Living Earth Community - 7. Fluid Histories Oceans as Metaphor and the Nature of History

Living Earth Community - 7. Fluid Histories



Living Earth Community
7. Fluid Histories


SECTION III: PRACTICES FROM CONTEMPORARY ASIAN TRADITIONS AND ECOLOGY


Fig. 5 Yamuna River, near the Himalayas. Photo by Alexey Komarov (2015), Wikimedia, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Yamuna_River_-_panoramio_(2).jpg#/media/File:Yamuna_River_-_panoramio_(2).jpg
7. Fluid Histories: Oceans as Metaphor and the Nature of History

Prasenjit Duara


© Prasenjit Duara, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0186.07

Time and tide wait for no man.

The field of pre-history is said to be characterized by the absence of a writing system. History is the study of human activity over the last 5,000 years or so based on texts and artefacts. Indeed, it is only recently that non-artefactual recording processes, such as carbon dating, tree-rings, the age of dental remains and bones have begun to be used in historical studies. John McNeill has proposed the idea of ‘superhistory’, distinguished from the academic discipline of Big History, which locates human history within the larger story of evolution. He explains that ‘Big History changes everything and changes nothing. It tells us that our species’ story conforms to a larger pattern. But it does not change our species story.’1 Rather, superhistory is the effort to link the history of humans to natural factors, beyond the specialized field of environmental history, and beyond the textual and artefactual. It will be a revolution in methodology, geared towards grasping how humans have interacted with the climate, and how the climate has interacted with humans. Mine is a related effort: to grasp the relation of historical time to natural time at a metahistorical level.

I seek to understand the temporality of historical flows through the model of oceanic circulations of water. I will seek:
to probe what I have called ‘circulatory histories’ as fundamental historical processes that are not tunneled, channeled or directed by national, civilizational or even societal boundaries, but are circulatory and global, much like oceanic currents. Processes emerging in one form in place A flow to many places, B, C, etc., where they interact with other local and trans-local forces to re-emerge often in place A, though recognized as something else.2 Older cosmologies, rhythms, and technologies of organizing time were closely in sync with natural patterns, even though they were not reducible to the latter.
to de-couple historiographical time from historical time, and re-link the latter to the temporal medium of natural flows. The flow of historical time can be viewed not only through the metaphor of ocean flows, but is also naturally continuous with the latter. The basic medium of temporal contact and intertemporal communication in historical time are the natural (including organic) and built environment which serve not only as its infrastructure but also its provisioner. Historical time is co-created by actors and actants, much as the ocean waters are the medium and co-creators of its flows with oceanic beings — both organic and inorganic.
by disclosing the metaphorical and natural links between historical and oceanic time, I want to reveal the consequences for the world as we know it, of the growing gap between historiographical time on the one hand, and historical and natural time, on the other.
Circulatory Histories and Oceanic Flows

In my recent work, I have introduced the idea of ‘circulatory history’ — a kind of history that is interested principally in the flow of time.3 Circulatory, in my usage does not necessarily reference a return to a starting point, but a movement or distribution from place to place. Historians have engaged with various conceptions of time, including the phenomenological, whereby different societies experience time differently. National and civilizational histories engage with evolution within a teleological framework of progress. The advocates of Big History and Journey of the Universe conceive historical time as embedded in processes of evolutionary complexity. But let us begin by asking what media — bodies, vehicles, and agencies — best allow us to recognize and measure the flow of time. The first candidate would be sunlight, with its diurnal and seasonal cycles. Another natural candidate is water, and may be more interesting for historical time, because, although water is a re-cycling element, we never step into the same water twice.

My interest in circulatory histories coincided with the burgeoning of inter-Asian studies, including important work by historians of South Asia who wrote about connected and entangled histories. Overwhelmingly, the picture we get of Afro-Eurasia is of a deeply interconnected historical sphere populated by sprawling networks, expanding and contracting empires, traveling ideas and practices, circulating microbes and species of all kinds. Our aim is to take stock of what kinds of intellectual, conceptual, and perhaps even epistemological significance this genre of trans-border work can have, not simply for Asian studies, but globally.

Since the publication of Rescuing History from the Nation in 1995, I have sought to dislodge historical writing from serving as the instrument of the nation’s sovereign legitimacy.4 The rationale for this is both simple and deep: the nation-form has been the dominant mode of identity for most of the world over the last couple of centuries, and it is structured to engage in a competitive race for global resource domination; in turn, it has led most visibly to two World Wars and to the ravaging of the global environment as we enter the Anthropocene.

The forces for global cooperation and checks against predatory activities upon people and nature have been much weaker, in great part because of the nationalist imperative for GDP growth and the assemblage of interests legitimated by this imperative. In turn, I have argued that national histories are the principal means of establishing the imagined solidarity and destiny of the nation. I try to show here that history is by no means linear and tunneled, predestined to tell the story of the nation.

The oceanic metaphor of historical time allows us to grasp how historical ownership of science, technology, culture, civilization — the question of sovereignty itself — can only be sustained when historical process or flow is separated from historiographical understanding (i.e., not only in the historical discipline). When we attend to temporalities of different processes, we recognize that human history shares significantly with other organic and natural processes and that it is a collective planetary heritage. This recognition is imperative if we are to address the problems of planetary sustainability.

This, however, is not to say that there are no subjects — or agency, now recognized to be distributed between different humans and nonhumans — in history that seek to control or shape processes, but, beyond a point, the process escapes these subjects. Analytically, we need to distinguish between historical time and historiographical time, which includes purposive reflexivity. To be sure, the two are practically difficult to distinguish because this reflexivity also shapes the process. Nonetheless, the process exceeds the determinate purpose of the actor as it emerges in the circulatory flow of historical time. Historical time flows on, shaping and being shaped, carrying with it, to paraphrase the process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, the ‘many’ from the ‘disjunctive universe’ which it gathers.5 And in its carrying, there are also memories and brandings that are cognized by some and recognized by others as a return. But for a start, we need to analytically differentiate the reflexive moments from the process itself.

Historical time is not fundamentally different from the flow of time in nature, which too remains irreversible.6 The flow of historical time is expressed in routine repetitive acts (never exactly identical) as well as the gathering or morphing into events caused by global interactions and contingencies, human and natural.7 The model of natural processes that I find most useful to understand history is the circulatory flow of oceanic water. Unlike rivers, they are not tunneled and bounded; their channeling is more interactive.

Ocean currents develop in interaction with changing atmospheric conditions of heat and wind, geological features and tidal activity. The Coriolis Effect, trade winds, the Gulf Stream, Equatorial Currents and Counter Currents, El Niño, La Niña, monsoons, cyclones, tsunamis, upwellings, and thermohaline circulation are some of the well-recognized oceanic processes. The oceans and seas are realms where spaces and temporal processes interact at varying scales. Take, for instance, the Mediterranean Sea — a waterbody that has been well-studied due to the fact that it is relatively enclosed. This Sea is a microcosm of an ocean and like it, has surface, intermediate and deep-water masses, the circulatory patterns of which are relatively autonomous, but also influence the North Atlantic circulation regime. The geography of islands and their shelves affect the circulation of these waters significantly. Thus, the converging of the Sardinian and Tunisian shelves directs the inflowing Atlantic waters southwards whereas decaying eddies in the north are constrained to flow northwards off Western Corsica.8

Oceans reveal circulatory currents of differing temporalities and effects, dependent on the diverse conditions they travel through. Surface currents are faster moving, because they carry heat and are shaped by winds; eddies are still faster, and more temporary gyres churn up smaller spaces. Deep currents are heavier, because water becomes colder at the poles and is pulled down by salinity and gravity. Nonetheless, deep currents also flow across the various oceans and cycle through roughly once every thousand years.

Over the last several decades, this deep-water flow across the oceans has been understood as a ‘conveyor belt’, reflecting the relatively stable pathway through which the warm waters pushed to the poles, overturned and made its way across the oceanic world. Recently, scientists have ‘deconstructed’ the model of the conveyer belt, suggesting that while overturning and coursing remain true, the conveyor belt idea was too simple. Rather, several different pathways have appeared, formed by surface eddies and wind-fields.9 This suggests that their temporality — the rate of flow and the types of activity they produce — has been maintained at the level, but they are also interactive with other geo-atmospheric forces. Even the deepest level is affected, and, in turn, affects the rest. The impact of anthropogenic activity on the conveyer belt has alarmed the scientific community in recent years. The massive polar ice melt has already and, is expected to, increasingly lighten and warm the polar water with excessive freshwater and thus to slow (or even halt) the flow of the conveyer belt carrying tropical waters to the north. One major consequence of this is the generation of colder weather in North America and Europe.

Compare currents to historical processes — ideas, practices, and material — that flow through time and space. Let me cite a case of a circulatory ideational complex across continents over the last two hundred years. In 1833, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, a polyglot thinker and reformer, deist, and Unitarian, who is often called the ‘father of modern India’, was visiting Bristol in the United Kingdom. In Salem, Massachusetts, at the time, Unitarians were circulating a locket with a curl of his hair in preparation for his visit, which, however, never happened, since Raja Ram Mohan died in Bristol that year. New England Transcendentalists, particularly, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, read Roy’s translations of the Upanishads and the principal Vedas, texts they deeply admired and cited profusely. American transcendentalists influenced a wide range of global ideas and practices, including abolitionism, proto-environmentalism, and civil disobedience founded upon transcendentalist conceptions of self-cultivation of the powers of the mind and consciousness of ultimate reality. Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience (1849)10 influenced many people, including Leo Tolstoy, who in turn was an important influence on Mahatma Gandhi. In the 1890s in South Africa, Gandhi adopted the phrase ‘civil disobedience’ as the English version of his satyagraha (truth force) experiment. During Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement in post-war USA, it was Gandhi and not Thoreau who was seen as its patron saint.

