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Does Eco-Politics Exist and Does it Have Need of a Philosophy? 113
vis-a-vis the power which is currently concentrated in the hands of states
operating on the principle of profit and capital groups behaving like
expanding empires. The dissatisfied citizens no longer have any chance
to change the way power is exercised. Their votes merely operate the
mechanism that ensures the rotation of the characters. They no longer
shape the conditions of power but rather endure them.
If the goal that justifies the existing social order — the multiplication
of goods — is proved meaningless and the principle that entitles one to
hold power — popular sovereignty — no longer prevails, then we can
declare that the given political system has lost its legitimacy. In reality,
it is the inexorable logic of raw power that dominates, which is mediated
by algorithms and enforced by impersonal automatisms.
3. What is ecological politics?
Ecology has become the rallying cry of the radical critique of the late
modern industrial mass societies in the last few decades, perhaps not
without grounds. The Greek word oikos means house, household, home
and is familiar from scientific fields related to associations and livelihood
and which study the connection between the two: the interdependence
of living beings and the order of their coexistence, whether in nature or
in society. The period of civilisation currently ending can be characterised
chiefly by the fatal self-conceit with which it sought to invalidate this
order. Our efforts in this area met with astounding success, the oikos,
our earthly home, has by now become practically speaking uninhabitable
and man homeless. The next era will be, if not about destruction and
the decay of civilisation, then about the attempt to restore the ecological
balance.
From now on we have to base our livelihood not on the exhaustion
and ruination of natural resources but instead on the wiser use of human
abilities. This turn will no doubt affect the hitherto existing division of
labour, order of governance and way of evaluating human performance.
Political wisdom can no longer content itself with automatically
supporting the way of life and procedures of resource management
which fit the logic of industrial society, under the guise of neutrality.
The admission of our global interdependence and the unfolding
ecological catastrophe render unavoidable the justification of individual
goals and of the goodness of particular ways of life as well as the
rethinking of the institutional framework of the public debate on these