People don't know this, but mainstream academic eco-thought has wholly capitulated to a version of animist beliefs that they attribute to Native American and Australian Aboriginal traditions. There's a little switcharoo where eco-thinkers start off with integrating such "voices" as part of a general liberal tendency towards inclusion, but then at a certain point respectful inclusion flips into a standpoint epistemology where animist beliefs are treated as just as good as scientific knowledge.
This is obviously an overcorrection to earlier tendencies in anthropology and humanities toward orientalism. I say it's obviously an overcorrection because it gets a hands-off kid-gloves treatment -- on the one hand, all the animist statements are treated with humorless guilt -- BUT on the other hand, if you treat these animist concepts with the rigor that seems befitting to the academics' sobriety, then you're punching down, etc.
Nietzsche would have a field day with these people!
Here are some of the animist claims I'm talking about: "Everything is alive," "we are all related to the rocks and trees," "the Earth is sacred," and so on and so on.
I'm not saying that these claims are true or false, but they're given extreme deference based simply on the anguished consciences of liberal academics who want to preserve an inner sense of purity -- preserving their own beautiful souls.
The academic motivation for this is straightforward: ever since the devastating postmodern critiques of the grand narratives of history, and the destruction of transcendental signifiers like Reason or religious truth, anthropologists and humanists have failed to swallow their own bitter medicine. Instead, they've made up a vision of the Earth as a new transcendental signifier and climate change as a new grand narrative. Now we're back to business!
