Rethinking Masculinity for a Warming World: The Case for Eco-Cooperative Men

A provocative new paper published in the journal Pastoral Psychology argues that one of the most overlooked drivers of the climate crisis may be hiding in plain sight: the way many Western men have been taught to think about themselves, other species, and the Earth. Ryan LaMothe, a pastoral theologian based in Louisville, contends that dominant forms of Western masculinity, forged by centuries of anthropocentric theology and philosophy, systematically produce dominating, instrumental, and destructive relations with the natural world. His response is not simply to critique those forms but to sketch an alternative he calls eco-masculinity, a way of being male grounded in vulnerability, empathy, compassion, and a categorical ethical command to care for and cooperate with other species. The paper, published on 30 September 2026, arrives at a moment when scholars across disciplines are increasingly asking why, after decades of warnings, humanity’s response to ecological collapse remains so halting.

LaMothe’s central analytical tool is the concept of the apparatus, borrowed from the philosopher Giorgi Agamben. In Agamben’s formulation, an apparatus is a set of practices, bodies of knowledge, measures, and institutions that aim to manage, govern, control, and orient human behaviors, gestures, and thoughts in ways that purport to be useful. Drawing on Michel Foucault, Agamben notes that in a disciplinary society, apparatuses create docile yet free bodies that assume their identity and their freedom as subjects. LaMothe applies this lens to the theological and philosophical traditions of the Abrahamic West, arguing that their theologies, narratives, and rituals have functioned as apparatuses shaping masculine identity around sovereignty, mastery, and dominion. The result, he argues, is a masculinity that treats other species and the Earth itself as objects to be used, reified, and destroyed rather than as fellow creatures deserving of care.

The paper is careful about definitions. By Western, LaMothe means people who have internalized the narratives and practices of dominant European anthropologies, theological and philosophical, that create a seemingly unbridgeable divide between humans and other species. He explicitly notes that many people and groups within the West, including Indigenous peoples, hold anthropologies that do not produce such a chasm between the human and the other-than-human, citing the work of anthropologists such as Eduardo Kohn and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Masculinity, meanwhile, is treated as biologically rooted but socially constructed, taking varied forms across time and cultures, with a fluidity of gender expression depending on culture and era. This definitional care matters, because the argument is not that men are inherently destructive but that particular historically contingent formations of manhood have been recruited into an ecological project of domination.

One of the paper’s most striking claims concerns the very concept of nature. LaMothe places the word in quotation marks because he regards it as a construct that is itself a feature of the ontological divide between Western human beings and the rest of the living world, a point he grounds in the work of Agamben, Jacques Derrida, and Bruno Latour. Many Indigenous religions and philosophies, he observes, do not have a concept like nature at all, mainly because they do not view themselves as distinct from the world around them. The implication is unsettling: the modern Western mind, in carving the world into human and natural domains, may have manufactured the very alienation that licenses ecological destruction. Once the Earth is deemed dead or inert, practices such as mountaintop removal, fracking, and oil drilling become thinkable, even legitimate, because there is no living community to injure.

LaMothe traces the genealogy of sovereign masculinity through political and psychoanalytic mythology alike. He points to the origin myths of Scripture and their counterparts in the origin myths of philosophers and psychoanalysts such as Thomas Hobbes and Sigmund Freud. Freud’s imaginative recreation of the origins of society in Totem and Taboo, in which the father of the clan dominates others only to be killed and overthrown by his progeny, essentializes and leaves unquestioned male sovereignty. Hobbesian political thought, meanwhile, implies that communal life depends on civilization, and therefore that ruling epistemologies are necessary for social order, a view that renders those deemed uncivilized subject to the whims and cruelties of nature and helps justify the colonization of other human beings and everything falling under the construct of nature. Even Aristotle, who believed animals have souls, placed them within a hierarchy crowned by human beings, diminishing the significance of other-than-human animals and othered humans alike.

