Perhaps I’m just having a dark moment right now, or perhaps this is what I really think. I’m not sure. Right now I’m in the process of working out my thoughts on black ecology for Jeffrey Cohen’s University of Minnesota Press collection entitled Prismatic Ecologies. To be honest, I’m still not entirely sure what I have in mind by a “black ecology”. I know some general outlines of the concept:
1) Being is radically a-teleological or without purpose.
2) Life is no more privileged than inorganic matter within the order of being.
3) Positive feedback phenomena (systems running out of control) are every bit as common as negative feedback (systems that regulate themselves or strive for homeostasis).
4) “Ecology” does not signify “nature” (or that which is outside of culture), but systems of interdependent relations.
None of these claims are proposed celebrate or ignore the environmental apocalypse we’re now facing. Quite the contrary. On the one hand, I’m interested in foregrounding the normative grounds of our judgments about environments so that we can consciously take responsibility for them. Contra films such as Avatar that present and ideological vision of being where environments are conceived as “wise” (the sacred tree) and self-regulating in the face of destructive perturbations (the revolt of the animals in the film so as to right the unbalance), I think we need to understand that the universe is every bit as much a cruel beast prone to destroying environments and flying out of “balance”. In other words, we need to understand that there’s no providence or wisdom of self-regulation we can rely on to address these problems. We also need to understand that in these discussions we are expressing values as to what environments ought to be. Insofar as being is a-teleological, there is nothing that environments ought to be. In my view we need to foreground our utopian imaginaries as to what environments ought to be in these discussions, rather than implicitly appealing to a spiritualized concept of nature that somehow is supposed to be one way rather than another (Siberian Traps anyone?).
read on!
As for the thesis that ecology is not a discourse about nature but interdependent relations, here the issue is that I believe that eco-theory has missed a tremendous opportunity by defining itself too narrowly. When Eileen and I were approaching people to contribute to the first issue of O-Zone (devoted to the theme of ecology), people repeatedly expressed hesitation suggesting that they had nothing to say about ecology. No doubt this is because they immediately associate ecology with a discourse about nature, rather than the investigation of systems or networks of interdependent relations. Consequently, for example, a queer theorist might think “I have nothing to say about nature because the focus of my work is the queer”, despite the fact that in investigating queer subjectivity one perpetually is investigating relations in language, culture, power, institutions, the body, interpersonal relations, etc. When ecology is understood properly (or in the way I propose, anyway), we see it everywhere: the classroom, homes, media, economy, technology, the natural world, the formation of the body, etc. And here, this is not because all of these domains open on to the natural world (though they do), but because the analysis of all of these domains requires an analysis of interdependent relations. And here I’m aware that there are legions of media theorists and other cultural theorists that describe their work as ecological. The problem is that this hasn’t really caught on and become a commonplace.
So where is my pessimistic moment in all of this? For me the three key political issues are the environment, gender, and economy (in no particular order). And as I look at environmental issues today I find myself increasingly pessimistic and feeling as if environmental politics and thought has not been ecological enough in its analysis of these issues. When I say that it has not been ecological enough, I am not suggesting that it has failed to properly analyze climate change, but that it implicitly seems to repeat the nature/culture divide, treating the environment as if it’s something over there and out there, while ignoring the social, political, and cultural world. Yet under a properly ecological conception of being, we can’t neatly divide these worlds, but rather the human world is one formation of nature among others. Cultural worlds are not outside of the natural world, but are thoroughly situated within that world. And if this is the case, then this is because there is only one being and that being is nature (one of the theses of my flat ontology).
So why is this an issue? It’s an issue because while environmentalists prescribe all sorts of action we need to take to avert the climate catastrophe, it seems to me that in failing to engage in an ecology of social and political institutions they are whistling past the graveyard by failing to address the question of the conditions under which action is possible. Here’s the part where everyone gets angry with me. Given the way in which government and corporations are today intertwined, I don’t think there’s much we can do to avert the coming catastrophe. As Morton says, referring to logical time, “the catastrophe has already happened”. So what would it mean, I wonder, to take Morton’s thesis seriously? Here I know Tim will disagree with me. When I look at environmental discussions in popular media and from many around me, I see the discussion revolving almost entirely around consumers.
