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Ariel Salleh | |
|---|---|
 Salleh in 2019 | |
| Nationality | Australian |
| Occupation | Sociologist |
Ariel Salleh is an Australian sociologist who writes on humanity-nature relations, political ecology, social change movements, and ecofeminism.
Salleh is a Founding Member of the Global University for Sustainability, Hong Kong; Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Humanities, Nelson Mandela University, South Africa; formerly Honorary Associate Professor in Political Economy, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Sydney, Australia; and Senior Fellow in Post-Growth Societies, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany. She taught in Social Ecology at the University of Western Sydney for a number of years; and has lectured widely including at New York University; ICS Manila; York University, Toronto; Lund University; the University of Ljubljana, and Peking University.
Salleh's theoretical position is developed in Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx, and the postmodern (2017/1997), Eco-Sufficiency & Global Justice: Women write Political Ecology (2009), and some 200 chapters and articles in the Journal of World-Systems Research (US), Globalizations (UK), Environmental Ethics (US), Arena (AU), New Left Review (UK), Organization & Environment (US), Environmental Politics (UK), and The Commoner (UK); with many anthology reprints and translations.
Her interdisciplinary analysis is seminal to political ecology as an emerging study of humanity-nature relations. The approach, an embodied materialism, emphasises the political economy of reproductive or regenerative labour in the world system. By relocating value in local everyday caregiving skills and indigenous knowledges, Salleh reconsiders social justice and sustainability questions like climate change and the neoliberal green economy and her current writing focuses on integrating the discourses of political ecology.
Salleh exemplifies the Marxist argument that hands-on praxis is essential to grounded political theory. Her work draws on practical experience in anti-nuclear politics, water catchments, biodiversity protection, and support for Asia-Pacific women's eco-sufficient community alternatives. She has been a governor of the International Sociological Association's Research Committee for Environment and Society and member of the Australian Federal Government's Gene Technology Ethics Committee. She serves on several editorial boards and is a founding editor of the US journal Capitalism Nature Socialism .
Salleh works at en/gendering dialogue between advocates of ecofeminist and eco-socialist politics. Her writing has addressed this terrain since the early 1980s and she was a signatory to the original Eco-Socialist Manifesto.
In contrast to idealist ecofeminisms coming from philosophy and cultural studies, Salleh's materialist analysis is closer to that of fellow sociologists Maria Mies in Germany and Mary Mellor in the United Kingdom. [1] Reproductive labor and economic use value are central themes here. Salleh's book Ecofeminism as Politics outlines the scope of an embodied materialist feminism, offering a transdisciplinary analysis of the deeply sex-gendered roots of capitalist patriarchal culture. It offers one of the earliest eco-socialist statements, though often not recognised as such because of its feminist framework. [2]
In theorising the contemporary ecological crisis, Salleh argues that all 'humans-are-nature-in-embodied form'. [3] However, from pre-capitalist patriarchal times and onwards through the European scientific revolution into modernity, the roles of men and women have been constructed differently with respect to the metabolism of human societies within nature. In this imaginary, men have been said to represent Humanity and civilisation, as women and later indigenous peoples are 'othered' as 'closer to nature'. Salleh traces the multiple everyday impacts of this 'originary contradiction'. They include the instrumental resourcing of labour - extractions from women's bodies in the first instance, colonised ethnicities next - 'as nature', while the Eurocentric 'Humanity over nature' ideology is used to justify that systemic hierarchy of exploitation. [4]
Globalised societies are riven by identity politics as each stratum in the capitalist patriarchal imaginary argues its singular interest through movement activism. Salleh's materialist analysis spells out how they are politically interlinked. Their structural exploitation on the hierarchy of appropriation is at once unique and part of a multi-faceted system of energy extraction and hence, debt. Salleh's book Eco-Sufficiency & Global Justice introduces this analysis and in later writing it develops as a system of six debts, providing a common denominator for workers, decolonial, women, youth, species, and planetary well-being. Each debt represents a thermodynamic drawdown, a violently unequal ecological exchange at the root of modern societies.
The integration of decolonial, women's, and worker struggles for ecology with justice pivots on Salleh's analysis of 'meta-industrial labour'. [5] Following Marx's inspiration, she reasons dialectically to extend his understanding of industrial labour to the hands-on lay knowledges of women, domestic providers, small farmers, and hunter-gatherers. Joining ecology back together with economics, she highlights the way in which meta-industrial labour meets social and embodied needs while simultaneously sustaining natural processes. This way of provisioning directly counters the entropic degradation or metabolic rift caused by capitalist extractivism and industrialisation. [6]
The meta-industrial labour - sex-gendered, racialised - captured by global capitalism, subsidises it by re-generating life processes in nature and in human bodies 'as nature'. Salleh identifies this unacknowledged 'debt' as a 'metabolic value', strictly speaking ecological rather than economic, and analytically distinct from use value and exchange value. Pointing to patriarchal bias in both orthodox Marxism and environmental politics, Salleh argues that the Left's narrow productivist focus on use and exchange value, and failure to acknowledge the metabolic value of natural living processes is an obstacle to formulation of a coherent eco-socialism, and to the unity of grassroots movements.
