A Political Theory for a Multispecies,Climate-Challenged World: 2050

Abstract

This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory. The ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a retrospective but with a confabulation of futures. Contributors were asked: What will political theory look and sound like in the next century and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How will the consistent concerns of political theorists evolve into the questions critical for people decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms might those take? What follows is one of the many confabulations published in response to these queries.

Political theory as Part of, Not Apart from, the More than World

We ¹ are writing from a high valley, slightly inland from the coast in the southeast of what was once known as Australia; Land ² that we, along with our community of multispecies collaborators, and under the guidance of the traditional Aboriginal custodians, are now seeking to replenish. This Land, which we now recognise in a complex way as a moral, legal, political, and spiritual “person,” also carries part of the story we wish to tell. In the spirit of recognising our embeddedness and the agency/actancy of all those who have been, are, and will be, in and of this place, we wish to theorise here and together.

In this place, the ghosts of the violence—both material and conceptual—inflicted by centuries of colonial capitalism are palpable, as are the attempts to exorcise those ghosts. The nonexhaustive list includes: colonialism as the history of European conquest and expansion through dispossession, racialised slavery, settlement, and mass extraction of resources; capitalism as the global triumph of an economic system committed to endless wealth accumulation and production of systemic nonjustifiable inequalities; a prevailing violent hierarchical anthropocentricism expressed in numerous ways, including in hundreds of billions of animals incarcerated in horrific conditions in food systems, while trillions were hunted down in the seas through mechanised capture; and climate change as a seemingly inevitable outcome of processes that pitted the drive for property and wealth accumulation against the planetary processes essential to sustain biological life.

Today, through traditional practices of care, Indigenous custodians and those seeking to learn what it means to care for Land are seeking to rejuvenate forests and reanimate rivers, razed over and again by catastrophic fires fuelled by the carbon economy and cleared, depleted, and poisoned for “progress” and “development.” We sense the intimations of communities of life returning to soils exhausted through the violence of industrial animal and monocultural agriculture. In place of the decaying infrastructure facilitating the transport of living and nonliving “commodities” that enriched certain humans—but externalised costs onto the morethanhuman, ³ marginalised humans, and humans remote in space and time—new material institutions and structures are being designed to accommodate, in the most expansive way possible, the interests and needs of all earth beings. The plant and animal life that is capable of flourishing here has been radically altered by changes in the climate that undid the worlds where those formed by Holocene ecologies could survive, at a pace beyond which they could adapt. The descendants of animals whose bodies were commodified, and whose labour was exploited remain present, displaced as we four try (together) to work out what justice means for turbulent worlds in transition.

In these encounters, we are interrogating and reimagining the ideas that once founded the discipline of political theory: the scope of who counts as a legitimate subject of justice; what happens to the idea of property and institutions designed to protect it, once sanctified private and acquisitive arrangements have been rejected; what responsibility demands once the idea of the human has been stripped of its claims to superiority and exceptionalism; and what just representation that takes seriously the interests of all earth beings—past, present, and future—entails. We look back from 2050 to the possessive individualism and Enlightenment humanism that dominated political theory as catastrophe intensified and recognise that these foundational commitments not only debilitated the discipline’s ability to contribute to the social and political transformations needed but fueled those very catastrophes.

To be clear, the transformations that have shaped the transformation of political theory since were not the outcome of enlightened awakening, but an eruption of the ground whose stability had been the necessary but disavowed condition for theory to operate as it had. That abstraction was in fact extraction—that the existence of free autonomous humans and their lauded agency was premised on the violent erasure of the relations that constituted and nourished them; that growth and progress entailed violence and death; that responsibility was organised irresponsibility (Beck 1995). An ugly mirror.

What emerged?

The Subject of Justice

By the early twenty-first century, it was becoming clear that politics framed by the Enlightenment tradition was leading all earth beings along a path of misery. What was less clear was where to turn.

Already a century ago, the Lockean view of natural rights dominating Enlightenment humanism had been recast by its critics as “possessive individualism” (see Macpherson 1962). This critique resonated with Indigenous and critical race scholars’ analysis of the co-constitutive relationship between such “possessive logics” and continuing colonial projects invested “in reproducing and reaffirming the nation-state’s ownership, control, and domination” (Moreton-Robinson 2015, xii), as it did with feminist conceptions of relational autonomy (Nedelsky 2011). Building upon ecofeminism (Plumwood 1993), multispecies justice perspectives allowed for a multifaceted critique of possessive individualism, recognising that a narcissistic, colonial, and extractivist anthropocentric worldview was responsible for much violence and destruction across numerous human and morethanhuman worlds. Shifting away from this model of individualism is one of the achievements of the development of multispecies justice perspectives.

