CAPITALIST MODERNITY AND ENVIRONMENTAL INJUSTICE: FROM CRITIQUE TO ETHICAL PRAXIS (Invited Presentation)

The onto-epistemic framework of capitalist modernity alongside the concrete practices of a totalizing global capitalist system forge together to create a slew of environmental injustices that disproportionately affect those at or near the bottom of white supremacist, patriarchal, and classist hierarchies. To achieve environmental justice, we must challenge and create replacements for the reified beliefs and assumptions of capitalist modernity that perpetuate social and environmental degradation. Such a counter-hegemonic movement must begin with a relational process ontology that necessitates the fundamental value of all human and more-than-human entities as constitutive forces in the creative process of reality. The above is presented as an ethical and moral problem by examining critical theory on the social consequences of capitalist relations and the hegemonic ideologies that (re)produce these relations. Ethico-aesthetics will then be presented as one way by which humans might pursue worlds otherwise. I will propose and support five theses: (1) environmental justice and ethical life is curtailed by a global capitalist system and capitalist modernity, the underlying, taken-for-granted design logic of our everyday lives; (2) this system and design logic conceals and devalues the relationality that constitutes one’s self, others, and the cosmos; (3) relational concealment and devaluation foreclose on difference and our ability to care critically and consciously for all entities engaged in the creative process of reality and to which all is indebted; (4) ethical thought and practice rooted in the moral logic of relational process is central to environmental justice’s realization; and (5) reflective thought grounded in relational process can help to reimagine how we, as co-inquirers, can reach the limit of perfection regarding our embodiment of justice. Here, justice is seen as a virtue for which mastery is sought through cycles of reflection in practice. It is not enough to appeal to, or even fight against, systems and structures that oppress; rather, in a very fundamental way, human hearts and minds must be transformed through ethical thought and practice if the planet and its peoples are to be competently cared for and their well-being established.