While mainstream neoliberal policy continues to marginalise and commodify meta-industrial labour, Salleh urges political activists to embrace the embodied knowledge skills of meta-industrials and learn from their grounded empirical epistemology and vernacular science. [7] She maintains that the worldwide unity of meta-industrial labour - the forces of re-production - through political actions like the World Social Forums and Global Tapestry of Alternatives, is essential to build a pluriversal and life-affirming Earth Democracy. [8]
Political ecology is the study of the relationships between political, economic and social factors with environmental issues and changes. Political ecology differs from apolitical ecological studies by politicizing environmental issues and phenomena.
Radical environmentalism is a grass-roots branch of the larger environmental movement that emerged from an ecocentrism-based frustration with the co-option of mainstream environmentalism.
Green anarchism, also known as ecological anarchism or eco-anarchism, is an anarchist school of thought that focuses on ecology and environmental issues. It is an anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian form of radical environmentalism, which emphasises social organization, freedom and self-fulfillment.
Ecological economics, bioeconomics, ecolonomy, eco-economics, or ecol-econ is both a transdisciplinary and an interdisciplinary field of academic research addressing the interdependence and coevolution of human economies and natural ecosystems, both intertemporally and spatially. By treating the economy as a subsystem of Earth's larger ecosystem, and by emphasizing the preservation of natural capital, the field of ecological economics is differentiated from environmental economics, which is the mainstream economic analysis of the environment. One survey of German economists found that ecological and environmental economics are different schools of economic thought, with ecological economists emphasizing strong sustainability and rejecting the proposition that physical (human-made) capital can substitute for natural capital.
Ecological modernization is a school of thought that argues that both the state and the market can work together to protect the environment. It has gained increasing attention among scholars and policymakers in the last several decades internationally. It is an analytical approach as well as a policy strategy and environmental discourse.
Environmental sociology is the study of interactions between societies and their natural environment. The field emphasizes the social factors that influence environmental resource management and cause environmental issues, the processes by which these environmental problems are socially constructed and define as social issues, and societal responses to these problems.
Metabolic rift is a theory of ecological crisis tendencies under the capitalist mode of production that sociologist John Bellamy Foster ascribes to Karl Marx. Quoting Marx, Foster defines this as the "irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism". Foster argues that Marx theorized a rupture in the metabolic interaction between humanity and the rest of nature emanating from capitalist agricultural production and the growing division between town and country.
Ecological debt refers to the accumulated debt seen by some campaigners as owed by the Global North to Global South countries, due to the net sum of historical environmental injustice, especially through resource exploitation, habitat degradation, and pollution by waste discharge. The concept was coined by Global Southerner non-governmental organizations in the 1990s and its definition has varied over the years, in several attempts of greater specification.
John Bellamy Foster is an American professor of sociology at the University of Oregon and editor of the Monthly Review. He writes about political economy of capitalism and economic crisis, ecology and ecological crisis, and Marxist theory. He has given numerous interviews, talks, and invited lectures, as well as written invited commentary, articles, and books on the subject.
Ecospirituality connects the science of ecology with spirituality. It brings together religion and environmental activism. Ecospirituality has been defined as "a manifestation of the spiritual connection between human beings and the environment." The new millennium and the modern ecological crisis has created a need for environmentally based religion and spirituality. Ecospirituality is understood by some practitioners and scholars as one result of people wanting to free themselves from a consumeristic and materialistic society. Ecospirituality has been critiqued for being an umbrella term for concepts such as deep ecology, ecofeminism, and nature religion.
Feminist political ecology is a feminist perspective on political ecology, drawing on theories from Marxism, post-structuralism, feminist geography, ecofeminism and cultural ecology. Feminist political ecology examines the place of intersectional social relations in the political ecological landscape, exploring them as a factor in ecological and political relations. Specific areas in which feminist political ecology is focused are development, landscape, resource use, agrarian reconstruction and rural-urban transformation. Feminist political ecologists suggest gender is a crucial variable – in relation to class, race and other relevant dimensions of political ecological life – in constituting access to, control over, and knowledge of natural resources.
