Geotrauma_and_the_Eco-clinic_Nature_Viol.pdf

Frontiers in Sociology

The dominant manners in which environmental issues have been framed by sociology are deeply problematic. Environmental sociology is still firmly rooted in the Cartesian separation of Society and Nature. This separation is one of the epistemic foundations of Western modernity-one which is inextricably linked to its capitalist, colonial, and patriarchal dimensions. This societal model reifies both humanity and nature as entities that exist in an undeniably anthropocentric cosmos in which the former is the only true actor. Anthropos makes himself and the world around him. He conquers, masters, and appropriates the non-human, turning it into the mere environment of his existence, there solely for his use. If sociology remains trapped in this paradigm it continues to be blind to the multiple space-time specific interrelations of life-elements through which heterogeneous and contingent ontologies of humans and extra-humans are enacted. If these processes of interconnection are not given due attention, the socioecological worlds in which we-human as well as others-live cannot be adequately understood. But misunderstandings are not the only issue at stake. When dealing with life-or-death phenomena such as climate change, to remain trapped inside the Society/Nature divide is to be fundamentally unable to contribute to world reenactments that do not oppress-or, potentially, extinguish-life, both human and extra-human. From the inside of Anthropos' relation to his environment the only way of conceiving current socioecological problems is by framing them in terms of an environmental crisis which could, hypothetically, be solved by the very same societal model that created it. But if the transformation of some of the world(s)' life-elements into the environment of the Human is part of the problem, then, socioecological issues cannot be adequately understood or addressed if they are framed as an environmental crisis. Instead, these problems need to be conceived as a crisis of Western modernity itself and of the kind of worlds that are possible and impossible to build within it.

A World not Made for Us: Topics in Critical Environmental Philosophy, 2020

Environmental philosophy has challenged the dominant western culture’s conception of human nature through critiques of “anthropocentrism” (human chauvinism). It has annoyed the mainstream with critiques of instrumental rationality and its plea on behalf of the “intrinsic value of nature.” It has irritated nonenvironmentalists and even some environmentalists with its criticism of mechanism or the reductionist scientific worldview and has argued in favor of some form of “ecological worldview.” The critique of anthropocentrism, the intrinsic value of nature, and the ecological worldview are central topics for environmental philosophers, appearing across a wide range of environmentalist writing, from environmental ethics and policy to political ecology, ecocriticism, and metaphysics. As I understand them, these topics have characterized environmental philosophy since its inception in the 1970s.

2021

For conclusion we argue that postmodern and leftist narratives are tried to overcame the limitations of the Modernity’s false claims of Subject lead us to our contemporary ecological crisis. However, it seems that all the theoretical progresses didn’t made us pass through Modernity but an even more sinister realization of it. We can see slowly and steadily as the human body and consciousness became the objects and working materials of technological progress.

Revista Argumentum - Argumentum Journal of Law, 2020

While recognizing economic development is important, it is necessary to strike a balance between such activities and its effect on the environment. With industrialization and economic prosperity being the underlining goals of various governments in various jurisdiction, the author indicates that these activities be carried out from an ecocentric view point, focusing on the importance of rights to nature and the problem of ecocide. History reveals the negative impact such activities have had on the environment. Environmental protections have been given international recognition; however, the modern approach of environmental activism has to be incorporated in the scheme of things. The author carefully explains the importance for the domestic and international community to move from an anthropocentric standard to an ecocentric one, by providing and statutorily recognizing the intrinsic value for nature. This is imperative in order to prevent events that have caused large scale destruction on the environment from repeating itself and preserve the original state of the earth for the benefit of both human and nonhuman life forms present in the ecosystem.