We’re told that we have to consume differently to solve this problem. I agree that we need to consume differently, but I don’t see any feasible way in which driving fuel efficient cars, using less heat and AC, eating less meat, etc will solve these problems. This is because the lion’s share of our climate change problems arise from the production and distribution end of the equation, rather than the consumption end. They are problems arising from agricultural practices, factories, and how we ship goods throughout countries and the world. The problem is that given the way in which governments and corporations are intertwined with one another, and given the way in which third world countries are dependent on fossil fuels for their development, and given the fact that only governmental solutions can address problems of production and distribution, we’re left with no recourse for action. We can only watch helplessly while our bought and sold politicians continue to fiddle as the world burns.
All of this leads me to think that green consummerism is a horrible symptom of our inability to act that actually exacerbates our problems by prolonging our confrontation with the reality we’re facing. And here’s the horrible thought that occurs to me in dark moments that everyone will slap me for: perhaps the truly ethical and right political response to climate change is not to jump on the green bandwagon and change all our consumption habits, but rather to consume as much as possible, especially with respect to energy. I just don’t see how there’s any feasible way we can get governments and industry to respond to these problems given the current governmental and economic ecologies. This seems to suggest that the only possible solution is to push ourselves over the ledge where fossil fuels are no longer available and where governments and industry are thereby forced to change. That’s my pessimistic thought for the evening. Let the demands for me to done a hair shirt commence.
Larval Subjects . 
March 19, 2012 at 2:07 am
I’m no expert on ecology as philosophical thought, but just a few observations which may be useful.
Firstly, your terms of reference to define or even scope ecology are way too general/vast and could involve everyone and everything. Perhaps that is your intention, but the resulting lack of focus might lead to a diffuse sense of action or possibilities of action.
Secondly, your triad of environment-gender-economy as inter-related systems are highly ambitious and, again, too vast to take in for me. If we overwhelm ourselves, despite the good intentions of our passionate care and concern, we emotionally defeat ourselves before we start. This too can only result in a diffusion of emotional focus to intuit any meaningful responses – thus a extension of problem #1.
Thirdly, the notion of pushing us over the edge to create the crisis that causes change has happened in history – but not with any fundamental shift in societal attitudes that are perhaps the ‘real’ solution you are looking for here. A response to crisis will be just that: no real learning or thinking. So the example here is of Russia – it required the collapse of the very corrupt Czarist system for the 1917 revolution to pave the way…not for Socialist thinking despite the best efforts of Lenin or Trotsky – but for the emergence of a new, efficient Czar (Stalin) who turned Russia from a peasant or serf economy into one of the world’s leading powers in 60 years. And that has repeated with Gorbachov’s glasnost and perestroika leading yet again to the Czardom of Putin and the oligarchs.
This takes me back to the unresolved problem in Heidegger of thinking: ‘Most thought-provoking in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.’
Now, if we assume that Nature is the new Dasein, and if Nature is responsible for creating life forms out of inanimate matter through chance and necessity, Nature is quite capable of resolving the termination of mankind and replacing us with new life forms. But who are we to argue with a force as powerful as Nature? ie perhaps it is Nature who no longer wants us here and is leading us to our extermination as a species? However, Nature, or History, always appears to torment mankind with impossible challenges. But this time, perhaps the solutions might be multiple and solved not through one unitary approach to ecology but through an incalculable myriad of people working away in their own fields to establish ‘ecologies’ ie I sense a need for a unitary system in your post when we may be living in an epoch of multiplicities which deny the all encompassing power of the unitary solution. But Nature would be responsible for that too – creating the myriad impulses that take down oppressive regimes and fight their reconstitution eg Egypt. So either way, the life or death of mankind as species is hardly in our hands. And this brings me to Heidegger’s problem: why would Being withdraw from us and refuse to disclose itself as thinking to mankind? That disclosure and the resulting evolution of mankind into a new psychological state of perceptions is also out of our reach – if it happens, only Nature can bring that about.
This does not mean we sit around doing nothing – I’m just pointing out that a new locus of metaphysical force as Nature is a necessary humility that the wisdom of mankind has intuitively understood: life is not, and never has been, in our hands….
