extended deadline Call for papers special issue on the asymmetry of the human relationship to planet earth
Nature Strikes Back!
Thinking the asymmetry of the Human Relationship to Planet Earth
Call for Papers for a Special Issue of Journal of Agricultural and
Environmental Ethics
Guest Editors:
Vincent Blok (Wageningen University)
Guido Ruivenkamp (Wageningen University)
Pieter Lemmens (Radboud University)
Jochem Zwier (Radboud University)
Context and Aims
Agriculture is one of the major forces behind many environmental threats,
including biodiversity loss and degradation of land and freshwater, while it
is to a large extent responsible for global greenhouse gas emissions. Human
society is quickly approaching a planetary threshold associated with the
paradoxes of the globalised industrial food system; plenty of food is grown
while still 70% of those who grow the food remain undernourished and another
part of the population is obese. At the same time, a third of the total food
production ends up in the garbage, enough to feed 600 million hungry people.
If we extrapolate these paradoxes of the globalised industrial food system to
the future, humanity will need three Earths by 2050. These expectations,
together with the experience of floods, storms and droughts (i.e., global
warming), make us increasingly aware of the significance of the earth system
on which humans entirely depend. This calls for human stewardship of nature in
order to ensure the sustainability of earth as our life support system.
Over the years, many versions of such stewardship emerged in agricultural and
environmental ethics, ranging from the acknowledgement that both the earths
ecosystems and human agents are stakeholders of planet earth (Waddock,
2002), to fundamental reflections on a non-anthropocentric concept of human
agency (cf. Plumwood, 2002). Since the acknowledgement of the agency of
things, it is no longer even necessary that stakes of nature are represented
and served by human agency - i.e., by Non-Governmental Oranisations (NGOs),
Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) or environmental organizations; natural
eco-systems and their inhabitants can represent themselves in a parliament of
things (Latour, 1993).
At the same time, earth sciences make increasingly clear that the
earth systems themselves are inherently instable and characterized by
transformation, change and volatility. Environmental scientists like Nigel
Clark for instance argue: Whatever we do, ice cores and other proxies of
past climate profess to us, our planet is capable of taking us by surprise.
With or without the destabilizing surcharge of human activities, the
conditions most of us take for granted could be taken away, quite suddenly,
and with very little warning (Clark, 2011: xi). Deep geological time points
at a fundamental asymmetry of the human relationship to planet earth. Also
contemporary philosophers like Question Meillassoux acknowledge the earth as
being and going beyond human agency (Meillassoux, 2008; Morton, 2013; Thacker,
2011). Or as Ray Brassier argues: We are surrounded by processes going on
quite independently of any relationship we may happen to have with them
(Brassier, 2007: 59). In fact, planet earth can be seen as the unstable
condition for the emergence of human agency (Blok, 2016). For some, this even
implies that that planet earth is the condition for the emergence of the
environmental crisis we face today (Blok, 2015).
This asymmetry of the human relationship to planet earth
challenges current conceptualizations of human stewardship in general, and in
agricultural and environmental ethics in particular. How to think human
stewardship of nature in order to ensure the sustainability of earth as our
life support system, if we have to acknowledge that the earth has agency
herself and that we are entirely dependent on her agency? At the same time,
the asymmetry of the human relationship to planet earth may also provide a
fundamentally different starting point for our conceptualization of human
agency beyond stewardship, care etc. Contemporary philosophers like Jean-Luc
Nancy for instance acknowledge the fundamental role of asymmetry which he
calls a void or nothing as possibility for the creation of the world
(Nancy, 2007). The confrontation with asymmetry urges us to reconsider and
reinvent the human relationship to nature, to give up the idea of one ideal
world and to acknowledge a multiplicity of different worlds. Furthermore, it
questions the dominancy of reciprocity-based economic exchanges in the current
conceptualizations of the human relationship to nature, and may inspire a
non-reciprocal concept of nature (cf. Bataille, 1991), exchange (cf. Derrida,
1992; 1995), ethics (cf. Levinas, 1969) and politics (Hardt & Negri, 2004).
This special issue of Journal of Agricultural and Environmental
Ethics aims to explore the question how agricultural and environmental ethics
should respond to the asymmetry of the human relationship to planet earth. We
look for both fundamental reflections on the nature of human agency and its
ethos in relation to planet earth, and for contributions that discuss these
issues in the context of agricultural and environmental ethics. Possible
questions to be addressed may include:
- What are the fundamental presuppositions of a symmetric
conceptualization of the human relationship to planet earth, and what are the
consequences for agricultural and environmental ethics?
- Does the experience of an asymmetric human relationship to planet
earth enable us to criticize the dominancy of reciprocity-based capitalist
practices, for instance the double internality as double movement of how
capitalism works through nature and how nature works through capitalism
(Moore, 2015)?