1996

James Lovelock, in a speech to the Royal Society on 29th October 2007, described his profound pessimism about the future of Earth, or ‘Gaia’ as he has named it. He also described his conversion to this pessimistic outlook, how he came to appreciate that we are on the brink of disaster. In 2004 he had visited the UK’s primary climate research centre, the Hadley Centre, and talked to a number of scientists, some concerned with melting ice in the Arctic Ocean, others with Greenland’s vanishing glaciers, still others with global heating in the tropics. He heard how the great forests were changing as the world grew hotter and how ocean life was disappearing as surface waters warmed. Each, separately, presented convincing evidence of positive feedback and accelerated change. But what shocked Lovelock was the way they spoke of all this: ‘as if they were describing some other planet, not Earth.’ Even more disturbing was their apparent ignorance of each other’s work, presenting their own research as ‘something separate from the heating of the whole planet’ while presenting the whole Earth system ‘as if it was no more than the simple addition of its parts’, something which he knew ‘was rarely ever true of a dynamic system.’ This visit profoundly changed his evaluation of the present state of affairs, inspiring him to write The Revenge of Gaia, which he published in 2006. Planet Earth, he now believes, has lost its resilience and ability to deal with perturbations such as the greenhouse gas emissions we are injecting into the atmosphere. By the end of the century, a runaway greenhouse effect will result in mass destruction of life, with possibly only 200 million or so people left alive, mostly living near the Arctic Circle. Lovelock went on to wonder at how scientists have let this disastrous future steal upon us. He offered several possible explanations. One is the false confidence engendered by the success in dealing with stratospheric ozone depletion. This is really the confidence of people who believe that there are always technological fixes to any problem. Another is the division of science into a multiplicity of unconnected specialties. He argued that ‘so long as we treat [Earth] as two separate entities, the geosphere for the material Earth and the biosphere for life, we will fail to understand our planet.’ A third, closely related to this, is the dominance of orthodox Darwinian theory according to which the evolution of life can only be scientifically explained through natural selection. There has been an inability to see that organisms could alter their environments, regulating climate and making the Earth a dynamic responsive planet. Lovelock’s experience reveals something profoundly awry not only in science but in our civilization. Examining the inter-relationships between diverse environmental problems, how each is exacerbating the other and also the global social forces driving environmental destruction, reveals that the entire future of humanity and most other forms of life are under serious threat. There have been sporadic publications proclaiming the disaster threatening us, not only from individual scientists, geographers, environmental historians and environmentalists, but from high profile collaborative works such as The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind published in 1972, The Global 2000 Report to the President commissioned by President Carter and published in 1982, and special editions of even relatively conservative journals such as Time Magazine, which devoted an issue to the plight of Planet Earth in 1989. But these have had almost no impact on the economic policies of most governments in the world. It was not just that the global triumph of neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism had driven the whole of humanity in exactly the opposite direction from which it should have been heading, or that the transnational corporations had mounted a public relations campaign to confuse the public about environmental problems. Despite the warnings, very few people in positions of power where differences could be made were seriously concerned, and those that were, such as President Carter and later, Vice-President Al Gore, made very little difference. The rate of environmental destruction has continued to accelerate. This lack of response has been particularly evident in the case of academics, the paid intellectuals whose responsibility it is to face up to, understand and work out what to do about dangers facing civilization. What became evident was that it was not only some climate scientists who looked at Earth as though they were not part of it, but almost all academics and, at least in Anglophone countries, almost all university educated politicians, business leaders, trade union officials, and in fact almost everyone holding significant positions of power in society. It also became evident how deep rooted and extensive was the specialization that Lovelock referred to and how completely it had fragmented people’s thinking. Not only were geo-chemical sciences separated from the life sciences and notions such as Gaia treated with derision; there has been a growing chasm between the natural and the human sciences and between both these and the humanities, and each of these has been fragmented, despite the efforts of historians of science. And far from this situation being seen as problematic, there has been a growing intolerance within academe for those struggling to overcome this fragmentation of culture. Beyond the froth and bubble generated by this fragmentation and multiplication of disciplines and sub-disciplines, there seemed to be a passive acceptance that the crude Darwinian theory of evolution is the true, hard-headed view of reality and that it is impossible to stand in the way of the drive for power and control by the fittest, apparently believed by most people to be the multi-billionaires running transnational business corporations. Deeper than this, there was a passive acceptance that the only value in life is pleasurable stimuli and entertaining distractions. That is, the obstacles standing in the way of developing a new understanding of what we are and what is our place in the world are more deep-rooted and more problematic than even Lovelock, one of the few intellectual scientists outside academia and therefore less bound by, but also less aware of mainstream thinking, has appreciated. There is an insidious and destructive nihilism promoted within and inculcated by universities, embodied in our institutions and in people’s everyday practices and in their everyday orientation to the world. Far from being in retreat, this nihilism has been promoted with a new level of intensity at a time when it is more important than ever that it be overcome. A central goal in writing this work was to understand and overcome this nihilism.

Selçuk Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Dergisi, 2023

Contemporary theory has been framed by structuralist, poststructuralist and postmodernist discussions about social, cultural and linguistic formation of meaning. Structuralists argue that meaning is an external feature. It depends on the linguistic framework, for it is defined in and through language. For poststructuralists, meaning can be subjectively defined; thus there is no meaning to be considered. Poststructuralism offers the idea of the plurality of meaning. Like all traditional notions, meaning is a metanarrative whose validity structuralist, poststructuralist and postmodernist critics find controversial. Contemporary theory has been a liberating experience. This might be exemplified with the enquiry into the legitimacy of the patriarchy which rendered women determination to question their inequalities. Theory has enabled discussions about the proletariat having a future to control production. However, theory has illustrated nature within the same exemplification. Nature is a socially, culturally and linguistically constructed notion defined as a man-made perception. The present environmental emergency loses its meaning as nature is a meaningless term. Environmental criticism dismiss the latest designation of nature as a metanarrative. It insists that nature is real, alive and in danger. This article aims to point out that mainstreaming of environmental criticism helps understand the relationship between theory and nature.

