Environmental Alienation

Abstract

Peter Dickens’s contribution to social and environmental studies has been very wide ranging and its influence felt in quite diverse disciplines and sites of political engagement. I am very aware, in offering this tribute to his work, of the richness of this legacy, and how little justice I can do to its full scope here. What lies at the core of it, however, has been a set of arguments that I myself have found particularly interesting and admirable, and this has been his lucid and nuanced account of the dialectics of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ nature. This, of course, has its fundamental roots in Marxism, but it has been developed by Dickens in ways that bring out the range of tensions and unresolved dimensions in the Marxist offering, particularly as this unfolds from early to later work. In this connection, Dickens is critical of the idea of human nature or ‘species being’ in the early work as lending itself to an overly idealised and essentialist position, and endorses the more equivocal or relativist position of the later argument, with its implication that human nature is ‘under determined’. This is a position with which I am in broad agreement (although, as will emerge from what I have to say here, I am perhaps less certain than Dickens is that the critical-normative and the more relativist understandings can be reconciled). I also, like others, very much value Dickens’s important and eloquently formulated distinction between ‘constructing’ and ‘construing’ nature and the Critical Realist insights this lends on the limits and fallibility of human interaction with, and conceptualisation of, external nature. Which brings me to the focus of my discussion here, which will be on a concept that has been central to Dickens’s sociology and environmental ethics, that, namely, of alienation, and specifically alienation as applied to our relations with ‘external’ nature and the non-human (what I shall refer to in short as ‘environmental alienation’).