Human autonomy and the value of nature: has there ever been an ‘eco-emancipatory project’?
Introduction
Liberation from ruling elites! Defence of critical thinking and free speech! Opposition to censorship! Deepening democracy! Regaining freedom!
Rallying cries of the left? Once upon a time perhaps, but no longer. It’s become something of a truism that the anti-system time-for-a-change banner is now being flown around the world by the right rather than the left. Analyses of this striking change in fortunes range from the profoundly structural to the superficially persona-cultural, and one set of explanations relates to the failure of the left to realise its promise(s).
Here we find the trenchant analysis of Ingolfur Blühdorn who focuses his attention on what he calls the ‘eco-emancipatory project’ (EEP) and the way in which its very logic has contributed both to its own failure and to the rise of a powerful counter-reaction. In the Introduction to the English-language version of his latest book he puts it like this:
"I am suggesting that the EEP has not simply failed because the logic of capitalism and the power of capitalist elites have suppressed and blocked it – in which case it might still be reactivated, but that it has become exhausted because the eco-emancipatory logic itself persistently chipped away at the EEP’s foundations and, in doing so, unknowingly paved the way for a very different societal transformation. In other words: The eco-emancipatory logic itself made a significant contribution to today’s ecological ungovernability and to the emergence of a society and modernity that radically depart from eco-emancipatory values and, more generally, from the values and institutions of liberal modernity so far".(Blühdorn, 2026: 12-13)
A principal claim here is that environmental political theory and practice, forty or fifty years ago, had an important non-environmental normative objective, namely the attainment of a key promise of Enlightenment modernity: the realisation of autonomy.
This claim is important to Blühdorn because according to him a side-effect of the eco-emancipatory project has been to bring about a reaction that has undermined the possibility of it ever being realised, while simultaneously fanning the flames of the post-liberal authoritarian turn sweeping the western world: ‘They [eco-activists] are unwilling to consider and reflect on the side-effects of their own efforts and logic – such as the exclusionary effects of participation, the injustices of ecological modernization or the escalatory tendencies of individualization, which have become an important trigger for the late-modern counter-revolt’ (Blühdorn and Seyd, 2025: 489).
The question this prompts is whether there has ever been an eco-emancipatory project understood in this way.
In what follows it will be argued that while this prospectus certainly forms part of political-ecological thought, it by no means exhausts it. In order to cash this out, a rough-and-ready distinction will be drawn between ‘anglo’ and ‘continental’ ecological political theory, in which the former bypasses much of the eco-emancipatory project as so defined while, for the latter, eco-objectives are embedded in the broader project of realising the key Enlightnment objective of realising human autonomy. (Terminological note: in what follows, the terms ‘green’, ‘environmental’ and ‘ecological’ will be used interchangeably insofar as they relate to theorising in this context).
From the outset, anglo theory aimed less at modernising modernity and more at pacifying the relationship between human beings and the non-human natural world. This often entailed a rejection of the idea of the autonomous subject in favour of the subject embedded in a web of ecological relationships, whose freedom of action was (and is) in part determined by environmental-ethical obligations and objective limits to growth. This pragmatic, sustainability, line of thought was set in train by the Limits to Growth report (Meadows, D. et al, 1972), and the heteronomous prospective of dependency it harbours lives on in the ‘planetary boundaries’ project of the Stockholm Resilience Centre.
Continental theorising has been more reluctant to see ‘ecologism’ as a project distinct from other progressive emancipatory trends, adding ‘ecological reason’ to the list of rationalities opposed to the instrumental reason of Enlightenment’s dialectic. This line of thought has always been suspicious of the idea of a ‘nature’ somehow separate and/or separable from human beings, and sceptical, too, of absolute limits to growth, arguing, rather, that limits are social rather than ‘natural’ and can be overcome given the appropriate social, political and economic relations.
It will be concluded that what both strands of ecological thought have in common is failure to achieve their objectives. From the anglo point of view the relationship between humans and nature remains unpacified, and in the continental perspective the idea of the autonomous subject has given way to forms of totalising identitarian politics that the modernising modernity project was supposed to do away with forever.
