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On June 1, 2017, much of the world watched, disappointed—but not especially surprised—as President Donald J. Trump announced his decision to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement. The landmark environmental accord, ratified in 2015, had been supported by all but two of the world’s independent states, and now it was lacking the backing of the world’s biggest polluter as well. The United States, superpower, defender of democracy, and champion of the West, effectively announced that being the ‘Leader of the Free World’ did not apply to the fight against climate change.

The other two nations—Nicaragua and Syria—that stood outside the Paris climate accord, did so for vastly different reasons. Nicaragua, one of the four nations most endangered by climate change, found that the agreement was too lenient. Syria was uninvited and unable to attend (Taylor, 2017). Only President Trump rejected the accord out of disbelief in the facts of, and human responsibility for, global warming. The credit for this radical turn was given, primarily, to two men: Scott Pruitt, the then-head of the Environmental Protection Agency, a man who was so hostile to his role that he had sued that self-same agency in the interest of polluting industries before being appointed to run it; and Steve Bannon, perhaps Trump’s most notorious former advisor (Baram, 2017).

Bannon, then executive chairman of far-right “news” site Breitbart and noted white nationalist (Politi, 2017), opposed the Paris agreement both for its climate science and its “globalist” agenda. Bannon is credited with the line of reasoning that Trump invoked in his announcement about the agreement: that the Paris accord was “cheating” America economically, putting its coal miners, who supported Trump overwhelmingly in the 2016 election, at a particularly gross disadvantage. Paying for other, poorer countries’ continued survival in the face of potential environmental disaster, as the agreement encouraged the United States to do, runs counter to nearly everything Bannon, Breitbart, and the far-right internet apparatus purport to stand for. It gives a “handout” to those less fortunate, who clearly should pull themselves up by their bootstraps and save themselves from the literal rising tide of America’s creation. It considers the interests of nations who are not the United States and whose citizens, not coincidentally, are not white. It is capitulating to the requests of the “socialist” and “globalist” European Union and United Nations, both boogeymen to those who would prefer that America comes first and stands alone in all things.

Under Steve Bannon’s guidance, President Trump announced his decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate accord. Thus, concern for the continuation of a myth of America had superseded care for the globe and its community. White nationalism had trumped (pun intended) environmentalism. This, nowadays, would appear to be an unfortunate but natural progression: reactionary conservatism and environmentalism are thought to be antithetical to each other. The media’s look into Steve Bannon’s history regarding the latter, however, threw things into confusion. Could it be that such a renowned nationalist (had) cared for the environment? Had Bannon merely had a sour change of heart—or could it be that such nationalism and ecological stewardship were not only not mutually exclusive but even had some cause for overlap?

The progressive, tech-savvy news sites of the left-leaning internet are littered with articles linking three things: Steve Bannon, a project called Biosphere 2, and a general sense of bewilderment. The explanation is as follows: in 1991, eight people sealed themselves into a complex reminiscent of the geodesic domes of Buckminister Fuller, with plans not to reemerge for another 2 years. The complex, Biosphere 2, and the eponymous mission it supported was the pet project of Edward P. Bass, a Texas oil scion-turned-environmentalist. At the sprawling, 3.1-acre compound, replica ecosystems—including marshland, rainforest, desert, savannah, and a miniature ‘ocean’—were enclosed, along with the human subjects, in what was meant to be a sealed, self-sustaining system. If the Earth itself was Biosphere 1, then Biosphere 2 was the 1970s’ fascination with closed-system ecology made concrete: a miniature Earth that could be studied. Perhaps, as its participants hoped, it would give valuable insight into the workings of the Earth’s (changing) climate. Furthermore, if the project proved successful, they could apply the closed ecosystems to other endeavors such as Mars colonization.

