms of life on earth, and democracy too is endangered, as popular discontent, elite malfeasance, and unresponsive institutions herald crisis if not collapse. It is clear that our present political concepts and institutions are inadequate for meeting the challenges of living in right relation with the more-than-human world and, moreover, that these inadequacies are themselves symptoms of a failing political-cultural story (...) and a lack of concrete practices of ecological renewal, a story that does not recognize that there is no "people" without the earth and that power is not held by humans alone but in common with the natural world--intensifying weather events effected by climate change are only the most obvious example. Earthborn Democracy upends conventional accounts, which view democracy as a modern invention, by probing deep histories of egalitarian political organization beyond the ancient Athenian efforts so feared by the American founders in the premodern Americas, Mesopotamia, and many other egalitarian cultures. Unlike the constitutional democracies in nation-states, which are in service to economic directives, the political practices and stories excavated in the book illustrate the interdependence necessary to inspire and orient the work of ecological and democratic renewal. Responses to climate catastrophe call for an understanding of how unconscious desire can be a resource for collective democratic action. Developing an embodied account of the unconscious in which a desire for pleasure is central, the authors examine the knowledge and living traditions of Indigenous communities; the incorporation of "pleasure activism" into contemporary social movements and antiracist struggles; and practices of cooperation-cross-species affinity and relational grassroots political organizing around the world. The resonances across these examples trace the possibility for renewal of individual and collective selves through the work of ecological attunement and restoration. Building from re-envisioned democratic histories and this radical rereading of the collective unconscious, they show how contemporary political experiments and practices might cultivate and channel desires for autochthonous-earthborn-democracy, as the Athenian mythos names it. (shrink)

Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation diagnosed what had happened in the Nineteenth Century that led to poverty, increasingly wild economic fluctuations, increasingly severe depressions, and social dislocation and oppression on a massive scale – the market had been disembedded from communities which were then subjected to the imperatives of a supposedly autonomous market. In fact, such disembedding and imposition of these imperatives was a deliberate strategy developed as a means to impose exploitative relations on people, in opposition to ideas (...) of republican democracy. Recognizing this, after such disembedding had engendered a major global depression in the 1890s and an even more severe depression in the 1930s, along with two world wars, reformers largely succeeded in re-embedding markets. This achievement was fought by neoliberals, and their triumph in the 1970s was a really a project of reversion to the Nineteenth Century economic and political order, now upheld by much more powerful forces, including immensely powerful transnational corporations and financial institutions, corrupt politicians, and much more effective mind control industries. As in the Nineteenth Century, it has concentrated wealth and income, destabilized economies, and threatens a new Great Depression and, as a by-product of the tensions generated by global ecological destruction, possibly a new world war. As opposed to Marxist analyses, Polanyi’s analysis provided a much clearer goal to aim at that has not been discredited by the failures of supposedly communist countries. However, there are still huge problems to be overcome if we are to re-embed the market in communities, including the problem of grappling with the immense power of transnational corporations and financial institutions and those who serve them and the success they have had in corrupting the institutions and culture of democracy. This includes not only undermining the power of nations to control their economies and their subversion of democratic processes, but also in promoting passivity in the population to render them inert and powerless. In this paper I will examine proposals, such as those promoted by Arild Vatn in his book Institutions and the Environment, to develop institutions able to achieve this re-embedding. (shrink)

Environmentalism is traversed by a dilemma between a movement toward identity politics and the impossibility of a speaking natural subject; this dilemma calls into question both the relevance of identity politics for ecological struggle and dominant classical constructions of the subject itself. Using Lacanianinspired insights on subjectivity, and the works of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe on radical democracy, I investigate the alternative versions of the subject implicit in ecological discourses and suggest that it is through these alternatives (...) that environmentalism can forge necessary alliances with other movements oriented toward human liberation. In particular, the very impossibility of a natural speaking subject suggests that the ecological project of redefining humanity’s relationships to nonhuman nature(s) is always contingent on reorienting human subjectivity itself; this fact highlights the centrality of political coalition between ecological and other social movements. (shrink)

Several prominent analysts, including Heilbroner, Ophuls, and Passmore, have drawn bleak conclusions regarding the implications of contemporary environmental realities for the future of democracy. I establish, however, that the day-to-day practice of environmental politics has often had an opposite effect: democratic processes have been enhanced. I conclude that the resolution of environmental problems may weIl be more promising within a political context which is more rather than less democratic.

