1. Environmental Awareness in
Contemporary Society:
Limitations and
Opportunities
Dr Prasun Banerjee
April 26th, 2022
Department of English,
Kabi Joydeb Mahavidyalaya
Illambazar, Birbhum
2. What is Environment?
• 1. the surroundings or conditions in which a person, animal,
or plant lives or operates.
• 2. the natural world, as a whole or in a particular geographical
area, especially as affected by human activity.
• 3. the aggregate of social and cultural conditions that
influence the life of an individual or community
3. Man and Environment
• Man is an essential part of Nature and Environment.
• Environmental Determinism:
• A) physical environment controls the course of human action.
• B) the history, culture, living style and the stages of
development of a social group or nation are largely governed
and controlled by physical factors of the environment.
4. Jay L Lemke
• First, that human organisms only develop normally in the presence of environmental
distributions of available matter, energy, and information which afford recapitulation of
phylogenetically evolved trajectories. Second, that molecular scale information in the
genome assists in the self-organization of higher scale structures, but only if the
phylogenetically ‘expected’ environmental complements are present, and only with the
result that the emergent structures will themselves be “tuned” to be selectively
sensitive to particular kinds of further environmental input. Third, that all levels of
organization in an ecosocial system are in a continuous process of development,
enabling (from below) and constraining (from above) development at each
intermediate level, but with each level developing at a significantly different
characteristic timescale (i.e. rate; faster at lower levels, more slowly at higher levels).
6. Mental, Social and Environmental Ecology
• Guattari holds that traditional
environmentalist perspectives obscure the
complexity of the relationship between
humans and their natural environment
through their maintenance of the dualistic
separation of human (cultural) and
nonhuman (natural) systems; he envisions
ecosophy as a new field with a monistic and
pluralistic approach to such study. Ecology
in the Guattarian sense, then, is a study of
complex phenomena, including human
subjectivity, the environment, and social
relations, all of which are intimately
interconnected
7. Man’s gradual disconnection with Environment
• Anthropocentric interpretation of the cosmos.
• Materialism giving way to self-centric epicureanism.
• Industrial Revolution.
• Globalisation
• Post-Industrial Capitalism or “Integrated World
Capitalism(IWC)”- Guattari
8. Renaissance and Anthropocentrism
• Competence-confidence-arrogance.
• O what a world of profit and delight,
• Of power, of honour, of omnipotence,
• Is promis’d to the studious artisan!
• All things that move between the quite poles
• Shall be at my command.-Dr Faustus.
• (Know, then, thyself, presume not God to scan;/ The Proper study of mankind is man.-
A. Pope)
9. Materialism and scientific realism
• Eat, drink and be merry/ Tomorrow, thou shall die.-Rossetti
• Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to day,
To morrow will be dying.-Herrick
10. Industrial Revolution
• Growth at the cost of Nature-Urbanised civilisation prioritising
physical comfort.
• Man’s ultimate disconnection with Nature.
• “Civilisation seeks to increase bodily comforts and it fails
miserably in doing so.”-Hind Swaraj
11. T. S. Eliot-The Rock (1934)
• Where is the life we have lost in living?
• Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
• Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
12. Globalisation
• Arrival of capitalism.
• Widespread plunder of natural resources.
• “Globalisation has given rise to exploitative practices that perpetuate a quite violence on low-
income labour and other vulnerable groups such as the poor, women and the children. New
technological and scientific advances that could be used to liberate human potential remain in
the capitalistic drive for profitability ”-Guattari
13. “Integrated World Capitalism(IWC)”
• “Post-war capitalism is delocalised and deterritorialised to such as
extent that is impossible to locate the source of its power.”
• “IWC’s most potent weapon weapon for achieving social control is
the mass media.”
• “Global village”: the world as a single community linked by
telecommunications.
• The mass media is involved in creating the demand…a new type
of individual is being shaped and moulded by the unseen
presence of market forces.
14. Silent Operations of IWC
• We are being manipulated through the production of a
collective, mass media subjectivity.
• IWC is destroying the environmental ecology by manipulating
the social and mental ecology.
• Human subjectivity or singularity is being supplanted by a
virtual sense of subjectivity created by mass media.
15. Environmental Activism: Limitations
• “Fridays for Future”-Greta Thunberg movement.
