Chapter 6 - The Earth, Education, and Human Action

Summary

Thinking with Hannah Arendt about non-human nature is not instantly intuitive. By now we have seen that at the center of her reflections, be they more of a philosophical or a political character, are always human beings in their plurality. Although earth and nature indeed belong to the most intimate of human conditions and constitute the possibility of labor, she does not pay much attention to them in either The Human Condition or elsewhere. Arendt is interested in human action, in different aspects of the political in our lives. She describes the common world and its structures with the greatest excellence, comments on the political events of her times, and makes—often controversial—judgments, prompting academic and public debate. Nature—the earth, plants, and animals—seems to be, at best, at the margins of her attention. It would also be difficult to argue that she attributed any political significance to it.

However, the human world needs to be seen as an ever-changing web of relations, where human beings are embodied beings in a particular space. Not only does this space, earth, condition our being but also our lives have an impact on the earth, changing the earthly conditions of human life in a more or less conscious way. In modern times this influence has become more and more harmful; or perhaps we have become more effective in affecting the natural world through the growing impact of infrastructure and technologies. The term “Anthropocene” has been coined to describe exactly this: human interference in the earth has become so severe as to cause presumably irreversible changes in the planet’s geology and climate, resulting in a crisis of global relevance.

In this chapter, we reflect on the environmental crisis and the political response to it. Our case study is the protest movement Fridays for Future, which opens a perspective not only to discuss Arendt’s views on nature and the earth but also to link them to education and political subjectivity. Her appreciation of the natural world in the sense of the material basis of the human condition has increasingly been a subject of academic interest: her reflections are being debated in the context of the position of humans in the midst of an anthropogenic climate change.