environmental politics

Focus of environmental politics

- Power and environment
- Equality and environment
- Justice and environment
- Freedom and environment

Political ecology implications

- Environment social construction
- Entanglement of nature and society
- Environment disrepair is social

Political Ecology example: Water use in Chile

- Neoliberal economic development
\= Privatisation of natural resources, Marketisation of natural resources
- Increase commercial agriculture for exports
- Increased demand for scarce water
- Large producers claim water rights.

Mitchell: Carbon Democracy:

- Dominant energy source shapes political activity and actors.
- Rise of modern mass democratic politics facilitated by coal.
- Extraction, production and transportation of coal empowers workers,
--\> They can then make effective demands: work and politics.

Concentrated energy

Coal
- In large quantities at specific sites.

Concentrated people

Can slow, disrupt or cut off energy.

Labor power

CAN:
- Strike,
- Sabotage
- Slow down

Political power

- Suffrage
- have the right to unionise
- mass parties.

Oil

Production: industrially isolated, geography remote
- Fewer, more easily surveilled workers,
- Fewer opportunities for worker disruption (compared to coal)
- Fewer opportunities to translate labor power into political demands.

Depoliticization

- Removes issue from political discourse
- Closes issue to debate, deliberation, contestation
- Decouples the issue from questions of power.

Post-politics

Consensus
- Universalizes particular political positions and demands
- Hidden normative power
- Expert-led administration
- Associated with the end of history.

Depoliticized environments

- Larger post-political contexts
- Lack of emancipatory subject
- Urgency and immediacy
- Denialism
- Commonplace notions of nature as uniform and singular, a realm of necessity.

3 discursive mechanisms of environmental power

- Depoliticization via scientization
- Depoliticization via economization
- Depoliticization via moralization

Example of scientization of environmental politics

The royal society

What are the effects of Scientization and Economization on environmental politics?

- Predetermines environmental politics
--\> Making democratic deliberation unnecessary

What are the effects of Scientization, Economization, & Power on experts and citizens?

- Empowers experts
- Disempowers citizens

Moralization

Good vs. bad

When is there depoliticisation of moralisation?

- When good goes beyond debate, and good is permissible and bad impermissible.

What are the risks of depoliticised environmental discourse?

- Tends to be business as usual
- Tends to be exclusionary
- Can enflame denialism
- Can undermine democracy.

What are the 4 elements of repoliticization for Swyngedouw?

- UNDERSTANDING that nature is open-ended and multiple
- RECOGNIZING that politics is always divisive
- AFFIRMING that there is equality
- ACTING from a place of 'can'.

Modernity

- 17th century: capitalism, nation-state, liberal democracy
- belief in progress through human agency and reason
- Environmental degradation period.

Ecomodernism

Green modernity by greening industry via tech

Green Keynesianism

Green modernity by greening capitalism via state.

Environmental harm and modernity

Environmental harm is integral to modernity because of industrialisation

What is Green "super-industrialization"?

A new and higher stage of human development

When did ecomodernism arrive?

1970s: legislative-bureaucratic approach to environmental harm

1980s: rise of ecological modernization: degradation became calculable (cost-benefit analysis),
-environmental repair became compatible with economic growth.

Onward: dominance of ecological modernization: environmental policy, science, macroeconomics.

Why is there ecomodernism?

Because:
- it frames environmental crisis as win-win business opportunity,
- Doesn't require structural change
- Neutralizes more radical environmentalisms

What is Green Keynesianism?

'Environmental harm integral to modernity b/c integral to capitalism'
- Green capitalism via the state
-\> State
a) directs investment and
b) coordinates production for c) social & environmental public good.
- Keynesian economics

Keyensian economics

- Economy driven by consumptive demand

- Which must be artificially stimulated during crises

- Via

a) fiscal policy (government spending and taxation)

b) monetary policy (adjustments to interest rates and money supply)

Conceptual roots of green keynesianism

- Collective action problem\= market failure\= tragedy of the commons
--\> IS SOLVED BY STATES ACTIONS: build markets, acts as a resource coordinator.

Why is there Green Keynesianism?