‘Anglo’ ecological political theory
Anglo green political theory emerged in the 1980s, designated as such here - in part - because although not all theorists came or come from English-speaking countries, English was the dominant language of exchange. At the same time, the theory gestated in this epistemological community was rooted in countries with a strong affinity to wild nature - either actually existing (the USA, Australia, Norway) or significantly present in the romantic imagination (the UK).
Anglo theorists shared a set of politico-intellectual concerns that set them apart from the theorising that was taking place in continental Europe. The principal anglo preoccupation was the non-human natural world (sometimes designated the more-than-human world, which itself tells a story) and how to prevent its despoliation. Much of the theorising was organised around the question of how humans should treat the non-human natural world, and so environmental ethics bulked large. What kind of value does the non-human natural world have? If we recognise only its instrumental value, is this sufficient to prevent its continuing exploitation, or do we need to acknowledge that it has intrinsic value and should therefore never be treated solely as a means to an end? This distinction was accompanied by that between anthropocentrism and ecocentrism, where the former refers to human-interested reasons for protecting the non-human natural world, and the latter to recognising nature as a political actor (and moral patient) in its own right.
A second strand of anglo theorising derived from the already-mentioned Limits to Growth report of 1972, which argued on the basis of computer modelling that if current trends of growth continued (population, resource consumption and so on) societal collapse would occur before the end of the 21st century. The basic trope here was that infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible, so ways need to be found to reduce the environmental impact of human activity and therefore make human presence on the earth sustainable.
Blühdorn is absolutely right to say that this sustainability objective has somewhat taken precedence over ethical concern for nature in recent years: ‘concepts like planetary boundaries and CO2 emissions have moved to the fore. The focus is on supposedly objective problems …’ (Blühdorn, 2026: 4). This concern is embodied, for example, in the planetary boundaries project of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, and the ‘new pragmatism’ is especially evident in the growing attention paid to adaptation to, rather than mitigation of, climate change.
Not so long ago, talk of adapting to climate change rather than slowing it down was regarded as tantamount to surrender. Now, though, there is a significant strand in anglo ecological thought and practice devoted to mapping out a route to a world in which the ever more calamitous effects of climate change are an accepted fact of life. Having said that, it was always the contention of environmental ethicists that recognising the rights of nature, configured in a particular way, would itself lead to more sustainable behaviours. In this sense it was never a case of either ethics or system sustainability, but of the former leading to the latter.
In terms of the question prompting this essay, whether there ever was an eco-emancipatory project aimed at the realisation of human autonomy, what is striking about both the ethical and the system sustainability strands of anglo political-ecological theory is that neither of them are much concerned with human emancipation. It is true to say, of course, that in a putative (anglo) green utopia we would all be living more fruitful and satisfying lives but far from this entailing an increase in human autonomy it is more likely to involve an acknowledgement of dependency.
The origins of this dependency in anglo ecological political thought are twofold and they map on to the ethical/sustainability distinction drawn above. In the ethical context, the effect of granting nature moral standing is to place restrictions on how it may be treated. Of course it is radically imprecise to talk of ‘nature’ as if this ontological category has a univocal and undisputed meaning. It would also be a mistake to think that environmental ethics deals only with an undifferentiated understanding of nature; there are myriad ways in which that totalising and totalised concept can be marked out for the purpose of ethical demarcation (parts or wholes? sentient or non-sentient? organic or inorganic? and so on). To take these distinctions any further, though, would be to distract us from the principal point here which is that once nature (or parts or aspects of it) has ethical standing, this places de facto restrictions on what we can do with it - and this amounts to a prima facie restriction on our freedoms.
This is one way in which anglo ecological political theory, far from seeking to realise human autonomy, actually promises to reduce it.
