This is the context in which the nuclear squabble is being played out. I recently read, for example, an article that claimed that renewable energy can’t meet ‘our energy needs’. But our needs for what? Coffee machines and fast broadband, or clean drinking water and living ecosystems? Middle-class life in a consumer democracy or a liveable human existence? Or do we now think these are the same thing? If you really want to see where a green quant is coming from, simply catch him in the middle of one of these arguments and ask him (and it usually is a him) to define ‘need’. Then watch the narrative spooling out like film from a broken canister.
As a poet, of course, I have a vested interest in objecting to this, and I often do, but I don’t do it without empathy or without some doubt. I know why it has happened. This, after all, is an approach designed to produce clear and concrete results – something that is undeniably useful in an age of ecocide. But what narrative framework are the results being produced in? Because it’s that framework, in the end, that will determine where those results take us.
Too many green quants, then, and not enough green poets? I think so. Or rather, I think that the poets have been cowed into silence by the dominance and urgency of the quants’ narrative. How to reassert the importance of stories, then, is perhaps a key question now. Green poets might perhaps start by observing that worlds are not ‘saved’ by the same stories that are killing them. They might want to observe that saving worlds is an impossible business in the first place. Or they might try to explore what it is about how we see ourselves that reduces us to this, time and time again – arguing about machines rather than wondering what those machines give us and what they take away.
The friction between the quant and the poet could be represented by focusing on a few bickering individuals, or by trying to divide the greens up into Two Cultures. But it could also, perhaps more honestly and productively, be represented as a tension that is present within all of us. None of us is wholly, or even primarily, rational and analytical, and none of us is quite devoid of poetry either, though it is sometimes hard to find it.
These divisions are themselves stories that we, in this particular culture, tell ourselves about how humans work. The quants and the poets are both needed, but I would argue that, right now, the poets ought to take the lead – if indeed that is ever something that poets are capable of. We have no shortage of arguments about numbers and machines, but we do have a great shortage of workable stories. That is to say: stories that don’t just have happy endings, but have convincing plots as well.
dark-mountain.net, 2011
A Short History of Loss
Thoughts on Biophilia
In October 2006, a beekeeper from Pennsylvania in the United States dropped off 400 colonies of bees in Florida, to overwinter in the much warmer state. A month later, when he returned to check on his hives, he was bewildered to find that most of the bees were missing. The queens were still there, and some of the young, but all of the older bees – the honeybees, who went out foraging for nectar and brought it back to feed the hive – had completely disappeared. The collapse had been rapid and almost total: only 9 of his 400 colonies remained intact.
Beekeepers regularly experience the loss of some colonies, and bees are often killed by parasites, cold winters and other natural phenomena. But this was different. Over the next six months, nearly a quarter of all the beekeepers across the US experienced similar disappearances, losing nearly half of all their hives. Every year since then, the problem has escalated: by 2013, around half of all the honeybee hives in the United States were victims of this new and mysterious plague.
Soon the problem spread further and ‘colony collapse disorder’, as the phenomenon became known, was experienced across Europe too. Between 2008 and 2013, the honeybee population was reported to have dropped by 30 per cent in Britain, 40 per cent in Italy and Germany and 50 per cent in Switzerland. If the collapse continues, the bee problem could become a human problem: many of our crops rely on bees and other insects to pollinate them.
In May 2014, a report by Harvard University biologists claimed to have identified the cause of the bee collapse: a relatively new kind of pesticide known as a neonicotinoid. When colonies were deliberately treated with these pesticides, the honeybees within would abandon their hives and not return. The scientists suggested that the pesticides might be impairing the bees’ memory or brain functions, making them unable to fully function, or to remember their way home.
Fortunately, over in another department of Harvard University, another team of scientists was working on a project that might render honeybees ultimately replaceable. The ‘Robobees’ project, run by the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, is dedicated, as the name suggests, to building robotic bees. In 2009, in response to the news about colony collapse disorder, one of the team explained that they ‘began to seriously consider what it would take to create a robotic bee colony. We wondered if mechanical bees could replicate not just an individual’s behaviour but the unique behaviour that emerges out of interactions among thousands of bees.’
So far, the Robobees team has succeeded in creating beesized robots and making them fly. The next step is to make them cooperate like a real hive. After that, the robotic insects may be trained to pollinate plants or even to work as part of search-and-rescue operations in disaster zones. The Robobees scientists are keen to stress that they don’t want their creations to replace real bees, but many of their supporters are not so shy about the ultimate endpoint of the project. The Robobees project ‘might seem unsettling, and a violation of our aesthetic sensibilities’, explained one futurist web magazine, ‘but we’d essentially be replacing biological “robots” with synthetic ones’.
