Eco-Emancipation

• In Event: Reimagining World-Making: Ideals, Concepts & Processes of Oppositional Politics

Abstract

The ideal of freedom has often been invoked by people to justify or excuse many forms of environmental damage as well as practices that impose great suffering on non-human animals, even to sustain environmental domination. When freedom is equated with unfettered property rights, for example, or limitless consumer choice, it tends to end in the exploitation of Earth others. We are not wrong to care about freedom; in fact, caring about it is crucial to remediating our environmental problems. Yet we need to understand freedom differently. Freedom as eco-emancipation consists in continuing practices of world-making in tandem with human and non-human others, practices that embody new institutional constraints and extra-institutional mobilizations. These constraints and mobilizations are geared toward limiting how human power may be exercised over nature and people, and toward more inclusive incorporation for all. Emancipation also includes a political respect for nature and persons along with a culture of responsibility that makes us accountable and responsive to a wide range of others, both human and non-human. And even as it orients us in new ways to the more-than-human world, it avoids resting the emancipation of nature on the domination of certain groups of people. Eco-emancipation does not promise perfect harmony, either among persons or between people and nature. What it promises is release from the entrapment and exploitation that comprise environmental domination; it prevents us as human beings both from exercising domination in this form and from suffering it.

Eco-emancipation is a non-sovereign kind of freedom. Instead of individual or collective mastery, it unfolds through relations of interdependence across individuals, communities, and types of being. And while it does involve greater influence over the human forces that shape our lives and affect the Earth, this influence is far from an experience of perfect control. Emancipation always coexists with uncertainty and precarity, and it is marked by continuing contestation among the diverse members of the more-than-human communities it sustains. Then too, emancipation is never complete because domination is a permanent possibility of power. This paper lays out the meaning of ecological emancipation, and it explores the plural, non-sovereign character of freedom in this form, including techniques for mobilizing eco-emancipation and some political, economic, and cultural mechanisms for institutionalizing it.

Author

• Sharon R. Krause, Brown University