Restating Tropicality: Another Critique of Modern Knowledge

This paper uses Wael Hallaq’s Restating Orientalism to radically restate David Arnold’s concept of tropicality i.e. the application of Saidian Orientalism to ecologies through a tropic-temperate binary. Much as Hallaq examines the secular-modern-scientific epistemological roots underlying Saidian Orientalism, I propose a deconstruction of tropicality in the hopes of creating the foundations for a deep critique of tropicality discourse and a novel path to healing our damaged planet in the Anthropocene; I envision tropicality as a means of rediscovering an older, ethical-ecological way of life, a tool for the cultivators of tropical landscapes to educate the modern temperate individual. I problematize modern scientific ecology as inadequate, and call for an ethical cosmology of repair in what I term the Temperate-ocene. I suggest an approach that combines the re-ethicization of ecology with degrowth political economy, using geopoetics to transform geographies and geopolitics, as a means of transcending the modern Temperate-ocene in toto.