How did we get to the point where we regard a living creature as a ‘robot’: and an inefficient one at that, ripe for replacement with better models once we have worked out how to make them? What errors have led us to this way of seeing? Were they the same errors that got us to the point where we were both willing and able to spray landscapes with toxic pesticides that wipe out vast swathes of insect life? Were they the same errors that could change the climate of an entire planet, trigger a sixth mass-extinction event, acidify oceans, break up ice caps and shred the last great wild forests and their inhabitants in the cause of toilet paper and soya mince?
We live in what is easily the most ecologically destructive culture in human history. But how did we get here? Have humans always been hardwired for ecocide, or did things go wrong somewhere along the journey? Was there an event, or a series of events, in our history that led us to the point where we regarded ourselves as separate from something external called ‘nature’, which we could choose either to idealise for pleasure or ravage for profit? If so, can we identify and learn from them?
The notion that humankind has experienced a Fall – a point at which we were ejected from a prelapsarian garden – runs like a golden thread through Western culture. In his novel Ishmael, Daniel Quinn suggests that the biblical story of the Fall is a dim historical memory: a retelling through myth of the human development of agriculture. The Garden of Eden represents the prehistoric world of the hunter-gatherer tribes who were displaced by agriculturalists. The development of agriculture, far from being a leap forward, was in this reading a disaster. People were forced to leave a world in which wild creatures were abundant, hunting was relatively easy and edible food was widespread, for backbreaking toil in the fields, a shorter and less healthy life, and a constant battle to subdue nature with ploughs and walls and fences and flocks.
Perhaps, then, the development of agriculture, which is the basis for all modern civilisations, was the point at which we began to look at the non-human world as a collection of potential resources to be utilised, rather than as a community to which we belonged. Certainly it was the development of agriculture, and the settled communities, towns and eventually cities that resulted, that allowed us to create the hierarchical, technologically dependent global civilisation that t
oday is denuding the planet of its riches.
Perhaps, on the other hand, the problem is not agriculture but industry. Until the Industrial Revolution really got off the ground in the eighteenth century, the Earth’s human population was small and relatively limited in the damage it could do. Then we discovered and began to extract and burn coal, gas and oil, and the party really began. It could be that the climate change that this most recent of technological leaps has already set in motion will knock the human experiment with civilisation on the head altogether. It is too early to say.
Then again, perhaps the problem goes much further back than this. Perhaps the taming of fire by human beings was the point at which we separated ourselves from other creatures. Perhaps it was the making of tools, which allowed us to hunt and kill way beyond the level that might be considered ‘natural’. The novelist William Golding believed that the development of language itself represented a symbolic break in human evolution: language, he suggested, allowed us to overlay abstractions onto reality and begin to shift away from that reality into our self-created internal universe.
In reality, there was probably no one moment before which we lived in harmony and after which a covenant was broken. Instead, there is a historical arc that can be traced from the development of human language to the development of synthetic bees. If there is, in the words of Thor Heyerdahl, ‘nothing for modern man to return to’, the question is what we can move on to, and how we can do it in a way that brings us back in tune with what the philosopher Thomas Berry called ‘the great conversation’ between humans and the rest of the natural world.
Certainly that conversation is almost non-existent in the modern West today. The twenty-first century is shaping up to be the age in which post-Enlightenment humanity finally realises a long-cherished ambition: to rebuild the planet in its own image. Probably we have been doing this since we planted the first seeds and bred the first livestock, but we have the power now to take things to a whole new level: to modify the genes of plants and animals, to build robotic alternatives to living creatures and to use the techniques of synthetic biology to create new living creatures from scratch, which can be sent out into the world with the sole purpose of achieving a human end. For centuries we have dreamt of usurping the gods. Many would like to believe that it is about to happen.
The increasingly fashionable word ‘biophilia’ seems to me to be simply a modern, science-sanctioned way of describing a very ancient kind of love: a love for the natural world of which we are part. ‘Nature’ is not something external to us, it is something we are part of and something that is within us: what are we if not natural? ‘Biophilia’, then – love of life – is as natural as love of your wife or husband or children or parents. Your relationship with nature may sometimes be as difficult and stormy as your relationship with any of them, but none of these relationships can ever go away, and they all change you. We are all bound up together. Watch any child play in a field or wood: they know this. Then they – we – grow up and learn to convince themselves that ‘objective’ reality is somehow different from lived experience. We learn to convince ourselves that the world is a machine, not an animal, that it is unconscious and meaningless and that the only questions to be asked are questions of how and not questions of why or whether.
However we got here, we have managed to create a culture in which we have alienated ourselves from the rest of life. We struggle to persuade ourselves that this alienation is the same thing as freedom. Increasingly, though, for those penned into cities with no view of the stars and no taste of clean air and nothing but grass between the cracks in the pavement to nourish their sense of the wild, this is no freedom at all. We have made ourselves caged animals, and all the gadgets in the world cannot compensate for what we have lost.
