A potent strand within the Euro-American tradition of political thought invokes durability, permanence, and even immortality as ideals. If the ancients tended to think in terms of cycles of rise and fall, with polities passing into and out of being, modern theorists seek institutions that persist in perpetuity, sustaining an always-improving trajectory of political, social, and economic development. For all its critical energy, the contemporary literature on environmental political theory, whose watchwords are sustainability, conservation, and preservation, shares this orientation. Thus, while political ecologists and other heterodox theorists of economy and society have begun to think critically about growth, their revisionist concepts, such as “sustainable growth” and “limits to growth” are designed to avoid the true antonyms of permanence: decay and decline. 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.
The vast quantities of plastic waste that fill our trashcans and landfills, our rivers and oceans, our food, drinking water, and even our organs and bloodstreams, however, highlight the darker sides of durability. “Forever chemicals” are terrifying because they are immortal, because they succeed so brilliantly in breaking the cycle of being and non-being. 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 the paradoxical plenitude of waste, of 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.
My dissertation, Grabage to Gardens: An Eco-Philosophy in Praise of Decline, develops such a theory, attending to the positive potentials within decline. I argue that durability can sometimes be dangerous and that deterioration is not inherently negative but can clear the way for positive ecological and political transformation. By exploring various facets of decline as essential components of an ecologically attuned ethics and politics, my work builds upon, and expands, the scope of environmental political theory. The first chapter critiques the harmful persistence of modern materials such as plastics, whose refusal to decay epitomizes the ecological dangers of arrested decline and highlights the necessity of dissolution. The second chapter addresses the persistence of waste as a form of colonial durability, arguing that the lingering presence of garbage appropriates space and time, acting as a continued form of colonial appropriation. In the third chapter, the focus shifts to the dead, investigating the processes that animate post-life materiality and proposing “the good death” as an essential component of an ecologically attuned, livable future. Situated in an exegesis of buildings in Baltimore, the fourth chapter explores the creative potential of deterioration, demonstrating how decay contributes to world-building and arguing for the recognition of decomposition as a vital architectural and political force. The final chapter synthesizes these discussions through an analysis of artworks and the concept of “compost politics”—a framework that embraces cycles of decay and regeneration to foster multispecies care and cultivate renewal amid ecological crisis. Together, these chapters propose an eco-philosophy that reimagines decline not as loss, but as a generative process necessary for creating more just and flourishing worlds.