The idea of the “natural” had a huge impact on political theory, though nature functioned as an idea, a plot point, and not the material reality in which all lived politics existed. That there was a requirement for both a “natural law” and a “human nature” in liberal individualism illustrated the attempt to lend naturalist and scientific legitimacy to a narrow set of political ideas, justifying everything from the state to individual property. Not only were these ideas distant from the ecological and material realities of human/morethanhuman relationalities, they were also developed in an era of uncommon ecological stability, where this stagnant, truncated, anthropocentric vision could flourish—for some and for a while. It took the lived turbulence of the first half of the twenty-first century to force the realisation that the humanist possessive individualism at the heart of mainstream of political theory was itself an obstacle to understanding and addressing the planetary instability this idea generated. The shift in focus from false ideals of a distinct and abundant “nature” to the very real and material relationships making up the currently turbulent world has been revelatory and productive.

Today, political theorising is about organising ethical lives, within ecologically and materially entangled environments, on a living, active, planetary system. We look back at a time when conceptions of justice were considered applicable only to individual humans in relation with each other—and not to the implications of human actions within and on those relational realities—as a form of wilful ignorance. It was the theoretical basis of the great derangement (Ghosh 2016) that underpinned the great dithering (Robinson 2012) as the globe witnessed the shift from the environmental stability of the Holocene to this tumultuous period. At best most political theorists sat and watched the collapse from the sideline; at worst, it provided the intellectual justificatory infrastructure necessary for the destabilisation and decimation of the ecological functioning of planetary systems.

The ideal of an individualistic conception of justice, often favoured by liberalism, was always unrealistic and unrealised. So much theoretical focus was on developing theories of justice that were analytically clear, consistent with anthropocentric notions of dignity, and yet ignorant of the ecological and relational world in which they were situated. Not only was such broad human dignity never realised, but the focus itself undermined the very environmental bases and capabilities necessary for any functioning life, dignified or not, human or otherwise. Ironically, and tragically, political and capitalistic institutions based on such unencumbered individualism undermined the foundations not only of individual dignity but of ecological functioning for all beings and relations.

The shift of focus in justice theory from dignity as possessive individualism to flourishing relationships as well as to imagining and implementing justice in the ecological flows in which individuals and systems live their lives has literally brought new life into political theorising. With the recognition of the impossibility of “the individual” in actual ecological life has come a growing understanding of justice, and just systems and processes, as the construction and maintenance of sustainable and relational flows of everyday life, for those impacted by human actions.

Now, in 2050, the implications of a conception of the subject that is ecological and relational, rather than simply human and individual, are evident. We know now—and live everyday—a reality where the injustice of climate change is not simply an injustice to fellow humans impacted by heat, floods, food insecurity, and more. The injustice is the impact of human arrangements and behaviors on the very systems that supported entangled lives—river systems now devoid of glacial and snow melt, reef systems cooked and bleached by heating oceans, broad ecosystems impacted by mining to provide energy (fossil fuelled and for early renewables). Human chauvinism and individualism as the basis of justice have been replaced by principles of maintaining entangled coexistence of multiple entities in a relational system. Such a broadened subject of justice has helped frame an ethics beyond individual human harm, attending instead to behaviours that undermine the ecological reality of shared lives. Ethics now matches an ecorelational ontology.

The politics remains a challenge. Rejecting the individualism and anthropocentrism of classical conceptions of justice radically expanded the interests that institutions needed to take into consideration to claim legitimacy. The injustice of the contention that a justice theory ought to provide resolutions to inevitable conflicts by appealing to a priori principles derived from the putative value or status of the claimants lost legitimacy, as had past political orders founded on classed, raced, and gendered hierarchies of human worth. Just resolutions of conflicts between the interests of different beings, or between the integrity or dignity of systems and individuals within them, can only be reached through constant, sophisticated, and capacious deliberative processes (Schlosberg 2014). Now that attentiveness and ethical generosity are no longer pitted against a falsified theory of human interest, and humans are experiencing the types of flourishing nourished through relational lifeways, experiments in multispecies democracy proliferate.