Greta Gaard is an ecofeminist writer, scholar, activist, and documentary filmmaker. Gaard's academic work in the realms of ecocriticism and ecocomposition is widely cited by scholars in the disciplines of composition and literary criticism. Her theoretical work extending ecofeminist thought into queer theory, queer ecology, vegetarianism, and animal liberation has been influential within women's studies. A cofounder of the Minnesota Green Party, Gaard documented the transition of the U.S. Green movement into the Green Party of the United States in her book, Ecological Politics. She is currently a professor of English at University of Wisconsin-River Falls and a community faculty member in Women's Studies at Metropolitan State University, Twin Cities.
Deep ecology is an environmental philosophy that promotes the inherent worth of all living beings regardless of their instrumental utility to human needs, and the restructuring of modern human societies in accordance with such ideas.
Eco-socialism is an ideology merging aspects of socialism with that of green politics, ecology and alter-globalization or anti-globalization. Eco-socialists generally believe that the expansion of the capitalist system is the cause of social exclusion, poverty, war and environmental degradation through globalization and imperialism, under the supervision of repressive states and transnational structures.
Ecofeminism is a branch of feminism and political ecology. Ecofeminist thinkers draw on the concept of gender to analyse the relationships between humans and the natural world. The term was coined by the French writer Françoise d'Eaubonne in her book Le Féminisme ou la Mort (1974). Ecofeminist theory asserts a feminist perspective of Green politics that calls for an egalitarian, collaborative society in which there is no one dominant group. Today, there are several branches of ecofeminism, with varying approaches and analyses, including liberal ecofeminism, spiritual/cultural ecofeminism, and social/socialist ecofeminism. Interpretations of ecofeminism and how it might be applied to social thought include ecofeminist art, social justice and political philosophy, religion, contemporary feminism, and poetry.
Ecofeminist art emerged in the 1970s in response to ecofeminist philosophy, that was particularly articulated by writers such as Carolyn Merchant, Val Plumwood, Donna Haraway, Starhawk, Greta Gaard, Karen J. Warren, and Rebecca Solnit. Those writers emphasized the significance of relationships of cultural dominance and ethics expressed as sexism (Haraway), spirituality (Starhawk), speciesism, capitalist values that privilege objectification and the importance of vegetarianism in these contexts (Gaard). The main issues Ecofeminism aims to address revolve around the effects of a "Eurocentric capitalist patriarchal culture built on the domination of nature, and the domination of woman 'as nature'. The writer Luke Martell in the Ecology and Society journal writes that 'women' and 'nature' are both victims of patriarchal abuse and "ideological products of the Enlightenment culture of control." Ecofeminism argues that we must become a part of nature, living with and among it. We must recognize that nature is alive and breathing and work against the passivity surrounding it that is synonymous with the passive roles enforced upon women by patriarchal culture, politics, and capitalism.
'Net positive', from Positive Development (PD) theory, is a paradigm in sustainable development and design. PD theory was first detailed in Positive Development (2008). A net positive system/structure would ‘give back to nature and society more than it takes’ over its life cycle. In contrast, sustainable development—in the real-world context of population growth, biodiversity loss, cumulative pollution, wealth disparities and social inequities—closes off future options. To reverse direction, development must, among other sustainability criteria, increase nature beyond pre-human conditions.
Clive L. Spash is an ecological economist. He currently holds the Chair of Public Policy and Governance at Vienna University of Economics and Business, appointed in 2010. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the academic journal Environmental Values.
Catriona Sandilands is a Canadian writer and scholar in the environmental humanities. She is most well known for her conception of queer ecology. She is currently a Professor in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University. She was a Canada Research Chair in Sustainability and Culture between 2004 and 2014. She was a Fellow of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation in 2016. Sandilands served as president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment in 2015. She is also a past President of the Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada (ALECC) and the American Society for Literature and the Environment (ASLE).
Ecofeminism generally is based on the understanding that gender as a concept is the basis of the human-environment relationships. Studies suggest that there's a difference between men and women when it comes to how they treat nature, for instance, women are known to be more involved with environmentally friendly behaviors. Socially there's an important claim in the ecofeminism theoretical framework that the patriarchy is linked to discrimination against women and the degradation of the environment. In Canada the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Toxics in 2020 shows that ineffective environmental management and mismanagement of hazardous waste is affecting different age groups, genders, and socioeconomic status in different ways, while three years before that, Canadian Human Rights Commission in 2017 submitted another report, warning the government about how the exposure to environmental hazards is a different experience for minorities in Canada. There have been ecofeminist movements for decades all over Canada such as Mother's Milk Project, protests against Uranium mining in Nova Scotia, and the Clayoquot Sound Peace Camp. Ecofeminism has also appeared as a concept in the media, such as books, publications, movies, and documentaries such as the MaddAddam trilogy by Margaret Atwood and Fury for the Sound: the women at Clayoquot by Shelley Wine. Ecofeminism in the Canadian context has been subject to criticism, especially by the Indigenous communities as they call it cultural appropriation, non-inclusive, and inherent in colonial worldviews and structures.
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