The way I seem to think of it, ecology has a lot in common with ontology. If only we had an Emmanuel Levinas of ecology out there writing book after book today. Maybe there is and I just don’t know. And yes, I have several of John Bellamy Foster’s books. And no, I would not call John Bellamy Foster the Emmanuel Levinas of ecology. Pretty close, though. But we need something more. I suppose only one of two things will happen: John Bellamy Foster’s work will open the door for more great thinkers to get their thoughts out there, or, John Bellamy Foster is as good as it’s going to get. We do see more people entering the discussion, but I certainly wouldn’t say the doors are wide open yet.
If the literati are paying attention, we are seeing a new school of thought so magnified and well-toned that it could be the inheritor of post-structuralism. Don’t tell me the likes of Fredric Jameson and postmodernism are the inheritors, I never believed that. That is a shift, not a turn. No matter how hard they tried. Many feminist works brought what was closest to a turn that we have seen in our lifetimes. However, that functioned better as interdisciplinary, scattered into every field, elaborating and perfecting. Feminism is like the fine art of the well-established fields. But they were already fields. If ecosocialism could be married to ontology, then we would have a new school. Wide. Diverse. Magnified. Elaborate. Accessible, yet critical. And most of all, human.