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Cameron Fioret, Eco-Emancipation: An Earthly Politics of Freedom by Sharon R. Krause, Political Science Quarterly, Volume 139, Issue 2, Summer 2024, Pages 317–319, https://doi.org/10.1093/psquar/qqae038
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Scholars enliven the academy by bridging critical academic pursuits with real-world influence. Through the lens of structuralism and the method of decentering solely human freedom, Sharon Krause has contributed valuably to political theory and, specifically, environmental domination and governance research. This work broadens political theory by transposing moral and political inclusion to nonhumans beyond merely agency. Centrally, it compels readers to engage with the dignity and power of nonhuman parts of nature that are, themselves, political actors.
Eco-Emancipation: An Earthly Politics of Freedom deepens the contemporary discourse in environmental politics and democratic theory by delving into questions of domination that not only extend to but center on nonhumans or “Earth others.” Krause's attention towards the “specter” of domination by humans over the nonhuman natural world is timely in a warming world of evermore consequential anthropocentric environmental degradation, increasing conflict, and democratic recession.
The seminal figures in environmental domination literature (e.g., Bookchin, Plumwood, Horkheimer and Adorno, Marcuse, Leiss, Luke, and Biro) all appeal to privileging the human as a figure being dominated or taking precedence over the nonhuman world. In Eco-Emancipation, though, Krause builds on deontological ethics and environmental domination literature through two central, original ways. First, her holistic approach links environmental domination of humans and the domination of nature and makes nonhumans' domination the nucleus of normative concern. Second, she defines environmental domination as vulnerability to unchecked power that is a “function of political, institutional arrangements and not only cultural orientations and personal values.” In doing so, we may develop a deeper “political respect” for nonhuman parts of nature and, most fundamentally, understand that nature does not merely exist for us. Nature is infinitely more than a gestell.
