18 Ecocentrism: Quotations

“What constitutes sustainability—or the contexts or system dynamics that one wishes to maintain—is a normative choice” (Downing et al. 2020).

“The perception that humans are separate from and doing things to nature reflects a particular, historically situated view of the material world. It is a legacy of the Enlightenment, the very same era during which many elements of our current legal system were established” (Benson 2019).

“It is not inevitable, nor is it wise, that natural objects should have no rights to seek redress on their own behalf. It is no answer to say that streams and forests cannot have standing because streams and forests cannot speak. Corporations cannot speak, either; nor can states, estates, infants, incompetents, municipalities, or universities. Lawyers speak for them, as they customarily do for the ordinary citizen with legal problems” (Stone 2010).

Elmar Altvater, ‘The Capitalocene, or, Geoengineering against Capitalism’s Planetary Boundaries’, in Anthropocene or Capitalocene, ed. Jason W. Moore (2016):  “The Capitalocene is about ideology as well as energy, class, and machinery. In the Capitalocene, ‘nature’ has been transformed into a capital asset. Nature has been reduced to something that can be valued and traded and used up just as any other asset: industrial capital, human capital, knowledge capital, financial claims, and so forth. This is the ideological way of incorporating nature into capitalist rationality and its monetary calculus. This is, of course, the dominant way of thinking in mainstream economics” (Parenti and Moore 2016)

“The educator who truly loves the new generation, on the contrary, will decide to share with them something she herself considers to be intrinsically good. However, not to impose a particular view of the world, but to offer this new generation the opportunity to first relate to the world” (Vlieghe and Zamojski 2019).