The Ecological Thought Read online

  In the name of ecology, we must scrutinize Nature with all the suspicion a modern person can muster. Let the buyer beware. Nature has turned out to be a plastic knockoff of the real thing. As Emmanuel Levinas puts it in an astonishing passage that is among other things a passionate critique of deep ecology’s favorite philosopher, Martin Heidegger, our concepts of “faceless generous mother nature” are based on “sedentary” agricultural societies with their idea of “possession.” The myth of the faceless mother provides the very motivation for our exploitation of Earth, seen as “inexhaustible matter for things.”16 Wilderness areas are giant, abstract versions of the products hanging in mall windows. Even when we’ve tried to preserve an enclave of safety from the ravages of the modern age, we’ve been getting it all wrong, on a more profound level.

  Can we get over our addiction to possession and the myth of the faceless mother? What is the real thing? We can get a sense of it, to be sure, though it will upgrade our ideas of “real” and “thing” to boot. Ecology shows us that all beings are connected. The ecological thought is the thinking of interconnectedness. The ecological thought is a thought about ecology, but it’s also a thinking that is ecological. Thinking the ecological thought is part of an ecological project. The ecological thought doesn’t just occur “in the mind.” It’s a practice and a process of becoming fully aware of how human beings are connected with other beings—animal, vegetable, or mineral. Ultimately, this includes thinking about democracy. What would a truly democratic encounter between truly equal beings look like, what would it be—can we even imagine it?

  When we start looking, we find the ecological thought everywhere. This isn’t surprising, since the ecological thought is interconnectedness in the fullest and deepest sense. Even Descartes’ infamous “I think therefore I am” takes place in an environment, and this environment is present in the very text of the cogito. Descartes begins the Meditations by describing himself sitting by a fire, holding in his hand the paper on which he is writing.17 Environmentalist thinking frequently condemns Cartesianism as a prototype of the dreaded dualism that separates mind and body, self and world, subject and object. Descartes is framed as environmental public enemy number one. The ecological thought insists that we’re deeply connected even when we say we’re not. Thinking itself is an ecological event. The kind of environmentalist ideology that wishes that we had never started to think—ruthlessly immediate, aggressively masculine, ruggedly anti-intellectual, afraid of humor and irony—is dubious at best. In fact, it’s part of the problem. The constant assertion that we’re “embedded” in a lifeworld is, paradoxically, a symptom of drastic separation.18

  When we think the ecological thought, we encounter all kinds of beings that are not strictly “natural.” This isn’t surprising either, since what we call “nature” is a “denatured,” unnatural, uncanny sequence of mutations and catastrophic events: just read Darwin. The ecological view to come isn’t a picture of some bounded object or “restrictive economy,” a closed system.19 It is a vast, sprawling mesh of interconnection without a definite center or edge. It is radical intimacy, coexistence with other beings, sentient and otherwise—and how can we so clearly tell the difference? The ecological thought fans out into questions concerning cyborgs, artificial intelligence, and the irreducible uncertainty over what counts as a person.20 Being a person means never being sure that you’re one. In an age of ecology without Nature, we would treat many more beings as people while deconstructing our ideas about what counts as people. Think Blade Runner or Frankenstein: the ethics of the ecological thought is to regard beings as people even when they aren’t people. Ancient animisms treat beings as people, without a concept of Nature. Perhaps I’m aiming for an upgraded version of animism. (I’m also aiming for another good excuse to write about my favorite film, Blade Runner.)

  OPENING MOVES

  Thinking the ecological thought is difficult: it involves becoming open, radically open—open forever, without the possibility of closing again. Studying art provides a platform, because the environment is partly a matter of perception. Art forms have something to tell us about the environment, because they can make us question reality. I would like to stay for as long as possible in an open, questioning mode. This open mode is intrinsic to whatever we inadequately call the environment.21 Is the ecological thought thinking about ecology? Yes and no. It is a thinking that is ecological, a contemplating that is a doing. Reframing our world, our problems, and ourselves is part of the ecological project. This is what praxis means—action that is thoughtful and thought that is active. Aristotle asserted that the highest form of praxis was contemplation.22 We shouldn’t be afraid to withdraw and reflect.

  The ecological thought is also difficult because it brings to light aspects of our existence that have remained unconscious for a long time; we don’t like to recall them. It isn’t like thinking about where your toilet waste goes. It is thinking about where your toilet waste goes. Anxiety over wastewater treatment provides a good example. In the United States, many people now drink recycled wastewater. Some people simply don’t want to know that their water is recycled excrement. It is public policy to tune out this fact. Yet recycled water is less unclean than “naturally” filtered water. We lose not only our undisturbed dreams of civilized cleanliness through this process but also our sense of Nature as pristine and nonartificial. Nature becomes wastewater treatment version 1.0.23 Freud described the unconscious as a wilderness area. Wilderness areas are the unconscious of modern society, places we can go to keep our dreams undisturbed. The very form of modern consciousness is itself this dream.

