Environmental Political Theory and the Material Turn. A Critical Assessment

Social and political theory has recently witnessed a sustained turn to ‘materiality’ or ‘ontology’. It is not a return to old forms of materialism after the post-modernist season. Its target are indeed the weaknesses of both constructionism and realism, as based on a dualistic thinking which is deemed theoretically untenable and inadequate to techno-scientific advancement and global environmental change. In spite of being an archipelago of positions, a common feature of this theoretical wave is the case for the mutual constitution of knowledge and reality, language and matter, and for the equal agential power of human and nonhuman entities. The material turn is especially salient in STS, sociology, feminist studies, geography, philosophy and humanities. Environmental political theory of course intersects all these fields, but to date there has been no systematic inquiry into the implications of the material turn. The paper aims at contributing to this endeavour. Of special relevance for environmental political theory are the non-dominative implications for socio-environmental relations that are usually drawn from non-dualistic standpoints. I will reflect on the extent to which such assumptions are warranted. I will do so by engaging with emergent forms of interaction with the environment, from carbon accounting to geoengineering, as increasingly characterizing the present phase of the Anthropocene, and entwined with the notion itself. As I will seek to show, the relationship between non-dualism and socio-environmental exploitation is more entangled than often assumed within the material turn. Some implications will be drawn also in respect to the emergent wave of sustainable environmentalism, as centred on a rearticulation of material flows.