This first chapter in particular deals with one of the research questions that the doctoral thesis addresses: the extent to which the official project of sustainable development –mainly as set out in Our Common Future (1987)— can steer the global polity out of the ecocidal mode of being. It is argued that, cognitively, the project at issue is conterminous with the epistemological tradition largely inaugurated by Socrates. It is on these grounds that the project of sustainable development is readily dismissed as a putative post-ecocidal candidate.

Seven points of continuity between the project of sustainable development and philosophy and science as epistēmē are identified. First, sustainable development is seen to fully endorse the anthropological slumber into which the Modern Age – the zenith of the epistemological trajectory— plunges. Similarly, sustainable development is found to project the analytic of finitude common to this Age to the environment as the latter turns into an issue of public concern. Second, the rational management with which Our Common Future is imbued is pinpointed as an intrinsic element of the logocentric sciences into which philosophy as epistēmē evolves. Third and relatedly, ecological statements that inform the report under scrutiny are identified as problematic logocentric claims to truth operative and legitimized under the ecocidal mode of being. Points four and five relate to a leading feature of philosophy and science as epistēmē –namely, the pervasiveness of binary pairs. Sustainable development replicates the Cartesian culture/nature divide by which the res cogitans –‘thinking matter’— stands over against the res extensa —‘extended matter’. Likewise, the rubric of sustainable development is conceived as conforming to an unproblematized reversal of productivity –as an extension and complementing pole of the latter, that is. Sixth, the propensity of sustainable development to take for granted a docile nature assumed as it is to be utterly controllable by Promethean Man is interpreted as an expression of restricted economy, a leading trait of the epistemological disposition. Seven, sustainable development, in its promise to render productivity clean, is severely charged with the perpetuation of the teleology of progress also ingrained in the epistemological trajectory.

Read the full chapter: Dystopian Contemporary Positions: Sustainable Development As A Manifest Instance Of The Epistemological Disposition [PDF, 2 Mb]

Re-embodiment is a global social phenomenon. It is a popular and organized response against the excesses of Wester(nized) both modernity and postmodernity that also receives the firm support of international intellectual quarters and NGOs. These excesses are part of the colonial legacy. They are conspicuously epitomized in the international climate change regime.

Re-Embodiment cuts across the social and natural sciences and reassembles both. It builds on previous work on embodiment theory from as varied fields as 20th-century philosophy, environmental sociology, ecofeminism, political economy, ethno-ecology and human geography. Re-embodiment theory equally builds upon classical and post-structuralist social theory and philosophy.

This symposium is organized as a roundtable with six speakers. Two speakers open up the debate by attempting to define the Age of Re-Embodiments from the perspective of philosophy & social theory. Subsequently another two address the topic from the the domain of political ecology. Two ecofeminists close the symposium.

An edited collection named after the symposium with another seven invited papers shall mark the official opening of the theory around the Age of Re-Embodiments.

For further details see the booklet of the symposium.

VENUE
BSA London Meeting Room, Suite 2, Station Court, Imperial Wharf, Townmead Road, Fulham SW6 2PY

Entrance Fee
£20 for regular attendees, £10 concessions, to pay at the entrance on the day of the symposium. Book in advance as the conference room only sits 35 people.

Bookings & inquiries to Ruth Thomas-Pellicer.

Read The Re-embodiment of the Global Polity: An Ecofeminist Approach.

Ruth Thomas-Pellicer has published a critical reflection in the form of an Eco Pax Mundi kernel on the political and chrematistic role that the banner of SD/sustainability has been playing ever since it reached the international arena with the publication of Our Common Future in 1987. Ruth alerts us of the need not to get co-opted by the overarching banner. The ecological movement should keep its diversity and plural visions.

Read ‘Sustainability as (Neo)liberalism’s Trojan Horse in Ecocidal Times’

Read ‘A Jubliee for Climate Justice as a Roadmap into the Age for Re-embodiements’

A global process of re-embodiment is incompatible with carbon markets. Karl Polanyi’s political economy is outspoken that the market is inherently disembodied from ecological processes and disembedded from politics.

We need non-market solutions to exit Western ecocidal assumptions. As a first step to this end, Eco Pax Mundi has proposed a global jubliee or erasure of the unfair financial relations entrenched with the grandfathering of ‘rights to pollute’ to the industrial nations in the Kyoto Protocol. In our Jubilee for Climate Justice we then go on to propose a number of intermediate measures to progressively reach the Age of Re-embodiments.

Friends of the Earth – US proposes now to the Obama Administration another five steps to steadily enter the Age of Re-embodiments. These are:

1/ Stop subsidizing fossil fuels.

2/ Spearhead a bold “Marshall Plan”-style effort to fund solutions in developing countries.

3/ Build new rails, not new roads.

4/ Support local agriculture.

5/ Divorce politics from corporate power.

“When he announced his new cabinet, Morales also said that Bolivian women’s social conscience, patriotism and dedication to defending national interests, as well as the respect he feels for his mother, sister and daughter, were factors in his decision to break with a long history of discrimination against women.

The female members of the cabinet include popular folk singer and activist Zulma Yugar in the Ministry of Culture; lawyer and former ombudswoman Nardi Suxo as the anti-corruption minister; U.S.-trained economist Elba Viviana Caro in the Ministry of Development Planning; Antonia Rodríguez, the head of an association of women artisans, as Minister of Productive Development; Nilda Copa, a leader of the Bartolina Sisa federation of peasant women of Tarija, in the Justice Ministry; and Carmen Trujillo as Minister of Labour and Social Security.”