We can continue to trace this circulatory current, which merges, re-emerges, submerges, converges, and de-merges with various related or novel processes right up into the present. Thoreau’s insights were carried on by spiritual naturalists — John Muir (Sierra Club), Aldo Leopold, and Arne Naess — and these insights today have transformed and emerged as a significant American environment movement (although with many different channels). E. F. Schumacher, Gary Snyder, the deep ecologists, and feminist ecologists, among others, have been influenced by Asian and Indigenous traditions. Many of these ideas around environmental spiritualism and moral protest have cross-fertilized with movements of Indigenous people, forest dwellers, civil society and religious groups across the world, climaxing (at least for millions of Catholic schoolchildren) with Pope Francis’s radical encyclical of 2015 on ecology and justice.11 What was for almost two centuries a sub-cultural and inconspicuous ‘countercurrent’ may yet swell into a movement of significance.

On a different level, consider the various temporal scales of historical processes. Modern nationalism (which developed symbiotically, for the most part, with competitive capitalism) has developed as the axiomatic principle of legitimacy globally over the last two hundred years. The nation-form built around the self-other binary is the most enduring circulatory feature that has permeated all parts of the world which emerged from empires and other political forms built around more complex forms of belonging. The ideal nation-form is a confessional form that compacts people-state-culture for competitive control of global resources. Its immediate predecessor was the confessional state of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Europe, where a compact of church-state-believer believed itself to be saved as the chosen people, and other(s) to be damned.12

The ecology that sustains this doxic and durable temporality from the early nineteenth century has to do with the system of nation states that has been its most necessary condition for over two centuries. The fundamental raison d’être for the nation state is competition, even if competition alone is insufficient to account for nationalism in a particular time and place. At this level, the identitarian polity that is the nation, is mediated by a host of other forces such as religion, language, political regime, historical relations, etc. — forces that are often changing and mixing. Note that the institutions of the capitalist competitive order have not always been the most durable formations; consider, for instance, the period of Soviet and Maoist socialism. I believe that Maoism itself needs to be understood within a world-order of competitive states that ultimately pushed China towards capitalism.

Emergent historical forces or currents shaping societies at this level of mediation possess a kind of middling temporality. The temporality may be seen in the mediatory form of Chinese nationalism which changed in accordance with the change in China’s place in the international order during the 1980s: simply put, a change from a Maoist socialist state, to a globally participating market society. It changed gradually from the socialist model of the civic nation state that was built, however rhetorically, upon the fraternity of nationalities within and socialist and third-world internationalism abroad, to an ethnic model of privileging the culture of the Han majority. In practice, this shift was also facilitated by the need to attract powerful overseas Chinese capitalist networks based on Chinese culturalism and Confucianism. At the same time, the relative weakness of development in the western regions of China and among the ethnically marginal communities also fostered ethnic nationalism among these minorities that we are witnessing daily today. Finally, at the most variable level, like eddies and gyres, nationalism can function as an ideology, as political strategy, as mobilization politics and as ideals and dreams, changing according to contexts and constituencies.
The Nature of History

What we call history is fundamentally a natural process upon which humans have created artificial technologies of recording, including, of course, the exclusive prerogative of historical writing and reflection. What can we learn from re-embedding history in the natural process?

Natural processes too register their activities, whether in geological layers, in tree-rings, in DNA (which is a record of our species’ epidemiological history), and, not least, in memory, language, and practices — the record of our social history. These are natural or elemental media for recording temporal processes which the inscriptions of historical humans mimic. Beings in time, of course, cease to exist; but not without registering their presence or trace — whether for functional purposes or not. To be sure, traces and records must be recognized and recalled. Biological organisms also leave information for the species and for others.

Human reflexivity and the technologies it has generated are said to distinguish historical knowledge from data produced by other organisms. But the sophisticated technologies of scientific observation reveal that the nonhuman world is constantly registering and responding to environmental changes, faster than ever in the Anthropocene. The Star Moss Cam is a sensor technology that does not merely sense mosses over time, but observes how the moss itself is a sensor that is detecting and responding to changes in the environment.13

Thus, Susan Schuppli argues, matter itself bears witness to events. It registers and documents change internally within its substrates and molecular arrangements, and is often expressed as a material aesthetic, increasingly in ‘dirty pictures’, be it of black carbon on polar snow, radioactive leakage or oil spills that transform the Arctic. Inuit hunters who followed a predictable ecological sign system have lost their moorings and capacity to hunt not only with the rapid changes in the snowscape, but because the geo-atmospheric changes have brought about new optical regimes: the sun appears to be setting farther west and the stars seem to be no longer where they were.14 The naked eye trained for generations to scope for life, can no longer do its job.

While many organisms may not have reflexive capacities, they certainly have cognition and communication. Just as the terrestrial earth, the ocean too is a storehouse of records and information for species and interactive organic forms. Cetaceans or marine mammals like dolphins and whales appear to differentiate sounds — phonations in water travel four times faster than in air — possibly identifying who must be responding to whom through the rapidly intensifying — and life destroying — din in the ocean.15 A recent report on whale songs reveals that whales do not communicate only for mating purposes, but are constantly transforming and evolving forms of communication across hundreds of kilometers.16 Some even claim that dolphins have an aquatic public sphere! In the words of John Durham Peters:

Maybe the whole ocean is their [cetaceans’] auditory apparatus and archive; by joining their water-based inner ear with the outer ear of the ocean, perhaps they have a medium for being in time that resembles our recording media but contrasts with the apparent instantaneity of our oral communication. What is perhaps natural for them — nonlinear data access — is a matter of cultural techniques for us, and is only made by recording media.17

Peters, a philosopher of communication technology, has argued that since the appearance of technological media of distant communication in the nineteenth century, we have forgotten the idea that media is primarily natural. In Marvelous Clouds, he argues that air, water, ground, fire, light, clouds are the elemental media of communication for beings. His point of departure in the philosophy of communication is — to simplify radically — Marshall McLuhan’s idea of ‘the medium is the message’. However, Peters demonstrates that the two — medium and content — are not entirely separable and shape each other. In the example given above, the properties of water and the sonic capacities of the cetaceans must be considered together as the communication medium.

The natural and built environments are the medium of communication across time and space.

Following Peters’ conceptualization, this composite environment is not only the container or infrastructure of historical or intertemporal communication. Rather, it also provisions beings in time. At the same time as the media provision beings, beings (i.e., content makers) ‘read’ and interpret these traces and signs to subsist, thus generating emergences. In the oceans, water is the principal medium for beings, but water is itself shaped by geo-atmospheric forces and even by the techniques of water beings. Peters asserts that ‘Dolphins and whales’ techniques shape the environment to enhance their techniques. Tuna for example, take advantage of vortices to propel themselves through the water at speeds much greater than would be predicted from their body size and strength, benefiting from hydraulic phenomena their swimming creates’.18 Humans use their technological capabilities to record and reflect upon processes which, in turn, re-shape the environmental media in which they are borne.

Let us explore the historical process as a medium. The historical is typically thought to be activity engaged by humans; but human-initiated activity is enabled and exceeded by chains of actors/actants, each of which may be linked in other chains. Historical time is the chain of events and activities, emergences and circulations of materials, practices and ideas which leave traces and records in their built and natural environment. The natural and built environment provides both the medium of flow and reshapes the messages channeled across time and space. Some of these sequences die out, others have con-sequences and take on new lives, and others return or are renewed, whether they are recognized or not.

The ‘ontological turn’ in social sciences has tended to break down the subject-object binary by attributing agency or quasi-agency to animals, organisms, instruments — for identifying, measuring, evaluating, or attaining — and, not least, the natural elements, in any consideration of a human undertaking. To be sure, this hardly displaces the fundamental condition of human knowledge for understanding these roles. But we might note that animals and organisms can and do process chains of action; and the great variety of human knowledge forms alerts us to ways in which sequences of action and knowledge are exceeded.

Historical processes may be indicated and evidenced through tiny traces such as Roy’s circulating lock of hair, itself an adaptation of circulating religious reliquaries. These traces can carry historical forms and ideas across continents and time. Regarding material history, it is now the gargantuan nuclear and hydro-power projects and millions of miles of fiber-optic cables on the ocean-bed that generate possibly still more con-sequences and counter-finalities that historiography and scientists may or may not be able to capture.

The point of this exercise is to suggest that the medium of intertemporal communication has a natural ground that humans share with other organisms, albeit with different proportions or relations of the nature-culture dialectic of the evolving, ‘living earth’.19 The communicator, the message/communication, and the medium are interdependently creative, much as the ocean waters are the medium and co-creators of its flows with oceanic beings. It is not then entirely surprising that historical processes are expressed in temporal patterns that resemble patterns and interactivities that we find in oceanic flows. At a fundamental level, the historical process engaging humans is also natural. Processes generate other processes. Events impact, churn, and disperse; parts die, and other parts transform, transmute, and return. As such, the flow of oceanic waters is not just a model or even a metaphor. The historical process is continuous with it.

It was not till the second half of the eighteenth century that the notion of history as the property of a subject — a nation or civilization — in linear time, tunneling through the past into the future, became the dominant mode of temporal knowledge, first in northwest Europe and subsequently across the world in the twentieth century. The factors that combined to produce the linear conception of time in Europe are also complex; conceptions of religion, science, and the quest for global resources generated the temporal framework for a capitalist mode of endless accumulation.

