To think and act ecologically: the environment, human animality, nature

ABSTRACT

Much work in care ethics and disability studies is concerned with the flourishing of human animals as an independent species. As a result, it focuses on how the built environments and the social structures that produce them restrict and exclude us. This paper addresses this problem and provides tentative first steps towards sketching an account of ethics that is structured around the interdependent nature of human and more than human life. I argue that our embodied existence places us in a shared condition of vulnerability with all forms of life on earth. This allows us to conceive of caring as an essential condition of the sustainability and well-being of social and ecological life systems. To this end, I discuss the notion of anthropocentrism – and the attendant notion of Anthropocene – and argue that the conception of human animality that underwrites it posits a disembodied and homogenous ‘anthropos’ that is equally responsible for and equally affected by unsustainable social systems. Further, I examine the debate that opposes realist and constructivist accounts of nature, and I argue that it is inadequate to look at nature through the lenses of the predatory social systems that are responsible for ecological injustices in the first place.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethics of care
• disability
• vulnerability
• sustainability
• environment
• nature

Acknowledgements

Didier Zúñiga wishes to thank Anouck Alary, Avigail Eisenberg, Jim Tully, and the anonymous reviewers of this journal for generously reading previous drafts of this essay, and for offering constructive comments and suggestions. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Canadian Political Science Association’s 2019 annual meeting in Vancouver. I am grateful to the audience, and especially to Sophie Bourgault, Eleanor MacDonald, and to Rachael Desborough for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. There are some notable exceptions, such as Kafer (2013), Ray and Sibara (2018), and Nocella et al. (2012); among others.

2. Similarly, Susan Wendell is concerned with how human-induced environmental degradation can damage people’s bodies (Wendell, 1996, p. 37).

3. The concept of the ‘Anthropocene’ was popularized by Crutzen (2002). It has since been discussed and criticized by multiple scholars, including: Bonneuil and Fressoz (2013); Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009), Grear (2015), Haraway (2016), Latour (2017), Malm and Hornborg (2014), Moore (2016), and Morton (2013); among others.

4. See also Strathern, 1992b. as cited in Escobar, 1999, p. 11.

5. See Latour (2017, p. 107): ‘ … we are not hoping to live at last “in harmony with nature.” There is no harmony in that contingent cascade of unforeseen events, nor is there any “nature.”’

6. Kate Soper refers to this, which she considers to be the condition of possibility of culture and society, as ‘nature in the realist sense’ (Soper, 1996, p. 29). That is, the nature ‘to whose laws we are always subject, even as we harness it to human purposes, and whose processes we can neither escape nor destroy’ (Soper, 1996, p. 29).

7. I have in mind something like Charles Taylor’s notion of strong evaluation (see, in particular, Taylor, 1985a, 1985b, 1985c).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes on contributors

Didier Zúñiga

Didier Zúñiga is a PhD candidate in political theory at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. His research interests lie primarily in democratic theory, care ethics, environmental philosophy, and feminist philosophy.