Crisis Progressive: Environmental Ethics in a Time of ‘Unavoidable’ Ecological Destruction in Amazonia

ABSTRACT

Environmentalists in southern Brazilian Amazonia framed the future as a horizon filled with ‘unavoidable’ crises in motion that could not be contained. This framing, which I call ‘crisis progressive,’ informed life-defining decisions that led environmentalists to participate in controversial environmental efforts designed to limit – rather than to avoid or reverse – mass-scale socio-ecological damage. Their efforts contravene progressivist ethical assessments whereby destructive actions are assessed as appropriate on the grounds they lead to a ‘good’ future of continuous improvements in human and nonhuman affairs. Advancing anthropological discussions on futurity and ethics, the ethnographic critique of crisis-progressive environmental practices foregrounds the ethical dynamics emerging from the collapse of progressivist futures. The analysis opens a window on how environmentalists’ ethical sensibilities, attuned to ‘unavoidable’ destruction, forego ethical purity and embrace compromise, uncertainty, and hesitation.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethics
• futurity
• progress
• crisis
• Amazonia

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to NGO officials who took the time to share with me their views on the future. I am very grateful to Chika Watanabe, Daena Funahashi, Andrew Johnson, Saiba Varma, Ryan Adams and Jason Cons who helped me give shape to the current argument. All shortcomings remain my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The names of all persons and places used in this article are pseudonyms.

2 An extreme version of this (im)moral reasoning can be seen in the ‘lesser evil’ argument that the indefinite imprisonment and torture of ‘enemy combatants’, mass-scale violence against civilians, and illegal surveillance carried out by armed forces are all necessary to bring about lasting peace (see Weizman 2011).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Bucknell University [grant number Sage Fellowship]; Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences [grant number SES-1126963]; Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research [grant number 8238].