The ideal of the conquest of nature as the means to achieve human satisfactions is the driving force of modern history as conceived by nation states. The nation states’ apparatuses of knowledge production also set up — to put it in the barest terms — the opposition between history and nature. This cosmological reversal from the pre-modern era perhaps saw its greatest triumph when humans — particularly early modern Europeans — began to successfully navigate the deepest oceans. For most humans, oceans had presented the limits of their capacities. Well into the Renaissance, the Pillars of Hercules that marked the passage between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean were said to bear the warning Non plus ultra, ‘nothing further beyond’, cautioning sailors and navigators to go no further.

Over the last two hundred years, humans have begun to colonize the ocean itself. This colonization has been industrial in nature, battering the ocean by massive commercial traffic and fishing, nuclear testing, constant bombardment for oil and gas explorations and militarized island buildings, among other invasions. Not least, it is being strangled as the dumpsite of the terrestrial planet. To my mind, the modern idea of the conquest of nature, and the institutionalized and technologized modes of exhausting it is radically unprecedented. We now come face to face with the hubris that human history can destroy, negate, and transcend the medium of its sustenance.

I have argued that historical time should to be understood in the terms of natural processes, more than has been done heretofore. As such, historical time is continuous with the nature of oceanic flows. For this purpose, I have rendered the historiographical process that is uniquely human to the background as something to be grasped in relation to historical-oceanic time. Reflexive historiography remains powerful; after all, it is a necessary condition of the capacity of humans to dominate nature. Can this reflexivity be turned to develop another relationship to nature?

Merely reducing fossil fuel emissions cannot address our problems. The massively growing scale of consumption and destruction of natural materials and organisms for increased production has depleted and destroyed the earth and the oceans. The treadmill of ever-increasing consumption for profits and GDP growth embedded in the deeply institutionalized cosmology of our times demands change. Is there still a way to reconcile the creative capacities of humans with the limits of nature? The re-direction of historiographical knowledge to accord better with the nature of historical time and the sovereign planet would mark an important step towards it.

The powers of symbolic representation that gave humans the capacity to race ahead of all species in the evolution of life may well have met its match in the revenge of the oceans. The greatest threats to the human world today appear from the oceans, from rising sea levels to geo-atmospheric transformations of recognizable climate patterns. The question that arises today is the extent to which the Anthropocene, an era where human activity has the greatest influence on climate and the environment, will ravage the ocean and the degree to which the ocean will ravage us.
Bibliography

Duara, Prasenjit, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226167237.001.0001

— The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015), https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139998222

— Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).

El-Geziry, T. M., and I. G. Bryden, ‘The Circulation Pattern in the Mediterranean Sea: Issues for Modeller Consideration’, Journal of Operational Oceanography, 3.2 (2010), 39–46, https://doi.org/10.1080/1755876x.2010.11020116

Gabrys, Jennifer, ‘From Moss Cam to Spillcam: Techno-Geographies of Experience’, in Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), pp. 57–80, https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816693122.003.0003

Goody, Jack, The Theft of History (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2006), https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511819841

Lozier, M. Susan, ‘Deconstructing the Conveyor Belt’, Science, 328.5985 (2010), 1507–11, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1189250, http://science.sciencemag.org/content/328/5985/1507

McNeill, John, ‘Historians, Superhistory, and Climate Change’, in Methods in World History: A Critical Approach, ed. by Janken Myrdal, Arne Jarrick, and Maria Wallenberg Bondesson (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2016), pp. 19–43, https://doi.org/10.21525/kriterium.2.b

Peters, John Durham, ‘Of Cetaceans and Ships’, in The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015), pp. 53–114.

Raj, Kapil, ‘Beyond Postcolonialism… and Postpositivism: Circulation and the Global History of Science’, Isis, 104.2 (2013), 337–47, https://doi.org/10.1086/670951

Robbins, Jim, ‘Oceans are Getting Louder, Posing Potential Threats to Marin Life’, New York Times, 21 January 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/science/oceans-whales-noise-offshore-drilling.html

Schuppli, Susan, ‘Dirty Pictures’, in Living Earth: Field Notes from the Dark Ecology Project 2014–16, ed. by Mirna Belina (Amsterdam: Sonic Acts Press, 2016), pp. 189–210.

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Swimme, Brian, and Mary Evelyn Tucker, Journey of the Universe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).

Thoreau, Henry David, ‘Resistance to Civil Government’, in Aesthetic Papers, ed. by Elizabeth Peabody (New York, NY: G. P. Putnam, 1849), pp. 189–213.

Tucker, Mary Evelyn, and John Grim, ‘Four Commentaries on the Pope’s Message on Climate Change and Income Inequality’, The Quarterly Review of Biology, 91.3 (2016), 261–70.

Weintraub, Karen, ‘These Whales are Serenaders of the Sea’, New York Times, 7 January 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/science/whales-songs-acoustics.html

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1 John McNeill, ‘Historians, Superhistory, and Climate Change’, in Methods in World History: A Critical Approach, ed. by Janken Myrdal, Arne Jarrick, and Maria Wallenberg Bondesson (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2016), pp. 19–43, at 22, https://doi.org/10.21525/kriterium.2.b


2 In addition to my own The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015), see chapter 2, https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139998222, from which I cite some of my examples, see also Jack Goody, The Theft of History (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2006), https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511819841; and Kapil Raj, ‘Beyond Postcolonialism… and Postpositivism: Circulation and the Global History of Science’, Isis, 104.2 (2013), 337–47, https://doi.org/10.1086/670951


3 Duara, The Crisis of Global Modernity.


4 Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226167237.001.0001


5 Methodologically, I follow process philosophy, particularly the idea of ‘emergence’ as delineated in the work of Alfred North Whitehead. Emergence is a form of creativity — which, for Whitehead, is the ultimate principle (also known as God). He writes that ‘“Creativity” is the principle of novelty. An actual occasion is a novel entity diverse from any entity in the “many” which it unifies. Thus “creativity” introduces novelty into the content of the many, which are the universe disjunctively. The “creative advance” is the application of this ultimate principle of creativity to each novel situation which it originates’ (my emphases). Thus, historical processes and events may be seen fundamentally as emergences. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, ed. by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York, NY: Free Press, 1985), p. 21.


6 In the Newtonian conception of time, natural processes can be reversible, but the temporal medium in which they occur is absolute time, which is not reversible; it depends on nothing external and moves in a linear way. See Brent D. Slif, Time and Psychological Explanation (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993), pp. 273–74. The phenomenological conception, while not denying the idea of absolute time, finds it inadequate to the task of explaining how consciousness experiences a temporal object.


7 Routine repetitive acts — for instance, the activity of institutions — to be sure are still emergent occasions, because they are separated by ‘degrees of difference’ not necessarily visible in everyday activities.


8 T. M. El-Geziry and I. G. Bryden, ‘The Circulation Pattern in the Mediterranean Sea: Issues for Modeller Consideration’, Journal of Operational Oceanography, 3.2 (2010), 39–46, https://doi.org/10.1080/1755876x.2010.11020116


9 M. Susan Lozier, ‘Deconstructing the Conveyor Belt’, Science, 328.5985 (2010), 1507–11, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1189250, http://science.sciencemag.org/content/328/5985/1507


10 First published under the title ‘Resistance to Civil Government’, in Aesthetic Papers, ed. by Elizabeth Peabody (New York, NY: G. P. Putnam, 1849), pp. 189–213.


11 See Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, ‘Four Commentaries on the Pope’s Message on Climate Change and Income Inequality’, The Quarterly Review of Biology, 91.3 (2016), 261–70.


12 The making of modern nation states since the nineteenth century is a complex and multidimensional process. However, two aspects, in particular, are important here. Firstly, nation states and nationalists seek to create a centralized, homogenized, and mobilizable political body to gain advantage in the competition of global resources for domestic growth. Secondly, nations are themselves products of circulatory forces morphologically similar to each other generated by importing and exporting ‘best practices’, to use an anachronistic term. See Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).


13 For more on the Star Moss Cam, see Jennifer Gabrys, ‘From Moss Cam to Spillcam: Techno-Geographies of Experience’, in Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), pp. 57–80, https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816693122.003.0003


14 Susan Schuppli, ‘Dirty Pictures’, in Living Earth: Field Notes from the Dark Ecology Project 2014–16, ed. by Mirna Belina (Amsterdam: Sonic Acts Press, 2016), pp. 189–210.


15 Jim Robbins, ‘Oceans are Getting Louder, Posing Potential Threats to Marine Life’, New York Times 21 January 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/science/oceans-whales-noise-offshore-drilling.html


16 Karen Weintraub, ‘These Whales are Serenaders of the Sea’, New York Times, 7 January 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/science/whales-songs-acoustics.html


17 My emphasis. John Durham Peters, ‘Of Cetaceans and Ships’, in The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015), pp. 53–114, at p. 96.


18 Ibid., p. 88.


19 See Brian Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker, Journey of the Universe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).
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Living Earth Community - 3. Humilities, Animalities, and Self-Actualizations in a Living Earth Community

Living Earth Community - 3. Humilities, Animalities, and Self-Actualizations in a Living Earth Community



Living Earth Community
3. Humilities, Animalities, and Self-Actualizations in a Living Earth Community

3. Humilities, Animalities, and Self-Actualizations in a Living Earth Community

Paul Waldau


© Paul Waldau, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0186.03

In preparation for the workshop’s dialogue on ‘multiple ways of being and knowing’ in our shared ‘living Earth community’, I attempted to ascertain themes relating to the following question: how might an individual today choose actions that celebrate the plain fact that each of us is a member of a species that has only sometimes, and not often lately, been a responsible member of the Earth community? I present my findings in this exploratory piece.

