ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Hannah Arendts political thought and particularly her notion of worldlessness or world alienation. It explores the political implications of the concept of the ecological planet. It also explores Arendts understanding of the promise of politics and the problem of world alienation. Hannah Arendt famously characterized her task as a political theorist with the injunction to think what we are doing. The chapter argues that the Arendtian theoretical framework suggests that environmental politics in its currently predominant geopolitical form fails to challenge the wordless mentality that is the soil in which an ecologically destructive civilization grows best. However, it concludes that while Arendt helps us understand what is at stake in the currently unfolding geopolitics of ecology, any more world-regarding mode of ecological politics would challenge the sharp distinction between nature and the human world that is thematized throughout Arendts work.