Unfortunately, from its outset, Biosphere 2 was not strictly successful. After a series of mishaps—financial, procedural, structural, and public-relational—Bass hired a Wall Street banker named Steve Bannon to keep the project from leaking money. Bannon, as Wired’s Eric Niiler (2016) puts it, was “all business.” And despite the retrospective incongruity of his participation in the project, it does seem that Bannon’s involvement with Biosphere 2 was strictly professional. Of all the outlets taken with the apparent oxymoron of Biosphere Bannon, the New Republic gives the most thorough take on the subject. Through interviews with scientists once involved with Biosphere 2 and analysis of Breitbart’s output under Bannon, journalist Emily Atkin (2017) pieces together a portrait of a man who perhaps does not believe much of anything when it comes to climate change.

As Atkin notes, statements on the subject from Bannon himself are in relatively short supply. Though Bannon gave a platform for climate change denialists on Breitbart, some staffers doubted how invested he was in the subject, beyond irritation at the amount of public energy expended on the “manufactured crisis” (Atkin, 2017). Bruno Marino, onetime scientific director at Biosphere 2, remembers Bannon as a man who kept books on climate science on his desk, who promoted the project’s research potential in the press, and who now “could be willfully ignoring his knowledge of climate science” (Atkin, 2017). Bannon once produced a movie called The Steam Experiment, a B-film set in a sauna whose aim was to “prove that humanity will go crazy under the pressures of global warming” (Atkin, 2017). To be fair, it is difficult to read much intellectual depth or intent into a film of this quality. In the movie, the scientist traps the attractive protagonist in the steam bath who is depicted as mad, risking human lives to prove his ‘crackpot’ environmental theory. Whether or not it can be said to prove the professor’s theory, the captives do suffer a fair deal.

On a more conspiratorial note, Atkin suggests that “perhaps Bannon believes that a warming world could cause chaos—and even welcomes it. After all, he is an alleged Leninist who wants to deconstruct the administrative state” (Atkin, 2017). Perhaps, in addition to finding the fight against climate change too extraneous to and globalist for his agenda, Bannon does believe in the scientific consensus on the subject. Maybe he yearns for the brave new world that would be ushered in by a climate apocalypse fueled by Breitbart’s propaganda. Until he addresses his past and present relationship to the specifics of climate science, though, all this is simply speculation. However, should Bannon prove to have an ideological stake in such environmental matters, he would not be the first American white nationalist to do so. Arguably, he would not (until recently) even be the most famous. If ecological stress, such as that brought about by anthropogenic climate change, would destroy the current world order, then there are those for whom the defense of the planet and the white race go hand in hand.

Unfortunately, as with Bannon’s involvement with Biosphere 2, the connection between white supremacy and environmentalism is not always readily apparent. Buzzwords like ‘overpopulation’ are used regularly, even in progressive climate discourse. But these discourses have their roots in theories of ecology that are disdainful of—if not outright hostile to—those who contribute the least, yet are most exposed to, the effects of climate change: the world’s poor and non-white. The racist and misanthropic underpinnings of the modern environmental movement, left unexamined, can undermine post-Paris attempts to move towards a more sustainable way of life. On a shared planet, no climate action can be effective if it is not equitable.

1 A Commons for Some: Garrett Hardin’s Enclosures Act

The question of whether we must ‘save the world,’ in an ecological sense, has in its wake another, more insidious question: for whom? Although this second question may not be asked outright, it often gets answered. For a glaring example, one needs to look no farther than the work of the late Garrett Hardin: a man who, troublingly, is much more famous for his contributions to the field of ecology than he is for the intense racism that motivated that work. To engage with ecology, in general, and environmentalism, in particular, as fields of knowledge and practice that benefit the whole world, it is vital that we understand how its foundations run counter to those aims.

Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons” is a foundational text in ecology. The 1968 article, which further stretched the idea of Earth’s ‘carrying capacity,’ is a staple in classrooms to this day. Hardin paints a picture of a world doomed by human numbers and greed. The tragedy of the commons, according to Garrett Hardin, is that people cannot—and should not—share. Imagining a pasture open to all, Hardin then introduces a herdsman who, “as a rational being… seeks to maximize his gain. He concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another….” (p. 1244). The pasture becomes overburdened, and each member of the increased population suffers.