- To what extent do concepts like multiplicity of worlds (Nancy),
moral economies of commons (Federici) and differential cosmo-poiesis of
localities (Sloterdijk) help to conceptualize an asymmetric human
relationship to planet earth, for instance as being-in-common with the
different other?
- How can an asymmetric earth be conceptualized in the context of
agricultural and environmental ethics, and what is the role of nature as
agent?
- How can, given the asymmetric human relationship to planet earth,
ethics be conceptualized in agricultural and environmental practices?
- Is asymmetric stewardship possible in practice, or dependent on a
conceptualization of planet earth as stakeholder?
Contributions are invited to reflect on these and other issues from various
perspectives (e.g. empirical research, critical-theoretical approach,
ontology, epistemology, ethics, applied ethics) and in particular to ponder
the question of what the asymmetry of the human relation to planet earth means
for agricultural and environmental ethics.
Submission Process and Deadlines
Papers will be reviewed following the JAGE double-blind review process.
Papers should be submitted by the December 1, 2018 deadline
(https://www.editorialmanager.com/jage/default.aspx) with clear reference to
the special issue Nature Strikes Back! Thinking the asymmetry of the Human
Relationship to Planet Earth. Papers should be prepared using the JAGE
Guidelines. As soon as the papers are accepted for publication, they will be
published and accessible online. The publication of the complete special
volume is scheduled for June 2019. The editors welcome informal enquiries
related to proposed topics. For this, please contact Vincent Blok
(vincent.blok@wur.nl).
Contact Email:
Corresponding Gues Editor: Vincent Blok, Wageningen University, The
Netherlands (vincent.blok@wur.nl)
References:
Blok, V. 2015 The human glanze, the experience of environmental distress and
the Affordance of nature: Toward a phenomenology of the ecological crisis,
Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 28(5): 925-938 (DOI
10.1007/s10806-015-9565-8).
Blok, V. (2016), Thinking the Earth after Heidegger: Critical Reflections on
Meillassouxs and Heideggers Concept of the Earth. Environmental Ethics
38(4): 441-462.Clark, N. 2011. Inhuman Nature. Sociable Life on a Dynamic
Planet. Los Angeles: Sage.
Blok, V. (2017), Earthing Technology: Towards an Eco-centric Concept of
Biomimetic Technologies in the Anthropocene, Techne: Research in Philosophy
and Technology. 21(2-3): 127-149 (DOI: 10.5840/techne201752363).
Derrida, J. 1991. The Gift of Death. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press)
Derrida, J. 1992. Given Time: i. Counterfeit Money. (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press)
Federici, S. 2004. Caliban and the witch. New York, Autonomedia.
Hardt, M., Negri, A. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire.
London: Penquin
Latour, B. 1993. We have never been modern. Cambridge: Harvard UP.
Lemmens, P., Blok, V., Zwier, J. (2017). Toward a Terrestrial Turn in
Philosophy of Technology: Guest Editors Introduction. Techne: Research in
Philosophy and Technology 21(2-3): 114126
Levinas, E. 1969. Totality and Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority. Pittsburgh:
Duquesne UP
Meillassoux, Q. 2013. After Finitude. An Essay on the Necessity of
Contingency. London/New Delhi/New York/Sydney: Bloomsbury
Morton, T. 2013. Hyperobjects. Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the
World. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press
Moore, J. 2015. Capitalism in the web of life. London: Verso
Nancy, J.L. 2007. The Creation of the World, or Globalization. New York: Suny
Press
Plumwood, V. 2002. Environmental Culture: The ecological crisis of reason. New
York: Routledge
Thacker, E., 2011. In The Dust Of This Planet. Horror of Philosophy vol. 1,
Washington: Zero Books
Waddock, S. 2002. We are all stakeholders of gaia: A normative perspective on
stakeholder thinking, Organization & Environment 24(2): 192-212.
Zwier, J., Blok, V., Lemmens, P., Geerts, R.J. (2015) The Ideal of a
Zero-Waste Humanity: Philosophical Reflections on the demand for a Bio-Based
Economy. Journal of Agricultural & Environmental Ethics, 28(2): 353-374 (DOI:
10.1007/s10806-015-9538-y).
Zwier, J., Blok, V. (2017) Saving Earth Encountering Heideggers Philosophy
of Technology in the Anthropocene. Techne: Research in Philosophy and
Technology , 21(2-3): 222-242
Dr. Vincent Blok MBA
Associate Professor in Sustainable Entrepreneurship, Business and Innovation
Ethics, Management Studies Group
Associate Professor in Philosophy of Management, Technology and Innovation,
Philosophy Group
Wageningen University
Management Studies and Philosophy Group
Hollandseweg 1, 6706 KN, Wageningen (Building 201)
De Leeuwenborch, Room 5060
P.O. Box 8130, 6700 EW, Wageningen
T: +31 (0) 317 483623
F: +31 (0) 317 485454
E-mail: vincent.blok@wur.nl
Website: www.vincentblok.nl
Disclaimer: www.wur.nl/UK/disclaimer.htm
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