“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Friday, April 8, 2011

New School Symposium Liveblog 3

Daemian's talk is now being precis'ed:

“Mutualism, Eco-Design and Political Ecology”
Positioning his interest in eco design and politics.
Sociology <> geography <> political theory
This tradition is concerned with how sustainability discourse can be picked up in all kinds of ways.
Post-socialist site for social remaking.
Problem of reductionism: reducing things to carbon cycles. Sanctimonious politics slips into that.

Human space of mutualism that has never had a dominant role in political discourse.
How to link mutualism with eco-design.
Certain aspects of humanism might be worth recovering or maintaining.

Lefebvre + posthumanism; geographical materialism that is explicitly spatial
Transformation of space, of nature: David Harvey, Neil Smith
Assumption that we are always stratified, diverse, embedded in a whole set of power relations
We've always been involved in the dynamic production of nature
Nature isn't external to capitalism
“Third Nature” essay
Trying to think about multiple agencies beyond the human
Happy alliances that can be constructed through recognizing the agency of things and nonhumans

Daemian finds it interesting because:
Trying to unpack the class race gender embeddedness of nature
We need to ask not just about change but about who gains and who loses
Who suffers and in what ways? Where are the cracks that emerge from that?
Environmental discourse assumes that change is inherently bad, often.
But political ecology wants to look at change in its specificity.

Political ecology zones in on the very specific. There's a need for the general. Discrete studies, classic one is The Lie of the Land. Zoning down into Kenya, looking at conservation management. Conservation as a mode of governance. Drawing out the complexities of nuggets.

Doesn't talk about scaling up.

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