This paper concerns the shape a ‘green’ political theory should have if alienation from nature is to be its central critical idea. The English word ‘alienation’ has a number of different senses, including: a state or process of estrangement; a transferral or renunciation of ownership. A related notion is reification. Alienation has been standardly discussed as a bad thing, something to be overcome or at least as absent under ideal conditions. One theme of my paper is how useful it is to think of alienation from nature like this. Perhaps in some environmental contexts alienation in one or more of its senses might be better considered more ambivalently, or as not wholly bad. Exploring this thought requires distinguishing different kinds of environmental contexts - different senses of ‘nature’ – as well as the different senses of alienation mentioned above. The environmental contexts I consider here are the natural world, non-human nature and the humanly constructed environment. This paper maps the different senses of alienation onto these contexts to produce various senses of ‘alienation from nature’. My suggestion is that a green political theory focused on alienation from nature needs to explore the relations between and balance such different senses of alienation from nature, not all of which are purely negative. Such a theory should be pragmatic in the sense of not seeking to establish Absolutes, fixed dichotomies or certainties: it needs to be nuanced and comfortable with matters of degree.
