Mick Smith

The Ethics of Tourism Development

Introduction 1. Ethical Values 2. The Virtues of Travel and the Virtuous Traveller 3. The Greatest Happiness is to Travel? 4. Rights, Codes of Practice, and Social Justice 5. From Social Justice to an Ethics of Care 6. Authenticity and the Ethics of Tourism 7. Ethics and Sustainable Tourism

Autistic Autobiographies and More-Than-Human Emotional Geographies:

This paper draws on an analysis of forty-five published autobiographical accounts of individuals with an autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) to highlight the important role of their, often intense, emotional relations to ‘natural’ things and places. In doing so, it offers a partial corrective to clinical and popular views of people with autism as almost entirely asocial and unconcerned with the beings and doings of others. A textual hermeneutic of the phenomenal insights reported by authors reveals instead that their personal geographies are characterized by rich, rewarding, and meaningful relationships with the wider more-than-human world, and that aspects of their lives can be undeniably, agreeably, ‘social’ in this broader sense. Such an analysis may offer important, albeit methodologically limited, insights into experiences of ASD while also challenging dominant understandings of ‘sociality’—in the sense of ‘being-with-others’—and of emotional involvement, that focus entirely on interactions between human beings. Indeed, to some extent, these emotionally charged experiences of the ‘natural’ world resonate with the feelings of many more neurotypical individuals.

'It Makes My Skin Crawl...': The Embodiment of Disgust in Phobias of 'Nature'

Specific phobias of natural objects, such as moths, spiders and snakes, are both common and socially significant, but they have received relatively little sociological attention. Studies of specific phobias have noted that embodied experiences of disgust are intimately associated with phobic reactions, but generally explain this in terms of objective qualities of the object concerned and/or evolutionary models. We draw on the work of Kolnai, Douglas and Kristeva to provide an alternative phenomenological and culturally informed account of the complex links between pervasive social categories and their emotional embodiment and expression in phobic individuals.

Ecological Community, the Sense of the World, and Senseless Extinction

How might a posthumanist notion of ecological community attempt to address questions concerning extinction? Such irredeemable losses are explicated through four aspects of ecological/community relations—material manifestation (appearances), material involvement (effects), semiotic resonance (meanings) and phenomenological experiences—that together constitute a broader understanding of ecological community that does not exempt humans from ecological effects or except ecology from ethical and political concerns. This ecological approach is further developed in the light of Jacob von Uexkulls phenomenological biology and Jean-Luc Nancys concepts of being singular plural and the sense of the world.

Against ecological sovereignty: Agamben, politics and globalisation

Several recent texts have argued that, given the ecologically destructive effects of unfettered economic globalisation, there are good pragmatic arguments for environmentalists to advocate and support a form of green state sovereignty. However, the key question concerning this strategy is not necessarily the plausibility or implausibility of ‘greening’ state institutions but rather the dangers to ecology and politics that sovereignty itself represents. Schmitt argues that the principle of sovereignty rests in the self-awarded power to declare a state of emergency (exception) that suspends all political activity, a condition Agamben argues is now becoming a global biopolitical norm. Unfortunately, both norm and exception threaten the very existence of ecological politics.

Wild-life: anarchy, ecology, and ethics

Abstract Certain forms of anarchism, especially those associated with primitivism, regard nature as a fundamental source of individual liberty, self-awareness, and self-responsibility. These distinctive varieties of ‘ecological anarchism’ often combine a wild(er)ness ethos with a polemical critique of the social constraints and environmental damage they identify, to varying degrees, with ‘civilisation’. To anarchists associated with Enlightenment humanist traditions, like Bookchin, such accounts epitomise an irrational and regressive form of nature worship, one supposedly shared with many deep ecologists. This critique is, though, somewhat misplaced and obscures the potential of ecological anarchism and its current failings. Re-wilding understandings of self and nature offer diverse ethico-political possibilities but only if it is recognised that self-identities, idea(l)s of nature, and even conceptions of individual autonomy are partly constituted by the same social histories that primitivism dismisses.

Suspended Animation: Radical Ecology, Sovereign Powers, and Saving the (Natural) World

Th e idea of saving the (natural) world has about it an air of ridiculous naivety. Indeed it openly invites ridicule. First, it seems unrealistically grandiose in the scope of its ambition. How could one hope to save a whole world or to keep all of nature safe? Second, it appears too close to the patronizing and dangerous religiosity of those who want to save “America” or our souls for Jesus and free-enterprise (a somewhat strange combination), whether or not we want to be so saved. Does the natural world really want or need saving, and for whom? Th ird, it is all too readily compared, and all too rarely contrasted, with the kind of mindless fundamentalisms that, with proselytizing fervor, posit single, simple, but mutually contradictory ends for humankind. Aft er all, aren’t there many world-views, and correspondingly many understandings of what saving the natural world might entail? And of course, there are. And yet it might still be suggested that, deep down, radical ecologists strive to save what they can of the natural world, that this is their fundamental ethical and political concern. What is more, this ethical and political concern separates radical ecologists, those who would go to the root of that which threatens the world, from the purveyors of environmental expediency, from the “shallow” (to use Arne Naess’s term) environmentalists who formulate all concerns for the natural world within the globally dominant language of resource economics

Shadow and shade: the ethopoietics of enlightenment

Modern Western thought and culture have envisaged their task in terms of a metaphorics, a metaphysics and a technics of ‘enlightenment’. However, the ethical and environmental implications of this determination to dispel all shadows have become increasingly pernicious as modernity both extends and alters the conceptualization and employment of (a now artificial) light as a tool of discovery and control. Drawing on the work of Foucault and Benjamin amongst others, this paper seeks to illustrate, through a critical ethopoietics, the ‘speculative aporia’ of contemporary society from the perspective of radical ecology. The world does not just reflect our own instrumental interests: it has an elusive, shadowy existence of its own that can impinge upon our ethical perceptions.

The reinvention of politics: Ulrich Beck and reflexive modernity

The Reinvention of Politics: Rethinking Modernity in the Global Social Order by Ulrich Beck. Cambridge: Polity, 1997. Pp.vi + 206; index. £45 (hardback); £12.95 (paperback). ISBN 0 7456 1366 7 and ...

Hermeneutics and the culture of birds: the environmental allegory of ‘easter island’

It has become commonplace to interpret ‘Easter Island’ in terms of an environmental allegory, a Malthusian morality tale of the consequences of over-exploitation of limited natural resources. There are, however, ethical dangers in treating places and peoples allegorically, as moralized means (lessons) to satisfy others’ edificatory ends. Allegory reductively appropriates the past, presenting a specific interpretation as ‘given’ (fixed) and exemplary, wrongly suggesting that meanings and morals, like islands, are there to be ‘discovered’ ready-formed. Gadamers hermeneutics suggests an alternative understanding which expresses something of the ethical ambiguities involved in giving meaning to the environmental history of Easter Island.