Thinking With the Ecological Thought

So what am I learning from this encounter with Tim Morton's Ecological Thought?

That a thought unrelated to practice is empty. That the relation to practice, too, must be thought and developed. That practice necessarily makes room for embodied others (and not just strange strangers), who need their own room to breathe (la partage du souffle), and that the provision of such room within the text--within the practice of style--is an ethical matter.

An ethical text--one I can live with, in a strong sense of the phrase--provides a map of the positions it seeks to engage, a sketch of how they're related to one another and therefore how I expect to engage them. Such a map should allow the reader to assess both the terrain and my map, to come to an independent judgment of how persuasive or effective the engagement has been.

For instance: there are plenty of places in the literature of ecology/environmentalism that resemble, in some ways, the lines of thinking that Morton pursues. Why doesn't he engage with them, if only to elaborate differences? His thinking crosses paths with ideas about ecological modernization, and with Tim Ingold's work in The Perception of the Environment. Would it do damage to his thought to tarry awhile in the vicinity of such texts?

Traditional scholarly convention distributes the map of its engagements between primary texts, worked into the body of the text, and secondary references, confined to the foot- or end-notes. Such spatial distinctions establish, as it were, the kinship terms for academic work. Morton has endnotes, but they act more like links than references; his text is a field of wild cross-pollination. This enacts the idea that ecology means the loss of the foreground/background distinction, the evaporation of distance, but it also collapses the distinction between map and territory and, indeed, just about any epistemic distinctions whatsoever (this despite his claim to distinguish between, say, environmentalism and the ecological thought.).

Alongside these concerns, there is a question about the time of reading, an issue related to practices of attention. Traditional reading takes time, with the text being an artefact designed to orchestrate time (I think of David Miller's phrase about the Victorian novel as a "drill in the rhythms of industrial society"). It may be that virtual reality dissolves such artefacts, suspending reading in a space of lateral associations and an environment of optionality (I currently have a dozen tabs open in my browser, and can readily skip between them: the fabric of this writing is riddled with those possibilities, and the awareness that they affect the reader as well. ). In this informational space, reading "takes" no time: it is pock-marked with points, constellated but not connected. Having grown up breathing, following the marked paths, the vacant, interstellar spaces frighten and disorient me, leave me infuriated. But perhaps those raised in the upper atmosphere are acclimatized: this is what ecologists call "shifting baselines."

THE Ecological Thought?

It's been some time since I was as provoked by a book as I've been by Tim Morton's The Ecological Thought (2010)--probably since reading his last one, Ecology Without Nature (2007) (also the name of his blogsite). Not that being provoked is necessarily bad, but my irritation risks overwhelming what is actually interesting about Morton's text. Like Slavoj Zizek, whom he cites and thanks, Morton goes out of his way to deride other people's icons ("Wilderness areas are giant, abstract versions of the products hanging in mall windows"--p.9; "These fake landscapes are the original greenwashing"-10), to caricature the thought he critiques by associating it with Things We All Despise ("Environmentalist ideology ... ruthlessly immediate, aggressively masculine, ruggedly anti-intellectual, afraid of humor and irony"--p.8), and to make off-hand counter-intuitive remarks as if they were self-evident ("Some people simply don't want to know that their water is recycled excrement"--9: a zinger too good too pass up, even though it flies in the face of basic chemistry: the All-is-connected Ecological Thought can't be bothered with petty distinctions).

Some of this can be chalked up to being an entertaining lecturer; some of it stems from the habitus of Grand Theory, where outrageous assertions are coin of the realm, always deferred for later development; some of it has the whiff of academic self-marketing, where claims to Big Think, even if under-realized, pave the way to promotion. But as a whole it feels like cybergenic ADD: it establishes an affective field of breathless association ("You could see turbines as environmental art"-9; "Ecology is a matter of human experience"-12). Although he SAYS that "We shouldn't be afraid to withdraw and reflect," this is not a contemplative text: it has only two speeds, fast and faster. And remember, "The ecological thought permits no distance" (39)

More to the point, its version of "thinking" feels radically individualized, closer to the Egotistical Sublime than to the Congress of All Beings. Morton's "Ecological Thought" seems untroubled by politics, being more intent on establishing My Correct Views on Everything (to cite Kolakowski) than on cultivating alliances or thinking in context. Its tone is, fundamentally, ungenerous ("Heidegger's environmentalism is a sad, fascist, stunted bonsai version"--27, presumably because he cherished place and home). No one else, it seems, is entitled to a voice, or a view worth respecting, at least not within the precincts of My Text: no ethics of hospitality here.

