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In Wildness is the Liberation of the World: On Maroon Ecology and Partisan Nature
Abstract
For good reasons, the green movement turned from wilderness to environmental justice as its central category in the 1980s and '90s. Today, several leading wilderness advocates seem to compete for the most reactionary positions, particularly on the issue of migration. A case can, however, be made for a progressive, cosmopolitan, Marxist view of wilderness as a space less fully subjugated to capital than others. There is a long history of exploited and persecuted people seeking freedom in and through the wild. This essay focuses on two such groups-maroons and Jewish partisans- A nd asks what we lose in a rapidly warming world where the remotest and supposedly wildest corners of the world are among the first to be destroyed.
... Over time, under the feudal mode of production, the countryside came to be associated with the peasantry and their common rights and rites (rituals), as a commons managed collectively (Linebaugh, 2009). This was a domesticated and tamed but relatively 'natural' landscape of mixed arable and pasture farmlandbeyond which lay untamed or even uncharted territory or 'wilderness', understood as spaces of relative wildness with a degree of autonomy from capitalist and pre-capitalist social forms (Malm, 2018; see also Cronon, 1996). Thus, the countryside emerged as a relational space defined by triadic contrast to urban settlements and wilderness. ...
... This episode in 'the people's history of wilderness' (Malm, 2018) counters conceptions of wilderness as untouched by forms of human habitation (Cronon, 1996) -views of nature that have written people out of landscapes and informed racialised and colonial forms of land conservation and rewilding. While the category of wilderness is absent from Heron and Heffron's (2022) theorisation of the town-country antithesis and its communist synthesis, such wild ecologies arguably have a place within their vision of the postcapitalist countryside. ...
This chapter identifies what urban-rural struggles and transformations in social relations might move us beyond a capitalist to a postcapitalist mode of production, or mode of life (Moore, 2015). In this transition from one mode of life to another, the question of land – the question of the urban and the rural – is of fundamental importance (Foster, 2023). What new ways of thinking about and relating to land would it take to bring about postcapitalist countrysides, as the title of this edited collection articulates it?
https://uclpress.co.uk/book/postcapitalist-countrysides/
... From 1493, a global process erupted, paradoxically called the "Columbian exchange" of people, plants, and animals, making ecosystems increasingly similar. Thus, not only has biodiversity drastically declined, but biogeography and ecosystems around the world have homogenized, after countless numbers of invasive species have been introduced into almost every region, sometimes inadvertently, other times intentionally, with the paradoxical aim of "diversifying" (in this case, synonymous with "homogenizing") and expanding livestock and crops-returning to the idea of capitalist expansion as the real origin of the crisis (Malm, 2018(Malm, , 2020(Malm, , 2021Malm & Hornborg, 2014;Moore, 2016Moore, , 2017. The new trade, often unidirectional and one-sided, but already on a relatively global scale, meant that new imported species of plants and animals suddenly appeared in regions where they had never existed, often eliminating native species. ...
The entrance into the Anthropocene Epoch has pushed historians and social scientists to reconsider human history through new lenses and along an entirely different timeline. For historians, the notion of the Anthropocene can be seen as an overarching category superimposed on the usual chronological divisions into ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary history. In social sciences in general, the notion of the Anthropocene has been embraced, often critically, by enlarging its semantic field through a series of neologisms, which this article aims to analyze and contribute to. Originating from within stratigraphy and geology, the new coining for a (not yet official) epoch acts as a tectonic shift by bringing geology into history, as well as into humanities and social sciences. Paradoxically, it could be said that humans are being “ejected from history” just as geology enriches itself with a human-centered eponym, Anthropocene, that is, when specific actions carried out by a single biological species, homo sapiens, have spawned consequences so deep and everlasting that an imprint upon the Earth’s stratigraphy has been impressed forever. These specific actions can be encapsulated in a single term: overconsumption, possibly accompanied by its twin dimension, overexploitation (of resources). This article sets out to identify the period and sequence of events leading to the shift from consumption to overconsumption and from exploitation to overexploitation. Identifying the moment these transitions occurred is essential, as the double excess of “over” patterns has characterized what is commonly understood as the Anthropocene Epoch.
