Celebrating the End of Enlightenment: Organization Theory in the Age of the Anthropocene and Gaia (and why neither is the solution to our ecological crisis)

TLDR

The human–nature dualism rooted in Enlightenment thought is largely responsible for the ecological crisis and cannot serve as a basis for meaningful solutions. The article seeks to shift the ecological crisis discourse by promoting a decolonial imagination and urging organization scholars to confront anthropomorphic biases and economism through engagement with Indigenous worldviews. The authors find that recent Western imaginaries such as the Anthropocene and Gaia, intended to bridge nature and culture, still rely on exclusions grounded in Enlightenment rationality and colonial legacies, whereas Indigenous philosophies offer relational ontologies that have been suppressed by Western scholarship.

Abstract

This article aims to change the terms of the conversation about the ecological crisis. We argue that the human–nature dualism, a product of Enlightenment thought and primarily responsible for the ecological crisis, cannot be the basis for any meaningful solutions. We show how more recent Western imaginaries like the Anthropocene and Gaia proposed to overcome the separation of nature from culture are also based on exclusions that reflect Enlightenment rationality and legacies of colonialism. In sharp contrast, we show that Indigenous philosophies that preceded the Enlightenment by thousands of years have developed systems of knowledge based on a relational ontology that reflects profound connections between humans and nature. We demonstrate that such forms of knowledge have been systematically subjugated by Western scholarship based on arguments inspired by Enlightenment ideals of rationality and empiricism. A decolonial imagination will be able to generate new insights into understanding and addressing the ecological crisis. We therefore call for organization and management scholars to challenge the anthropomorphic biases and the economism that dominates our field through a respectful engagement with Indigenous worldviews.