Thanks Peter for this provocative essay… and for poking me out of my silence. I’ve always preferred conversations on this blog; so Dear Readers, please start with Peter’s argument that we/you are not enough to save the world.
I agree that the environment doesn’t need us to save it! The planet rotates on its tilt, creating dawns and seasons. Bateria combine, producing chemical reactions leading to oxygen and the rest… Physics, chemistry, biology: life goes on, with or without humans and their intervention on this planet. This is fact. Life has existed on this planet for 3.5 billion years and will continue to exist long after we disappear.
Meanwhile, the human form-of-life is only millennia, or centuries, or maybe even decades, old. Our ‘age’ depends on what characteristic is conveyed with the label ‘human’. Is it an erect body-type, opposable thumbs and particular genetic markers? The Homo genus is probably no more than 2 million years old, though it’s hard to say. By human, do we mean a social being capable of group-hunting and myth-telling? That would point to the Upper Paleolithic, only 50’000 years ago, as the birth of our social kind. Or do we need sedentary villages to count as ‘humans’? The Neolithic/First Agricultural Revolution occurred concurrently with the warming of the Holocene, about 10’000 years ago. What about a civilization’s capacity to built temples and to master writing? That would point to a beginning merely 5’000 years ago, with the Egyptian pyramids and hieroglyphs. Or by ‘human’, do we mean a nation-state who think of their selves and species as so central to the universe that they/we live in the illusion that we are separate from it? If so, we’d recognize the Athenian demos, less than 2’500 years ago, as the ‘origin’ of our humanity. This latter date appears to me as foundational in our collective imaginary.
But our form-of-life (ie. the ways in which we live, our patterns of behaviour) has continued to change ever since. Monotheistic religions developed. Empires came and went. After developing ocean-worthy vessels and ‘discovering’ America, the cultural descendants of the Greeks set out to conquer (and pillage) the rest of the world. Their colonization efforts succeeded, in part because we — descendants of Europeans — imposed our legal regime onto cultures which did not recognize ‘possession’ as their guiding principle; a model which is, more or less, 500 years old.
Crucial to this narrative and to our current form-of-life is the shift from human-power labour to carbon-burning, with Watt’s internal combustion engine altering most of our practices of production. In A Billion Black Anthropocene or None, Kathryn Yussof argues that our extractive exploitation of energy from the Earth merely extends, indeed multiplies, our exploitation of each other’s labour. This event occurred only 250 years ago… which is ‘yesterday’ in the Grand Scheme.
However, ‘carbon’ is not our only problem. Carbon-burning technologies became culturally transformative when they combined with religious beliefs, developing into the White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant (WASP) ethic in which life — human and otherwise — is subordinated to a God who judges us according to our economic success.1 To me, this is the ‘origin’ of our extractive humanity: a God-endorsed Homo Economicus genre2 of human-ness which exploits each other and rapes the Earth in order to demonstrate their grace.
While we are acknowledging our story, let’s include the digital revolution underway since the 1950’s. The invention of the computer didn’t change the dominant trends in our culture, but ‘turbo-charged’ our capacity to impact our environment, to affect (and indeed, disrupt) ecologically dynamic processes which operate on a time scale much vaster than us.
Why this history lesson??? To understand how those fridges ended up in that Maine puddle. While it’s a bit random why those particular fridges were trashed in that particular park, the cycle of their existence — design, production, use, disposition — is part of a pattern of thoughts and actions which we must recognize, especially if our goal is to disrupt them. I say ‘Our’ because we all have a responsibility to acknowledge our participation with/in this historically-grounded complex system of economic policies, legal and religious ideals, cultural norms which justify particular actions and attitudes.
It is important to remember that we are a baby species of deep time: one often too shortsighted to remember a few centuries of histories and how this very particular past still creates our present circumstances. We cognitively can remember. In fact, this collective ability to remember (and learn from past experiences) is one of the characteristics that has permitted humanity to become the world-shaping force that we are today.
Je me souviens — trans:I remember. This is the motto under which I was born; embossed on all Quebecois’ license plates. In its linguistic structure, it references the 1st person twice. In tone, it is more akin to “I remind myself”…
The big question is: Of what do I, should I, should we remind ourselves???
Peter, I agree with your diagnostic: self/Euro/anthropos-centrism is the problems. Our centrist patterns-of-thoughts are so deeply embedded within our psyche and ideology/ies that we have created the Anthropocene as a way to situate ourselves as ‘central’ to a geological epoch! Yes, this ‘label’ reinforces the same style-of-thinking that got us into this mess, while also covering up the fact that not ‘all of humanity’ (ie. anthropos) are equally responsible for this predicament. Concepts can be battlefields too! The Anthropocene, as a concept, is supposed to shock us all from oblivion, from this selective (willful) forgetting that our actions have consequences. While we can affect/select our actions, we cannot anticipate nor control their consequences. This desire for control — ie. the belief in, and thus pursuit of, Mastery — is specifically the attitude that got us knee deep into flooded territories.
