greenknowing

Scraps, links, notes, thoughts in one place

[greenknowing]

Enlivenment

http://www.kosmosjournal.org/article/the-enlivenment-manifesto-politics-and-poetics-in-the-anthropocene/

I like this manifesto/movement for Enlivenment, going beyond the Enlightenment approaches to sustainability which are too Anthropocene (technoculture, seeing nature as dead matter or as resource). 

It calls for a shift from techne to poiesis, which is something I support. 

It concludes with this summary 

A policy of life strives for the following:

A global ecological agriculture, which secures yields by enhancing biodiversity and human existential experiences (meaning and joy); which integrates and does not separate.

An economy that does not support the ‘use’ of resources in a ‘market’ built on ‘objectivity’ and separation but enlarges the possibilities to participate in a shared planetary metabolism of commons economy and is guided by an understanding of economic exchange as the shared household of the biosphere.

A culture that no longer functions according to the income-generating model of private economics but participates in a cocreative process of production.

A biology that understands organisms not only as ecosystem-service providers and molecular toolboxes but also as creative subjects, and which sees humans as a metabolic part of a biosphere enmeshed with life and feeling.

An education that teaches an Art of Living and Connection; that does not follow only a standard of abstract knowledge, functionalistic technology, and ‘dead world’ thought; that reduces valuations and judgements.

A policy that understands regional administrative entities as self-organizing commons and does not follow rules of universal abstraction and selfish market interests.

A shared livelihood with other beings in line with the South American creation ethos of ‘Buen Vivir’ or the idea of ‘Conviviality’ by Caillé et al., that is, a solidarity of existence with all beings.33,34

A regenerative transformation of the fractures and contradictions inherent in any connection, creation, and in life itself, in line with a bravery of being and an imaginative practice of aliveness with ‘manners, grace and style’ (Gary Snyder).18

[greenknowing]

Fruit bat persons

‘Flying Fox: Kin, Keystone, Kontaminant’ by Deborah Bird Rose is a fascinating account of how flying foxes are perceived as kin by indigenous Australians, and what this can teach us towards “ever greater mutuality and accountability as intra-dependent members of the suffering family of life on Earth.”

Flying foxes (or fruit bats) are an endangered group of over 900 species of megachiroptera and microchiroptera, “and are involved in all four of the major factors causing extinctions: habitat loss, overexploitation, introduced species and extinction cascades.” They have been seen as pests by orchardists, so there have been many attempts to cull them. Bird Rose describes these attempts in terms of warfare, as part of a ‘logic of terror’. Although their numbers declined over the past century, orchardists continued to report growing numbers, as habitat clearance forced the flying foxed to gravitate towards orchards. Now their fates have tipped to being declared endangered. Climate change-related heat events are leading to incidents of mass deaths. She concludes by referring back to the indigenous view of flying foxes as family, that they have to be treated with a combination of responsibility and vulnerability (e.g. knowing that flying foxes harbour disease).  

[greenknowing]

Designing indigenous landscapes

This is really interesting work by Julia Watson that uses digital technology and interpretive landscape design to create alternative and educational experiences of sacred and World Heritage Sites, to reduce environmental impacts and to conserve these sites in collaborative ways with indigenous inhabitants. 

[greenknowing]

Read on the anthropocene

A great reading list about the anthropocene, compiled by Jason M Kelly in preparation for teaching a course on ‘History, the Environment and the Global Anthropocene’. 

[greenknowing]

Ideas4Sustainability

I like this blog by Joern Fischer. I agree with his challenges to mindsets in science, research and policy that produce ‘bounded models’. For example, the limitation of an ecosystem to a particular place or the omission of environmental externalities. He is theoretically supportive of the idea of trying to value ecosystem services, but highly critical of our limited models for doing so. This article for example suggests that we should be aiming to create a more nested model of ecosystem services (distinguishing inflows and outflows with more categorical nuance) and scaling up in more considered ways. 

[greenknowing]

Humans as superorganisms

Humans are superorganisms, habitats for other selfish entities. Here are two quotes extracted from a research paper by Peter Kramer and Paola Bressan. 