As the ecological crisis becomes increasingly pressing, the relation of environmentalism and democracy is spotlighted with new instancy. On one hand, the capability of present democratic governments to take adequate political action is seriously questioned. On the other hand, environmentalism is charged of being anti-democratic. This paper, in a first step, examines the “green” criticism of and sometimes actual departures from democracy. Drawing on that analysis as well as a pragmatist concept of democracy, the elements (...) of an “ecological democracy” will be outlined in a second step. Democracy, then, is not only a way of collective-problem solving, but also a form of life that has an intrinsic value, even in the face of unresolvable problems and failure. Striving for transformation and the best possible scenario nevertheless, finally, demands an attitude of ecological meliorism, which will be briefly outlined. (shrink)

In the intellectual confusion prevailing since the demise of Marxism and “marxism”, the attempt is made to define democracy as a matter of pure procedure, explicitly avoiding and condemning any reference to substantive objectives. It can easily be shown, however, that the idea of a purely procedural “democracy” is incoherent and self-contradictory. No legal system whatsoever and no government can exist in the absence of substantive conditions which cannot be left to chance or to the workings of the (...) “market” but must be posited as objectives of political activity. The confusion results from a deficient understanding of what makes a society and an empty idea of “freedom”. The objective of politics is not happiness, an affair to be left to the individuals, but it certainly is liberty understood as participation in the governance of the polity; it is also the pursuit of the common good, defined as the sum of the prerequisites and facilitations of individual autonomy depending on collective action, and as the realization of commonly agreed collective goals. (shrink)

Environmental commodification, trading and offsetting are business as usual approaches to environmental policy. There is also consensus across political divides about the need for economic growth. Many environmental NGOs have become apologists for corporate self-regulation, market mechanisms, carbon pricing/trading and biodiversity offsetting/banking, while themselves commercialising species 'protection' as eco-tourism. In this issue of Environmental Values the state and direction of the environmental movement are at the fore. D'Amato et al. contrast pragmatism with the need for revolutionary change and consider which (...) will achieve social ecological transformation. Parry raises the issue of how animal activists should operate within an idealised deliberative democracy and what they could then legitimately justify doing to further their cause. Quist and Rinne are concerned with the challenges that disenfranchised groups face in building shared agendas and expressing themselves in their struggles to protect the environment and their ways of life. How natural resource extraction issues are framed by the media is the concern of Davies et al. Issues of power, inclusion and representation in the environmental movement are also raised in the paper by Fenney, which addresses the challenges specifically faced by disabled people. Societal change is an inherently value laden and political issue. Environmental policy is no more a win-win than any other policy; this journal issue shows how different polices change winners and losers. (shrink)

Environmentalists have long claimed it is unjust for the state to prioritize economic interests over environmental ones by sacrificing ecosystem integrity and functioning to unsustainably expand the economy. Recently, mainstream environmentalists have moved to a more conciliatory approach highlighting the common ground between environmental and economic goals. They today claim processes of economic growth and development can be made just if they become green. This paper explores the question: should states pursue “green growth”? Although some critics claim green growth is (...) impossible, I maintain it is. I theorize three conditions that must be met for an instance of growth to be truly considered green. That a development project is green, however, does not automatically ensure it is just. Justice considerations remain in adjudicating the competing interests of different groups of stakeholders. I then examine four reasonable approaches to resolving controversies over the pursuit of green growth: cost-benefit analysis, sufficientarianism, democracy, and pluralism. I conclude a liberal pluralist form of decision-making is best for ensuring fairness. (shrink)

_Edward Carpenter: In Appreciation_, first published in 1931, presents a collection of tributes to and reminiscences about the renowned socialist poet, pioneering gay rights activist, environmentalist and political thinker. Embroiled in controversy with prominent figures of all political persuasions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Carpenter’s vision of sexual freedom, democracy and an end to commercialism was maintained with integrity over the course of his whole life. These portraits and anecdotes testify to a man of both determination (...) and warmth, whose writings, though inspirational for many up to the 1960s, are seldom read today. (shrink)

The article presents the concept of ecological civilization and examines some of its aspects and its philosophical background. It points to the problem of under-standing the concepts of culture and civilization, also in relation to the under-standing of civilization as a further stage in the development of society. The ecological civilization should overcome the contemporary industrial civilization and its devastating effects on society and the environment. In examining the philosophical background of the concept, it focuses on Daoism and its relevance (...) to contemporary, especially Chinese environmentalism. Finally, it deals with the differences between the Chinese and Western versions of the concept of ecological civilization, which identifies in a different understanding of the possibilities of ecological democracy and authoritarianism as tools for achieving an environ-mentally sustainable society. (shrink)

