Review of the Handbook of Critical Environmental Politics

The UN COP27 and COP15 have not long since passed, wherein nations, social movements and other major actors gathered to effectively deliberate the fate of much of life on earth. As with previous COPs, both have been characterised by a stark dearth of necessary ambition and transformative measures needed to stem climate and biodiversity collapse. Hence the timeliness of the Handbook of Critical Environmental Politics (2022) featuring varied interventions on contemporary issues and contestations surrounding the climate and biodiversity crises as defining political issues of our time. The spirit of critical theory, which engages not only in robust critiques of systems of domination like capitalism but also strives for liberated futures, serves as a particularly apt lens for urging us in the direction of systemic change. Thus, the handbook captures a crucial insight from critical-environmental politics: that adequately addressing our socio-ecological predicament requires transformative change entailing ‘not only scientific and technological advances but also profound and enduring social and cultural changes’ (Lidskog & Berg, p. 266). Times of crisis require immanent political modalities of critique that go beyond ‘discourse deconstruction’ and towards embodied experimentations with- and affirmations of- alternative ways of being (p. 5).

This comprehensive text is divided into six main thematic sections, from theoretical foundations to future trends. Each spans a considerable breadth of topics from a diverse authorship, including Dengler and Strunk’s ‘Feminisms and the environment’, McIlroy & Barry’s ‘Just transition: a conflict transformation approach’, Das’ ‘Ecological mobilisations in the Global South’ and Bresnihan and Millner’s ‘Decolonising environmental politics’. The Handbook features chapters on a range of key issues and debates within (critical) environmental-politics, such as the mounting antagonisms between degrowth and ‘sustainable development’ as two decidedly distinct responses to contemporary socio-ecological perturbations. Chertkovskaya’s informative chapter on ‘degrowth’ offers an accessible introduction to this utopian political movement which proclaims the radical incompatibility between endless economic growth and ecological integrity, instead calling for an equitable downscaling of production and consumption for socio-ecological wellbeing. By contrast, Blühdorn chapter ‘Sustainability’ critically examines the hegemonic sustainable development paradigm. Decades of sustainable development policies and approaches have failed to stem mounting socioeconomic inequality, environmental breakdown and related ills. Indeed, sustainable development was never designed to challenge Western understandings of progress, the latter as synonymous with consumer-capitalist development and its ‘core principles’ of endless growth, extraction, and commodification for shareholder profitability. In other words, sustainability ‘has never been a transformative project, but more than anything, a defensive project’ (Blühdorn 2022, p. 151).

Crucially, the text does especially well to draw on decolonial perspectives throughout (Ferdinand, p. 40; Bresnihan & Millner, p. 521) which challenge hegemonic Western definitions of knowledge, the good life and ‘Nature’. For instance, Ferdinand’s ‘decolonial ecologies’ chapter sheds important critical light on the discursive ecologies of canonical environmental texts like Henry David Thoreau’s Walden as ultimately predicated on a colonial, masculinist, white socio-political organisation of the world that ‘prevented both white women and colored others (men and women) from speaking and writing’ (p. 41). As a result, a pervasive whiteness and androcentrism (Dengler & Strunk, p. 58) still permeates many contemporary ecological policies, academic and mainstream discourses, wherein racialised and gendered ‘others’ are often still excluded. However, there is much we can learn from historically marginalised voices, and the multiplicity of ethico-political and onto-epistemological approaches espoused by the thousands of indigenous peoples spanning the globe as living testaments to ‘the possible’. In this vein, Altmann’s chapter ‘Buen Vivir’ explores the challenges and potentialities of the Ecuadorian indigenous-inspired movement Buen vivir as a radical alternative to the ‘destructive realities’ (Altmann, p. 107) of Western-Capitalism. Relatedly, environmental justice is another prevalent theme throughout, as evinced by Das’ chapter ‘Ecological mobilisations in the Global South’ (p. 456), wherein the mounting social and environmental dispossessions of extractive capital are fuelling local and indigenous resistance.

However, one notable omission in the collection is the lack of entries with an explicit and sustained focus on the agentic other-than-human world. The collection would have been more fully complete with entries drawing on fields and concepts such as the critical-posthumanities and multispecies justice (MSJ). The latter lens adds a necessary and further critical dimension to political-ecological debates by highlighting that, although environmental justice and climate justice framings have been essential for calling attention to the multiple, intersecting inequalities that continually result in the disproportionate exposure of marginal human populations to environmental harms, this alone is not enough. Rather, MSJ seeks to extend the notion of justice beyond its traditionally anthropocentric remit to our myriad terrestrial counterparts as beings who also deserve respect and ethical consideration as ends in themselves. From this more inclusive perspective we can begin to approach the complex yet urgent question of how we learn to live better together, facilitating more harmonious multispecies cohabitation through, for example, urban rewilding and convivial conservation initiatives. Any viable project of radical political transformation, a central pillar of critical theory, must proceed from the recognition that this world is inhabited by many persons- human and other-than-human- who all matter. This is not only an ethical imperative but also an existential one, as the sixth mass extinction gathers momentum.

Nevertheless, the Handbook of Critical Environmental Politics covers a considerable range of topics and discussions in critical environmental politics and as such makes for important reading for students and scholars in the field. The collection offers an important reminder of the utopian value of critical theory and praxis: its tireless, resounding ‘No!’ to the necro-political status quo, and continual (re)affirmation of the enduring possibility of other worlds. As Ferdinand, Bresnihan, Millner and others in this collection rightly denote, critical environmental political theory and praxis amidst the Capitalocene must work to include historically racialised, sexualised, [and animalised] others as ‘companions on equal footing with whom a common world is imagined’ (Ferdinand, p. 50).