  In Lakewood, Colorado, residents objected to the construction of a solar array in a park in 2008, because it didn’t look “natural.”24 Objections to wind farms are similar—made not because of the risk to birds but because they “spoil the view.” A 2008 plan to put a wind farm near a remote Scottish island was, well, scotched, because residents complained that their view would be destroyed. This is truly a case of the aesthetics of Nature impeding ecology and a good argument for why ecology must be without Nature. Why is a wind turbine less beautiful than an oil pipe? Why does it “spoil the view” any more than pipes and roads?

  You could see turbines as environmental art. Wind chimes play in the wind; some environmental sculptures sway and rock in the breeze. Wind farms have a slightly frightening size and magnificence. One could easily read them as embodying the aesthetics of the sublime (rather than the beautiful). But it’s an ethical sublime that says, “We humans choose not to use carbon”—a choice visible in gigantic turbines. Perhaps it’s this very visibility of choice that makes wind farms disturbing: visible choice, rather than secret pipes, running under an apparently undisturbed “landscape” (a word for a painting, not actual trees and water). As a poster in the office of Mulder in the television series The X-Files used to read, “The Truth Is Out There.” Ideology isn’t just in your head. It’s in the shape of a Coke bottle. It’s in the way some things appear “natural”—rolling hills and greenery—as if the Industrial Revolution had never occurred. These fake landscapes are the original greenwashing. What the Scots are saying, in objecting to wind farms, isn’t “Save the environment!” but “Leave our dreams undisturbed!”

  If you’re a parent, you will understand our resistance to cleaning things up. Ecology talks about areas of life that we find annoying, boring, and embarrassing. Art can help us, because it’s a place in our culture that deals with intensity, shame, abjection, and loss. It also deals with reality and unreality, being and seeming. If ecology is about radical coexistence, then we must challenge our sense of what is real and what is unreal, what counts as existent and what counts as nonexistent. The idea of Nature as a holistic, healthy, real thing avoids this challenge.

  We must face some puzzling questions. What is an environment? Is there such a thing as the environment? Is it everything “around” us? At what point do we stop, if at all, drawing the line between environment and non-envir
onment: The atmosphere? Earth’s gravitational field? Earth’s magnetic field, without which everything would be scorched by solar winds? The sun, without which we wouldn’t be alive at all? The Galaxy? Does the environment include or exclude us? Is it natural or artificial, or both? Can we put it in a conceptual box? Might the word environment be the wrong word? Environment, the upgrade of Nature, is fraught with difficulty. This is ironic, since what we often call the environment is being changed, degraded, and eroded (and destroyed) by global forces of industry and capitalism. Just when we need to know what it is, it’s disappearing.

  Along with the ecological crisis goes an equally powerful and urgent opening up of our view of who we are and where we are. What, therefore, is environmental art? If what we inadequately call the environment entails a radical openness, how does this appear in art forms? Are there environmental ways of reading and doing criticism that account for this radical openness? Various kinds of ecocriticism have emerged to explore the role of ecology in literature. In particular, Romantic literature, from the beginning of the modern age of industry and capitalism, has served as a touchstone for ecocriticism.25 This brand of criticism, however, restricts the radical openness the ecological thought implies, employing a prepackaged conceptual container labeled “Nature.” Ironically, Romantic “Nature” is an artificial construct. And extra-ironically, Romantic-period art itself already thought about the environment in ways that were decisively “out of the box.” We will thus find it helpful to explore Romantic literature in The Ecological Thought.26 Nothing much has changed since. There is more concrete, more plastic, more democracy, more intense science and technology, more GDP, more alienation, and more self-consciousness about whether writing poems really can change the world. These are quantitative differences, not qualitative ones.

  A truly ecological reading practice would think the environment beyond rigid conceptual categories—it would include as much as possible of the radical openness of the ecological thought. Ecocriticism has overlooked the way in which all art—not just explicitly ecological art—hardwires the environment into its form. Ecological art, and the ecological-ness of all art, isn’t just about something (trees, mountains, animals, pollution, and so forth). Ecological art is something, or maybe it does something. Art is ecological insofar as it is made from materials and exists in the world. It exists, for instance, as a poem on a page made of paper from trees, which you hold in your hand while sitting in a chair in a certain room of a house that rests on a hill in the suburbs of a polluted city. But there is more to its ecological quality than that. The shape of the stanzas and the length of the lines determine the way you appreciate the blank paper around them. Reading the poem aloud makes you aware of the shape and size of the space around you (some forms, such as yodeling, do this deliberately). The poem organizes space. Seen like this, all texts—all artworks, indeed—have an irreducibly ecological form. Ecology permeates all forms. Nowadays we’re used to wondering what a poem says about race or gender, even if the poem makes no explicit mention of race or gender. We will soon be accustomed to wondering what any text says about the environment even if no animals or trees or mountains appear in it.27

  The ecological thought affects all aspects of life, culture, and society. Aside from art and science, we must build the ecological thought from what we find in philosophy, history, sociology, anthropology, religion, cultural studies, and critical theory. I shall combine empirical evolution theory with “Continental” thinking about being and existence. This seems perverse: “high” philosophy merging shamelessly with “vulgar” materialism. There are pretty good boundaries between science and humanities departments and within the humanities themselves. This won’t be to everyone’s taste. Daniel Dennett, a Darwinist cognition theorist, pooh-poohs deconstruction.28 Much Continental thinking assumes that there is no continuity between humans and animals, adopting a haughty “everyone knows that” tone and declaring that thinking otherwise is “asinane” (worse than asinine—and worse because we’re behaving like donkeys).29 This is condescending exclusivity. Some insist proudly that they “refuse to accept the theory of evolution,” which to a biologist sounds like refusing to accept that the Earth is round.30 Even creationists take evolution more seriously than that. It doesn’t have to be like this. No less a figure than Derrida maintained that deconstruction was a form of radical empiricism.31 You want anti-essentialism and antibiologism? Just read Darwin.

