Over the past 50 years, environmental politics has operated based on the premise of a vulnerable planet, an interconnected system to be addressed using technocratic expertise (Allan, 2017a, 2017b; Bonneuil & Fressoz, 2016; Corry, 2013; Edwards, 2010). In this conception, the future consistently features consistently as a warning. Prophecies of doom, of imagined and expected degradation, act as the primary motivator for a politics of environmental transformation. This is not just a rhetorical theme but also an epistemic configuration that structures environmental politics – from the Limits to Growth report to the more recent ‘planetary boundaries’ concept. It has animated both the discourse and the dramaturgical regime of environmental politics. 

This approach has proved able to put environmental concerns on the political agenda, yet such an image of the future cannot stimulate the aspirational politics necessary for the major cultural shifts necessitated by the environmental crises. In this paper, we argue for more utopian environmental politics, more aspirational and democratic conceptions of the future that will open up (geo)political space for alternative discourses and interests. 

We contend that the success of environmental politics ultimately depends on capturing cultural and political aspirations and on the dynamics of values as they play out in political expression. Drawing on discourse and dramaturgical analysis, we argue that such utopian environmental politics require a reappreciation of which political stages and what forms of political expression matter and why – and consistent investigation of how values and aspirations change. Via several examples that at first glance appear marginal – but might have significant power to foster cultural aspirations and a reimagination of the stages that matter – we point to emerging avenues for a less technocratic and more utopian, culturally-literate, and democratic form of environmental politics.

Biography

Jeroen Oomen is assistant professor at the Urban Futures Studio, within the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development at Utrecht University. His research focuses on the social, cultural, and scientific practices that create societies' conceptions of the future. His main research interests are climate politics, geoengineering, and social theory, specifically where it concerns questions of sustainability. In 2021, he published the book Imagining Climate engineering: Dreaming of the Designer Climate, on the history and sociology of climate climate engineering as a proposed approach to climate change. Together with Maarten Hajer, he is currently working on a book about the Captured Futures of Environmental Politics for Oxford University Press.