Ecological and related health crises as symptoms of “wrong life”: Disturbance, reflection and cognitive transformation

Beyond its distinct geological character, the Anthropocene is also a lived social reality, one whose properties are actively processed and internalized by its members in the form of “reflections from damaged life” (Adorno in Minima Moralia: Reflections from damaged life. Verso, London, 2005). The more immediate its destructive tendencies become, the more anthropocentric climate change disturbs the process of equilibration, prompting a need for reassurance that our ontological security is not threatened by powerful, unstoppable forces. Dewey (The later works. Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, pp. 105, 1984) draws attention to the importance of not neglecting the function of this need in “creating ends or consequences” that connect intimately with affectivities embedded deep in the subject and exert a powerful influence over cognitive reasoning. Ultimately, it is the “physical moment” of the experience of ecological collapse that “tells our knowledge that [this] suffering ought not to be, that things should be different” (Adorno in Negative dialectics. Routledge, London, p. 203, 1973), prompting a need to change age-old environmental practices and a desire to think beyond “the given” towards better potentialities. This chapter notes how emerging formulations of environmental and related health crises, as symptoms of ‘wrong life’, provoke new thinking about the moral and political promises of cosmopolitan Europe and the need to extend justice relations to non-human others. Even though this contribution does not deliver a clarification of greentopia, it provides a context, a meta-narrative and political proposals for a real greentopia.