We’re losing the very ground under our feet. In philosophical language, we’re not just losing “ontological” levels of meaningfulness. We’re losing the “ontic,” the actual physical level we trusted for so long. Imagine all the air we breathe becoming unbreathable. There will be no more environmental poetry because we will all be dead. Some ecological language appears to delight in this, even sadistically, by imagining what the world would be like without us. Some deep ecological writing anticipates a day when humans are obliterated like a toxic virus or vermin. Other texts imagine “the day after tomorrow.”32 It’s hard to be here right now. There is some relief in picturing ourselves dead. I find this more than disturbing. Awareness of the mesh doesn’t bring out the best in people. There is a horrible bliss in becoming aware of what H. P. Lovecraft calls the fact “that one is no longer a definite being distinguished from other beings.”33 It’s important not to panic and, strange to say, overreact to the tear in the real. If it has always been there, it’s not so bad, is it?
It gets worse, because we’re losing the ground under our feet at the exact same time as we’re figuring out just how dependent upon that very ground we are. We find ourselves pinned to the void. Schizophrenia is a defense, a desperate attempt to restore a sense of solidity and consistency. It’s highly likely that some environmental rhetoric is delusive in this way. By reasserting a lost harmony with a lost lifeworld, this rhetoric tries desperately to paper over the crack. The paper itself betrays the crack. Thinking big involves facing the meaninglessness and disorienting openness of the ecological thought.34 Interconnectedness isn’t snug and cozy. There is intimacy, as we shall see, but not predictable, warm fuzziness.
Do we fill the hole in the world with holism and Heidegger? Or do we go all the way into the hole? Perhaps it’s a benign hole: through it we might glimpse the Universe. Many environmental writers tell us to “connect.”35 The issue is more about regrouping: reestablishing some functioning fantasy that will do for now, to preserve our sanity. Yet this is radically impossible, because of the total nature of the catastrophe and the fact that there is no script for it (we are “still here,” and so on). It’s like waking up: it becomes impossible to go back to sleep and dream in good faith. The ecological disaster is like being in a cinema when suddenly the movie itself melts. Then the screen melts. Then the cinema itself melts. Or you realize your chair is crawling with maggots. You can’t just change the movie. Fantasizing at all becomes dubious.
Denying the problem, like the Bush administration of 2001–2008, amplifies the danger. And more subtle forms of denial exist. Wishing the problem away by “doing one’s bit”—I use wartime rhetoric deliberately—is also avoiding the void. In the Second World War, British people hoarded tin cans to be made into aircraft and weapons. Whether or not the government really manufactured these products as a result, repetitive, compulsive activity kept horror at bay. Helpful as they are, recycling and other forms of individual and local action could also become ways of fending off the scope of the crisis and the vastness and depth of interconnectedness. These responses fit contemporary capitalist life. Being tidy and efficient is a good idea, but it isn’t the meaning of existence. As Barack Obama memorably told his campaign staff in Fall 2008, “‘we can’t solve global warming because I f——ing changed light bulbs in my house. It’s because of something collective.’”36
There is, however, at least the satisfaction that one is finally taking charge of one’s own shit, literally and figuratively. Psychoanalysis maintains that disposing of shit is the quintessential human problem. I beg to differ.37 Still, what’s interesting about recycling culture is that the mysterious curvature of social space-time, the curvature marked by the bend in the tube beneath the toilet bowl, disappears. We know where our shit goes. There are even some new pages about it in Richard Scarry’s popular children’s book Busy, Busy Town.38 The lack of invisible places in our social space prevents us from separating public and private, local and global.39 This was already the case in Tibet, where in charnel grounds outside the village the sky butcher chopped up your corpse to be eaten by the vultures, the ultimate ecological funeral.
