Beyond Post-Environmentalism

The work aims at analysing the raise and critiques of post-environmentalism and suggesting a new material-semiotic oriented postenvironmentalism. After having presented the general context for the emergence of Postenvironmentalist theory in the broader context of international environmental thinking (with reference to the International Organisations, environmental NGOs and think-tanks’ production), the internal debate between different interpretations of Postenvironmentalism (i.e. the realist and the constructivist interpretation) is described. With the aim of advancing the theoretical debate and overcoming the opposition between these different interpretations, the perspective of material semiotic scholars is adopted as a standpoint for stepping beyond current understanding of Postenvironmentalism and imagining the future of environmental thinking. The proposed material-semiotic interpretation of Postenvironmentalism debunks the solidity of constructivist interpretation and - still not falling back into a crude realism - describes environmental culture and its socio-politics implications as the effect of heterogeneous networks’ agency (including human, non humans and more than humans). This advances a non-representational, non-discursive, materiality-oriented understanding of environmental thinking. Conclusively, together with answering the need for a bird-eyes view on Postenvironmentalism, the proposed work also invites to make a step beyond and suggests that a material-semiotic interpretation of environmental thinking and agency can help at answering many of the critiques it has been addressed with.