Earthly Engagements

Earthly Engagements: Reading Sartre after the Holocene brings together scholars from the Sartre studies community to think through the planetary ecological crisis. Edited by Matthew C. Ally and Damon Boria, the collection explores ways in which Sartre’s existential thought can be read socio-ecologically, illuminating the tightly imbricated earthly and worldly crises of our post-Holocene epoch. Contributors variously discuss phenomenology, ethics, politics, ontology, and metaphysics. Earthly locations include the Icelandic coast, the Minnesota woods, the Indiana Dunes, the Chinese Great Plain, the Venetian Lagoon, and more; worldly situations include that of the artist, the activist, the consumer, the tourist, and more. Through their diversity of methods and substantive concerns, the chapters reveal a wealth of critical and heuristic resources within Sartre’s thought for thinking through and engaging the planetary ecological crisis and its direct ties to global social, economic, and political crises. In full recognition of Sartre’s personal distaste for agrarian settings and wilderness, and some ostensibly anti-environmental philosophical and literary moments, the contributors take the proper Sartrean line that how we view nature and our relationship to nature is neither closed nor predetermined. Like life itself, our worldly relationship to earthly nature is rooted in the sufficiency and open-endedness of freedom.

One could be forgiven for assuming that Sartre, who died in 1980, would have little to teach us in our struggle to understand, and to combat, the current ecological crisis. But one would, nonetheless, be sorely mistaken, as this outstanding collection makes abundantly clear. Matthew Ally and Damon Boria have assembled an all-star roster of writers, who illuminate the crisis from a variety of angles, while making use of a staggering number of Sartrean concepts, theories, and arguments. Anyone interested either in environmental issues or in Sartre will find much of interest here, most of which one cannot find elsewhere.--David Detmer, Purdue University Northwest

Matthew C. Ally is professor of philosophy at the Borough of Manhattan Community College of the City University of New York.Damon Boria is associate professor of philosophy at Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady University.