The boundaries of the political

Summary

This section offers an overview of various critical arguments and methods engaged with conceptions of environmental justice. The environment emerges here as a peculiarly challenging topic. In one sense, it seems limited, the focus of single issue campaigns. In another, environmental issues refuse to be contained within given political structures. After all, the environment is, in a sense, everything.

Environmental questions challenge inherited conceptions of politics and effect a crisis in their criteria of legitimacy. At times, green attacks on existing society are accompanied by calls for new kinds of thinking and practice so extreme that they amount to a dismissal of given political institutions altogether. A search for alternative political traditions has ranged from idealisations of various premodern cultures or of indigenous peoples, to new age religiosity (‘respect for Gaia’, etc.) and a fascination with some eastern religious traditions. One unfortunate result of the intellectual instability and the huge complexity of environmental issues is that green attitudes often recoil into an easier kind of personal moralism. Bob Pepperman Taylor writes:

the search for new ethical and political traditions … tends to reduce questions of environmental ethics to issues of personal consciousness … it appears that concern for political reform almost falls away altogether in the search for an appropriate individual consciousness and lifestyle …