Just as John Ashbery’s poems are written for and about anybody (rather than everyman), so the ecological thought thinks place as anywhere.119 Milton imagines “anywhere” in Paradise Lost, when Raphael envisions a possible extraterrestrial Eden. The idea of authentic place is a powerful Western myth, but indigenous cultures have traditions that include outer space. Nomadic Tibetan culture imagines meditation being practiced in other worlds and in other galaxies. The ecological thought must extend our sense of location to include “anywheres.” “Anywhere” corrodes our sense of “here.” Other times and other places are part of this “here.” The more we study it, the more holes we find.
Imagine a line. Now remove the middle third. You have two shorter lines with an equal-sized space between them. Now remove the middle thirds of the two lines you have left. Keep going. You are creating a Cantor set. The mathematician Georg Cantor discovered it in the 1880s. The Cantor set contains an infinite number of points. Yet it also contains an infinite number of no-points. It appears to contain two different infinities. Does this make it weirdly larger than “regular” infinity? Cantor got into trouble for these thoughts. But his discoveries laid the foundations for set theory, Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, and Alan Turing’s thinking on artificial intelligence. It was also the basis of fractal geometry, which underlies the geometry of branching and circulatory systems in life forms.
This is Cantor dust: infinite dust and infinite no-dust. A three-dimensional version is called a Menger sponge, a fractal entity with infinity spaces and infinity points. Talk about holding infinity in the palm of your hand. You can’t squeeze a Menger sponge. But there is something there. The Menger sponge is infinity on “this” side of phenomena. Gilles Deleuze describes Leibniz’s view of matter, which is quite Menger-spongy: “Matter thus offers an infinitely porous, spongy or cavernous texture without emptiness, caverns endlessly contained in other caverns: no matter how small each body contains a world pierced with irregular passages, surrounded by an increasingly vaporous fluid, the totality of the Universe resembling a ‘pond of matter in which there exist different flows and waves.’”120 The strange stranger and “anywhere” are like the Menger sponge.
Recent time-lapse movies using NASA’s Earth Observatory show the Amazon basin disappearing: years of activity compressed into ten seconds. When you can see like this, the reality of our ecological disaster becomes vividly real, and at the same time, the literal ground disappears before our very eyes.121 Learning about global warming serves to make us feel something much worse than an existential threat to our lifeworld. It forces us to realize that there never was a lifeworld in the first place, that in a sense “lifeworld” was an optical illusion that depended on our not seeing the extra dimension that NASA, Google Earth, and global warming mapping open up. The more information we acquire in the greedy pursuit of seeing everything, the more our sense of a deep, rich, coherent world will appear unavailable: it will seem to have faded into the past (nostalgia) or to belong only to others (primitivism). Some of us will eventually think that we once inhabited this deep, rich, lost world. Others will realize that even this sense of loss is an illusion created by our current modes of seeing. We could read the recently discovered phallic symbols drawn on unsuspecting householders’ roofs, symbols that can be seen only with the aid of Google Earth, as desperate, impotent attempts to normalize a situation that borders on psychosis, through crude Freudian humor.122
A place bounded by a horizon now seems a mere patch. That is why the really evocative poetry of place is mysterious and uncanny. There is an awareness that “here” already includes “elsewhere,” that “here” is “anywhere.” One of the most vividly imagined narratives of “anywhere” is Kim Stanley Robinson’s masterpiece, the Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars). Humans arrive and “terraform” Mars, slowly introducing a breathable atmosphere, water, and plant life. At every stage they must make conscious decisions. Nothing is given. Humans must create the backdrop for their historical dramas. There is no Nature. Everything is artificial. This means that, at the beginning at least, almost anywhere on Mars is as good (or as poor) as anywhere else. The Mars trilogy shows how the ecological thought must include social theory and social practice.
Earth is under terrible stress in Robinson’s novels. To relieve the stress, global corporations start doing what they have done on Earth: undertaking colonialism and imperialism. There was always a planetary scale to this project in any case. Queen Elizabeth I’s letter establishing the first English global corporation, the East India Company, declared that the purpose of international trade is to knit nations closer together.123 Colonialism tells stories of a fabulous, mythical realm “over yonder” that provides a jackpot of enjoyment, a constant drizzle of luxuries. Some of the first language of global environmental awareness was capitalist poetry, the advertising language of big commerce from about 1650 to about 1800. The only thing Robinson adds is the terraforming. Even that was present in the way colonialism created monocultures, ecological disaster areas that grew only one crop, like Ireland, where the potato monoculture eventually resulted in a devastating famine. Certain places were known only for the commodities they grew—consider the “Spice Islands.”124
The fun begins on Mars when some colonists decide that they want to cut loose from the oppressive colonial structure. This involves violence. Whatever the colonists do, they are burdened with the full knowledge that they are shaping a world. In deciding to flood Mars with water, the rebel colonists have simply decided to live. A religious splinter group splits from the rebel group. The group values Mars as its own place, as a unique entity. A conflict emerges between “red” Martians, who want to retain an original, authentic Mars, and “green” Martians, who don’t.