“Unbeknownst to many people, our emotions, cognition, behavior, and mental health are influenced by a large number of entities that reside in our bodies while pursuing their own interests, which need not coincide with ours. Such selfish entities include microbes, viruses, foreign human cells, and imprinted genes regulated by viruslike elements. This article provides a broad overview, aimed at a wide readership, of the consequences of our coexistence with these entities. Its aim is to show that we are not unitary individuals in control of ourselves but rather “holobionts” or superorganisms—meant here as collections of human and nonhuman elements that are to varying degrees integrated and, in an incessant struggle, jointly define who we are.”

And “Whereas our cohabitation with one or another of them may not pose a strong challenge to the commonly shared assumption that humans are unitary individuals, the presence of a large number and wide variety of such entities—and the power they have on us—renders this assumption untenable. We are not organisms but superorganisms, and understanding our behavior ultimately requires an understanding of the network of selfish entities that inhabit our body and actively interact with it. It is time to change the very concept we have of ourselves and to realize that one human individual is neither just human nor just one individual.”

Surely the same is true of most other complex life forms, and, for example, the way that trees harbour and sustain life of many other species? Are humans being presented as a kind of ecosystem in order for us to understand the concept of interdependence? 

[greenknowing]

Can trees survive heat?

This article by Lizzie Wade, also to be found on Wired, describes research by Klaus Winter which tested the capacities of 10 different tropical tree species to thrive in hotter temperatures. There were 3 temperature ranges, linked to future scenarios of global warming. Surprisingly all but two of the species survived. Other tree scientists are quoted underpinning this finding, and suggesting that tropical forests in the future will be very different from those today, probably much simpler, with rapid-growing and nimble species doing best. The article then goes on to cover research about ocean acidification, how it is wreaking havoc on marine invertebrates but how although the food web will be dramatically simplified, there will still be some species that thrive.  

The question that arose for me is whether these research projects can possibly be predictive when there are so many critical factors that would also affect trees or marine species, in particular, the effects of pollution such as nuclear waste and plastics. This is why we need much more collaboration so that studies can be much bigger, admit much more complexity, and begging as few questions as possible. 

[greenknowing]

Murray Bookchin

Toward a new social ecology is an appreciation of the work of Murray Bookchin, by Sanjay Perara. This is a short summary of the article. Bookchin articulated many of the concepts used by ecological and libertarian social activists (including anti-nuclear activists) in the 1960s and beyond.  He also revived social anarchism, which he later termed ‘communalism’. When most of the Left believed that economic growth was essential to social progress, and supported the myth of the ‘domination of nature’ he pioneered an ecological critique of capitalism and technology.  His first published article in 1952 addressed ‘The problem of chemicals in food’ and his first book was ‘Our Synthetic Environment’. He was not just technical in his writing, but addressed social origins of pollution and extraction, and was aware that ecological thought was not just subversive but revolutionary. He was impatient with narrow instrumentalism of more scientific environmentalists, demanding a more systemic approach that included social ecology. 

In the Ecology of Freedom he reviewed anthropological literature to define the core principles of organic societies (indigenous, holocratic...). These principles include: 

interdependence,

usufruct (the right to use or enjoy a thing possessed, directly and without altering it)

unity-in-diversity and complementarity (”disavowing the oppressive inequality of supposed ‘equals’ within contemporary societies, instead invoking traditional communities’ efforts to compensate for differences in ability among members”)

and the irreducible minimum, (i.e., the principle that communities are responsible for satisfying the their members’ most basic needs). 

Read on for more about his influence on politics and his critique of the ‘deep ecology’ movement as expressed in Earth First! Concluding with a consideration of how a revival of Bookchin’s concept of social ecology offers radical possibilities for change now, in the light of the failure of cautious and instrumental environmentalism. 

[greenknowing]

Umwelten and biosemiotics

An interesting account by Linda Williams about biosemiotics, the ‘umwelt’ of other creatures and how this has influenced environmental art. 

The concept of umwelten is derived from the work of Jakob von Uexküll. Umwelt means surrounding or self-centred world, and for von Uexküll umwelten “conveyed the idea of the vast range of creatures occupying worlds whose meaning could be understood from their specific point of perspective”. He concluded that communication was a process of interaction common to the umwelten of all organisms, human or non-human. This formed the basis of biosemiotics, as explored in the study of the ‘information dance’ of bees. Bees are understood to adapt their dance according to the enthusiasm of other bees to receive the information, so it is not a simple one-to-many transmission. 

