The Problem with Cooperative Action Problems: Conceptions of Agency and the Understanding of Environmental Crises

Cooperative action problems are not necessarily the most effective frame for engaging with environmental crises. We need other and better ways of conceptualising human responsibility for environmental crises on the level of the individual. We require a framework for cultivating an environmental conscientiousness – the kind of beliefs and attitudes towards the natural world conducive to a genuine and personal response to environmental crises such as climate emergency. We propose, drawing on an Indigenous Australian knowledges perspective, that we ought to expand the moral project of environmental ethics from the attempt to prescribe where humans and nonhumans stand in the global community to a description of what membership in the global community involves. This sort of enquiry leads us to other and better ways of thinking about our relationship with the world and our understanding of environmental crises.