My framing of these issues focuses particularly on the importance of different forms of humility. I suggest that different forms of humility are needed because each of us is a member of human-centered communities that have, whether intentionally or not, produced diverse harms beyond the species line that many individuals within our own species and, in particular, the major institutions of modern industrialized societies have long celebrated rather than condemned.

My framing also foregrounds our obvious animality, although again I want to spur my own thinking by using the plural ‘animalities’, since lives on this planet are unbelievably diverse and always embedded in a more-than-animal context. I refer here both to those nonhuman lives we name with words like ‘plant’ and phrases such as ‘the material world’ to denote those parts of the universe that our host culture overwhelmingly treats as non-living, and thus merely a resource for our use and benefit.

My experience over the last half-century has suggested to me that no rich form of ‘self-actualization’ is possible for us when humans claim to be separate and superior, as occurs habitually through the demarcating property of language that produces categories such as ‘humans and animals’. I take human exceptionalism to be the dominant narrative of our time, even though in our received wisdom traditions there are many profound formulations about recognizing the importance of both human and nonhuman ‘others’ whenever any human individual or group seeks full self-actualization.1 I offer here a few forthright statements that make plain the importance of such wisdom. The first is from Viktor Frankl.

[S]elf-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.2

A pair of comments from Thomas Berry takes the issue well beyond the species line:

[W]e must say that the universe is a communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects.

Indeed we cannot be truly ourselves in any adequate manner without all our companion beings throughout the earth. The larger community constitutes our greater self.3

Beware Bootlegging. I also use the plural ‘self-actualizations’ in this chapter because I intentionally want to call out another issue — it does not follow that one’s own notions and/or attempts at self-actualization provide any sort of paradigm by which the self-actualization of other animals, whether human or not, can be measured. Instead, I go forward on the assumption that, in any group (and this gathering of chapters would provide a paradigmatic example of the following), there will be different forms of self-actualization. One widely successful form appears in service traditions, and yet other forms appear in meditation traditions. Many other forms appear in instances where individual humans have found a way to stand outside the penchant for self-preoccupation that individuals in our own species so often exhibit. In such instances, these individuals have thereby approached particularly fulsome forms of self-actualization.

Based on the personal and communal experiences that have led me to describe issues as I do above, and based on the challenges I tried to meet in my previous book-length projects (both single-author publications and the two edited collections A Communion of Subjects and An Elephant in the Room),4 I am currently finishing a book that will carry the title The Animal Invitation: Science, Ethics, Religion and Law in a More-Than-Human World. This book is an attempt to say what five different human domains — science, ethics, religion, law, and education — might look like if we took our animality seriously.

To introduce the issue further, I include next the opening two paragraphs of the book, after which I will try to sketch out ways in which I think each of the four eminently human efforts described in the subtitle — science, ethics, religion, and law — must always be living efforts (this claim, which is by no means novel in regard to any of these four domains, is related to how I discuss our own animality throughout the book). In my closing comments below, I will address both formal and informal education, since this theme is a meta-topic, as it were, of the chapters addressing science, ethics, religion and law.

Animals invite us. This world-constituting fact is true whether we are talking about humans inviting humans, or, the focus of this book, nonhumans inviting human awareness, co-existence, appreciation, and even awe. One domain after another of our human existence, including often our daily lives, reveals the astonishing variety and depth of these invitations.

It is both of these features — variety and depth — that are, tellingly, reflected in the human domains we know as ‘science,’ ‘ethics,’ ‘religion’ and ‘law.’ Admittedly, the great variety of approaches, which has spawned many different ways of talking and thinking about the animal invitation, reflects both deep acknowledgements and facile dismissals. Considered alone, the variety is revealing, for it reflects basic features, especially the finitudes, of our human capacities. But it is the depth evident in many humans’ recognition of the animal invitation which, though less commonly encountered than diversity, reflects best the fecundity and vivifying power of human thinking and action. As this book will show, human possibilities, narrow and broad, play out in the depth and variety of responses to the animal invitation that are evident in different human groups’ claims of identity, community, compassion, awareness, self-delusion, self-inflicted ignorance, and so much more.

In the following four sections, I raise the issue of whether our astonishing achievements in science, ethics, religion, and law are (i) helpfully seen as eminently animal achievements, and (ii) better understood when each of these four domains is discussed primarily as an ongoing commitment of our kind of animal that must be understood and experienced as ‘living now’, rather than ‘eternally fixed’ or as an ‘absolute truth’. Correspondingly, treatment of any of these domains as irrevocably fixed defeats what can be thought of as the vivifying and enabling genius of each of these living domains as a human achievement. I suggest in the book, then, that it takes truly living, responsive forms of each of these human achievements to move individual humans in the direction of full actualization of our human animality.
Human Science in a More-Than-Human World

That our sciences have organic features is strongly hinted in the long history of shifts in ideas and changes in governing paradigms across the centuries. Organic features of many sciences are also seen in the unbelievable rate of new discoveries in recent decades, for these discoveries have produced shifts in particular scientific communities’ dominant ways of thinking. I want to add, though, that it remains my impression (perhaps a result of my ‘education’) that the western science tradition in some ways still does not feature ‘living aspects’ quite as fully as do ethics, religion, and law.
Human Ethics in a More-Than-Human World

I’m only too aware that ethics has long been taught in the western intellectual tradition as a set of answers to questions such as ‘what is the right thing to do?’ and ‘what does it mean to be a moral and/or good person?’ Having taught ethics now for over twenty years, I do not think such formulations are helpful, nor do I think these formulations reflect that ethics is, and always needs to be, very alive indeed. For this reason, I have come to see such views of ethics as a failure to detect the true heartbeat that takes place as we embrace, develop, and seek full actualization of our human ethical abilities. A question that does prompt us to hear more clearly the heartbeat of our ethical abilities is what I have come to call ‘the root question’ of ethics, namely, ‘who are the others?’ This is an abbreviated version of what is, in our daily lives, a far more complicated rendition of this root question, which can be stated in a variety of ways — here’s one version that I think captures some of the animal and human genius of the abilities we call ‘ethics’: ‘Who are the others about whom I should care given that I have finite abilities and there are, as a practical matter, many other limits on my ability to care?’

The principal point in the book’s chapter on ethics is that such root questions, and of course the abilities that we use in pursuing our own answer, reflect what can only be described as eminently animal abilities. I do not mean to suggest with ‘eminently’ in the prior sentence that each and every kind of animal features the high-level abilities we call ethics — my guess is that only some animals do (caring about ‘others’ is more common, I suspect, in mammals, but there is much to suggest that some birds and a variety of non-mammals also have some feature in their life that, in effect, can be described as a version of the ‘who are the others?’ question).5

In this chapter, I suggest that one cannot understand an ability of the ethical sort without affirming that ability’s animal origin and nature. As a segue into the following comments about humans’ spiritual/religious awarenesses, let me add that I have come, after a half-century of studying religious traditions, to think that much, if not all, of great value in our religious traditions follows from the eminently animal nature of ethics. Religious traditions are of particular interest to me on account of their following aspects: the role of narrative; the pervasive degree to which our worlds feature sacredness and gift in connection with real places and other living beings; and the insightful observation that relational epistemologies are crucial to each of us recognizing much of who we are.
Human Religion in a More-Than-Human World

Here I tread on sensitive ground — I do this intentionally and reverentially, recognizing that there is no single definition of religion that I might employ to argue that ‘religion must be alive in order help humans self-actualize.’

As I get older, I’m less inclined to preface the following claim with mea culpa, but perhaps I should as a way to underscore my theme of ‘humilities’ — much that is called ‘religion’ fails to help ‘adherents’ or ‘believers’ self-actualize (in the sense I use this term in these short comments). Yet our spiritual/religious domains seem to me, after a half-century of immersion in studying religion, to include a great variety of options, some of which embrace responsibly rather than repudiate what it means for religious awareness to respect and nurture our many animal-based abilities, finitudes, fragilities, organic births, decline, and eventual death. Religious awareness, when it acknowledges our animality in responsible, foundational ways, will itself be truly alive and living in every sense that I am an animal now alive and living.
Human Law in a More-Than-Human World

Law (by which I mean ‘legal systems’, of which there are at least seven distinct major traditions and obviously many different minor variations) may also seem, like science, somewhat of a challenge to fit into the ‘living’ paradigm. Yet any study of comparative law makes it obvious how fully constructed each individual legal system is, and how such ‘construction’ has features that are easily discerned to be ‘living’, in the sense that I’m using that broad term in this short paper. This can be observed in these two comments by Robert Cover:

To live in a legal world requires that one know not only the precepts, but also their connections to possible and plausible states of affairs.6

Law is the projection of an imagined future upon reality.7

The need for stability in legal systems, especially as they are part of complex societies, creates features and pressures that tend to make legal systems ‘conservative’, ‘predictable’, and subject to forces that easily and often have made enactment and enforcement of ‘law’ the prerogative of reactionary forces.8 Consider the exclusion implied in Cicero’s seemingly inclusive comment that ‘we are all servants of the laws, for the very purpose of being able to be freemen.’9 The ‘we’ today might seem to refer to the human group alone, but Cicero through this claim in actuality hides two recurring facts. Human groups now use, and seemingly forever have used, ‘law’ (developed legal systems) to subordinate not only nonhuman animals and the more-than-human Earth, but also marginalized, politically powerless human groups.

