Researcher ORCID Identifier

0009-0006-4399-6233

Graduation Year

2025

Document Type

Open Access Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Philosophy

Reader 1

Dr. Jordan Daniels

Reader 2

Dr. Aimee Bahng

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Rights Information

© 2025 Aaron J Morgan

Abstract

This thesis interrogates the movement from ontology (what things are) to ethics (what one should do) in the context of environmental theory and settler colonialism. From new materialism to posthumanism, theorists within the “ontological turn” aim to overcome the anti-ecological foundations of modern philosophy (e.g., dualisms of nature and society, matter and meaning, body and mind). Contra dualism, critical environmental theorists argue that relational ontologies can produce more ecologically responsible ethical frameworks, affects, and values. In this thesis, I focus on appeals to climate anxiety and ecological urgency as two common discursive formations that function to redirect philosophical accounts of relationality toward the reproduction of colonial ecologies. As defined by Malcom Ferdinand, colonial ecologies are environmental discourses that preserve the relations of settler society and reproduce projects of Indigenous dispossession. First, I contextualize climate anxiety in a long history of European settler environmentalism. Second, I unpack relationality in Donna Haraway’s philosophical work, illustrating how appeals to climate anxiety undermine the practical application of her critiques of nature-culture dualism. While generally more attentive to histories of injustice than mainstream scientific conceptions of the Anthropocene, I will argue that Haraway's late-career work, representative of the ontological turn more broadly, does not escape the methodological imperatives of colonial ecology. Drawing from scholars in Black Studies and Indigenous Studies, I conclude by proposing a methodological re-orientation for critical environmental theory: against universalizing or idealizing tendencies, relationality must be grounded in the history and ongoing processes of settler colonial domination.

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