Politics and Worldview

Political Nature stands at the very important juncture of politics and environmentalism, and in it John M. Meyer challenges political thought that would divorce politics from questions of the human-nature relation, as well as environmentalist thought that would divorce questions about the human-nature relation from politics. Meyer thus brings the political and the environmental together in an attempt to move past some familiar environmentalist debates and towards a more productive environmentalism. The book is divided into three sections, the first of which reviews and critiques certain strains of environmentalist literature. Meyer’s analysis begins by noting that environmentalists often emphasize the importance of developing a new worldview or “ecological conception of nature” (5)—a conception often linked to ecological science— which asserts “that humans and non-human nature are necessarily connected and hence interdependent” (35). This view, Meyer argues, is intended by environmentalists to give new direction to our dealings with the natural world and to inform greener social and political practices, but Meyer is concerned that within this way of thinking “political debate becomes ... largely inconsequential” (33) due to the fact that it sees politics as “a mere consequence of our worldview” (37). He goes on to suggest that this emphasis on worldviews is supported by two dominant ways in which environmentalists (and others) read the history of Western thought. The “dualist” reading (35 ff.), which Meyer finds in clear form in the work of ecofeminist Val Plumwood, contends that in the West our thinking about human beings and human activities involves a rejection of our status as natural beings. Interpreting Western thought in this way, it is easy to see the power of a transformed worldview: if our current practices are premised upon such a dualism, then the ecological worldview “can have great power to restructure our thinking on a wide variety of other subjects; most notably on politics and social order” (40). The second reading, which Meyer associates with Carolyn Merchant and Freya Mathews, is that political and social orders have in fact been derived from conceptions of nature all along. On this “derivative” account (36 ff.), the problem in the West is not that our thinking about politics has been based on a dualistic separation of the human from the natural, but rather that the current (mechanistic) conception of nature gives rise to a distinctively un-ecological order of things. Consequently, on this telling, the ecological worldview is promoted as a corrective to previous, flawed understandings of nature and the practices to which they have given rise. Meyer takes issue with both of these interpretations, not least because of their oversimplification of the nature-politics relation in Western thought. This critique is