Global, Urban, and Environmental Studies (GLUE)

Challenging Privatized, Individualized and Commodified Environmental Care in Mainstream Western Environmentalism – Emma Julia Vos

Honorable Mention, 2019-2020

Abstract

An increasingly presiding proposed solution to the climate crisis in Western Environmentalism considers environmental degradation the product of individual shortcomings, best rectified through actions that are typically individual, and routinely consumption dependent. Promoted by neoliberal logic such individualization of responsibility universalizes accountability, abstracts environmental care, and drives human-nature dualities. Entrusting neoliberal logic in monopolizing the definition of environmental care has encouraged the formation of voluntary offsetting and ‘low environmental impact’ ‘green’ brands. Here, capitalism paradoxically reconfigures itself to falsely propose solutions that sustain the very systems central to the climate crisis. In such propositions skewed distributions of power remain untouched or are exacerbated and surface the problematic socio-economic characteristics of neoliberal capitalism. These acts of stabilizing existing order through market compatible ‘sustainability’ legitimizes oppressive paradigms, structures and epistemologies through ‘carbon colonialism’ and competition favoring economic order. This thesis examines why it is necessary to liberate our environmental imaginaries from neoliberal logic. I argue that we must radically rethink commodified environmental care, and move towards participatory democracies inspired by those proposed in indigenous led alternatives.