Although the contemporary movement widely known as ‘animal law’ has for the last two decades challenged such a narrow construction of law, public policy circles today nonetheless remain ignorant of and unconcerned about the ‘animal question’. There are changes afoot today by which the living features of law can be seen, but since, characteristically, ‘the political trumps the legal’, the full potential of public policy for the more-than-human world remains, as of yet, unrealized.
Some Final Comments on Human Education

The education theme is, as noted above, a meta-theme in the forthcoming book. In my Animal Studies — An Introduction, I worked with both formal and informal education, both of which are encapsulated by an observation made by the English philosopher Stephen Clark: ‘one’s ethical, as well as one’s ontological framework is determined by what entities one is prepared to notice or take seriously’.10 I entered the academic world because, for me, it is a place a daring, and so much so that, at its best, the academic world fosters critical thinking that allows for self-criticism along the lines of Theodore Roszak’s ‘But then let us admit that the academy has very rarely been a place of daring’.11 David Orr adds a further dimension to this discussion, extending the issue across the species line — ‘The truth is that without significant precautions, education can equip people merely to be more effective vandals of the earth’.12

One way in which our society has been equipping ‘educated humans’ to be ‘effective vandals’ (or, in Aldo Leopold’s phrasing, ‘conqueror of the land-community’ rather than ‘plain member and citizen of it’) is categorical division of humans from other animals.13 This framing defeats us even as it prompts ignorance that leads to great harms to other animals and their local communities. Teachers and students who insist on language that foregrounds a ‘human/animal dualism’ seem to me to have less chance, often none at all, of accurately assessing themselves or counseling other humans in ways that lead to greater prospects of self-actualization. Why do I suggest this? Because our evident mammality, primatehood, and ape-ness are radically (that is, at the root) denied by the dualism.

A key feature of our local formal education — the two-part division of ‘higher education’ into the sciences, on the one hand, and the ‘arts and humanities’, on the other — continues to foster the notion that human possibilities are the paradigm of achievement for any living being. In effect, the two-part university has features that legitimize human exceptionalism in a more-than-human world — this is one way that it equips us to be effective vandals of our shared world. Moreover, education further vandalizes in those areas of formal education where the ideology ‘all humans matter’ inadvertently masks harms done to many human animals as well. Thus, in the book, I suggest that teaching about science, ethics, religion, and law in virtually all mainline institutions today presents a face of human exceptionalism that goes beyond harms to nonhumans and their communities because, ironically, formal education in practice continues to hold in place the privilege of only some humans.
A Near-Term Task

I have come to think of our personal and social tasks as finding ways to re- assert our animality, even though these fundamental features of our lives are hidden in plain sight, as it were. These animal abilities are, I suggest, the very condition of our (i) doing science thoroughly and effectively, (ii) pursuing ‘living’ forms of ethics, (iii) fostering diverse opportunities for spiritual and religious awareness that are truly alive and free, and (iv) creating legal systems that create and project for ourselves a future of responsible membership in the larger community.
A Longer-Term Task

My sense that we can do such work by returning to a full, gracious acknowledgment of our own animality needs, I think, to be supplemented by affirmations of the fact that ‘our larger community’ includes more than animals alone — insights about the plant world are cascading into our awareness again by virtue of creative scientific work, and our connection to the whole earth is, of course, something that many small-scale cultures have long known. The senses of ‘gift’ and ‘community’ found in writers such as Robin Wall Kimmerer, Richard Wagamese, and Linda Hogan reveal that our human forebears knew a great deal about setting the stage for the emergence of a larger community and for forms of self-transcendence that such a community offers, and thereby helps make our own self-actualization possible and fuller.

Let me end on notes that are intentionally provocative and personal — I have come to think of denials of humans’ evident animality as cowardice in the face of reality. I am an animal, and so are members of my human community. I love them not in spite of their animality, but because of their animality. And I have come to recognize that I cannot ‘know myself’, nor it seems to me can any human come to know the possibilities of their life well, without coming to terms with the plain fact that we are now and have always been and will always be animals. By acknowledging our animality, we stand to open up key possibilities for self-actualization. This is why my forthcoming book, as well as the present volume in which this chapter appears, attempts to explore our scientific, ethical, religious, and social sensibilities that permit forms of life and a rule of law that are fair to all members of our extended, larger community.
Bibliography

Abram, David, Becoming Animal: An Essay on Wonder (New York, NY: Pantheon, 2010).

Ackerman, Jennifer, The Genius of Birds (New York, NY: Penguin, 2016).

Balcombe, Jonathan, What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins (New York, NY: Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).

Bekoff, Marc, The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy, and Why They Matter (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2007).

Berry, Thomas, ‘Loneliness and Presence’, in A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics, ed. by Paul Waldau and Kimberly Patton (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 5–10.

Cicero, M. T., The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, trans. by C. D. Yonge (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1856), Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0019%3Atext%3DClu

Clark, Stephen, The Moral Status of Animals (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977).

Cover, Robert M., ‘The Supreme Court, 1982 Term – Forward: Nomos and Narrative’, 97 Harvard Law Review, 4 (1983).

— ‘Violence and the Word’, Yale Law Journal, 95.8 (1986), 1601–29, https://doi.org/10.2307/796468

de Waal, Frans, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2016).

Forthman, Debra L., Lisa F. Kane, David Hancocks, and Paul Waldau, eds, An Elephant in the Room: The Science and Well-Being of Elephants in Captivity (North Grafton, MA: Center for Animals and Public Policy, 2008).

Frankl, Viktor E., Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy, 4th edn (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992).

Haskell, David, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors (New York, NY: Penguin, 2017).

Kimmerer, Robin Wall, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed, 2013).

Leopold, Aldo, A Sand County Almanac, with Essays on Conservation from Round River (New York, NY: Ballantine, 1991).

Olmert, M. D., Made for Each Other: The Biology of the Human-Animal Bond (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2009).

Orr, David, Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1994).

Roszak, Theodore, ‘On Academic Delinquency’, in The Dissenting Academy, ed. by Theodore Roszak (New York, NY: Vintage, 1968), pp. 3–42.

Shubin, Neil, Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 2008).

Waldau, Paul, Animal Studies — An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).




1 I have previously defined ‘human exceptionalism’ in my book Animal Studies — An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), as follows (p. 8): ‘Human exceptionalism is the claim that humans are, merely by virtue of their species membership, so qualitatively different from any and all other forms of life that humans rightfully enjoy privileges over all of the earth’s other life forms. Such exceptionalist claims are well described by [James] Rachels as “the basic idea” that “human life is regarded as sacred, or at least as having a special importance” such that “non-human life” not only does not deserve “the same degree of moral protection” as humans, but has “no moral standing at all” whenever human privilege is at stake’.


2 Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy, 4th edn (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992), p. 115.


3 The second quote is from Thomas Berry, ‘Loneliness and Presence’, in A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics, ed. by Paul Waldau and Kimberly Patton (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 5–10 (p. 5). The first quote was said by Berry on multiple occasions, and it appears at p. 7 of the same collection.


4 An Elephant in the Room: The Science and Well-Being of Elephants in Captivity, ed. by Debra L. Forthman, Lisa F. Kane, David Hancocks, and Paul Waldau (North Grafton, MA: Center for Animals and Public Policy, 2008).


5 Note, for example, the great range and diversity of life explored in the following titles: Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2016); Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed, 2013); David Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors (New York, NY: Penguin, 2017); David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Essay on Wonder (New York, NY: Pantheon, 2010); M. D. Olmert, Made for Each Other: The Biology of the Human-Animal Bond (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2009); Jonathan Balcombe, What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins (New York, NY: Scientific American/Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2016); Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds (New York, NY: Penguin, 2016); Marc Bekoff, The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy, and Why They Matter (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2007); Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 2008).


6 Robert M. Cover, ‘The Supreme Court, 1982 Term – Foreword: Nomos and Narrative’, Harvard Law Review, 97.4 (1983), 4–68, at 10.


7 Robert M. Cover, ‘Violence and the Word’, Yale Law Journal, 95.8 (1986), 1601–29, at 1604, https://doi.org/10.2307/796468


8 It should be noted that my generalizations here do not apply to Indigenous legal systems.


9 Cicero makes this comment in ‘The Speech of M. T. Cicero in Defence of Aulus Cluentius Habitus’ (M. T. Cicero, The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, trans. by C. D. Yonge (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1856), Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0019%3Atext%3DClu). See paragraph LIII, paragraph 146.


10 Stephen Clark, The Moral Status of Animals (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), p. 7.


11 Theodore Roszak, ‘On Academic Delinquency’, in The Dissenting Academy, ed. by Theodore Roszak (New York, NY: Vintage, 1968), pp. 3–42, at 4.


12 David Orr, Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1994), p. 5.


13 Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, with Essays on Conservation from Round River (New York, NY: Ballantine, 1991), p. 240.
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Living Earth Community - Introduction

Living Earth Community - Introduction



Introduction: Ways of Knowing, Ways of Valuing Nature

John Grim and Mary Evelyn Tucker


© John Grim and Mary Evelyn Tucker, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0186.22

The contemporary market-driven worldview relies upon and legitimates rational, analytical ways of knowing, often to the exclusion of other ways of knowing. Support for a consumerist ideology depends upon and simultaneously contributes to a worldview based on the instrumental rationality of the human. In this worldview, rational choice is seen as that realm of common sense in which both the world and human demands on the world are laid out as commensurate, equal realities that confront decision-makers. That is, in this rational scheme, the assumption for decision-making is that all choices are equally clear and measurable. According to that perspective, the challenge is to find a common metric for evaluating the quantitative differences among the relevant factors. Different values are integrated into this metric by assuming that all values are relative and that trade-offs are made between these values in order to arrive at a choice.

