Against Ecological Sovereignty: Ethics, Biopolitics, and Saving the Natural World

摘要

This is a difficult, even daunting, book. I mean yet no criticism, for its difficulty is partly a function of our paralysis in the face of two related nightmares. The first features a danger more unsettling, if not as urgently immanent: that "everywhere sovereignty declares nature free, it is already in chains" (p. (ⅫⅠ)). The very act of setting aside land to preserve it from exploitation-and what ecologically sensitive person could object to that?-presumes the prior right of humans to dispose over nature, to determine what may be done with it. Our right to make an exception proves the existence of the rule-i.e., of the sovereignty over nature against which Smith declares himself in his title. The second nightmare features a danger less disconcerting, but politically more immanent. Hitherto the powerful have fought recognition of climate change, but they will eventually face inescapable facts. Yet their acknowledgement, so long delayed, may not arrive as good news: for "the very powers implicated in bringing that crisis about" may find in it "the latest and most comprehensive justification for a political state of emergency"-a state that, once declared, will "legitimate yet further technocratic interventions, to further extend the state and corporate management of biological life,... and to stifle ecological politics as such" (pp. (ⅩⅥ)-(ⅩⅦ)).