Fourth quandary: the crisis of legitimation 74
This section offers an overview of various critical arguments and methods engaged with conceptions of environmental justice. The environment emerges here as a peculiarly challenging topic. In one sense, it seems limited, the
focus of single issue campaigns. In another, environmental issues refuse to be contained within given political structures.
After all, the environment is, in a sense, everything.
Environmental questions challenge inherited conceptions of politics and effect a crisis in their criteria of legitimacy. At
times, green attacks on existing society are accompanied by calls for new kinds of thinking and practice so extreme that they
amount to a dismissal of given political institutions altogether. A search for alternative political traditions has ranged
from idealisations of various premodern cultures or of indigenous peoples, to new age religiosity (‘respect for Gaia’, etc.)
and a fascination with some eastern religious traditions. One unfortunate result of the intellectual instability and the huge
complexity of environmental issues is that green attitudes often recoil into an easier kind of personal
moralism.
Bob Pepperman Taylor writes:
the search for new ethical and political traditions…tends to reduce questions of environmental ethics to issues of personal
consciousness…it appears that concern for political reform almost falls away altogether in the search for an appropriate individual
consciousness and lifestyle…
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This section engages such political and meta-political issues as: the tensions between
reform environmentalism and
radical environmentalism (can environmental questions be adequately engaged within existing
democratic
structures?); the world-wide environmental justice movement and its challenge to some forms of environmentalism and ecocriticism;
the latent conflict between environmental questions and those
liberal traditions of politics focussed on issues of individual human liberty;
ecofeminist arguments that connect the oppression of women with that of the natural world; and efforts to ‘green’
post-colonial criticism by aligning environmental issues with the interests of colonised or indigenous people.
As this thumbnail survey suggests, criticism in relation to environmental justice works largely by extending to environmental
questions modes of thought, equity and judgement already practised in thinking geared towards conceptions of justice amid
human beings. Thus, for example, if the liberal tradition sees itself as developing and expanding conceptions of human ‘right’, some environmental thinkers ask if these may now be extended further to embrace the non-human.
The identification of broadly left-progressive conceptions of social justice with the supposed interests of the natural world
seems in part a response to one obvious danger – eco-fascism. This is the all too plausible counterargument that protection of the natural world, justice for future generations and for
the non-human can only be achieved by authoritarian governments prepared severely to regulate current modes of life. An unqualified
biocentric ethic is especially vulnerable to accusations of latent eco-fascism. After all – to take this to an extreme – from
the viewpoint of most inhabitants of the earth the most ‘eco-friendly’ policy could well be the extermination of most of the
human species.
Overall – and overriding some significant differences – the general stance of radical environmental criticism at the end of the century's first decade
is this: biocentric ideals of an equal flourishing of all life remain an inspiration and ultimate goal. In practice, however,
the immediate orientation of twenty-first-century environmental criticism is on the destructive effects of human systems of
hierarchy and inequality. Nevertheless, some environmental issues, notably overpopulation and climate change, still seem inadequately addressed by an ecocriticism adapting modes of oppositional politics developed in
relation to human beings. The challenge to received ways of thinking remains.
Fourth quandary: the crisis of legitimation
The issue of
climate change again throws into alarming relief the crisis of legitimacy inseparable from environmental politics. To hold
in one's head both the uncertainty and yet terror of the futures at stake is to produce an irresolution, even a derangement,
in given criteria of decision. Bearing in mind such issues as the mass extinction of non-human life and the probable deaths
of many millions
of people, how honestly certain is it which of the following two statements is finally the more responsible:
Climate change is now acknowledged as a legitimate and serious concern and the government will continue to support measures to improve
the fuel efficiency of motor vehicles.
The only defensible relationship to have with any car is with a well-aimed brick.