Inherently Ecocidal?
Is environmental destructiveness inherent to human culture?
Misanthropy: is it a central feature of environmentalism? It’s a charge that’s often laid by those who oppose environmental activism. Underlying that claim is a belief that human culture inevitably works in opposition to the natural world, so that resisting human assaults on the environment is seen as defying human culture itself. This seen as unfair criticism by most supporters of environmental defence, the aim of which of course is to move towards ways of living that work in harmony with nature instead of against it.
We all now regularly hear dire warnings of the collapse of civilisation due to the environmental crisis, made in order to provoke action to avert impending disaster. And yet, it sometimes seems as if those making these warnings quietly hold a darker thought: bring on human extinction, so that the global ecosystem can survive and recoup its losses. The resemblance to the biblical flood narrative is readily apparent, especially considering the likely impact of sea level rise as the effects of climate change continue to unfold.
Margaret Atwood, in her MaddAddam trilogy, seems to be giving a wry nod to this phenomenon, through the explicit invocation of Flood mythology by her God’s Gardeners. (For a brief plot summary, see the first post of this series.) But Atwood’s exploration of this notion — that the human species, by its very nature, is doomed to become a victim of its own success — is much more involved than that. A particularly misanthropic expression of this view is found in Atwood’s character, Crake.
Reflecting his subscription to the aforementioned belief in the basic opposition of human culture to nonhuman nature, Crake decides to provoke the extinction of the human species, and the repopulate the globe with a human-like species he has engineered to avoid ecologically destructive behaviours. Crake’s vision bears some similarity to the push for the creation of ecological culture that is my focus with Culture Dystopia and outlined in its opening article, particularly in its desire to eliminate value and power hierarchies:
It was amazing — said Crake — what once-unimaginable things had been accomplished by the team here. What had been altered was nothing less than the ancient primate brain. Gone were its destructive features, the features responsible for the world’s current illnesses. For instance, racism — or, as they referred to it in Paradice, pseudospeciation — had been eliminated in the model group, merely by switching the bonding mechanism: the Paradice people simply did not register skin colour. Hierarchy could not exist among them, because they lacked the neural complexes that would have created it. Since they were neither hunters nor agriculturalists hungry for land, there was no territoriality: the king-of-the-castle hard-wiring that had plagued humanity had, in them, been unwired.
But Crake’s vision of what needs to be pared from Western culture goes further than this:
In fact, as there would never be anything for these people to inherit, there would be no family trees, no marriages, and no divorces. They were perfectly adjusted to their habitat, so they would never have to create houses or tools or weapons, or, for that matter, clothing. They would have no need to invent any harmful symbolisms, such as kingdoms, icons, gods, or money.
Indeed, in a passage reminiscent of Walter M. Miller’s speculative fiction classic, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Atwood indicates that Crakes sees all human culture, and symbolic thought itself, as inevitably leading to ecological destruction:
Watch out for art, Crake used to say. As soon as they start doing art, we’re in trouble. Symbolic thinking of any kind would signal downfall, in Crake’s view. Next they’d be inventing idols, and funerals, and grave goods, and the afterlife, and sin, and Linear B, and kings, and then slavery and war.
A very similar point of view is attributed to Atwood’s character Adam, founder of the God’s Gardeners:
According to Adam One, the Fall of Man was multidimensional. The ancestral primates fell out of the trees; then they fell from vegetarianism into meat-eating. Then they fell from instinct into reason, and thus into technology; from simple signals into complex grammar, and thus into humanity; from firelessness into fire, and thence into weaponry; and from seasonal mating into an incessant sexual twitching. Then they fell from a joyous life in the moment into the anxious contemplation of the vanished past and the distant future. The Fall was ongoing, but its trajectory led ever downward. Sucked into the well of knowledge, you could only plummet, learning more and more, but not getting any happier.
Atwood, perhaps signalling her own opinion, has both Crake and Adam implicating reason, technology and culture as characteristics of the human species that doom us to fowl the nest. Whereas Crake’s solution was human extinction, Adam’s hope is that adherence to dogma of his own pragmatic construction can curtail humanity’s otherwise suicidal impulse:
Early in her Eveship, Toby had asked if it was really necessary to split such theological hairs, and Adam One had said that it was. “The truth is,” he’d said, “most people don’t care about other Species, not when times get hard. All they care about is their next meal, naturally enough: we have to eat or die. But what if it’s God doing the caring? We’ve evolved to believe in gods, so this belief bias of ours must confer an evolutionary advantage. The strictly materialist view — that we’re an experiment animal protein has been doing on itself — is far too harsh and lonely for most, and leads to nihilism. That being the case, we need to push popular sentiment in a biosphere-friendly direction by pointing out the hazards of annoying God by a violation of His trust in our stewardship.”
Adam’s point of view seems to be Atwood’s way of suggesting that, despite the supposed tendency of human cognitive faculties to yield environmentally destructive behaviour, a misanthropic response can be avoided by promoting restraint — in Adam’s case by putting the fear of God into people. As I argued in an earlier post, the particular doctrine adopted by the Gardeners falls short of a properly ecological outlook. And in Atwood’s story, the project ultimately fails when most of its adherents are killed by Crake’s plague, and those who remain find Gardener dietary law impractical in the absence of effective agriculture. But to me, the deeper failing of Adam’s project is in its proposal that conscious, voluntary restraint can work to neutralise an otherwise in-built tendency towards over-exploitation of the natural world. This is just what most current environmental campaigning appeals to, and let’s be under no illusions: it’s not working (even though it’s better than nothing).
