John M Meyer
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 3731199 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | John M Meyer |
| NOMBRES | John M |
| APELLIDO | Meyer |
| FIRMA | MEYER J M |
| AFILIACIONES | Cal Poly Humboldt |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3565-7435 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 37 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 53 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 21 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 16 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1977 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2024 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
The People” and Climate Justice
Today, populism is widely understood to entail an exclusionary conception of "the people" that threatens climate change action. While this threat is real, I argue that populism itself can be understood as a response to perceived exclusion and marginalization, making it possible to conceptualize a more heterogeneous conception of populism's "people." Examining two approaches to climate change action rooted in contrasting conceptions of the people …
Power and Truth in Science-Related Populism
Populism is often characterized as a rejection of scientific expertise and a key obstacle to societies’ ability to address the climate crisis today. I challenge this account, arguing for a more inclusive conception of populism and a more critical account of expertise. Consistent with this, I delineate a range of responses to the challenges of climate politics in populist times. In doing so, I have two primary aims: first, to highlight limitations…
Between Two Knees by Eric Ting (review)
Reviewed by: Between Two Knees by Eric Ting Karen Alvarado and John M. Meyer BETWEEN TWO KNEES. By the 1491s. Directed by Eric Ting. McCarter Theatre Center, Princeton, New Jersey. February 3, 2023. The brainchild of the 1491s, a Native American sketch comedy troupe, Between Two Knees is a satirical Brechtian epic that interrogates how the colonial traumas of the late nineteenth century fed the Native American warrior ethos of the twentieth centu…
Continuities and changes; voices and silences
The thirtieth anniversary is an opportunity to take stock of Environmental Politics. To consider where the journal and – by extension – the academic study of environmental politics should go, we must have insight into where it has been. We aim to generate conversation about three questions. The first asks who publishes in the journal – whose voices are prominent and whose are missing – and in what ways this has changed over time. The second asks …
Trajectories in environmental politics
This book explores the dominant framings and paradigms of environmental politics, the relationship between academic analysis and environmental politics, and reflects on the first thirty years of the journal, Environmental Politics. The book has two purposes. The first is to identify and discuss the key themes that have driven scholarship in the field of environmental politics over the last three decades, and to highlight how this has also led to …
The politics of the “post-political” contesting the diagnosis
The diagnosis of our present age as "post-political" have become commonplace among political theorists and other scholars. This diagnosis is critiqued here on the grounds that it offers an account of temporality and hegemony that are fundamentally misleading. While these authors' critical stance toward technocratic managerialism is warranted, the post-political diagnosis itself serves to narrow our political imagination and weakening our ability …
House by Daniel MacIvor, and
Ken Webster's Hyde Park Theatre serves as the central Texas conduit for small-scale literary plays, while artistic director Bonnie Collum's VORTEX is the Austin theatre with the highest national profile [ ]context matters here, and the significance of letting go of the sine qua non of theatre—a live performance and a live audience—also merits an assessment because of its consequences for scripted, live theatre as a viable form in an era of pandem…
Environmental Governmentality
This chapter asks critical thinkers and activist movements to concentrate their efforts on mapping out how and why the essential tasks of government today pivot on the arts of exercising power in techno-economic forms in both “the ecology” and “the economy” to protect the environment, maintain order, and attain the good life through more effective governmentalizing actions. In turn, they must determine if such actions either attain democratic act…
Environmental Science and Politics
This chapter examines the relation between environmental science and politics with regard to its implications for environmental values, expert advice, and the public understanding of science. Environmental thinkers have offered powerful critiques of modern science, but they have also relied on science both to understand environmental problems and to legitimate political responses to them. Ironically, both romantic critics of science and their rat…
Ecological Democracy and the Co-participation of Things
Is ecological democracy possible? If so, what would it entail? This chapter first reviews the literature based in deliberative democracy that proposes to extend communicative competence to non-humans, and then traces an alternative constructivist line of environmental political thinking from its beginnings in the strand of science and technology studies pioneered by Bruno Latour and others known as actor-network theory, through two actor-network …
Sacrifice and the Possibilities for Environmental Action
A key political-strategic question facing those aiming to foster environmental action is, When and how do environmental concerns resonate widely with citizens ? This question invites reflection upon the rhetoric of “sacrifice,” especially as often deployed within wealthy consumer societies. This rhetoric has become a political sticking point that often entangles environmental discourse in a false dichotomy between sacrifice and self-interest and …
