Affluence and Freedom

An Environmental History of Political Ideas

Pierre Charbonnier, Andrew Brown

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781509543731
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Philosophie politique

In this pathbreaking book, Pierre Charbonnier opens up a new intellectual terrain: an environmental history of political ideas. His aim is not to locate the seeds of ecological thought in the history of political ideas as others have done, but rather to show that all political ideas, whether or not they endorse ecological ideals, are informed by a certain conception of our relationship to the Earth and to our environment.

The fundamental political categories of modernity were founded on the idea that we could improve on nature, that we could exert a decisive victory over its excesses and claim unlimited access to earthly resources. In this way, modern thinkers imagined a political society of free individuals, equal and prosperous, alongside the development of industry geared towards progress and liberated from the Earth's shackles. Yet this pact between democracy and growth has now been called into question by climate change and the environmental crisis. It is therefore our duty today to rethink political emancipation, bearing in mind that this can no longer draw on the prospect of infinite growth promised by industrial capitalism. Ecology must draw on the power harnessed by nineteenth-century socialism to respond to the massive impact of industrialization, but it must also rethink the imperative to offer protection to society by taking account of the solidarity of social groups and their conditions in a world transformed by climate change.

This timely and original work of social and political theory will be of interest to a wide readership in politics, sociology, environmental studies and the social sciences and humanities generally.

1
The Critique of Ecological Reason

The fabric of liberty

For a very long time, we thought that social conflicts were woven from rival experiences and conceptions of liberty, that history was played out in the endless struggle between those demanding recognition and those in a position to grant them that recognition. We thought that what mattered was winning the right to enjoy the world and its riches as equals, under the protection of a just state. The conquest of freedom of conscience, protection against the arbitrariness of power and economic justice all seemed to us to be responses to expectations arising from within society, unfolding in an immutable external space. And then there emerged struggles for which relationship to this territory became an issue, forcing us to revise this conception of injustice and how to remedy it. When ecological and climate warnings, for example, lead us to trace back the chain of energy dependencies, life forms and associated interests so as to scrutinize them more closely, we do indeed become aware that the fate of the world as it is known – and not only the fate of society – hangs on the resolution of a political riddle.

Although we thought we were fighting on common ground, we are starting to realize that this common ground is, now more than ever, the object of our differences. The soil, the ocean, the climate and the associations between living beings are undergoing transformations that we are trying to gauge with the help of science and that are forcing us to liberate them from the political silence to which we have long relegated them. As these serial destabilizations occur, the communities that have to face up to them will voice demands for a new kind of justice and a redefinition of what it means to dwell on the Earth. These movements, while prolonging the social struggles with which history has made us familiar, testify to a profound change in the relations between the social body, its own idea of itself and its natural environment.

Struggles for equality and liberty, and against domination and exploitation, have not ceased to drive human history, but they are more and more often entrenched in a conflict over the very soil that lies beneath these fundamental differences and needs to be protected. Or rather, they shed a tragic light on the way that political and ecological conditions are intimately linked, and subject to joint transformations.

This is what makes contemporary political events so difficult to grasp, given our history and our intellectual reflexes. How, indeed, can we think of these two dimensions of the present – the political order and the ecological order – at the same time? How can we bridge the growing economic and social inequalities and the increasing number of global environmental and climate disasters to which, so far, there is no response? How can we use the same instruments to diagnose the democratic collapse experienced by many states – including the major economic and political powers – and the support provided to these regimes by the main fossil fuel and mining industries? The very shape assumed by contemporary social relations, and therefore the pathologies that they generate, are the result of an increasingly contested arrangement between territorial organization, the quest for productive intensity, the authority of science, the colonial legacy and many other factors that involve the way we use the world.

At the heart of these ecopolitical arrangements is the meaning of our freedom and our capacity to establish it. This is what the climate issue makes tangible in a quite spectacular way. The rise in average temperatures is the result of a century and a half in which fossil fuels have been burned on a huge scale: after having treated the atmosphere as a spillway for industrial pollution, we are starting to understand that its capacity of absorption is limited and that our way of inhabiting the Earth depends on it. So it is the ashes of industrial freedom that are accumulating over our heads; it is the spectacular increase of our technological grip on the world and the cultural imaginary of high modernity that are at stake – urban sprawl, the automobile, household appliances and a certain sense of comfort and security.

In other words, we cannot separate ecology from politics. Social institutions, especially the state, have a material life that is not a technological prerequisite for the deployment of social life. The experience of injustice is becoming ever more apparent from the way that space and land are used, and from the demands for compensation that follow in the wake of disasters: this testifies to the fact that the flows and networks that sustain our lives co-define our political condition. All this forces us to sharpen our knowledge of the material dependencies that make and break our conception of emancipation. It is crucial for example to know that our phones, our cars, the contents of our plates are the coagulation of a set of supply chains that go back to mines and their employees, to the soil, to geological expertise and to capital flows, and that the price of these goods almost never reflects the real social cost of their production. We are often unaware that our economic cruising speed requires 25 per cent of the Earth’s annually produced biomass to be integrated into commercial circuits or sacrificed to make room for them,¹ or that, in the case of the world’s wealthiest regions, demand exceeds the environment’s biocapacity by 100 per cent.² We are experiencing a geological experiment of global magnitude, one that upsets all the familiar eco-evolutionary dynamics.