2015

Try to imagine a society-or even an individual human being-that does not require some form of interaction with the natural world in order to exist. At the moment, I am reading Sharman Apt Russell's Hunger: An Unnatural History (2005), and she speaks in her opening chapter about certain individuals-eccentrics, desperately overweight individuals, and even "hunger artists" who perform by abstaining from food-who have avoided eating for extraordinary periods of time. An American magician, for instance, had himself suspended in a six-foot by six-foot by three-foot box near the Tower Bridge in London, England, for 44 days without food in 2003. But did this "entertainer," David Blaine, go without water? Without air? And what about the 465-pound Scottish man, known to the public simply as "A.B.," who fasted for 13 months in the mid-1960s in order to lose 276 pounds? Even during this long period of hunger, Mr. A.B. relied upon the planet, upon nature, for his very survival. All human beings throughout history have relied upon their relationship with nature in order to exist. The problem, some might say, is that many of our cultures have either come to take nature for granted or have, as the ecological literary critic, or "ecocritic," Simon Estok, has written, developed an adversarial attitude towards nature, believing that human success and comfort require us to dominate and exploit nature rather than to live in a kind of symbiotic, or cooperative, relationship with the non-human world. Estok refers to this antagonism towards nature as "ecophobia" and argues that it is an essential condition of many contemporary societies, a condition that we may need to overcome if humans are to continue living on this planet well into the future. What I have begun to describe above is a kind of paradox, a strange and ironic situation by which we know that we all need nature; yet, for some peculiar reason we humans like to think of ourselves as being free from the encumbrances of physical

The title of Steven Vogel's book is, of course, a play on Aldo Leopold's famous " Thinking like a Mountain. " The provocative title is part of the central aim of the book: to reorient environmental thinking away from nature as normative foundation and toward a practical engagement with our socially created, lived environment. The book explicitly rejects the obscurantism and mysticism of some environmentalist thinking, and offers a thorough-going materialist and dialectical account of the lived environment. It largely succeeds in making the case for reorienting our thinking, despite some criticisms I will offer in the second half of the review. The basic critical thesis of the book is that the concept of nature is not coherent, especially as a normative foundation for environmental thought. For, " nature " either means that which is not supernatural, in which case, human beings and their activities are included in the concept, or " nature " refers to those elements of the environment that have gone unshaped by human activities, in which case, we are literally talking about nothing, or at least nothing that has much relevance to thinking about what humans ought to do and ought not to do. The alternative, descriptively, to relying on a concept of nature to motivate environmental protection is a literal social constructionism; we materially create the world in which we live through our social practices. In the largely alienated form of this practice of building our world, we do not self-consciously decide what is valuable, but rather allow what is valuable to emerge as a side-effect of other forces like those of the market. Our current relationship with our built environment is alienated because we generally treat it as though it were a product of some natural force out of our control. But it is, in fact, largely the product of human activity and —at least potentially— human choice. The alternative normative basis for this view, then, rests on our standing as the linguistic (social) creatures par excellence. Vogel adopts a version of deliberative democracy: what is valuable is what all those concerned would agree is valuable under conditions in which the only force recognized is, as Habermas might say, the force of the better argument; the solution to our alienation from the environment is to take responsibility for our built environment both physically and politically. A compelling feature of Vogel's argument is his challenge to assumptions about " nature " that one finds in both environmental philosophy and in more popular environmental writing like that of Bill McKibben. This challenge takes up the first chapter, and is developed throughout the rest of the text. In advancing his argument, Vogel addresses much of the biocentric environmental literature, though he also engages critically with thinkers from outside this camp. Chapter 2 and 3 survey the history of Western philosophy with an eye toward clarifying both the epistemological and the physical respects in which the environment is socially constructed. This discussion reflects the Hegelian-Marxist roots of Vogel's project by arguing that environmental philosophy must come to terms with our active role in the construction of our natural environment. This involves both our conceptualizations and our physical structuring of the world through our practice. Chapter 4 gives the first clear practical implication of Vogel's view, while also setting the stage for titular chapter, " Thinking like a Mall. " Since the dualism between artifact and nature cannot be maintained, many arguments regarding the desirability of restored environments or problems

Global Environmental Politics, 2011

1997