- Big economic tent accommodating of political economic diversity
- Taps into renewed post-2008 interest in state's return to economy
- Doesn't require structural change - capitalism can just be greened

Is Keynesianism still viable?

Climate leviathan, Mann & Wainwright.
- Keynesianism functions through state's ability to shape movements of capital
- But state can no longer do this as it effectively did once
- Global sovereign states needed to pull Keynesian levers of globalised economy, but this is politically unlikely.

Neoliberalism critique of Keynesianism

Keynesian economics assumes states can
- Manipulate cross-border flows of goods, services, labor, capital
- reallocate and coordinate internal investment

- Investments drives the economy: Keynesianism tries to stimulate investment by influencing the factors capitalists weigh when deciding whether to invest

- Economies are now global, but Keynesianism is domestic.

- Critique of Keynesianism via the dismantlement of Bretton Woods and the creation of a floating XR, which inhibits Keynesian polices.

Financialization critique of Keynesianism

- Capitalism is increasingly financialized
- Profits are driven more by finance and less by trade and commodities.
- International or globalised quality of finance capitalism poses a challenge to Keynesian policies.
-\> In this context, investment can be decoupled from national economic well-being
--\> IN a global economy, only a global sovereign could adequately stimulate and channel green investment and demand.

Environmental modernity

- Efficiency gains may just be funnelled into more production and consumption which taxes the environment

- Where what's economic profitable ≠ what's environmentally beneficial, first takes priority over second.

- technological improvements, even when they help the environment, may have socially regressive impacts.

Modern ethos

Modernity: elevation of the human, denigration of non-human
- belief in human mastery, supremacy, autonomy --\> instrumentalization and domination of the environment.
- Greening modernity\= rein scribing human hubris?

Modernity and the entering on humanity

- Polity and society are made by and for humanity
- Knowledge is infinitely open to human inquiry and to used for human gain.
- Time becomes linear and reflective of human generated progress

Modern Ethos an environmental harm

- Modern centering and elevation of humanity sidelines and denigrates the non-human
- The non-human environment is thought to exist for humanity's enjoyment and taking, and this attitude leads to its degradation
- Modernity is the cause of environmental harm, but it can't be the solution because human hubris is too integral to it.
- The solution, on this view, must instead come by a humbler ethos that acknowledges on and bet to non-human nature.

Pre-Nazi, proto-fascistic blend of naturalist-nationalist sentiment

• Anti-modern rejection of industrialization, urbanization, capitalism, and rationality as environmentally destructive forces (associated with Judaism)

• Promotion nature mysticism, romantic connection to nature, natural purity (associated with German folk)

• Pseudo-scientific "justification" in early ecology

National Socialist (Nazi) ideology and practice

• Rejects modernity and anthropocentrism, argues society must be organized per nature
• Frames anti-modernism in racialized terms partly by drawing on misapplied ecology
• Pursues environmentally sensitive policies in agricultural and industrial sectors
• Enacts assertive environmental laws

Significance of ideological continuities and German Fascism regarding ecology

• Environment and ecology politically indeterminate - can be part of all sorts of political projects
• Must be vigilant about how green concerns are interpreted and given meaning

Anti-Modern Naturalism and Nationalism

• Late 19th , early 20th century in Germany: cultural synthesis of naturalism and nationalism

• Naturalism: nature not inert matter to dominate through reason, but
quasi-mystical entity to commune with
• Nationalism: well-being of German people linked to well-being of German soil, nature and nation one

• E.g., Völkisch Movement

Anti-Modern Naturalism

nature not inert matter to dominate through reason, but
quasi-mystical entity to commune with

Anti-Modern Nationalism

well-being of German people linked to well-being of German soil, nature and nation one

• E.g., Völkisch Movement

• Unites ethnocentric populism with nature mysticism

• Rejects modernity i.e., capitalism, industrialization, urbanization

• Advocates return to land, simplicity, natural purity

• Personifies modernity as Judaism, in rejecting modernity, rejects race

• Naturalism and nationalism go hand in hand with antisemitism

Ecology and German Nazism

• Ernst Haeckel, ecology: study of how organisms interact with environment

• Haeckel himself social Darwinist, pro-eugenics, pro "racial purity"

• Early ecology bound up in reactionary political framework

• Unmediated application of biological concepts on society has complex implications:

What does Insisting human society governed by same laws as rest of nature leads to?