Social movements focused on elements of everyday material sustainability led the way, such as the development of food and energy systems where communities actively engage in the realities of creating the conditions for their lives unhooked from systems of capitalist production and wasteful material flows, and more in tune with ecological functioning for all earth beings. Indigenous resistance movements spread, focused on Land protection and cultural practices of ecological governance. Practices of regenerative farming spread the broad benefits of relating to soil as a shared living system, and energy generation finally moved past the eighteenth-century technologies of burning carbon to those that remove and recycle it. Material systems are now more locally and democratically controlled, to benefit the broad range of subjects of justice key to the functioning of communities.

Property and Capitalism

One of the central tensions haunting political theory in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries related to property. As discussed above, part of the challenge was that from John Locke onward, a theory of property that was bound to a theory of individual rights prevailed and a “possessive individualism” described previously took centre stage. The story was bittersweet: a Lockean conception of property (Locke 1689, 2009) undergirded many of the political and human rights central to political claims from the European “Enlightenment” on, including those circulating around rights to bodily integrity, freedom from arbitrary detention, and freedom from torture. However, this same conception of property—the idea that humans have a right to take possession, in a seemingly unlimited way, over everything external to them—provides a short-hand description of the logic that organised the social, economic, and environmental catastrophes that undermined the relative stability of the Holocene.

Within political theory debates a century ago, the problem of property could not be resolved; ⁴ there seemed to be few openings to challenge the supremacy of property rights and capitalism as an economic system. However, multispecies justice movements and debates opened the discussion around property in new ways. First, they gained prominence at a point of crisis when the prevailing model of property relations and economy participated in producing an environmental catastrophe that posed an existential threat to life on the planet. This coincided with a range of questions being asked about the future of capitalism, including its unfettered tendency toward radical inequality, with resultant impacts on democracies (Piketty 2014), and the legacies of colonialism that produced historical and continuing injustices that circulated around property, including the land and resource theft central to Indigenous dispossession (Moreton-Robinson 2015), and the past and present of racial slavery (Robinson 2021). Whether anyone liked it or not, a conversation about property seemed inevitable.

Debates in multispecies justice provided a renewed space to discuss what should be done about property moving forward. This included recognising the diverse and potentially irreconcilable ways in which “property” might be understood. Human societies have had many alternative ways of organizing social, economic, and political relations that promoted co-flourishing between human and morethanhuman communities. For these societies, including for many Indigenous Peoples, the prevailing conception of property appeared thoroughly “alien.” Irene Watson summarises:

In capitalist thought, ruwe [land] becomes “property,” a commodity, which can be traded or sold. The Nunga relationship to ruwe is more complex. We live as a part of the natural world; we are in the natural world. The natural world is us. We take no more from the environment than is necessary to sustain life; we nurture ruwe as we do ourself. (Watson 2015, 15)

The effect of these lessons is that today there is a wider, more expansive conception of “economy.” Marxist feminists used to describe social reproduction under capitalism as comprising the many forms of labour and production that occur outside of “formal production” but fundamentally required for the economy (Bhattacharya 2017). Green political economy and ecofeminist perspectives had been highlighting how the morethanhuman plays a role in propping up the formal economy (Salleh 2017). Multispecies justice perspectives further emphasised that all production and reproduction was both formal and social, and that “the social” necessarily extended beyond human relations. Of course, as Watson and others emphasise, these ideas have been fundamental to the range of human societies but foreclosed by prevailing European Enlightenment conceptions.

The features of today’s economies are distinct. Against the privatisation and individualisation of “property” there is space for relational—collective—resources and responsibility. Human production makes no sense; all production is multispecies in nature, as it enfolds human labour with the labour and energies of a range of earth beings as a necessary part of the labour process (Pearse and Wadiwel 2021). Finally, the job of the economy remains the distribution of value. However, the endless accumulation of abstracted “surplus” (money, capital) is not the goal; the economy serves to collectively produce and distribute meaningful and valuable goods and relations that promote flourishing for all earth beings as a social and political community.

