log: green utopias, chp6

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@@ -4,6 +4,66 @@ title: Dissertation log
 author: Joe Carstairs
 ---
 
+## 2026-07-06
+
+### @{green-utopias}
+
+In chapter 6, Garforth studies McKibben's 2003 _The End of Nature_, in which he
+argues that in the era of global pollution, everywhere has come under human
+power, and there is therefore no nature left. She points out that, considered
+as an ontological thesis, it would be inconsistent both with constructionist
+and realist views of the ontology of nature. But, whereas the first wave of
+post-war environmentalism used discourses of limits and crisis to project
+losses into the future, and the second wave emphasised protecting existing
+nature and sustainable development (studied in chapter 2), McKibben's discourse
+uniquely emphasises the present experience of loss. She thinks McKibben is
+'logically problematic' but wants to explore whether the end-of-nature discourse
+which it promoted has generated productive new green utopias.
+
+McKibben is apparently anti-utopian, wants us to steel ourselves to fight for a
+second-best world, distasteful, artificial, full of mourning for what we've
+lost, but not quite as bad as it might have been. Garforth reckons that there
+may be glimmers of utopianism in dystopian mourning, but I'm not convinced:
+sounds like thin gruel to me.
+
+Garforth then discusses 'new materialists', who claim to advocate for a
+different kind of materialism from both empiricism and Marxism, according to
+which reality is composed of complex entities, and there is no clean divide
+between the human, natural, and technological. This has led Bruno Latour and
+Jane Bennet to reject the concept of nature in ecological politics.
+
+Latour argues that, while ecocentric philosophy claims to speak for nature
+within the modern constitution, nature is not really a thing recognised by the
+modern constitution, and the attempt to speak for it only 're-hashes' the binary
+politics of the modern constitution, when what is really needed is a new kind of
+political constitution which acknowledges the complex hybrid realities which
+exist within modernity. Bennet argues that because the environment only becomes
+politically relevant when it stops functioning as an invisible background to
+human life, the idea that nature has its own internal logic and will tend to the
+good if only left alone won't hold water (I didn't get the reasoning here).
+
+The new materialists do suggest a boundless optimism for post-nature politics.
+But, like McKibben, they reject utopianism and emphasise attending to the real
+world as it appears before our faces. Garforth leaves an open question hanging:
+can they still do what utopias do, namely, unsettle the status quo, stop people
+from taking it for granted?
+
+Garforth says that post-natural views have not yet produced formal eco-topias.
+She's hunting for glimmers of utopianism: hope for a better, radical,
+alternative, future.
+
+She raises critical condemnation of contemporary pro-nature utopias, like nature
+documentaries, the Eden Project, or the film _Avatar_. They function to console
+people for a nature which is already lost, say the critics, and obstruct the
+construction of a new, post-nature politics. I fear this criticism cuts deep
+into my own emotional reaction to @{wilding}, but am not convinced to be
+entirely cynical.
+
+This criticism also casts doubt for me on whether appealing to earlier,
+20th-century green utopias would be productive for my dissertation. I need a
+utopia which does not reproduce a clean distinction between the natural and the
+human.
+
 ## 2026-07-03
 
 ### @{green-utopias}