The metrics used may vary, but in the current market-driven worldview, metrics such as price, utility, and efficiency dominate. This can result in highly diverse views of a forest, for example, as a certain amount of board-feet (a unit for measuring lumber-volume), or as a mechanistic complex of ecological systems that provide previously unmeasured services to the human. In environmental policy, ecosystem services and cost-benefit analysis have been used as metrics to determine how a plant or animal species contributes to human welfare in a quantifiable way. These modes of commensuration may provide invaluable bridges into the business community for bringing environmental issues to their attention for serious consideration. Moreover, ecosystem services analysis certainly manifests a form of the transformation of consciousness urgently needed at this time. However, it is also important to ask if such rational perspectives that transform reality into information — namely, manageable, quantifiable data — alter or eliminate other significant ways of knowing reality in relation to decision-making.

One long-term effect is that the individual human decision-maker is distanced from nature because nature is reduced to measurable entities. From this perspective, humans become isolated in our perceived uniqueness as something separate from the biological web of life. In this context, humans do not seek identity and meaning in the numinous beauty of the world, or experience themselves as dependent on a complex of life-supporting interactions of air, water, and soil. Rather, this logic sees humans as independent, rational decision-makers, who find their meaning and identity in systems of management, that now attempt to co-opt the language of conservation and environmental concern. It is a short step within this commensurate worldview to psychological reflection on happiness as personal power derived from simply managing or having more ‘stuff’.

This modern, mechanistic, utilitarian view of matter as material for human use and benefit arises in part from a dualistic Western philosophical view of mind and matter. Adapted into Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religious perspectives, this dualism associates mind with the soul as a transcendent spiritual entity given sovereignty and absolute control over wild matter. Many traditional values embedded in religions, such as the sacred, the placement of the sacred in particular geographical locations, the spiritual dimension of the human, and care for future generations, are incommensurate with an objectified reality, and are not quantifiable. Thus, they are often ignored as externalities, or overridden by more pragmatic, profit-driven, bottom line considerations.

Yet, even within the realm of scientific, rational thought, there is not a uniform approach. Resistance to the easy marriage of applied science and instrumental rationality comes from what we might call ‘science-that-sees-the-whole.’ By this we refer to a lineage embedded in the world of empirical, experimental science of valuing wonder, beauty, elegance, and imagination as crucial components of knowing the world. Knowing, within these perspectives, stresses both analysis and synthesis — the reductive act of observation, as well as placement of the focus of study within the context of a larger whole. ‘Science-that-sees-the-whole’ resists the temptation to take the micro, empirical, reductive act as the complete description of a thing, but opens analysis to the history of a large interactive web of life. It helps to illustrate the radical interdependence of life that characterizes all ecosystems.

From the Enlightenment period in Western Europe some three centuries ago, the human community has increasingly gravitated towards rational, scientific ways of knowing the world. Modern mechanistic worldviews engender value orientations that separate humans from the Earth. Simultaneously, modernity encourages the primacy of human extractive use and dominion over material reality. The Enlightenment legacy emphasizes knowing the world rationally and scientifically, not religiously or ethically. Rather, religion in modernity orients one away from the immanent and towards the transcendent; whereas ethics examines behavior between humans or between humans and the divine. Moreover, in its economic dimensions, modern worldviews rationalize nature. In this sense, the world at large is without intrinsic value, unless it is calibrated in a metric based on its use value for humans.

This human capacity to imagine and implement a utilitarian-based worldview regarding nature has undermined many insights from the ancient wisdom of the world’s religions by segmenting any meaningful religious values as psychological choices or subjective interests. More insidiously, some religions, allured by the individualistic orientations of market rationalism and short-term benefits of social improvement, seized upon wealth and material accumulation as containing divine approval. Thus, early in the nineteenth century, Max Weber identified the rise of Protestant Christianity in Northern Europe with an ethos of inspirited work and accumulated capital. Interestingly, Weber also articulated a disenchantment from the world as this rational, analytical, profit-driven worldview became dominant as global capitalism.

The prior enchantments of the old creation stories were burned away in the critical fires of rationality. Wonder, beauty, and imagination as ways of knowing were gradually superseded in a turn from the organic wisdom of traditional worldviews to the analytical reductionism of modernity. A mercantile mindset sought to shift the play and sport of the world in ways that accorded with modern industrial productivity as the epitome of progress.
Ways of Knowing the World

Certainly, the insights of scientific, analytical, and rational modes of knowing are indispensable for understanding and responding to our contemporary environmental crisis. So also, we will not bring ourselves out of our current impasse without the technologies that brought us into it. Indeed, these technologies are being reshaped in more ecological directions as witnessed in such developments as industrial ecology and green chemistry. But it seems important also to recall that other ways of knowing are manifest in culturally diverse cognitive pathways that treasure emotional intelligence and affective insight. These are evident in the arts — music, painting, literature, poetry, drama — that celebrate human experience in a more than rational mode. Moreover, in their explorations of embodied experience of humans and nature, many aspects of Western culture, such as visual aesthetics, literary arts, narrative poetry, and cinema are far from dormant in modern consciousness.

What is especially striking in this regard are the versions of empirical observation found among Indigenous, or aboriginal, peoples that have both rational and affective components. This involves knowledge of lands and ocean, animals and fish, plants and trees. These many ways of knowing appear in an amazing variety of human interactions with the natural world that include: the development of traditional herbal knowledge, proto-chemical understandings, healing practices, philosophical reflection in oral-narrative traditions, and agricultural cultivation. These diverse ways of knowing-dialogues are evident in the domestication of various crops such as rice, millet, wheat, corn, and tobacco. Much of modern science was built upon these foundational insights. Such understandings must have come through a wide range of careful observation and attention to seasonal changes and animal interactions. Similar observational knowledge of the migratory patterns of plants, animals, birds, and fish is evident among many native cultures. Almost uniformly, the remaining Indigenous oral narratives describe this trial and error in experimental usage along with inspired reflection on the beauty and profundity of an in-spirited world. One insight is that many modes of Indigenous knowledge often refer to these connections with the world as kin relationships.

Thus, it is becoming clearer that new modes of integrating traditional environmental knowledge and science are emerging.

Bridging multiple knowledge systems requires drawing on natural and social sciences’ methodologies and constant consideration for the value systems of all knowledge holders, a process that is based on ongoing iteration and feedback. The Mi’kmaq principle of ‘Etuaptmumk’ or ‘two-eyed seeing’ captures the concept of bringing different knowledge systems together to increase our collective bread and depth of understanding: ‘learning to see from one eye with the strengths of indigenous knowledges…and from the other eye with the strengths of western knowledges…and learning to use both these eyes together, for the benefit of all’.1

Science-that-sees-the-whole is beginning to appreciate these other ways of knowing without giving over its foundational analytical approach. In recent years, science has returned to study Indigenous knowledge not simply as idiosyncratic experiences, but as connected to larger social and ecological phenomena. Increasingly, these connections are understood as creative entanglements of the senses and the cognitive faculties. Over the last century, new ways of understanding reality have moved from the periphery of our knowledge into more common usage that increasingly tip us toward creative engagement with cosmology. For example, ways of seeing reality at the quantum level as simultaneously particle and wave, as multicentered, and as foaming into and out of existence are beginning to challenge creatively our articulation of everyday life. Our mental horizon now embraces the comprehensible and the intuitive in ways that formerly would have been dismissed as contradictory or logically incompatible.

In addition, there is a growing appreciation for the multiple ‘intelligences’ in the world. This book aims to explore some of those intelligences from plants and animals, to trees and forests. It recognizes both Indigenous ways of knowing and modern ecological ways of knowing. In both cases, organic interconnectivity is acknowledged and affirmed. Those participating in this book bring an appreciation for multiple ways of knowing and multiple intelligences in the world. Their work reflects the careful attempt to ‘see the whole’. Our work collaboratively aims to bring that sensibility toward an embodied ethic for nature.
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1 Susan Kutz and Matilde Tomaselli, ‘Two-Eyed Seeing Supports Wildlife Health’, Science, 364.6446 (2019), 1135–37, at 1136, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aau6170; inner quote from Shelley K. Denny, Lucia M. Fanning, ‘A Mi’kmaw Perspective on Advancing Salmon Governance in Nova Scotia, Canada: Setting the Stage for Collaborative Co-Existence’, International Indigenous Policy Journal, 7.3 (2016), 1–25, at 16, https://doi.org/10.18584/iipj.2016.7.3.4

Living Earth Community - Preface

Living Earth Community - Preface

Living Earth Community
Preface

Preface

Sam Mickey


© Sam Mickey, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0186.21

There are many ways of seeing Earth. It is possible to gaze at the planet from the vantage of a space shuttle in orbit. If you are standing on the moon, you can see Earth rise in the distance, as seen in the famous photograph of Earth taken from the moon by the NASA astronaut William Anders in 1968, Earthrise (see Figure 1). You can also look at Earth much more closely, on a more minute level, observing the habitats and inhabitants of Earth as they appear at any moment, and in any context — urban, rural, or wild. You are looking at Earth when you see a meadow, a forest, a tree, a cat, a farm, a house, or the ground beneath your feet. Along with these different ways of visually perceiving Earth, there are also many ways of understanding Earth, spanning various fields of scientific research, the religious traditions of the world, and philosophical theories of nature. There is great diversity in how we can relate to the vast panoply of beings composing the life, land, air, and water of Earth. This book is a celebration and revitalization of that diversity.