(Reading Morton brings to mind Jane Bennett's remarks in "The Moraline Drift:" what gives a text that moralistic flavor? Self-certainty, a quest for purity, punitiveness: being caught in the rip-tides of one's own judgment. Bennett calls for ethical tactics to cultivate a humbler stance, preferring to present one's "world-view as an onto-story rather than an ontology," for instance: "Weak ontologists do aim to persuade others of the value, meaningfulness, or ethical advantages of their onto-stories. But they seek to balance the moraline drift of this project with a courageous admission of weakness"--17.)

The lack of generosity, of hospitality, feels somehow connected to the formlessness of the text, its headlong quality or precipitate flight. As a reader of poetry and an aspirational asthmatic, I tend to be sensitive to the rhythm of reading, the space it allows for companionable breathing. Morton's staccato observations, patterned on Zizek, make no room, take no time, give no quarter, have no mercy-- a condition they then describe as the true existential condition. This is partly temperamental, I suppose, but it is also deliberately cultivated--no, as they say, accident.

And yet, and yet...

I have great sympathy for the open-ended, essayistic quality of the text. Beyond the verbosity, there are some interesting thoughts--I can't call them insights--into the unboundedness of ecosystems, and how acquaintance with some texts can move us towards engaging their dynamics. On his blog, Morton mentions some affinities with William Jordan's Sunflower Forest, where a related "onto-story" about the incompleteness of nature (and the psychic costs of relatedness) proposes to resolve itself into restorative ritualization. Jordan's project draws on Frederick Turner, and aims at collective action: so far as I can tell, by contrast, thinking the Ecological Thought is its own reward.

OSU Grad Students Sustainability Summit

April 1, 2011: OSU Grad Students hosted their first (annual?) sustainability summit, to unveil a resolution to establish a set of sustainability goals--by 2015--for the university. After introductions, the event centered on a set of presentations--by James deFrance, Aparna Dial, Joseph Fiksel and Rattan Lal--covering some basics points about sustainability, including concepts like sources and sinks (Lal), natural capital, feedback loops and systems thinking (Fiksel) and the basics of OSU's planning process.

Rattan Lal spoke of the need to establish baselines for emissions and resource use, as the basis for establishing goals. Aparna noted the challenge of aging infrastructure, and the initiative to meter all the buildings, a $3.5 million project. Joseph talked in general terms about the limits of the traditional model of economic growth, and the overshoot generated by failure to take account of natural capital. One of the few moments of argument surfaced when someone asked whether capitalism needed to be reined in, and both Joseph and Aparna extolled market mechanisms as an efficient way of coordinating responses. Both of them have been trained as engineers.

The event was well-attended and promising, but had its limits as a learning opportunity, in part because it assumed a homogeneous audience, all starting from a common baseline. In future years, I hope the organizers consider how to better integrate the summit into the rhythm of the academic year, and to choreograph diverse stakeholding groups. Coordinating such an event with Earth Week activities, for one, would open out the process to a larger context. Similarly, it would be useful to have breakout sessions geared towards different constituencies (There was a stylistic microdrama in the division between the suit-and-tie reps of Student Government and the t-shirted insurgents from Free the Planet and the grass-roots types.). It was, for instance, testimony to the limitations of the political imagination that, when asked how we can make sure the goals are implemented, the primary response was to "pressure' the administration.

At an organizational level--because sustainability is an organizational problem--it would be helpful for those working on the various dimensions of the issue (operations, student life, curriculum, research, community engagement) to meet semi-regularly to share goals, questions and learnings from the year. We need to create a field--a community of practice--that can "hold" the question of sustainability and how to approach it on an ongoing basis. Holding the question, creating a container for conversation, differs from a hierarchical performance review, in that it establishes a supportive environment, one which aims to renew and deepen commitment by making room for reflection and appreciation. It should, as well, ease the burden of individualized action, which often leads to moralism and resentment.

