Nature and Environment in Western and Non-Western Political Thought

Anthropogenic climate change is one of the greatest challenges our world faces today. Since the advent of the Since the advent of the Industrial Age, humans have become the most influential force on nature and the environment. Their actions have shaped the appearance of landscapes, caused a loss of biodiversity, and altered long-term climate parameters. These factors, in turn, influence a multitude of important political topics, including food security, climate migration, or public health.
The scope of potential responses to environmental degradation and its consequences is contingent upon the political thought employed to analyze, comprehend, and interpret these phenomena. Traditions of political thought provide us with epistemic and normative ‘lenses’ through which we perceive and evaluate political issues. For much of modern history, the discourse on environmental issues has been shaped by a distinctly Western liberal tradition.
In this seminar we will look at various Western and non-Western traditions of political thought and their ideas about nature and the environment. The aim is not to dismiss Western traditions of political thought or to divide traditions into good and bad. Instead, we will seek to explore and appreciate the plurality and diversity of different traditions of political thought. Ultimately, our aim is to identify those ideas that are more conducive to environmental politics and, ideally, to combine them to achieve a more genuine universalism in environmental political thought.

• Gabrielson, Teena/Hall, Cheryl/Meyer, John M./Schlosberg, David (Hrsg.) (2016): The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Political Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Godrej, Farah, (2016): Culture and Difference: Non-Western Approaches to Defining Environmental Issues, in: Gabrielson, Teena/Hall, Cheryl/Meyer, John M./Schlosberg, David (Hrsg.): The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Political Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 39-56.
• Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2021): The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
• Ginn, Franklin/Demeritt, David (2008): Nature: A Contested Concept, in: Clifford, Nicholas/Holloway, Sarah/Rice, Stephen P/Valentine, Gill (eds.): Key Concepts in Geography, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 300-311.