Abstract
A decade after Mick Smith published An Ethics of Place: Radical Ecology, Postmodernity, and Social Theory, he has returned with another critical and insightful work focusing on radical ecology. In Against Ecological Sovereignty: Ethics, Biopolitics, and Saving the Natural World, Smith turns his focus from the idea of an ecological self, which was front and center in An Ethics of Place, to community and politics, working to establish an ecological ethos that can attempt to save the natural world without appeal to a concept of sovereignty.
Smith begins by explaining that “what radical ecology contests is human dominion over the natural world—that is to say, ecological sovereignty in all its many guises” (p. xi). The book is thus an attempt to defend radical ecology by situating it firmly as both political and ethical against its detractors’ characterizations of radical ecology as chaotic and amoral. Smith’s project is to challenge pervasive ideas of our culture—those that portray nature as merely commodity or resource and those that reinforce human exceptionalism over nature—and to reveal all claims of sovereignty to be antiecological.
Smith develops a critique of Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of sovereignty and biopolitics through the entire text, which is divided into seven lengthy chapters that collectively serve as Smith’s defense of radical ecology. Smith argues from the outset that radical ecology should be understood as the environmental ethos that opens up potential for real social and ecological change. He argues that radical ecology, contrary to what its many critics believe, is “potentially the most radical form of politics” and “offers the most fundamental challenge to the established order of things” (p. 107). What radical ecology can do is set people and nature free from the bonds of the very principle of sovereignty. Ultimately, for Smith, this is more radical than any other environmental philosophy, as it re-envisions what we mean when we say that our goal is “saving the natural world.” More than just rescuing nature from imminent danger, “saving,” in Smith’s Heideggerian sense, is a “setting free”: “Saving does not only snatch something from danger. To save really means to set something free into its own essence” (Heidegger, as cited in Smith, p. 107).
In the first chapter, “Awakening,” Smith takes the reader into the Lascaux cave of southwestern France where Paleolithic cave drawings were discovered in 1940. Drawing on Georges Bataille’s account of these drawings in The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture, Smith gives an account of the cultural importance of the images in the cave, particularly the one human image of a man roughly depicted as lying supine with an erect phallus, having struck a bison dead with a spear. The image, according to Bataille, represents an epochal change in human history—a time when humans begin to represent themselves “in thought and in art” (p. 2). This is when humanity discovered its relationship to the natural world and began to hold itself distinct from the natural world and, as depicted by the contrast between the carefully drawn animals and the roughly sketched man, responsible “for the deadly consequences that the fulfillment of [human] desires has for other living beings” (p. 2). Thus, according to Smith, from the earliest parts of human history, human self-understanding has been inextricably tied to its troubled relationship with nonhuman nature. The chapter goes on to address a fundamental theme to the text, Giorgio Agamben’s idea of “the anthropological machine,” that is, “the sociohistorical variable ways in which humanity has constantly redefined itself (metaphysically) over and over against animality, as speaking animal, rational animal, enspirited animal, tool-using animal, and so on” (p. 4). Smith’s aim throughout the rest of the text is to show how radical ecology can challenge the anthropological machine and create potential for a much more radical environmental ethics—one that re-envisions the world as an ecological creation that everyone shares in.
The second chapter, “The Sovereignty of the Good,” analyzes Plato’s conception of the Good to examine the ways that ethics, politics, and ecology are wholly submerged in a totalizing philosophical system, one which presumes a notion of sovereignty. Through this analysis, Smith argues, we can begin to see ways in which ethics, politics, and ecology together can reemerge in the midst of the totalizing philosophical system as “subversive possibilities” (p. 27). Smith also introduces Iris Murdoch’s conception of the Good as a possible alternative to various iterations of the anthropological machine, including anthropological despotism and pastoral stewardship. Here he introduces a key idea in Murdoch, the notion of “unselfing” as a way to challenge the dominant culture. “Unselfing” resists self-oriented concerns and looks outward, revealing the world “stripped of the self-centered illusions we compose to console our human psyches” (p. 40). Unselfing allows us to see the world as “‘alien’ (estranged), ultimately ‘pointless’ (nonteleological), and ‘independent’ (existing in its own right, owing nothing to ourselves or humanity)” (p. 40). Ethics, for Murdoch, allows us to see the world as it is, suspending our own interests and self-centered obsessions: “Ethics is an awareness of others’ differences and independence from ourselves” (p. 40). Of course, Murdoch was not developing an environmental ethics, but insofar as we can think of these others’ differences to be the differences of nonhuman others, her notion can certainly be expanded to include them. A key problem with most environmental philosophies, Smith argues, is the tendency to try to find similarities between nonhuman nature and human nature—between plants and animals and ourselves—in order to establish the ethics. What is needed, rather, is an understanding and respect of difference—of utter singularity—for the ethics to resist the anthropological machine.
