1 Introduction and Approach
By the end of January in 2020, 1,333 local governments, in 26 countries and representing 814 million people, had declared climate emergencies, as have 16 national governments and the European Union, calling upon themselves and others for a more urgent response to climate change than had yet been taken. The Climate Mobilization, which advocates and tracks such declarations, describes them as “a critical first step” in an effort to “rescue and rebuild civilization.”1 A similarly dire assessment and urgent call to action is expressed by the Extinction Rebellion movement, which proclaims “an unprecedented global emergency” in which humanity is “in the midst of a mass extinction of our own making.”2 In May 2019, The Guardian Editor-in-Chief Katherine Viner (following a call to do so by teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg earlier that month) issued new language guidelines, advising her staff to use “climate emergency, crisis, or breakdown” rather than “climate change,” in order to convey the requisite urgency “when what scientists are talking about is a catastrophe for humanity.”3
While such apocalyptic rhetoric is hardly new to the environmental movement, its recent coalescing around a discourse of crisis or emergency reflects not only what scientists describe as a closing window of opportunity to avoid catastrophic climate change, but also the recognition that the scope and scale of human-caused environmental change on the planet over the past half-century represents a multidimensional crisis. It will likely involve social, economic, and political crises for those affected by it, intensified as meaningful action to mitigate its various threats is postponed or otherwise avoided. “Ecological crisis” is probably an understatement for the expected period of mass extinctions that threatens to irreparably harm the planet’s biodiversity and ecological stability. Many will experience personal crises, whether from loss of places and livelihoods or through the anxiety that psychologists link to the awareness of increasing environmental insecurity. For our purposes here, however, the crisis is also one of ideas about what matters in the organization of politics and society.
Ideas and environmental politics
At a time in which Australian bushfires have killed over a billion nonhuman animals in a single season (potentially driving the iconic koala to extinction in the wild), collapse of pollinator colonies from exposure to neonicotinoids used in agriculture threatens the planet’s food systems, ocean acidification from climate change and plastic wastes are combining to devastate marine life, and water supplies to major world cities are being shut off due to chronic drought, it may seem naïve or self-serving to fault ideas rather than more palpable sources of power for the environmental crisis. Ideas are in our heads, and perhaps books and other texts, but they have no material power of their own and seem benign next to instruments of power such as weapons or political authority. They are not what is starting bushfires or killing bees, and will not in themselves extinguish those fires or save those bees. As a professional political theorist who studies ideas for a living, it may seem particularly disingenuous for me to claim that ours is a crisis of ideas. Those holding hammers may often mistake many things in the world for nails, and the political theorist’s interest in abstract ideas is a pretty esoteric hammer.
But ideas matter. They can orient us in the world and to each other, link causes and effects and explain complex phenomena, and provide meaning for our individual lives. In the form of social and political ideals that inform and direct our collective existence, they can articulate our aspirations and can direct our energies in maintaining or reforming public institutions in an effort to realize them. When our imaginations are impoverished of fruitful ideas or are trapped in conventional ones, our possibilities likewise become limited. As William Blake characterizes the self-imposed limitations of the imagination, our “mind-forged manacles” can imprison us in despair.4 But ideas can also be emancipatory, freeing us from such limitations. They can contribute to ocean pollution or climate change in manifold ways to be explored in upcoming chapters, or prevent our realization that we’re doing so. They can also bring recognition of these problems or inform constructive solutions to them.
Our ideas can and do also change, either in response to changes in the world or in our understanding of or relationship to it. In this sense, they comprise what Sheldon Wolin calls “a continuously evolving grammar and vocabulary to facilitate communication and to orient the understanding.”5 They can effect change, particularly when they have normative content that identifies a gap between what we observe or experience and that toward which we aspire. Ideas and events therefore exist in a dynamic relationship with each other, reacting to and causing reaction in the other as ideas change the world and changes in the world disrupt and transform our ideas. They exist in dialectic with other ideas, disrupting and being disrupted by new or competing ideas. Theorists seek to understand these dynamics – political theorists do so with important social and political ideals, and environmental political theorists direct their attention to the shared space between politics and collective social life, on the one hand, and the ecosystems that can provide the material bases for their flourishing, or render this more difficult.
Events in the world have shaped the ideas and ideals through which we understand our world and orient ourselves within it. The execution of Socrates by democratic Athens and its fall to militaristic Sparta surely influenced Plato’s understanding and evaluation of democracy. The English Civil War shaped Hobbes’ views of human nature and political authority, while the Glorious Revolution led Locke to view these somewhat differently. But the emergence of new ideas and ideals has also been formative in Western political thought, as Tocqueville and Mill – in their own ways – sought to accommodate a new ethos of democratic equality with what they saw as its potential and its pathologies. Such disruptive ideas can also be scientific ones, as with Copernican heliocentrism denying that humans were at the center of the universe, or Darwin’s theory of natural selection and its influence on politics and religion. When disruptive events occur or new ideas emerge, existing systems of ideas must accommodate them.
Ideas and ideals exist in time and can evolve or be transformed over time without the full erasure of previous incarnations, like a modern city built on an ancient footprint, with layers of foundations associated with earlier generations to be found beneath the surface. Like toxic chemicals emanating from barrels of industrial waste decades after being shortsightedly stored in underground chambers incapable of containing them, toxic ideas and ideals associated with race and gender hierarchies or authoritarian politics can return to democratic polities that had previously rejected them. But, like a forest ecosystem