Finally, all this raises the interesting question of why Nature might create the possibility of a ‘black’ ecology as part of evolutionary energy, as a necessity for the species of mankind – though again, that would depend on how you define ‘black’ ecology and why…
March 19, 2012 at 2:17 am
I can follow the rationale, but the kind of acceleration-ism you propose in the end supposes something just like market-oriented ways of thinking about environmental stewardship. I mean, the idea that if we just force the hand of “government and industry” by running the economy into the ground sounds swell until you recognize that if things get “that bad” we are even less if at all really able to respond. To that end, the ability of the earth as a dynamic system of animate and inanimate processes doesn’t stretch back and forth with the abstract elasticity economists like to assume markets do.
My girlfriend is a chemistry student and looking to maybe study environmental toxicology in grad-school. Her chief concerns with pollution, resource depletion and other facets of environmental degradation are like yours in remaining trained on the systemic forces of production and distribution. The thing is, she also recognizes we are processing/producing and distributing more resources than probably any other life-form that existed save for the plankton that help oxygenate the atmosphere. Moreover, what we are producing is a toxic globe and not simply – I don’t know – an in conveniently hot, wet or resource-depleted one. Ocean acidification, carbon emissions, deforestation and other bullshit are off the charts and are deteriorating the planet’s capacity to absorb environmental disturbances.
Zizek likes to underscore how evolution is a series of horrible catastrophes, but seems to forget that most of those catastrophes haven’t been systemic and that for billions of years there has been an unbroken chain of life and other processes that absorb these catastrophes. Maybe the Permian or any of the other great extinction-events mark a moment of deep systemic disturbance, but the fact that species or individual creatures die as part of the process of life fails to appreciate the properly systemic nature of how we’re fucking up the planet today. Of course, there is no “true” harmony to which we’re going to return and the planet will be different than the one that existed before human influence became what is has. Human intervention and restoration on a mass scale is needed, but tying the fate of the biosphere to these interventions as a wholesale replacement for ecological processes stinks of hubris and sounds like every other human wish to destroy what it cannot have.
March 19, 2012 at 2:26 am
Joe,
You speak about “market-driven approaches” as if these are self-evidently mistaken. I’m not sure whether or not I’m suggesting a market-driven approach, but minimally you need to explain the mechanism or set of practices that would allow us to confront this set of deadlocks. It seems to me that the green consummerist movement is thoroughly premised on market-driven approaches and that it is failing massively. What are our other options?
March 19, 2012 at 2:30 am
Strav12,
I propose that we treat “ecology” as a general term like “ontology”. I don’t think this is too vast at all, and we can narrow it for specific subjects.
As to your second point, I said that economy, queer theory, and environment are the most important issues to me, not that they’re necessarily imbricated (though I do think that it’s impossible to think environmental issues without thinking economic dynamics).
Finally, I think you go over the cliff when you move to Heidegger and start talking about “evolutionary energy”. Here you’ve moved into obscurantist, mystical discourses that I believe lack all credibility. If you’re not embracing naturalism and materialism I don’t think you have a credible position. This is certainly suggested by tropes like “energy” as you’re using them. We need less of this vitalism/mysticism/spiritualism, not more. Especially when talking about humans (your strange evolutionary view).
March 19, 2012 at 3:20 am
You’ve already mentioned re-structuring production and distribution. Here are a couple ways that people are trying to come up with non-State and non-Market routes to this kind of ecological interventions.
(radio interview) building a working-class environmental movement http://kboo.fm/node/30728
(written article) Section from An Anarchist FAQ on capitalism and ecological crisis http://kboo.fm/node/30728
March 19, 2012 at 3:24 am
Oops. I didn’t realize the paste didn’t take when I copied that second address. I think the sub-section on distinguishing environmentalism and ecology is right up your alley.
http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/secEcon.html
March 19, 2012 at 3:47 am
When I was growing up, the paradigmatic image was the nuclear winter — nothing left alive on the planet but insects and grass. That was an ecological issue too. Is it still? Have governments succeeded or failed in dealing with that catastrophe? What role has the public played in that success or failure? The answers to these questions might help shed light on today’s ecological woes.
