Institution

Humanities

Department

Philosophie

Teaching staff

Dr. Rachel Anna Aumiller

SDG-topic cluster

Nature conservation and sustainable use of resources, Sustainable infrastructure, cities, and communities, Climate change

Comments/contents

This course explores Environmental Ethics through a Marxist-feminist lens, analyzing the relationship between global capitalism and our current ecological crisis. Our readings will orient us in contemporary debates in Marxist political theory, environmental ethics, and eco-feminism. The dominant models for sustainability demand that we reduce climate pollution by cutting back on fossil fuel emissions. This approach to ecology employs a similar logic to an economic model based on austerity, which responds to deficit with spending cuts. Recent initiatives for sustainability—notably the Green New Deal as it is being developed in the U.S. and Europe—add a positive program to the demand to reduce practices that have detrimental effects for the environment. By introducing alternative energy sources and new green jobs, for example, these deals seek to transform our social and economic structures with the aim of ecological recovery. Some political theorists argue that various versions of the Green New Deal still do not go far enough. By “greenwashing” capitalism, these programs fail to recognize the source of our ecological crisis. They argue that in order to save planet earth a deeper ecological approach is needed, one that radically reconceives relationships of power. We will consider these relationships on a number of levels: relationships between socio-economic groups, between nations, between different species, and between the human and more-than-human world. Drawing on Marxist and feminist perspectives, this course tests the hypothesis that our environmental crisis stems from a failure to grasp our collective existence. A lack of an understanding concerning the interconnectivity of all life results in relationships built on competition. The natural world becomes reduced to a resource to sustain our individual existences. We fear that if we don’t claim this resource for ourselves and “our people,” others will steal away our right to a prosperous future. As these “resources for sustaining the self” become threatened, social and political relationships become fueled with fear and discrimination and economic disparity widens. We will question how a perspective of our collective existence could give birth to a new ethical framework that generates global action to recover the earth as something more than a resource to be used (and used up) for our individual ends.  Many of us imagine that we can invest in the individual ends of our families, communities, or nations while neglecting other lives and other life forms that don’t appear to be directly related to us. We believe that our ethical responsibility is first and foremost to our own. And so we build walls, underground bunkers, and plan new colonies on Mars—imagining that the vulnerability of others won’t touch us. We would save ourselves before saving our planet—as if we don’t share the same fate. This course drives towards developing a new ethics that fights to sustain the common good of our collective existence.  

Semester

WiSe 19/20