Our situation is fascinatingly contradictory. On the one hand, we know more. On the other hand, this very knowledge means we lose touch with reality as we thought we knew it. We have more detail and more emptiness. The scope of our problem becomes clearer and clearer and more and more open and outrageous. It might be strictly impossible to draw a new map with new coordinates. The ecological thought has no center and no edge. Even if it were possible to find a center, would it be desirable? If all our previous forms of orientation, from the slingshot to the megaton bomb, from tribalism to totalitarianism, have contributed to the problem, shouldn’t we be suspicious of finding our bearings too soon, even if we could?40
The more intense environmental awareness becomes, the more puzzling it grows, in a positive feedback loop. We may all now be experiencing what Thoreau wrote concerning the ascent of Mount Katahdin:What is it to be admitted to a museum, to see a myriad of particular things, compared with being shown some star’s surface, some hard matter in its home! I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound here become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one ... but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them ... Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come into contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?41
Thoreau’s sense of actuality explodes as his sense of ground vanishes. The “hard matter in its home” is also the “surface” of “some star”—at once right there and somewhere, anywhere, else. The Romantic rush isn’t so easy to appreciate today. We suppose either that Thoreau was a brave soul or that he was whistling in the dark. His language floats between both possibilities. Nowadays we’re slightly surer of one thing. Yes, everything is interconnected. And it sucks.
LESS IS MORE: THINKING THE MESH
If everything is interconnected, there is less of everything. Nothing is complete in itself. Consider symbiosis. A tree includes fungi and lichen. Lichen is two life forms interacting—a fungus and a bacterium or a fungus and an alga. Seeds and pollen have birds and bees to circulate them. Animal and fungal cells include mitochondria, energy cells (organelles) that are evolved bacteria taking refuge from a (for them) toxically oxygenated world. Plants are green (the color of Nature) because they contain chloroplasts, derived from the cyanobacteria. Mitochondria and chloroplasts have their own DNA and perform their own asexual reproduction. Our stomachs contain benign bacteria and harmless amoebae. Termites rely on bacteria and amoebae in their stomachs to break down cellulose; the termites live on the waste products. These mixotricha are themselves a “town” of tiny spirochetes resembling cilia (little waving hairs) and pill-shaped bacteria on the surface into which the spirochetes fit. Sponges are communities of protozoa; amoebae can form collective one-millimeter-long “slugs.” The first “metazoan” was a colony of flagellate protozoa (tiny creatures with tiny tails). Most of the root hairs of plants are tiny fungi, the mycorrhizae. At the viral level, there are all kinds of replicating entities: “plasmids, episomes, insertion sequences, plasmons, virions, transposons, replicons, viruses.”42 And ultimately, as Richard Dawkins puts it, “we are all symbiotic colonies of genes.”43 Even DNA is subject to symbiosis, coevolution, parasitism, conflict, and cooperation.44 We consist of organs without bodies, like the grin of the Cheshire cat.45
Symbiosis isn’t the half of it. Dawkins’s hypothesis of the “extended phenotype” is that DNA acts at a distance on organisms outside its particular vehicles (such as you and me). DNA’s “genotype” expresses itself in the varied phenotypes of life. You are a phenotype; but so, in a way, is your house. A spider’s web is a phenotype. Does the beaver phenotype stop at the end of its whiskers or at the end of a beaver’s dam? Some kinds of animal saliva from chewing herbivores have profoun
d effects on plants.46 Snail shell size may well be a function of fluke genes, since the shell is a phenotype that snails share with their fluke parasites, just as a beaver couple shares a dam. Fluke genes will even influence snails lacking fluke parasites, appearing to control their behavior. Ti plasmids manipulate their bacterial hosts to enable trees to produce galls in which insects live. Meanwhile the plant tissue that generates the gall appears to have been produced for the sake of the insect. Shrimp are manipulated by flukes, which in turn manipulate the ducks that feed on the shrimp. When you sneeze, is it because a virus manipulated you to propagate its DNA? After all, rabid animals (even gentle ones) are possessed by an urge to bite. Some parasites and symbionts are so intimate you can’t tell where one starts and its habitat stops, all the way down to the DNA level. There is no way of knowing which bits of our DNA are actually “ours” and which are plasmid insertions. 47 The human genome contains endogenous retrovirus derived sequences, and one of these, ERV-3, may confer immunosuppressive properties to the placenta, thus allowing embryos to coexist with the mother’s body. Thus, that you are here today reading this is partly owing to a virus in your mother’s DNA that may have prevented her from spontaneously aborting you.48