--\> cuts against modern ethos of human
supremacy and control

--\> scientific veneer to racist naturalist-nationalism of völkisch movement (i.e., modernity personified can be framed as anathema to "laws of nature"

Youth Movements

- Wandervögel youth movement
- Influenced by philosophy

Wandervögel youth movement

• Neo-romanticism, nature mysticism, hostility to reason

• Environmental conservation, wilderness expeditions, immersion in nature

• "Right-wing hippies" later absorbed by Nazis who model own youth movement on it

Philosophical influence on youth movements

--\> 1913 gathering of Wandervögel keynote given by philosopher Ludwig Klages

• Illustrates coalescence of anti-modernism, ethnocentrism, and environmental concern

• Klages bemoans modernity's destruction of environment, but blames it on reason

• Klages and Wandervögel anticipate later fascistic rejections of reason

Environment and Nazi Ideology:

- Nazi ideology denigrates human agency in favor of natural order
- Nazi ideology emphasizes organic holism

Nazi denigration of human agency in favor of natural order

• Rejects anthropocentrism and modern ethos of human primacy

• Humanity isn't the make and measure of all, nature is

• Per party member, anthropocentrism only valid "if it is assumed that nature has been created only for man. We decisively reject this attitude. According to our conception...man is a link in the living chain of nature just as any other organism"

• Systems of human life must be modeled on and in accordance with nature's dictates, which are iron clad

• Failure to organize human society according to nature will lead to social and environmental devastation

Nazi ideology emphasis on organic holism

Holism \= parts of a whole can't exist independently or be understood but in relation to whole, which therefore takes priority over parts

• Nazi thought transposes ecological-biological idea of holism onto society

• Because human society no different from nature, rules of ecology and biology apply

• Transposition has authoritarian implications: individual can be sacrificed for totality

• Transposition has racist implications: "urbanized and overcivilized modern human race" is "responsible" for destroying the environment and therefore must be eliminated

Environment and Nazi Practice

- Agricultural policy
- Industrial and technological policy
- Environmental law

Nazi Practice of agricultural policy

• Organic farming methods introduced at massive scale

• Goals
- a) re-agrarianization
- b) farming conducted according to "laws of life"

• Increased agricultural productivity in harmony with nature, soil kept "healthy"

• Unmatched level of government support for environmentally sound agriculture

Nazi practice of industrial and technological policy

• Massive construction projects must be executed in environmentally sensitive way

• Construction must harmonize with natural surroundings and complement landscape

• Environmental criteria for industrial projects

• Reich "Advocate for the Landscape" ensures industrial build-up doesn't compromise environment

Nazi environmental law

• 1933: reforestation, species protections, preservationist limits to industrial development, construction of nature preserves

• 1935: guidelines for safeguarding of flora, fauna, and natural monuments, restrictions on commercial uses of natural resources, requirement to consult "nature-reserve" authorities in advance of development

Environment and Genocide

• Anti-humanism + fixation on natural purity gives rational and incentive for genocide

• National Socialism personified forces of modernity (capitalism, industrialization, urbanization) as expressions of Judaism

• Blamed modernity's environmental degradation on "destructive influence" of a RACE

• To correct for environmental degradation, and return German people to their
supposedly innate closeness to nature, Nazism seeks to eliminate that race

• Legacy of eco-fascism in power: "genocide developed into a necessity under the cloak of environmental protection"

Li & Shapiro: China as eco-political model? Eco-autocrat needed to save planet? No.

