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Trajectories of green political theory

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Notes

  1. www.andrewdobson.com

  2. I distinguish participation in government from the election of Green Party members to national legislatures which of course was already happening by 1990 (for example in Germany in 1983).

  3. As one of the anonymous referees pointed out to me, it is also striking the degree to which science has played a key role in the development of environmental political theory, from the implications for economic growth of the Second Law of Thermodynamics to the science that lies behind the politics of climate change.

  4. Ecological modernization is not a monolithic system of thought and practice and there are more and less radical versions of it. Peter Christoff (1996) shows this very clearly.

  5. 1 One area where feminist theory has been taken up to some extent by some green political thinkers is the ethics of care, which has been considered as an alternative to liberal, rights-based approaches to justice that is relevant to the notions of sustainability and stewardship.

  6. 2 Gender's absence from academic discourse on climate change is especially worrying from a feminist perspective, given that there are some influential green activists and experts who are seriously thinking (aloud, in the media) again about the urgent need for population control. Population control is an issue that feminists regard as dangerous territory no matter how ‘empowering’ the approach may be.

  7. 3 For exceptions see Dankleman (2002) and other articles in the special issue of Gender and Development 10(2), July 2002. See also Terry (2009) and several other articles in Gender and Development 17(1) 2009. It may be that a publication lag partly accounts for the apparent absence of work on gender and climate change in both feminist and environmental journals.

  8. 4 The late Val Plumwood noted this common misperception with frustration in 1993 on the first page of her book Feminism and the Mastery of Nature.

  9. 5 Christ is the self-described founder of the Goddess movement and a teacher at the ‘Ariadne Institute for the Study of Myth and Ritual’ in Crete. She has not been engaged in academic scholarship for well over 20 years. The word ‘ecofeminism’ does not appear in any of her biogs available on the Web or in her publisher's descriptions of her books.

  10. 1 See Habermas (1974, p. 51): ‘If the theoretically based point of departure for the Ancients was how human beings could comply practically with the natural order, the practically assigned point of departure for the Moderns is how human beings could technically master the threatening evils of nature’ (cf. Strauss, 1953; Long, 2005).

  11. 2 The problem of political appearance is posed in contrasting ways by Arendt (1958) and Ranciére (1998).

  12. 3 Readers of Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle may recall, for example, the properties of ‘ice-nine’.

  13. 4 See the work of Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands (for example, Sandilands, 1999, 2002; Mortimer-Sandilands, 2009).

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Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Raia Prokhovnik and to Mike Saward for giving me the opportunity to offer these reflections, and for the latter's very helpful comments on a first draft of this paper. Thank you, too, to two anonymous reviewers who helped me to sharpen the argument.

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  1. Department of Politics and International Studies, Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK

    Andrew Dobson, Sherilyn MacGregor, Douglas Torgerson & Michael Saward (Edited and Introduced by)

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Correspondence to Michael Saward.

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Dobson, A., MacGregor, S., Torgerson, D. et al. Trajectories of green political theory. Contemp Polit Theory 8, 317–350 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2009.11

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