There is less substance: “Organisms and genomes may ... be regarded as compartments of the biosphere through which genes in general circulate.” 49 The ecological thought isn’t about a superorganism. Holism maintains that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. “Nature” tends to be holistic. Unlike Nature, what the ecological thought is thinking isn’t more than the sum of its parts. Taxes are lower for married people because, in a sense, there is “less” of them than two individuals. If we want ecology, we will have to trade in Nature for something that seems more meager. The mesh is made of insubstantial stuff, and its structure is very strange. The more we examine it, the hollower it seems. Gaia is out. “Harmony” is out, but cooperation is in.50
Less is more. Darwin’s thinking tries to imagine the “cheapest” way for organisms to evolve (the path of least resistance). Consider large testes in certain apes such as humans: if they don’t rock the evolutionary boat, organs survive the way they are.51 The ecological thought can’t say what “nature” is. This doesn’t (even) mean that “nature” is some mystical hyper-thing beyond comprehension. Because evolution isn’t linear, the mesh isn’t bigger than the sum of its parts. There is no point in appealing to a “more than human world” as some writers put it.52 So if everything is “less,” if everything “doesn’t really exist,” will it not be hard to care about it? The ecological thought responds in the following ways. (1) When did things ever exist “more” than now? We care about them now, don’t we? So what is the problem? (2) Since everything depends upon everything else, we have a very powerful argument for caring about things. The destruction of some things will affect other things. (3) What does “exist” mean? If it means “exist independently,” then why would something need our care? If it were all right by itself, thank you very much, why would we need to care for it?
On the one hand, our world expands as our knowledge grows. But on the other hand, it shrinks: things are “less” than we thought they were. We discover that our more detailed understanding of how things connect with each other results in a loss of a sense of reality. Avoid opens up in our social and psychological space. On the micro and macro levels, things are less complete, less integrated, less independent, than we believed.
The insides of organisms teem with aliens. As Lynn Margulis has shown, our cells contain the original bacteria, the Archæan anaerobic ones, the prokaryotes, hiding in organic tissue from the ecological disaster they created, the disaster called oxygen. This is the theory of endosymbiosis: symbiosis takes place within as well as among organisms. Exchange and interdependence occur at all levels. The surfaces of living beings are envelopes and filters, thick regions where complex chemical transfers and reactions take place. Biochemistry is only beginning to discover the precise mechanisms of photosynthesis and the transfer of nutrients across the placenta to the embryo. The interfaces involved host countless parasites and symbionts. At a microlevel, it becomes impossible to tell whether the mishmash of replicating entities are rebels or parasites: inside–outside distinctions break down.53 The more we know, the less self-contained living beings become. Chemistry and physics discover how malleable and fungible things are, down to the tiniest nanoscale objects.54 We dream about total manipulation. We could turn a piece of wood into a chunk of meat. Military nanotechnology now helps backpackers stay dry by pointing certain atoms in their pants in certain specific directions, thus causing liquids to leach out.
These dreams of abundance and control are tempered by knowledge itself, which asserts that nothing has intrinsic identity. Transgenic art contemplates this fact. Eduardo Kac’s fluorescent rabbit, created with genes from a jellyfish, is the perfect example.55 Is the horror of this art simply the shock value derived from the clichéd Frankenstein interpretation—that science has overstepped the bounds of human propriety? Or is it the revelation that if you can do that to a rabbit, then there wasn’t that much of a rabbit in the first place? If you really could put duck genes in rabbit genes and rabbit genes in duck genes, it would give a new spin to Joseph Jastrow’s duck–rabbit illusion. You really would be able to see a duck and a rabbit at the same time, because you really never saw a duck or a rabbit in the first place. There are less ducks and less rabbits not in number but in essence. We’re faced with the extraordinary fact of increasing detail and vanishing fullness. The ecological thought makes our world vaster and more insubstantial at the same time.