Psychologically, the challenge of sustainability is the need for enthusiasm, the desire for "more life." How to invest what can seem like compulsory austerity and self-discipline with symbolic and affective satisfaction? From sacrifice to communion.

The Long Death of Environmentalism

Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger went to Yale last month, for a retrospective on their ideas about the "death of environmentalism." I spent a lot of time on their book in the early days of this blog, so I felt obligated to look pretty carefully at their current views.

There's a lot of cogent and provocative analysis here, obviously a challenge to greens to do some hard thinking about values, priorities and strategies. As a resident of the coal-dependent Midwest, I'm keenly aware of the hole we've dug for ourselves and what it's going to take to dig ourselves out.

But while I have a lot of misgivings about "An Inconvenient Truth," I can't tell whether Nordhaus and Shellenberger think Gore was substantively mistaken about the need to "change our lives" or whether they see it simply as a strategic error. Is Gore wrong to think we need to change, or is he wrong just in saying so out loud?

This matters because N & S--no doubt in the interest of being provocative--tend to reduce environmentalism to the issue of climate change, and then to find the key to climate change in energy policy. The policy debate then gets overshadowed by the need for pragmatic action. End result: the future lies with industrial agriculture and nuclear power--the only two substantive proposals I can find in N & S's 12 Theses.

In other words: if environmentalism isn't dead, it should prove it by committing suicide. Give up your fantasies about protecting nature. Oh, and don't worry, be happy. :-) Is that the sort of "breakthrough" N & S are looking for?

N & S are certainly right to emphasize that the link between science and policy is immensely problematic, with no direct lines to be drawn. And I'm sure that grass-roots greens are at fault for harboring naive views about the scale and pace of any transition to a post-carbon economy. But I wonder whether N & S are not unnecessarily narrowing the argument, and sacrificing the trees in the name of a global view of "forest strategy."

"System justification" can be a useful concept, but it has a functionalist bias and shouldn't be used to discredit politics. Look around: lots of people are talking about change, and about how other people are afraid of change. We disagree about what needs to change, and why, but one way or another, it's happening.

Art Dept Discussion: What are We Eating?

Thanks to Jesse Hemminger for an invitation to today's Topics Table at Hopkins Hall, to talk about Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food and what we're eating.

Pollan's argument is that "nutritionism is the ideology of industrial agriculture," and that, as such, thinking in terms of "nutritional value" (rather than eating food) has led us astray. Pollan himself notices how hard it is to escape from nutritionism, since he keeps drawing on it to explain why the "Western diet" (too broad a term?) is so unhealthy. (In fact, thinking of diet in relation to health is already to slight the cultural meanings of food, to downplay pleasure, taste and sociality.) This ineluctable pull says something about the nature of ideology: it's not just a distortion, but has its own structural necessities. It is fitted to, and makes somewhat intelligible, a certain reality.

Pollan also emphasizes that food--eating--is a relationship. From this perspective, "nutritionism" is the symptom of a relationship: to industrial agriculture, but also to science and to media. A relationship, that is, to a particular way of understanding relationships, namely, through the vocabularies of scientific reductionism and industrial production. It is important to us to know the latest about diet and health, and thus to acknowledge that professional authority.

At the same time, the development of industrial agriculture in the United States is not exclusively profit-driven, but also has a particular, historical path-dependency. It was historically justified by the need to "feed the world," which was born out of the experience of WWII and the emergence of the postcolonial world (famine in India, starving children in Biafra). Even know, the prospect of demographic apocalypse--feeding the 9 billion--continues to drive the development of GMO foods and to deride romantic localism. Industrial producers and nutritionists think on large scales, ultimately in terms of calories and nutrients and energy-efficiency, rather than in terms of local cultures. From the deracinated scientific standpoint, foods ought to be fungible, rather than culturally embedded: rice is, finally, rice. This way of thinking is premised on the background of famine or catastrophic deprivation, in which hunger and survival ultimately erase and override all other, meaningful considerations.

As a goal, feeding the world means feeding it indifferently. It locates agency all on one side, leaving the "receiving end" to be fed, passively. This is monocultural thinking with a vengeance (as it were). The prospect of climate change requires a more flexible, elaborated and localized approach to resilience. For instance, here's a link to discussion of what a sustainable food system might look like.

