Ecological Collapse Research Articles

Educating in and for Degrowth: Training Future Generations to Prevent Environmental Collapse

This research has been developed through a literature review on the importance of and current approach in the education system to the present environmental and ecosystemic crisis and the training of future generations in degrowth in the Spanish education system. To this end, a systematic literature review (SLR) has been carried out following the standards of the PRISMA declaration. In total, 40 articles published between January 2005 and March 2024 were selected from the following databases: Scopus, Dialnet, Web of Science and Scielo. The findings show it is a relevant topic in school education as a concern, but it is not reflected in educational practice; that it has been incorporated into the curriculum, but sporadically, decontextualised and more focused on ‘sustainable development’; also, it lacks critical questioning of the unlimited growth and consumption model that capitalism entails. The study concludes that it is crucial to incorporate degrowth in a transversal way in education at all schooling levels, and to reform the curricula of the faculties of education in all universities so that the pedagogy of degrowth is a priority in the training of future teachers.

Solidarity and broadening the practices of action research

We live in a world of runaway global social inequality and immanent planetary ecological collapse and action research is more necessary than ever. Solidarity across countries, regions, classes, and ecosystems is the only way out of these linked crises caused by neoliberal capitalism. Action research is a vibrant and heterogeneous set of democratic practices capable of addressing many of these dilemmas. Action researchers have for generations largely been content to develop their own approaches independently and the attempts to create better integrated global action research networks have yet to show the needed success. This essay argues that the lack of collaboration and solidarity across the whole spectrum of action research is an unaffordable luxury. Living up to our own ethical and political commitments, we need to find ways to treat the diversity among our own practices and political visions as sources of strength and dynamism. Beyond this, together we need to make a concerted effort to link with other groups and networks promoting fairness, democracy, sustainability and solidarity because the future without these collaborations is unsustainable.

Defending and expanding industrial democracy and worker cooperatives in an age of neoliberal globalisation

ABSTRACT Neoliberalism has reinforced inequality, environmental collapse, famine, refugee crises, supply chain vulnerabilities and more. We agree with Gibson-Graham (2006) that the core of the issue for a post-capitalist politics is to overcome the sense of the inevitability of the dominant system of political economy. With this argument in mind, we analyse the diversity, innovativeness, and resilience of two specific manufacturing alternatives to neoliberal capitalism: the Norwegian industrial democracy and the Mondragon Cooperative Experience. The cases show that each example arises from a unique history, environment, and has unique structures. This diversity shows that there are many paths to workplace democracy, such systems are capable of innovation, and they are internationally competitive. Our comparison also reveals that no successful equilibrium is ever static. Scaling (up or out) to secure market share presents a challenge potentially existential for both models. Reviewing their efforts for meeting these challenges conclude our analysis.

Translating disaster resilience: How values, world views and politics complicate interpretation and implementation

Globalized climate change and ecological collapse discourses have created a universally relatable conceptual arena within which institutional actors’ debate, design and implement interventions to create ‘disaster resilient cities’ in the Global South. The implications of resilience ideologies and practices adopted from the Global North can have detrimental and counterproductive effects when translated into interventions in postcolonial countries like Pakistan. In this research paper, we use interviews and discourse analysis to underscore the techniques, rationalities, and framings mobilized by governmental and non-governmental actors in the name of ‘reducing risks’ and building ‘disaster resilience’. Within this arena, Pakistani institutional actors create, mimic, and adapt normative resilience trajectories influenced by international resilience standards that do not align, or worse, conflict with the spiritual, cultural, and postcolonial contexts and values of communities they engage with. Imposition of international resilience standards may result in disconnected top-down interventions that overlook the vulnerabilities of local communities deemed as ‘beneficiaries’ and misallocate funds in favor of ineffective projects and programmes, ultimately missing opportunities for meaningful change. While building upon existing urban resilience efforts in Pakistan is important, it is critical to recognize that merely pursuing resilience as an outcome is not enough. Fulfilling basic needs should take precedence over resilience efforts, particularly when the goal is not only the survival of local communities in the face of escalating climate and disaster risks but also their overall well-being.

