A Postcapitalist Politics of Dwelling: Ecological Humanities and Community Economies in Conversation

Abstract

Introduction: How do we live together with human and non-human others?If our species does not survive the ecological crisis, it will probably be due to our failure to imagine and work out new ways to live with the earth, to rework ourselves and our high energy, high consumption, and hyper-instrumental societies adaptively.We struggle to adjust, because we're still largely trapped inside the enlightenment tale of progress as human control over a passive and 'dead' nature that justifies both colonial conquests and commodity economies.The real threat is not so much global warming itself, which there might still be a chance to head off, as our own inability to see past the post-enlightenment energy, control and consumption extravaganza we so naively identify with the good, civilized life-to a sustainable form of human culture.The time of Homo reflectus, the self-critical and self-revising one, has surely come.Homo faber, the thoughtless tinkerer, is clearly not going to make it.We will go onwards in a different mode of humanity, or not at all.(Plumwood, 'Review' 1) 1 This powerful statement opens Val Plumwood's review of Deborah Rose's book Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation published in the Australian Humanities Review in August last year.We begin this essay with it because we wish to engage with the ideas of Plumwood, Rose and other feminist ecological humanities scholars as we ponder the question of how to live together with human and non-human others.Plumwood's call follows anthropogenic crises that have become all too familiar.A BBC documentary 'Global Dimming' demonstrates the overflowing nature of such crises and provides a shocking wake-up call about global responsibility.It tracks how the Ethiopian famine that killed ten million people in the early 1980s resulted from the failure for more than a decade of the yearly monsoon.This catastrophe was caused as the water-laden tropical air mass was prevented

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