... Na wyspie nie tyle miejskie, ile górskie powietrze czyniło człowieka wolnym" (Łepkowski 1964, 208 Amato 2020). Bez większego ryzyka błędu możemy przyjąć, że w świecie przed wynalezieniem kolei każde większe podwyższenie terenu musiało utrudniać egzekucję podatków i pańszczyzny, komplikując kontrolę w środowisku, które było znane lokalnej ludności, ale mało dostępne i niebezpieczne dla agentów zewnętrznych ośrodków władzy (kościelnej, państwowej, feudalnej czy niewolniczej) (Braudel 1976, 40;Scott 2010;Malm 2018). ...
Esej jest wprowadzeniem do numeru Praktyki Teoretycznej poświęconego środowiskowym historiom kapitalizmu. Na przykładzie rewolucji w Haiti i prowadzonych równolegle do tego wydarzenia europejskich walk z mechanizacją pracy autor pokazuje, jak różne rodzaje układów społeczno-ekologicznych wzmacniały lub osłabiały pozycję grup podporządkowanych.
This article aims to discuss the issue of political agency in the context of the climate crisis. In this regard, the article reports and analyzes the outlines of the debate on the relationship between human beings and the non-human world, and takes Bruno Latour’s theoretical proposal and some criticisms of it as a reference. For the most part, this debate revolves around ontological questions concerning the status of human beings in the world. Such questions provide arguments for better understanding whether politics represents an autonomous dimension in which human agency possesses a peculiar meaning or not.
Transformations to sustainability require alternatives to the paradigms, practices, and policies that have generated social-ecological destruction and the Anthropocene. In sustainability science, several conceptual frameworks have been developed for transformations, including social-ecological, multi-level, transformative adaptation, and pathways approaches. There is a growing shift towards recognising transformations as ‘shared spaces’ involving multiple ways of knowing, being, and doing. Diverse relational approaches to transformations are increasingly articulated by Indigenous, humanities, and social science scholars, practitioners, and activists from the Global South and North. Broadly, relational approaches enact alternatives to separable categories of society and nature, emphasise unfolding relations between human and non-human beings, and highlight the importance of ethical responsibilities and care for these relationships. Yet while it is important to recognise the collective significance of diverse relational lifeways, practices, and philosophies to transformations, it is also vital to recognise their differences: efforts to produce universal frameworks and toolboxes for applying relationality can reproduce modernist-colonialist knowledge practices, hinder recognition of the significance of relational approaches, and marginalise more radical approaches. In this paper we explore five intersecting ‘relationalities’ currently contributing to discussions around transformations: (i) Indigenous-kinship, (ii) systemic-analytical, (iii) posthumanist-performative, (iv) structural-metabolic, and (v) Latin American-postdevelopment. We explore how these different relational approaches address key concepts in transformations research, including human-nature connectedness; agency and leadership; scale and scaling; time and change; and knowledge and action. We suggest that their diversity gives rise to practices of transformations as ‘walking together in a world of many worlds’ and support intercultural dialogue on sustainability transformations.
Following substantial investments in battery production and fossil-free steel, a few select places in northern Sweden are currently undergoing rapid economic and cultural changes. The aim of this article is to explore the role language education plays for three different groups of (im)mobile subjects – refugees, labor migrants, and cosmopolitan elites – in the ongoing social transformations. By using the time-consuming and ideologically charged social practice of teaching and learning languages as a lens, it is argued that although framed as a sustainability project, the pace of the transformation is set by the accelerating logic of capitalism, posing a challenge to the democratic planning of inclusive local communities, as well as to societal subsystems characterized by much slower temporal regimes. Hence, although Sweden is committed to a “just transition” as part of the Paris Agreement, some are obviously benefiting much more than others from this transition. This paper further highlights the potentially high costs for the local communities that “win” the bids for the new green industries. Apart from considerable economic costs in the present, another result might also be increased social stratification and weakening social cohesion in the long term.
