Abstract
Corporate engagements with pressing environmental challenges focus on expanding the role of the market, seeking opportunities for growth and developing technologies to manage better environmental resources. Such approaches have proved ineffective. I suggest that a lack of meaningful response to ecological degradation and climate change is inevitable within a capitalist system underpinned by a logics of appropriation and an instrumental rationality that views the planet as a means to achieve economic ends. For ecofeminism, these logics are promulgated through sets of hierarchical and interrelated dualisms which define the human in opposition to the realm of “nature”. This has led to the resilience of ecosystems, social reciprocity and care being unvalued or undervalued. An ecofeminist, care-sensitive ethics is proposed that focuses on the interconnections between human and nonhuman nature and on affective engagements with the living world. A practical morality is developed that sees the self not as atomized nor as self-optimizing, but as a self in relationship. Such an ethics is necessary to motivate action to contest capitalism’s binary thinking, evident within corporate environmentalism, which has re-made the web of life in ways that are not conducive to planetary flourishing.
Highlights
We want to remember that emotions are things we value’’ (Gaard 1993, p. 3). These words were spoken by an participant in a workshop on global economics at the World Women’s Congress for a Healthy Planet in 1991. They point to the importance of caring engagements with the ecological challenges the world currently faces and which are lacking from the practices of corporate environmentalism (CE) (Phillips 2014, 2015)
It reinforces the structural relationships and behaviour patterns that facilitate environmental appropriation resulting in a lack of meaningful response to continuing ecological devastation and to the dangers posed by climate change (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2014)
My aim in this paper is to argue that current corporate responses to the ecological challenges which face the inhabitants of this planet are the logical outcome of capitalist systems that regard humans as atomized, instrumentalist and self-serving and which see the economic rationality of the market as providing solutions
Summary
These words were spoken by an (unnamed) participant in a workshop on global economics at the World Women’s Congress for a Healthy Planet in 1991. I offer this paper as a response to CE that is grounded in finding a different way of living in the world (Gibson-Graham 2011) through developing a moral vision based in an ecofeminist ethics of care Such an ethics views the self as part of a web of relationships and is committed to negotiating and promoting practices that enhance the flourishing of relevant parties. This is beginning to happen, for example in anti-fracking demonstrations in the UK, the Leap manifesto, and in the growth of groups and organizations such as Skipchen which are striving to develop different ways of working These are movements underpinned by a practical morality that sees the self not as atomized nor as self-optimizing, but as positioned in a web of caring relationships. I offer such an ethics as a possibility that can underpin activism and the development of alternative modes of organization which can challenge CE
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