The piece goes on to describe an exhibition Us and Them: Umwelten, with work by Steve Baker, Yifang Lu, Catherine Clover, Debbie Symons and others. I first came across Symons’ work as I’ve supported the Day of Remembrance for Lost Species, in which awareness is raised of the Sixth Mass Extinction in creative ways on 30 November each year. In 2012 Symons created a work called World Species Market, replacing financial share information with data from the Red List of endangered species.  

[greenknowing]

Theory in the Anthropocene

McKenzie Wark writes about theory of the Anthropocene in his 2015 book Molecular Red. 

In this article he introduces his key idea, referring to some theoretical sources around Marxism that can inform ecological thinking. He doesn’t go into the Russian and American intellectual contexts that his book addresses, but it is a useful and engaging summary. He writes... 

The situation is that “the sum total of social labor undermines its own conditions of planetary existence. There is no longer an outside, a margin, an elsewhere, to dump the waste products of that labor and pretend this disorder that we make has gone away. That disorder now feeds back through the whole metabolism of the planet. It has done so for a while, it will keep doing so, in a sense, forever. There is no ‘environment’ or ‘nature’ that is separate. There is no ‘ecology’ that could be in balance if we just withdrew from it.”

He also describes the forms of denial that one encounters in trying to talk about the Anthropocene, not as crudely as found in climate denial, but more insidiously as found in most intellectual circles. 

[greenknowing]

On the notion of sustainability

This article by Richard Raatzsch is quite a philosophical treatment of the idea and term ‘sustainability’. I think his overall point is that you cannot distinguish a ‘sustainable economy’ from a functioning economy, or an economy per se. Sustainability isn’t a part of a whole economy. Also, sustainable economics aren’t a subcategory of sustainability. The idea of life or nature continuing is fundamental to an economy, and to basic morality. (It would kind of suggest that our planet is currently operating an anti-economy?) 

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0020174X.2012.696349

[greenknowing]

Ecological Thought and place

An interesting article by Samantha Clarke called:

Strange strangers and uncanny hammers: Morton's The Ecological Thought and the phenomenological tradition

This is the abstract: "Phenomenological notions of ‘dwelling’, particularly as presented by Heidegger, have recently come in for a great deal of criticism (Garrard 2010; Morton 2010; Plumwood 2008; Spencer 2010). This article will evaluate these criticisms, particularly those set out by Timothy Morton in his book The Ecological Thought (2010). Morton argues that the concepts of the ‘lifeworld’ and ‘dwelling’ raise several problems: the extinguishing of the ‘otherness’ of nature, the eradication of difference and the equating of ‘place’ with ownership, exclusion and nationalism, thus failing to allow for uncanniness within intimacy, and for other beings to remain ‘strange strangers’ (Morton 2010). I will consider whether Morton's notion of an ecological ‘mesh’ may be a reiteration of the insights of those thinkers he is criticising, and I will argue that the phenomenology of Heidegger and Husserl has more space for gaps, absence and uncanniness than Morton and others are allowing."

It’s in Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, Vol 17, 2013

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14688417.2013.800339

Interesting to me because it deals with concepts of place as being equated with ownership, which by turns excludes and separates. 

[greenknowing]

Infrastructure base for civilisation

Michel Bauwens here does a neat summary of Cultural Anthropology by Marvin Harris and Orna Johnson, showing how it gives an ecological explanation for the origins of civilisation. Societies consist of three interrelated layers, infrastructure (the foundations of security, production & reproduction), structure (relations of exchange, kinship & decision-making) and superstructure (rituals, culture, ideas). Truly radical social change really only occurs with shifts to infrastructure (e.g. through migration or revolutions such as agriculture or use of fossil fuels). Adopting agriculture was a response to the end of the Pleistocene, an era of dramatic climate change. They had to catch more small animals to survive, which expended too much labour so they had to adapt to a more efficient system, which involved settling. Many of the settlements grew to become states. The ones that did so were those that were most susceptible to: intensification, redistribution and the expansion of managerial functions. These production systems tended to be based on grain and ruminants. Intensifier-redistributor-warriors were the nuclei of the first ruling classes of the world. 