One of the chief problems of the American environmental movement is the definition of philosophy—the exploration, examination, and elucidation of ideas—of the many different causes that have been combined in it. In this book Joseph Petulla sorts out the various issues and concepts of environmentalism by tracing their inspiration and values from the three traditions of environmental thought—the biocentric, the ecologic, and the economic. He examines the movement's historical roots, assumptions, goals, values, politics, struggles, successes, limitations, trends, and, finally, (...) the priorities it has brought to the national consciousness. This disentangling, clarifying process involves political implications and judgments about the recent directions of the environmental movement. Absolutist assumptions and methodologies often lead environmentalists and their opponents into conflict, yet even conflict groups must live with each other in the natural world, and that natural world must be understood by reason. This book attempts to establish wider ethical understanding and a political basis for support of environmentalism by promoting rational discussion about increasingly important subjects. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this essay, I argue that large‐scale technologies may be more threatening to open democratic institutions than to ecological systems. I describe the threat in terms of an alliance between bureacrats and entrepreneurs to govern society according to their own methods, e.g., cost‐benefit analysis, and thus to usurp the rule of law. In America, though not in England, blue‐collar and environmentalist constituencies have on occasion beaten back this threat, a triumph of democracy. I use ‘grid‐group’ theory, as developed (...) by Mary Douglas and her students, to make these arguments about the relation between technology and democracy. (shrink)

Since the early 2000s, authoritarianism has risen as an increasingly powerful global phenomenon. This shift has not only social and political implications, but environmental implications too: authoritarian leaders seek to recast the relationship between society and the government in every aspect of public life, including environmental policy. When historians of technology or the environment have investigated the environmental consequences of authoritarian regimes, they have frequently argued that authoritarian regimes have been unable to produce positive environmental results or adjust successfully to (...) global structural change, if they have shown any concern for the environment at all. Put another way, the scholarly consensus holds that authoritarian regimes on both the left and the right generally have demonstrated an anti-environmentalist bias, and when opposed by environmentalist social movements, have succeeded in silencing those voices. This book explores the theme of environmental politics and authoritarian regimes on both the right and the left. The authors argue that in instances when environmentalist policies offer the possibility of bolstering a country's domestic (nationalist) appeal or its international prestige, authoritarian regimes can endorse and have endorsed environmental protective measures. The collection of essays analyse environmentalist initiatives pursued by authoritarian regimes, and provide explanations for both the successes and failures of such regimes. Looking at a range of case studies from a number of countries, including Brazil, China, Poland and Zimbabwe. (shrink)

Islamic environmentalism is an intellectual movement whose representatives discuss contemporary environmental problems in the language of Islamic theology. This field includes Shariah-based environmental law, environmental activism, and environmental philosophy. This article is an overview of the genealogy of this philosophical trend: key names will be listed and their contributions to the development of this movement will be analyzed. For example, the legacy of Sayyid Hossein Nasr, considered the founding father of Islamic environmentalism, will be examined in detail. The (...) religious and ethical program of this philosophical movement will be analyzed in detail. The categorical apparatus to which Islamic eco-activists, philosophers, and ulema turned as the Islamic environmental agenda expanded will also be examined, such as how the concepts of khalifa, hima, and misan were conceptualized. Philosophers whose writings we will turn to include Iraqi philosopher and jurist Mawil Izzi Dien, British eco-activist Fazlun Khalid, Egyptian Grand Mufti Ali Jumaa, and representatives of so-called “Western Islam” Ziauddin Sardar and Tariq Ramadan. The example of Indonesia will be used to examine how Islamic eco-theology has formed the basis of a multilevel environmental policy. The thesis of the fundamental contradiction underlying Islamic environm entalism is put forward. On the one hand, this movement in its present form genetically dates back to the European protest movements of the 1960s and 70s, which opposed the culture of mass consumption, impersonal materialism, and overproduction. On the other hand, an equally important part of the rhetoric of a number of Islamic modernists, including on ecology, is the emphasis on the break with Western neoliberal values. The special role of social media in the promotion of Islamic eco-activism is noted separately. (shrink)