Postmodern Time and Space. Eco-critical Approaches to Temporal and Spatial Collapse

This article explores the complex intersections of postmodern literature, time-space theory, and eco-criticism, particularly in portraying temporal disruption and spatial collapse amidst current environmental crises. It examines how postmodern literary works challenge the linearity of time and the stability of spatial boundaries in response to the global environmental challenges of the Anthropocene. Through an analysis of critical texts, the study explores ecological degradation as a physical reality and a conceptual issue, fragmenting our perceptions of time and space. Using an eco-critical lens, the article investigates how authors dismantle linear narratives and static settings, instead presenting cyclical or collapsed structures that metaphorically mirror the breakdown of ecosystems and natural rhythms. Focusing on Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, the article critiques the socio-political ramifications of environmental crises and their reflection on postmodern aesthetics. Ultimately, it contends that the fragmentation of time and space in postmodern literature symbolises broader environmental collapse, urging readers to re-evaluate their relationship with nature, time, and space.

Biosoteriology and the Postsecular (In)Human: The Religio-Racializing Assemblages of Evangelical Nephilim Demonology

ABSTRACT This article explores the use of apocryphal narratives of the angelic Watchers and their offspring, the nephilim, in contemporary American evangelical demonology. It contends that such demonologies use the figure of the nephilim to galvanize reactionary political narratives of crisis, placing the source of cultural change and ecological collapse in an inhuman Other whose removal would permit the restoration of social and spiritual order. Drawing on Black studies and postsecular critique, the article contends that nephilim demonologies mobilize processes of “religio-racialization” rooted in antiblackness to create a paradigm of “biosoteriology”—a conflation of biological “purity” and soteriological possibility mobilized through religio-racializing assemblages. Situating this paradigm in the context of US Christian nationalism and a racialized “return” of religion, the article shows that the nephilim become figured as an alterity threatening white, cisheteronormative visions of the human and the futurity of (white, Christian) America.

Care, nature and heritage: shared care practices and thinking

Essentially based on the domination of nature, Western progress has proved as much a source of material comfort and increased life expectancy as it has been destructive and unequal. Ecological collapse and health challenges compel us to mobilize more holistic approaches to care, integrating patients and caregivers, nature and the environment as partners. As a shared function, care can be understood as a founding democratic principle.

Results of a Survey of UK Farmers on Food System Vulnerability over the Short and Long Term

We report the results of a survey of farmers and landowners to identify the most likely potential food system disruption scenarios for the UK and compare these with a previous expert elicitation with a much wider set of food system stakeholders. We found that 60% of farmers think a Societal Event in which 1 in 2000 people are injured in the UK is at least 20% likely to occur over the coming decade. Over a timeframe of 50 years, this increased to almost 90% of farmers. These results show that farmers and landowners are considerably more concerned about the vulnerability of the food system in the UK than the wider group of food system experts are. Farmers agreed with experts on the majority of potential causes of such vulnerability, which are climate change, trade policies (import and export), competition for land and ecological collapse (over 50 years). However, they also highlighted the importance of the power structure within the food system, with large corporations supplying to, or buying from, farmers creating lower revenue, making farming an unsustainable business. We conclude that an urgent systematic review of potential interventions that would improve resilience be conducted by the UK Government, in partnership with farmers.

Technologically mediated encounters with ‘nature’

Despite well-founded critiques on the concept of nature and even claims that the concept is decidedly obsolete, evidence would suggest that nature continues to play a pivotal role in orienting people towards environmental practices and advocacy. Given nature’s unyielding relevance, this paper takes inspiration from Sally Haslanger’s project of conceptual amelioration to examine how meanings ascribed to nature can lead to the actualization of desired sociomaterial realities. By building on posthumanist political ecology and Michel Callon’s notion of performation, I illustrate a dynamic in which meanings of nature emerge through the engagement in practices with the environment which are, more often than not, mediated by different technologies. After exploring this proposal through the lens of different environmentalisms, I argue that technologies can play a significant role in mediating conceptualizations of nature. To support this argument, I introduce a few elements of mediation theory and examine the meaning of nature that may emerge when social media users interact with online content of climate and ecological collapse. Overall, this approach advances a postphenomenological contribution to the scholarly trend of examining how technologies may disrupt fundamental concepts with which we respond to ethical issues. This approach underscores the role of technologically mediated practices in processes of conceptualization, as well as the significant political dimension of conceptual engineering projects.