At this historical juncture in the story of our species, we could let ‘nature’ run its course. Yet, alarm-bells are ringing within the chests of many: anxiety is rising faster than the sea. If we continue to let ourselves run amok over our environment, we risk destroying it so thoroughly… that we will have destroyed the very future of humanity. This is the Anthropos-centric fear of our century: that our whole species will pay with their lives for the feast of the few. Clearly, if we continue to consider ourselves separate and superior from our environment, humanity will fail to wake up because we have already committed our slow and painful collective suicide in pursuing a global oil-empowered binge of extractive frenzy that benefits only those individuals whose super-power is to be in denial of our deep interdependencies. I am not exaggerating: the oppressed already — have always — pay with their lives…
In the whole, I agree with you: the environmental discourse is badly framed. We should be honest with ourselves and acknowledge that we care about the environment, first of all, insofar as we require it in order to live! We need food, water and air as clean as possible from toxins and radioactivity. We need to stop our soils from turning into dust. We need to stop exploiting our ecosystems, pretending as though the bountiful is boundless. Bottom line: we need to care about the future insofar as we want that future to exist!
It is not the environment that we want to save: it is ourselves. If we cared most about the environment, we would — like philosopher Patricia MacCormack — propose that we should go extinct: saving the Earth’s ecosystems by removing their apex predator. Maybe only with our disappearance can the environment recover from the burden of carrying a short-sighted and ill-advised ‘monkey’ on its back.
Personally, I reject this argument because I refuse to give up on the human form-of-life. I see the ‘human’ as a beautiful being, capable of love and ethical action, empowered by creativity and an ability for recursive thinking. Ultimately, I still have some faith in humanity and our potential to curtail our centrist impulses. However, this faith is more ‘hope’ than ‘fact’.
I hope that the indeterminacy of human-kind will save our collective future. Because of our cognitive capacity of both rationality and imagination, we can decide to live according to different principles, more inclusive rules, more just norms. We can imagine a better society, and create it with our labour. In the very structure of humanity, in how we orient ourselves with ideals, in our capacity for philosophy lays the possibility to become otherwise, to affect how and how much we affect our environment and each other. We could remind ourselves that ‘we are not special’, that ‘we are entangled in ways that we cannot understand’, that ‘our lives depend on one another’.
How can I retain my faith in humanity in the face of intra/inter-species genocides? How can I still believe that thought can illuminate a different path forward, when I witness so much thoughtlessness?
I must confess: my faith often falters… I get angry; because I feel helpless; because I fear that my actions are almost insignificant relative to the problem’s magnitude; because our predicament is the result of a vicious cycle which has been reinforcing itself for 2’500 years. Can we design magical spells to undo that history? How can we soothe the traumatic devastation that we set into motion? How might ‘I’ change the logic of a society for which despair and hardship is the lot of the majority?
My faith in humanity does falters at times. At such time, , I swirl in a void of meaninglessness; this nihilism with which you flirt my friend. Because, in arguing that we are not enough, you may be understood to propose “why bother” and “why not just give up”. I’ve read your words carefully: you are not saying neither. You say that action taken today and in the near future will have noticeable effects only in a century or two. Geological time is vast, so you are probably right.
But those words — “You are not enough” — are dangerous. Rhetorically, this logic has served as a justification to ‘kick the cost of environmental care’ to an undetermined future, mostly because our centric-norms are also ‘present-centric’. As a result, we do not value the future, for the same reason that we forget the past: both disappearing from our minds, to be replaced with incessant insatiable desires for objects of planned obsolescence.
It could be otherwise. The North American indigenous cultures, especially the Haudenosaunee (ie. Iroquois) on whose territory I reside and write today, considered the impact of their decisions on the 7th future generation. However, 7 generations ago, Europeans were too busy colonizing and extracting value from everything that moved or shines: thus failing (or less charitably, consciously refusing) to consider us — the humanity of the 21st century — as relevant to their decisions.
Yet, we know today that our actions will affect and shape the possibilities available to our future 7th generation. We know enough about complex systems (ie. ecosystems, economies, societies) to understand them as unpredictable yet responsive to material practices and ways-of-thinking.
If we decide that humanity is worth saving, then we must act today: for a few more years or decades of delusions, of recklessly perpetrating traumatic injuries on each other and the Earth, can only worsen our collective predicament. We know now the destructiveness of our way-of-life. Thus, we can no longer plead ignorance, only foolishness. If we want humanity to exist in 7 generations, we must ask ourselves: what ‘genre’ of humans do we wish our collective descendants to be?
When I extricate myself from pessimism, when I muster energy to affirm life, I am amazed at how much creative potential we all hold within. My faith in humanity might be the result of an availability bias: I happen to live in a human body… I happen to live in a privileged society in which I can dream, and then work to realize my visions within the fabric-of-reality. The human form-of-life allows us to create. More importantly, it allows us to be self-reflective and critical about our creations. We can do good or bad, be thoughtful or thoughtless. We can individualize and become unique, or hide behind norms and identity politics. We can desire and feel pleasure, but we can also feel pain and empathize. We have emotions that warn us of dangers. We have intuitions guiding us toward wisdom. Ontologically, we are a beautiful, powerful, complex yet vulnerable form-of-life, with indeterminate potential at its core. Individually and collectively, we do make the choices which orient and actualize our lives. Therefore, we must choose better ways and conducts, for ourselves in the present and for the humanity of the future.
