Philosopher Nancy Fraser delivered the Senior Loeb Scholar Lecture, “Against the Environmentalism of the Rich,” at Harvard University’s Piper Auditorium on Wednesday.
The emeritus professor at the New School for Social Research has made a career out of radical critiques of capitalism. The students, scholars and community members in attendance would have been well prepared for the general trajectory of Fraser’s argument by her body of work, which includes “Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet – and What We Can Do About It.”
The lecture took as its point of departure observations about the growth of climate change denialism.
The source of its intractability, Fraser argued, was a failure to identify the cause of nature’s exploitation and ruination: capitalism, an economic model that treats Nature (with a capital “N”) as an infinite resource and provides cover for its infinite exploitation. The result is our deep inequity in politics, as the rich benefit and the poor suffer the consequences of this exploitation, and environmental catastrophe at a global level.
Through a mix of philosophical, theoretical and historical arguments, Fraser examined the genesis of environmentalism as a movement and its various incarnations, which are bad at diagnosing and worse at responding to the environmental crises of our present moment.
The “environmentalism of the rich,” highlighted in the title of the talk, came in for a particularly thorough drubbing.
Fraser explained the phrase in different ways. It refers to single-issue environmentalism (“Save the whales!”) that privileges a part of nature over the whole ecosystem. It also refers to the tendency to romanticize nature, mythologizing concepts such as “wilderness” to justify decisions like, say, forbidding indigenous peoples to hunt on their own traditional lands to preserve certain ideals of nature in the minds of industrialized elites.
Significantly, the “environmentalism of the rich” is not at all an ideology restricted to the rich. The cascading influence of money and power exports the ideas of single-issue and romanticized environmentalisms to everyone, including the marginalized social, economic, sexual and racial communities who disproportionately suffer its consequences. Fraser’s critique maintains her trademark radicalism by calling for a revolution in politics and economics, in addition to challenging dominant currents in environmentalism.
The talk was part of a series of lectures organized by Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. A recording of Fraser’s talk is available at the event page. To learn about future lectures in the series, free and open to the public, visit the graduate school’s event calendar.
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