Im Maul der Gefährt*innen: Eine sozialtheoretische Konzeptualisierung ökologischer Vulnerabilität
摘要
The article discusses the conceptual proposal of ecological vulnerability. Vulnerability is discussed in climate debates primarily with regard to the effects of climate change taking into account socio-political contexts. Here, vulnerability is shown to be structurally unequally distributed. In order to determine more precisely why we are vulnerable to climate change impacts in the first place, the concept of ecological vulnerability expands the understanding of a structurally unequally distributed vulnerability by a more fundamental dimension: vulnerability as a shared condition of (human) life. Following the discussion of the relationship between the climate crisis and vulnerability, we will discuss Judith Butler and Jule Govrin’s understanding of the term, which unpacks the shared dimension of vulnerability as consequence of human existence qua embodiment. We combine this perspective with the concept of a more-than-human world and use Donna Haraway’s figure of the companion species to work out the dependency relationships within an overall ecological structure. In the second part, we illustrate the conceptual proposal by reconstructing Val Plumwood’s and Nastassja Martin’s accounts of a life-threatening encounter with a crocodile and a bear: Firstly, reflections on their life-threatening encounter are to be understood as moments of becoming aware of an ecological vulnerability. Secondly, we use these experiences of vulnerability to demonstrate a reconfiguration of self and world relations responding to the tension between becoming-with and dying-with in a more-than-human world. The conceptual proposal of ecological vulnerability is understood as a socio-theoretical proposal making feminist concepts of vulnerability more relatable to debates on the climate crisis.