- Environmental authoritarianism
- China's environmental accomplishments real but compromised

Environmental authoritarianism

• Environmentalism as means to the end of autocracy

• State uses environment to concentrate, entrench, and justify authoritarian rule

Environmental authoritarianism in China

• Expansion of state's regulatory scope to eco and eco adjacent issues

• Cooptation of non-state actors (e.g., NGOS, media, scientists) into state's eco agenda
• Repairing environment lets state shore up its OWN power

China's environmental accomplishments real but compromised

• Yes, there's actual environmental progress (e.g., clean tech industries, enshrining of "ecological civilization" in Constitution)

• But China still plagued by environmental challenges (e.g., pollution, contamination)

• And what progress has been made has come at cost of individual rights & social freedoms

Environmental Authoritarianism in China

• Environmental authoritarianism different in different parts of country

• In less developed areas, green autocracy can take form of forced relocations in name of environment

• Forced relocation for reforestation, building of renewable energy sites, conservationism, etc.

• Often targets ethnic minorities

• Green autocracy can let state advance several goals at once

• For instance, with forced relocations, state can pacify border regions and secure green energy at the same time

• Therefore, for Li and Shapiro, this isn't authoritarian environmentalism, but environmental authoritarianism

Multiplicity of eco-socialism

- EP takes many different forms

- youth activists, degrowthers, indigenous communities pitted against corporate extractors, environmental feminists, green new dealers, eco-nationalists

- Each form has conflicting diagnosis- prescriptions about what's causing environmental degradation and what would be needed to correct it

Fraser's Eco-Socialism

Trans-environmental

Anti-capitalist

Counter-hegemonic

Fraser's Eco-Socialism: Trans-environmental

• Environmental crises linked to social and political crises

• Environmental issues bound to non-environmental issues

Fraser's Eco-Socialism: Anti-capitalist

• Capitalism is common driver behind environmental, social, and political crises

• A fundamental contradiction within capitalism means it creates crises in all three domains

• Therefore, shared rejection of capitalism could unite them

Fraser's Eco-Socialism: Counter-hegemonic

• In a world organized by capital, anti-capitalist position definitionally against the grain

Anticipated Objection Clarified by Fraser's eco-socialism

• "Capitalism non-accidentally creates environmental crises" ≠ "Only capitalism creates environmental crises"

• Non-capitalist societies can, but are not structurally compelled, to generate environmental harm

• By contrast, capitalism can't help but generate environmental harm because of a contradiction baked into its structure

• Therefore, unlike for green Keynesians, capitalism cannot be greened for eco-socialists

what is capitalism?

-System of economic production and exchange predicated on growth and accumulation

-System for organizing the relationship between
--\> a) economic production and exchange
--\> b) its supporting, non-economic conditions and materials

Capitalism: Contradiction

- Capitalism organizes relationship between economy and non-economy in a contradictory \= self-undermining way

- Capitalism divorces economy (value creating) from non- economy (not value creating)

--\> Therefore, capitalism invites economy to free ride on non-economic resources

Capitalism: 3 Non-Economic Contradictions

Capitalism needs:

-ENVIRONMENT as a tap for inputs and a sink for waste
-SOCIETY for a carework of human labor and of human cooperation
-POLITICS for security, legal protection of private property and policies that enable accumulation.

But by designating each as "non-economic," capitalism encourages economy to free ride on and corrode:
-ENVIRONMENTAL RESOURCES
-SOCIAL RESOURCES -POLITICAL RESOURCES
This means capitalism simultaneously needs and trashes:
-ENVIRONMENT, leading to environmental crises
-SOCIETY, leading to social crises
-POLITICS, leading to political crises

Non-economic interconnected

Environment, society and polity are interconnected

Then a crisis in one domain is likely to mean a crisis in others.

--\> opportunité for solidarity and coalition building

Why are environmental crisis often also political crisis?

Because states manage the boundary between environment and economy, making environmental decisions also political ones

Eco-socialism vs. single-issue environmentalism

Interconnection of "non-economic" domains, and their racialization, challenges single-issue environmentalism

Eco-socialism critique of single-issue environmentalism as a strategy (shallower critique)

--\> single-issue environmentalism bypasses opportunity for coalition-building

Eco-socialism critique of single-issue environmentalism as an ideology (deeper critique)

single-issue environmentalism accepts capitalism's separation of economy and environment

Capital's contradiction in history

- History of capitalism demos systematic creation of interconnected eco, social, and political crises

-When crises come to ahead, existing period of capitalism, or "accumulation regime," will be replaced by a new period.

