1. Environment as problem

Our basic category of analysis is the totality of relations

• We cannot embrace the whole reality
• Prof Eric? - people always have a particular context

Los Angeles protest 8 Jun 2025

• Michael Hudson economist, Super Imperialism $
• Peter Fleming - Capitalism & Nothingness, “Pathologic Present”. Immediacy.
• The answers are not simple
• What is nature. Noel Castree 2014 Making Sense of Nature
• In non-Western cultures nature is not separated from the world

Issues

• Different scales & times
• Uneven distribution gains & lossess - environmental injustices
• Different cots & interests
• Policy reactive

• Fairbourne, north Aberystwyth, climate refugees
• Macnaghten & Urry, “The environment is the new opium of the masses”
• Globalisation of western economic practices & values

Despite all these problems, we should not accept defeat

• Challenging a Dominant Apolitical Ecology - Environmentalism is meaningless without a politico-ecological perspective on the causes and responsibilities for the problems

We are going to die and that makes us the lucky ones ~ Richard Dawkin

The manifold self-differentiating expanse of life ~ Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit

We cannot explain everything through the universal (this is crux)

Hypernormalisation by Adam Curtis.

Our main aim here is to decolonise…

There is an emerging critical nature-society scholarship that demonstrates how socio-environmental dilemmas are not only sites of dispossession and exploitation but are also sites of hope, experimentation and resistance.