The Nature of Environment: Dialectics of Social and Environmental Change

Abstract

The best that socialist politics can achieve, it is often argued, is an environmental (instrumental and managerial) rather than ecological politics. At its worst, socialism stoops to so-called 'promethean' projects in which the 'domination' of nature is presumed both possible and desirable. My concern in this essay is to see if there are ways to bridge this antagonism and turn it into a creative rather than destructive tension. Is there or ought there to be a place for a distinctively 'ecological' angle to progressive socialist politics? And, if so, what should it be? In what follows I will concentrate on how values are assigned to 'nature' as the beginning point for consideration of how 'nature' and the environment can be socially used and construed as an aspect of socialist politics.