Max Abu-Laban
Environmental and Sustainability Studies
Acadia University, BA (Hons)
Unceded Mi’kma’ki Territories
Abstract
It is difficult to overstate the severity of the environmental crises presently destroying Planet Earth. It is equally true that without radical social and economic change in the immediate decades, our species and countless others will face increasingly grim futures of accelerating instability, runaway global warming, and ultimately, extinction. As one response to this unprecedented and profoundly immediate task, I propose in this article a synthesis of threads found in Japanese and East Asian spiritual ontologies such as Shinto, Zen, wabi-sabi, and Tao, with generative anticapitalist theory to advance a set of proposals for political and philosophical mobilization, which I refer to as ‘ecological praxis.’ Inspired by a four-month academic exchange in Japan, I argue that themes of ecological reverence found in these philosophical currents would be most effectively actualized within the domain of revolutionary politics. Likewise, I argue that these rich ontologies might be rescued from their current state, which is largely one of political uselessness and capitalist saturation, through this ‘left-turn’ that I am suggesting. This takes the form of a two-part exploratory analysis; first, of the current environmental destruction unfolding in Japan and the inability of reverence-based spiritualities to prevent it, and second, of the synthetization of these ontologies with radical theory, with the aim of inspiring and informing generative ecological praxis.