Bu makale zoonotik salgınlar-çevre sorunları ve güvenlik arasındaki ilişkilerin önemine dair son dönemde artan tartışmalara müdahil olmaktadır. Makalede, zoonotik salgınlar ve çevre-güvenlik bağlantıları ile ilişkili olarak nedensellik sorununa dayanan -mevcut literatüre alternatif- bir başlangıç noktası sunulacaktır. Makalenin amacı özgürleştirici bir sosyo-biyolojik güvenlik anlayışının gelişimine katkıda bulunmaktır. Makalede, “kimin için, ne için güvenlik” sorusuna odaklanan mevcut literatürün, doğa ve toplum arasındaki ilişkiselliği ve nedensel mekanizmaları göz ardı ettiği iddia ediliyor. Makale, felsefi düzlemde eleştirel gerçekçiliğin, kuramsal düzlemde ise Marksizm’in toplum bilimlerine yaptığı katkıdan besleniyor. Eleştirel gerçekçiliğin ön plana çıkardığı materyalist- diyalektik soyutlamalar güvensizliğin altında yatan mekanizmalara vurgu yapmamıza yardımcı olurken, eleştirel gerçekçilikle desteklenmiş Marksist yaklaşım pratikte sorunun nasıl çözüleceğine odaklanır. Bu bakımdan makale, tartışmanın odağını güvenliğin nesnesi ne olmalı (devlet, insan veya doğa) sorusundan güvensizliği ortaya çıkaran yapı ve mekanizmalar arasındaki nedenselliğe kaydırmaktadır. Buna uygun olarak makalede sosyo-biyolojik güvensizliklerin bir tesadüf sonucu ortaya çıkmadığı da savunulmaktadır.
In this article, we argue that E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful offers important insights for contemporary social theory. In particular, we focus on the merits of his use of ‘meta-economics’ and of ‘scale’ as a means for advancing ecological social critique. While we are sympathetic to Schumacher’s approach, we are mindful of the limitations to his theoretical imagination and commence our article acknowledging his partisan metaphysics and his insensitivity to global political dynamics. To resolve this, we demonstrate that the central critical insights Schumacher provides can be substantially extricated from these problems. Our task here, therefore, is a critical reconstruction of Schumacher’s approach to social-ecological critique, which we claim offers the potential to shape contemporary social theory, both within and beyond critical political ecology.
Political ecology is a recent development in contemporary scholarship. Contrary to popular belief, the French philosopher Bruno Latour was not its originator. Some scholars began to recognise that nature and politics were closely connected back to the time of Montesquieu. Nonetheless, Latour’s political ecology is original in that it features new or revamped concepts that lend it new content and meaning. It includes concepts such as ‘mode of existence,’ ‘actor/network,’ ‘humans’ and ‘non-humans,’ ‘terrestrial’ or ‘Earthbound,’ and offers a new interpretation of the concepts of nature and politics. These concepts are the focus of the first and second parts of the article. The final part looks at their practical application, particularly in connection with Latour’s idea of creating a common world fit for life, or at least survival. -------------------------- Received: 24/11/2022. Reviewed: 08/03/2023. Accepted: 30/03/2023.
Föreliggande studie har som syfte att undersöka vilka kunskaper och erfarenheter som förskollärare lyfter fram i samtal kring förskolebarns utforskande av väder och klimat som naturvetenskapliga fenomen. Det empiriska materialet omfattas av deltagande observationer vid ett nätverksmöte med förskollärare som under läsåret 2020/2021 har temat väder och klimat. Med hjälp av begreppen ”terrestrial” och ”natur-kultur” hämtade från Donna Haraway och Bruno Latour görs analyser av förskollärarnas samtal. Studien visar att de kunskaper och erfarenheter som förskollärare lyfter fram som handlar om kroppsliga upplevelser av natur och väder, men även om en medvetenhet om och kunskap kring människans del i ekologin. Studien visar utöver detta vilka didaktiska frågor och överväganden som aktualiseras i förskollärares samtal om barns utforskande av väder och klimatsamt belyser frågan om att göra och synliggöra kopplingar kring naturvetenskapliga fenomen. I relation till tidigare forskning om didaktiska överväganden inom naturvetenskaplig undervisning i en antropocen tid problematiseras den polariserade frågan om att ”lära-om” kontra att ”lära-med” natur och väder i en förskolekontext.
Natural history, loosely defined as the observational study of organisms in the habitats where they occur, is recognized at the roots of ecology. Although the centrality of natural history in ecology has shifted over time, natural history is currently in resurgence: many again consider it to be the foundation of ecological and evolutionary inquiry and advocate the value of organism‐centered approaches to address contemporary ecological challenges. Educators identify natural history as the foundational entryway into the practice of ecology, for example in the Ecological Society of America's Four‐Dimensional Ecology Education (4DEE) framework. A strong natural history foundation can help generate testable hypotheses to refine mechanistic understanding of the drivers regulating species distributions and abundances and to inform restoration and conservation efforts. Given the resurgence of natural history as the foundation for ecological knowledge and practice, it is important to recognize that natural history has a long history of racism that has impacted ecological thought and priorities. This history shapes not only who conducts ecological science but also foundational ecological concepts. For example, natural history's emphasis on pristine nature untouched by humans disregards or appropriates stewardship and knowledge of most of the world's population. Because of the legacy of chattel slavery, this exclusion is particularly strong for people of African descent. This exclusion narrows ecological inquiry, limits the capacity to find solutions to ecological problems, and risks interventions that perpetuate the relation between eugenics, ecological knowledge, and natural systems. If ecology is to become an inclusive, responsive, and resilient discipline, this knowledge gap must be addressed. We here present the colonial and racist underpinnings of natural history and offer strategies to expand inclusion in the study of nature. Natural history was steeped in racism, providing a hierarchy of cultures and a taxonomy of races. Complementing growing interest in traditional and Indigenous ecological knowledge, we focus on Black ecological knowledge, for example in the study of “maroon ecologies.” Addressing the racist history of natural history is necessary for removing structural and racist barriers to diverse participation and expanding ecological knowledge bases in service of better and more just science.