What’s needed is neither the elimination of human culture (Crake’s plan) nor the incorporation of self-control into existing culture (Adam’s plan). Instead, what’s needed is deep cultural change, so that no impulse towards systematic environmental destruction arises in the first place. This is what many environmental thinkers have argued, from Leopold to Plumwood and the deep ecology movement, as I outlined in the opening post of Culture Dysphoria.
Self-maximising environmental imperialism is not built-in to the human species or human culture. Exemplars of pro-ecological culture are all around us. Ignoring this by universalising the dominant Western culture is itself a symptom of the same complex of self-centeredness that drives the Western conquest of nature, as pointed out ably and at length by Val Plumwood’s Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason.
Margaret Atwood’s writing is literature, not manifesto. She is under no obligation to explore every avenue. Nevertheless it’s hard not to see the complete absence of indigenous cultures from the MaddAddam trilogy as a manifestation of Western self-enclosure. Atwood’s “joke-filled romp through the end of the human race” seems to lump all humans together in monoculture. And, although I know I’m probably being unfair, the inclusion of Crakers, insapient by design, as a kind of vegetative caricature of indigenous people, only serves to compound this suspicion:
“He’d have seen the Crakers as indigenous people, no doubt,” says Ivory Bill. “And Homo sapiens sapiens as the greedy, rapacious Conquistadors. And, in some respects …”
The existence and flourishing of a plethora of pro-ecological indigenous cultures disprove Crake’s claims that a capacity for art and symbolic thought necessarily leads to king-of-the castle syndrome, and Adam’s claims that language, technology, reflexive thought and knowledge necessarily causes a Fall into environmental destructiveness. Indigenous cultures demonstrate the falseness of the notions, so often expressed by people on both sides of the dispute around environmental protection, that it is natural for humans and indeed all species to ruthlessly pursue narrow self-interest, and that all culture inevitably reinforces this. As Deborah Bird Rose points out,
There seems to me to be a fundamental philosophical gap between European cultures of conquest and Aboriginal cultures of balance. Dominant European cultures of colonisation, and at this time the dominant political and economic cultures of Australia, assert that some living things are to be eradicated, or, more negligently, simply stranded on a path toward death. This has been called, without irony, the survival of the fittest. I say ‘without irony’ because from a life-centred perspective it is difficult to discern the long-term fitness of practices which destroy the practitioners’ own life-support systems. In contrast, many indigenous peoples do not articulate a justification for life precisely because they hold life inherently to be significant. … Life is meaningful, and much human activity ~ art, music, dance, philosophy, religion, ritual and daily activity ~ is about celebrating and promoting life. Country is the key, the matrix, the essential heart of life.
In thousands of indigenous societies we can find the necessary ingredients for ecological culture: an ontology that acknowledges the interdependent agency of all organisms, and an ethical framework that respects the members of the ecological community, the community itself, the components of ecological systems, and the systems themselves. In some ways, Atwood’s character Toby takes on these attributes, as discussed in an earlier post. The adoption of ecological culture by Westerners is exactly what I’m trying to advocate, and this is what Toby approached… but to me, it doesn’t sit right to ignore, as Margaret Atwood’s trilogy does, the likelihood that indigenous cultures would continue on if Western civilization collapsed, in many cases exemplifying the type of worldview required to live with ecological sustainability.
Contemporary aboriginal Australians have a saying: always was, always will be Aboriginal land. A view shared by many indigenous people is that their societies will continue indefinitely after Western civilisation destroys itself. Others fear that they will be wiped out along with civilisation. In either case, indigenous voices identify, correctly, that the issue is not with the human species, or with supposedly universal human culture, but with Western culture. A poignant example, to close this post, comes from Wintu woman Kate Luckie:
People talk a lot about the world ending. Maybe this child [pointing to her eldest child] will see something, but this world will stay as long as Indians live. When the Indians all die, then God will let the water come down from the north. Everyone will drown. That is because the white people never cared for land or deer or bear. When we Indians kill meat, we eat it all up. When we dig roots, we make little holes. When we build houses, we make little holes. When we burn grass for grasshoppers, we don’t ruin things. We shake down acorns and pine nuts. We don’t chop down the trees. We only use dead wood. But the white people plow up the ground, pull up the trees, kill everything. The tree says, “Don’t. I am sore. Don’t hurt me.” But they chop it down and cut it up. The spirit of the land hates them. They blast out trees and stir it up to its depths. They saw up the trees. That hurts them. The Indians never hurt anything, but the white people destroy all. They blast rocks and scatter them on the earth. The rock says, “Don’t! You are hurting me.” But the white people pay no attention. When the Indians use rocks, they take little round ones for their cooking. The white people dig deep long tunnels. They make roads. They dig as much as they wish. They don’t care how much the ground cries out. How can the spirit of the earth like thewhite man? That is why God will upset the world-because it is sore all over. Everywhere the white man has touched it, it is sore. It looks sick. So it gets even by killing him when he blasts. But eventually the water will come.
References are available in the notes: visible as numbered speech bubbles to the right of the main text.
