Sustainability and the Politics of Materialist Action

Abstract

Sustainable materialist movements have a very particular, and vital, understanding of the meaning and practice of sustainability. Activists are actively trying to replace a politics of separation with one of immersion and flow, a politics of the domination of nature with one that recognizes human beings as animals in embedded material relationships with ecosystems and the non-human realm. A key focus is the importance of ethically informed material action that embodies such sustainable practice. One core argument is that sustainable materialist action offers a substantive response to the misplaced critiques of the ‘apolitical’ or ‘post-political’ nature of such materialist-focused environmental and social movements.