Human Nature, Non-human Nature, and Needs
This chapter assesses the relevance of Frankfurt School critical theory for contemporary environmental political theory. Early Frankfurt School thinkers such as Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse developed a critique of instrumental rationality that provides a powerful framework for understanding the domination of nature in modernity, including an inability to articulate and defend human needs. Habermas subsequently attempts to mitigate this totaliz…
Capital, Environmental Degradation, and Economic Externalization
Neo-liberal principles of individualism, privatization, consumption, and unconstrained choice underpinning advanced capitalism are rapidly becoming the predominant strategy used in response to widespread environmental degradation and climate change. This essay describes and analyzes capital’s production of negative environmental externalities. Despite a slew of environmental legislation passed by governments the world over—a response to the deman…
Challenging the Human X Environment Framework
Challenges to the idea of the human raised in posthumanist inquiry present both problems and opportunities for understanding and organizing an environmental politics able to transform environmental degradation and address global climate change. This essay explains how arguments about human embodiment, symbiosis, and human embeddedness in social and material habitats have led to a reconceptualization of the human as well as the environment. Next, …
The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Political Theory
Set at the intersection of political theory and environmental politics, yet with broad engagement across the environmental social sciences and humanities, this Handbook illustrates, defines, and challenges the field of environmental political theory (EPT). Authors address canonical theorists and contemporary political and environmental problems with a diversity of theoretical approaches. The initial section focuses on EPT as a field of inquiry wi…
Cultivating Human and Non-human Capabilities for Mutual Flourishing
The commitment to human flourishing in various traditions of political thought has been an important bridge between anthropocentrically conceived political theory and the more encompassing concerns of biocentrism and eco-centrism in environmental political theory. This chapter explores how this commitment has been developed and applied by scholars drawing on the theory of human capabilities—or “capabilities theory”—to imagine and construct an env…
The greening of everyday life
The greening of everyday life' develops a distinctive new way of talking about environmental concerns in post-industrial society. It brings together several conceptual frameworks with a diversity of case studies and practical examples of efforts to orient everyday material practices toward greater sustainability. The volume builds upon internal criticisms of dominant strands of contemporary environmentalism in post-industrial societies, and devel…
Culture and Difference
Can non-Western traditions offer the West intellectual resources to re-conceptualize the human–nature relationship, and transform our ethical relationship to the natural world? This essay argues that there have been two kinds of approaches to this question: first, an almost purely ethical approach that is termed “civilizational,” which follows the logic inherent in biocentric critiques of Western anthropocentrism and instrumentalism; and second, …
Political Economy of the Greening of the State
Two different general claims have been made about large-scale political transformations produced by responses to environmental change. One is the claim that we are witnessing the potential emergence of a “green state,” where states internalize an ecological function as a core state imperative. Another is that we are undergoing a transition to an “environmental state.” The former claim thus envisages a radical transformation and its theory of the …
Global Environmental Justice and the Environmentalism of the Poor
There are an increasing number of ecological distribution conflicts around the world ultimately caused from the increase in the metabolism of the economy in terms of flows of energy and materials. There are resource extraction conflicts, transport conflicts, and also waste disposal conflicts. Therefore, there are many local complaints. Since the 1980s and 1990s there has been a globalizing environmental justice movement that in its strategy meeti…
Environmental Justice and the Anthropocene Meme
This essay examines the adoption of and the indifference to the term “Anthropocene” in diverse discourses addressing the urgency of climate change in the early twenty-first century. Through an analysis of keynote speeches, this essay argues that Anthropocene—a storytelling device invoking a pan-human species responsibility for the current climate crisis—is deployed widely within Euro-Australo-American academic environmental studies and environmen…
Sustainability— Post-sustainability— Unsustainability
Sustainability and sustainable development have become hegemonic frames shaping the ways in which national governments and international bodies conceptualize eco-political issues and devise related policy agendas. Yet, a consensus is emerging that this mainstream approach is unable to deliver the kind of structural change that is required if serious social conflicts and ecological collapse are to be prevented. This contribution explores why the p…
Response to Walter F. Baber and Robert V. Bartlett’s Review of Engaging the Everyday
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Royal Indian Navy Mutiny of 1946
This article argues for the importance of the Royal Indian Navy mutiny of 1946 in two key aspects of the transition towards Indian independence: civilian control over the Indian military, and a competition for power between Congress and communists that undermined Indian workers and their student allies. The article begins with an investigation of the mutiny drawing on three sources: a first-person account from a lead mutineer, a communist history…