Fig. 1 Earthrise. Photo by William Anders (1968), Wikimedia, public domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NASA_Earthrise_AS08-14-2383_Apollo_8_1968-12-24.jpg

Everything lends itself to multiple perspectives. Consider the heart: an organ that is found in fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals. What is the heart? There are different ways of responding to that question. A poet speaks about the heart in terms of love and loss. A biologist speaks about the heart in terms of the cardiovascular system and blood pressure. It is not that one person is right and the other wrong. Those different ways of speaking reflect different perspectives, different ways of understanding and experiencing the heart, and different ways of knowing and being in relation to the heart. A poet and a biologist can both be right. They do not have to be mutually exclusive. They can each be true at the same time. Indeed, those perspectives can be held by the same person. Each human being contains various capacities for taking different perspectives on the world: logical, poetic, verbal, emotional, perceptual, intellectual, social, and more.

One can cultivate the artistic perspective of a poet or painter, the mathematical and logical perspective of a chemist or biologist, the verbal skills of a speech writer, the emotional intelligence of a sensitive friend, and the embodied or somatic knowledge of a swimmer or basket weaver. Furthermore, different perspectives are variously cultivated throughout human cultures and traditions. Biology, Buddhism, Hinduism, Indigenous lifeways, mathematics, and music all involve different ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. Understanding these differences is a way of understanding ourselves collectively, of understanding humankind. Furthermore, different perspectives are not taken up only by humans, but by all kinds of living beings.

Different forms of agency, sentience, significance (semiosis), intelligence, and communication are exhibited throughout the community of life on Earth. For example, research in microbiology suggests that communication takes place between bacteria, specifically through exchanges of pulses of electrical energy.1 Communication enables bacteria to sustain themselves in communities, without which an individual bacterium cannot survive. Regarding the increasing number of scientific studies that find evidence of intelligence across all forms of life, the botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer makes the following observation during an interview with Krista Tippett: ‘I can’t think of a single scientific study in the last few decades that has demonstrated that plants or animals are dumber than we think. It’s always the opposite, right? What we’re revealing is the fact that they have extraordinary capacities […] we’re at the edge of a wonderful revolution in really understanding the sentience of other beings.’2

Approaching the middle of the twenty-first century, humans are learning more and more about the extraordinary capacities of life on Earth, and, at the same time, life on Earth is undergoing a profoundly troubling transformation due to the massive overexploitation and overconsumption of resources by developed (industrialized) nations. During the current period of environmental change, immensely complex challenges are facing life on Earth, including pollution, deforestation, water scarcity, climate change, and mass extinction. Such challenges cannot be sufficiently addressed through a single perspective alone. What is needed is dialogue and integration among diverse perspectives. Planetary problems call for globally coordinated responses. The inclusion of multiple ways of being and knowing is crucial for coordinating viable responses to the intensifying ecological crises occurring around the world. This anthology is a contribution toward that effort, presenting succinct essays that explore the diverse ways in which humans think, feel, and act in relation to the community of life on Earth.
Dialogue across Perspectives

The essays in this volume illuminate different ways of being in the world and the different kinds of knowledge that they entail, such as the traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) of Indigenous communities, the affective knowledge that comes with religious love and devotion, the scientific knowledge of a biologist, the aesthetic knowledge of someone listening to or composing music, and the embodied knowledge communicated through storytelling. It is important to emphasize that different ways of knowing are not always harmonious or even compatible. Consider an example between different religions. Some ways of knowing are oriented around belief in God, as in the monotheism of Christianity or Islam, whereas other ways of knowing suspend belief in God (i.e., agnosticism) or they explicitly believe that there is no God (i.e., atheism). In astronomy, the idea that Earth revolves around the sun (heliocentrism) is strictly incompatible with the ancient model of geocentrism, which assumed that the sun revolved around the motionless Earth. There will always be contrasts and contradictions between perspectives, especially when considering the community of life on Earth in all its diversity. The question is how to sustain a flourishing coexistence amid this radical diversity.

Integrating multiple perspectives does not mean that everyone will agree about everything all the time. It means, rather, that there is an ongoing dialogue between those perspectives, seeking shared understanding and common interests, while accepting differences. However, not all perspectives should be included in a thriving planetary civilization. Perspectives oriented around violent control, domination, or hate cannot be included in any kind of integrative dialogue, since those perspectives refuse to participate. Respectful or hospitable relations are required for dialogue to take place. If you cannot acknowledge some truth or intrinsic value in your interlocutor, then you cannot have a dialogue. Authoritarianism, racism, religious fundamentalism, and colonialism are examples of perspectives that are not amenable to dialogue. Even the perspective of a poet can become too narrow-minded to hold itself open to dialogue. A poet and a physicist cannot have a dialogue about an ocean if the poet refuses to acknowledge that there is some validity to physics (e.g., tides are caused by the gravitational pull of the moon), or if the physicist refuses to acknowledge that there is some truth in poetry (e.g., tides are the ocean’s dream of the moon).

Dialogue between multiple perspectives is not only about knowledge. Ways of knowing (epistemology) are always connected to ways of being (ontology). To put it simply, epistemology implies the existence of knowers. An artist has a way of life, a way of perceiving and acting in the world, a way of being, of which an artistic way of knowing is an integral part. Ways of knowing are not merely abstract frameworks or belief systems. Frameworks and beliefs are involved with knowledge, to be sure, but knowledge only makes sense in some kind of existential context. Knowing is therefore entangled with encountering, feeling, imagining, experiencing, relating, sensing, intending, and so on. Your understanding of the world shapes and is shaped by who you are, including your opinions and beliefs, as well as the practical, emotional, embodied, historical, and material dimensions of your existence. What a gorilla knows is part of what it is like to be a gorilla. What a scientist knows is part of what it is like to be a scientist. What a rabbi knows is part of what it is like to be a rabbi. The contributors to this volume are mindful of this connection between knowing and being. Bringing together scholars, writers, and educators across the sciences and humanities, this anthology provides informative and inspiring accounts of perspectives that attend to ways of being and knowing that intimately intertwine humans with the vibrant vitality of the Earth community.

Multicultural and interdisciplinary in scope, this anthology engages with diverse cultures and traditions around the world, and draws upon academic disciplines across the sciences and humanities. It is unique for its mixture of expertise and accessibility. The authors included in this book are leading figures in their respective arenas, and in the chapters that follow they introduce contemporary research, traditional knowledge, and emerging modes of thought in ways that are accessible to the general reader while also relevant to specialists. The essays included in this volume are revised versions of what the contributors presented to one another when they met for a workshop held in the fall of 2018 at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation in Virginia. The workshop was hosted by the renowned botanist and evolutionary plant scientist Peter Crane and organized by the two directors of the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale, Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim. The focus of the workshop, like that of this book, is the integration of multiple perspectives on the community of life on Earth.

When bringing multiple perspectives into dialogue, there is no perspective that is assumed to be the best or truest. No single perspective is given priority over the others. Any contrasts, conflicts, and comparisons between them emerge through mutual understanding and not one-sided evaluation. It is the dialogue that is given priority, the ongoing struggle for mutual understanding. Furthermore, if no single perspective is given priority, that includes the perspective of this introductory overview. The birds-eye view is not privileged over a close-up. A more general or universal perspective is not given priority over more specific, local perspectives, and vice versa. Each perspective can be understood on its own terms. Each of this book’s chapters do just that: they elucidate different ways of being and knowing on their own terms, based on their own place within the evolving community of life on Earth. The aim of the book is not to determine once and for all which perspective comes out on top, but to figure out ways to move forward together.
Chapters

The chapters of this book are grouped into six sections, which reflect the diverse histories and futures of humankind in intimate relationship with the more-than-human world. The focus of Section I is precisely the presence of that which is more-than-human. Reflecting on species dynamics within the planetary biosphere, David Abram, in Chapter 1, suggests that new insight into the astonishing navigational feats of migratory animals can be gleaned by recognizing the broad Earth as a dynamic, agential player in these migrations. The long-distance movements of various animals can readily be understood as metabolic processes within the body of the living planet, not unlike the rhythmic systole and diastole of a heartbeat.

Remembered songs of extinct wattlebirds, endemic to Aotearoa New Zealand, catalyze Julianne Warren’s storytelling. In Chapter 2, she spins a path from first listening to a Pākehā-narrated recording of an elder Māori performing traditional mimicry of Huia. Replaying these dead bird-human voices interacting with sounds in the near-Arctic helps her begin learning, in poet W. S. Merwin’s words, to ‘hear what never/ Has fallen silent.’3 Between antipodes, ancestral echoes escape from machines, and sleeping languages live on—in loss—spellbinding companionships of hope’s sound.

In Chapter 3, Paul Waldau considers possibilities for transforming human institutions (e.g., law, education, ethics, and religion) in ways that promote a flourishing Earth community. The author considers how self-actualization for humans can be found not through the arrogance of human exceptionalism, but through different expressions of humility and through a recognition of the animality of humankind.

Section II brings attention to the dynamics of forests in Latin America. Drawing on his ethnographic research among Indigenous communities in Ecuador, Eduardo Kohn considers the political and ethical implications of thinking with forests in Chapter 4. It is a diplomatic undertaking that seeks to integrate multiple ways of understanding the cosmos, and it is an ontological undertaking that rethinks the very nature of existence by recognizing the intelligence inherent in all life.

Frédérique Apffel-Marglin advocates for integral ecological healing in Chapter 5, particularly by attending to the practices of Indigenous Amazonian communities. The use of psychedelic plant medicines in Amazonian shamanism exemplifies the kind of non-rational ways of knowing that expand human consciousness beyond the individual ego and into intimate communion with the more-than-human world.