Already there is something odd, something sinister about Hardin’s logic. For these hypothetical herders, more is always better, even with stiffer competition for the resources needed to support increased numbers. This approach is not a particularly rational course of action, despite Hardin’s claims. The individual herders are entirely unable to consider themselves members of a community that might act in the interest of shared goals. For Hardin, what prevented the despoiling of the commons in the past was not the success of interpersonal communication or the awareness of a common humanity. Instead, “tribal wars, poaching, and disease” (p. 1244) kept the population too low for the ‘fact’ that man’s interests run directly counter to that of society at large to become an obstacle.

For this grave problem, Hardin offers a brutal solution. Neither education nor community development will solve the tragedy of the commons, where a Hobbesian species of man proliferates in great numbers. Instead of questioning the narrow individualism on which he has built his argument, Garrett Hardin challenges the right of certain individuals to exist. “The only way we can preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms is by relinquishing the freedom to breed, and that very soon” (p. 1248), he writes, else “freedom to breed will bring ruin to us all” (p. 1248). Coercion, a buzzword at the time, is the specific term that he uses to describe the means for curbing what he viewed as devastating overpopulation: no longer can we fill the Earth with so much human waste.

Hardin implicitly includes human beings with contaminants, listing ‘breeding’—already an exceptionally dehumanizing term—right after toxic waste dumping and air pollution. The rather antisocial belief in humanity as a ‘parasite’ on the planet was not uncommon in the heyday of twentieth-century environmentalism (more on this later). However, Hardin’s take on the matter is perhaps even more vicious. Instead of pitting the desires of the human race against that of the planet, Hardin sets the comfort of the few against the existence of the many. To him, a positive ecological future is more a question of which race. He includes a few dog-whistles in “The Tragedy of the Commons” that hint at who he does not include in this specific few. He writes, “The most rapidly growing populations are (in general) the most miserable” (p. 1244). He continues with, “because “our society is deeply committed to the welfare state” (p. 1246), the poor have less chance of suffering the negative consequences of “overbreeding”—that is, a rank inability to feed their children. Intelligent, temperate people simply don’t reproduce at the same rates, and their attitudes are drowned out in the genetic pool. Where might these poor, miserable, and intemperate people be found? Well, predominantly in the Global South, where population growth rates have outpaced those of the West for quite some time. Is it fair to ask that these brown people exist in fewer numbers? Hardin writes, “Injustice is preferable to total ruin” (p. 1247).

It does not take much sleuthing to discover that Garrett Hardin, one of the leading intellectual voices of the ecological movement, was a strident white nationalist. The Southern Poverty Law Center describes his contributions to both movements as such:

Hardin used his status as a famous scientist and environmentalist to provide a veneer of intellectual and moral legitimacy for his underlying nativist agenda, serving on the board of directors of both the anti-immigrant Federation for American Immigration Reform and the white-nationalist Social Contract Press. He also co-founded the anti-immigrant Californians for Population Stabilization and The Environmental Fund, which primarily served to lobby Congress for nativist and isolationist policies. (SPLC, n.d.)

It is, unfortunately, not difficult to see why these two causes might converge. If brown people are bad, and an overpopulation of humans is bad, then it makes good racist sense that a preponderance of this already-unsavory type would be a particular problem. It is difficult to argue against racist logic, based as it is on irrational hatred. The introduction of racist logic into ecological thought brings into the discipline a strain of wrongheadedness that undermines even more than the idea that a healthy planet is (a) good for all people.

2 “A White, Racist Plot”

The source of Hardin’s arguments stems from the post-Second World War revival of interest in population theories advanced by the English political economist Thomas Robert Malthus. In An Essay on the Principle of Population, first published in 1798, Malthus drew attention to the relationship between the human population and the productive capacity of the soil. Malthus argued that increased food production resulting from new mechanical instruments introduced during the first industrial revolution would inevitably lead to unsustainable growth in the human population.