A marvelous passage at the beginning of Green Mars describes how the planet itself is part of the terraforming project. The narrator imagines how the formation of Mars for human habitation cannot replicate that of Earth: “all the genetic templates for our new biota are Terran; the minds designing them are Terran; but the terrain is Martian. And terrain is a powerful genetic engineer, determining what flourishes and what doesn’t, pushing along progressive differentiation, and thus the evolution of new species.”125 In this sense, the background is never just a background. The very planet the humans terraform dictates what lives and what dies, shaping the forces of evolution. The planet itself is a “genetic engineer.” It has as much input as any other actor, maybe more. To this extent, we are indeed all Earthlings. Heidegger poetically said that you never hear the wind in itself, only the storm whistling in the chimney, the wind in the trees.126 The same is true of the mesh itself. You never perceive it directly. But you can detect it in the snails, the sea thrift, and the smell of the garbage can. The mesh is known through the being of the strange stranger.
The ecological thought understands that there never was an authentic world. This doesn’t mean that we can do what we like with where we live, however. Thinking big means realizing that there is always more than our point of view. There is indeed an environment, yet when we examine it, we find it is made of strange strangers. Our awareness of them isn’t always euphoric or charming or benevolent. Environmental awareness might have something intrinsically uncanny about it, as if we were seeing something we shouldn’t be seeing, as if we realized we were caught in something.
2
Dark Thoughts
Strangers passing in the street
By chance two separate glances meet
And I am you and what I see is me
And do I take you by the hand
And lead you through the land
And help you understand the best I can?
Pink Floyd
We shall now go further, down into the darkness. How deep? Is it deep? Will we know when we are near the bottom? The journey is disorienting. Perhaps we aren’t going down at all. Perhaps we’re going in. In a response to deep ecology, I once called this “depthless ecology”: either unima
ginably deep or having no depth at all—we can never tell. In the end, I decided to call it dark ecology.1
It will be like going into the heart of the computer HAL 9000 in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The astronaut Dave disarms HAL by dismantling its structure, piece by piece.2 Dark ecology makes the world safe for the ecological thought. The only way out is down. It is the ultimate detox. But like homoeopathy, it uses poison as medicine. Rather than closing our ears and making loud noises to combat the sound of anti-ecological words, we shall absorb them and neutralize them from within.
Knowing more about interconnectedness results in more uncertainty. Staying with uncertainty is difficult; plenty of environmental ideology shirks it. We discovered the strange stranger, the unexpected arrival, the being about whom we know less than we presume. Is the strange stranger the same as us or different? Is the strange stranger alive? How can we tell? Is the strange stranger a person? What is a person? Are we people?
Art’s ambiguous, vague qualities will help us think things that remain difficult to put into words. Reading poetry won’t save the planet. Sound science and progressive social policies will do that. But art can allow us to glimpse beings that exist beyond or between our normal categories.
MUTATION, MUTATION, MUTATION
The Origin of Species begins with an extraordinary image of existence as coexistence:[Mistletoe] draws in nourishment from certain trees, which has seeds that must be transported by certain birds, and which has flowers with separate sexes absolutely requiring the agency of certain insects to bring pollen from one flower to the other.... [I]t is equally preposterous to account for the structure of this parasite, with its relations to several distinct organic beings, by the effects of external conditions, or habit, or the volition of the plant itself.3
There is no environment as such. It’s all “distinct organic beings.” Organisms can manipulate other organisms’ muscles and senses.4 Existence is coexistence or, as Darwin puts it, “adaptation.” This doesn’t mean what laissez-faire ideology wants it to mean: life is hard, and there it is, so get used to it or die, as if we were jigsaw pieces (only the ones that “fit” survive). You can’t get an “ought” from an “is” in any case: evolution doesn’t tell you how to behave.5 Darwin describes the misunderstood “struggle for existence”:How have all those exquisite adaptations of one part of the organisation to the other part, and to the conditions of life, and of one distinct organic being to another being, been perfected? We see these beautiful co-adaptations most plainly in the woodpecker and mistletoe; and only a little less plainly in the humblest parasite which clings to the hairs of a quadruped or feathers of a bird; in the structure of the beetle which dives through the water; in the plumed seed which is wafted by the gentlest breeze; in short, we see beautiful adaptations everywhere and in every part of the organic world.6
What a fine mesh we’ve gotten ourselves into. Wonderstruck, Darwin observes small, slight things clinging to hairs, slipping into water, and wafting on the breeze. Water and air are like hairs and feathers. Living and nonliving beings become the medium in which other beings exist. “Struggle for existence” doesn’t necessarily translate into dog-eat-dog. It means the simple dependence of one being on another, like a desert plant depending on moisture.7
There is no static background. What we call Nature is monstrous and mutating, strangely strange all the way down and all the way through. Reading the Book of Nature is momentously difficult. Darwin’s texts resemble other monumental nineteenth-century works, such as the first volume of Marx’s Capital or the opening of Dickens’s Bleak House. Piece by weird piece, one is let in on a vast, frighteningly complex world. Each text begins with a mysterious clue. Marx begins with a coat, Dickens begins with fog—Darwin begins with pigeon fanciers. The big picture creeps up on the reader like an atmosphere. The texts themselves model the gigantic, environmental, immersive phenomena they describe: the disturbing, Kafkaesque system of bureaucracy and law (Dickens), the phantasmagorical world of capital (Marx), and the illegible text once called the Book of Nature (Darwin).
