George Orwell and ecological citizenship: moral agency and modern estrangement

Theories of ecological citizenship seek to conceptualize political agency while taking into account humanity’s embeddedness in nature. This essay intervenes with contributions from an author distant from discourses about environmental politics, but with insights to offer them. George Orwell’s writings respond to a problem continuously articulated in the history of ecological thought: the estrangement from the conditions of one’s existence. In doing so, he provides a literary case study of ecological moral reasoning, a practice whereby the virtues of ecological citizenship are cultivated. Such virtues are cultivated by confronting the conditions of one’s existence in embodied terms, incorporating that experiential knowledge, and contributing to practices of self-government using it. This essay presents Orwell’s case, explains its relevance to the contemporary discourse on ecological citizenship, and concludes by suggesting that it also provides resources for empirical social scientists seeking to operationalize ecological citizenship theory by way of a moral sociology of the environment.