When then Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) joined the Sunrise Movement’s protest in the office of incoming speaker Nancy Pelosi, she catapulted a radical climate policy into public consciousness. Known as the Green New Deal, the policy would enable a just transition away from the high-carbon production that exacerbates climate change. Given this renewed interest in the potential of transformational federal spending, including on programs like the federal job guarantee, which many have argued will be one of the central components of a Green New Deal, it is necessary to reexamine the state of ecological theory in order to provide a philosophical foundation for our era’s new, centralized approach to ecology.
By Maxximilian Seijo
Since the first Earth Day, on April 22, 1970, ecological theory has favored a theoretical approach which is skeptical of centralized authorities. Most evident in the path-breaking work of the Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss, his “deep ecology” movement, among other things, prioritized “local autonomy and decentralization” over any centralized mediation of ecological relations. This perspective is based on a philosophical approach that reduces abstract relations with legal and political authorities unto immediate material connections. Such a reduction creates a limited ecological theory, which in Næss’ own words asserts that “the vulnerability of a form of life is roughly proportional to the weight of influences from afar.” Næss’ view that distanced relations introduce a metaphorical weight upon ecologies is anathema to a Green New Deal, which aims to utilize centralized and abstract monetary issuances or legal decrees to create more just, egalitarian relations between humans and the environment. In this essay, I offer an alternative to Næss’ deep ecology which accords to the centralization and collectivity needed to achieve such transformative socialist goals.
Næss’ philosophy can be traced to the works of Spinoza, Whitehead, and Heidegger. Where Spinoza and Whitehead seem to reinforce, in varying degrees, Næss’ decentralized ontological materiality, Heidegger offers a more capacious ecology which, while still problematic in some ways, I argue must nevertheless be the foundation for an alternative ecology of just centralization.
In his 1946 essay, “What Are Poets For?” Heidegger offers one particularly prescient formulation of his approach to ecology. “Plant, animal, and man—insofar as they are beings…are ventured,” Heidegger writes. (100) Ventured, for Heidegger, is the state of being thrown into a shared and egalitarian ecology, what he simply dubs “being.” In addition to establishing equality for ecological beings, Heidegger also articulates some form of innate ecological centralization. “Being, which holds all beings in the balance, thus always, draws particular beings toward itself—toward itself as a center,” he argues. (101) After formulating ecological equality and some form of centralization, Heidegger laments that the presence of this center has not been recognized. He calls this all-mediating center, “an-unheard of center,” and with it, further obscures the legal relationship between governance and ecological relations which persists even when it is not avowed.
At this point, the reader might be thinking, “what does this have to do with a Green New Deal?” To explain why these arcane philosophical conceptions of centralization are relevant, we must go to the word ecology itself. Ecology, from the Greek oikos, means “dwelling.” (145-147) One of the central tasks of human production is to establish such a “dwelling” of our own, from the planetary to the household scale. We produce to afford such dwellings. This production, as the constitutional and neochartalist theories of money and law have demonstrated, is always undergirded by centralized legal authorities, whether through legal currency issuance, property rights, or taxes and fines. This means that our ecologies, whether human-to-human, human-to-environment, or environment-to-environment, are mediated by governance. Despite what Næss would suggest, I argue that this is a good thing, as it means that we can collectively reorganize ecological relations through centralized legal authorities, through democracy.
From this standpoint, I will approach a later Heidegger essay, entitled, “The Question Concerning Technology,” which points to a similar conclusion. In the essay, Heidegger attempts to establish the causal mechanisms of production. He writes, “wherever ends are pursued and means are employed, wherever instrumentality reigns, there reigns causality.” (5) He breaks this productive causality into four categories: the material, the form or category, the end goal, and the means of bringing the production into being. Further, Heidegger suggests that these four causal mechanisms of production depend on each other, and that “in this connection, [they] bring about means to obtain results, effects.” (3) What Heidegger has done in this essay is establish that production itself is dependent upon a lubricating abstract “connection.” I claim that this abstract ecological relationality is law. It is the centralized legal medium of money that enables all exchange.
Approaching the question of ecological theory on these legal terms leads to the question of Bitcoin. Bitcoin represents the fantasy of ecological decentralization on money’s terms. Dangerously reminiscent of Næss’ philosophical commitment to the weight of abstract influence, Bitcoin is a commodified abstraction that must be mined, as it was designed as materially finite. As a result of both its decentralized network design and this artificial finitude, Bitcoin is contributing to immense environmental damage across the world. In other words, offering the inherent centrality of ecological relations in the legal mediation of production is not merely an arbitrary theoretical path forward, but a specific affront to the theoretical frameworks that are accelerating our abandonment of ecological justice.
Grounding ecology in the legal mediation of money is not what contemporary ecological theorists do. For example, in his recent book, noted ecological theorist Sean Cubitt writes that “ecological crisis, it is argued here, is not the fault of individuals but of the communicative systems, most of all the tyranny of the economy, of money as the dominant medium of twenty-first century intercourse between humans and our world.” (7) I understand why Cubitt takes this position. The issuance of money has incentivized extractive economic production for generations, but allowing that trend to solidify into a determined truth is not how we fix our ecological quandaries. Rather than fetishize money’s historical limitations, we need to embrace its democratic potential, we need to use its full legal power in the name of a Green New Deal, for all our sakes.
About the Author:
Maxximilian Seijo is a graduate student at the University of South Florida. He is the co-host of @moneyontheleft (a podcast that mobilizes Modern Monetary Theory to reclaim money’s collective possibilities for leftist politics and culture) and Digital Media Fellow at the Modern Money Network.
