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Various analyses show that right-wing populist parties (RWP) tend to be sceptical of climate science and policy. This points to a blank space in the dominant analyses of populism: their blindness towards society-nature relations. This paper aims to develop an approach grounded in Cultural Political Economy (CPE) that can be used to decipher the mediation of RWP within the context of economic, political, and cultural developments as well as society–nature relations. Against this background, the argument is developed that RWP is concerned not only with countering migration and processes of societal liberalisation, but also with defending an existing way of life that is firmly rooted in the destructive appropriation of nature. As a current of right-wing politics, RWP defends the imperial mode of living by expressing scepticism towards the existence of anthropogenic climate change. The paper contributes to a better understanding of the political economy of RWP by linking the dimensions of social domination with the appropriation of nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of climate change, social theory has been subject to a surge of new materialist and posthuman approaches that reconfigure ontology and politics beyond the modern nature/culture binary which the Anthropocene has rendered untenable. But their (re-)turn to ontological speculation brackets the socio-epistemic situatedness and productivity of the way we think nature and its relationship to society. This paper reads Niklas Luhmann's systems theory as a posthuman perspective that can address the epistemological blind spot of materialist-ecological thought. Luhmann's ecology aligns with the former on the posthuman framing of shaping power, the productivity of an environmental outside that remains unknown, and the call for political modesty which follows. On the other hand, Luhmann's theory poses a critical challenge to materialist-ecological thought: the society/environment binary is here constitutively necessary, and its mapping onto a nature/culture binary functionally advantageous for subjects and social systems because it offers opportunities for complexity-reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Plastic pollution is a global phenomenon offering a vivid illustration of the scale of anthropic impacts on the environment, a key characteristic in defining the Anthropocene. Plastic pollution not only contributes to the current climate crisis but is also accentuated by extreme events caused by climate change. The scale and omnipresence of the issue of plastic pollution makes it a relevant object of study for archaeologists, as well as an object of concern for heritage and archaeological sites marked by plastic pollution. In this paper, I advocate for an archaeological consideration of plastic pollution, by exploring plastics as artefacts (through visual analysis and archaeological science), as chronological markers in the stratigraphy and eventually as components of waste landscapes. While the issue of plastic pollution can be studied archaeologically, I argue that it must be considered by archaeologists, especially as natural and cultural heritage sites are threatened by the presence of plastic pollution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]