The Ecology Politic

A compelling proposal for new international law and institutions to address the planetary crisis that improves biodiversity protection, supports Indigenous peoples, and prevents catastrophic climate change.


In The Ecology Politic, Anthony Burke and Stefanie Fishel contend that the roots of our planetary crisis lie in the modern state: in its destructive entanglement with capitalism and its colonial legacies of extraction and oppression. This, in turn, has shaped global governance and international law, as they continue to fail to curb global heating, deforestation, and extinction. In a far-reaching critique of the foundational political theory of the modern state—the Body-Politic—the authors insist that nothing less than a radically different model of the polity—an Ecology Politic—is needed if we are to escape this impasse.

Burke and Fishel argue that the international rule of law enacts a sovereign ban of nature that appropriates nonhuman lives for profit and use while denying them political and legal standing. We fail because we rely on the very institutions, worldviews, and systems that generated the crisis to solve it. The authors reconsider political power, agency, scale, and democracy in the Anthropocene and assert a biospheric ethic that values the entangled planetary structure of matter, energy, and life. Further, they argue for more-than-human beings to be represented in an ecological democracy that flows across borders. In short, they imagine a polity whose fundamental purpose is to protect planetary ecosystems and nurture interlocking systems of social and ecological justice.Introduction

1 The Sovereign Ban of Nature
Politics, Law, and Ecology after the Holocene

THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS

2 The Human Body Politic
State, Territory, and Nonhuman

3 Power After Power
Ecology, Thing-Systems, and Responsibility

4 Another Political Animal
Nonhuman Presence and Ecological Democracy

POWER, ECOLOGY, AND LAW

5 Blue Screen Biosphere
The Absent Presence of Biodiversity in International Law

6 Posthuman Political Scale
Governing Climate Between Biome and Planet

7 Towards a Multispecies Contract
Human and Ecological Justice

CONCLUSION
8 The Ecology Politic
A Polity for the Earth“Burke and Fishel have written the most thoroughgoing ecological revisioning of the social contract I have ever read. If only Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau and their ilk had started here!”
—Robyn Eckersley, Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor in Political Science, University of Melbourne

“This engaging book questions extractivism, the nation-state, and sovereignty to develop a theory of collective responsibility that will be critical for shaping transformative governance and advancing a just society for humans and nonhumans.”
—Joyeeta Gupta, Distinguished Professor in Climate Justice, Sustainability, and Global Constitutionalism, University of Amsterdam

“The Ecology Politic thoroughly exposes the ecological failings of contemporary politics and the ideas that support it. This landmark contribution to environmental political theory shows how to radically reimagine politics, democracy, and justice along multispecies and ecological lines.”
—John S. Dryzek, Distinguished Professor, University of Canberra; author of The Politics of the Earth

“[The Ecology Politic] is a necessary component of any future environmental ethics.”
—Choice

“Burke and Fishel’s book The Ecology Politic inhabits a productive and nuanced space between theory and practice which acknowledges the limits of the Anthropocene concept but also its generative potential.”
—Environmental PoliticsAnthony Burke is Professor of Environmental Politics and International Relations at UNSW, Australia. His books include Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence, Uranium, and Institutionalizing Multispecies Justice.
Stefanie Fishel is Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia. She is the author of The Microbial State, Environmentalism after Humanism, and Poe and the Microbiome.