Citizenship and Ecological Obligations

Abstract

Obligation, moral philosopher John Caputo proposes, is the feeling of being tied or connected; its root in the Latin ligare — to bind (1993: 7). The question of who we share obligations with has a long history in discourses on citizenship. So too does it have a considerable past in ecological discourses, which go back well beyond the flurry of environmental concerns of recent decades. Enlightenment philosophes considered the prospect of a world citizenship that would bind all of humanity together — though the idea was later overshadowed by the achievements of the sovereign state system. Over more than a century, political ecologists — an eclectic consortium united by a fusion of biological understandings and moral yearnings — have also dreamt of binding humanity together (Bramwell, 1989). Their melding of humankind was to be part of a much greater reconciliation, a fusion of humanity with the cosmos.