About

The conventional understanding of environmental crisis espoused by national governments and by organisations like the IPCC, UNEP and the CBD is of a physical threat to an established, otherwise-functional social-ecological system. This view leads to solutions focused on monitoring and intervening in local and global ecological processes, solutions that are often presented as politically neutral and universally beneficial for both humans and nonhumans. My project attempts a critical historical and conceptual analysis of ecological science to explore how ecology has shaped orthodox conceptions of crisis and the kinds of solutions that seem possible, adequate or feasible. At the same time, I investigate ecology’s unacknowledged theoretical and normative assumptions and propose alternative ways of thinking about environmental crisis and planetary stewardship.