Environmental Democracy

Environmental crisis is above all a problem of knowledge. It leads to rethinking being and its ways towards complexity, to be able to open new paths in history and to create an environmental savoir , capable of reorienting societies towards the reconstruction of their life-worlds in a new relationship with nature. Bogus modern rationality has crashed into its limits - the un-knowing of its one-dimensional thinking, the alienation and uncertainties in the order of nature.

Environmental rationality seeks to reestablish the links between being, thinking and knowing. This new road towards understanding environmental complexity makes its entrance through the denaturalization of history, of that history that has landed in a technological and economized world where being and thinking have been seduced and absorbed by the formal and ‘instrumental rationality’ that dominates modernity: by calculation and planning, by determination and legality. This dominated and assured world of certainties has reached its limits expressed by environmental crisis.

The construction of environment rationality implies the reconstitution of identities through the relation of cultural beings and cultural savoir. It implies the reformulation of knowledge and the emergence of a new savoir that orients and supports the re-appropriation of nature and life-worlds of the people through power in knowledge and the will to power that is a will to know and a will to be.

The solution to the global environmental crisis will not be possibly accomplished mainly and only through a rational (scientific, technological, economic) administration of nature, of ecological risk and global change. The environmental crisis questions the epistemological project that has searched for a uniformed and homogeneous thought, for the unification of the world and being through the absolute Idea and totalizing Reason; of its transcendence and the transit towards a sustainable future, negating the limit of being, time and history.

Environmental crisis signals the end of economic rationality that has unleashed the illusion of unlimited growth, of infinite production. Environment savoir deconstruct the logic of the scientific control of the world, of the technological domination of nature, of the rational administration of the environment.

Truth is socially constructed by confronting the limits and the potentialities of the real; by an understanding of a non-determined world …..that emerge from a diversity of meanings; by the revival of quieted truths –that demand an exegesis of silence, of the non thought, of exiled saviors – that we have inherited through the history of ‘domination of nature’.

The environment is that “part of the world” –of the real, of knowledge, of being– which has been dismissed, externalized and exiled from normal science and rational thinking. The environment is the complex other in the order of the Real and the Symbolic, which transcends a one-dimensional rationality and its hegemonic and homogenizing global order, to open the way to that to come –to a sustainable future–, by the potency of creativity, diversity and difference. Environmental savoir ‘confronts’ the strategies to unify thought and to dissolve the varieties in thinking and knowing in a common field ruled by a ‘universal law’, even that of a consensus of differing views and interests conducted by ‘communicative rationality’. It thus opens a dialogue of beings/savoirs, and fertilizes a politics of difference, dissent and conviviality.

Environmental crisis is the first global crisis produced by the ignorance produced by knowledge, including the scientific conception. Science, pretending to liberate man from backwardness and oppression, from primitivism and underdevelopment, has generated a blind knowledge that governs an alienated society that is ignorant of its overspecialized knowledge and of the rules of power that govern the world.

In present global world, cultural hybridization leads to the reconstruction of identities away from any essentialism that could attach cultural beings to an immutable original root and to an existence outside of history. The reconstitution of identities in environmental complexity leads to an inquiry about the grounding of collective beings in their territories and their cultures; their resistance and permanence in time. If scientific rationality is based in the relation of truth between the concept and the real, under environmental rationality knowledge is embodied and rooted in being.

In the emergent democratic social order, identity is not only the reaffirmation of the one while tolerating the others. Environmental democracy implies the reconstitution of being in its relations with otherness –difference, diversity–, in the melting pot of nature and culture, through a dialogue of savoirs and knowledges. Today, when the individualized subject is carried away in abandoning its being that is dissolved and fused in a collective anonymous being –as coins that are coined under a unitary economic sign, like merchandizes that are anchored in the gold standard and dissolved in current money–, identities emerge as beings grounded in their territory and expressed through their savvy knowledge. The rebirth of ethnical identities is the most eloquent manifestation of these territorialized beings. The “indigenous”, this human being marginalized, dominated, subjugated; this being forged in a “traditional” and “cold” society, irrational and time-less; in a world where their memories have been forgotten through a history of domination and denial, where their saying has been enslaved in the rock of silence and submission.
Environmental crisis is the result of the subjection, submission, dominium and ignorance of complex nature, of complex time, of complex being, of complex thinking. Environmental movements are struggles for the just distribution of material goods (usevalues), but include also the invention of values-meanings assigned to nature, goods, needs, worldviews, world-lives, ideas and desires, that define the processes of adaptation / transformation / co-evolution of cultural groups with nature. Beyond problems of incommensurability of goods-objects, these claims deal with identity values differentiated by alternative cultural significations. These social movements are imagining power strategies capable of building a common front for the construction of a world of diversities, guided by an environmental rationality and a politics of difference – a new dialogue with nature.

Source:
Ecological Threats and New Promises of Sustainability for the 21 Century
Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford Univ, July 2005