Winning while Waning? The Cunning of Ecological Reason.

Abstract

More than 50 years have passed since the eco-emancipatory project (EEP) was launched in the wake of the silent revolution triggered by new social movements. A response to the side-effects of first (industrial) modernity, the EEP helped to shape a second (reflexive) modernity that was supposed to democratise society and liberate nature. But the EEP seems to have failed on that account – hence the post-apocalyptic turn within environmentalism. However, the fate of the EEP is more nuanced than it seems. In this paper, I argue that the latter has been by and large successfully assimilated by liberal societies. The ecomodernist response to the Anthropocene, which pursues human and nonhuman emancipation by means others than those of the EEP, attests to that. It also signals a way out of late modernity, heralding a third modernity characterised by the post-utopian management of socionatural relations in increasingly liberal albeit not fully democratic societies.