Something similar can be said regarding the sustainability injunction. The perceived requirement to live within the limits imposed by living on a planet with finite resources and sinks effectively restricts freedom of action. Indeed one criticism often laid at the door of environmental activists is that their political programme amounts to no more than a series of prohibitions, and it does indeed seem to be the case that anglo environmental political theory concludes that the human condition is one of heteronomy and dependence.
Moreover, it’s argued that this heteronomy neither can nor should be overcome. It can’t be overcome because it is a constitutive feature of the human condition, and it shouldn’t be overcome because attempts to do so lead to us exceeding the so-called ‘safe operating limits’ imposed by living on a planet with finite resources and sinks. Borrowing the expressive title of a book by Alasdair MacIntyre (1999), anglo ecological political theorists will argue that, ontologically, we are ‘dependent rational animals’, and this dependency takes the form of the requirement to live within the boundaries of the processes that regulate the earth system to the degree that those processes make possible a satisfying human life.
This brief survey of key aspects of anglo environmental political theory calls into question the following characterisation of (one of) its objectives: ‘the ideal of the self-determined citizen, the autonomous subject, which the eco-emancipatory movements – assisted by progressive intellectuals and critical social theorists – once managed to make hegemonic’ (Blühdorn, 2026: 10; emphasis in the original).
From the anglo point of view environmental political theory and the politics that accompanies it can’t be regarded as having failed to bring about the ideal of the self-determined citizen since this was never the objective in the first place.
Another way of looking at this is that anglo environmental political theory has often had a troubled relationship with modernity and its promises. One reading of one of these promises, for example, drawing on a strain of thought developed by Francis Bacon among others, is the human domination of nature, with nature as an object of technological control. This is precisely the anthropocentric and instrumental attitude to nature that environmental ethics seeks to undo.
Similarly, it can be argued that anglo green politics has its roots in the romantic reaction to industrialisation and has therefore always been wary of claims that properly ordered industrial advances will progressively improve the lot of humanity. Indeed, anglo environmental political thought often chides both the left and right traditions that emerged from the French Revolution and early industrialisation on the basis that they both cleave to an ‘industrialism’ which eventually runs up against the buffers represented by a finite planet.
Given this characterisation of anglo environmental political theory, it would seem not especially susceptible to Blühdorn’s critique outlined at the head of this essay, that: ‘eco-emancipatory logic itself made a significant contribution to today’s ecological ungovernability and to the emergence of a society and modernity that radically depart from eco-emancipatory values and, more generally, from the values and institutions of liberal modernity so far’ (Blühdorn, 2026: 13).
‘Continental’ ecological political theory
It is no doubt as unwise to generalise about continental ecological political theory as it is about its anglo counterpart, but the level of abstraction at which we are working here has to justify such liberties. At this level, a striking feature of the continental tradition is its lack of interest in nature as an object of political concern.
For someone brought up in the anglo tradition it is something of a shock to be told that, ‘political ecology has nothing to do with nature’ (Latour, 2004: 5; emphasis in the original). For the anglo, this was rather like reading ‘socialism has nothing to do with equality’, or ‘liberalism has nothing to do with freedom’. Once one has come to believe that nature and our treatment of it is central to the politics of ecology it is seriously disorientating to be advised to give up on nature as an organizing theoretical and political category.
One sentence from one book written by one somewhat iconoclastic French theorist obviously can’t of course stand as representative of the whole of continental environmental political theory, though I think it’s true to say that social constructivism has played a bigger role in continental social theory in general than in the anglo context. My impression is that ecological politics in the continental idiom is seen as part of a wider progressive tradition rather than apart from it, and in which nature plays only a bit part if it plays a part at all. This contrasts with the anglo tradition which sees itself as something of a challenge to other progressive ideologies.
This is perhaps the moment for a brief disquisition on ‘ideology’ and the way in which it signifies another discontinuity between anglo and continental ecological political theory. Because (anglo) ‘ecologism’ does see itself as an ‘ideology’ and, in contrast to its continental counterpart, this carries none of the negative freight often attached to the word in the latter context.