Responsibility for Climate Change as a Structural Injustice
This chapter critically explores the political and moral challenges involved in understanding the harms of climate change as the product of structural injustices with a specific focus on political responsibility. The chapter stages a critical encounter between Iris Marion Young's account of political responsibility, and the debate among climate justice theorists on how to assign responsibility for mitigation and adaptation to citizens and states.…
Populism, paternalism and the state of environmentalism in the US
This article examines the challenges and opportunities faced by US environmental movements, in light of contemporary efforts to address climate change. The author identifies and describes two discourses, which he terms paternalism and populism. These need not describe distinct movements, but reflect differing impulses and ways of engaging the public that are available to environmentalists of various stripes. Discourses are explored through their …
The People” and Climate Justice
Today, populism is widely understood to entail an exclusionary conception of "the people" that threatens climate change action. While this threat is real, I argue that populism itself can be understood as a response to perceived exclusion and marginalization, making it possible to conceptualize a more heterogeneous conception of populism's "people." Examining two approaches to climate change action rooted in contrasting conceptions of the people …
Responsibility for Climate Change as a Structural Injustice
This chapter critically explores the political and moral challenges involved in understanding the harms of climate change as the product of structural injustices with a specific focus on political responsibility. The chapter stages a critical encounter between Iris Marion Young's account of political responsibility, and the debate among climate justice theorists on how to assign responsibility for mitigation and adaptation to citizens and states.…
Power and Truth in Science-Related Populism
Populism is often characterized as a rejection of scientific expertise and a key obstacle to societies’ ability to address the climate crisis today. I challenge this account, arguing for a more inclusive conception of populism and a more critical account of expertise. Consistent with this, I delineate a range of responses to the challenges of climate politics in populist times. In doing so, I have two primary aims: first, to highlight limitations…
Interpreting nature and politics in the history of Western thought
A number of environmentalists have argued that a gulf between nature, on the one hand, and culture or politics, on the other hand, is deeply rooted in Western thought. By contrast, other environmentalists have read the history of Western thought as replete with social and political understandings derived from particular (albeit incorrect) conceptions of nature. In this paper, I distil the essence of these two dominant ‐ and mutually exclusive ‐in…
Gifford Pinchot, John Muir, and the Boundaries of Politics in American Thought
Later interpreters have usually described Gifford Pinchot and John Muir as defining two different conceptions of nature: "conservationism" and "preservationism." While the difference between these conceptions is significant, it plays a much less central role in guiding practical proposals than is typically assumed. This article highlights the independent influence and importance of contrasting conceptions of politics, and of the appropriate divis…
The politics of the “post-political” contesting the diagnosis
The diagnosis of our present age as "post-political" have become commonplace among political theorists and other scholars. This diagnosis is critiqued here on the grounds that it offers an account of temporality and hegemony that are fundamentally misleading. While these authors' critical stance toward technocratic managerialism is warranted, the post-political diagnosis itself serves to narrow our political imagination and weakening our ability …
The Concept of Private Property and the Limits of the Environmental Imagination
An absolutist concept of property has the power to shape and constrain the public imagination. Libertarian theorists normatively embrace this concept. Yet its influence extends far beyond these proponents, shaping the views of an otherwise diverse array of theorists and activists. This limits the ability of environmentalists, among others, to respond coherently to challenges from property rights advocates in the U.S. I sketch an alternative conce…
We have never been liberal
The shifting relationship between environmental political theorists and liberalism is examined, moving from a total critique to an increasingly nuanced engagement. The argument here is neither for nor against the possibility of ‘greening' liberalism per se. Instead, it is argued that the preoccupation with ‘liberalism' in this context is a category mistake based upon the reification of liberalism as not just a political philosophy, but a characte…
The Landscape of Reform
The Landscape of Reform: Civic Pragmatism and Environmental Thought in America. By Ben A. Minteer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. 272p. $28.00. Accounts of the history of American environmental thought typically characterize it as riven by a divide between a utilitarian preoccupation with “use” and a more romantic focus on “preservation.” Many contemporary environmental philosophers have fixated upon a similar debate between “anthropocentrism” a…
Rights To Life? On Nature, Property and Biotechnology
Continuities and changes; voices and silences
The thirtieth anniversary is an opportunity to take stock of Environmental Politics. To consider where the journal and – by extension – the academic study of environmental politics should go, we must have insight into where it has been. We aim to generate conversation about three questions. The first asks who publishes in the journal – whose voices are prominent and whose are missing – and in what ways this has changed over time. The second asks …
