TY - JOUR
AU - Bresnihan, Patrick
AB - In July 2020, the Irish Green Party entered into a coalition Government with the two historically dominant parties in Irish politics, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael. The decision to enter Government came after heated debate amongst the Party members over the proposed Programme for Government. At the heart of this debate was whether you could separate climate action from social and economic justice. This was not just a matter of idealism versus pragmatism, as the mainstream media tended to portray it. It was more fundamentally a disagreement over the categories of economy, society, and environment. Are work and housing any less ‘environmental’ than biodiversity loss and pollution? As Ethan Miller’s book, Reimagining Livelihoods, outlines, the cultures of thought that make this question so challenging have a long and deep history. Ethan explains early on where his own intellectual concern with the ‘hegemonic trio’ of economy, society, and environment began. He describes being involved in a campaign against a proposed tourist development in Plum Creek, Maine, where he lives and works, and where the book is firmly situated. The 5-year conflict over the development served, he argues, to affirm, rather than challenge, the separate categories of economy, society, and environment. This was evident in the binary framing of ‘jobs versus environment’, for example, or the overly technical and economistic framing of diverse social and environmental concerns. In Maine, for example, the environment has historically meant material resources—timber, fish, minerals. Today, even as the material extraction of these resources dwindles, the environment is re-made as a resource for attracting tourists—‘amenities’. What is consistent is the idea that the environment is a domain of ‘things to be used, managed, or avoided’. This account is of course familiar, particularly in Ireland, where the demands of FDI-led, economic development have not only defeated conflicting social and environmental concerns but also determined how these conflicts are articulated and managed. For Ethan, this trio of categories works as an historical and ongoing process of enclosure. In one sense, this is enclosure as privatization and deprivation, but in another, broader sense it is about the way they constitute material and conceptual boundaries that produce exclusions—about what counts, what is valued, and by whom. Categories such as economy, society, and environment are not just terms that innocently aim to describe the world. They actively bring into being the world they describe. They work, for example, to constitute animosity towards immigrants, at the same time as they constitute blindness to non-utilitarian relations to nature. As an active member of the Community Economies Research Network (the book is published as part of the Diverse Economies and Liveable Worlds Series), Ethan’s critique of the hegemonic trio is strongly influenced by the work of J-K Gibson-Graham. Key to their shared critical perspective is an emphasis on plurality and multiplicity (rather than dialectical thinking) when it comes to the making of alternative worlds. The hegemonic assemblage of economy, society, environment is powerful but it is also always becoming-otherwise—it is not a coherent or rigid system, but has within it multiple cracks and fissures—which Ethan locates in the hesitations and desires expressed by some of the professionals involved in the development of Maine who he interviews. One of the more compelling qualities of this approach to power is that it refuses any pure position. There is no way to stand outside of the systems that we critique and object to. One of the ways this sense of complicity and interconnection comes to the fore is in Ethan’s concept of ecological livelihoods, the key concept in the book. Critical of the ‘major’ discourse of ‘livelihood strategies’, Ethan seeks to develop the ‘minor becomings’ of livelihood (that which exceeds its function within technocratic developmentalism). He does this by turning to two main sources. First, the influential ‘subsistence perspective’ developed by feminist scholars Maria Mies and Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, which emphasizes the under-valued yet life-sustaining work of women, peasants, and nature. Second, the work of Massimo de Angelis who represents a broader collective of autonomist thinking on the practice and politics of the commons. Ethan’s concept of ‘ecological livelihoods’ is clearly inspired by this work but departs in an important way. The idea of an ecological livelihood pushes back against an idea of autonomy that assumes separation or self-sufficiency. ‘Rather than rendering a world in which “all that is solid melts into air”, the environment in the form of the ecological thought suggests that all that is solid may in fact be connected to air in ways that we can barely imagine’ (p. 125). Dovetailing with much important and varied work often generalized as ‘new materialism’, this emphasis on interconnectedness across multiple spatial and temporal scales is more and more evident—consider the 500 year life span of some plastics, or the cumulative effects of carbon mined and burned over the past 200 years. ‘New materialism’ is not really new—it expresses what many, particularly indigenous peoples, have always know: humans are not at the centre of things. Nor does this de-centering spell the end of collective action and world-making change. In fact, as Ethan and many others are beginning to argue, it may be the only hope. In escaping the localism and purism associated with some visions of subsistence and the commons, the ‘ecology of livelihoods’ perspective raises difficult questions: ‘[w]hat is the connection between coal-fired electric generators, people turning on coffee-grinders in Chicago, smallmouth bass laden with toxins in a Maine pond, and communities (human and nonhuman) devastated by mountaintop removal in Appalachia?’ (p. 167). For Ethan, the commons are not reducible to resources or institutions for making and sharing resources. As a political idea, the commons are understood to be a shared concern, not something that pre-exists active negotiation, conflict and ultimately exclusion. In this sense, commons are not the opposite of enclosure. ‘The ethico-political question must shift from “commons versus enclosure: to what enclosure, for whom, for what purposes, and to what effect?”’ (p. 190, emphasis in original) So, the making of connections between coal-fired electric generators, people turning on coffee-grinders, and so on, is the work of commoning, the making of a shared concern, a commons, that can then be defended and protected against the forces of enclosure responsible. This is a critical departure for thinking on the politics of the commons. Reimagining livelihoods draws on a wide array of critical theorists and texts. At times it is dense and difficult to wade through. But critical theoretical work is difficult. If things were obvious or could be stated in immediately straightforward ways then we would not need to think about them. Ethan does not fetishize theory. His thinking and writing is driven by a desire to think with and through the problematics outlined above: the dominance of the ‘hegemonic trio’ and a way to craft collective life beyond them. ‘The political question, then, becomes not simply that of cultivating courage and dissent but also of constituting different habitats in which other forms of action and relation become more possible’ (p.137, emphasis in original). This is a key argument of the book. But, while the book is based on rich fieldwork and interviews with professionals working in Maine, there is not so much description of what these ‘habitats’ might look like. Reflections are based on what individuals said, not what they do or how they relate to others around them. The focus on professionals is understandable but it also made me want to know about other voices in Maine—the communities who are making (organizing?) alternative habitats in which different actions become possible. How do the conditions described in Maine relate to more visible political formations and movements in the United States and elsewhere? The rise of the right wing, particularly in rural North America, has been well-documented. To what extent is this product of the hegemonic trio and its demise? Is support for Trump a reflection of people hanging on to a rose-tinted past (waged work, white, patriarchal, nature-as-resources) or is this too simple a narrative—as suggested by Arlie Hochschild in her book Strangers in Our Own Land? Similarly, with all that has happened over the past few months with Black Lives Matter and the re-casting of colonial histories, how does the ecological livelihoods framework relate to these popular, world-historical movements? While Ethan provides a good genealogy of the economy, society, environment, there is little mention of the movements that forced these developments—consider since the 1960s, the role of organized labour, feminist, decolonial, environmental movements (particularly environmental justice movements and those of the Global South) in challenging and transforming how economy, society, and environment are thought about and valued. This is less of a critique than an invitation to further thinking and conversation—the book already does so much. © Oxford University Press and Community Development Journal 2020. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Reimagining Livelihoods: Life Beyond Economy, Society, and EnvironmentEthan Miller, 2019, 312 pages, University of Minnesota Press, ISBN: 978-1,517,904,319, £20.99 (pb).
JF - Community Development Journal
DO - 10.1093/cdj/bsaa032
DA - 2020-09-07
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/reimagining-livelihoods-life-beyond-economy-society-and-3dzKXUK2Ol
SP - 1
EP - 1
VL - Advance Article
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
ER -