Landscape Architecture Carbon Emission Lifecycle Management Tool Based on Artificial Intelligence

In the contemporary discourse, carbon emissions have emerged as a focal point of global concern due to their role in inducing climate warming and precipitating ecological collapse. The establishment of a comprehensive carbon emission management system, coupled with effective measures, holds the potential to mitigate climate change, safeguard ecological integrity, improve health conditions, and promote global sustainable development. The Carbon Lifecycle AI Project Management Tool (CLA) proposed in this paper makes use of Large Language Model (LLM) and image processing model to intelligently analyze and manage the carbon emission of landscape architecture throughout its life cycle, and focuses on solving the carbon emission problem in landscape architecture. By gathering, integrating, and analyzing data related to landscape architecture, including information on material selection, plant configuration, and energy utilization, comprehensive monitoring and management of carbon emissions from landscape architecture are achieved. CLA not only offers real-time monitoring and analytical capabilities for carbon emissions but also identifies emission reduction opportunities and provides corresponding optimization recommendations, thus offering crucial support for the sustainable development of the landscape architecture industry.

Undoing business: revealing critical narratives in an edge-city business park through nature-based auto-photography

Business parks are a ubiquitous feature of city-edge development. They have attracted attention for their lack of sustainability, spurring interest in how they can be reconfigured or reimagined in the face of ecological collapse and social fragmentation. Inspired by calls to notice everyday practices at the city edge (Tzaninis et al. 2021. “Moving Urban Political Ecology Beyond the ‘Urbanization of Nature’.” Progress in Human Geography 45 (2): 229–252; Tsing 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press; Gandy 2022a. “Ghosts and Monsters: Reconstructing Nature on the Site of the Berlin Wall.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 47: 1120–1136.) and drawing on data from a participant-led photography exercise at a suburban business park in the north-east of England, this article explores how workers employed at businesses on the park engage with and value its natural assets. We set out from Tzaninis et al.’s (2021) contention that the dominant framing of suburbia as ‘non-place’ or ‘no man’s land’ has the effect of denying the many intriguing practices unfolding at the city’s edge. Resonating with Tsing (2015), we highlight the significance of everyday interaction with nature in an ecologically vulnerable landscape as a creative, open-ended and, potentially, hopeful process. Focused on denizens of the business park, our data draws attention to the possibilities and potentialities of more-than-human encounters, the feeling of tranquillity generated by green spaces, and the sense of freedom that derives from bodily movement in a natural setting. These open-ended practices are distinct from, and ‘other than’, the dominant way of doing business in the park. Such encounters, drawn out by auto-photography, foment a radical connectedness with nature through which a powerful sense of custodianship and responsibility can find expression.

The Challenge of Political Will, Global Democracy and Environmentalism

In 2024, around the world nearly 60 national elections will be held involving billions of people. Many commentators see this as a make-or-break moment in terms of re-establishing democracy and pushing back against rising authoritarian regimes that have been increasing in recent years. This essay explores why –despite worldwide scientific consensus that we are facing ecological collapse –there is little discussion about the climate crisis among the upcoming wave of national elections. This silence around the climate emergency raises several pressing questions: Why is there limited political will on behalf of national leaders when it comes to mitigating the climate crisis? What does this suggest about the state of democracy when political leaders can sidestep and ignore the escalating demands of their constituencies? Finally, what actions can be taken by ordinary people who are increasingly subject to repressive anti-protest laws that prevent them from speaking out against antidemocratic leaders and their political collusion with the fossil fuel sector?

Ecological grief as a crisis in dwelling

AbstractIn the current context of widespread environmental collapse, ecological grief—the sense of loss that arises from experiencing environmental destruction—has become a burgeoning topic of inquiry across psychology, geography, and anthropology. The central challenge in the study of ecological grief is that its theoretical foundations remain underdeveloped. Recent discussions in philosophy of emotions elucidate that a central element in this theoretical challenge is determining what the object of ecological grief is. In turn, our understanding of the object of ecological grief goes hand in hand with our understanding of the nature of ecological grief. This paper develops a phenomenological analysis of cross‐cultural subjective reports that identifies crucial themes in the experience of ecological grief. This phenomenological analysis reveals the object of ecological grief as the loss of the life possibilities that are sustained by dwelling. The resulting view is that ecological grief corresponds to a crisis in dwelling—a disturbance in the very way we inhabit our home environment.

