Nature Strikes Back!

Thinking the asymmetry of the Human Relationship to Planet Earth

Call for Papers for a Special Issue of Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics

Guest Editors:
Vincent Blok (Wageningen University)
Guido Ruivenkamp (Wageningen University)
Pieter Lemmens (Radboud University)

Context and Aims

Agriculture is one of the major forces behind many environmental threats, including
biodiversity loss and degradation of land and freshwater, while it is to a large extent
responsible for global greenhouse gas emissions. Human society is quickly approaching a
planetary threshold associated with the paradoxes of the globalised industrial food system;
plenty of food is grown while still 70% of those who grow the food remain undernourished
and another part of the population is obese. At the same time, a third of the total food
production ends up in the garbage, enough to feed 600 million hungry people. If we
extrapolate these paradoxes of the globalised industrial food system to the future, humanity
will need three Earths by 2050. These expectations, together with the experience of floods,
storms and droughts (i.e., global warming), make us increasingly aware of the significance of
the earth system on which humans entirely depend. This calls for human stewardship of
nature in order to ensure the sustainability of earth as our life support system.
Over the years, many versions of such stewardship emerged in agricultural and
environmental ethics, ranging from the acknowledgement that both the earths ecosystems
and human agents are stakeholders of planet earth (Waddock, 2002), to fundamental
reflections on a non-anthropocentric concept of human agency (cf. Plumwood, 2002). Since
the acknowledgement of the agency of things, it is no longer even necessary that stakes of
nature are represented and served by human agency - i.e., by Non-Governmental Oranisations
(NGOs), Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) or environmental organizations; natural ecosystems and their inhabitants can represent themselves in a parliament of things (Latour,
1993).

At the same time, earth sciences make increasingly clear that the earth systems
themselves are inherently instable and characterized by transformation, change and volatility.
Environmental scientists like Nigel Clark for instance argue: Whatever we do, ice cores
and other proxies of past climate profess to us, our planet is capable of taking us by surprise.
With or without the destabilizing surcharge of human activities, the conditions most of us take
for granted could be taken away, quite suddenly, and with very little warning (Clark, 2011:
xi). Deep geological time points at a fundamental asymmetry of the human relationship to
planet earth. Also contemporary philosophers like Question Meillassoux acknowledge the
earth as being and going beyond human agency (Meillassoux, 2008; Morton, 2013; Thacker,
2011). Or as Ray Brassier argues: We are surrounded by processes going on quite
independently of any relationship we may happen to have with them (Brassier, 2007: 59). In
fact, planet earth can be seen as the unstable condition for the emergence of human agency
(Blok, 2016). For some, this even implies that that planet earth is the condition for the
emergence of the environmental crisis we face today (Blok, 2015).
This asymmetry of the human relationship to planet earth challenges current
conceptualizations of human stewardship in general, and in agricultural and environmental
ethics in particular. How to think human stewardship of nature in order to ensure the
sustainability of earth as our life support system, if we have to acknowledge that the earth has
agency herself and that we are entirely dependent on her agency? At the same time, the
asymmetry of the human relationship to planet earth may also provide a fundamentally
different starting point for our conceptualization of human agency beyond stewardship, care
etc. Contemporary philosophers like Jean-Luc Nancy for instance acknowledge the
fundamental role of asymmetry which he calls a void or nothing as possibility for the
creation of the world (Nancy, 2007). The confrontation with asymmetry urges us to reconsider
and reinvent the human relationship to nature, to give up the idea of one ideal world and to
acknowledge a multiplicity of different worlds. Furthermore, it questions the dominancy of
reciprocity-based economic exchanges in the current conceptualizations of the human
relationship to nature, and may inspire a non-reciprocal concept of nature (cf. Bataille, 1991),
exchange (cf. Derrida, 1992; 1995), ethics (cf. Levinas, 1969) and politics (Hardt & Negri,
2004).
This special issue of Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics aims to explore
the question how agricultural and environmental ethics should respond to the asymmetry of
the human relationship to planet earth. We look for both fundamental reflections on the nature
of human agency and its ethos in relation to planet earth, and for contributions that discuss

these issues in the context of agricultural and environmental ethics. Possible questions to be
addressed may include:
-

What are the fundamental presuppositions of a symmetric conceptualization of the

human relationship to planet earth, and what are the consequences for agricultural and
environmental ethics?