Responsibility and Agency

A conception of responsibility founded on linear models of causality and individualist, liberal conceptions of agency has popular appeal, as well as a crucial role in underpinning everyday practices such as criminal law. But political theorists have long understood its inadequacies when it comes to explaining structural and systemic violence and injustice. ⁵ The dissolution of the autonomous agent entailed a theoretical crisis for the classical subject of responsibility. Ultimately, it was the complete failure of institutions charged with taking responsibility for preventing the climate crisis that forced a collapse of moral and political theories tethered to ontological individualism and to national or state centrism alike. It is now broadly appreciated that only theories that conceptualise responsibility as multidimensional and multiscalar, and that recognise the role that broadly distributed human actions and discourses play in constituting the institutions that generate harm, are up to providing the intellectual infrastructure capable of sustaining just relations. ⁶

Correlatively, as mounting environmental crises devastated ever more earth beings, and the roots of those harms in longer histories of colonialism, capitalism, and anthropocentrism were unmasked, ideas about who is owed moral and political responsibility were revolutionised. Early attempts framed within the language of welfare or environmental impact purported to institutionalise moral responsibility to other animals, ecosystems, and the earth’s planetary system itself but still rested on narrow utilitarian calculations that, at best, drastically discounted their flourishing and, at worst, entirely instrumentalised them. Four types of developments rendered such approaches increasingly illegitimate: the acknowledgment across disciplines that humans are always already entangled in morethanhuman worlds; the collapse of the ecological conditions required to sustain human flourishing; the erosion of the various bases of the purportedly “natural” exceptionalism of humans; and the emergence of social movements insisting on the moral considerability of all earth beings. As philosophies that map relations between humans and the morethanhuman otherwise to the dominant modes of colonial capitalism gained broad legitimacy, the extensionist imaginations of early moves toward inclusion gave way to a more thoroughgoing understanding that likeness to humans, cast as autonomous rational agents, did not constitute a just criterion for according moral considerability; hence they were also owed moral responsibility. That these shifts also underpinned the institutionalisation of legal and political representation of the morethanhuman was decisive for reconceptualising responsibility.

Voice and Representation

Slowly at first, then in a tumbling onrush, countries turned to law and policy-making as sites to reinscribe the relations between human and morethanhuman. There was scepticism at first—too utopian perhaps to hope for a turn from extractivism to a relational engagement with the planetary (Chakrabarty 2021). First there were the “rights for nature” moves—encapsulated in the Ecuadorian Constitution and Bolivia’s Rights of Mother Nature Bill. Following quickly came the agreements between the Aotearoa (New Zealand) government and iwi ⁷ giving natural landscapes legal identity, a personhood status. The Whanganui River and its iwi most caught people’s attention (New Zealand Government 2017a), but the Urewera and Ngati Tuhoe were the first (New Zealand Government 2014), the majestic Taranaki Maunga followed (New Zealand Government 2017b).

This legal identity status for discrete environments captured activists’ and lawmakers’ attention around the world. In India rivulets, glaciers, the air!, won “personhood” status. Lake Erie too for a while until the corporate persons interfered (Pallotta 2020). But this approach rippled across the globe through law, policy, and international agreements. More mountains, forested regions, lakes, and rivers followed. The purposes were multiple. In Aotearoa the status blended philosophy, knowledge, and law from different traditions, healing social rifts and environmental wrongs. In other states, responding to decades of environmental justice advocacy and activism, the moves were perhaps more existentially motivated, designed to tame the rapacious greed of extractivist corporations and moderate the flow of pollution. From novel repurposing of corporate law, this movement morphed as the century unfolded.

The power of this movement was motivated and exemplified by two revolutionary sentences embedded within the text of the Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017 (New Zealand Government 2017) and replicated across the globe:

Clause 12 Te Awa Tupua recognition

Te Awa Tupua is an indivisible and living whole, comprising the Whanganui River from the mountains to the sea, incorporating all its physical and metaphysical elements. (italics added)

Clause 14 Te Awa Tupua declared to be legal person

(1) Te Awa Tupua is a legal person and has all the rights, powers, duties, and liabilities of a legal person. (italics added)

That Te Awa Tupua was judged to be “indivisible and living whole” drove a wedge into the Anglo-European practices of separation and atomisation of human from natural and the natural from its integrated nested contextual webs of physical and spiritual connections and meaning making. Secular legislation and legal standing recognised the world through Mātauranga Māori framings where physical and metaphysical, human and morethanhuman are one (Aho 2014; Ruru 2018). This legislation opened the crack through which shone a light for other legislators to follow.

