Читать книгу Environmental Political Theory - Steve Vanderheiden - Страница 9

At a time in which Australian bushfires have killed over a billion nonhuman animals in a single season (potentially driving the iconic koala to extinction in the wild), collapse of pollinator colonies from exposure to neonicotinoids used in agriculture threatens the planet’s food systems, ocean acidification from climate change and plastic wastes are combining to devastate marine life, and water supplies to major world cities are being shut off due to chronic drought, it may seem naïve or self-serving to fault ideas rather than more palpable sources of power for the environmental crisis. Ideas are in our heads, and perhaps books and other texts, but they have no material power of their own and seem benign next to instruments of power such as weapons or political authority. They are not what is starting bushfires or killing bees, and will not in themselves extinguish those fires or save those bees. As a professional political theorist who studies ideas for a living, it may seem particularly disingenuous for me to claim that ours is a crisis of ideas. Those holding hammers may often mistake many things in the world for nails, and the political theorist’s interest in abstract ideas is a pretty esoteric hammer.

But ideas matter. They can orient us in the world and to each other, link causes and effects and explain complex phenomena, and provide meaning for our individual lives. In the form of social and political ideals that inform and direct our collective existence, they can articulate our aspirations and can direct our energies in maintaining or reforming public institutions in an effort to realize them. When our imaginations are impoverished of fruitful ideas or are trapped in conventional ones, our possibilities likewise become limited. As William Blake characterizes the self-imposed limitations of the imagination, our “mind-forged manacles” can imprison us in despair.⁴ But ideas can also be emancipatory, freeing us from such limitations. They can contribute to ocean pollution or climate change in manifold ways to be explored in upcoming chapters, or prevent our realization that we’re doing so. They can also bring recognition of these problems or inform constructive solutions to them.

Our ideas can and do also change, either in response to changes in the world or in our understanding of or relationship to it. In this sense, they comprise what Sheldon Wolin calls “a continuously evolving grammar and vocabulary to facilitate communication and to orient the understanding.”⁵ They can effect change, particularly when they have normative content that identifies a gap between what we observe or experience and that toward which we aspire. Ideas and events therefore exist in a dynamic relationship with each other, reacting to and causing reaction in the other as ideas change the world and changes in the world disrupt and transform our ideas. They exist in dialectic with other ideas, disrupting and being disrupted by new or competing ideas. Theorists seek to understand these dynamics – political theorists do so with important social and political ideals, and environmental political theorists direct their attention to the shared space between politics and collective social life, on the one hand, and the ecosystems that can provide the material bases for their flourishing, or render this more difficult.

Events in the world have shaped the ideas and ideals through which we understand our world and orient ourselves within it. The execution of Socrates by democratic Athens and its fall to militaristic Sparta surely influenced Plato’s understanding and evaluation of democracy. The English Civil War shaped Hobbes’ views of human nature and political authority, while the Glorious Revolution led Locke to view these somewhat differently. But the emergence of new ideas and ideals has also been formative in Western political thought, as Tocqueville and Mill – in their own ways – sought to accommodate a new ethos of democratic equality with what they saw as its potential and its pathologies. Such disruptive ideas can also be scientific ones, as with Copernican heliocentrism denying that humans were at the center of the universe, or Darwin’s theory of natural selection and its influence on politics and religion. When disruptive events occur or new ideas emerge, existing systems of ideas must accommodate them.

Ideas and ideals exist in time and can evolve or be transformed over time without the full erasure of previous incarnations, like a modern city built on an ancient footprint, with layers of foundations associated with earlier generations to be found beneath the surface. Like toxic chemicals emanating from barrels of industrial waste decades after being shortsightedly stored in underground chambers incapable of containing them, toxic ideas and ideals associated with race and gender hierarchies or authoritarian politics can return to democratic polities that had previously rejected them. But, like a forest ecosystem devastated by fire, nurturing ideas and ideals can return over time to those places and peoples that repudiated them, giving new life to the aspirations that they enable.

As climatic changes shift disease vectors and induce species migration through changes to habitats, creating new assemblages of species that allow some to prosper, others to die off, and new hybrids or adaptations to appear, so also with ideas and ideals that are shifted by environmental change. Species adapt to changes in their environment, whether through developing productive forms of resilience or through decline and extinction, but do so without the mediation of disruption to and transformation of their ideas about the world and ideals that orient them to it. Humans also adapt – whether successfully or not in developing resilience against environmental change – through their ideas and ideals, and only then through their institutions, material relationships, and social practices.

Understanding the planet that we inhabit and the changes that we have brought about, and must therefore adapt to, requires our catching a glimpse of the world in deep or geologic time. The natural scientist learns to see the world in this way, then – like the philosopher returning to the cave in Plato’s Republic – helps the rest of us see a bit of what this perspective offers. Empirical social scientists sometimes view the world in what Stephen Skowronek calls political time,⁶ understanding change scaled to decades or centuries of human history rather than millennia of earth systems history, and gleaning insights that would not be available to those of us experiencing a world of more limited time horizons.

Normative political theorists seek a perspective that is wider than political time – as this is necessarily contained within the period occupied by a single political community or regime, in order to follow how it changes and in order to observe patterns that emerge over time – so that they can trace the emergence and evolution of formative ideas and ideals across political communities and regime types, as well as through major world events and the appearance of disruptive and transformative ideas. In conversation with those viewing the world in geologic time and those viewing it in political time, the political theorist is thus well equipped to understand how changes at the earth system level interact with those in formative ideas and ideals, in turn shaping social and political institutions and practices. A disposition toward ideas, or a critical method of seeking to understand forces in the world through the ideas that animate it, political theory is less a collection of texts than an activity or quest. Our goal in this book will therefore be focused upon theorizing environmental politics in ways that assist in understanding the crisis of ideas described above. While this may involve some engagement with canonical texts in the history of Western political thought or contemporary political theory, its objective is to motivate and inform students seeking to understand how ideas may be complicit in the environmental crisis or constructive in addressing it.