I motivate and develop a normative framework for undertaking work in applied epistemology. I set out the framework, which I call epistemic environmentalism, explaining the role of social epistemology and epistemic value theory in the framework. Next, I explain the environmentalist terminology that is employed and its usefulness. In the second part of the paper, I make the case for a specific epistemic environmentalist proposal. I argue that dishonest testimony by experts and certain institutional testifiers should be liable to (...) the sanction of inclusion on a register of epistemic polluters. In doing so, I explain the special role that experts and the relevant institutional testifiers play in the epistemic environment and how the proposal is justified on the basis of that special role. (shrink)

The position advocated in the target article should be called “absurd environmentalism.” Literature showing that general intelligence is related to musical ability is not cited. Also ignored is the heritability of musical talent. Retrospective studies supporting practice over talent are incapable of showing differences in talent, because subjects are self-selected on talent. Reasons for the popularity of absurd environmentalism are discussed.

The prelims comprise: The Athenian Solution The Filter The Mirror The “Mob” The Apparent Conundrum Referendum Democracy versus Deliberation Modern Deliberative Microcosms The Role of Representatives Notes Bibliography.

Beyond Environmentalism is the first book of its kind to present a timely and relevant analysis of environmentalism.

When the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary went to press in 1971, it still recognized only one sense of ‘environmentalism’ – as the name of a particular sociological theory holding that the differences between human cultures were to be wholly explained in terms of such factors as soil, climate and food supplies. As for the now cognate term ‘ecological’, that too had a purely scientific significance. The German zoologist Ernst Haeckel had coined the word ‘ecology’ in its German (...) form as early as 1870, to signify ‘the investigation of the total relations of the animal both to its organic and its inorganic environment’. It was soon extended beyond animals to the study, in these terms, both of plant life and of human societies. (shrink)

This book aims merely to study the human values that were sought and realized by Greek democracy, the chief problems that it faced, the measure of success and ...

Aesthetic Democracy argues that art and the aesthetic in general are the founding condition of the possibility of establishing social and political democracy. The book examines contemporary criticism and finds that it is historically shaped by colonialism, and that it sets up an opposition of east and west that shapes all contemporary cultural politics. The author argues for a way of outwitting this potentially dangerous struggle of east and west grounded in an aestheticism and a validation of sensory (...) experience. Docherty proposes a new model of cultural critique, based on a revitalized and positively valorized notion of “hypocrisy,” whose roots lie in Machiavelli, but whose contemporary strength lies in its potential for an ethical encounter with alterity as such. (shrink)

The collapse of the Soviet Union, all hope that Eastern European communism might somehow be transformed into a more attractive, less environmentally destructive social order than the liberal democratic societies of the West has been destroyed. The description of the modern predicament by Alvin W. Gouldner has become even more poignant: "The political uniqueness of our own era then is this; we have lived and still live through a desperate political and social malaise, while at the same time we have (...) outlived the desperate revolutionary remedies that had once been thought to solve them." If this is the case, there is reason to examine the failure of the Soviet Union more closely. Was it possible that things might have worked out differently; and if so, does this provide any orientation for the present? In this paper I will show how an alternative path for Soviet society had been charted, and partly implemented, in the 1920's by the radical wing of Bolshevism, a path which made environmental conservation a central issue. And I will suggest that this is the path which holds most hope for the future. (shrink)

Hobbits and hooligans -- Ignorant, irrational, misinformed nationalists -- Political participation corrupts -- Politics doesn't empower you or me -- Politics is not a poem -- The right to competent government -- Is democracy competent? -- The rule of the knowers -- Civic enemies.

Is there a public good? A prevalent view in political science is that democracy is unavoidably chaotic, arbitrary, meaningless, and impossible. Such scepticism began with Condorcet in the eighteenth century, and continued most notably with Arrow and Riker in the twentieth century. In this powerful book, Gerry Mackie confronts and subdues these long-standing doubts about democratic governance. Problems of cycling, agenda control, strategic voting, and dimensional manipulation are not sufficiently harmful, frequent, or irremediable, he argues, to be of normative (...) concern. Mackie also examines every serious empirical illustration of cycling and instability, including Riker's famous argument that the US Civil War was due to arbitrary dimensional manipulation. Almost every empirical claim is erroneous, and none is normatively troubling, Mackie says. This spirited defence of democratic institutions should prove both provocative and influential. (shrink)