• Green Imperialism-Ricahrd Grove.
• “It is not enough to take to the streets and wave placards, an
entire mental ecology is necessary in order not to give IWC our
unconscious assent.”-Guattari
• “Ecology must stop being associated with the image of a small
nature-loving minority or with qualified specialists.”-Guattari
16. Opportunities
• Ecosophical revival.
• Preparation of a mental ecology.
• Subjectification-in order to achieve subjectivity one needs to
get rid of the extant grand metanarratorial structures of logic
and pseudoscientific paradigms.
• Being conscious about the process of “fixing-into-beings.”
• Developing an individual, unique eco-logic.
17. Arts of Subjectivity Ecosophy
• With my current scholarship in ecosophy, I want to
further developing some of Guattari’s key concepts
(see Glazier, 2020) developed later in his life and
work:
• Ethico-aesthetic paradigm
• Existential-consistency
• subjectivation vs. subjection
• Meta-modelling
• Working toward further decentering the human –
• i.e., not only showing how subjectivity is interlinked and
enmeshed in a world of beings, but troubling the category of
subjectivity fundamentally qua ‘eco-consciousness’
18. Why Ecosophy, Now?
• Ecological apocalypse
• Roughly 7% (130,000 extinctions) of species (Régnier et al., 2015).
• Androgenic reduction of oceanic photosynthesis capabilities
(Behrenfeld et al., 2006).
• Rising sea-levels and unsustainable waterways (Stanley &
Clemente, 2016).
• Destruction of tropical and temperate rainforest (Oskamp, 2000).
19. Folklore
• Indigenous, geographically localized folklore is a powerful site
in which to reharmonize our ecological self using myths,
rituals, and stories (Hopper, Gosler, Sadler, & Reynolds,
2019).
• E.g., the fairy crosses of the blue ridge mountains:
• https://www.escapetoblueridge.com/blog/trail-trees-and-fairy-
crosses/
20. Conclusion
• Ecosophy brings together both
transpersonal and critical psychology in
order to develop a theoretical and
practical approach to re-balancing
subjectivity and the natural world.
• Old models do not work; the ecological
apocalypse makes this strikingly clear.
• The wisdom of indigenous folklore offers
touchstones, perhaps, to set us on the
right path.
21. References
Glazier, J. W. (2020). Arts of subjectivity: A new animism for the post-media era. Bloomsbury.
Guattari, F. (2000). The three ecologies (I. Pindar & P. Sutton, Trans.). The Athlone Press.
Hunter, J. (2015). Between Realness and Unrealness: Anthropology, Parapsychology and the Ontology of Non-Ordinary Realities. Diskus: Journal of
the British Association for the Study of Religion, 1(2), 4-20.
Husserl, E. (1970). The crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology. Northwestern University Press.
Levesque, S. (2016). Two versions of ecosophy: Arne Næss, Félix Guattari, and their connection with semiotics. Sign Systems Studies, 44(4), 511-
541.
Marlowe, C.(1980). Doctor Faustus. Oxford University Press.
Næss, A. (1989). Ecology, community and lifestyle: Outline of an ecosophy (D. Rothenberg, Trans.). Cambridge University Press.
Nigel, H., Gosler, A., Sadler, J., & Silas, R. (2021). Species’ cultural heritage inspires a conservation ethos. Conservations Letters.
doi:10.1111/conl.12636
Oskamp, S. (2000). Psychological contributions to achieving an ecologically sustainable future for humanity. Journal of Social Issues, 56(3), 373-390.
Régnier, C., Alchaz, G., Lambert, A., Cowie, R., Bouchet, P., & Fontaine, B. (2015). Mass extinction in poorly known taxa. PNAS, 112(25), 7761-7766.
Stanely, J.-D. & Clemente, P. L. (2016). Increased land subsidence and sea-level rise are submerging Egypt’s Nile delta coastal margin. GSA Today,
27. doi:10.1130/GSATG312A.1
Tripathy, A. (1998). Swadhinatar Mukh(Face of Independence, translation mine). Ananda Publishers.
van Boeckel, J. (Director). (1997). The call of the mountain: Arne Naess and the Deep Ecology movement [Documentary]. Netherlands: ReRun
Productions.
