Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T09:29:21.479Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Save the Appearances! Toward an Arendtian Environmental Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 November 2021

LAURA EPHRAIM Open the ORCID record for LAURA EPHRAIM [Opens in a new window]
LAURA EPHRAIM*
Affiliation:
Williams College, United States
*
Laura Ephraim, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Williams College, United States, [email protected].
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Drawing critical resources from Hannah Arendt, this article argues for a revaluation of the appearances of nature in environmental political theory and practice. At a time when pervasive anthropogenic contamination threatens the very survival of vulnerable communities and species, it would be wrong to revive the timeworn mythos of nature as an untrammeled beauty. Instead, with Arendt’s help, I advocate an environmental politics rooted in an alternative aesthetic of nature, one that respects and seeks to protect earth’s diverse lifeforms for the sake of their strange, disquieting appearances of otherness. Earth’s living displays of alterity are valuable, I argue, for their propensity to upset the destructive logic of mass production and consumption and spur political action. In an Arendtian frame, we can better recognize interdependence between biological and political life and appreciate the role of nonhuman lifeforms in constituting spaces of appearance where human freedom and plurality may flourish.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 116 , Issue 3 , August 2022 , pp. 985 - 997
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. [1958] 1998. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. [1961] 2006a. “The Crisis in Culture.” In Between Past and Future, 194–222. New York: Penguin.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. [1961] 2006b. “What is Freedom?” In Between Past and Future, 142–69. New York: Penguin.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. [1963] 1964. Untitled Letter from Hannah Arendt to Gershom Scholem. Encounter 22: 53–56.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. [1975] 2003. “Home to Roost.” In Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Kohn, Jerome, 257–275. New York: Schocken Books.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. 1978. The Life of the Mind. New York: Harcourt.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. 2005. The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome, Kohn. New York: Schocken Books.Google Scholar
Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Bowring, Finn. 2014. “Arendt after Marx: Rethinking the Dualism of Nature and World.” Rethinking Marxism 26: 278–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brune, Michael. 2020. “Pulling down our Monuments.” Sierra Club. July 22. https://www.sierraclub.org/michael-brune/2020/07/john-muir-early-history-sierra-club.Google Scholar
Callicott, J. Baird. 2008. “Leopold’s Land Aesthetic.” In Nature, Aesthetics, and Environmentalism: From Beauty to Duty, eds. Carlson, Allen and Lintott, Sheila, 105–15. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Cannavò, Peter F. 2014. “Arendt: Place, World, and Earthly Nature.” In Engaging Nature: Environmentalism and the Political Theory Canon, eds. Cannavò, P. F. and Lane, Joseph H. Jr., 253–70. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Carson, Rachel. [1962] 2002. Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
Carson, Rachel. 1965. The Sense of Wonder. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Chapman, Anne. 2007. “The Ways that Nature Matters: The World and the Earth in the Thought of Hannah Arendt.” Environmental Values 16: 433–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Connolly, William E. 2019. Climate Machines, Fascist Drives, and Truth. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Cronon, William. 1995. “The Trouble with Wilderness; or Getting back to the Wrong Nature.” In Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. Cronon, William, 69–90. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.Google Scholar
Ephraim, Laura. 2018. Who Speaks for Nature? On the Politics of Science. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gardiner, Beth. 2020. “Unequal Impact: The Deep Links Between Racism and Climate Change.” Yale Environment 360. June 9. https://e360.yale.edu/features/unequal-impact-the-deep-links-between-inequality-and-climate-change.Google Scholar
Grassroots Global Justice and the Climate Justice Alliance. 2019. “The People’s Climate March 2014.” December 4. https://issuu.com/ggjalliance/docs/the_peoples_climate_march_2014___a_climate_justice.Google Scholar
Grusin, Richard. 2004. Culture, Technology, and the Creation of America’s National Parks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hribal, Jason. 2010. Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden History of Animal Resistance. Oakland, CA: AK Press.Google Scholar
Honig, Bonnie. 2009. Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Honig, Bonnie. 2013. “The Politics of Public Things: Neoliberalism and the Routine of Privatization.” No Foundations: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Law and Justice 10: 59–76.Google Scholar
Honig, Bonnie. 2017. Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair. New York: Fordham University Press.Google Scholar
Hyvönen, Ari-Elmeri. 2020. “Labor as Action: The Human Condition in the Anthropocene.” Research in Phenomenology 50: 240–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kolbert, Elizabeth. 2014. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. New York: Henry Holt and Company.Google Scholar
Kynala, Philips. 2020. “Gardening as a Radical Act.” Wall Street Journal, August 19. https://www.wsj.com/articles/gardening-food-summer-ron-finley-11597840206.Google Scholar
Latour, Bruno. 2004. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Latour, Bruno. 2017. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, trans. Porter, Catherine. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Markell, Patchen. 2011. “Arendt’s Work: On the Architecture of The Human Condition .” College Literature 38: 15–44.Google Scholar
Marshall, Robert. 1930. “The Problem of Wilderness.” Scientific Monthly 30: 141–48.Google Scholar
Maxwell, Lida. 2017. “Queer/Love/Bird Extinction: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring as a Work of Love.” Political Theory 45 (5): 682–704.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McKibben, Bill. 1989. The End of Nature. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Montrie, Chad. 2018. The Myth of Silent Spring: Rethinking the Origins of American Environmentalism. Oakland: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morton, Timothy. 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Myers, Ella. 2013. Worldly Ethics: Democratic Politics and Care for the World. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Nash, Roderick Frazier. 2014. Wilderness and the American Mind, 5th edition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Oelschlaeger, Max. 1991. The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
O’Neill, John. 1993. Ecology, Policy and Politics: Human Well-Being and the Natural World. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Payne, Daniel G. 1996. Voices in the Wilderness: American Nature Writing and Environmental Politics. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.Google Scholar
Pierce, Jessica, and Bekoff, Marc. 2017. The Animals’ Agenda: Freedom, Compassion, and Coexistence in the Human Age. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Rossello, Diego. 2021. “The Animal Condition in the Human Condition: Rethinking Arendt’s Political Action beyond the Human Species.” Contemporary Political Theory. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-021-00495-9.Google Scholar
Solnit, Rebecca. 2014. Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Hidden Wars of the American West. Oakland: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spence, Mark David. 1999. Disposessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Swift, Simon. 2009. Hannah Arendt. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Szerszynski, Bronislaw. 2003. “Technology, Performance, and Life Itself: Hannah Arendt and the Fate of Nature.” The Sociological Review 51 (2): 203–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thomas, Wilbur L. Jr. 1970. “Black Survival in Our Polluted Cities.” Proud 1: 10–13.Google Scholar
Thunberg, Greta. 2018. “Our Lives are in Your Hands.” Medium. September 7. https://medium.com/wedonthavetime/greta-thunberg-our-lives-are-in-your-hands-b5a7b1e24a97.Google Scholar
Voice, Paul. 2013. “Consuming the World: Hannah Arendt on Politics and the Environment.” Journal of International Political Theory 9 (2): 178–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wapner, Paul. 2010. Living through the End of Nature: The Future of American Environmentalism. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Whiteside, Kerry H. 1998. “Worldliness and Respect for Nature: An Ecological Application of Hannah Arendt’s Conception of Culture.” Environmental Values 7 (1): 25–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Submit a response

Comments

No Comments have been published for this article.