Water Footprints

Next step in eco-awareness: calculating "water footprints."

Food Fight: Grist weighs in

Last week, the NYT ran a provocative op-ed by self-proclaimed "Liberal Curmudgeon," Stephen Budiansky.  In "Math Lessons for Locavores," Budiansky looks to debunk the "misleading and often bogus" statistics deployed to explain why eating locally is environmentally friendlier.  Writes Budiansky:

The real energy hog, it turns out, is not industrial agriculture at all, but you and me. Home preparation and storage account for 32 percent of all energy use in our food system, the largest component by far.

A single 10-mile round trip by car to the grocery store or the farmers’ market will easily eat up about 14,000 calories of fossil fuel energy. Just running your refrigerator for a week consumes 9,000 calories of energy. That assumes it’s one of the latest high-efficiency models; otherwise, you can double that figure. Cooking and running dishwashers, freezers and second or third refrigerators (more than 25 percent of American households have more than one) all add major hits. Indeed, households make up for 22 percent of all the energy expenditures in the United States.

While locavoracity may have acquired something of a self-righteous halo recently, especially among the coastal trend-mongers, some of Budiansky's own calculations struck me as suspiciously ad-hoc, mustered to score points rather than to advance understanding of the pros and cons of our current food system.  Partly it was using the club of "efficiency" to bludgeon the arguments about localism ("The best way to make the most of these truly precious resources of land, favorable climates and human labor is to grow lettuce, oranges, wheat, peppers, bananas, whatever, in the places where they grow best and with the most efficient technologies"); partly it was the smugly contrarian conclusion ("The relative pittance of our energy budget that we spend on modern farming is one of the wisest energy investments we can make, when we honestly look at what it returns to our land, our economy, our environment and our well-being.") that pretends that the interests of land, economy and environment are somehow naturally aligned under industrial monocultures.  In the role of curmudgeon, Budiansky reduces complex and textured arguments about diversity, resilience, seasonality and ecological scale to a choice between virtue and efficiency.

The folks over at Grist have taken up Budiansky's challenge and organized a series of responses, including this one from Elanor Starmer of Food & Water Watch. I'm curious to see how the debate unfolds (nothing in the NYT yet, as far as I can tell); let's hope it generates a bit more light.

 

Fish Stories

A review by Sam Sifton (restaurant critic for the NYT) of Paul Greenberg's book Four Fish--salmon, cod, tuna, and sea bass--that are pillars of the global fishing industry. Wild stocks are dwindling fast, and aquaculture poses its own significant risks and challenges.  A telling complement to Caroline Fraser's book on Rewilding.

August 1, 2010

Photo from NYT

Fish Stories

A review by Sam Sifton (restaurant critic for the NYT) of Paul Greenberg's book Four Fish--salmon, cod, tuna, and sea bass--that are pillars of the global fishing industry. Wild stocks are dwindling fast, and aquaculture poses its own significant risks and challenges. A telling complement to Caroline Fraser's book on Rewilding, mentioned below.

How the Climate Bill failed in the Senate

Insider analysis from the NRDC on why climate legislation collapsed in the Senate.  Failure has many fathers, success is a virgin birth.

Sustainable Cities

Interesting site (apparently out of Denmark) dealing with sustainable urbanism.  This page includes a sequence of links to declarations, going back to the Brundtland Report, that have developed principles of sustainability in relation to high-density cities.

Two articles

The American Prospect has a cover story on "Why Local Food Doesn't Stand a Chance," by Heather Rogers.  It's an implicit rebuttal to Michael Pollan's NYT piece, which was more optimistic about the chances of extricating ourselves from corporate monoculture.  Rogers, who authored a book called Green Gone Wrong, focuses on the way Big Ag is entrenched in the USDA under Tom Vilsack, and the continuing obstacles to small and sustainable farming.  The story is framed by anecdotes about virtuous organic farmers who still can't make it and are about to leave their land: it's a classic feel-bad story, which I've come to suspect but which is hard to dismiss.  The core thesis is that Vilsack, and the whole USDA structure, still looks at commodity farming and biofuels as the twin pillars of farm policy; the "urban locavore" market is no more than a niche.  There's a whiff of self-flagellation there, despite the fact that there are plenty of battles to be fought (notably--a fact Pollan emphasized--that cheap "fast food" has subsidized the impoverishment of rural America).  The way Rogers sets up the argument, though, suggests that there's a need to think through the idea of "post-industrial agriculture," perhaps along the lines suggested by Hugh Raffles on urban beekeeping.