Two books, published months apart from each other, are generally credited for the revival of Malthus’ population scare in the twentieth century: Fairfield Osborn’s Our Plundered Planet (1948) and William Vogt’s Road to Survival (1948). These works were critical to the emergence of the modern environmental movement (Robertson, 2012), introducing a new style and sense of urgency to environmental writing that was blunt, alarmist, and highly contagious. They had a tremendous impact on succeeding generations of environmentalists, especially on the best-sellers of the 1960s, such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968). Despite their extreme popularity during the 1950s and 1960s, only recently have these works elicited the attention of environmental historians. The oversight is due, in part, to the unwillingness to complicate our views of the environmental movement.

Many of the problematic aspects of Hardin’s worldview were derived from Osborn and Vogt. For example, Vogt castigated Indians for “breeding with the irresponsibility of codfish” (Desrochier & Hoffbauer, 2009, p. 46). He argued that a high death rate should be seen as “one of the greatest national assets” of the developing world and called for foreign food aid to poor countries be cut so as not to “subsidize … unchecked spawning” (Desrochier & Hoffbauer, 2009, p. 46). Paul Ehrlich seemed to echo these sentiments in the first lines of The Population Bomb, which vividly described an overcrowded market as “one stinking hot night in Delhi” (p. 1).

The sense of disdain for the Global South was recast by Hardin in an article published in 1974 with the disturbing title, “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case against Helping the Poor.” In it, Hardin attacked Christians and Marxists, and all those who “feel guilty about their good luck” living in the United States for their “justice-based” moral conscience (p. 39). Lifeboat ethics, by contrast, were “reality” based; less-affluent nations needed to “learn the hard way” (p. 40). In short, Hardin recommended that the UN’s World Food Program, which facilitated emergency aid to famine-stricken nations, and a similar domestic program, Food for Peace, be permanently closed and all food aid terminated. Hardin warned against programs that didn’t export food but empowered communities to develop more robust agricultural practices. He also called for an immediate halt to all immigration into the United States to “save at least some parts of the world from environmental ruin” (p. 43).

The idea that the poor and the nonwhite cause more ecological damage than the predominantly white developed world is simply false. Ehrlich came to understand and promote this stance. He realized that a good deal of ecology centered on population planning (he estimated one-third) was “a white racist plot” and that “fundamentally the rich of the world are still stealing from the poor” (Robertson, 2012, p. 174). Racist ecology is self-defeating. It is an oxymoron because the attitudes behind the former occlude the realities of the latter. It is predominantly the rich who are eating the world. Shunting the blame for environmental degradation onto disadvantaged minorities does almost nothing to solve the real problems at hand.

In addition to being scapegoated, the poor experience greater environmental pollution than other socio-economic classes, such as the disposal of toxic or radioactive waste on African American or tribal lands in the United States or the smog in Asia generated by the production of commodities mainly for Western markets. As feared by Garrett Hardin and others, overpopulation is only an existential threat if we all consume at the selfish and excessive rates of the herders in his dark parable—the rates of the 1%. Even overpopulation does not have the same culprit that Hardin identifies. The biggest driver of both population growth and ecological strain is not the wanton behavior of the poor and brown but the brutal churning of global capitalism.

While Hardin borrowed key arguments from the Neo-Malthusians, he ignored or underemphasized notable elements from the work of Osborn and Vogt in his analysis. Among these was their criticism of American consumption. As Thomas Robertson (2012) has argued, the population debates of the immediate post-war era are best understood in reaction to the popularity of ideas put forth by the economist John Maynard Keynes and the “new obsession with growth” overtaking the American imagination (p. 30). Osborn and Vogt were fiercely critical of the spread of American consumerism across the globe. They condemned the free enterprise system, which they understood to be primarily responsible for the rapid destruction of wilderness. Therefore, the unjust focus on the poverty of developing economies in their work was balanced with a critique of the significant American contribution to that dynamic. By comparison, Hardin’s call to reduce the world’s population–he set the limit at 100 million people–was not paired with a significant reduction in consumption (Miele, 2002, p. 267). Instead, he imagined that, were there fewer people on earth, they would be “living a hell of a good life” (Miele, 2002, p. 267), and their standard of living would undergo a dramatic rise as “clean beaches, unspoiled forests and solitude” (Hardin, 1974, p. 41) would be available to all. In addition, Hardin presented private property as the antidote to a failed system of shared environmental commons. “Under a system of private property,” Hardin explained, “the men who own property recognize their responsibility to care for it” (Hardin, 1974, p. 40). The historical precedent of the commons in England, the very commons to which Hardin was alluding and which were privatized by the passage of the Enclosures Acts beginning in the seventeenth century, would seem to show the inverse. The enclosure of the commons precipitated a massive population shift from rural settings to the swelling industrial cities and increased misery and poverty tenfold.