More radically, Clause 14 has helped multiple polities dilute the influence of unbridled greed that another personhood legislation—for corporations—unleashed upon the globe. Quickly the potential of “rights, powers, duties, and liabilities of a legal person” became clear. One powerful manifestation of such rights, powers, duties, and liabilities is to have an active voice in the politics of a nation and to guide politics for the benefit of all within the polity (see Winter 2021). How this right is imagined and implemented now varies across the globe, but the result is the same: the morethanhuman voice is heard and has claims as valid and imperative as those of the human and the corporation, even as the latter two are completely dependent on the first.

Who could have imagined fifty years ago that a small island nation at the bottom of the world would unleash an environmental and multispecies revolution? Who imagined a philosophy maligned as “folk wisdom” would ignite a philosophic revolution and draw the ecological, the natural, all the multispecies entanglements that cast their nets across the planet, into the spheres of justice? Who foresaw the radical potential of these legal persons as political influencers (although it might well have been predicted from the rapacious political influence of corporate legal identities)? But looking back it was obvious: of course all creation must be equally represented in the halls of power, since all creation is affected by politics.

Such thinking has inspired democratic thought and practice, especially in the face of the inaction of so many governments to address climate-induced instability. Ideas for expanding democratic participation beyond individual humans—to other beings and processes impacted by environmentally damaging practices—had long been central to theories of environmental and ecological democracy in the late twentieth (Plumwood 1995; Lafferty and Meadowcroft 1998) and early twenty-first centuries (Eckersley 2020; Pickering et al. 2020). It was only with the recognition and institutionalisations of Indigenous notions of relationality, and the democratic demands of climate movements in the wake of disastrous flooding, heatwaves, and fires in the 2020s and 2030s, that such theories flourished again—and were reinstitutionalised. Demands for citizen climate assemblies and other democratic innovations, and the building of new democratic institutions from the spontaneous community-based responses to climate instabilities, meant such experiments grew and replaced inadequate, inefficient, and unjust institutions. Those early sprouts of legal personhood spurred a growth of relational modes of politics, and inclusive ecological democracy flourished as a set of pragmatic responses to the instability and turbulence of climate-challenged societies.

Multispecies Theorising

This forest is thriving again. Forests, waters, soils, substrate, lifeforms, earth, and we authors now hear voices speaking the old language: gentle people are back. The birds call, darting back and forth; they pluck berries and spread seed. Rivers are roaring, babbling, gliding calmly in succession down a course no longer constricted by dams, invaded by pumps stealing its life away to lands on which it does not belong, to which it does not relate. True, it is scarred from logging, track carving, and dam building, but these wounds are healing now that the people have relearned the art of listening. They take forests’ claims seriously, are alert to their needs. They know that without forest(s) there is no life. Understanding that all earth beings are entangled and interdependent, forests get a say now in what happens here. Could it have been anticipated at the start of this century, over 50 years ago now, that this forest’s needs and those of many others—grasslands, lakes, rivers, seas—could be heard? When the people joined with the tumbling, gliding, majestic life force of the Whanganui to lead government toward acknowledging and recognising ecological agency, they unleashed a mighty movement, sending ripples of change around the world. Blending ancient knowledge and philosophies—knowledge of the river and forest, beast, fish and fowl, waters, seas and spirits—with more youthful legal frameworks bound an ancient place-based knowledge and philosophy with international, replicable legal codes. How quaint it seems now that humans imagined other earth beings had no political voice, and how close that wilful ignorance brought all to annihilation. Today it’s natural to say: “of course matter has political agency,” as if it was always obvious (which “of course” it always was if only humans had simply observed). It took the harms of changing climate regimes exposing the contingency of corporate and social life, the physical limits of earth, and the expansive frontiers of damage to reengage even the most obdurate in politics. Now humans understand that their flourishing depends in all earth beings’ flourishing: earthly beings are again a partner in life, not (just) a resource and sink for pollution (Liboiron 2021).

Sun’s light touches softly on earth, mists kiss the streams, birds sing up a chorus, and whales navigate safely through the cooling seas. Earth breathes again; forests share their oxygen once more. The planet rests in comfort.