What if it was all alive?
Some thoughts on how we see and what difference that makes to how we think and act
Photo of Lake Windermere from Wansfell - author’s own. All rights reserved.
We need a holistic picture of the depth of our enmeshment. Who could possibly claim that we could be as absorbed by a park or garden or zoo as we are by ‘the real thing’? What is ‘the real thing’? A waterfall (without countless tourists taking selfies), a mountain top from which we can see nothing but other mountains and hills, and trees, rivers and lakes, and distant deserts. An ocean beach without human footprints, where seabirds circle in huge flocks overhead and the water is teeming with life.
To suggest that human perception is so unsophisticated that it cannot tell the difference, that humans could be as satisfied sitting shouting at a screen as feeling the wind and rain, the stars above, the earth beneath, shows a complete failure to understand the nature of our perception. There is therefore no justification for human impact that destroys such landscapes and ecosystems that allow us this level of perception of our interconnectedness.
We need to completely acknowledge that the level of human impact on the planet alters our experience, and this alteration is detrimental to us humans. This acknowledgment would allow an honest assessment of that impact.
Most approaches to human interventions ‘cover over’ this blind spot in our dumpings, concreting over and tunnelling under. These excavations and exploitations are not just physical but include the spirit and the flesh. We fool no one by distracting ourselves with the next shiny synthesised chindogu. It is beyond foolish to ignore this: it is ecocide, but it is also sui-speciocide, the self destruction of our own means of survival.
We are similarly blind when it comes to joined-up thinking. No scheme or policy or programme has ever managed to satisfy all parties, from sick children and their furious, fearful parents to marginalised groups clamouring for their human rights, to environmentalists raging against the machinery digging up another river to lay a pipe (for the effluent from a project to house the homeless), to businesses lobbying against bureaucrats that tie up loopholes preventing them from expanding and employing all those they could otherwise afford to pay.
Why?
It’s certainly complex. What if a systems approach required us to view systems as vibrant matter, alive in their complex interrelationships, entanglements, and propensities for open-ended change? Most of the time, we think of objects as passive and stable things, and we humans as the active subjects. When we dissolve the dualism between subject and object, we allow all action to animate, both subtly and dramatically.
Envisioning our system as purely physical requires phenomenally complex calculations. But if we have to think about what our intentions are when we balance interests, not just human interests, the complexity need not increase.
Economics is complex; envisioning supply chains is complex; weather mapping is complex. None of this has stopped people attempting to work out some way of understanding how those systems work. Similarly, we have to begin to address the glaring problem of how to balance interests between those which value humans and human wellbeing over everything else, and those which recognise that human wellbeing is intricately linked to the wellbeing of the entire ecological whole of which it is a part.
It is vital that we become sensitive to the need to rebalance our relationship with what the Global North often envisages as a passive object, ‘the environment’, often including other species as mere ‘ecosystem services’ at the beck and call of human whims and requirements. We can shift our attitude towards it so that we are far more aware of, and take into consideration far more, the concerns not only of the human good but also of the good of the entire backdrop against which this human good is conceived, the entire planetary systems which sustain us and which we, in our turn, can support and sustain by very virtue of our status as conscious entities aware of our awareness in a different (but not superior or exclusive) way to how awareness manifests in other fields of existence, like rocks, and rivers.
Humility, Eliot so memorably reminded us, is endless. To lay ourselves before the wheels of the juggernaut of history may seem suicidally reckless, but it’s the only way we can hope to slow things down enough so we can change course. This metaphor doesn’t imply actual physical sacrifice. Nor does it mean choosing abject poverty. It does mean taking every step possible in one’s personal life to bring one’s actions into line with the stated goal to respect the earth and everything in it, for the stated reason that to do so is to obey the natural law that as humans, we are as obliged to respect the complex web of existence within which we have evolved as all else. Or risk annihilation.
We have developed technologically, outward, as it were, and now we must at the very least equal that development by making progress in linking the areas of technological development to their value bases. We need to realise that technological decisions are inherently decisions about what we value, that values occupy every part of our lives.
Is it possible to develop an industry, an agriculture, an education, health, security and economic system, based entirely on principles of respect? The focus will be different. What will it require? It will require that those who disagree with the possibility of such a system are out-debated, and eventually outnumbered, that it becomes the norm to consider treating problems of inequality and global poverty, of injustice and abuse, and particularly of environmental degradation and biodiversity loss, as criminalities which are intolerable.
