George Orwell and ecological citizenship: moral agency and modern estrangement

Abstract

Theories of ecological citizenship seek to conceptualize political agency while taking into account humanity’s embeddedness in nature. This essay intervenes with contributions from an author distant from discourses about environmental politics, but with insights to offer them. George Orwell’s writings respond to a problem continuously articulated in the history of ecological thought: the estrangement from the conditions of one’s existence. In doing so, he provides a literary case study of ecological moral reasoning, a practice whereby the virtues of ecological citizenship are cultivated. Such virtues are cultivated by confronting the conditions of one’s existence in embodied terms, incorporating that experiential knowledge, and contributing to practices of self-government using it. This essay presents Orwell’s case, explains its relevance to the contemporary discourse on ecological citizenship, and concludes by suggesting that it also provides resources for empirical social scientists seeking to operationalize ecological citizenship theory by way of a moral sociology of the environment.

Keywords:

• Ecological citizenship
• George Orwell
• estrangement
• virtue
• green political thought

Acknowledgments

The author acknowledges, without implicating, helpful comments on earlier versions of this work by Razvan Amironesei, Craig Carr, Kyle Haines, Gerald Mackie, Sean Morgan, Ike Sharpless, and Tracy B. Strong. The Citizenship Studies reviewers offered many valuable insights that are reflected in the final version of this article.

Notes

1. Some authors prefer the terms ‘green citizenship’ or ‘environmental citizenship.’ Depending on the author, the distinction can be substantive or rhetorical. Although the distinction is substantive for Dobson, on whose work I focus below, he sees the two approaches as ultimately complementary (cf. Dobson 2003).

2. I am not the first to reevaluate ecological citizenship theory through the writings of a twentieth-century thinker not principally associated with environmentalism. Godrej (2012), for example, proposes a Gandhian ecological citizenship.

3. I thank an anonymous reviewer for pushing me to engage with this strand of Barry’s work.

4. See also Dobson (2009) for another relevant, albeit briefer, engagement with MacIntyre which endorses his focus on dependence, but argues that he focuses on social dependence in times of vulnerability at the expense of adequately engaging head-on with ‘our condition as biological (better, “ecological”) beings.’

5. I borrow the language of moral agency from MacIntyre (1984). Although his appraisal of the enlightenment project is more nuanced and less pessimistic, Taylor’s approach to political theory is also centered on the relationship between moral agency and social practice, a philosophical method he calls a ‘phenomenological account of identity,’ which I read as resting on a similar claim as MacIntyre’s (Taylor 1989, 32).

6. Similar concerns about modern industrial (and especially capitalist) society have been raised by a number of twentieth-century philosophers of technology including M. Heidegger, H. Marcuse, G. Anders, and H. Jonas.

7. On my reading, Leopold is not literally suggesting that one must dedicate one’s life to farming in order to understand where one’s food comes from, a statement as impractical as it would be distasteful to those who spend far too many of their waking hours to produce enough calories to subsist. The Sand County Almanac is a meditation from Leopold’s very particular perspective in rural Wisconsin in the early and mid-twentieth century, and is self-consciously so. One can, of course, acknowledge that his work is ‘parochial, gendered, and Western’ as do Gabrielson and Cawley, while simultaneously affirming that ‘the fact that Leopold was a product of his time does not necessarily mean his theory must be trapped in its historical setting’ (Gabrielson and Cawley 2010). I thank an anonymous reviewer for asking me to clarify my position on this point.

8. In this vein, Nussbaum argues that the most relevant aspect of 1984 to understanding the political response to the attacks of 11 September 2001 in the United States is that the regime’s ‘project of extinguishing compassion and the complex forms of personal love and mourning that are its sources, and of replacing them with simple depersonalized forms of hatred, aggression, triumph, and fear’ (Nussbaum 2005, 281).

9. In 1984 the Party has its own internal hierarchy. Winston belongs to the Outer Party, Oceana’s middle class.

10. Shklar remarks similarly that for Owell, ‘[n]ature is instinct and Winston longs to believe that it survives among the proles.’ But she also points to Julia, Winston’s partner, who plays a kind of intermediary role between the proles and himself. On Shklar’s reading, Julia ‘is the personification of unreflective honest feeling and unbelief. It is she who brings Winston out to the countryside, to sex, and to love. This is of course, the true natural world of feeling. She is not in the least interested in the difference between truth and falsehood that so torments Winston’ (Shklar 1985).

11. Graeber notes that what the figure of the tyrant and the figure slave share is the inability to make friends (which he associates with freedom) (Graeber 2011, 209).

12. See also Milton who addresses this problem with the distinction between ‘ecosphere people,’ those who rely primarily on local ecological resources, and ‘biosphere people,’ ‘those whose way of life is tied with the “global technological system”’ (Milton 1996, 29). Phenomena like global warming call into question the very notion of an ‘ecosystem person,’ or at least its relevance to the most pressing contemporary issues.

13. I thank an anonymous reviewer for pushing me to clarify this point.