Peter, I disagree with your suggestion that we are not enough to change our present. ‘You’, ‘I’, any ‘One’ is certainly insufficient, but no less necessary, to save our environment from the dominant culture of our time. Indeed, I’ve argued that it is our self/Euro/anthropos-centrim that we must counter. While we might not be able to affect the atmospheric carbon level, we certainly can affect our cultural narratives and norms.
We — all 7.8 billions of ‘You’ — are one of most potent mechanism of change that the Earth has ever encountered. Collectively, we are as powerful as meteorites: carving craters and launching tsunamis with our actions. In the Grand Scheme, we have appeared as quickly and induced as profound and extensive an ecological transformation as any other extinction-level-event. Regretfully, this includes the 6th mass extinction, from which no Marvel super-hero is powerful enough to save us.
We will not wake up tomorrow, unthreatened by rising sea levels. Canada will indeed accept an increasing number of climate refugees. Destructive storms and heat domes will get worse. Trillions of beings — some of them humans — will die in landslides, in hurricanes, in droughts. The 21st century will suck for any species that requires environmental stability in order to survive, let alone thrive.
Will we survive our self/Euro/anthropos-inflicted existential threat? We get to decide if and how we wish humanity to exist in 7 generations, and 7 generations thereafter. To give our descendents a chance at surviving, to give them the possibility to thrive, we must say ‘That’s Enough!’ to our centric culture!
We are certainly ‘Enough’ to say that we’ve had enough exploitation, enough excess, enough waste, enough of a worldview that distorts our relationships. We can and must commit to stop considering ourselves superior to all other forms of beings. If we were radically honest with ourselves, we’d realize that it’s not so much the human species that we want to save, but an easy — guilt-free — lifestyle: no matter how perverse its externalities. In the West, for millennia, we have been supreme because of free energy, slave or cheap labour, extracting ‘surplus’ value from our relationships. With carbon-burning, with instrumental rationality, with digital technologies, we only strengthened our most indulgent short-term tendencies. In fact, I suspect that we — or at least, the privileged among us — are more afraid of losing our symbolic referents built on “wealth=salvation=happiness” than we are about suffering, or even dying, from the effects of global warming. It is quite a ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ that we are more panicked at the prospect of dismantling our system of exploitation (and, thus privilege) than we are about the death of our species.
It will not be easy to alter our collective path. Our carbon-burning addiction was developed over 10 generations. Our material lives and standards of living depend on a steady rate of extraction and trash. Meanwhile, our cultural ideals are 10 times as old and refer back to a time when it was judged desirable that landowners would command the fate of not only human-kind, but all of creation!
Even as we realize the distortions and mistakes to which our beliefs contribute, I am not naive enough to think that we will change our worldview overnight. So, we should start to practice this ex-centric ethos right away. We must not forget. In fact, we will require rituals to articulate and to help us make a habit of new patterns of behaviours. My hope is that we will develop rituals to remind ourselves of the future that we aim for our 7th generation.
With our actions, we introduce changes that might appear imperceptible now but will ripple through time; amplifying and diffracting in ways that empower or constrains our descendents. Our ancestors set in motion the same process; now binding us to melting ice, rising seas and lifeless soils. In the same way that our current predicament is the result of past actions, the future possibilities of humanity depend on us.
Soon, we will be invited to deal with the death of our dominant culture. The choice we are facing nowadays is whether this death will be literal or metaphorical. I suspect that whether we disappear or collectively choose alternative values and norms of behaviour might well depend on how our current generation unfolds. The harmony between humans, other-than-human beings and our environments must be fought with non-destructive weapons, within our collective imaginary, with alternative modes-of-life that we are only beginning to create.
The pressure is mounting for us to prioritize relationships of mutual blossoming over extractive practices. To do so would hurt the egos of those who continue to deem themselves the most important Being on Earth. A good first step would be to acknowledged that if what we really care about is a human form-of-life as pain-free as possible, then we should ask ourselves why some humans are more ‘worthy of care’ than others? Why, on average, are African, Pacific Islanders, Black and Chicano Americans less important within our global culture?
We are already enough, in both power and numbers, to say ‘Enough!’ to discrimination, to domination, to hegemonic claims. We are capable enough to determine our values, our beliefs, our priorities, our aspirations, our ideals and attitudes, and shape our symbols, myths and collective imaginary accordingly. Such a massive cultural change will require mourning. But humanity, like the Phoenix, can be reborn… The question is whether we will wait to act until we burn alive, or if we will willingly act as midwives. Either way, like any birth, this transition will be painful, yet possibly no less than the sum total of the pain already present in the world.
For the sake of our 7th generation, I — through this post — act today to invoke into existence a non-supremacist and post-centric culture.
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Note 1: Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Note 2: I thank Sylvia Wynter for the idea that there are several ‘genres of human-ness’, distinct not because of their biology but according to their cultural myths and stories.