Covid and the politics of nature

It is argued that the decades before 2020 saw a steady rise in public concern about and political recognition of symptoms of a crisis in human social and economic relations to (the rest of) nature. For many, the Covid-19 pandemic has become linked to that, as well as providing, despite the grief and suffering, moments when a different relationship to nature could be experienced. The possibility of a transformative politics towards a just reconciliation between social life and nature may be more visible, but will be ruthlessly resisted by those in power.

Nature and Environment

This chapter treats Reinhold Niebuhr’s thought on nature and environment in an effort to evaluate its utility for contemporary environmental politics and ethics. Like a small but growing group of Niebuhrian environmental ethicists, the chapter finds in Niebuhr’s thought both peril and promise. Niebuhr’s anthropological focus leaves him inattentive to the ethical status of the more-than-human world, the intrinsic value of which is a premise for much contemporary environmental ethics and politics. Nonetheless, Niebuhr’s insistence on the social nature of sin and the exigencies of democratic political power should have a more central place in contemporary thinking about the politics of nature and environment. The chapter makes this argument by way of attention to a few themes in Niebuhr’s thought, primarily nuclear science, nature, and industry.

TC Boyle’s “Politics of Nature”

This paper offers a Latourian reading of T.C. Boyle’s novel When the Killing’s Done. It shows that the novel satirizes contemporary ecological debates and stages the cultural wars of our current ecological culture. It also demonstrates, however, that the novel does not merely point out the impasse of our current ecologies: its fiction intuitively diagnoses the contemporary “crisis of purity” in modern environmental politics and points us towards the kind of entangled ecologies sketched by Latour and other recent thinkers. Like Latour’s reinvention of a more hybrid and entangled “politics of nature,” Boyle’s novel allows us to reimagine a complex and contaminated new ecology, away from the purifications of our contemporary “NaturPolitiks”.

Politics of Nature: The board game

Here we introduce the board game Politics of Nature, or PoN as it is now known. Inspired by the work of Bruno Latour, PoN offers an alternative take on co-existence by implementing a flat political ontology in a gamified meeting protocol. PoN does not suggest that humans have no special abilities, only that humans at the outset, are bestowed with no more rights than other kinds of beings. Designed to enable people of all walks of life to playfully unpack and resolve controversies, PoN provides a space where beings can have their existence renegotiated. The aim of PoN is to play as a team to explore and decide on potential good common worlds in which more indispensable beings can exist than if the status quo is continued. By playing PoN iteratively through rounds, each having four stages, the players gradually construct PoN - a planet mirroring ‘real worlds’. The four stages provide a novel combination of identification, representation, meditation, prioritization, mapping, individual and group ideation, proposal formulation, and decision-making; only to ask the players to challenge and change PoN to fit their requirements after each round. What follows is taken directly from the manual.

Ideology or History as “Idéologie:” C. F Volney and the Uses of the Past in Revolutionary France

The French Revolution had a complex relationship with historical thought. In a significant sense, the politics of 1789 was built upon a rejection of the authority of the past. As old institutions and practices were swept away, many champions of the Revolution attacked conventional historical modes for legitimating authority, seeking to replace them with a politics anchored in notions of reason, natural law and natural rights. Yet history was not so easily purged from politics. In practice, symbols and images borrowed from the past saturated Revolutionary culture. The factional disputes of the 1790s, too, invoked history in a range of ways. The politics of nature itself often relied on a range of historical propositions and, as the Revolution developed, a new battle between “ancients” and ‘moderns’ gradually emerged amongst those seeking to direct the future of France. This article explores these issues by focusing on a series of lectures delivered at the École Normale in the Year III (1795), in the wake of Thermidor and the fall of Robespierre. The lectures, commissioned by the Ministry of Education, were designed to lay out a program for historical pedagogy in the French Republic. Their author, Constantin-Francois Volney (1757–1820), was one of a group of figures who sought, during these years, to stabilise French politics by tying it to the development of a new form of social science—a science that would eventually be labelled “idéologie.” With this in mind, Volney sought to promote historical study as an antidote to the political appropriation of the past, with particular reference to its recent uses in France. In doing so, he also sought to appropriate the past for political purposes. These lectures illustrate a series of tensions in the wider Revolutionary relationship with history, particularly during the Thermidorian moment. They also, however, reflect ongoing ambiguities in the social role of the discipline and the self-understanding of its practitioners.

Public value and the planet: accounting in ecological reconstitution

PurposeThis paper explores the role of accounting in ecological reconstitution and draws attention to the public value as a topic of strategic interest for developing it.Design/methodology/approachThe process of ecological reconstitution described by Latour in the “Politics of Nature” is traced towards a distinct set of accounting practices. These accounting practices, designated here as full-tax accounting, offer indications of the changing shape and role of accounting in ecological renewal.FindingsFull-tax accounting extends the planetary public towards the inclusion of nonhuman planetarians. It establishes matters of care in multimodal accounts and haunts constitutional processes with the spectre of exclusion. Starting with full-tax accounting, public-value accountants emerge as curators of matters of care.Research limitations/implicationsThe association of accounting in ecological reconstitution with matters of care highlights the mediating and immersive effects of accounting practice, inviting accounting scholars to explore these effects more systematically.Practical implicationsAccountants need to reconsider their stewardship role in relation to the fundamental uncertainties implied in planetary public-value accounting, support the process of ecological reconstitution by associating themselves with matters of care and develop ethics of exclusion.Social implicationsBroad alliances among planetary accountants are needed to extend the terms of ecological reconstitution, to gain and preserve attunement to matters of care and defend these attunements, in the atmospheric politics of ecological renewal, against regressive tendencies.Originality/valueIn problematising public value, the paper draws attention to a convergence of interests among scholars in accounting, public sector research and the environmental humanities. It presents a case for planetary accounting in ecological reconstitution that calls for participation from across disciplines, professions, arts and environmental activism.