Towards a Habitability Approach within Environmental Political Theory

In geographer Jamie Lormier’s words, “the Anthropocene represents the public death of the modern understanding of Nature removed from society.” Indeed, on the “early-Anthropocene” hypothesis, which holds that substantial human transformation of the environment is coincident with organized human social life, it is a mistake to think Nature and society were ever meaningfully separated at all. In this respect the Anthropocene demands a thorough reframing of any version of Environmentalism that idealizes a Nature purified of human presence. To offer a compelling normative vision for human beings’ relationship with what ecologist Erle Ellis calls our “used planet,” I therefore argue, Environmentalism must start from a plausible account of the biological and social imperatives that underlie the historically and geographically pervasive phenomena of human environmental transformation. I propose a “habitability approach” for this project of refocusing Environmentalism for the Anthropocene. The habitability approach is grounded in the biological program of niche construction theory—the view that many organisms (not only human beings) actively modify the environment to suit it to their metabolic needs. I seek normative standards for evaluating human modification of the environment within an analysis of human niche construction. Because niche construction in general aims at a set of environmental conditions a given organism requires to flourish in the way characteristic of its species, we can base norms for human interaction with the environment on an understanding of human flourishing—as articulated, for example, in the ”capabilities approach” of Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen. In a normative sense, then, a place is habitable if it affords its inhabitants the possibilities for a flourishing life. But because human niche construction is a social endeavor, habitability, in this normative sense, is a socially provided good, which ought to be provided justly. Habitability is thus an appropriate subject for environmental political theory.