LE3 .A278 2023

2023

Duke, David

Acadia University

Bachelor of Arts

Honours

Environmental and Sustainability Studies

Environmental & Sustainability Studies

It is difficult to overstate the severity of the ecological crises presently destroying Planet Earth. Radical social and economic change is required imminently if our species and countless others are to avoid grim futures of dislocation, upheaval, runaway warming, and annihilation. In my thesis Reverence or Revolution?, I bring together threads found in Japanese spiritual ontologies with generative revolutionary theory to advance a set of proposals for political mobilization, which I refer to as ‘ecological praxis.’ Inspired by a four-month academic exchange in Japan, I argue that a synthesis of ecological reverence found in Japanese philosophical currents would be most effectively actualized within the domain of revolutionary politics, and in turn, that a true commitment to reverence for the Earth and all life both justifies and necessitates the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. In exploring these possibilities, I draw from the Japanese ‘post-miracle’ economic situation to outline the predicament of global capitalism and also discuss the prospects of ecological and political action in Japan. Expanding beyond Japan, I explicate a universalizable praxis grounded in ecological reverence and revolutionary socialism, exploring its generative possibilities as well as the obstacles such an effort will confront. The guiding conviction of this ecological praxis and the thesis itself may be described as follows: “From reverence comes revolution, and from revolution comes reverence.”

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https://scholar.acadiau.ca/islandora/object/theses:4019