Chapter 1 introduces two ideas within the ecological thought—the mesh and the strange stranger. When we think big, curious things happen. People commonly criticize science for disenchanting the world, making it both utterly flat and highly profitable, to parody Hamlet. Science isn’t necessarily enchanting, but I shall suggest that the more we know, the less certain and the more ambiguous things become, both on a micro and on a macro level. The current ecological disaster, which we know about only because of very sophisticated interdisciplinary science, has torn a giant hole in the fabric of our understanding. This isn’t just because the world has already changed utterly. It is also because of the philosophical and experiential implications of the crisis that engendered the ecological thought. The ecological thought imagines interconnectedness, which I call the mesh. Who or what is interconnected with what or with whom? The mesh of interconnected things is vast, perhaps immeasurably so. Each entity in the mesh looks strange. Nothing exists all by itself, and so nothing is fully “itself.” There is curiously “less” of the Universe at the same time, and for the same reasons, as we see “more” of it. Our encounter with other beings becomes profound. They are strange, even intrinsically strange. Getting to know them makes them stranger. When we talk about life forms, we’re talking about strange strangers.39 The ecological thought imagines a multitude of entangled strange strangers.
How do we get inspired to think as big as the ecological thought requires? In Chapter 1, I explore some literary, artistic, and cultural forms that can help us. There is, for example, a counterstrain in literary “green” writing that has not so much to do with hedgerows and birds’ nests as it has to do with the planet Earth as a whole and with the displacement and disorientation we feel when we start to think big. Milton is the forerunner here, but Wordsworth also shows up, along with the very Wordsworth people associate with green Wellington boots, muddy Volvos, and quaint nooks of mythical Olde England. When we think of indigenous cultures, we tend to impose a Western ideology of localism and “small is beautiful” onto them. In the case of at least one culture—nomadic Tibetans—this is a big mistake. Should we wish to send astronauts to Mars, we could do worse than train Tibetans and other indigenous peoples for the ride. They would only have to learn to push a few buttons. The very people we think of as thinking small may think the biggest of all.
The ecological thought is as much about opening our minds as it is about knowing something or other in particular. At its limit, it is a radical openness to everything. The ecological thought is therefore full of shadows and twilights. The ecological world isn’t a positive, sunny “Zippity Doo Da” world.40 The sentimental aesthetics of cute animals is obviously an obstacle to the ecological thought. But so is the sublime aesthetics of the awesome. We need a whole new way of evoking the environment. In this respect, utopian eco-language turns me off. It is far too affirmative. This is one reason why Chapter 2 is called “Dark Thoughts.” I am perhaps unfairly nauseated by the idea of “bright green”—a shade of environmental thinking that recently gained some popularity.41 “Bright” conveys optimism, intelligence, and an acceptance of the sunny world of consumer products. The inventors claim that ecological thinking can accommodate itself to postmodern consumer capitalism. Maybe at heart I’m an old-fashioned goth, but when I hear the word “bright” I reach for my sunglasses. The ecological thought is intrinsically dark, mysterious, and open, like an empty city square at dusk, a half-open door, or an unresolved chord. It is realistic, depressing, intimate, and alive and ironic all at the same time. It is no wonder that the ancients thought that melancholy, their word for depression, was the earth mood. In the language of humor theory, melancholy is black, earthy, and cold.
Environmental rhetoric is too often strongly affirmative, extraverted, and masculine; it privileges speech over writing; and it simulates immediacy (feigning one-to-one correspondences between language and reality). It’s sunny, straightforward, ableist, holistic, hearty, and “healthy.” Where does this leave negativity, introversion, femininity, writing, mediation, ambiguity, darkness, irony, fragmentation, and sickness? Are these simply nonecological categories? Must we accept the injunction to turn on, tune in, shut up, go outdoors, and breathe Nature? Are we ostriches compelled to stick our ironic heads in the sand for fear of embarrassing Nature? I don’t think so. If the ecological thought is as big as I think it is, it must include darkness as well as light, negativity as well as positivity.
Negativity might even be more ecological than positivity is. A truly scientific attitude means not believing everything you think. This means that your thinking keeps encountering nonidentical phenomena, things you can’t put in a box. If the ecological thought is scientific, this implies that it has a high tolerance for negativity. Psychoanalysis asserts that melancholia bonds us inextricably to the mother’s body. Are we similarly bonded to Earth itself? Is the dark experience of separateness from Earth a place where we can experience ecological awareness? Is loneliness a sign of deep connection? Chapter 2 answers “yes” to these questions.
I explore the possibility of a new ecological aesthetics: dark ecology. Dark ecology puts hesitation, uncertainty, irony, and thoughtfulness back into ecological thinking. The form of dark ecology is that of noir film. The noir narrator begins investigating a supposedly external situation, from a supposedly neutral point of view, only to discover that she or he is implicated in it. The point of view of the narrator herself becomes stained with desire. There is no metaposition from which we can make ecological pronouncements. Ironically, this applies in particular to the sunny, affirmative rhetoric of environmental ideology. A more honest ecological art would linger in the shadowy world of irony and difference. With dark ecology, we can explore all kinds of art forms as ecological: not just ones that are about lions and mountains, not just journal writing and sublimity. The ecological thought includes negativity and irony, ugliness and horror. Democracy is well served by irony, because irony insists that there are other points of view that we must acknowledge. Ugliness and horror are important, because they compel our compassionate coexistence to go beyond condescending pity.
