Marist Undergraduate Philosophy Journal Vol VII 2024

The Immorality of Ecosabotage

environment? Long story short, anger is never the answer, which means committing ecosabotage is never going to help the environment.

III. Counter-Argument and Historical Account To work against my previous claim, anger may not be all that comes out of an act of ecosabotage. While it can be blinding in the moment, committing an act of ecosabotage that results in a deep sense of aggression might be beneficial to the environment later on in the sense that the emotion people feel is not anger, but fear. The sole reason people commit acts of ecosabotage is that they themselves are afraid of humanity’s complacency with the never-ending climate crisis, even though they are the ones to blame for its existence. Politics are corrupt, the same goes for any economy or social hierarchy, leaving the only option to raise awareness about environmental degradation as doing something so massive, so beyond what anyone thought a grass-roots organization would be capable of, that no one in their right mind could ignore reality anymore. Ecosaboteurs could use the fear that stems from their actions as a tether between people; it is as if ecosaboteurs are going to such emotional extremes that they are purposefully making themselves a scapegoat to take emotion out of the environmental movement. Thus, this forces people to see how their actions relate to others, and the issue of environmental degradation. To an ecosaboteur, helping the natural world, an issue so complicated because it does not have a traditional voice that humans have come to value, means forcing people to see nature within every aspect of their lives. This would then provoke a sense of fear amongst individuals, which would lead to a greater desire to create change and see themselves on the same level as the natural world. Although the general argument for committing an act of ecosabotage makes sense, as these intense feelings of anger and fear are valid, this definition still provides too much leeway for what “might '' happen. Sure, one can hope that someone on the receiving end of an act of ecosabotage is at a high enough level of consciousness to learn from an experience like this, but realistically that would

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