But we close our eyes to this experiment and its consequences because they clash with what is most dear to us, or what often appears as such, namely the possibility of enjoying absolute, unconditioned freedom. Yet nothing is more material than freedom, and in particular the freedom of modern societies, which have concluded a pact with the productive capacities of land and labour – a pact that is now falling apart.

This is the reason why political emancipation must today be reformulated in material and geographical terms. Whether at a local or global scale, we impose on nature in ways that contravene the simplest principles of sustainability. The erosion of the fertility of agricultural land, the saturation of atmospheric carbon storage sinks and the collapse of biodiversity between them comprise a set of indicators that testify to the limited capacity of the environment to cushion the blows inflicted on it, and on its propensity to return these blows in unexpected, often unpredictable and sometimes catastrophic ways. Some of the biogeochemical cycles and evolutionary dynamics that make the Earth habitable are now being pushed beyond their threshold of tolerance, climate being only one of these transformations, albeit doubtless the most spectacular.³ Thus, access to territory, our common future, and the most basic conditions of justice, in other words all that constitutes the basis of a political existence, are being simultaneously compromised.

But to say that ecology and politics tend to be superimposed is not enough, because many different ideological strategies are based on this observation. For example, a ‘green finance’ is emerging, one that tries to label certain investments as responsible, and thereby attract capital to projects that are respectful of natural balances or the principles of low energy.⁴ Behind this ‘green finance’ lurks the ambition to build up markets that are compatible with environmental requirements and thus bypass the longstanding criticism of them on the part of the ecological movement. The assembly and circulation of capital now claim to meet environmental standards without jeopardizing the idea of the fundamental freedom of stock exchange and market operations.

On the side of conservative and reactionary movements, for example, the idea that nature can serve as a norm for social organization is gaining ground.⁵ Thus, so-called ‘integral’ ecology is proposing to re-establish principles deemed quite commonsensical and yet abandoned by modern political culture. Family and nation are considered as natural communities backed by an identity conferred by the soil of one’s ancestors in an alleged continuity of settlement, and the preservation of the environment, it is claimed, then fits smoothly into this substantialist framework whose legitimacy is based on the so-called natural order of things. The diffuse requirement that a conformity be found between our modes of organization and the physical, living substratum of the world is reflected in multiple forms that are obviously incompatible with each other, so that the belated marriage between the moderns and ‘nature’ is celebrated in a rather confused way.

For some people, peace can easily be restored to this ecological battlefield by limiting the stakes to simply slowing down the economic and extractive machine. Once we have eliminated the accumulative drive inherited from the past and now rendered obsolete by technological efficiency, the economic mega-machine will obediently bend to natural constraints to allow the same society to carry on as before, with the same political organization, albeit rid of its productivist excesses. But, as has already been suggested, moving away from ecological forcing and decarbonizing the economy implies a total redefinition of what society is, a rearrangement of relations of domination and exploitation and a redefinition of our expectations of justice. In other words, it is the democratic organization and the aspirations that sustain it that need to be decarbonized – not just the economy. Gaining access to ‘prosperity without growth’, to use the title of a famous work,⁶ is the result not of a technological solution but of a political transformation whose historical equivalents are to be sought in the great technological and legal revolutions that founded modernity and served as a laboratory for our shared ideals.

Climate change and the disruption of eco-evolutionary dynamics are therefore not crises of nature, but events that require a redefinition of the project of autonomy. This project was born in the age of the early nineteenth-century revolutions, and then perpetually postponed and hindered, especially outside the area of Western industrialization; it consisted of dismissing arbitrary authorities and entrusting the assembled people with the power to provide themselves with their own rules, to grasp the rudder of history, and to realize the liberty of all as equals. This conquest was never brought to any real completion; furthermore, these days, we feel uneasy about the material possibilities that first supported it. The growth and technological intensification that for so long made control of our historical destiny a tangible ideal now induce an increased sense of submission to the arbitrariness of nature. This is the main hypothesis of this book: affluence and freedom have long walked hand in hand, the second being considered as the ability to escape the vagaries of fortune and lack that humiliate human existence, but their alliance and the historical trajectory it has followed have now come up against a dead end. Faced with this, the alternative that presents itself sometimes contrasts the pure and simple abandonment of the ideals of emancipation under the pressure of severe ecological constraints, on the one hand, with an enjoyment of the last moments of autonomy that we still retain, on the other. But who would want an authoritarian ecology or a freedom without tomorrow? The theoretical and political imperative of the present is therefore to reinvent freedom in the age of climate crisis – i.e., in the Anthropocene. Contrary to what one sometimes hears, it is not a matter of stating that infinite freedom in a finite world is impossible, but that this freedom can be gained only by establishing a socializing and sustainable relation with the material world.

The other history: ecology and the labour question

How, these days, can we embark on a theoretical and political inquiry into these questions? First, by telling the right kind of history. Contrary to what philosophy has traditionally suggested, sensitivity to nature and the desire to treat it as a person rather than a thing are not the only, or even the main, framework within which the emergence of an environmental critique can be understood. Instead of abstractly conceiving a nature for which we might feel empathy, we would like to set the contradictions we have just described within the history of the...