Trajectories in environmental politics
This book explores the dominant framings and paradigms of environmental politics, the relationship between academic analysis and environmental politics, and reflects on the first thirty years of the journal, Environmental Politics. The book has two purposes. The first is to identify and discuss the key themes that have driven scholarship in the field of environmental politics over the last three decades, and to highlight how this has also led to …
The Royal Indian Navy Mutiny of 1946
This article argues for the importance of the Royal Indian Navy mutiny of 1946 in two key aspects of the transition towards Indian independence: civilian control over the Indian military, and a competition for power between Congress and communists that undermined Indian workers and their student allies. The article begins with an investigation of the mutiny drawing on three sources: a first-person account from a lead mutineer, a communist history…
The Unseeing Eye
Gifford Pinchot, John Muir, and the Boundaries of Politics in American Thought
Later interpreters have usually described Gifford Pinchot and John Muir as defining two different conceptions of nature: "conservationism" and "preservationism." While the difference between these conceptions is significant, it plays a much less central role in guiding practical proposals than is typically assumed. This article highlights the independent influence and importance of contrasting conceptions of politics, and of the appropriate divis…
Machiavelli, Leonardo, and the Science of Power . Roger D. Masters
Interpreting nature and politics in the history of Western thought
A number of environmentalists have argued that a gulf between nature, on the one hand, and culture or politics, on the other hand, is deeply rooted in Western thought. By contrast, other environmentalists have read the history of Western thought as replete with social and political understandings derived from particular (albeit incorrect) conceptions of nature. In this paper, I distil the essence of these two dominant ‐ and mutually exclusive ‐in…
Rights To Life? On Nature, Property and Biotechnology
Political Nature
Concern over environmental problems is prompting us to reexamine established thinking about society and politics. The challenge is to find a way for the public's concern for the environment to become more integral to social, economic, and political decision making. Two interpretations have dominated Western portrayals of the nature-politics relationship, what John Meyer calls the dualist and the derivative. The dualist account holds that politics…
The Landscape of Reform
The Landscape of Reform: Civic Pragmatism and Environmental Thought in America. By Ben A. Minteer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. 272p. $28.00. Accounts of the history of American environmental thought typically characterize it as riven by a divide between a utilitarian preoccupation with “use” and a more romantic focus on “preservation.” Many contemporary environmental philosophers have fixated upon a similar debate between “anthropocentrism” a…
Populism, paternalism and the state of environmentalism in the US
This article examines the challenges and opportunities faced by US environmental movements, in light of contemporary efforts to address climate change. The author identifies and describes two discourses, which he terms paternalism and populism. These need not describe distinct movements, but reflect differing impulses and ways of engaging the public that are available to environmentalists of various stripes. Discourses are explored through their …
The Concept of Private Property and the Limits of the Environmental Imagination
An absolutist concept of property has the power to shape and constrain the public imagination. Libertarian theorists normatively embrace this concept. Yet its influence extends far beyond these proponents, shaping the views of an otherwise diverse array of theorists and activists. This limits the ability of environmentalists, among others, to respond coherently to challenges from property rights advocates in the U.S. I sketch an alternative conce…
Hypocrisy, Nimby, and the Politics of Everybody's Backyard
The environmental politics of sacrifice
The idea of sacrifice is the unspoken issue of environmental politics. Politicians, the media, and many environmentalists assume that well-off populations won't make sacrifices now for future environmental benefits and won't change their patterns and perceptions of consumption to make ecological room for the world's three billion or so poor eager to improve their standard of living. The Environmental Politics of Sacrifice challenges these assumpt…
We have never been liberal
The shifting relationship between environmental political theorists and liberalism is examined, moving from a total critique to an increasingly nuanced engagement. The argument here is neither for nor against the possibility of ‘greening' liberalism per se. Instead, it is argued that the preoccupation with ‘liberalism' in this context is a category mistake based upon the reification of liberalism as not just a political philosophy, but a characte…
Environmental Governmentality
This chapter asks critical thinkers and activist movements to concentrate their efforts on mapping out how and why the essential tasks of government today pivot on the arts of exercising power in techno-economic forms in both “the ecology” and “the economy” to protect the environment, maintain order, and attain the good life through more effective governmentalizing actions. In turn, they must determine if such actions either attain democratic act…
Environmental Science and Politics