[greenknowing]

Offsetting

I liked this piece on Biodiversity Offsetting on a blog by Charlotte Wrigley. There is plenty of material elsewhere critical on this topic but this account was both accessible and critical.  

The idea of Biodiversity Offsetting is based on the idea that ecosystems are useful. "A seemingly innocuous phrase, ecosystem services is an umbrella term for the ways humanity benefits from the services provided by the environment – namely, clean water, flood control, air quality etc." My key point here is that it's not so much that ecosystems have other types of value for humans (e.g. aesthetics and heritage, although these things do matter), it's that these ecosystems are primarily of use to the other species that inhabit them. The whole notion of only valuing anything for the benefit of only one animal species is deeply unecological. 

The process of Biodiversity Offsetting is based on the idea that you can destroy one ecosystem if you can replace similar elsewhere to provide the same ecosystem services (for humans). Charlotte helpfully uses the concept of de re and de dicto to explain how one cannot be replaced with another. De re is the thing itself (the specific ecosystem or place). De dicto is the thing as talked of, the generic category of the thing. They are not interchangeable, especially when it comes to ecosystems.

One of the crucial elements that the offsetting system neglects to measure is the ecosystem services provided by the 'sense of place' of a place: people's regular and established use or sight of it, the memories and historical significance, and the wellbeing benefits that arise from it. I'd argue that despite our neglect of other species in the way that we manage and talk about the environment, we still have a deep rooted sense of wellbeing when other species are thriving and a sense of hurt or loss when they are not. We do have a sense that wild nature is sacred, that it benefits us precisely because we see that others are benefiting, not so much because we can commodify and exploit it. Much as I like the idea of enchantment in nature, I think we do need to articulate 'ecosystem services' but a) in clear terms that demonstrate the full range of human benefits including heritage, aesthetics, health and spirituality and b) in terms that somehow calculate and rate the services provided for other species.  

[greenknowing]

Fear, promise, hope and reality

Here is an interesting juxtaposition of articles. One is George Monbiot's expression of his change of approach, from warning of ecological disaster to a gentler (but also more active) relanguaging and appreciation of the natural world. The headline is 'Saving the world should be based on promise not fear'. He doesn't quote Rachel Carson but it brings to mind her famous saying: “The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.” I particularly like his reference to The Landreader Project, in which photographer Dominick Tyler is documenting and rediscovering words that connect people to place and nature. Indigenous knowledge is primarily knowledge of the detail of nature, and how to live well in it, and when the specifics of ecosystems are destroyed through homogenised agriculture, ecocide or natural disaster, this knowledge is lost too as reported in this BBC article. Rewilding, as Alan Watson Featherstone reminds us, is not just a practical task but one of enchantment. 

The other article is Clive Hamilton's reply to Andrew Revkin arguing against the delusion of ecopragmatists who promote the task of saving the planet - mainly through technology - as exciting and hopeful. He says this response is a 'maladaptive coping strategy'.

Both Hamilton's and Monbiot's positions are compelling and truthful. 

George's position is not quite the same as the ecopragmatists - he's not bouncy about the prospect of geoengineering (unless you see Rewilding is a form of geoengineering - which I happen to think it is) and he's definitely alert to the worst case scenarios. He has argued in the recent past for nuclear power as a solution, but Rewilding (and more ecological forms of land use in general) has taken prime position in his planet-saving arsenal. 

Hamilton has written in 'Requiem for a Species' about the different forms of denial of ecological collapse - and I was particularly struck by the idea of 'constructive denial'. Once I'd read this book I saw constructive denial everywhere, including in myself.

I'm wondering if turning from stark climate communication to enchantment in nature is the most benign possible coping strategy. I don't think it's maladaptive. But Rewilding and nature education are both fairly long term strategies. Trees take 80-100 years to reach maturity. Humans arguably take longer. A sole focus on these approaches might not be terribly effective in the short to medium term in tackling the crisis.

