A central strand of Euro-American political thought idealizes durability, permanence, and even immortality. Contemporary environmental political theory, despite its critical stance, often mirrors this focus, emphasizing sustainability, conservation, and preservation. Associating decline with loss, failure, oblivion, and existential despair, scholars tend to see only its tragic aspects—disease, destruction, and moral degeneration—concluding that decay is an inherently harmful and undesirable process.

However, the persistence of plastic waste and “forever chemicals” exposes the dangers of arrested decay. Their harmful “immortality” disrupts typical cycles of life and death, revealing that durability can be dangerous. Existing environmental political theory, oriented as it is around the problems of scarcity and depletion, and the aims of sustainability and preservation, is not yet adequate to the urgent tasks of analyzing problems of plenitude or understanding the harms that follow when we hold off decay and decline. What is needed now is a critical theory able to identify the conditions within which sustaining and conserving are and are not laudable goals.

Falling Apart: A Politics of Decline for a Damaged Planet develops such a theory, reframing decline as a necessary political and ecological process. By challenging the uncritical valorization of durability, it highlights how decay can foster renewal, transformation, and ecological flourishing. The first chapter critiques the harmful persistence of modern materials, such as plastics, which refuse to decay, disrupting natural cycles. The second chapter examines waste as a form of colonial durability, arguing that the persistence of garbage enacts spatial and temporal appropriation, perpetuating the violence of colonialism through the lingering material presence of waste. The third chapter shifts to death itself., asking what it would mean to think death not primarily as negation, not as symbolic loss, and not as an existential horizon, but as a material and political condition of being dead. Moving from the problems of a lack of decline to the possibilities within falling apart, the second half of the manuscript looks to decline’s creative and productive work. The fourth chapter, grounded in an exegesis of architectural sites, explores the creative potential of deterioration, demonstrating how decay contributes to world-building. The final chapter synthesizes these discussions through an analysis of artworks and the concept of “compost politics,” as fundamental to fostering multispecies care, ecological renewal, and political transformation in the Anthropocene. By reinterpreting decline as integral to ecological and social transformation, the book project expands the scope of environmental political theory while contributing to the environmental humanities.