--\> But this new period will eventually create new crisis of its own, as it will too segregate economy from non-economy\= free-riding and crises

History of capitalism

\=pattern of accumulation regime, crisis, new accumulation regime, new crisis, etc.

Metabolic rift

--\> disruption of a society's ability to turn inputs into energy needed for self-replication

- Eco-socialists see capitalism as especially vulnerable to metabolic rifts because of how it relates to non-economy.

Ecological imperialism

--\> taking resources from capital's periphery to compensate for metabolic rift at capital's core

--\> Eco-socialists see this as capitalism's standard "fix" to metabolic rifts
--\> Ecological imperialism at periphery sustains unsustainable growth or environmental overdraft at core.

Fraser's Liberal-Colonial Period

• Characterized by metabolic rift

• Mass agriculture shipped from countryside to cities to feed newly concentrated factory laborers

• Food produced and consumed in one place returns nutrients to soil, but food produced and consumed in different places doesn't, leading to decline in soil fertility

• Newly industrialized Global North experiences soil-nutrient crisis threatening food supplies

• Industrial capital creates metabolic rift w/in capitalist so

Guano in the 19th century: the must-have natural resource

- Fertiliser traditionally used by indigenous people of South America
- Guano trade profitable but environmentally taxing: Unique geography and aesthetic of guano islands erased by extraction


METABOLIC RIFT IN NORTH CREATES ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS IN SOUTH

Guano and Labor

Early 19th century Peruvian labor shortage leads to immigration law subsidizing import of contract laborers


--\> European merchants import Chinese laborers through coercion and deception under horrific transport conditions


--\> Chinese laborers employed on plantations, railroads, and in the guano business under slave-like conditions (guano mining thought to be worst)


--\> Compensating for metabolic rift in Global North via ecological imperialism → inhumane, racialized exploitation of labor (i.e., social crisis) in Global South

Nitrates

Nitrates: alternative fix for capital's depletion of soil fertility in Global North

Found in Peru and Bolivia, nitrates start to rival guano as export fertilizer of choice

Peru monopolizes nitrates, expropriates private investors, many of whom are foreign (esp. British)

Bolivia raises taxes on nitrate exports

Monopolization and taxation anger foreign investors

--\> WAR OF THE PACIFIC, AKA THE NITRATE WAR, 1879-1883

Nitrate War

• Chile backed by Britain v. Peru and Bolivia

• Chile, victorious, claims all nitrate zones held
by Peru and Bolivia and much of Peru's guano

• British investors ALSO win big

• Many see war as British-instigated, Chilean- executed quest for fertilizer

• Metabolic rift in Global North creates not just environmental and social crises but here political crisis in the form of war

Eco-socialism's Takeaways

• Ecological imperialism allows Global North to overburden its own environment by taking from environments of others in South

• Capital's contradictory relation to environment sustained by such taking

• E.g., soil nutrient crisis in North displaced by creating environmental (i.e., destruction of Peruvian landscape), social (i.e., inhumane, racialized labor), and political (i.e., war) crises in South

• Fraser: hope for trans-environmental bloc organized around rejection of capitalism, for her the only adequate prescription for environmental harm

New Imperialism

• Late 19th to early 20th century

• Global North imperial powers expand colonial territories on unprecedented scale in search of:

• Resources and land (e.g., for cash crop agriculture)
• Cheap labor

• Second industrial revolution
increases demand for both

• Second industrial revolution increases productive capacity, creating huge demand for raw materials and new markets

Holleman's Ensuing 2 Socio-Ecological Crises

- Soil erosion
- Starvation

Holleman's Ensuing Socio-Ecological Crises: soil erosion

- Colonial policy promotes cash crops for export \= monocultural
farming aimed as mass production for exportation

- More land farmed more uniformly and more aggressively

- Market also incentivizes cash crop agriculture and encourages farmers to produce as much as possible as quickly as possible