Broadly speaking, there are two meanings of ‘ideology’ in play here. The first is ideology as -ism, as in conservatism, liberalism, fascism, socialism and so on. This is ideology as a set of more-or-less coherent world views, with sub-variants, which compete in the marketplace of political ideas. The second is the meaning drawn from Marxism, where ideology is a set of ideas that serves the interests of the ruling class: pitting partial interests against universal truths. In this second case, the epithet ‘mere’ or ‘sheer’ is often appended to ideology - as in ‘mere’ ideology - to signal the contrast between a set of ideas that pretend to tell the truth about political, social and economic relations, and those that actually do so.
In this context Blühdorn accurately captures the anglo position as follows: ‘In the early 1990s, eco-political theorists themselves explicitly described the EEP as an ‘ideology in its own right’, ecologism, on a par with classical ideologies such as socialism, liberalism or conservatism (Dobson, 1990)’ (Blühdorn and Seyd, 2025: 489). Given the anglo-associated definition of ideology above, anglo green activists are perfectly happy to accept that ‘their reading of these [environment-related] empirical facts, their truth and their categorical imperatives are indeed only a world view. And if political opponents refer to it as an ideology, they do actually have a point’ (Blühdorn, 2026: 2; emphasis added).
In the continental idiom the words ‘only’ and ‘ideology’, here, are largely pejorative - a sense that is absent in the anglo environmental political theory tradition. (I distinctly remember the consternation on the faces of the audience in Kiel, Germany, sometime in the 1990s when I spoke of ecologism as a political ideology as if this was an uncomplicated claim devoid of any scientific truth/falsity claims, rather than as a Marxian concept irrevocably trailing negative connotations. The incomprehension was, for a short while, mutual).
The difference in the understanding of ideology here is significant because the conception drawn from Marx is very much rooted in the Enlightenment notion of self-mastery. Ideology is malign because it keeps us in a state of Kantian immaturity, preventing us from using our reason in freedom to become self-directed actors. So viewing environmental political theory, and the politics it both analyses and foments, through the prism of ideology amounts to setting it in the emancipatory context outlined, in Blühdorn’s words, at the head of this essay.
This is closely linked to the notion of reason and the role that different conceptions of it have played in progressive politics, building on Kant, and especially in the context of debates initiated by the Frankfurt School (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002). How is it that Enlightenment, which was meant to lead humanity out of immaturity, has fostered new forms of domination and barbarism? Reason, which was meant to overcome myth, has turned into a malign force that is capable of designing and justifying the genocidal machinery of concentration camps. In a terrifying inversion of Francisco Goya’s 1799 aquatint ‘The sleep of reason produces monsters’, it seemed for all the world that reason is perfectly capable of producing its own monsters.
One answer to this question is that it’s a particular form of reason that’s at fault rather than reason itself, and this noxious type of reason has come to be known as instrumental reason. Instrumental rationality reduces reason to means-end calculation, and while it is clearly an important component of rationality, when rationality is reduced to its instrumental form with no mind given to the ends to which it is put, rationality can turn into a tool of domination. Thus, any programme for emancipation must bear in mind the potential for domination that lies in the one-eyed exercise of one aspect - the instrumental aspect - of rational thought and action.
The relevance of this for our present discussion is that the objective of emancipation in the form of human autonomy, and the role of reason in this undertaking, has bulked larger in what I am (trepidatiously) calling the continental academic and political-progressive context than in its anglo counterpart. This is the ‘big picture’ into which other issues are inserted and through which they are understood.
Notable among these ‘other issues’ is the environmental problematic. By these lights, this problematic is subsumed under the broader umbrella of emancipation and human autonomy in such a way that there can be no trade-off between the latter objective and whatever needs to be done to ‘solve’ environmental problems. More strongly still, ‘continental’ political ecologists yoke their project to that of realising human autonomy and emancipation in a way that their anglo counterparts do not. For the latter, a pacified relationship with nature will improve the quality of human life, but there is no sense of political ecology contributing to the historical mission of ‘fully realis[ing] what capitalist industrial modernity was seen to alienate, oppress and enslave: the authenticity, dignity and integrity of the human subject and its claim to autonomy’ (Blühdorn, 2026: 4) .
