Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Entangling ethics
Environmental ethicists have long contended that our narrowly anthropocentric
frameworks of human rights and ethical values are both unethical in themselves
and
a key driver of unsustainable practices. This is one of the starkest examples of the
divide at work. Human life is (supposedly at least) sacred; all other life is anything
but: a resource (at best) with no rights and no intrinsic value. Recent disputes
around animal rights form a small but highly signifi cant skirmish on this ethical
borderline. But beyond such minor shifts, the prevailing Cartesian dualism 'has
stalled the process of getting on with a viable environmental philosophy' (Grange,
1997, p. 11). Reconfi guring ethics to somehow apply to the whole-again after nature
world, is now a primary task. As Buell (1995, p. 2) puts it:
If, as environmental philosophers contend, Western metaphysics and ethics need revi-
sion before we can address today's environmental problems, then the environmental
crisis involves a crisis of the imagination the amelioration of which depends on fi nding
better ways of imagining nature and humanity's relation to it.
This is, however, a challenge which requires 'an act of considerable moral imagina-
tion for those raised in the heart of the monster, the Western dualism of moral
insiders and outsiders' (Cheney, 1999, p. 144). The stakes are indeed high:
Through exclusively social contracts, we have abandoned the bond that connected us
to the world. . . . What language do the things of the world speak that we might come
to an understanding of them contractually?. . . . In fact, the Earth speaks to us in terms
of forces, bonds and interactions . . . each of the partners in symbiosis thus owes . . . life
to the other, on pain of death. (Serres, 1995, cited by Whatmore, 1999, p. 26)
Whatmore (2002), Thrift (2005) and others are keen to develop a new ethico-
political practice based on affective inter-corporeal ethics of care. ANT and new
ecology offer useful mappings of relationality, which can be pored over in the pro-
cesses of ethical readjustment. Dwelling points to moments of embodied becoming
in which ethical resonances might be embedded. While Marxism takes up the prin-
ciples of relational ontology and unfi xity, it seems to remain ethically and politically
wedded to an anthropocentrism that other relational approaches are ready to give
up, or at least call into question.
Entangling politics
Many political implications and questions stem from the newly broken grounds of
after nature. How do we value and engage with each other, with other environments
and non-humans? Are we freed from nature as an essential ground for being as
hoped/argued for by feminist, anti-racist and queer theory?
We have already seen how ANT and related approaches have been critiqued for
providing an uncertain ground on which to conduct politics. The fi rst response to
this charge is the claim that revealing the relational, hybrid nature of everyday for-
mations is a political act
in itself
insofar as it unsettles conventional modernist
dualisms. Just as Latour (2004b) suggests that political ecology and social science
cannot even begin without fi rst demolishing those metaphysical divisions, neither
can any kind of meaningful politics. In
We Have Never Been Modern
Latour (1993)
