Beyond Nature: Contingency, Extractive Logics, and Thinking Like a Landscape

Session Submission Type: Virtual Created Panel

Session Description

This panel explores the implications of the breakdown of key conceptual boundaries—between human and nonhuman, necessary and contingent, terrestrial and extraterrestrial—for politics in the era of climate change. Chayne Wild makes the case for a post-foundational ecopopulism that embraces radical democratic pluralism to muster the necessary political response to the climate crisis, pointing to the radical contingencies of climate change as an opportunity rather than an obstacle for building a radical movement. Conor Bean points to surprising resonances between Rosa Luxemburg’s writings on “mass strikes” and William Connolly’s call for a climate general strike, suggesting that Connolly’s emphasis on contingency and pluralism might temper tendencies toward historical determinism in Luxemburg’s writings while opening the way for a radical response to climate change. Katinka Wijsman examines the intermingling of the human and the nonhuman in coastal wetlands, urging a reconceptualization of climate resilience as a creative multispecies practice that focuses not just on technopolitical imperatives or human survival but on an ethics of attention that opens the way to new possibilities for multispecies life on the coasts during climate change. Finally, Emily Ray and Sean Parson turn to outer space, arguing the colonial logic of the liberal theory of property is breaking down the boundary between terrestrial capitalism and extraterrestrial resources. They point to neoliberal trends in U.S. policy that increasingly treat outer space as an endless expanse of resources for private appropriation and extraction, suggesting that outer space is becoming the next colonial frontier of capitalism.

Sub Unit

• Related Groups / Environmental Politics and Theory

Individual Presentations

• Ecopopulism, Post-Foundational Theory, and Radical Democratic Pluralism - Chayne Wild, Virginia Tech

• Strike Without End: Mass Strikes and the Anthropocene - Conor Bean, Johns Hopkins University

• Making Climate Resilient Coasts: From Technopolitics to Multispecies Politics - Katinka Wijsman

• Caelum Nullius: Outer Space and the Colonial Logic of Property Rights - Emily Ray, Sonoma State University; Sean Parson, Northern Arizona University

Chair

• Chelsea Welker University of Northern Colorado

Discussant

• Andy Scerri Virginia Tech