Recovering the Commons: Democracy, Place, and Global Justice by Herbert Reid & Betsy Taylor

Author:Herbert Reid & Betsy Taylor [Reid, Herbert & Taylor, Betsy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Public Policy, Environmental Conservation & Protection, Social Science, Political Science, Anthropology, Nature, Environmental Policy, General, Cultural & Social
ISBN: 9780252076817
Google: D0PEJtUuVS4C
Goodreads: 8017134
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2010-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

Deep Ecology and the Political

From Edith Cobb and Merleau-Ponty, we may find a beginning in the recognition that the culturing of the body, the child’s body, must inaugurate the pre-political suffrage of our vital and necessary participation in the world’s flesh of time’s body. Deep ecology has begun a process of resituating ecological citizenship in the nexus of body and place. However, in the following, while we recognize the contributions of deep ecology, we argue that it does not move toward a sufficiently political economic analysis of the roots of the body/place nexus in politics of the ecological and civic commons. “Deep ecology” has emerged as a critical response to technocratic managerialism, but we argue that it does not go far enough because it does not attend sufficiently to body, place, and politics—especially as these are understood as different modes of engagement with the world within history. Theorists such as David Abram, Neil Evernden, and Monika Langer richly articulate the embodied phenomenology of our lived being as ecological, yet they sidestep history and power. This move is particularly curious in theorists who have a thick sense of the sensorily grounded experiential flow. (A curious deflection, if one stops to think about it. Having gotten one’s feet wet in time, does one not fall “naturally” into history?) It is as if the (much needed) turn to the senses and embodiment is too easily shifted to a strangely “abstracted concrete”—sliding into idealized practices of sensation in a purified “natural,” practices that do not fold clearly into praxis as historical action.

This curious sideways slip suggests an undertow of submerged hegemonic meanings. In the following chapters, we offer an understanding of the body~place~commons nexus in a political ecology as an alternative to “deep ecology” theories that falter in the face of transnational corporate power. Our current institutions of higher education, in the United States and elsewhere, are key players in maintaining the “body-blindness” that is a central prop of technocratic managerialism and its attendant blindness to place, politics, and history. Against this, as a necessary part of our struggle for a sustainable and equitable world, we propose institutional transformation of academe toward “place-based” scholarship and teaching in partnership with “local knowledges” in collaborative defense of the civic and environmental commons.

In his 1988 Environmental Ethics article and more recent book The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, David Abram has offered a remarkably creative, compelling, and lucid reading of Merleau-Ponty’s discoveries and their significance for what he calls “the movements toward an ecological awareness” (Abram, 1988, 1996). Merleau-Ponty’s “Lebenswelt is identical to the biosphere of a truly rigorous ecology,” as Abram put it (Abram, 1988, 119). Abram ably renders Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of thought and speech taking form upon the infrastructure of a living perception already engaged in the world and from “the play between the esthesiological body and the expressive physiognomies and geographies of a living world” (116).

But a “truly rigorous ecology,” if cultivated in Merleau-Pontian terms, must also be a political ecology.

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