Crisis Progressive: Environmental Ethics in a Time of ‘Unavoidable’ Ecological Destruction in Amazonia

Abstract

ABSTRACT Environmentalists in southern Brazilian Amazonia framed the future as a horizon filled with ‘unavoidable’ crises in motion that could not be contained. This framing, which I call ‘crisis progressive,’ informed life-defining decisions that led environmentalists to participate in controversial environmental efforts designed to limit – rather than to avoid or reverse – mass-scale socio-ecological damage. Their efforts contravene progressivist ethical assessments whereby destructive actions are assessed as appropriate on the grounds they lead to a ‘good’ future of continuous improvements in human and nonhuman affairs. Advancing anthropological discussions on futurity and ethics, the ethnographic critique of crisis-progressive environmental practices foregrounds the ethical dynamics emerging from the collapse of progressivist futures. The analysis opens a window on how environmentalists’ ethical sensibilities, attuned to ‘unavoidable’ destruction, forego ethical purity and embrace compromise, uncertainty, and hesitation.