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Ingalls, Kellen

English

2008

MA

In light of the scientific evidence indicating a sustainability and climate crisis, the role of the ecologist is due for a radical shift. Environmentalism has become an important movement in our society, acting as a check on consumer-driven environmental destruction. However, the stakes have risen as we begin to understand more fully what our age of industrialism has done to the chemical composition of the atmosphere, causing a global heating trend that threatens to drastically alter the world's ability to sustain human, animal, and plant life. Because the nature of the threat is different today than it was several decades ago, our methods of dealing with our environmental problems are in need of revision. When we look to the evidence gathered and published in recent years, and to its clear conclusions, it becomes obvious that our contemporary challenges must be met with innovation and an enthusiasm for the possibility of change. The time for alarm as a means of motivation has passed, and we must focus instead on the possibility for positive change and innovation. By no means does that suggest that we should simply force a happy outlook on the situation regardless of reality. How then can positive and meaningful change actually occur in the context of the various fields of ecology that are so often politicized and confused? This is where the ontology of Alain Badiou becomes useful. Badiou's focus on effective breaks from the status quo makes his ontological philosophy an excellent source of operation when dealing with complex issues such as global warming. As beneficiaries of the status quo clash with the slighted and uncounted, Badiou's ontology guides us to a non-dogmatic and non-ideological way of looking at how change for those uncounted members is possible. Within the realms of politics, science, art, and love, Badiou describes how an adherence to a wholly subjective truth or innovation may provide the conditions necessary for an event, or a point at which the old way of being is no longer possible. There are elements of this idea in already existing environmental work, but Badiou's direct ontology of possibility may be of great use to the future work of those working towards innovative solutions to our global challenge.