This chapter focuses on some socio-spatial views by Nordic geographers who have studied the tendencies of politicisation vs. depoliticisation of human/nature relationships. First, I introduce early formulations of politics of nature research by showing the epistemological grounding and argumentation for the political in Nordic nature studies. This is followed by an overview of studies that have focused on depoliticising drives and turns in contemporary human/nature practices. The variations in handling and conceptualising the dominating aspects of neoliberal environmental governance will be described. Thereafter, I address some approaches of research within Nordic geography that are entangled in the processes and actors defending and promoting a (re)politicisation in nature-use. Finally, I discuss the Nordic content and bearing found in the geographical contributions included in this study.
As a basic concept, sustainable development combines meeting global environmental challenges with the realisation of social aspirations. Sustainability history must, therefore, constitute a branch of historical inquiry that combines social and environmental issues into a connected whole. In order to do so, it is necessary to clarify the deeper historical meanings of society and environment and their interrelations, and to establish a platform from which to observe the hybrid realities of change.
This book has explored a project that was orchestrated in an arts-based program in an early learning centre. We have described the context, the development of the program and the richness of a particular project within this centre. The roles of the children and the adults are significant, and these have been unpacked in previous chapters. In this final chapter we return to the theme of the languages of childhood and discuss the value of a multi-modal approach to promoting creative expression and recognize the importance of individual and collaborative voices to make meaning of experience.
This chapter provides a background to the story of a year-long project between a group of preschool children and their teachers The ELC has specialist teachers who support the arts-based program and for this project an Australian musician and composer was invited to visit the centre to facilitate the composition of five songs. We explore the use of metaphors to describe the projects detailed in Chap. 5 and the growth of one song is explained in terms of early childhood education and the practice of linking experience to activity in Chap. 6. Metaphor is also a means of expressing intangible ideas like emotional engagement. We identify what makes a good project and explore the concept of ‘big ideas’ or ‘life-worthy’ investigations. These are important concepts underpinning the work in the ELC centre Theoretical considerations include the image of the child, learning by doing and the role of the environment.
Using a case study of Alberta, Canada, this paper demonstrates how a geographic critique of fossil capitalism helps elucidate the tensions shaping tar sands development. Conflicts over pipelines and Indigenous territorial claims are challenging development trajectories, as tar sands companies need to expand access to markets in order to expand production. While these conflicts are now well recognised, there are also broader dynamics shaping development. States face a rentier’s dilemma, relying on capital investments to realise resource value. Political responses to the emerging climate crisis undercut the profitability of hydrocarbon extraction. The automation of production undermines the industrial compromise between hydrocarbon labour and capital. Ultimately, the crises of fossil capitalism require a radical transformation within or beyond capital relations. To mobilise against the tar sands, organisers must recognise the tensions underpinning it, developing strategies that address ecological concerns and the economic plight of those dispossessed and abandoned by carbon extraction.
This chapter explores the implications for curriculum studies of a shift from a carbon-based era to a post-carbon one. The rise of mass education systems coincided with the processes of industrialisation. The school curriculum was a ‘fossil curriculum’, reflecting a society whose economy was based on fossilised sunlight but which assumed the separation of society and nature. The school curriculum reflects dominant ‘industrial’ conceptions of the relationship between society and nature. The transformation to a post-carbon economy will require a radical realignment of that relationship, and the post-carbon curriculum will demand different ways of thinking about the content and organisation of knowledge. We are now entering a new epoch, one propelled by human-induced climate change and the idea of the Anthropocene, which holds that we are at the end of the settled period known as the Holocene. Human impact on the earth system is altering the operations of that Earth System. Does this pose the question of the nature of a ‘post-carbon’ curriculum? What will subjects such as English, science, history and geography look like as they are re-oriented to respond to ‘the shock of the Anthropocene’? What styles of curriculum thought are appropriate to this age? The answers to these questions are not easily settled, and depend on how the relationship between society and nature is conceptualised. This chapter clears the ground for such a curriculum reconceptualisation.