There are several problems with Hardin’s views, not least that they conceal the social inequalities that cause the dramatic imbalances in the distribution of resources. Resources, after all, have tended to flow from developing nations to rich ones. This oversight points to a broader difficulty at the core of much Neo-Malthusian thinking on the environment: its tendency to subsume humankind under the larger category of living beings. For Hardin, as for Vogt, Osborn, and the early work of Ehrlich, the human impulse to reproduce and over-populate an ecosystem was seen as scarcely different from that of deer, fish, or locusts, and the consequences could be just as dire. Their omission of the social and political vectors that drive resource depletion was due, in large part, to their desire to apply lessons from the animal world directly to the human one. Indeed, humanity’s fate was continually compared to the lesson of the Kaibab deer incident, an episode in Northern Arizona that saw the deer population plummet precipitously upon exceeding the carrying capacity of its habitat (Robertson, 2012, p. 73).

The Neo-Malthusians were not alone in their inability to contend with human agency and differentiate between humanity and the rest of the animal kingdom. Indeed, generations of environmentalists have found an intractable problem in the human/nature divide. Despite its outright racist subtext, “Tragedy of the Commons” has come to be reprinted in over 100 anthologies since its publication in 1968, most providing no critical discussion of the motivations of its author. Its racism comes out of a profound process of dehumanization endemic to more than a few environmental movements.

Hardin, of course, was not the first to inject nativist ideas into the discipline. Indeed, as a more or less holistic system of thought, ecology has long been co-opted towards troubling ends. The problem, as Joel Kovel (2003) has rightly pointed out, lies in the temptation to “naturalize” human culture in a reductive way, in other words, to assume that nature or biology determines all facets of human conduct. The German concept of Lebensraum (translated loosely as “living space”), weaponized by the Third Reich, provides the most explicit cautionary tale. Friedrich Ratzel, a pupil of Ernst Haeckel, the noted nineteenth-century zoologist who coined the term “ecology” in 1866, developed the notion. For Ratzel, the German people were an organism whose development could only be assured if given the proper room to grow in the environment for which it was adapted. Nazi Germany reconfigured these ideas into racial policies that denied the political boundaries of the German state in favor of expansionist practices that sought to provide the “Aryan” race the territory deemed necessary for it to flourish.

If naturalizing human conduct is a problem, so is the inverse of that fallacy, denaturing humanity. Both dynamics were clearly at work in the Neo-Malthusian environmental movements of the twentieth century. For example, Hardin, Ehrlich, Vogt, and Osborn all tended to blame humanity—often in the form of newborn babies—for the despoiling of the environment, not specific practices, lifestyle choices, or belief systems. Indeed, one of the most popular political lapel pins of the 1970s featured the simple words: “People Pollute,” as though harmful pollution was endemic to human behavior (Chase, 1980, p. 366).

2.1 Misanthropic Ecologies

A similar process of naturalizing and denaturing human beings underpinned environmentalists’ efforts at the other end of the spectrum, such as the wilderness preservation group Earth First!. With Earth First!, the rhetoric about population growth shifted from focusing on the fear of war, famine, and resource depletion—effects that would harm human beings—to emphasizing threats to the well-being and biodiversity of non-human species. Earth First! traced its roots back to the nature worship of Henry David Thoreau and John Muir and to such mid-twentieth-century ecologists as Aldo Leopold (1949), whose criticism of conservation efforts based on human and “economic self-interest” (p. 213) left a lasting imprint on succeeding generations. The group’s views also were shaped by the Deep Ecology movement of the 1970s and its challenge to the prevailing anthropocentric system of values. Deep Ecologists, such as Arne Naess, argued that nature’s well-being was an intrinsic value of its own; “the earth does not belong to humans,” Naess often insisted. Earth First! radicalized these principles into an eco-centrism that not only privileged the diversity and expansion of the non-human world but demonstrated a veritable antipathy to humankind.

