Use your imagination: Artistic practice, social ecology, and the utopian potential of environmental ethics

Abstract (accepted)

If your idea of the good is at odds with the way you live, then consider changing the way you live. And if the way you want to live is at odds with the structures of your community, then consider finding, or creating, more congenial social structures. This train of thought and action is at least as old as any languages that can express it, as evidenced by much of cultural and political (pre-)history. Today, some of us feel at odds with globalised civilisation. Based on their ideas of the good, they are looking for ways of transforming it towards a symbiotic, rather than destructive, relationship with the rest of the biosphere. In my paper, I situate this ethical/political/cultural project at the intersection of three relevant practical and conceptual approaches. They are connected by their methodical use of the imagination.

Firstly, artistic practices can help us explore alternative ways of being in the world. Drawing from my current research under The Big Green, a pan-European project on sustainable development with the creative sector, I present a range of examples, from sensory immersion in natural materials and living landscapes to science-infused storytelling on alternative futures.

Secondly, Murray Bookchin’s conception of social ecology emphasises the central and dual role of “fancy, imagination, and art” in developing societies that are as free as they can be from repression, domination, and hierarchy – among humans, between our “internal” human nature and other parts of our culture and psyche, and between humans and “external nature”. We need imagination and art as tools to envision good societies, which are in turn defined by their artfulness. The good society is an “artistically crafted society”.

Thirdly, in the philosophical discipline of environmental ethics, the main trajectory of inquiry since the early 1970s can be described as the result of an original choice favouring abstract, normative theory over concrete, ambivalent imagination. Arguing that both should be linked, I demonstrate how ethical conceptions can be used methodically to develop social-ecological utopias and vice versa.

Drawing together all three intersecting approaches, I suggest that a benign transformation towards sustainable societies may hinge on, more than anything else, our ability to cultivate both our imagination and the spaces to use it for the good.