Is materialism still relevant to critically think politics? Throughout modernity, the concept of materialism was associated with fatalism and naturalism, when it was not simply dismissed as heresy and atheism. In the nineteenth century, materialism evolved into a central concept of progressive politics, reappearing again in the past decades through renewed Marxist and Spinoza-based approaches, New Materialism, and feminist discourses. This volume inquires these contrasting uses from theoretical and historical perspectives.
This chapter applies the SoP approach to the consumption of food which has become increasingly dysfunctional, with obesity set to create a global health epidemic. The chapter shows that these outcomes result from the intersections of cultures of food consumption and the systems by which food is produced. Capitalist imperatives underpinning food production create pressures to expand output in the pursuit of profitability, alongside the emergence of financialization which has created structures oriented around speculation alongside production in agriculture. Producers therefore need the food produced to be consumed. Neoliberalized systems of food production intersect with material cultures of food consumption to give rise to consumption norms. The chapter deploys the 10Cs (Chap. 3) to show that cultures are diverse and complex, needing reference to how food beliefs and practices are formed and the role of food producers within these. The chapter shows that the SoP approach offers significant insights regarding the limitations of dietary advice in improving health outcomes without stronger controls over the systemic processes around provisioning.
This literature review describes and analyses 19 peer-reviewed scholarly articles published between 2015 and 2020 that focus on the notion of the Anthropocene in early childhood education. The review is guided by two pairs of analytical concepts stemming from environmental history and the sociology of childhood. The results of the analyses are presented under the themes ‘entangled children of the Anthropocene’ and ‘extraordinary children of the Anthropocene’. These two categories of children recur in the reviewed articles, and a discussion follows about how these children pose different challenges to the purpose of education in the Anthropocene. The review concludes by noting research gaps in the current literature that would benefit from further analysis in future studies in the early childhood education field.
Making sense of our world of epochal transformations is an ongoing concerted effort of various endeavors. Ideas as diverse as Karen Barad’s “agential realism,” Ulrich Beck’s theory of the “metamorphosis of the world,” and the appeal to indigenous knowledges in Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s The Ends of the World are equally instrumental in capturing various aspects of the larger picture. Although the respective themes they address and the views they express sound reasonable separately, taken together they entail hardly reconcilable and oftentimes contradictory imperatives with respect to the question of how to inhabit the very world they attempt to understand. Following an overview of conflicting views, this book concludes with the takeaway message that learning to inhabit a world of epochal transformations is not simply a matter of understanding that world and producing knowledge about it in light of one imperative or the other. It is also a matter of learning to navigate carefully among conflicting but equally compelling imperatives that underlie the greatest challenges we face today.
The starting point of this article is the escalating climate crisis, the precarity it has already caused in the Global South, and the fact that nations in the Global North have also begun to suffer from climate change, a development that is likely to accelerate in the future. The focus of the article is the disagreement within eco-socialist and postcolonial scholarship on the future of capitalism and on how global relations will change in a world transformed by the climate crisis. These questions are approached via Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker trilogy (2010–17) which depicts how global social and economic relations have been transformed in a world altered by the climate crisis. The article argues that while these novels describe the future world as still capitalist and sharply class divided, and (illegal) migration as the only escape from precarity, they also imagine a profound shift in how wealth is distributed.
Lenton and Latour proposed there is now a new phase of Gaian history, Gaia 2.0, where humanity is challenged to collectively manage the biosphere in its own interests as well as those of the rest of life on our planet. Here is an ecosocialist perspective on Gaia 2.0. There are three critical requirements for still having a chance, if rapidly diminishing, of keep global warming below the IPCC goal of 1.5°C, namely, demilitarization of the global economy, global solarization of energy supplies coupled with rapid phase out of fossil fuels, and the transformation of agriculture to agroecologies. Degrowth proposals for the global energy supply would not provide the energy capacity for climate mitigation and adaptation, and would fall short of creating equity between the global South and North, in particular by keeping most of humanity in a state of energy poverty. The only feasible way to avoid climate catastrophe are radical changes in both the physical and political economies, notably the degrowth and rapid dissolution of the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) and implementation of a Global Green New Deal as a pathway for global ecosocialist transition.
