How can the debate on the environmental crisis be re-politicized? Akeel Bilgrami argues in favor of anti-capitalist, radically cooperative perspectives.

Keynote lecture from the State of Nature in India conference, August 23-25, 2018

The term “Anthropocene” emphasizes the ramifications of human interventions into the Earth system, but as philosopher Akeel Bilgrami points out, the term has its conceptual shortcomings. It has a tendency to hide the power asymmetries between groups of people and obscures the fact that the burden of responsibility is not distributed equally. From this vantage point, Bilgrami stresses the importance of thinking critically about the interdependence between global capitalism, ecology and human societies, rather than merely analyzing the shifting relations between humans and nature, in order to effectively re-politicize debates around the current environmental crisis. Drawing on wider intellectual history, Bilgrami first discusses the connection between the rationality of capitalism, political liberalism, and societal alienation and secondly argues for a complete terminus of capitalist systems.