ABSTRACT
Social and political theory has recently witnessed a sustained turn to ‘materiality’ or ‘ontology’. It is not a return to old forms of materialism after the post-modernist season. Its targets are indeed the weaknesses of both constructionism and realism, as based on a dualistic thinking which is deemed theoretically untenable and inadequate to techno-scientific advancement and global environmental change. A feature of this theoretical wave is the case for the mutual constitution of knowledge and reality, language and matter, and for the equal agential power of human and nonhuman entities. To date there has been no systematic inquiry into the implications of the material turn for Environmental Political Theory. This chapter contributes to this endeavour. Of special relevance for environmental political theory are the non-dominative implications for socio-environmental relations that are usually drawn from non-dualistic standpoints. I will reflect on the extent to which such assumptions are warranted, by engaging with emergent forms of interaction with the environment, from carbon accounting to geoengineering, as increasingly characterizing the present phase of the Anthropocene, and entwined with the notion itself. As I will seek to show, the relationship between non-dualism and socio-environmental exploitation is more entangled than often assumed within the material turn.