Earth First! participants were militant and uncompromising, and their activism promoted direct action in contrast to the lobbying efforts and legal mechanisms employed by mainstream environmental organizations. They saw their group as the “action wing” of the Deep Ecology movement, and their mission was to create as many wilderness expanses as possible (Chase, 1991, p. 8). For some in the group, the ultimate end lay in jolting humanity to revert to its nomadic and pre-agricultural roots, and “return to the Pleistocene” was a familiar rallying cry at Earth First! events (Chase, 1991, p. 21). Participants in Earth First! employed methods that were controversial, such as “ecotage” tactics—from nail spiking old-growth trees to the sabotage of earth-damaging machinery—in order to defend the environment from, what they termed, “parasitic” humanity.

In addition to tactics that posed a danger to human welfare, the viewpoints of a faction of participants in Earth First! reveal the depths of the group’s misanthropic, if not apocalyptic, streak. For example, an article published by a certain Miss Ann Thropy (the nom de plume of the environmental activist Christopher Manes) in the May 1987 issue of Earth First! Journal argued that AIDS was “nature’s way of protecting the planet from an excess population” and that the disease was not a problem, “but a necessary solution” (Manes, 1987, p. 32). Like the characterizations of the Neo-Malthusians, humankind was presented as an undifferentiated mass, one subjected to the full brunt of nature’s population control mechanisms. Humanity was treated no differently from other forms of life; either it was futile, or it stood against the course of nature to limit exposure to the deadly virus or remedy its effects.

Indeed, some participants in Earth First! also held views that steered undeniably close to the nativist policies championed by Garrett Hardin. Dave Foreman, the group’s most prominent participant, argued against foreign aid to quell the famine in Ethiopia in 1986, “the best thing we can do is let nature seek its balance, to let the people there just starve” (Scarce, 2016, p. 92). On the issue of immigration to the United States, Foreman advocated for a moratorium in the 1980s and, even as he retracted some of his most dogmatic opinions in the following decades, his promotion of deeply restrictive immigration policies remained long after his participation with Earth First! had concluded.

3 The Return of the Commons

Hardin and Foreman’s disturbing views are essential reminders that even well-intentioned causes, such as the preservation of the environment, can be redirected to entrench the very attitudes that impoverish citizens of the Global South. An ecological movement that, purposefully or not, implicitly or explicitly castigates or excludes entire swaths of the population is antithetical to its aims. The views of Hardin and Foreman also demonstrate the danger of attempts to naturalize and denature human conduct. Efforts to naturalize away human agency, denature human actions, and thus remove humans from the rest of the web of life are not constructive. Both approaches fail to acknowledge and treat the entirety of the situation in which we find ourselves.

These lessons are particularly important in pedagogical settings, such as college classrooms, where anxieties about environmental degradation can lead to misanthropic or discriminatory reasoning. We have seen two problematic attitudes resurface in classroom discussions about ecological crises, which bear mentioning. The first tends to subsume human action under nature’s own set of priorities or prescribed sense of agency. Human conduct is perceived as an extension of nature’s inner purpose. The human capacity for self-destruction (and some would say humanity’s drive towards self-extinction) is often explained away as the direct result of nature’s protective mechanism. It is not hard to recognize the profound difficulties this kind of perspective poses if one is serious about mitigating human harm to the environment. Humanity, for one, cannot at once be a passive object of nature’s directives and a constructive subject engaged in environmental rehabilitation. The second characterization that surfaces in the classroom is equally prominent in the attitudes of Neo-Malthusians and sees humans as “parasites” existing outside of nature and acting on it in a wholly disruptive way. Here, the familiar binaries–nature/culture, reason/instinct–reappear in such a way as to make their reconciliation an impossibility.

