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This commentary responds to the following article previously published on the Journal and Business Ethics: 'Baudoin, L., Arenas, D. "Everyone Has a Truth": Forms of Ecological Embeddedness in an Interorganizational Context. J Bus Ethics 185, 263–280 (2023)'. Our commentary offers a rejoinder to Baudoin's and Arenas' conclusion that environmental engagement within organizations is a plural field within which many different sub-positions may be discerned. In rejoining their conclusion, our commentary searches for greater nuance in the portrayal of engagement for social and ecological transition in the workplace. This is done in two steps: first, by 'softening' categories that conceal as much as they reveal: like Olin Wright's tripartition of rupture, interstice and reform as distinct forms such engagement might take. Second, by undertaking a close reading of the experience of an activist undertaking training on environmental issues, who has previously left a job with a French car manufacturer. In so doing, we discern the following strategies co-existing simultaneously in this person's story: an existential quest to frame his choices, the decision to become a broker of scientific information concerning human-made climate change to other professionals, and a state of 'suspension' in moving from individual consciousness raising to the initiation of joint action with others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the epistemological dimensions of the term "technocratic paradigm" which is used by Francis in Laudato Si' and Laudate Deum to describe our relationship with technology, and through it, with Creation; the Pope considers this attitude as the human roots of the ecological crisis. The article begins expounding the very concept of technocratic paradigm as it is presented by the Pontiff in the abovementioned documents; it has been frequently gone under the radar of most of the comments written about the encyclical. The article underlines its cognoscitive dimensions because it argues that those are de origin of the disordering of the relationship between humankind and the environment. The article presents also technology as a form of knowledge, to show more clearly the epistemological biases embedded in the technocratic paradigm and, at the same time, shows how the Pope's position is very close to some of the current philosophical and theological analysis of technology. Finally, it will show the ways to overcome these biases, as proposed by Francis, in order to build a sound relationship with technology that can lead us to care about our Common Home, as the Pontiff and contemporary environmentalist in general, aspire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores three different forms of negotiation implemented by environmentalist engineers between their professional work and their environmental activism. These engineers, members of environmentalist organizations, appropriate in different ways this conceptual professional boundary that separates and opposes the social worlds of engineering and activism. The article draws from narrative interviews with 50 environmentalist engineers that focused on the dynamics of these negotiations and their effects on biographical trajectories. The process of conforming, shifting or overstepping the boundary between profession and activism is linked to the framing of environmental causes. The precarious balances these engineers strike between work and activism thus depend on three factors: the emergence (or not) of a professional reflexivity, the adoption (or not) of a political interpretation and the reaction of hierarchical superiors and company management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wendell Berry is a poet, fiction-writer, essayist, and environmental activist. Recent publications include The Art of Loading Brush, Stand by Me, and two volumes of essays in the Library of [...]

We explore the global fossil fuel divestment movement to show how climate activists worked to stigmatize the fossil fuel industry using analogy. In doing so, we develop a model that illustrates how constructing a "moral dualism" is central to stigmatizing an organizational category. This involves concurrently establishing "stigmatizers" (ingroup) as morally superior and amplifying the deviancy of the fossil fuel industry (outgroup), both in relation to analogical contexts. Stigmatizers strategically employed two types of analogy: "deep" and "surface." Deep analogies produce emotive power, facilitating the moralization of the ingroup through the transfer of affective meanings from a source context to a target domain. Surface analogies generate causal power to inform wider audiences of the target's deviance through association with already-stigmatized organizational categories. Analogical power underpinning the morally dualistic nature of stigmatization can therefore empower fringe actors to stigmatize an incumbent as they appropriate meanings from analogical source domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through regenerative environmentalism, the international ecoproject scene aims to re-create human-environment relations. To do so, eco-activists reject the dominant narrative of individuation that underlies capitalist resource extraction in favor of a notion of relationality that collaboratively cocreates all life. In Greece, as elsewhere, eco-activists assert that such regeneration of relationality necessitates personal transformation. Some of them aim to raise cognitive awareness of this situatedness through embodied practices of sound healing. Framed by integrative medicine and cross-cultural transcendental spirituality, such therapeutic employment of sound aims to restore and sustain an equilibrium of energy flow. I experientially explore two specific sound-healing practices, vowel meditation and gong therapy, to show how raising awareness of affect and experiencing the relational self beyond individuation inspires open-ended personal transformation. Employed for ecosocial change, such self-transformational efforts at once reproduce what they seek to overcome and challenge dominant narratives of duality and separation. As regenerative eco-activists employ a politics of the self for a politics of belonging, they render the notion of relationality political in ontological terms and produce an affective politics of sound. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the discussion on encompassing the entire spectrum of philosophy, politics and critique of our times. Topics include mantra of activists and academics, populists and peasants, environmentalists and evangelists; and the Charter of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights is subject to the same trenchant critique of decolonial humanism.

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Some environmentalist writers argue human flourishing depends on rich engagement with wild ecosystems and biodiversity, such that inadequate conservation would undermine our prospects for happiness. To succeed, arguments of this kind must specify a connection between flourishing and ecological engagement that can accommodate happiness' diverse manifestations while also being sufficiently particular to require well-protected ecosystems. I argue these conditions cannot both be met. It is true that nature enriches our lives, that much of its value comes from engagement with wilderness and biodiversity, and that conservation often is a sound investment. But humans can flourish in many ways that do not involve rich relationships with nature, and meaningful ecological engagement can occur even in degraded and urbanized environments. By acknowledging these possibilities, conservationists can advocate for nature without pigeonholing themselves as proselytes for a narrow conception of the good life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crisis and care have been paired as complementary terms. The dialectical relationship invests itself within and across planetary biomes that struggle to thrive. China is a land of ancient heritage and abundant rivers, as well as a drive to modernize through hydropower and electricity. This essay focuses on the important case of the Nu River controversy to add to the corpus of care and crisis discourse in environmental communication. This example requires a move outside the over-determination of spaces that involve episodes of immediate stories of protracted engagement. In a study of how Chinese ENGOs and environmentalists fought hard in a 13-year-long battle to save China's last natural river, I illustrate China's ways of working through assertions of crisis, opposition to care, and an outcome opened by new care strategies for creating consensus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic growth is a major force in the destruction of the natural world. Rainforests are leveled to make way for soybean plantations. The atmosphere is overheated by pollution from the [...]

This chapter is a sociologist's personal reflection. In it, she recognizes that her mother, a woman from rural Puerto Rico with limited formal education, was actually an informed environmentalist. She taught her children the things she learned growing up as one of the older girls among 11 siblings from a poor family. Her mother's family members knew a great deal about the environment, for example, how to grow healthy, edible and useful plants in or near the home; and, how -- for reasons that seemed implicit to her, not to consume too much sugar in the daily diet. The author and her siblings were taught basic environmental principles through their mother's shopping and meal preparation in the South Bronx and visits to family members in Puerto Rico. She recalls that her mother knew the importance of fresh produce, something the author only learned through formal education, and that she was an amazing cook. Nothing was wasted and everything tasted better than just good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]