Ecological subjectivities, responsibilities, and agency

This Chapter argues for the centrality of ontological questions to analyses of climate change scepticism: questions about ‘who do we think we are?’, uttered provocatively and insistently to contest widespread presumptuous actions in the affluent world that attest to blithe assumptions that ‘we’ are entitled to consume and pollute as we will. With its origins in twenty-first century (mostly white) western feminist ecological thinking, the analysis focuses on practices of ‘we-saying’ to urge deconstructing a tacit belief in human sameness to move toward recognizing the scope and limits – indeed the situatedness – of even the very best ‘factual’ knowledge, urging that these factors matter not just in acquiring knowledge, but in understanding the world in which it claims pertinence.