The Living Oikos : Towards an Ecological Politics of Dependence

This book examines ecological practice through an approach that challenges dominant anthropocentric and ecocentric perspectives in environmental political theory.

This book examines ecological practice through an approach that challenges dominant anthropocentric and ecocentric perspectives in environmental political theory. The work argues that different mainstream approaches tend to objectify the ecological by treating it as a uniform set of behaviors or techniques detached from its social contexts, based on dualistic assumptions. Drawing on an ethnographic case study of the Chilean island of Chiloé, the book explores the ecological as an embedded practice in which attachment, body and sociability play a critical role. The theoretical framework combines insights from authors such as Elinor Ostrom, Pedro Morandé, Robert Spaemann, Bruno Latour, strands of feminist theory and phenomenology, and especially Alasdair MacIntyre’s reflections on vulnerability and dependence. The central thesis is that ecological practice is sustained by a community ethos of acknowledged dependence, in which vulnerability and need provide reasons to care and overcome instrumental rationality. By articulating the concepts of care, flourishing, limits and belonging, the book outlines a view of communities of everyday ecological practice that recovers the experience of the living as crucial for ecological politics at the local scale and beyond.