When The Earth Strikes Back
As springs fades into what is an already intolerably hot summer across much of the Western world, a sense of anxiety and insecurity is palpable across much of that world. Many feel an “inchoate yet powerful discontent,” in the words of one Bloomberg commentator.
The few at the top of the economic heap exhibit bipolar tendencies, shifting from illogical market giddiness at one moment, to predictions of imminent doom the next.
Some of this is the crazy climate. It’s knowing that flood and fires, frost and heatwaves are breaking out all over, decades ahead of “schedule,” and that it can only get worse. It’s knowing that the seasons and sensations of nature that poets have held on to for emotional support for millenia can no longer be relied on to show up when they’re supposed to.
The sense that the world has come unhinged goes beyond even that, though. The old world is dying. Everyone feels or fears it , even if they’re not clear what it means. But what comes next? No one knows. Empty uncertainty haunts many of our quiet moments.
War on Earth
Dig another layer down and you find an “inchoate” realization by many that humanity has for too long been at war with everything non-human on Earth and with the Earth itself.
Now, nearly 300 years into the Industrial Revolution, the Earth is striking back. Not only has the climate gone berserk, and the bugs and birds and fish begun to disappear, but most every “natural resource” we humans want seems to be in short supply, from oil, to lithium, to good soil, to whatever.
The only things in assured oversupply are people and plastic. Somehow, peace must be restored to the planet itself. The Earth has to become our benevolent friend again. Most of us feel this imperative even if we don’t admit or express it. But how to do that?
Lots of writers and talkers have lots of ways of writing and talking about this urgent need for people to get back on the good side of a world that Westerners have long seen as “out there,” beyond our Cartesian consciousnesses. A world which Western society is accustomed to considering its dominion. Nature has long been treated as a kind of slave plantation that people are free to rule over, use, and abuse for their own whimsical purposes.
How did nature — the Earth in all its fullness — become an active agent that decided to “strike back,” whatever that means?
Mid-20th Century German philosopher Martin Heidegger called our industrial-era way of seeing the world the “enframement” of “technological thinking.” He wasn’t talking about particular technologies, but rather about the way people in our era have come to perceive the world as “standing reserve,” a storehouse of quantifiable resources whose sole purpose is to be available for human exploitation. Seeing beyond that frame — or outside the box, to use a more common term - is difficult, if not impossible for many people, as Heidegger explains it.
One prism for helping people as they strive to see outside that frame is indigenous thought, and a favored thinker along these lines is Robin Wall Kimmerer in her brilliant Braiding Sweetgrass. If you haven’t read it, there’s still time, but perhaps not much time, so go read it. Or find other indigenous thinkers and writers who are willing to share their insights into how people can live “reciprocally” in the world, instead of trying to exercise dominion over it.
In Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett maintains that there is “a vitality intrinsic to materiality as such.” Not a “life force” injected from outside, but a built-in ability to affect what happens in the world, which belongs not merely to humans, or even living things, but to all matter. “My aspiration is to articulate a vibrant materiality that runs alongside and inside humans to see how analyses of political events might change if we gave the force of things more due,” Bennett writes. Her concept leads naturally into notions such as giving rivers legal standing in human courts, which has been tried in several places. And also perhaps to more obscure propositions, such as whether humans might have standing in the “trial and judgement of the sea,” in T.S. Eliot’s words. I would argue, with Bennett, that the simple act of trying to wrap your head around such ideas has ethical and perhaps political value.
Jason Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life puts concrete historical and contemporary meat on the theoretical bones presented by Bennett. As an environmental historian and geographer, he shows not only how humanity has “compelled nature to work harder and harder — for free or at very low cost,” but also how nature is increasingly refusing to do the work demanded of it. The breakdown in the relationship between humans and the non-human world is evident in shortages and rising prices for food, energy, raw materials, and even labor.
At the moment, I’m trailing thoughtfully through Dougald Hine’s At Work in the Ruins. It’s an amazing book about how a climate campaigner and activist of long standing came to decide he should move beyond talk of climate change, and beyond reliance on “the science,” to examine “upstream questions” that aren’t susceptible to quantified scientific examination. For example, what name we should give to the way of approaching the world that led humanity into its current situation? He chooses “modernity.” I see him as seeking to break down the “enframement of technological thinking,” to borrow Heidegger’s phrase.
Working with Earth
Most of these explorations light at some point upon fossil fuels — the ultimate storehouse of the Earthly energy of the millennia — as the archetypal source of the imbalance between humanity and everything else that so marks modernity. I tend to start with fossil fuels myself, given my decades-long career of following the oil industry. And nuts, bolts, and economics constitute much of what I write about that imbalance.
But it’s evident to me, much as it is to Hine, that important as those nuts and bolts may be, they don’t fully encompass humanity’s current predicament. The imbalance has spread too far for economic answers alone. It encompasses our overuse and exploitation of all the natural riches we should be working with instead of against, including each other. And it has become pervasive in the way the world appears to people, so pervasive they cannot imagine another mode of existence.
A global energy transition is no small thing, but it’s not nearly a big enough change to solve what ails the world.
I wrote recently about how the “haves” of the globalized economy have accepted that carbon emissions from fossil fuels must go in order to retain a livable climate, but are struggling mightily to save everything else in what German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk has dubbed the World Interior of Capital. And about how they have lighted on carbon capture and storage (CCS), hydrogen, and biofuels as means to accomplish this. They want to keep as much as they can of what they have, starting with the capital that allows them to keep earning more.
The last thing the contemporary Captains of Industry, Technology, and Finance care about is how the Earth, or oil deposits, or trees, flowers and soil will respond to their activities. Or so it seems when you first encounter the idea. But is it so?
The oil magnates care about the rising cost of extracting fossil fuels from resistant rocks. They care about how much chemically messier and harder it is to refine today’s oil than it was to process the biggest and purest resources, which were produced first.
The giants of industrial farming care that more and more fertilizer is needed to grow plants as soil quality deteriorates due to ill-treatment. They care that chemical fertilizers are becoming ever more expensive as the fossil fuels from which they’re made go up in cost and price. They care that the perfect pesticides they developed earlier are becoming less toxic to weeds as these unwanted plants develop resistance, and more evidently toxic to humans and other animals.
These are examples of the Earth exercising “agency,” to use a philosophical term; or of non-human stuff having an impact on the way the world works, to use plainer language. People in the largely artificial space in which the winners of globalized capitalism exist — the world interior of capital, to return to Sloterdijk’s phrase — may think that only the silly and simple-minded imagine non-human stuff can “act” with “vibrancy.” But in fact, what many of them do day in and day out is try to stave off for a bit longer humanity’s confrontation with non-human, Earthly agency.
Humanity can ignore the signals of rebellion coming from the Earth and its non-human inhabitants, the signals that are the root cause of our anxiety and insecurity, until civilization collapses. Or we can find simpler ways of living with less stuff, less destruction, and a lot more attention to those signals.