This chapter examines the relation between environmental science and politics with regard to its implications for environmental values, expert advice, and the public understanding of science. Environmental thinkers have offered powerful critiques of modern science, but they have also relied on science both to understand environmental problems and to legitimate political responses to them. Ironically, both romantic critics of science and their rat…
Ecological Democracy and the Co-participation of Things
Is ecological democracy possible? If so, what would it entail? This chapter first reviews the literature based in deliberative democracy that proposes to extend communicative competence to non-humans, and then traces an alternative constructivist line of environmental political thinking from its beginnings in the strand of science and technology studies pioneered by Bruno Latour and others known as actor-network theory, through two actor-network …
Sacrifice and the Possibilities for Environmental Action
A key political-strategic question facing those aiming to foster environmental action is, When and how do environmental concerns resonate widely with citizens ? This question invites reflection upon the rhetoric of “sacrifice,” especially as often deployed within wealthy consumer societies. This rhetoric has become a political sticking point that often entangles environmental discourse in a false dichotomy between sacrifice and self-interest and …
Human Nature, Non-human Nature, and Needs
This chapter assesses the relevance of Frankfurt School critical theory for contemporary environmental political theory. Early Frankfurt School thinkers such as Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse developed a critique of instrumental rationality that provides a powerful framework for understanding the domination of nature in modernity, including an inability to articulate and defend human needs. Habermas subsequently attempts to mitigate this totaliz…
Capital, Environmental Degradation, and Economic Externalization
Neo-liberal principles of individualism, privatization, consumption, and unconstrained choice underpinning advanced capitalism are rapidly becoming the predominant strategy used in response to widespread environmental degradation and climate change. This essay describes and analyzes capital’s production of negative environmental externalities. Despite a slew of environmental legislation passed by governments the world over—a response to the deman…
Challenging the Human X Environment Framework
Challenges to the idea of the human raised in posthumanist inquiry present both problems and opportunities for understanding and organizing an environmental politics able to transform environmental degradation and address global climate change. This essay explains how arguments about human embodiment, symbiosis, and human embeddedness in social and material habitats have led to a reconceptualization of the human as well as the environment. Next, …
The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Political Theory
Set at the intersection of political theory and environmental politics, yet with broad engagement across the environmental social sciences and humanities, this Handbook illustrates, defines, and challenges the field of environmental political theory (EPT). Authors address canonical theorists and contemporary political and environmental problems with a diversity of theoretical approaches. The initial section focuses on EPT as a field of inquiry wi…
Cultivating Human and Non-human Capabilities for Mutual Flourishing
The commitment to human flourishing in various traditions of political thought has been an important bridge between anthropocentrically conceived political theory and the more encompassing concerns of biocentrism and eco-centrism in environmental political theory. This chapter explores how this commitment has been developed and applied by scholars drawing on the theory of human capabilities—or “capabilities theory”—to imagine and construct an env…
The greening of everyday life
The greening of everyday life' develops a distinctive new way of talking about environmental concerns in post-industrial society. It brings together several conceptual frameworks with a diversity of case studies and practical examples of efforts to orient everyday material practices toward greater sustainability. The volume builds upon internal criticisms of dominant strands of contemporary environmentalism in post-industrial societies, and devel…
Culture and Difference
Can non-Western traditions offer the West intellectual resources to re-conceptualize the human–nature relationship, and transform our ethical relationship to the natural world? This essay argues that there have been two kinds of approaches to this question: first, an almost purely ethical approach that is termed “civilizational,” which follows the logic inherent in biocentric critiques of Western anthropocentrism and instrumentalism; and second, …
Political Economy of the Greening of the State
Two different general claims have been made about large-scale political transformations produced by responses to environmental change. One is the claim that we are witnessing the potential emergence of a “green state,” where states internalize an ecological function as a core state imperative. Another is that we are undergoing a transition to an “environmental state.” The former claim thus envisages a radical transformation and its theory of the …
Global Environmental Justice and the Environmentalism of the Poor
There are an increasing number of ecological distribution conflicts around the world ultimately caused from the increase in the metabolism of the economy in terms of flows of energy and materials. There are resource extraction conflicts, transport conflicts, and also waste disposal conflicts. Therefore, there are many local complaints. Since the 1980s and 1990s there has been a globalizing environmental justice movement that in its strategy meeti…
Law (34 obras) · Political science (34 obras) · Politics (33 obras) · Sociology (29 obras) · Environmental ethics (27 obras) · Epistemology (19 obras) · Philosophy (18 obras) · Environmental Philosophy and Ethics (12 obras) · Social science (12 obras) · Political economy (11 obras)