The third chapter, “Primitivism: Anarchy, Politics, and the State of Nature,” is a defense of the political nature of radical ecology. Smith gives a thorough account of notions of primitivism that are commonly articulated by environmental philosophers. At risk in primitivist accounts, however, is the loss of politics and ethics. How can we resist the anthropological machine without ending politics and ethics? A notion of “wildness” or “wild(er)ness” is key here, as Smith shows that wildness can espouse an anarchic picture of nature without limiting political possibilities for our treatment of nature. Thus, he articulates a “living (ecological) anarchy” without a lifestyle anarchism, saving our ethical and political capacities.
The final four chapters pull the project of radical ecology together, asking how the critical aspects of ethics and politics might contribute to the overall aim of “saving the natural world” and what political philosophy develops out of such an endeavor. This is where the previously discussed notion of what “saving” actually means is articulated. “Saving” sets nature free from claims of sovereignty by way of ethicopolitical action—and it has promising effects for humans, too:
If we regard the natural world as nothing but a resource, then humanity is left, at best, with nothing to become other than the orderer of that resource. At worst, human lives come to be entirely dictated by this projection, by our being caught up in endless cycles of resource mobilization. (p. 105)
To begin to think of nature as more than resource, then, opens up room for humanity to become more political, more ethical, and, ultimately, more autonomous. Contrary to its detractors’ claims of misanthropy, radical ecology, then, is “not just interested in saving the natural world, it is also a movement that strives to save a place for politics and ethics” and resists reducing humans to “bare life” (p. 106). Smith insists that radical ecology can work to save the natural world while “generating the possibilities for concerned involvement in the world” (p. 114). Although Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy has been present throughout the text, it is in this second half of the book that it becomes even more prevalent, as Smith advocates for an Arendtian notion of “action in concert” that can help us become more fully human, recognizing our singularity in the world as humans, but also acknowledging our life in community with and for others—even nonhuman others. Our capacity to act, for Arendt, is the most fundamental feature of human existence, and “acting involves taking an initiative, making a beginning, creating the political and ethical conditions of our existence” (p. 138).
As he concludes the book, Smith asks “whether an ecological ethics might come to delimit, but not dictate, how political communities choose to act in the world” (p. 159). He insists, with Arendt, on the importance of maintaining a political life as “pure means . . . a practice valuable not for what it produces but only insofar as we value human freedom itself” (p. 162). Our political action reveals who we are and from it can develop an “intimate ecology of responsibility to others” (p. 167).
Throughout Against Ecological Sovereignty, Smith draws in the work of Levinas, Benjamin, Hegel, Bookchin, and many other, as well as those whom he spent a good deal of time addressing: Bataille, Agamben, and Arendt. He succeeds at the task of making these thinkers clearly relevant, especially since for many of them, environmental ethics was not of chief concern. And although they were not the focus of his work, Smith addresses feminist concerns occasionally, which is crucial as there are many feminists offering important critiques of radical ecology. By insisting on the centrality of politics and ethics to the project of rejecting the principle of sovereignty and resisting the anthropological machine, Smith has, in Against Ecological Sovereignty: Ethics, Biopolitics, and Saving the Natural World, produced the solid and engaging defense of radical ecology to which many others have only aspired.