Does the experience of an asymmetric human relationship to planet earth enable us to

criticize the dominancy of reciprocity-based capitalist practices, for instance the
double internality as double movement of how capitalism works through nature and
how nature works through capitalism (Moore, 2015)?

To what extent do concepts like multiplicity of worlds (Nancy), moral economies of

commons (Federici) and differential cosmo-poiesis of localities (Sloterdijk) help to
conceptualize an asymmetric human relationship to planet earth, for instance as beingin-common with the different other?

How can an asymmetric earth be conceptualized in the context of agricultural and

environmental ethics, and what is the role of nature as agent?

How can, given the asymmetric human relationship to planet earth, ethics be
conceptualized in agricultural and environmental practices?

Is asymmetric stewardship possible in practice, or dependent on a conceptualization of

planet earth as stakeholder?

Contributions are invited to reflect on these and other issues from various perspectives (e.g.
empirical research, critical-theoretical approach, ontology, epistemology, ethics, applied
ethics) and in particular to ponder the question of what the asymmetry of the human relation
to planet earth means for agricultural and environmental ethics.

Submission Process and Deadlines

Papers will be reviewed following the JAGE double-blind review process. Papers should be
submitted by the June 15th, 2017 deadline
(https://www.editorialmanager.com/jage/default.aspx) with clear reference to the special issue
Nature Strikes Back! Thinking the asymmetry of the Human Relationship to Planet
Earth. Papers should be prepared using the JAGE Guidelines. As soon as the papers are
accepted for publication, they will be published and accessible online. The publication of the
complete special volume is scheduled for March 2018. The editors welcome informal

enquiries related to proposed topics. For this, please contact Vincent Blok
(vincent.blok@wur.nl).

Special Issue Workshop

To help authors advance their manuscripts, a Special Issue Workshop will be held in March
2017 in Wageningen, The Netherlands. Authors of manuscripts are invited to submit their
working papers. The editorial team will assign a referee among the guest editors for each
paper presented, with the intention of strengthening the papers prior to official submission for
peer review for potential inclusion in the special issue. The deadline to submit working papers
for the workshop in Wageningen is Februari 15th, 2017 to Vincent Blok
(vincent.blok@wur.nl). Participation in the workshop is encouraged, but not a precondition
for submissions to the special issue.

Contact Email:
Corresponding Gues Editor: Vincent Blok, Wageningen University, The Netherlands
(vincent.blok@wur.nl)

References:
Blok, V. 2015 The human glanze, the experience of environmental distress and the
Affordance of nature: Toward a phenomenology of the ecological crisis, Journal
of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 28(5): 925-938 (DOI 10.1007/s10806015-9565-8).
Blok, V. 2016. Thinking the Earth: Critical Reflections on Meillassoux and Heideggers
concept of the Earth (working paper).
Clark, N. 2011. Inhuman Nature. Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet. Los Angeles: Sage.
Derrida, J. 1991. The Gift of Death. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press)
Derrida, J. 1992. Given Time: i. Counterfeit Money. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press)
Federici, S. 2004. Caliban and the witch. New York, Autonomedia.
Hardt, M., Negri, A. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. London:
Penquin
Latour, B. 1993. We have never been modern. Cambridge: Harvard UP.
Levinas, E. 1969. Totality and Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP
Meillassoux, Q. 2013. After Finitude. An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. London/New
Delhi/New York/Sydney: Bloomsbury

Morton, T. 2013. Hyperobjects. Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World.
Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press
Moore, J. 2015. Capitalism in the web of life. London: Verso
Nancy, J.L. 2007. The Creation of the World, or Globalization. New York: Suny Press
Plumwood, V. 2002. Environmental Culture: The ecological crisis of reason. New York:
Routledge
Thacker, E., 2011. In The Dust Of This Planet. Horror of Philosophy vol. 1, Washington:
Zero Books
Waddock, S. 2002. We are all stakeholders of gaia: A normative perspective on stakeholder
thinking, Organization & Environment 24(2): 192-212.