Our democracies presently face a set of unique challenges. In this article we argue that the current crisis needs to be understood as resulting from the convergence of two historical transformations: the paradigm of boundlessness; and what we term “endividualismo”, a novel mutation of individualism in the context of the financial age. The result is a novel political reality where individual rights are ever-expanding and the opportunities for collective action have shrunk to the point of impossibility. The resulting powerlessness of (...) the polity demands new answers: we need to reconfigure the relationship between citizens and political power. (shrink)

That some animals need to prey on others in order to live is lamentable. While no one wants predators to die of starvation, a world in which no animal needed to prey on others would, in some meaningful sense, be a better world. Predation is lamentable for four primary reasons: predation often inflicts pain on prey animals; it often frustrates prey animals’ desires; anything other than lamentation—which would include relishing predation as well as being indifferent to it—is in tension with (...) sensitivity to many other forms of hardship and suffering; and lamenting is demanded by the virtues of compassion and gentleness. One can lament predation even while acknowledging respects in which predation is genuinely praiseworthy. One can esteem admirable traits developed through and displayed in predation without esteeming the mechanism through which they are developed or the activity in which they are displayed. In addition, appreciating the check on population that predation provides does not preclude lamenting predation. While holding these positions does involve opposing nature itself and failing to appreciate predators for exactly what they are, doing so does not disqualify a person as an environmentalist. Finally, one can lament predation without being logically committed thereby to preventing or disrupting it. (shrink)

Environmental theorists, seeking the origin of Western exploitative attitudes toward nature, have directed their attacks against 'humanism'. This essay argues that such criticisms are misplaced. Humanism has much closer affinities to environmentalism than the latter' s advocates believe. As early as the Renaissance, and certainly by the late eighteenth century, humanists were developing historically-conscious, hermeneutically-grounded modes of understanding, rather than the abstract, mathematical models of nature often associated with them. In its twentieth-century versions humanism also shares much of the (...) mistrust of consumerism, instrumental reason, and 'worldlessness' that marks environmentalist literature. Nevertheless, humanism is indeed committed to the principle that human beings are and ought to be free, and opposes theoretical approaches that suppress freedom. Reconciling humanism and environmentalism thus involves two steps: resisting the former's tendency to treat nature and freedom as metaphysical polarities, and drawing environmental theory away from flirtation with deterministic, biologistic worldviews. The essay concludes by suggesting Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac as the paradigm case of environmental thought with roots in humanist approaches. (shrink)

While the subject of democracy has been explored by philosophers since ancient times, in the last few decades democracy has been taken for granted in the West as the political norm. The issue of democracy as an empty concept in western political discourse and the emergence of radical democracy has renewed engagement in democratic theory and politics. _Radicalizing Democracy in the Twenty-first Century _explores the radicalizing movement in democratic thought and: • Introduces readers to the (...) key debates in contemporary philosophical theories about democracy. • Confronts popular assumptions about democracy. • Provides a philosophical underpinning for the rise of radical democratic theories, movements and politics. • Examines how radical democracy can respond to the challenges of the contemporary world. Radicalizing Democracy in the Twenty-first Century is an important resource for students, scholars and university teachers in the field of political philosophy, political theory and international relations. (shrink)

This book articulates a participatory conception of deliberative democracy that takes the democratic ideal of self-government seriously. It aims to improve citizens' democratic control and vindicate the value of citizens' participation against conceptions that threaten to undermine it. The book critically analyzes deep pluralist, epistocratic, and lottocratic conceptions of democracy. Their defenders propose various institutional ''shortcuts'' to help solve problems of democratic governance such as overcoming disagreements, citizens' political ignorance, or poor-quality deliberation. However, all these shortcut proposals require (...) citizens to blindly defer to actors over whose decisions they cannot exercise control. Implementing such proposals would therefore undermine democracy. Moreover, it seems naive to assume that a community can reach better outcomes 'faster' if it bypasses the beliefs and attitudes of its citizens. Unfortunately, there are no 'shortcuts' to make a community better than its members. The only road to better outcomes is the long, participatory road that is taken when citizens forge a collective will by changing one another's hearts and minds. However difficult the process of justifying political decisions to one another may be, skipping it cannot get us any closer to the democratic ideal. Starting from this conviction, the book defends a conception of democracy ''without shortcuts''. This conception sheds new light on long-standing debates about the proper scope of public reason, the role of religion in politics, and the democratic legitimacy of judicial review. It also proposes new ways to unleash the democratic potential of institutional innovations such as deliberative minipublics. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: I'm an Mammal, I'm a Reptile, I'm a Tree! Asanas as Earth Democracy in Practice Yogis for the Earth.