A Political Ecology of Modernist Resistance: Turning the Tide on Ecomodernism and Ecofascism in the New Climatic Regime

Abstract

This article claims that the material and epistemic disruption of climate and ecological collapse engenders feedbacks of ecomodern and ecofascist resistance that undercut democratic capacities for mitigation and adaptation (IPCC 2022). Moreover, that opposing these positions engender a second-order adversarial feedback, which further hampers climate action. Analyzing this modernist resistance in an “ecology of practices” (Stengers 2005) shows it to occur in defence of a modern timespace and on behalf of affordances of Whiteness. To mitigate this resistance, the article concludes by calling for a ‘politics of life’ that decentres humanistic agency as the locus of historical progress and territorial integrity by emphasizing habitability in an emergent field of environmental relations.