In Chapter 6, Thomas E. Lovejoy elaborates on the importance of biodiversity for the Earth community and the role of biologists therein. Bringing science together with ethical and political issues, Lovejoy articulates the responsibilities of biologists and other scientists for promoting biodiversity and addressing contemporary ecological crises.

The ecological implications of Asian traditions provide the guiding thread for the next section, Section III. In Chapter 7, Prasenjit Duara thinks with the circulating waters of oceans to articulate the complex confluence of human and natural histories, particularly with reference to Asian contexts. Whereas the fragmentation of human and natural histories contributes to ethical and political failures to address environmental issues, Duara’s oceanic metaphor demonstrates how human history, including the study of history (i.e., historiography), overlaps with natural history, while these histories nonetheless operate on different temporal scales.

Religion and ecology in Hinduism is the focus of Chapter 8, with David L. Haberman elucidating the value of love and devotion as ways of connecting to the natural world. In contrast to the detachment that characterizes abstractly intellectual forms of knowledge, these ways of connecting to nature yield emotional or affective knowledge, which promotes care for the beauty and vulnerability of the natural world.

In Chapter 9, Mary Evelyn Tucker presents contributions to ecological ethics in Confucianism, highlighting the importance of Confucian cosmology for understanding the material world as vibrant and lively, not passive and inert. Confucianism facilitates an approach to ethics for which personal and social concerns are embedded in the Earth community and the whole cosmos, such that ecological concern is not separate from the practice of self-cultivation.

Section IV integrates perspectives from ecology and the humanities, with a view toward storytelling. To build a bridge between scientific and ethical perspectives on ecological issues, David Haskell advocates in Chapter 10 for contemplative exercise, in the sense of repeated, open-ended attention. Contemplative participation within the community of life deepens one’s sense of ecological aesthetics, and such appreciation for the beauty of nature provides an integrative ground for ethical actions informed by scientific knowledge.

In the next chapter, advocating for the cultivation of storytelling skills, Timothy Brown shares his experience bringing science and storytelling to students, specifically through work with National Geographic. Stories provide a framework for communicating scientific information to non-specialists, for thinking across different academic disciplines, and for motivating action.

Chapter 12 attends to the role that listening plays in attuning humans to the stories of the natural world, specifically in terms of a project involving Long-Term Ecological Research oriented around conserving coastal ecosystems. Willis Jenkins describes The Conservatory Project, which integrates perspectives on environmental change from sciences, humanities, and the arts, designing ecoacoustic listening exercises that afford participants an aural sense of their embodiment and embeddedness in a dynamic environment.

Listening can facilitate a contemplative awareness that is conducive to nonanthropocentric ways of being in the world. Brooke Williams, in Chapter 13, presents a series of reflections on the conference that gave rise to this volume. Williams discusses an exercise for engaging with ecology through the imagination. Participants are guided through an imaginal encounter with ancestors, the different kinds of gifts they might bring, and the paths those gifts can be taken.

In Section V, attention is given to the resilient relationships cultivated within Indigenous lands. Chapter 14 introduces the worldview of the Okanagan people, an Indigenous people inhabiting the northwest of North America. Jeannette Armstrong describes her personal background and experience growing up as a member of the Okanagan community in the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia, Canada. She highlights the importance of intimacy with the land, taking responsibility for relationships, and building resilient communities in the face of cultural and environmental destruction.

In the next chapter, drawing attention to the contemporary resurgence of Indigenous languages, Mark Turin describes the collaborative work of linguistic and cultural revitalization in response to the destruction of Indigenous communities in settler colonial nations. While recuperating the vitality of languages, this process also facilitates the recuperation of the well-being of Indigenous communities as well as the lands within which those languages and communities are embedded.

Chapter 16 draws on the wisdom of Indigenous traditions and the world’s religions, as John Grim proposes a triad of sensing, minding, and creating, to help us understand the world without separating nature from culture. All things exhibit capacities for external interaction (sensing) and an inner patterning or consciousness (minding), and those external and internal facets change over time as novel conditions arise (creating). The emergence of life from matter and of humans from other life forms can be understood as an explication of the dynamics of sensing, minding, and creating inherent in the universe.

The following chapter indicates that revitalizing Indigenous communities requires more than a recognition of tribal sovereignty. Samara Brock shows how it also requires a recuperation of Indigenous understandings of existence and ways of being. The inclusion of multiple ontologies opens up possibilities for creating relational, hybrid forms of practices that cultivate mutuality and reciprocity between humans and the land.

The final section, Section VI, concentrates on the planetary and cosmic dimension of human existence. In Chapter 18, Sean Kelly proposes that the current cultural and ecological transformations taking place on Earth are evidence of a Second Axial Age. The period between the eighth and third centuries BCE is known as the ‘Axial Age’, which saw the beginnings of philosophy, science, mathematics, and many of the world’s religious traditions. Whereas Axial Age values were oriented around transcendent or cosmological principles (e.g., Truth, God, Oneness), values of the Second Axial Age compel humans to reorient civilization around the living Earth community — Gaia.

The next chapter reflects on the enduring quest of human beings to inhabit and understand the universe. Weaving together an account of the exterior (objective) and interior (subjective) facets of the cosmos, Heather Eaton finds the unique qualities of human subjectivity in symbolic consciousness and in the worldviews, narratives, and other systems of symbols through which humans interpret and respond to their surroundings. Along with symbols and narratives, learning about ecology involves attention to systems and interrelationships at multiple scales, from ecosystems to the biosphere.

To facilitate the cultivation of ecological imagination and promote environmental awareness, Mitchell Thomashow’s concluding chapter presents proposes five qualities of environmental learning (observation, information, interpretation, expression, and manifestation). Those educational qualities are pathways for integrated ways of knowing and being in the living Earth community.

As the concluding chapters of this volume indicate, the end of the book is not the end of the journey. This whole book is a beginning, an opening for people who seek different ways to partake in planetary coexistence. In other words, this book is an invitation to new beginnings, new possibilities for living, learning, connecting, and communicating with other humans and with the more-than-human world. This includes new opportunities for the revitalization of Indigenous lands and languages; for the rejuvenation of ancient wisdom; for the inclusion of rational, emotional, embodied, animal, and ecological ways of knowing; and for the integration of humankind within a living Earth community.

What would it look like if more people became more aware of and sensitive to their relationship with the living Earth community? How would the education, government, economy, and media change? How would individuals think, feel, and act differently? The responses to those questions will vary from place to place, depending on different cultural values, and from person to person, depending on different experiences, moods, and personal backgrounds. This book does not present a framework that the reader should apply. If a framework or model is like a map, this book can be thought of more like a compass. A map is something distinctly separate from the territory that it describes and separate from the person using the map; a compass has a more participatory relationship to the territory and to the position of the person wielding the compass. The needle of a compass is composed of steel, an alloy of iron, which is responsive to Earth’s electromagnetic field. A compass needle moves according to the specific place of the person using it. With compass in hand, where will you go?

As humans shift toward a more sustainable way of inhabiting the community of life on Earth, every single human being will participate in that shift differently. Each of us will navigate several overlapping concerns, including oneself along with family, friends, and strangers, whether human or more-than-human. Some might start new nonprofits or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), whose mission is to restore ecosystems or advocate for peace and justice. Some will advocate for environmental issues in their respective sphere of influence — at home, in school, on social media, or in the workplace. Some will feel more empathy toward a companion animal, maybe a dog or cat, whose personality makes it impossible to hold up a rigid boundary that would separate humans from our nonhuman kin. Some will make changes in dietary preferences and other personal behaviors to adapt to the precarious conditions of life on Earth. Some will have conversations with friends and family. Some will have conversations with trees, listening to what trees might have to say to an inquiring mind, like one of the characters in The Overstory (2018), a novel by Richard Powers about the many ways humans and trees relate to one another. Sitting on the ground, leaning against a pine tree, a woman listens to what the tree is saying, ‘in words before words’, and then she hears it say, ‘Sun and water are questions endlessly worth answering’.4

We all move forward in our own way, depending on the unique circumstances of our lives. There is more than one way to read this book, as there is more than one way to inhabit this planet and answer the ongoing questions of sun and water. We are making ourselves at home on Earth, and we are learning how to do so together.
Bibliography

Merwin, W. S., ‘Learning a Dead Language’, in Migration: New and Selected Poems, W. S. Merwin (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2005), p. 41.

Popkin, Gabriel, ‘Bacteria Use Brainlike Bursts of Electricity to Communicate’, Quanta Magazine, September 5 2017, https://www.quantamagazine.org/bacteria-use-brainlike-bursts-of-electricity-to-communicate-20170905

Powers, Richard, The Overstory: A Novel (New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Company, 2018).

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1 Gabriel Popkin, ‘Bacteria Use Brainlike Bursts of Electricity to Communicate’, Quanta Magazine, September 5, 2017, https://www.quantamagazine.org/bacteria-use-brainlike-bursts-of-electricity-to-communicate-20170905


2 Krista Tippett, ‘Robin Wall Kimmerer: The Intelligence in All Kinds of Life’, On Being, February 25 2016, https://onbeing.org/programs/robin-wall-kimmerer-the-intelligence-in-all-kinds-of-life-jul2018


3 W. S. Merwin, ‘Learning a Dead Language’, in Migration: New and Selected Poems (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2005), p. 41.


4 Richard Powers, The Overstory: A Novel (New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Company, 2018), p. 3.