A highly detailed collection of notes from the majority of Green Political Thought classes. These include all text from the powerpoints as well as additional information from the classes. These also include most of the seminars from the class, detailing the topics of discussion which can otherwise ...
Commentaries to be handed in 5pm Thursday in non-seminar weeks
- Prompts in handbook
- Word limit only 250 words
Mid term
- 750 words
- Due nov 22
- Will get its own lecture
- Apply key principles of deep ecology or social ecology to soton city council local plan for the
environment
- Second commentary focuses on this essay
Final Essay
- Need to submit essay plan
- Due January 11
- 1500 words no penalty for going over but no credit for words 1501 and onwards
- Will be questions uploaded on the blackboard
Useful journals on the blackboard
Have to do required reading and something from longer reading list on handbook
Green Political Thought Page 1
,Class 2 - Defining and Critiquing 'The Anthropocene'
06 October 2023 12:02
Attempting a Typology
- When examining environmental crises, humans have been cast variously as:
○ Victims (universally or selectively)
○ Villains (again, universally or selectively)
○ The focus of the narrative (for good or bad)
○ Irrelevant
- These are 'ideal types' - none of these narratives capture the whole picture
- Nor does it capture every narrative (e.g. denialism)
Our task
- Think critically about position of humans in relation to nonhuman world
- Will do this by looking at overall narratives before getting more specific - e.g., role of the state,
tech, and counter-narratives e.g., denialism, inactivism, doomism
The Anthropocene
Definitions
- Unofficial unit of geologic time when human activity started to have a significant impact on
the planets climate and ecosystems (National Geographic)
- Zylinska 2014 10: Unique situation in which humans are said to have become the biggest
threat to life on earth
- How is this related to politics or ethics?
The 'Anthropos' Category
- Some narratives posit the whole aggregate of humanity (anthropos) as the source of the
problem. This comes with risks:
○ Ignoring/flattening all social distinctions (e.g. class) which influence the level of damage
each group of humans causes
○ Misanthropy - reducing whole species to villain status
Aggregating the Anthropos
- Bookchin 1991 quote about an exhibit portraying the most dangerous animal on earth that
was a mirror - "Mind you, there was no exhibit of corporate boards of directors planning to
deforest a mountainside or of government officials acting in collusion with them."
- Idea that not all humans are the same in this scenario - the ones who hold the most blame are
the ones who normally get away with it
'Misanthropy' and 'Miss Ann Thropy'
- "just as the Plague contributed to the demise of feudalism, AIDS has the potential to end
industrialism which is the main force behind the environmental crisis." (Miss Ann Thropy 1987)
- Similar narratives around COVID - idea that nature was healing as a result of humans staying
inside, therefore factories being closed, people driving less and general decrease in pollution
because of covid - "Coronavirus is Earth's vaccine. We're the virus"
Are Humans Relevant?
- James Lovelock (cited Cudworth and Hobden) - Earth systems theory/Gaia
- Earth will correct itself and fix any damage done to it - sounds optimistic, but he doesn’t think
this will end well for humans
- To Gaia, we are not special and may be decimated to reduce the problem
- Elizabeth Stengers (2015): Gaia is blind and impartial, will excise damage without favour
- Even framing humans as villains exaggerates our importance in the greater scheme of things
Politics and Ethics for the Anthropocene Era
- Is it possible to develop policies that will genuinely solve the various environmental crises
Green Political Thought Page 2
,- Is it possible to develop policies that will genuinely solve the various environmental crises
without degenerating into suggestions such as Miss Ann Thropy's? How/where can we strike a
balance?
- Should such policies account for the many distinct groups within the anthropos, with their
differing contributions to the problem? How can these be taken into account?
Green Political Thought Page 3
, Class 3 - Critiquing 'The Anthropocene'
09 October 2023 16:00
Victims, Villains and Aggregates
- Whether humans are seen as good or bad, there is often a tendency in these discourses to
perceive a single anthropos. This doesn’t always map neatly to reality
- Anthropocene refers to damage caused by humans - but which ones?
- Stengers (2015) talks about power differentials - who benefits from processes behind the
Anthropocene and who is sacrificed to its effects
Other 'cenes
- Plantationocene (e.g., Tsing 2017) - ecological damage caused by modern agricultural practices
○ Lots of attempts to fix issues of modern agricultural processes such as through rewilding,
though this often has mixed results
- Capitalocene (Malm and Hornborg 2014) - damage is caused by industrial development (and
the social relations behind it)
○ Socialist approach
○ Idea of capitalism as ever accelerating and having to expand at every turn - having to
wring as much out of the world as it can
- (more on both of these below)
Plantationocene
- Tsing uses 'plantation' in the widest sense - large scale agriculture contrary to biodiversity
- Plantations are 'simplified ecologies designed to create assets for future investments' (Tsing
2017, pp.51-52)
- Meaningful sustainability (including in food production) depends on what she calls
'resurgence' - the return of liveable ecologies after damaging effects.
- Plantations are designed to 'knock out resurgence' (ibid) - to 'kill off beings that are not
recognised as assets' and prevent natural ecologies from recovering
○ Because you don’t want natural ecosystem to come back and disrupt the process of
creating cheap food for many people
○ Idea therefore that plantations are the natural enemy to ecology
Reversing the Plantationocene?
- Some recent discourses have focused on 'rewilding'
- 'rewilding, in my view, should involve reintroducing missing animals and plants, taking down
the fences, blocking the drainage ditches, culling a few invasive exotic species but otherwise
standing back. It's about abandoning the Biblical doctrine of dominion which has governed our
relationship with the natural world.' (Monbiot 2013)
○ Lots of debate about which missing animals to reintroduce btw - but we'll get into that
later
○ Also debate about culling invasive species (such as grey squirrels - are they still invasive
or are they simply a part of our ecosystem now?)
- Repairing/preventing ecological breakdown by reversing the processes Tsing describes
So where’s the catch?
- Rewilding does not happen in a vacuum, but rather in communities where it can have negative
effects
○ e.g., Martin et. al. (2021) highlight how early rewilding efforts in the Scottish Highlands
were experienced by local populations as 'new Clearances' enforced from above/outside
- Not insurmountable - Martin's work describes successful co-operation with local communities
at a later point - but raises many questions about the role of the human in creating and
reversing the Plantationocene
○ e.g., many rewilding discourses take the 'villain' or 'irrelevant' narratives as read
- Should also consider whether affected communities are the ones whose activities most need
disrupting
Green Political Thought Page 4
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