Things will get worse before they get better, if at all. We must create frameworks for coping with a catastrophe that, from the evidence of the hysterical announcements of its imminent arrival, has already occurred.
Chapter 2 provides extra shading to the idea of strange strangers, the life forms to whom we find ourselves connected. The strange stranger is at the limit of our imagining. As well as being about melancholy, dark ecology is also about uncertainty. Even if biology knew all the species on Earth, we would still encounter them as strange strangers, because of the inner logic of knowledge. The more you know about something, the stranger it grows. The more you know about the origins of the First World War, the more ambiguous your conclusions become. You find yourself unable to point to a single independent event. Viewed from a distance, the United Kingdom looks like a triangle. When you view it at a scale of millimeters, it looks very crinkly.42 The more we know about life forms, the more we recognize our connection with them and the stranger they become. The strange stranger isn’t just a blank at the end of a long list of life forms we know (aardvarks, beetles, chameleons ... the strange stranger). The strange stranger lives within (and without) each and every being. Along the way toward this idea, we visit the philosophy of consciousness, and in particular theories of artificial intelligence. Animals and robots (and computers) are often held in the same (low) esteem.
The more you know, the more entangled you realize you are, and the more open and ambiguous everything becomes. Consider the final paragraph of The Origin of Species: It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws
acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance ...; Variability, from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequent to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms.43
Throughout this book, I return to Darwin, because it is Darwin who thought through many of the complex and hard-to-face issues that confront the ecological thought. Modern thinking is willfully ignorant of Darwin. What does it feel like to understand evolution? Are we ready to admit the world of mutation and uncertainty that Darwin opens up?
Evolutionary biology must take art into account. The theory of sexual selection suggests that life manifests profound elements of sheer display, as any self-respecting mandrill or bowerbird could tell you. There are no realms more ambiguous than those of language and art. Camouflage, deception, and pure appearance are the stock in trade of life forms. Language provides evidence of the reduplication and random mutation that make up the processes of evolution. The strange stranger is involved in a shifting zone of aesthetic seeming and illusion. A rigorous thinking of the ecological thought compels us to let go of the unitary, virile ideas of Nature and the Natural that still prevail. The ecological thought is intrinsically queer. (Joining ecological thinking with thinking on gender and sexuality would make a fantastic bang, and this alone is reason enough to try it.) Finally, Chapter 2 shows that even at the furthest reaches of supposedly anti-ecological thinking, we find traces of the ecological thought. This is good news: it means that everything is ultimately workable and that the ecological thought, while hard to think thoroughly, is easy to latch onto from anywhere.
The ecological thought thinks big and joins the dots. It thinks through the mesh of life forms as far out and in as it can. It comes as close as possible to the strange stranger, generating care and concern for beings, no matter how uncertain we are of their identity, no matter how afraid we are of their existence. How do we proceed? Chapter 3, “Forward Thinking,” argues that these are not the end times but the first glimmerings of new times. The ecological thought must transcend the language of apocalypse. It’s ironic that we can imagine the collapse of the Antarctic ice shelves more readily than we can the collapse of the banking system—and despite this, amazingly, as this book was written, the banking system did collapse. The ecological thought must imagine economic change; otherwise it’s just another piece on the game board of capitalist ideology. The boring, rapacious reality we have constructed, with its familiar, furious, yet ultimately static whirl, isn’t the final state of history. The ecological society to come will be much more pleasurable, far more sociable, and ever so much more reasonable than we can imagine.
Ecology equals living minus Nature, plus consciousness. There are some tentative, shadowy models in art to show us the way. I explore how they direct us toward an ecological view. These models include experiments in artistic form as well as special kinds of artistic content. Chapter 3 explores progressive ideas in philosophy, science, economics, politics, and religion. It also examines one of the longest-term ecological problems: how to deal with the existence of hyperobjects, products such as Styrofoam and plutonium that exist on almost unthinkable timescales. Like the strange stranger, these materials confound our limited, fixated, self-oriented frameworks.
Our current categories are not set in stone. Capitalism isn’t the Procrustean bed that stretches everything to fit it forever. In the future, people might see what we now call postmodern art and culture as the emergence of global environmental culture. Like a virus, the ecological thought infects other systems of thinking and alters them from within, gradually disabling the incompatible ones. The infection has only just begun.
1
Thinking Big
The whole of the gene pool of the biosphere is available to all organisms.
Kwang W. Jeon and James F. Danielli
Small is beautiful. Diet for a small planet. The local is better than the global. These are some of the slogans of environmental movements since the late 1960s.1 I’ll be proposing the exact opposite of the sentiments they express. In my formulation, the best environmental thinking is thinking big—as big as possible, and maybe even bigger than that, bigger than we can conceive. The philosopher Immanuel Kant said that the sublime could be the idea of bigness beyond any ability to measure or picture—magnitude beyond any idea of magnitude. In its profundity and vastness, this magnitude demonstrates the radical freedom of our minds to transcend our “reality,��� the given state of affairs. Like operating system software, it doesn’t tell us what to think, but it boots up our minds to be ready for what we need in thinking democracy.2 And it’s also what we need in thinking ecology.