Calling for eco-peace: reimagining interconnected peace education

ABSTRACT In this critical co-constructed auto-ethnographic article we draw on research from two contexts, exploring how critical peace education can be more than palliative care in times of ecological collapse and profound crises across ecosystems. Examining the current crises of learning, living and being, we call for eco-peace-based education: grounded in interconnectedness and interdependence, as a way to transgress unsustainable violences on personal, interpersonal, and ecological levels. We focus on three main arguments that extend learning about nature, to learning with and in nature, towards regenerative approaches of learning, living, and being. Firstly, to move beyond the self-centered (ego) towards interconnected and Earth-centered (eco) epistemologies. Secondly, we explore concrete examples of alternative schools that learn from, in and with nature through fostering innate care between students and Earth (in our own contexts, India and Germany). Thirdly, we reimagine possible futures of eco-peace-based approaches, and argue for a shift towards more peaceful and interconnected futures by integrating eco-peace principles, content and pedagogies into current education systems.

Prisons, Immigration, and the Right to a Livable Life in the Anthropocene: Reading Garrett Hardin and Michel Foucault

Abstract Critical work theorizing the nature of immigration imprisonment in relation to anthropogenically influenced ecological phenomena is in its infancy. Scholars have productively made sense of the modern carceral state's expansion by locating it within the framework of race and neoliberalism, registering the collateral damage essential to Western European whiteness and a neoliberal problematic. These framings of migrant incarceration continue to effectively serve a critical function. However, this essay argues that the historical character of immigration incarceration is in the process of changing in the face of real and imagined Anthropocene impacts. Increasingly, immigration is the result of ecological collapse, and taking race and neoliberalism as primary frameworks for understanding forces subtending the carceral system has become critically restrictive. This essay develops an environmental genealogy from historical references within Michel Foucault's work on the relationship between land enclosures and rise of the prison, in order to establish a larger constellation in which to think the event of immigration incarceration today. The essay places Foucault's work in conversation with the work of prominent ecologist and white nationalist Garrett Hardin, whose concurrent pro-enclosure work on immigration and the environment inaugurated a coercive truth discourse that has come to impact not only ecological disciplines in the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the environmental humanities but also current US immigration policy.

The Anthropussy: an ecolesbian manifesto

The Anthropocene is old news. As young queer zine-makers in Singapore, we heard the term on repeat and dared to ask: What about the AnthroPUSSY? From this queer environmentalist pun we birthed a new take on our relationship to the Earth amidst climate crises – and in doing so, we came out as ecolesbians. Ecolesbianism is a concept we co-created, bringing together queer ecologies, political lesbianism, ecofeminism, transecology, ecosexuality, and our own experiences. Ecolesbianism explores our relationship with the Earth and asks: what if our interspecies relationships are lesbian too? We argue that lesbian intimacy is unique in proceeding from a point of sameness and marginality, by recognising shared experiences of gender marginalisation with our lovers. Ecolesbianism thus might be understood as a subset of ecosexuality, but with an emphasis placed on marginality and intimacy more so than a general focus on sex and sensuality. The Anthropussy, meanwhile, is our nod to rejecting classifications: The Anthropussy is the erotic and utopian potential we carry within this era of unprecedented anthropogenic climate change. It combines an environmentalist recognition of the climate crisis with a feminist and queer theory analysis of the vulva as a symbol for vast potential, pleasure, intimacy, and expansiveness. This article is a re-formatted zine: a form that brings creativity and fun into the often heavy and overwhelming conversation on ecological collapse, while also expanding its audience beyond that of a typical academic article. A full version of the zine can be found in the supplemental materials linked to this article.

