Green Political Thought is clearly a textbook, a survey of the current state of the field intended, I’d judge, for a senior undergraduate course. Given that it is in its fourth edition, it is clearly a successful one, but how does it work for an “ordinary,” non-student reader, looking for an overview of a fast-moving field?
The answer is “surprisingly well” – although with the inevitable frustration of a textbook meant to direct the student to further readings: you want more – more explanation, more details, more background.
Four key points, in particular, left me scrabbling in the bibliography, underlining and adding to my “must read” list:
1. Bruno Latour’s theory of “hybridity” – spreading the capacity to “speak” across the human and non-human realms. Sounds odd – but then his claim that some parts of nature “speak” very loudly – charismatic megafauna such as polar bears and orangutans (through influential organizations) – much louder than of what many humans are capable. This avoids many problems of the human/nature binary that Dobson briefly outlines. (Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, Harvard University Press, 2004)
2. The distinction between self-reliance and self-sufficiency – Greens almost invariably adopting for the former, not the latter (Albania’s lesson enough there) – the argument being that communities (or “bioregions”) should try to satisfy needs and wants locally, and only look outside when that is unavoidable. (Ekins, ed. The Living Economy, Routledge, 1986)
3. The claim that Habermas sees women’s movements as offering the only group that seeks “fundamental change from a universalistic standpoint” – that women can be the vanguard party of change, being the only group sufficiently disengaged from the current system to resist colonization by the system. (Roderick, Habermas and the Foundations of Critical Theory, Macmillan, 1986)
4. The claim that the call by some ecofeminists for women to embrace traditional female values is deeply dangerous to the liberation of women, what Plumwood calls “uncritical reversal” – “to use ideas that have already been turned against women, in the belief that, if they are taken up and used by everyone, a general improvement in the human and non-human condition will result. If they are not taken up, then women will have ‘sacrificed themselves to the environment’." (Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, Routledge, 1993)
But another reader, interested in different aspects of the past three decades (the framework Dobson identifies as marking the history of “ecologism” so far), might well light on an entirely different selection – for this is a wide-ranging text.
The basic thesis, which Dobson says has only crystallized since previous editions (this may be one case where the latest edition of the textbook is essential – far from often the case) is that ecologism is now a standalone bank of political thought that deserves to be considered in the same arenas as socialism, liberalism or feminism (and one chapter has a handy checklist of how it significantly differs from each of those).
.jpg?t=20120209092158)
Article comments
1 - Ted
That was a seriously interesting and well thought out analysis. Kudos.
2 - Jonathan
Excellent and useful review.