Esej recenzyjny wokół książki Andreasa Malma "Progress of this Storm. Nature and Society in the Warming World" (Verso, London-New York 2018).
In November 2015, Slovenia erected a technical security barrier in the form of a razor-wired fence along the most exposed parts (178 km) of the Slovenia-Croatia border. Over a ten-month period (11 November 2015 – 11 September 2016), carcasses of 21 ungulates (13 red deer and 8 roe deer) and two grey herons were found entangled in the razor-wired fence, giving a mortality rate of 0.12 ungulates/km of fence. Although the direct impact of the fence on wildlife mortality is of relatively low importance, over the long-term, the fence may pose a serious threat to wildlife via its barrier effect, resulting in fragmentation of habitats and disconnection of populations. Therefore, systematic studies are urgently required to determine the implications of the fence on spatial behavior, movements and gene flow of key species in the border zone.
The ongoing refugee crisis in Europe has seen many countries rush to construct border security fencing to divert or control the flow of people. This follows a trend of border fence construction across Eurasia during the post-9/11 era. This development has gone largely unnoticed by conservation biologists during an era in which, ironically, transboundary cooperation has emerged as a conservation paradigm. These fences represent a major threat to wildlife because they can cause mortality, obstruct access to seasonally important resources, and reduce effective population size. We summarise the extent of the issue and propose concrete mitigation measures. The Rise of Transboundary Conservation Conserving biodiversity on an increasingly crowded planet will always involve a combination of applying ecological knowledge and skilful politics. The art of successful conservation lies in aligning the best available knowledge with the appropriate management actions and the current political and economic realities. Accordingly, conservationists must constantly adjust their strategies to the prevailing opportunities and constraints within a constantly shifting environment. The period from the early 1980s through the dawn of the 21st century was marked by a fortuitous convergence of situations. Environmental awareness among the general population was PLOS Biology |
WEB Du Bois argued that black participation in the US Civil War was “the largest and most successful slave revolt,” but he did not link the causative agents of black participation in the war to those that motivated other major slave revolts in the antebellum USA. In this essay, I focus on how two factors contributed to such revolts: (1) slave religion, which provided an ideological justification for overthrowing the slave system and mobile slave preachers to articulate it, and (2) the system of hiring out slaves—especially slave artisans, which increased their disaffection with the slave system, while expanding networks across plantations and rural and urban slave and free black communities. I argue that these two factors provided ideological motivation and institutional coordination for the antebellum revolts and for the slave revolt of the Civil War, as well.
In 2002, the year it was published, The Environmentalism of the Poor was one of the first books examining in a multidisciplinary perspective three parallel environmental movements around the world. Eleven years later, we re-examine these movements – the Cult of Wilderness, the Gospel of Eco-Efficiency and the Mantra of Environmental Justice, – focusing on the increased visibility of struggles representing Environmental Justice and The Environmentalism of the Poor. Even if they are often disconnected from an organizational standpoint, glocal manifestations of resistance have emerged since the 1990s. Today, environmental movements assert common values related to place, identity, and culture. Activists' concepts such as ecological debt, environmental justice, environmental liabilities, land grabbing, environmental gentrification, corporate accountability, climate justice, food sovereignty, or economic degrowth are the keywords of the networks of the global Environmental Justice movement. At the same time, such concepts support the rural and urban movements that remake place for marginalized groups, re-assert traditional practices, and protect territory from contamination, land appropriation, and real estate speculation. Some possibilities exist for cooperation between Environmental Justice and the other varieties of environmentalism. Here, comparative research can help unravel the use of valuation languages different from “green” economic growth or sustainable development.
In contemporary politics, nature is generally assumed to be a commitment of the political left and restrictionism a commitment of the right. The reality, however, is significantly more complicated: in the United States, environmentalists have argued for immigration restrictions since the movement first began in the last 1800s; many of the so-called fathers of American environmentalism were immigration restrictionists; and the argument continues to attract vocal adherents among mainstream and radical greens.This book seeks to explain these seemingly paradoxical commitments by grounding them in contemporary debates over the relationship between sovereignty and nature. It observes that – amid the ruptures of neoliberal globalization – restrictionist and their opponents seek to reconfigure the relationship between sovereignty and nature toward what they believe to be a sustainable end. Through this analysis, it makes the case that nature is increasingly being deployed as a form of "walling"-enabling restrictionists to subtly reinforce territorial boundaries and identities without having to revert to racial and cultural logics that are unpalatable to the political left. This phenomenon has major implications on the prospect for justice an inclusion in the 21st century; well-intentioned environmentalist efforts to “green sovereignty” are actually serving to reinforce exclusionary forms of political community.It argues that attention to the realities of transnational migration could provide an alternative perspective upon which to construct a very different brand of socio-ecological activism – one that might be our only chance of effectively confronting the powerful forces and structures producing ecological devastation and social injustice.