Humans are animals – undomesticated animals – and there is something in us that still yearns for that great conversation. We need it, as we need water and air and food. Often this sense of a need to connect with wild nature is mocked or belittled in contemporary culture: dismissed as romantic, backward-looking, naive, irrelevant to the serious business of living in the ‘modern world’. In reality, it is that modern world that is out of tune with what sings in the human body. Biophilia is as natural and inherent as any other form of human love, and it is not going away. All the Robobees and artificial forests on Earth cannot make up for our strange, strong sense that living without wild nature is like living without one of our senses or one of our limbs.
As the Christians have their story of a Fall from a prehistoric Eden, the Hindus have a belief that the world travels through four different ages, or yugas. The age we are currently living in is the Kali yuga: a dark age characterised by degeneration and greed. Avarice and a general disrespect for life define the kali yuga: it is the age when humans have been telling themselves that they are equal to the gods for so long that they begin to believe it and act on it, with catastrophic consequences.
Only when this era is over, Hindu mythology tells us, will sanity begin to prevail again. But in the decline of one age, and one way of seeing, there is always contained the seed of another. If an unexamined yearning to reconnect with the wild world remains within us, then perhaps we will never quite allow ourselves to be tamed. It is a delicious thought that what might save us, in the end, will not be a new economic arrangement or a new politics or another revolution or a series of wonder technologies, but our own inner wildness, pushed under so hard and for so long that it finally bursts to the surface again, hungry for what it has lost.
Biophilia, 2015
II : WITHDRAWAL
Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist
Some See Nature all Ridicule & Deformity … & Some Scarce see Nature at all. But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself.
William Blake
SCENES FROM A YOUNGER LIFE 1
I am twelve years old. I am alone, I am scared, I am cold and I am crying my eyes out. I can’t see more than six feet in either direction. I am on some godforsaken moor high up on the dark, ancient, poisonous spine of England. The black bog juice I have been trudging through for hours has long since crept over the tops of my boots and down into my socks. My rucksack is too heavy, I am unloved and lost and I will never find my way home. It is raining and the cloud is punishing me; clinging to me, laughing at me. Twenty-five years later, I still have a felt memory of that experience and its emotions: a real despair and a terrible loneliness.
I do find my way home; I manage to keep to the path and eventually catch up with my father, who has the map and the compass and the mini Mars bars. He was always there, somewhere up ahead, but he had decided it would be good for me to ‘learn to keep up’ with him. All of this, he tells me, will make me into a man.
Only later do I realise the complexity of the emotions summoned by a childhood laced with experiences like this. My father was a compulsive long-distance walker. Every year, throughout my most formative decade, he would take me away to Cumbria or Northumberland or Yorkshire or Cornwall or Pembrokeshire or the Welsh Marches, and we would walk, for weeks. We would follow ancient tracks or new trails, across mountains and moors and ebony black cliffs. Much of the time we would be alone with each other and with our thoughts and our conversations, and we would be alone with the oystercatchers, the gannets, the curlews, the skylarks and the owls. With the gale and the breeze, with our maps and compasses and emergency rations and bivvy bags and plastic bottles of water. We would camp in the heather, by cairns and old mine shafts, hundreds of feet above the orange lights of civilisation, and I would dream. And in the morning, with dew on the tent and cold air in my face as I opened the zip, the wild elements of life, all of the real things, would all seem to be there, waiting for me with the sunrise.
SCENES FROM A YOUNGER LIFE 2
I am nineteen years old. It is around midnight and I am on the summit of a low, chalk down, the last of the long chain that winds its way through the crowded, peopled, fractious South
Country. There are maybe fifty or sixty people there with me. There is a fire going, there are guitars, there is singing and there are weird and unnerving whooping noises from some of the ragged travellers who have made this place their home.
This is Twyford Down, a hilltop east of Winchester. There is something powerful about this place; something ancient and unanswering. Soon it is to be destroyed: a six-lane motor way will be driven through it in a deep chalk cutting. It is vital that this should happen in order to reduce the journey time of travellers between London and Southampton by a full thirteen minutes. The people up here have made it their home in a doomed attempt to stop this happening.
From outside it is impossible to see, and most do not want to. The name-calling has been going on for months, in the papers and the pubs and in the House of Commons. The people here are Luddites, nimbies, reactionaries, romantics. They are standing in the way of progress. They will not be tolerated. Inside, there is a sense of shared threat and solidarity, there are blocks of hash and packets of Rizlas and litres of bad cider. We know what we are here for. We know what we are doing. We can feel the reason in the soil and in the night air. Down there, under the lights and behind the curtains, there is no chance that they will ever understand. We are on our own.
Someone I don’t know suggests we dance the maze. Out beyond the firelight, there is a maze carved into the down’s soft, chalk turf. I don’t know if it’s some ancient monument or a new creation. Either way, it’s the same spiral pattern that can be found carved in rocks from millennia ago. With cans and cigarettes and spliffs in our hands, a small group of us starts to walk the maze, laughing, staggering, then breaking into a run, singing, spluttering, stumbling together towards the centre.
Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays Page 5