The Book of Nature is more like a Mallarmé poem than a linear, syntactically well organized, unified work. The words spread out on the page: we can’t tell whether to read from left to right, nor can we tell which words go with which. The words fluctuate and change position before our eyes.8 Darwin himself uses the analogy. The history of life forms is like a book. Many pages are lacking: we can infer them only from the few remaining ones. (Not every living being existed in a place that the sea overwhelmed so as to fossilize it.)9 Within those pages, whole paragraphs are missing or fragmented: “I look at the natural geological record, as a history of the world imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect.”10 Within existing paragraphs, there are incomplete sentences. (Successful species, for example, tend to make their immediate “family” extinct, so it’s difficult to trace their history.)11 Within existing sentences, some words seem to lack a letter or two. And some letters might not be letters at all, just squiggles. Interpreting the book depends upon interpreting the blanks between the marks, letters, words, sentences, paragraphs, and pages. Is there something in the blanks, or nothing? How can we tell? Derrida, eat your heart out.12 Contrary to what some humanists think, it is not big news to Darwinism that “species” don’t really exist.13 What a work of repression we have wrought. Darwin shares with Freud and Marx the honor of having his theory declared dead every few weeks, as if it were necessary to kill the corpse over and over again.14
It gets worse. Consider a dialect, a local version of a particular language. No one can point to a specific person who spoke its first words.15 Now consider chimpanzees. When chimps evolved, no observer could have said, “Hey! Look at that ape over there! That looks like a new species. Let’s call it a chimp.” Only later can someone do that. No one stood around in some thirteenth-century street, furtively chatting with a cadre of co-conspirators: “I know, let’s really shake things up. Let’s have the Renaissance. We’ll invent perspective and travel round Africa using maps derived from this technology, find the Spice Islands, and form city-states and joint stock companies. Oh, and let’s figure out a new, more individualistic version of Christianity and prove that the Earth goes round the Sun.” No: several hundred years later, we look back at that moment and call it the Renaissance. Causality works backward. You can name something only retroactively. Something identical happens in evolution. When you look at a “species,” you are looking at the past. When we look at organs, we’re looking at a text—a record of past variations and adaptations.16 We can’t specify species rigorously without succumbing to what Dawkins calls “the tyranny of the discontinuous mind.”17 Only dead (extinct) intermediaries suggest sharp-seeming boundaries between species.18 Yet continuity is as much of an illusion as is discontinuity.19 Anti-essentialism is also dogmatic. The effects of the discontinuous mind are not trivial. Denying that humans are continuous with nonhumans has had disastrous effects. Yet declaring that humans are “animals” risks evening out all beings the better to treat them as instruments. Humans may be “animals,” but “animals” aren’t “animals.”
The retroactivity of naming a species is like reading a poem. The words are already there, in a weird “will-have-been read” state (the future anterior). Darwin discusses “Artificial Selection” (breeding) as follows:A man preserves and breeds from an individual with some slight deviation of structure ... and the improved individuals slowly spread in the immediate neighbourhood. But as yet they will hardly have a distinct name, and from being only slightly valued, their history will be disregarded. When further improved by the same slow and gradual process, they will spread more widely, and will get recognised as something distinct and valuable, and will then probably receive a first provincial name.... But the chance will be infinitely small of any record having been preserved of such slow, varying, and insensible changes.20
Events of awareness, recognition, and naming retroactively posit the existence of new
creatures, cutting into the smooth continuum of slight changes. There are no rivers as such, only river stages.21 Recognizing and naming species and varieties is like putting a stick in a river and saying, “This is river stage x.” For example, consciousness, which evolved piecemeal over millions of years, is nothing like the Boeing 747 to which the astronomer Fred Hoyle compared the evolution of simple cells. Nor is consciousness like the designer of the plane. A whirlwind assembling a Boeing 747 in a junkyard would indeed raise eyebrows. But the plane components are already plane components. Because causality works backward, we needn’t worry about “intelligent design.” Backward causality means that there is no intentionality whatsoever. The intentionality gets stuck onto evolving life forms later.
Things get weirder. Forget naming the chimps, and just concentrate on an ape growing some features that look chimplike. At no point can you say, “Hey, look at that proto-chimp.” You might just be able to do so, says Darwin, but only with great difficulty and only after becoming an expert reader of life forms. And “expert” means that you have had to drop your rigid ideas about species.22 So how keen will you be to name this being a proto-chimp? Imagine that the next stage of chimphood is a variant called a chomp. When will you be able to say, “That’s not a chimp, that’s a chomp-to-be”? (There is a correct answer.) Now imagine chomps evolving into a whole new species called a champ. How will you be able to distinguish between the highly developed chomp and the champ-as-such? Things get weirder still, because the retroactive effect is hardwired into evolution. For a mutation to count, it must be passed on. A single mutation is not an event. For something to happen, it must happen at least twice.23
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