It could be that the most vocal and diligent environmentalists eventually cannot cope with reactions to pointing out the alarming unfolding ecological collapse. People just do not engage with you. If you're freelance or on short contracts, you just can't get the work if you expose the stark truth all the time. Some of them find other ways - poetry, permaculture, tree-planting, or working in outdoor education, or eco-tourism. Others might go seeking work in the more industrial ecopragmatist direction - the position Hamilton criticises. The task is to somehow create progressive routes out of these coping strategies - so that they join up to create effective action. 

[greenknowing]

Radical human ecology

Alastair McIntosh explores 'soil and soul' as an academic subject in these chapters, extracted from a book on Radical Human Ecology: Intercultural and Indigenous Approaches. 

I am interested in a section where he unpacks the underlying issues. Human Ecology is seen as problematic because it is both too political and too psycho-spiritual for conventional thinking. "Once a way of thinking and being moves beyond the relatively safe confines of PRED - population, resources, environment and development - it runs up against iceberg-like structures of money, power and epistemology which are largely invisible until struck". The most profound challenge of Human Ecology is epistemological. It alters our framing of what constitutes knowledge. It challenges personal comfort zones, notions of academic subjects and the purpose of research, the abstraction of academia from life, the emotional impact of discovering deep cracks in our world and our very ideas of what it means to be a human being. 

He goes on to compare three civilisational worldviews, the pre-modern, the modern and the post-modern.

Pre-modernity is "a system in which physical reality is held to be inter-penetrated, or underpinned, by spiritual reality" and its worldview is mythopoetic. Spirituality is not understood as a private affair, but rather "we are possessed of both our individuality and the ecology of our collectivity". It is not lost in the past but continues to be the worldview of most indigenous peoples today. 

Modernity grew out of the Enlightenment and its positivism, but increasingly less representative of the 'logos' of Ancient Greek but "pedestrian human rationality, a function of the brain held in the conscious control of the ego and cognitively articulated through logic".

Postmodernity emerged out of the need to challenge dominant power structures and consists mainly of 'deconstruction' or unpacking assumptions, including a resistance to myths. McIntosh sees it as 'flatulent', airy, still driven by the ego and not arriving at coherent answers or stories. The wild environment is seen as a construction and used as a metaphor.

He then presses to the "core of this detachment of post/modernity from its premodern embedded ensoulment". In nihilism he sees smothering violence. The idea of the sacred as a secular (i.e. non-dogmatic, uninstitutionalised) ground for our being has been vaporised and in its place is egotistical aggression. He concludes with a story that suggests we need to 'call back the soul'

[greenknowing]

Stable or open

A really informative essay by Chris Reed & Nina-Marie Lister on how ecology emerged in Science and the Humanities and then influenced Design. It charts the shift in thinking of ecosystems as ideally stable to acknowledging that they are resilient, open-ended and adaptive to critical changes. They see this ecology thinking most strongly applied to landscape architecture which is "in a unique disciplinary and practical space — informed by ecological knowledge as an applied science, as a construct for managing change, and as a model of cultural production or design." 

Under the Science heading, they describe the dual rise of Ecosystem Ecology (more large-scale/abstract) and Applied Field Ecology (more focused on problem-solving). Ecology thinking has influenced practical management of forest fires and floods, moving from trying to control a steady state, towards allowing flow and self-healing. In the Humanities, they talk about Daniel Botkin, establishing a bridge over from science, through a number of thinkers that explored the human relationship with nature, to Michael Pollan who illuminated the agency of planets themselves and the interconnections in nature in the evolution of crop diversity. 

In Design thinking, Ian McHarg was influential in drawing attention to natural resources as essential within planning. Richard Forman connected the use of data and mapping to landscape design problems. They refer to work of land artists and designers, including the co-author Lister, who work with dynamic ecologies.

They conclude that there is more to be done: "few designers have yet ventured beyond the metaphors and mechanics supplied by these ecological models to design effectively for adaptation to change, or to incorporate learned feedback into the designs, or to work in transdisciplinary modes of practice that open new apertures for the exploration of new systems, synergies and wholly collaborative work. This is the project ahead: leading the sciences, humanities, and design culture toward a more rigorous, robust and relevant engagement across the domains of ecology and design."