More nuanced understandings of humankind’s relationship to the natural environment are essential, especially in the classroom, if antisocial and misanthropic ecologies are to be dispelled. In the 1980s, the most vociferous challenges to Neo-Malthusian and Deep Ecology perspectives were issued from advocates of Social Ecology, who argued that humankind’s relation to nature could be explored only with a simultaneous critique of social structures. Social Ecologists, such as Murray Bookchin, contended that the domination of nature could not be overcome until hierarchy in all its forms—gender, racial, economic, and political—was eliminated from society. Bookchin’s ecological philosophy highlighted both the continuities and the ruptures between human and natural worlds. While not merely reducible to the instincts and impulses in “biotic nature,” human society, for Bookchin, was, at its point of origin, profoundly related to the evolutionary processes which were understood as mutualistic practices of diversification, differentiation, and flexibility. Bookchin (1993) advanced “an ethic of complementarity” in which human beings “must play a supportive role in perpetuating the integrity of the biosphere” (p. 369).

Over the past two decades, philosophers such as Bruno Latour and Timothy Morton have invited us to move beyond subject/object ecologies and towards a recognition of the complex imbrications between humankind and the environment. Latour (1998), for example, has criticized Green movements in Europe, arguing that political ecology ought to trigger a more sweeping re-evaluation of governing structures. Political representation, in his imagined system of governance, would be extended to incorporate the relational webs that “entangle” human and non-human nature into what he terms “a parliament of things” (Latour, 2004). Morton also demonstrates considerable antipathy towards the notion of a stand-alone nature which he sees as a primary source of humankind’s shunting of ecological responsibility. For Morton (2007), the concept of nature suggests a passive object to be used up and polluted for human gain. Nature, he writes, is “the away to which things are flushed” (Morton, 2012). A more constructive approach, in his view, entails disclosing the matrix of “affiliations” between human and non-human objects.

In the last few years, environmentalists have become more fully aware of the racism and misanthropy that once resided in elements of the environmental movement and are quick to recognize the enduring nature of some of these biases today. Indeed, the term “Anthropocene,” coined in 2000 by the atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen to denote the measurable geological stratum in the natural landscape that is produced by mankind, has raised alarms for fear of resuscitating the problematic tropes that all human beings share equal blame for the climate emergency and that human existence is in itself irreconcilable with a healthy natural environment. As the environmental historian Jason W. Moore has recently explained, “Capitalocene” may be a more appropriate term if one hopes to pinpoint the source most responsible for planetary degradation in the last two centuries (Moore, 2015).

These contemporary perspectives in ecological thought come when a new environmental crisis, the rapid warming of the globe due to unchecked carbon emissions, has replaced the population scare of the previous generation. And though, motivated by population growth, Hardin and Foreman arrived at the troubling conclusion that the United States should be saved while the rest of the world should be left to its own devices, climate change today knows no geographical or political boundaries. Indeed, the analogy of the earth as a spaceship, or a closed system, an analogy famously rejected by Hardin due to its inference of a shared commons, has become all the more relevant in a world that is beginning to experience the effects of increased greenhouse gases. In the face of this new hazard, the approach of Neo-Malthusians, which assigned blame to the very existence of people and not to specific carbon emissions-producing practices, is simply untenable.

The current situation presents possibilities that can move us past the impasse occasioned by the population scare of the 1950s and 1960s, and away from the divisive rhetoric of Hardin and Earth First!. Most importantly, climate change compels us to focus on the global atmosphere as a continuous and shared territory, uninterrupted by geographic features or national boundaries. Indeed, environmentalists today are rethinking the global atmosphere in ways that draw more rigorous attention to the nature and source of contemporary pollution. Recent approaches to curbing the impacts of climate change, such as The Green New Deal, proposed by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey, reflect an awareness of the environmental movement’s past biases by deliberately conjoining social equity and justice with economic and environmental rehabilitation. The attention has helped shift the discussion of the environmental crisis from blaming people for pollution to understanding the outsized role that business and industry play in perpetuating it. The figure of the commons today has reappeared, not as a tragedy to be avoided, but as a tool for better understanding global responsibility and sustainability.