Files
Abstract
This dissertation critically examines the imaginative habits of a strand of environmentalism characterized by its preoccupation with transforming the worldviews of other people. I argue that these would-be worldview changers are animated by anxiety over the existence of their ethico-political opponents, whom they cast as mere barriers to solving ecological problems. Employing a methodology inherited from ordinary language philosophers, the project seeks to augment the imaginations of such environmentalists, freeing them from a narrow focus on worldview change and supporting them to imagine a future on a damaged planet where other people do not disappear through conversion but require negotiation. The argument unfolds in three stages; the first (Chapters 1 and 2) is diagnostic and critical. I argue that a particular picture of environmentalism’s other as such, a figure I call the ecological other, constrains the imaginations of eco-conversionists to the modality of worldview change. In this picture, the ecological other is figured as transparent despite their heterogeneity and insignificant on moral matters concerning the nonhuman: a familiar and inconsequential stranger. I also argue that multiple strategic and moral problems attend this preoccupation with worldview change, ranging from the alienation of potential allies to allotting the other a merely impedimental role in one’s thought and action. To expand the eco-conversionist imagination beyond its focus on worldview change, I describe another conception of the other that illuminates additional relational modes. Stage two (Chapters 3 and 4) develops that alternative picture by considering how others’ perspectives can be opaque to an onlooker and how the others of environmentalism can prove strategically, epistemically, and ethically significant on nonhuman matters. Those examinations suggest the image of the other as a genuinely strange stranger, who may bear gifts. Stage three describes further modalities of other-relation that come into view when we contemplate this alternative conception of the ecological other. In Chapter 5, I suggest that this conception invites the idea of trying to dissolve another’s opacity, a labor I call apprenticeship. That relational mode, in turn, leads me to consider the ways in which such efforts can go wrong, including that others can refuse to take us on as apprentices. I illustrate this possibility by considering Indigenous American refusals to collaborate with settlers, including environmentalists. That efforts to dissolve another’s opacity can fail in these ways suggests a further relational possibility, namely, that one might learn to live with another’s opacity. In Chapter 6, I argue that the picture of the other as genuinely other also suggests the relational modality of revisiting our preconceptions of others, a possibility I call re-reading. I illustrate this possibility vis-à-vis the figure of one of Western environmentalism’s repugnant others: the conservative Christian anti-environmentalist. I re-read this other by examining a collection of hunting and fishing devotionals authored by American Evangelicals and marketed to a sympathetic audience. I argue that these objects parochialize the image of this opponent as narrowly unconcerned with the nonhuman and that re-reading practices are morally and politically valuable.