Introducing Ecopolitics

Welcome to the first issue of Ecopolitics newsletter!

We are a living part of a living planet. -Joanna Macy

I will start with the grim facts, but I won’t stay there. The Earth is barreling toward an unrecognizable future due to the political failure to address climate change; there was a 73% drop in the average size of wildlife populations between 1970 and 2020; millions of people die each year due to air pollution. Our political-economic system is cannibalizing the natural world that humans and other living beings are all a part of and rely on to survive and thrive.

The startling reality of the moment demands a new politics—or, perhaps better put, the renewal of an older form of politics rooted in the environment.

My hope is to keep the politics of this newsletter open-ended rather than prescriptive and following from formula. But I think it is useful for this first issue of the newsletter to sketch out one vision of an ecological politics.

The crises of structural injustice and environmental degradation can be thought of as failures of moral consideration. We have not managed to create a political and economic system that affords equal moral consideration to all people, let alone non-human animals and the natural world.

But to form a grounded and rooted politics, we can actually begin with the individual body. To gain an expansive moral consideration, you can start with you. The body (and with it the mind, spirit, etc.) is what is sacrificed in a political-economic system that squeezes the environment and human labor. Because of this, self-love, nurturing, and acceptance of the body is politically meaningful.

However, the self is only a starting point because the self is inextricably connected with the rest of the world. The circle of moral consideration can and should expand from the self to the immediate community, a larger community, human beings as a whole, non-human animals, and the entire living world. This form of politics hinges on a recognition of interconnection and, as a result of this interconnection, demands a complete solidarity.

This approach implies an expansive view of both environmentalism and politics. Environmentalism is not just about protecting a patch of land here and there or instituting specific regulations but rather caring for an ecological system as a whole, which involves both humans and non-human beings. In this view, the environment and economics are closely ...