A Radical Environmental Politics?

What would a truly radical environmental politics—an entirely new relationship between human politics and the natural environment—look like? Alex Loftus, William Ophuls, and Mick Smith all tackle this question. They approach it from the perspective of political philosophy, building their arguments in conversation with, and imparting environmental perspectives to, established works within existing schools of thought. Loftus works within the critical Marxist tradition, Smith the postmodern tradition. Ophuls is a little more eclectic, but seems to be coming for the most part from a Straussian perspective.

All three see the problems with contemporary environmentalism not as a failure of policy, but as a deeper failing in the very structure of contemporary society. The particular failures they see are different but overlapping. For Loftus it is capitalism; for Ophuls, rationalism; and, for Smith, governmentality and biopolitics. Their solutions all focus on a radically democratic politics, participatory rather than representative, in which individuals can embrace a direct relationship with the natural and lived environment. The solutions differ beyond this commonality, particularly in the scale of polities: Smith envisions a world of only small polities and Loftus a world of democratized cities, with Ophuls somewhere in between. All three authors assume that radical democratization will successfully address the environmental crisis, without telling us how this relationship will work.

Mick Smith, in Against Ecological Sovereignty, argues from a postmodern perspective against the anthropocentric philosophy underlying most contemporary environmentalism. His analysis begins with Georgio Agamben’s critique of sovereignty, which in turn draws on Carl Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty as “he who decides on the exception” (Smith, p. 123) and Michel Foucault’s theory of biopolitics. Agamben argues that the existence of sovereignties (zones of actual or potential exclusion from the realm of the political) creates biopolitics, the reduction of people from participants in the political realm to mere biological entities, allowing “the governmental management and control of the biological life (and death) of populations” (p. xv).

Agamben’s sovereignty is explicitly of the human realm—it is the ability to exclude humans from political participation or consideration. But Agamben also writes of the anthropological machine, the constant historical definition and redefinition of what it means to be human, as a way to elevate people above nature, and to define who is properly and fully human. Smith applies the critical lens of the anthropological machine to the idea of sovereignty, and argues that we should think of sovereignty not only in anthropological, but also in ecological terms. Sovereignty thus becomes the exclusion of nature. Only by abjuring the sovereignty of the human over the natural, the use of nature for our purposes rather than recognizing it as a political subject in its own right, can we develop a properly ecological politics.

Smith then builds a theory of ecological politics and ecological ethics, drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt and Emmanuel Levinas (among many others). The politics is one of participation rather than institutionalization, and the ethics is one in which “the natural” is accounted as beings in their own right, ultimately unknowable but worthy of ethical consideration nonetheless. In the same way that that political (rather than biopolitical) life is only possible without the existence of a sovereign over people, an ecological politics in only possible in the presence of an ecological ethic and the absence of ecological sovereignty.

Smith’s argument is developed almost exclusively in reference to previous work of political (and occasionally ecological) philosophy. It shows a great breadth of reading and of analysis in the realm of postmodern political philosophy, which is explained for the most part effectively, although the book will be dense going for readers not fluent in the genre. Where the book does less well is in connecting the works of political philosophy to a world beyond the internal debates of the genre. Smith...