Socio-ecological gestures of mathematics education

In this theoretical article, we argue that the imminent collapse of earth systems that sustain life forms calls for mathematics education as a field to reflect on and re-evaluate its priorities and thus practices. We consider both what ecological collapse means for mathematics education and whether mathematics education might offer meaningful gestures in response. We explore how the relationship between the social and the ecological is conceptualised in mathematics education (and other relevant) research and what this implies for mathematics education. We read, in this scholarship, a growing focus on the ecological and conceptualisations of socio-ecological relations between existing entities that are dialectical, or mutually dependent. More rarely, are they seen as entangled and monist, and it is in this thought that we locate our contribution of multi-layered gestures of mathematics education. We describe these, in terms of three broad practices: listening for socio-ecological entanglement; attending to the scales of socio-ecological entanglements; and living entanglement as mathematics educators. We exemplify these gestures through examples of curriculum innovation. This article, a socio-ecological gesture in itself, is written in the spirit of opening a conversation into which we invite others.

In the Garden of Anthropos

The term ‘planetary garden’ was coined by Gilles Clement to refer to the privileged site of the planetary mixing of species that is managed by humans. In the face of the ongoing environmental collapse, we envision the garden as a new locus for symbiotic attachment and original exchange between human and non-human ecologies. Drawing on the garden metaphor, we discuss the conceptual and ecological impacts of human stewardship of the environment. Recognising ecosystems as changing fields of social and technical interactions, we evaluate how conservation strategies shift in tandem with these changes. We explore the influence of emerging technologies on human understanding of natural ecosystems and on societal approaches to conservation. Envisioning the future, we are mapping out the need for human-centric technologies to foster new forms of agency between humans and their environments. While any technological promise does not come without ethical and technical challenges, we advocate for ecological intelligence (EI), a spatialised human-AI collaboration scheme, as a critical condition for reimagining and upscaling conservation practices in the Anthropocene.

Crisis in Motion

This article diagnoses the catastrophe of the present as crisis in motion. Looking to the sphere of circulation as site and source of a multitude of crises in contemporary life, it explores the emergence of crisis not simply in the disruption of movement but in the production of particular regimes of motion. The article tells three stories of crises in motion: supply chain disruption during COVID-19, blockades of colonial circulatory infrastructures, and the disastrous ecologies of extractivism, emphasizing their deep entanglements. This article traces how these crises of lifeworlds are produced by particular configurations of motion that are assembled through imperial infrastructures. Each tale is a fragment of a wider story about the violent motion of expanded reproduction, and between them are common places and peoples in struggle with the entangled crises of premature death, dispossession, and ecological collapse. Yet, in each case, crisis is called to order through refusal. Refusal disrupts racial capitalist and settler colonial circulation as it also opens radical alternatives. Looking to struggles over the imperial logistics of mobility and containment, the paper asks what kinds of collective futures take shape through infrastructure's refusal and repair.

Psychiatry on fire: Climate change and the role of mental healthcare

IntroductionWhat is the psychiatrist’s role on a burning planet? As our world faces the existential ramifications of irreversible climate change, clinicians are contending with what purpose a normalizing institution like psychiatry can have in increasingly abnormal times.Objectives This presentation investigates the role of the modern mental health clinician by examining psychiatry’s current impotence in the face of climate crisis. It will be shown that current approaches are often complicit in psychiatry’s historical depoliticization of mental health and subsequent individualization of social concerns. It will be argued that the only way psychiatry can maintain its ethical obligations to its patients is by taking a courageous sociopolitical stance.MethodsEmerging from a multidisciplinary literature review on the relationship between psychiatry and social crises, this work examines our field’s response to climate change in particular. A focus is made on literature that explores psychiatry’s political obligations, current trends in climate psychiatry, and proposed social psychiatric approaches to the climate crisis.ResultsIt is shown that while ecological collapse tangibly affects our patients, psychiatry often fails to engage socio-politically with the crisis’ root causes. Framing intense reactions to climate change as trauma responses and developing neo-diagnoses such as “ecoanxiety” both risk individualizing inherently social experiences. However, Psychiatrists are also uniquely positioned to speak with authority about social crises and to articulate what a more comprehensive medical response to climate change might look like.ConclusionsGiven climate change’s disproportionate effects on disenfranchised populations, it is increasingly clear that health is inextricable from social circumstances. As a result, political inaction is incompatible with our ethical duty to serve patients’ health, both in the clinic and beyond it.Disclosure of InterestNone Declared