As the Holocaust unfolded, approximately 50,000 to 80,000 Jews, predominantly from Eastern Poland, sought refuge in nearby forests. Thus, the forest became another Holocaust ‘space and place’ – an important socio-spatial arena for agency and power relations between various agents including partisans (both non-Jewish and Jewish), peasants small Jewish groups-in-hiding, and Nazis. This article explores the forest as a liminal space where pre-war norms and cultural boundaries were challenged, reversed and reworked to increase chances for survival. The article is based largely on interviews with surviving ‘forest fugitives’ conducted by the author.
Wilderness provides a multidisciplinary introduction into the diverse ways in which we make sense of wilderness: how we conceptualise it, experience it, interact with, and imagine it. Drawing upon key theorists, philosophers, and researchers who have contributed important knowledge to the topic, this title argues for a relational and process based notion of the term and understands it as a keystone for the examination of issues from conservation to more-than-human relations. The text is organized around themed chapters discussing the concept of wilderness and its place in the social imagination, wilderness regulation and management, access, travel and tourism, representation in media and arts, and the use of wilderness for education, exploration, play, and therapy, as well as its parcelling out in parks, reserves, or remote "wastelands". The book maps out the historical transformation of the idea of wilderness, highlighting its intersections with notions of nature and wildness and teasing out the implications of these links for theoretical debate. It offers boxes that showcase important recent case studies ranging from the development of adventure travel and eco-tourism to the practice of trekking to the changing role of technology use in the wild. Summaries of key points, further readings, Internet-based resources, short videos, and discussion questions allow readers to grasp the importance of wilderness to wider social, cultural, political, economic, historical and everyday processes. Wilderness is designed for courses and modules on the subject at both postgraduate and undergraduate levels. The book will also assist professional geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, environmental and cultural studies scholars to engage with recent and important literature on this elusive concept.
In the seventeenth century, the Caribbean islands were increasingly incorporated into the international trade network, the core of which was constituted by the European colonial powers. The growth of markets and buying power in Europe stimulated investments in sugar plantations. Consequently, sugar cane agriculture in the Caribbean developed into a considerable apparatus, consisting of land, people, animals and buildings. Agricultural methods and techniques, as well as well-organised routines in sugar production, were developed with a view to managing the sugar plantations as efficiently as possible. The results were in many cases deforestation, impoverished soils and erosion. The changes in the landscapes were noticed and commented upon by visitors who wrote travel accounts of the English and French islands. By the end of the seventeenth century, new agricultural methods and techniques had been developed, based on the growing body of experiences of the sugar planters. The aim of the strict regime on the plantations was to control nature in order to produce sugar as efficiently as possible. In some cases experience taught planters to use resources in a more sustainable manner. The ambition to control nature created the solutions to the problems caused by overexploitation. Conservationist measures were taken to keep the sugar production apparatus in as good a shape as possible.
Drawing from engrossing survivors' accounts, many never before published, The Minsk Ghetto 1941-1943 recounts a heroic yet little-known chapter in Holocaust history. In vivid and moving detail, Barbara Epstein chronicles the history of a Communist-led resistance movement inside the Minsk ghetto, which, through its links to its Belarussian counterpart outside the ghetto and with help from others, enabled thousands of ghetto Jews to flee to the surrounding forests where they joined partisan units fighting the Germans. Telling a story that stands in stark contrast to what transpired across much of Eastern Europe, where Jews found few reliable allies in the face of the Nazi threat, this book captures the texture of life inside and outside the Minsk ghetto, evoking the harsh conditions, the life-threatening situations, and the friendships that helped many escape almost certain death. Epstein also explores how and why this resistance movement, unlike better known movements at places like Warsaw, Vilna, and Kovno, was able to rely on collaboration with those outside ghetto walls. She finds that an internationalist ethos fostered by two decades of Soviet rule, in addition to other factors, made this extraordinary story possible.
A provocative argument that environmental thinking would be better off if it dropped the concept of “nature” altogether and spoke instead of the built environment.