There is much debate around questions of resources: in the unlikely event that the entire human population had access to livelihoods which meant that no one could any more be considered ‘poor’, would there in fact be enough to go round? What would this mean for other species and ecosystems? This question seems less and less theoretical to me: we have a duty to create such conditions but we also have a duty to ensure that ecospheres benefit and are not degraded by such a scenario. Is this possible? It is, if, as part of such a global achievement, the question of population growth has also been addressed. If we can elicit a response amongst individuals, that reproduction is not a means of ensuring security in old age, or a requirement of a vengeful (or loving) God, or indeed proof of great virility; if, as Lorenz suggested might be possible with aggression, we could subvert these urges and fears and reassure through programmes of social care that equivalent and even increased benefits accrued for those who restricted their family size, then this, too, could be reversed.
But think of the countries, like North Korea, where such global policies would be resisted by the dictatoriate, or of China or other developing countries arguing that their population reduction programmes work now, without any further incentives (to which I’d answer, do they? What of all the sex workers, all the unaccounted for millions who exist because they survived, or their parents subvened, the cruel programme you imposed?). Perhaps the answer is to go local, to think back to the region at least, to incentivise here and to attach conditions to aid when donating to development programmes elsewhere.
We know that we need other organisms to survive: we eat them, we digest and we excrete them and we, in our turn, are eaten, digested and excreted. We move in and out of the land and the land moves in and out of us, as Wendell Berry said. We’re artificers, though, in important ways: we do not belong to the land in the same way that other organisms do. For millennia, this hasn’t mattered: we’ve even developed justificatory systems (many of them based on religious dogmas) to argue for our dominance. We are not animals, we tell ourselves. We’re somewhat closer to angels. We have souls and nothing else does.
From the 1950s onwards, when Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (1949) became a rallying call for individuals interested in how humans relate to the environment, it has been evident that in studying the impact of any project, human interests are as basically biological as the interests of any other creature. Leopold’s most famous statement was, a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.
Can capitalism and the free market comfortably coexist with a newfound protection of the non-human world, so that biodiversity decline, so evident in so many places, can be reversed, climate change be absorbed by a better use of so-called resources, and a happy medium be found for all? Again, an intentional systems approach seems the best geared to addressing this. And there is denial here too. The free market has not had the long trumpeted ‘trickle down’ effect it was supposed to. Economies are in free fall. Wealth is becoming more concentrated. Fewer individuals have more and more control over larger and larger control over larger quantities of resources. China is buying Africa: the locus of control is moving from democratic systems in the west to a completely different kind of free market, that of the completely utilitarian, material drives of the east.
Ecology demands that we situate ourselves in the environment not as justifiably dominant organisms but as interdependent ones. The world can do without us. We cannot do without the world. What, then, can we do to bring ourselves more into line with what we know to be the case: the interdependency of living systems, the necessity that our existence puts demands on other systems, but the knowledge that we can, at least to some degree, mitigate this impact, given the level of knowledge we have of ourselves and of the world?
We can take an instrumental approach: what do the ‘systems’ ‘serve’?
Organisms that at present are little appreciated or even unknown may be found suitable for pest control, for soil improvement, for pollution treatment or for growing as a new crop. It is important to protect these resources to be able to take full advantage of the options they offer for future development.
I don’t buy this. Of course it’s all true, but is the main reason we ought to value a thing that it might ‘serve’ us in the future? This if you’ll excuse the pun is somewhat self serving…
The natural environment is also seen as ‘an insurance policy… a control area. As a self-sustaining and non-polluting system it clearly has a lot to offer as a model for improving man’s [sic] attempts at land management. Its comparative function with the field and greenhouse is considerable.’
But is this really why we want the natural world to be conserved: so that we can learn from it? Perhaps that is one reason for valuing it, but surely there is more to it than simply that we want to use it as a ‘model’. We belong in it. As the Aboriginal people of Australia say, ‘the land is all there is’. We come from, and go back to, dust. This is all we are. Our awareness of awareness, our consciousness of ourselves, has allowed us to ask ‘what if?’ and this conditional opened to road to exploration, but also to stories of ourselves that are hubris, narcissism, a failure to see and acknowledge, and respect, the land, the earth, the air, from which we emerged, not alone, but in the interplay of species and circumstances, through chance and the cooperation and competition and creativity of systems.
Hegel recognised that we are all always searching for a way of making things how they ‘ought to be’. Perhaps we can also see in our current predicament a need to acknowledge that things have ways of being that allow their continuance, and ways that do not. This is, effectively, the golden rule under which we bow, or break:
In nature the highest truth is that a law is
Thanks for reading, if you got this far. I’m an ecophilosopher, yoga and meditation teacher, writer, and companion. If you want, you can support my work, which would mean a lot to me, and allow me a bit more freedom to work. https://ko-fi.com/lucywei
Thoughtful and appropriate.