We should be careful about ideas of meagerness and poverty. Environmentalism commonly finds them quite attractive. There is a “less is more” argument that ecological social policy is always about limits. You hear it frequently, especially when it comes to the fear that there are too many humans on Earth. This is one of the central platforms of deep ecology. It’s a very suggestive idea, made more suggestive by a dash of Darwin and a pinch of Thomas Malthus.56 When I lived in Colorado, I found the “Malthus was right” bumper stickers disturbing. Here we were, in the middle of nowhere—from my dense urban European perspective—worrying, basically, about immigrants spoiling our view. Conservatism and neoliberalism have used Darwin to justify welfare cuts, just as Malthus himself wrote his book on population to justify the British government slashing the welfare laws of his day. The model behind this justification is a view of limited, scarce resources. But Darwin’s story is also one of proliferation, randomness, contingency, and useless display. The jungle isn’t the concrete jungle. The theory of evolution transcends attempts to turn it into a theological defense of the status quo.57
Beyond the disturbing racism of the “population debate,” what bothers me is that the language of limits edits questions of pleasure and enjoyment out of the ecological picture. Marx’s criticism of capitalism wasn’t so much that it’s overrun with evil pleasures—the standard environmentalist view, as a glance at an almost progressive magazine such as Adbusters will confirm—but that it is nowhere near enjoyable enough. I’m not talking about the “right” of Big Oil to “enjoy” its massive profits at the expense of “the soil and the worker” (Marx’s phrase).58 I’m talking about how the language of curbs turns ecology into personal and interpersonal puritanism. If the ecological thought is about thinking big as much as or more than “small is beautiful,” then it must explore and expand upon existing pleasures. If interconnectedness implies radical intimacy with other beings, then we had better start thinking about pleasure as a coordinate of the ecological thought. We must take a new path, into the vast mesh of interconnection. Who lives there?
STRANGE STRANGERS: THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF COEXISTENCE
If we think the ecological thought, two things happen. Our perspective becomes very vast. More and more aspects of the Universe become included in the ecological thought. At the same time, our view becomes very profound. If everything is i
nterconnected to everything, what exactly are the things that are connected? In some significant sense, if we already know what they are, if we already have a box in which to put them, they are not truly different beings. If the ecological thought is profound as well as vast, we can’t predict or anticipate just who or what—and can we tell between “who” and “what,” and how can we tell?—arrives at the intersections in the unimaginably gigantic mesh. Individual beings become more unique, even as they become more susceptible to measurement and analysis.
Really thinking the mesh means letting go of an idea that it has a center. There is no being in the “middle”—what would “middle” mean anyway? The most important? How can one being be more important than another? This creates problems for environmental ethics, which risks oversimplifying things to coerce people to act. Movies about endangered species tend to focus on one species at a time. From a penguin’s point of view, seals are dangerous monsters.59 But from a seal’s point of view, an orca or a human with a club is the monster. The aesthetic of “cuteness”—a rough version of Kantian beauty (it’s small and perfectly formed and doesn’t hassle our mind)—might only be applicable to one species at a time. A dog might look cute until it bites into a partridge’s neck. When we consider the mesh, we must drop this “one at a time” sequencing. So awareness of the mesh may suck the cuteness out of beings. Songs about the mesh, such as “We Are All Earthlings” (from Sesame Street), may have it wrong—they are about multitudes of cute creatures, and cuteness doesn’t come in multitudes.60 (In Chapter 2, I discuss some exceptions to the problem of cuteness.)
The Ecological Thought Page 5