March 19, 2012 at 3:48 am
Right Joe, but are these realistic responses given the global nature of this issue? That’s the question, not whether small and local groups are doing such things, but whether the responses are proportionate to what needs to be done.
March 19, 2012 at 3:54 am
I apologize in advance if my questions/comments seem overly simplistic. Your philosophical approach is new to me (though I find it very exciting) and I have not studied the particular issues that you are addressing in much detail. But I have some clarification questions I would like to ask.
First, your argument seems premised on the notion that we need a radical transformation in the organization of production and distribution. What would such a transformation look like?
There is a problem with the way corporations and governments are intertwined which makes the situation seem hopeless. But I am just wondering if the hopelessness does not arise from the absence of a clear, positive alternative organization for society and the organization of distribution and production? Or does it arise from the asymmetry in power relations that are a part of our current situation so that, even if we had a clear alternative, there would be no possibility of positively enacting it? Or does it arise from the fact that we have already done irreversible damage?
Your policy prescription of driving over the ledge relies on the notion that our situation is hopeless, which I think you recognize, so I am just trying to get a better sense for why you consider it hopeless?
Second, what would we be avoiding by purposely pushing ourselves over the ledge? If we drove ourselves off the ledge would that allow us to avoid some of the worst consequences of environmental degradation or economic collapse?
If not then it seems to me it is worth doing what we can even with the knowledge that we might fail. If I am in a carriage and I suddenly become aware that I am heading for a cliff and part of me says, “It is too late to turn” it is still worth trying to turn because what is the worst that could happen? If I fail I will go over the edge of the cliff but in that particular case it does not seem like a good strategy for me to say: because I might not make it I should not even try.
So I am wondering if you could clarify why you think driving us off the ledge by consuming as much fossil fuel as possible would be a better option than trying to do what we can with the full knowledge that we might fail? Would there be some advantage to failing sooner rather than later?
March 19, 2012 at 3:54 am
I see that Joe has already posted responses to my first question
March 19, 2012 at 4:14 am
I think it would be a mistake to suppose that these are actions limited to small groups. I point to these as prefigurative of a different kind of collective action that in so enacting will call upon us to form a different kind of collective (though not one necessarily limited to the organizational boundaries of the prefigurative group). Peter Frase’s remarks about the “dialectic of technology” resonate with what I’m saying, where he shows how the forces of production and all their ecological implications can (and must) be /re-appropriated/ by the working-class.
It almost sounds though like you are waiting for the kind of global, homeostatic effect that you also say fails to emerge out of the play of market and ecological forces. Would you have said that it’ll be impossible for doctors and scientists to develop a polio vaccine, now in standardized use, unless they (nearly) all did it at once?
March 19, 2012 at 8:40 am
Levi,
Probably not as slap worthy as you imagine given that that the economic funk we are in means that environment slips down the agenda, a jump start to production & consumption might put it back on.
Another thing that struck me in the course of reading the post is how the conception of ‘nature in balance’ which gets perturbed by humans mirrors the organic conception of society that is latterly perturbed by outsiders.
Will.
March 19, 2012 at 9:07 am
Have you checked out Nick Land’s work? Like his book “Thirst for Annihilation”?
March 19, 2012 at 12:49 pm
Joe,
I think there’s a disanalogy between implementing the polio vaccine and responding to climate change. In the latter case the issue is how to get nations globally to change their ways and how to get business and corporations to respond when it is not in their economic interests to do so. These are systematic problems in a way that implementing the polio vaccine is not systematic. Part of my reasoning in this post is that the catastrophe has already happened and that we’re now at a point where it’s irreversible. The pushing things to the ledge reasoning is based on the idea that it’s better to exhaust fossil fuels sooner rather than later so we can set about changing our relation to resources and energy, averting some of this mess.
March 19, 2012 at 2:58 pm
You’re right about the polio vaccine. I was thinking in terms of development, but implementation is probably the bigger hurdle at this point.