Environmentalism, in theory and practice, is concerned with protecting nature. But if we have now reached “the end of nature,” as Bill McKibben and other environmental thinkers have declared, what is there left to protect? In Thinking like a Mall, Steven Vogel argues that environmental thinking would be better off if it dropped the concept of “nature” altogether and spoke instead of the “environment”—that is, the world that actually surrounds us, which is always a built world, the only one that we inhabit. We need to think not so much like a mountain (as Aldo Leopold urged) as like a mall. Shopping malls, too, are part of the environment and deserve as much serious consideration from environmental thinkers as do mountains.
Vogel argues provocatively that environmental philosophy, in its ethics, should no longer draw a distinction between the natural and the artificial and, in its politics, should abandon the idea that something beyond human practices (such as “nature”) can serve as a standard determining what those practices ought to be. The appeal to nature distinct from the built environment, he contends, may be not merely unhelpful to environmental thinking but in itself harmful to that thinking. The question for environmental philosophy is not “how can we save nature?” but rather “what environment should we inhabit, and what practices should we engage in to help build it?”
Many environmental scientists, scholars and activists characterise our situation as one of alienation from nature, but this notion can easily seem meaningless or irrational. In this book, Simon Hailwood critically analyses the idea of alienation from nature and argues that it can be a useful notion when understood pluralistically. He distinguishes different senses of alienation from nature pertaining to different environmental contexts and concerns, and draws upon a range of philosophical and environmental ideas and themes including pragmatism, eco-phenomenology, climate change, ecological justice, Marxism and critical theory. His novel perspective shows that different environmental concerns - both anthropocentric both anthropocentric and nonanthropocentric-can dovetail, rather than compete with, each other, and that our alienation from nature need not be something to be regretted or overcome. His book will interest a broad readership in environmental philosophy and ethics, political philosophy, geography and environmental studies.
During the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804, arguably the most radical revolution of the modern world, slaves and former slaves succeeded in ending slavery and establishing an independent state. Yet on the Spanish island of Cuba barely fifty miles distant, the events in Haiti helped usher in the antithesis of revolutionary emancipation. When Cuban planters and authorities saw the devastation of the neighboring colony, they rushed to fill the void left in the world market for sugar, to buttress the institutions of slavery and colonial rule, and to prevent "another Haiti" from happening in their own territory.Freedom’s Mirrorfollows the reverberations of the Haitian Revolution in Cuba, where the violent entrenchment of slavery occurred at the very moment that the Haitian Revolution provided a powerful and proximate example of slaves destroying slavery. By creatively linking two stories - the story of the Haitian Revolution and that of the rise of Cuban slave society - that are usually told separately, Ada Ferrer sheds fresh light on both of these crucial moments in Caribbean and Atlantic history.
This article explores what environmental history might contribute to the field of holocaust and genocide studies (and environmental
histories of genocide might contribute to the field of environmental histories of war) through examining the complex ways
nature functioned materially and imaginatively during the Holocaust and its postwar telling. Drawing on both published and
unpublished memoirs and oral history interviews with Jews who survived the war hiding in the forests of central and eastern
Europe, the article examines three main tensions. First, they experienced the woods as a disorienting, alien, and alienating
world, and yet an escape from a more corrupt world outside the forest. Second, nature was both something to be worked with
and adapted to given its benevolent role while also being seen as insufficient and therefore in need of supplementing in order
to survive. Third, adapting to nature—or becoming “animal” as a number of survivors put it—was both assertion of successful
survival and a way of explaining and distancing self from wartime behavior in the forest. While survivors have told stories
of human triumph over nature, they have also told stories of “nature” acting on their behalf.
‘The Lie of the Land: Does Environmentalism Have a Future in the Age of Trump?’
- Kingsnorth
‘“Go In De Wilderness”: Evading the “Eyes of Others” in the Slave Songs’
- Nielson
‘Hurricane-hit Dominica Holds Fast, for now’
- Hansen
‘Slavery and Slave Revolts: A Sociohistorical Analysis of the First Maroon War, 1665–1740’
- Patterson
‘From the Lida Ghetto to the Bielski Partisans’
- Ettinger
- Hultgren
‘Immigration: Truisms vs Cliches’
- Kingsnorth
- Martínez-Alier
‘Wilderness Skepticism and Wilderness Dualism’
- Plumwood
‘PM Roosevelt Skerritt of Dominica Speech to the General Assembly at the United Nations 2017’
- Skerritt
- Vogel