So far I have drawn something of a sharp distinction between anglo and continental ecological political theory, but the discussion above prompts the thought that there is one word which appears to draw them closer together as far as the diagnosis of the environmental problematic is concerned; the word is ‘instrumental’. We have just seen how one source of domination of humans and nature is attributed to the excessive use of instrumental reason. The slightly modulated anglo counterpart to this, as we saw earlier, is the idea that seeing the non-human natural world as a resource only is tantamount to viewing it having instrumental value only.
However, the similarity is superficial and the noun that follows the adjective ‘instrumental’ serves only to accentuate the differences between the two programmes. For anglos, the instrumentalism relates to the specific case of the ethical rules relating to the right treatment of the environment. In the continental case the environmental problematic is subsumed in a wider project aimed at realising the Enlightenment promise of bringing the human to maturity.
Conclusion
The claim that prompted these reflections runs as follows: ‘In the 1970s and 1980s, emancipatory issues figured very prominently in environmental debates’ (Blühdorn, 2026: 4). Via the tendentious separation of environmental political theory into two camps (others are of course available) I have suggested that this is more true of one strand of environmental political theory than it is of the other. ‘Continental’ environmental theorising has tended to fold the environmental problematic into other already-existing frameworks of thought and action, drawing especially on the Enlightenment objective of bringing the human to maturity and self-mastery through the exercise of reason.
In this prospectus the idea of emancipation does indeed bulk large, and it is therefore entirely appropriate to refer to this as an ‘eco-emancipatory project’ as Ingolfur Blühdorn does.
I have suggested that this is less true of the ‘anglo’ tradition in which environmental ethics has played a much bigger role than in its continental cousin. Whatever form environmental ethics takes, whether ‘deep’ or ‘shallow’, the overall effect of its injunctions is to place restrictions on what humans can legitimately ‘do’ with non-human nature (and it’s worth repeating that the very idea of a non-human nature is far more anathema to the continental tradition than to the anglo one).
The same restriction injunction is true of what I have called the sustainability strand of anglo theorising in which the mandate to live within the limits imposed by a finite planet reduces the viable range of options open to us as far as forms of life are concerned. The theoretical and practical focus of anglo theory has generally been one of restraint rather than emancipation (excepting emancipation from pathologies such as consumerism and the unwarranted exploitation of the more-than-human world).
However we slice the ecological theory pie, though, what remains true is that its overall political objectives remain unrealised. From the anglo point of view, our relationship with non-human nature remains unpacified; all the indicators relating to biodiversity, for example, are heading in the wrong direction.
Similarly, in the continental idiom, eco-emancipatory values are the object of anti-woke derision and - worse - its very own progressive tropes (liberation from ruling elites, defence of free speech) are turned against it.
Blühdorn may therefore well be right that, ‘eco-activists have manoeuvered themselves into a trap … With their dualism of socio-ecological transformation vs. apocalypse they have conjured up a constellation where, in view of the untenability of their own project, there now seems to be no future’ (Blühdorn, 2026: 21).
There will be a future, of course, though while the short-term future looks to be firmly in the hands of those offering a heady though unstable mix of libertarianism and authoritarianism, longer term contours are more uncertain. In the aphorism perhaps most quoted by the left as it tries to make sense of the assault on its principles and projects, and sophisticatedly fleshed out by Blühdorn, Antonio Gramsci wrote: ‘The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters’.
What will that new world look like? Long term, two myths perhaps orientate the possibilities. The first is Promethean, stealing from the gods, overreaching and suffering the consequences. The other is the English king, Canute, whose courtiers supposedly thought he was so powerful that he could turn back the tide. He proved he couldn’t by placing his throne on the sea shore as the tide came in and lapped around it. In one future we have our kidneys eaten every day by an eagle. In the second we get our feet wet. Choices, choices …
Bibliography
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