The other significant article is John Terbrogh's review of Rewilding the World, by Caroline Fraser, an extended explanation of why the return of "top predators" is key to restoring biodiversity.  It's essentially a justification, backed by decades of new research, of Aldo Leopold's insight in "Thinking Like a Mountain," about why wolves matter.  Terbrogh is good on the coming conflict, especially in developing countries, between conservation and meat-farming, and the need to figure out compromises and coexistence.  But as a survey of conservation science, it's fascinating and lucid.

Global Warming Games

Thinking about teaching for sustainability, I've come around to the view that it's going to take all sorts of techniques, tools and contexts in order to indigenize approaches to the environment across the curriculum. So one of the things I'm flirting with is how to use environmental simulation games, models of decision-making and policy analysis that will enable students to witness the effects of assumptions, actions and consequences. Wikipedia has an entry listing "global warming games" that I'm going to start looking into.

At the same time, I'm inspired by some remarks of Michael Maniates, prefacing a book on Encountering Global Environmental Politics. "Muddling towards sustainability," Maniates writes (invoking Kai Lee)

is messy work--it means, at times, coloring outside the lines, in imaginative, unanticipated ways.... This suggests that education for sustainability, rather than training experts and rewarding passive acceptance of facts, should be about reproducing this messiness in the classroom (at least some of the time) in order to acclimate students conditioned by years of sitting in neat rows and raising their hands before speaking....higher education should be training students to patiently cope with ambiguity , to systematically evaluate conflicting expert claims about the state of the environment, to dissect the ways in which competing interests mask risk and highlight uncertainty to their advantage, to cultivate a passion for civic engagement, and to roll up their sleeves and set to work on local and regional causes of environmental decline that sum to global environmental degradation (10)

I like this very much as a pedagogical aspiration, though it's undoubtedly hard to do. A mess can be instructive, but it's always frustrating; teaching can be about tolerating frustration--one's own as well as students'--but there has to be some sort of narrative recuperation towards "the end."

Making Connections

Walking over to the 4-H building this morning for the first-ever USO Sustainability Conference, I was captivated by what looked like a solar-powered aluminum-frame pirate ship--red sails flapping in the wind, solar panels outstretched to catch the early morning light--parked outside the center. Its relation to the proceedings was unclear--no explanatory signage--but it perched on the lawn as if it had just landed from some extraterrestrial expedition, a cross between the Kitty Hawk and a cyborg. At its heart, drawing power from the solar panels, was...an ice chest, stocked with popsicles.

Turned out to be the Trickster Project, brainchild of Ohio University's Duane McDiarmid, designed to turn up in various out-of-the-way hiking spots in the Southwestern deserts (Diablo Canyon, Antelope Island, the Yampa River), dispensing icy treats to weary travelers. We fell to talking about the place of art in the sustainability conversation, and the necessity of wit, whimsy and humor in enlivening visions of a green future ("It can't all be austerity and efficiency"). What art brings, Duane suggested, was the capacity for self-reflection and self-criticism embedded in an occasion for conversation, a way of gaining ironic perspective on the work of the angels.

Earth, Air, Fire, Water

Earth Day, 2010: Gathered at noontime outside Hopkins Hall, in the shadow of the Constitution Tree (a sycamore, growing in the 1780's), for conversation about "environmental art." I laid out three questions:

• What roles do you see (let's call it) environmental art playing in the world today?
• What role can a conversation about environmental art play in Columbus over the next two years?
• How can art (or: the arts) clarify and support OSU's commitment to sustainability

On the questions, first: "roles" are multiple, running from visual communication and illustration to vehicles of community-formation or renewal to expressions of anger and mourning. The work of art: to release imagination--intuition, empathy, affect, understanding--from its self-enclosure, from its attachment to habits grown meaningless or self-destructive, to glimpse new meanings on the horizon, new mythologies.

