The Biosphere and Me

In this essay I explore—and confess to—my own awakening to what Peter Sloterdijk (2009, 28) calls “the silent condition of [our] existence”: the air I breathe, the water I drink, and the Earth on which I stand. In many ways then, this is a piece of writing about the biosphere and me.

Here’s an extract of the essay published over at the Journal of Narrative Politics:

For another way to visualise the tenuousness of life, imagine yourself on a journey upward from the center of the earth, taken at the pace of a leisurely walk. For the first twelve weeks you travel through furnace-hot rock and magma devoid of life. Three minutes to the surface, five hundred meters to go, you encounter the first organisms, bacteria feeding on nutrients that have filtered into the deep water-bearing strata. You breach the surface and for ten seconds glimpse a dazzling burst of life, tens of thousands of species of micro-organisms, plants and animals within a horizontal line of sight. Half a minute later almost all are gone. Two hours later only the faintest traces remain consisting largely of people in airliners who are filled in turn with colon bacteria. — E.O. Wilson[1]

I: The technical account

On June 3, 1967, all four of my grandparents boarded a plane at Manston airport in Kent, in the southeast of England, in a concerted effort to become acquainted. My parents, Jan and Roy, then 21 and 25 years of age, had been married only several months. And so, it was in this spirit of new beginnings that both sets of parents — and my grandparents — were to holiday together in Spain. As was becoming fashionable at the time, Isabel and Joseph, along with Royston and Nancy, had decided to fly into Perpignan, France, rather than travel the first leg of their journey by bus or by boat. The plane they boarded was marked: “G-APYK”.

What happened on that flight, the report of the Ministere des Transports later concluded, is that “the accident occurred following a collision with the mountainside”.[2] On board the Douglas DC-4 were 88 passengers and crew — all perished together in a single collision with the Pyrenees. The plane was a mere four minutes from its destination when it impacted with Mont Canigou, some 4,000 feet above sea level. The Commission’s chain of causation curiously downplayed the finding that G-APYK’s pilots displayed signs of “intoxication by carbon monoxide coming from a defective heating system”. The subsequent flight investigation found that the crash “resulted directly from a series of errors on the part of the crew”.

Having studied the report in search of reasons, I infer three primary causes. First, the “language difficulties and in particular the non-existence of any standard phraseology” is evident in the transcribed black box recording between the co-pilot and the traffic controller. The investigating commission asserts that this resulted in grave “misunderstandings” in what was being communicated (and comprehended) by both parties. Second, and coupled with the first, the pilot and co-pilot made “a series of errors”, including:

[…] failure to use all the means of radio navigation available in the aircraft, error in dead reckoning, descent starting from a point which had been inadequately identified, failure to observe the safe altitudes fixed on the company’s flight plan and, perhaps, mistakes in identification by visual reference to the ground.

The report also points to a failure on the part of the ground controller to cross-check the plane’s bearing — due in part because he was led to believe by the pilots that they had the runway in sight — such that, “[i]t is legitimate to think that if the bearing had been checked by the controller, the latter would have found the [error]”. And lastly, and contributing to both aforementioned reasons, the pilot and co-pilot displayed signs of “severe intoxication by carbon monoxide […] coming from a defective heating system”.

II: Reasons

To say that my four grandparents died because of a defecting heating system seems no reason at all. But for a very long time, it was the only reason I had.

“I don’t like talking about it,” my mother would most often say while blowing her nose, “But don’t be afraid to ask!” Seeing my mother in this way — my father and I never spoke about it — how could I ever ask her anything? Thus, whilst the event was an accident, acquiring a sense of what I’ve been born into has taken some effort.

This essay started out as an attempt to reconstruct my family’s narrative that has remained unequivocally hidden away and fragmented.[4] In so doing what was revealed is the feeling of alienation — from the self, the family, society, and world — that produced a desire within me to make sense of this feeling not merely as a personal experience, or a string of sad stories (which to some readers it may only seem to be), but rather as something that gave rise to the altogether new desire to philosophically interrogate another, more fundamental, isolation of my body from its biospheric surrounds.

Before I proceed, I have come to believe that I must declare the reasons why I’ve decided to publicly share my pained meditation on a familial tragedy rather than to do so privately.[5] You see, much of what I know about the accident — and thus also my grandparents — has been translated from the French, extracted from online databases, purchased from libraries, kindly donated by amateur plane spotters, and procured from forums of aviation enthusiasts. Sadly, very little may be gleaned from stories passed within my family, or engaging with my relatives’ personal effects or photographs. To understand whom my grandparents were and the repercussions of their sudden deaths, I had wanted to ask my mother and father: How did it make you feel? But doing so, much less so now, seemed impossible.

Writing about the reasons we give and how we give them, the late sociologist Charles Tilly wrote that there is no hierarchy of reasons; no one mode of communicating that always trumps the rest.[6] Although my mother often fell back on the sorts of “conventions” that are so helpful in dealing with grief, she also revealed key details about when and where the accident happened. She did this not by sharing what she and my father thought or felt, but by relaying snippets of various other, rather more impersonal, “technical accounts” or “codes”. According to Tilly, what was missing — from what my mother told me — were the “stories” that are typically passed within families, or shared between loved-ones and friends.

And so whilst I was informed about what had happened, my mother didn’t share all that was happening. When I did ask about my grandparents, what I was afforded was the technical account, not what I had most wanted: a familial story. As it so often does, the trauma surrounding the event and its aftermath had served to isolate my mother and father from one another, and later still, from their own son. Despite the solidarity that might have been forged from our shared pain, suffering and vulnerability, part of my family — and our tragic past — has drifted in-and-out of focus. Quite rightly, Tilly would leap to my mother and father’s defence here. He would claim that there’s no relation between the kinds of reasons that people give and their character. For how we communicate more commonly reflects the situation, and our role in it.

“You were just a child!” my mother recently protested, “How could I have told small children?” The trouble is, as our family evolves, I want my role in it to change too.

What follows, therefore, is not just recounting of life and death in the Taylor and Nicholson clans. No, perhaps enough has been said already to suggest that it attempts much more than that. Rather, it is intended as an essay that not only serves to unmake some those social isolations, but one in which I also explore — and confess to — my own awakening to what Peter Sloterdijk calls “the silent condition of [our] existence”: the air I breathe, the water I drink, and the Earth on which I stand.[7] In many ways then, this is a piece of writing about the biosphere and me.