5 - Adorno and radical ecology

Summary

Adorno recognizes that the damage we have inflicted on nature has been extensive, and predicts that it could assume catastrophic proportions if we continue to behave as we do now: as rapaciously acquisitive creatures whose survival instincts are veering so far out of control that we are now destroying not just what we are trying to preserve but need to survive. What we call progress is forcing hundreds of millions of people to renounce the satisfaction of their needs to the point where they suffer horribly from malnutrition, starvation and preventable diseases. In less severe cases, we are forfeiting far richer, more materially and spiritually fulfilling, lives because mere survival remains our primary goal. For its part, non-human nature lies in ruins because we have imposed goals and purposes on it that are far different from those that it would adopt independently. We have ignored and suppressed nature's autotelic powers.

The looming prospect of environmental catastrophe – the extinction of all life on this planet – now acts as a powerful stimulus to thinking about the changes that must be implemented to ensure the survival of human and non-human nature. As Adorno argues throughout his work, our current idea of progress – the progressive domination of nature – is incompatible with a more emancipated form of progress in which human beings would reconcile themselves with nature (HF 151).