Geog Thoughts

Who can be an urban ecological citizen? Who has “rights to the city,” as well as obligations, duties, and the necessary virtues, to play a legitimate role in keeping it healthy? Traditionalists argue that citizenship involves enforceable contracts. But moral as well as contractual, legal aspects matter, resulting in an ecological citizenship that includes nonhumans. Such citizenship revolves around the pursuit of ecological justice and is underpinned by an ethics of care… This ethic is not rooted in some generalized compassion or sense of responsibility, but rather in co-evolutionary processes… Citizenly relations thus stretch across the nature-society divide.