Information, Walter Benjamin tells us ("The Storyteller"), is the enemy of wisdom. Traditional wisdom, layered into stories that have gone from hand to hand, tells us "how to go on." Information shocks, leaving us none the wiser; today, we are awash in a rising sea of information, shocked but struggling. Appearing as information," our "environment" appears as an "issue"--already covered, already inscribed in controversy and power. Art can amplify our relation to "the issue," immerse us in, connect us to, facts we (or is it just you?) would rather avoid. And then?

"(Let's call it) environmental art": For some, "environmental art" is a historical label, taking us back to the 1970's, with Land Art and such. Do those labels get in the way? that is: are they part of the meaningless habits that art works to undo? Or might they have a special resonance today, resources for new ways of working? What if they were the ruins of a still-born civilization, a consciousness that never quite emerged? Could we look at them again?

"In the world today:" let's say, the climate for environmental art has changed. Let's say that, in our post-natural world, "the environment" has grown meaningless, even as the degradation of the earth's ecosystems proceeds apace, "Apocalypse as a Way of Life," as Frederick Buell puts it. Eaarth, Bill McKibben calls our "tough, new planet." What roles, what routes can art take? Recall, for instance, how reminiscent Land Art was of heroic modernism, with its extravagant scales. How are we to imagine now?

Like "the environment," "sustainability" is a parking lot, a place everyone uses but few of us linger. We can't do without it, but it's not exactly hospitable to our best thinking. It's paved with information from here to the horizon. So, what if we take it back to the elements? Orient ourselves to the fourfold: earth, air, fire, water? What could art disclose?

In our conversation, Michael Mercil brought up Jonathan Lear's book Radical Hope, subtitled "Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation." Lear's starting-point is a cultural dead-end, the collapse of the Crow nation's way of life: "When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground. ... After this nothing happened." How, then, did they go on? Reinventing themselves, reinventing what it meant to be meaningful. Lear focuses on the testimony of Plenty Coups, the Crow chief, steering his people toward a different way of being, a reinvented tradition.

Downsizing Nature

How reducing biodiversity impacts species size.

What the World Needs Now: Green Humor

Thanks to Andrew Revkin's Dot.Earth blog for linking to this cartoon site:

Rigorous Scientific Debate.

When the moment is right, the vision appears:

Vision for an eco-village at OSU, incubator for imagining a sustainable future.

On the Idea of Climate Change

Mike Hulme's Why We Disagree About Climate Change is by far the most thorough, engaging and thought-provoking survey of the contests around the global climate that I've read, a welcome antidote to the post-Copenhagen blahs. Hulme is a Professor of Climate Change at the University of East Anglia (home of the notorious "climategate" emails) and an advisor to the EU on climate change policy. But the book is something like a deconstruction of the concept of "climate change," turning repeatedly on the question, "So why DO we disagree" about this vexed topic. In brief: because we study, imagine, value, fear, believe, govern and understand differently.

Hulme takes pains to declare that he's not a climate skeptic--he thinks the dangers are all too real--so it's surprising to see him embrace a constructionist position in the end, one that calls for re-embedding the idea of climate into our "mythic" meaning-making narratives. In particular, he disputes the construction of climate change as a "problem" calling for a "solution:"

If we continue to talk about climate change as an environmental problem to be solved, if we continue to understand the climate system as something to be mastered and controlled, then we have missed the main lessons of climate change. If climate means to us only the measurable and physical dimensions of our life on Earth then we will always be at war with climate. Our climates will forever be offering us something different from what we want.
Rather than placing ourselves in a 'fight against climate change' we need a more constructive and imaginative engagement with the idea of climate change. (360-1)

Whatever we do, Hulme suggests, ACC (anthropogenic climate change) is not going to just go away: there is no end in sight. Let's make it an opportunity to think more deeply, creatively, wisely about life on earth.

Ten Sustainability Trends

The Post-Carbon Institute is in the process of evolving from a virtual to a real-world think-tank, drawing together some of the leading figures in the sustainability movement while making interesting use of new-media crowd-sourcing techniques.  Warren Karlenzig, one of PCI's Fellows, made some start-of-the-decade predictions here.  Among the trends he's watching:  the new biking culture, urban agriculture, drought preparations, resiliency planning, cellulosic biofuels, the use of ICT (information and communications technologies) to enhance sustainable cities.  Columbus has some skin in a number of these games, but my sense is that we're still hedging our bets.