Sustainability and Social Justice
Document Type
Article
Abstract
In the Virocene epoch, global pandemics such as COVID-19 disrupt the world order organized by capitalism and racial privilege, making clear the unsustainability of ‘normal’ ways of organizing both society and nature. Despite its failure to address these disruptions, the existing capitalist-racist system attempts to reproduce itself, posing greater risks of disease, inequalities, and injustice to the most vulnerable human and nonhuman populations. The Virocene epoch makes these workings visible, and challenges both hegemonic and counterhegemonic ways of organizing human-nature relations. Political ecology requires new emancipatory theoretical-political strategies firmly grounded in a theory of justice that embodies social and ecological rights in order to imaginatively produce new ways to counter such social and ecological crises arising from the global process of capitalism and viral activities. To this end, political ecology must develop a universal perspective on the justice-rights-power nexus with an explicit moral basis to enhance its emancipatory praxis against the globalizing challenges of the Virocene, without reproducing existing vulnerabilities and without dismissing hegemonic and counter-hegemonic narratives in the name of otherness, difference, universalism or sameness. In this article, I reconfigure the justice-rights-power nexus to dismantle oppression and injustice in pursuit of regenerative solutions. I chart an alternate ‘multispecies theory of justice’ building upon love as an embodiment of the moral foundations for critical multispecies justice praxis, which produces another world of diverse, interconnected communities committed to social and ecological wellbeing. The ‘Lovecene’ is an aspirational planetary-order shaped by multispecies (human and non-human) equality and justice that transcends the anthropocentricism of current periodizations of planetary-level social and ecological change. It attempts to overcome the limitations of many political-ecological theories of justice centered on notions of ‘right order’, ‘fairness’, ‘distribution’, and ‘opportunities and capabilities’, thereby successfully addressing the sociological and ecological vulnerabilities of the Virocene.
Publication Title
Journal of Political Ecology
Publication Date
1-1-2020
Volume
27
Issue
1
First Page
685
Last Page
731
ISSN
1073-0451
DOI
10.2458/V27I1.23816
Keywords
capitalism, pandemic, political economy of health, racism, Virocene, vulnerability
Repository Citation
Fernando, Jude, "From the Virocene to the Lovecene Epoch: Multispecies Justice as Critical Praxis for Virocene Disruptions and Vulnerabilities" (2020). Sustainability and Social Justice. 144.
https://commons.clarku.edu/faculty_idce/144
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.