Witness this new-made world, another Heav’n
From Heaven gate not far, founded in view
On the clear hyaline, the glassy sea;
Of amplitude almost immense, with stars
Numerous, and every star perhaps a world
Of destined habitation; but thou know’st
Their seasons: among these the seat of men,
Earth with her nether Ocean circumfused,
Their pleasant dwelling place.
(John Milton, Paradise Lost 7.617–625)
What if that light
Sent from her through the wide transpicuous air,
To the terrestrial moon be as a star
Enlight’ning her by day, as she by night
This earth? reciprocal, if land be there,
Fields and inhabitants: her spots thou seest
As clouds, and clouds may rain, and rain produce
Fruits in her softened soil, for some to eat
Allotted there; and other suns perhaps
With their attendant moons, thou wilt descry
Communicating male and female light,
Which two great sexes animate the world,
Stored in each orb perhaps with some that live.
For such vast room in Nature unpossessed
By living soul, desért and desolate,
Only to shine, yet scarce to cóntribute
Each orb a glimpse of light, conveyed so far
Down to this habitable, which returns
Light back to them, is obvious to dispute.
(8.140–158)3
There’s a decisive moment in the angel Raphael’s conversation with Adam in John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost. Raphael is warning Adam against the dangers of speculation. Idle flights of fancy could divert one from just and temperate action. But Raphael uses the form of a negative injunction, like the modern-day equivalent, “Don’t think of a pink elephant!” Too late: we, and Adam, have already thought of it. What is the pink elephant?
It’s an image of other possible Edens on other planets, other atmospheres, other ecosystems “with ... Ocean circumfused” (7.624). Raphael points to the stars and the Moon. Who knows, he says, perhaps there are extraterrestrial Gardens of Eden up there, on which an alien Adam and another Raphael are conversing. Raphael reinforces this in book 8, suggesting that there may be livable worlds beyond Earth.
What an extraordinary moment in the history of the ecological thought! Instead of saying, “You are here. Get used to it,” Raphael offers a negative image of human location, suggesting that humans shouldn’t think that their planet is the only important one. The angel’s language makes good theological sense. If they refrain from thinking that they are too important, humans will resist Satan’s setting up of humans at the center of a Universe that, like the apple, is there for the taking. Eden is surrounded by other worlds. The stars are not just a light show (8.153). It’s not only a vast Universe that Raphael is revealing but also an intimate one—the stars are peopled.4 This is an amazing affront to the idea of the uniqueness of “mankind,” and Raphael prohibits it even as he permits it.
According to this Universe’s eye view, humans must not act from a se
nse of irrational spontaneous connectedness. Instead, Raphael suggests, they must reflect rationally on their decentered place in the Universe—and on their inability to account for this disorientation. Raphael’s injunction liberates reason and speculative enjoyment (what kinds of fruit do they eat up there?). It opens the capacity for fantasy while restraining it, such that the promise of complete knowledge always exceeds its conditions. And yet this very excess (of accurate thought) is what the injunction permits.
We can’t see everywhere. We can’t see everywhere all at once (not even with Google Earth). When we look at x, we can’t look at y. Cognitive science suggests that our perception is quantized—it comes in little packets, not a continuous flow.5 Our perception is full of holes. The nothingness in perception—we can’t plumb the depths of space—is the basis for Raphael’s injunction not to think of other planets. The infinite is not an object to be seen.6
Raphael doesn’t claim that extraterrestrials exist: that’s the whole point. The mere possibility of extraterrestrial environments and sentient beings—their possibility (hypothetical but imperceptible) is their essence—provides the fantasy point from which the reader herself, like Adam and Eve, can achieve the “impossible” viewpoint of space. To reach this standpoint involves an act of rational self-reflection independent of graven images. This “impossible” viewpoint is a cornerstone of the ecological thought.
Raphael is saying, “There may be things beyond your ken, but that is beyond your ken.” The statement pulls the rug out from under its own feet. Under the rug is a sky filled with stars, and there might be other minds out there. That subjunctive might be is important. Milton deals with the hypothetical, because having a hypothesis means having an open mind—perhaps the supposition is wrong. Raphael is hesitant, not authoritative. The iconoclastic Milton studiously avoids the touchy-feely, ultimately authoritarian organicism upon which claims of interconnectedness are usually built—organicism being an aesthetic image of a “natural” fit between form and content and between parts and the whole. While Adam and Eve inhabit the Garden of Eden, they aren’t shut off from the rest of the Universe. Humans must act not because a powerful authority figure has told them to but via a sense of the openness of space. It’s a different way of imagining what ecology means, without the coziness of Noah’s ark. According to this view, we care for what surrounds us not because God commanded us to, nor because of some authoritarian “truthiness,” but because of reason.
The Ecological Thought Page 3