  Taken at their trivial and ideological worst, the humanities is hamstrung by “factoids,” quasi- or pseudofacts that haven’t been well thought out, while the sciences are held in the sway of unconscious “opinions.” Humanities and sciences hold broken pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, pieces that might not fit together. Like William Blake I’m suspicious of “fitting & fitted.”32 The ecological thought must interrogate both the attitude of science, its detached authoritarian coldness; and the nihilistic, baselessly anthropocentric arguments in the humanities as well as humanist refusals to see the big picture, often justified by self-limiting arguments against “totalization”—talk about shooting yourself in the foot.33 The ecological thought is about warmth and strangeness, infinity and proximity, tantalizing “thereness” and head-popping, wordless openness.

  The ecological thought is intrinsically open, so it doesn’t really matter where you begin. There are good reasons for trusting the biases and specialties that I bring to this task. Studying art is important, because art sometimes gives voice to what is unspeakable elsewhere, either temporarily—one day we will find the words—or intrinsically—words are impossible. Since the ecological thought is so new and so open, and therefore so difficult, we should expect art to show us some of the way. The ecological thought supplies good reasons to study culture and philosophy. Ecology is a matter of human experience. Humanities research can ask questions that science should address, questions that scientists may not have asked yet. For its part, science is about being able to admit that you’re wrong. This means that if we want to live in a science-based society, we will have to live in the shadow of the possibility of wrongness. A questioning attitude needs to become habitual. Philosophy and critical theory in the humanities can help. Some people, including left humanities scholars who should know better, either think that scientists should be left to get on with their work, or even when they don’t, the net effect of their beliefs is that science is untouched.34 We have a responsibility to examine, participate in, support, and criticize scientific experiments: to that end, this book shall propose some.

  For example, are nonhumans capable of aesthetic contemplation? Can they enjoy art? Fascinating research projects, to say the least, are beginning find out whether the beings we call animals are capable of this. If they were, it would be essential to find out whether this contemplation was an advanced cognitive state or a simple one, if not the simplest. Is our capacity to enjoy art one of those things that makes us uniquely human (along with hands, tools, laughter, and dancing, all of which have been discovered in nonhumans)? Or do we share this capacity with nonhuman beings? These questions get to the heart of some of our cultural and political assumptions regarding nonhuman beings.

  While it’s deeply informed by critical theory, this book won’t be talking very explicitly about theory. Why? Not because I want to dumb down the argument. I do this because people who aren’t members of the in crowd of specialists familiar with the language of theory (and the kinds of things that are cool to say with it) badly need to read this book. Otherwise the ecological thought separates theory haves from have-nots. Humanities scholars have some very good and important ideas, if only they would let others read them. We simply can’t leave environmentalism to the anti-intellectualists. If you’re interested, this book does engage with theory in the notes. Or you can read my essays, perhaps starting with “Queer Ecology” in PMLA, and also Ecology without Nature.35 I won’t be doing a lot of green close reading either. You can find some examples, based on the view this book lays out, by following this note.36


  THE CHAPTERS IN THIS BOOK

  Current ecological scholarship in the humanities is divided between ecocriticism, environmental justice criticism, science studies ethnography and anthropological investigations of non-Western environmental perception; and there is a growing body of philosophical and theoretically oriented work. The humanities are where we reflect on culture, politics, and science. If they mean anything at all in this age of scientism, the humanities must do serious reflection. While we address the current ecological crisis, we should regard this moment as a precious, if perilous, opportunity to think some difficult thoughts about what ecology is.

  Ecological science has to model ecosystems on different scales in order to see things properly: it’s not enough to section off a small square of reality and just examine that.37 This is very suggestive for aesthetic and political thinking. Chapter 1, “Thinking Big,” argues that for the ecological thought to lift off, it must escape some terms in which it has been trapped. Terms such as the local, the organic, and the particular have been good for environmentalist social policy. These ideas provide at least a pocket of resistance to globalization. But what about global warming? Doesn’t that make a global response necessary? How about the fact that we’re witnessing the Sixth Mass Extinction Event? Ecological thinking risks being caught in the language of smallness and restriction. I use Milton to kick off the discussion, because he offers us one of the most immense viewpoints of all: that of space itself. Seeing the Earth from space is the beginning of ecological thinking. The first aeronauts, balloon pilots, immediately saw Earth as an alien world.38 Seeing yourself from another point of view is the beginning of ethics and politics.