The paper does not pretend that concern for animals is absent from Western history. LaMothe catalogues a counter-tradition stretching back to antiquity: Plutarch argued for the rights of animals, and the third-century Neoplatonist Porphyry maintained that it was our moral duty to extend justice to other animals. Centuries later, Jeremy Bentham argued for animal welfare, and in the nineteenth century Arthur Schopenhauer raised concerns about animal rights. In recent decades, philosophers such as Peter Singer, Andrew Linzey, and Martha Nussbaum have explored the thorny ethical issues surrounding humanity’s treatment of other species. Yet LaMothe’s point is that these ethical currents have largely failed to reshape dominant masculinity, which remains tethered to apparatuses of sovereignty and mastery. Care ethics, developed by thinkers including Carol Gilligan, Nel Noddings, Joan Tronto, Virginia Held, and Maurice Hamington, offers resources, but they must be deliberately extended beyond human relationships to the more-than-human world.

What would becoming eco-cooperative and caring men and boys actually involve? LaMothe argues that forms of eco-masculinity sustain caring relations toward other species, and that such relations depend on capacities for vulnerability, empathy, and compassion vis-à-vis the other species that share this one habitable Earth. Vulnerability here is technical rather than sentimental: it means relinquishing the fantasy of invulnerability and control that sovereign masculinity demands, and accepting exposure to the needs, sufferings, and singularities of other creatures. Empathy and compassion, in this framework, are not merely feelings but practiced capacities that orient action toward the flourishing of particular animals, plants, and places. The affirmation of the singularities of other human beings and other species accompanies what LaMothe describes as a categorical ethical command to care for and cooperate with other species and the Earth, a formulation that deliberately echoes the unconditional structure of Kantian ethics while relocating its scope beyond humanity.

The paper finds exemplars of this stance in unexpected places, including male researchers whose scientific work manifests caring and ethical concern in relating to and cooperating with other species, such as Peter Godfrey-Smith, whose study of octopus minds models a form of engagement that neither dominates nor reduces the other. LaMothe also draws on Dana Lloyd’s account of Yurok earth-based theology, in which the Land itself is a living being: the Yurok believe the Earth is alive and has a spirit, motivating care for mountains, rivers, wildlife, and ocean in which each part is entangled with every other part. Because trees are considered living beings and members of the community, their removal is an attack on the community itself, which Lloyd argues should be understood as a continuation of genocidal policy rooted in epistemologies of ruling and deficiency. Such relational stances, LaMothe suggests, expose the poverty of the sovereign model.

He is equally candid about the limits of fashionable solutions. Chandler and Reid have objected to the tendency of anthropologists and others to argue that dealing with the climate crisis requires becoming Indigenous, citing Indigenous peoples’ history of resilience and ways of relating to the land. Yet even those critics conclude their book by calling for a recovery of the hubris on which modernity was built, and from which other worlds are yet to come. LaMothe’s verdict is blunt: the hubris of Western subjects is exactly what we do not need, because hubris, especially with regard to masculinities, has been a significant factor in the current climate crisis. The paper thus refuses both romantic primitivism and technological triumphalism, insisting instead on the harder work of transforming the emotional and ethical formation of men within Western societies themselves.

The significance of the argument extends well beyond pastoral theology. If LaMothe is right, then climate communication, environmental policy, and sustainability education may all be addressing symptoms while leaving intact the gendered apparatuses that reproduce domination across generations. Raising boys to equate manhood with control, invulnerability, and mastery does not merely constrain individual lives; it recruits them into an economy and politics that treat the living Earth as inert material. An eco-masculinity of care and cooperation, by contrast, would reframe strength as the capacity to remain vulnerable, to empathize across species lines, and to act on a categorical obligation to protect the singular creatures with whom humans share a single habitable planet. Whether such a transformation can occur at the scale and speed the climate crisis demands remains an open question, but LaMothe’s paper makes a compelling case that the answer will depend, in part, on what it means to become a man in the West.

Subject of Research: The relationship between Western masculinity, anthropocentric thought, and the climate crisis, and the development of an eco-cooperative, caring eco-masculinity

Article Title: (Western) Men and the Climate Crisis: Toward an Eco-Cooperative and Caring Masculinity

Article References: (Western) Men and the Climate Crisis: Toward an Eco-Cooperative and Caring Masculinity. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-026-01381-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11089-026-01381-0

Keywords: eco-masculinity, climate crisis, care ethics, Western philosophy, anthropocentrism, pastoral theology, sovereignty, animal ethics, Indigenous worldviews, Giorgi Agamben, vulnerability, environmental ethics