Hannah Arendt’s turn to the self and environmental responses to climate change paralysis

Abstract

Environmentalists have struggled with how to mobilize people to act in the face of widespread and now inevitable consequences of climate change. Significant responses to this challenge, such as incentivizing individual Green choices in the market and avoiding the rhetoric of catastrophe, continue the philosophical and political trends, identified by Hannah Arendt, that contribute to world alienation and the decline of politics. Environmental thinkers are invited to use Arendt’s theories of the turn to the self and political action to think critically about contemporary strategies to address climate change.

Keywords:

• Hannah Arendt
• environmental political theory
• framing
• democracy
• self
• climate change