I also understanding the “pushing things to the ledge” rationale (and I’ve heard it before), but I’ll try to make my point again, hopefully a bit more clearly. When I initially said that this sounds like it suffers from a market-oriented outlook, I had in mind the specific assumption that once we exhaust fossil fuels that we will be ABLE to orient production toward and carry out creating new, more sustainable extractive technologies. If there are “no” fossil fuels (if we run supplies into the ground in some sense), which are integral to modern industrial production AND society, how are we going to fuel the change in “our relation to resources and energy”? When I say fuel, I don’t just mean directly fueling production, but supporting people and social organization. I work in an anti-hunger nonprofit and one of our chief concerns is child-hood hunger and what that does to their development, susceptibility to disease and other risks. I don’t want to make a direct analogy, because I know it’s not /the same/, but it’s the kind of dilemma I think you and others are over-looking when advocating that we “starve the beast” by eating up energy.
The concern with getting “business and corporations to respond when it is not in their economic interests to do so” sounds like a fool’s errand too. It’s not that those organizations aren’t relevant, but that I simply don’t believe they WILL or conceivably CAN act “when it’s not in their economic interests to do so”, where economic interests includes a long-term strategic hope at “coming back” after some kind of grand energy revolution. That is, not under the current regime of attraction (capitalism). This though might be the more relevant context in which to think of how “the catastrophe has already happened”, where economic sustainability is the fantasy that must be traversed.
March 19, 2012 at 4:45 pm
I guess I understand where you’re coming from and sympathize with the Bataillesque take on consumption, but am worried that the both the uncertain environmental impacts of climate change and the more-certain mining of fossil fuels, etc. are of course not evenly distributed and tend to impact already vulnerable people/places/ecologies (appalachia, indigenous people in the “first” and “third” world, small island countries, etc). As you say, it is a problem with production and distribution rather than consumption…, but an acceleration of consumption presumably would intensify these sorts of unequal relationships, right? Which ecologies would survive to witness governmental / industrial change?
And another worry is that the obvious push in a post-fossil fuel world will be for more nuclear power (which has similar unequal exploitative effects)
March 19, 2012 at 4:47 pm
Have you read Massumi’s article on the biopolitics of climate change – National Enterprise Emergency?
March 19, 2012 at 4:49 pm
[…] discussing. In comments, Joe has been raising some especially interesting points. In his most recent comment he writes: I also understanding the “pushing things to the ledge” rationale (and I’ve heard […]
March 21, 2012 at 2:29 am
[…] Levi Bryant has a series of bleak (some more than others) posts (see here, here, here, here, and here) in which he outlines his growing pessimism about what he considers to […]
March 21, 2012 at 8:34 am
May I just point out that this discussion is extremely generic. For example, the reason you apprehend environmental discourses or exhortations as targeting consumers has everything to do with your (limited) perspective (if I may say so). Never before in history have more relatively normal people, outside of corporate and government, been extremely active *at technical levels* in working out feasible environmental solutions. Moreover, never before have so many corporations been actively working on emissions reduction measures. Some of these are quite cynical but a great many actually are not. Indeed very many companies assess climate change as a deep threat to long term growth. So market approaches may be found everywhere, but what this means is very unclear, since it’s a mistake to assume they are captured by rank profiteering or simply result in continued hegemonies.
There are all kinds of weird happenings afoot, and you are right to call attention to many urgencies, but overall I view your sense of the dire situation to be just an artifact of your own perspective.
I appreciated Jeremy Trombley’s reply to your recent postings over at struggleforever. I agree first that the issue is work – specifically in what capacity may we work on the present? But the bigger issue, as he points out, is an ethical one of orientations toward the future. To my mind, what we must recognize and insist upon is that climate change (for example) is not one problem, but a vast assemblage of much smaller problems. This is where the work happens. There are literally all kinds of things to be done (which don’t necessarily boil down to changes in consumer behavior). The idea of an overarching despair is no different than an overarching optimism – it simply doesn’t obtain – the future really is multiple in the sense that some things will go quite badly but many others will not, and every victory is worthwhile.
I address these issues directly in this draft paper – Accounting for Atmosphere: Climate futures, climates past. You can find it with google i think.
Attempting to step back and draw some overarching characterization is ultimately the cause for such bleak assessments, but recognize that such a situated perspective is a choice you make, which then puts you in the position of having to speculate on dystopias.
Cheers,
Jerome
risk_perverse
accountingforatmosphere