- In the long run, this erodes soil \= 1st global environmental crisis

Holleman's Ensuing Socio-Ecological Crises: Starvation

• Cash crops for export outstrip food crops for local consumption

• Leads to:

a) decreased dietary variation and nutrition
b) severe humanmade famines in colonized areas

• Likened by some to "late Victorian holocaust"

Colonialism-Environmental Harm Link

• Soil erosion understood AT THE TIME to be a consequence of colonial conquest and colonial agricultural practices

• Soil erosion \= "disease to which any civilization founded on the European model seems liable when it attempts to grow outside [of] Europe"

• Soil erosion \= "warning that Nature is in full revolt against the sudden incursion of an exotic civilization - Europe - into her ordered domains"

"The White Man's Burden"

Imperial view that white race is morally obliged to civilize rest of world and facilitate its development through colonialism

- Soil erosion framed as another "white man's burden" (i.e., burden of development that white colonizers must shoulder despite having caused)

- Recognition that colonialism creates socio-ecological crises, but assumption that these can be fixed with more colonialism

Colonialism and White Supremacy

• White supremacy essential according to Holleman to new imperialism

• Provides "justificatory" pretext for colonial conquest (i.e., alleged "superiority" means whites have obligation to intervene around the world)

• Environmental colonialism shaped, per Holleman, by BOTH

• Material compulsions of capital accumulation
• Immaterial ideology of white supremacy
• I.e., economic growth of capital can be pursued via colonialism because racism provides legitimating pretext for intervention

Example: US Dust Bowl Background

• Early 1870s: US ends recognition of native tribal sovereignty

• 1887: Dawes Act authorizes government to privatize land held in common by
native tribes

• Privatization opens large tracts of "unassigned" land to settlers and economic actors (75% of previously indigenous land designated "unassigned" and opened)

• Settlers of newly privatized land often economically disadvantaged

• ∴ white supremacy + domestic New Imperial land grabs \= "release valve" for
class antagonism

• Ensuing settler colonialism into Southern Plains region organized around environmentally destructive cash crop agriculture where market logic - not environmental health - dictates how land and resources are used

Example: 1930s US Dust Bowl

• Environment of Southern Plains can't sustain cash crop agricultural practices

• Empire, capitalism, and racism come to a head in soil erosion of 1930s US Dust Bowl

• Dust Bowl \= period of severe dust storms and drought

• Not a domestic-regional problem

• But a manifestation of first global environmental crisis (i.e., soil erosion) driven by imperialism + white supremacy + capitalism

Contemporary Implications of the US dust bowl: Hollema

• Soil erosion and desertification likely to reemerge with climate change

• Learning wrong lessons from past soil erosion means we're likely to mishandle new, climate-driven forms

• Standard Dust Bowl lesson: soil erosion and desertification caused by poor knowledge and inadequate tech, corrected through better knowledge and tech

• Holleman argues this isn't the right lesson: soil erosion and desertification weren't just a knowledge-tech problem in the past (i.e., were caused by imperialism, white supremacy, and capitalism) and won't be just a knowledge-tech problem in the future

• Colonialism might be over, but coloniality endures in how Global North calculates cost of climate action (i.e., sacrifices faraway peoples & places b/c changing own relation to environment too onerous)

Environmental Racism

• 1970s: scholars study distribution of environmental harms across society

• In racialized societies, allocation of environmental bads & goods tracks race

• E.g., in US, non-white populations more likely to live and work in degraded places

• Environmental racism: sacrifice of racial minorities' environmental health and well-being for sake of racial majority's

• Logic of SACRIFICE links environmental colonialism and environmental racism

- Bullard

Bullard's findings on environmental racism

• Just as Global North sacrifices South's environmental well-being for own material comfort (Holleman), racial majority within North may sacrifice racial minority's environmental well-being for own material comfort (Bullard)

Environment and White Privilege

- White privilege: benefits and advantages that accrue in highly racialized societies to white people simply due to whiteness

- Different from overt racism because NOT intentional

- Can occur even when no one means to be racist (e.g., in context where social structures reproduce white privilege, just maintaining status quo will benefit whites)

- White privilege means evironmental racism (i.e., environmental sacrifice of racial minority for racial majority) can be unintentional