Let’s think about the delivery mode of ecological advice—drive less, shop locally, save energy, all the usual “shoulds” that we hear again and again. Either we are being preached to as individuals, being made to feel bad and encouraged to change our habits, so that maybe we will feel better, because we think others think of us differently—or we are being lectured at, made to feel powerless, because the thought of revolution or other big kinds of political change are very inspiring, but also bring up thoughts of how they might be resisted or constrained: the powers that be are too great, revolutions are always co-opted … Maybe they’re just impossible on any scale that would matter. Sometimes I think, “Really? I have to assemble a huge group of humans and start a revolution right now, then I can relate to polar bears?”
But awareness of the sensuous existence of other lifeforms doesn’t have to involve big ideas or actions. How about just visiting your local garden center to smell the plants?
Why this constant and very particular orientation to the future—what needs “to be done” in order to start being ecological? It’s a sort of gravity well that ecological thought about ethics and politics can get stuck in. You think future and you think radically different from the present. You think I need to change my mindset, now, then I can really start making a difference. You are thinking along the lines of agricultural religion, which is designed mostly to keep agricultural hierarchies in place. You are trying to get the right attitude toward some transcendent principle; in other words, you are operating within the language of good and evil, guilt and redemption. Agricultural religion (Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, and so on) is implicitly hierarchical: there’s a top tier and a bottom one, and the very word hierarchy means the rule of the priests. By framing ecological action this way, you have been sucked into a gravity well, and it’s not an especially ecological space down there. In many ways, it’s not helping at all. For instance, there’s really no reason to feel individual guilt: your individual actions are statistically meaningless.
We don’t have to frame an ecological future as being radically different, at least not in quite that way. Now some of you may be tempted to close this book because you’ve already pegged me as a quietist who doesn’t want to address the elephants in the room such as neoliberal capitalism. You’d be quite wrong. I’m talking about exactly how to address the elephants, considering that all forms of elephant address so far haven’t worked out so well for planet Earth (and all the creatures, including humans, who live on it). There’s nothing wrong with being a little bit hesitant and thoughtful and reflective. But anti-intellectualism is the favorite hobby of … the intellectual. At the end of ecology conferences, you so often hear someone saying, “But what are we going to do?” And this has to do with guilt about sitting on chairs for a few days thinking and talking (and perhaps also with the sheer physical frustration of sitting on chairs for a few days).
I want to take an entirely different approach. I want to persuade you that you are already being ecological, and that expressing that in social space might not involve something radically, religiously different. Don’t think this means that nothing changes, that you are just the same when you know about being ecological. It’s rather hard to describe what happens, but something does happen. It’s like someone slit your being with a very sharp and therefore imperceptible scalpel. You started bleeding everywhere. It’s something like that.
A couple of years ago, I was being interviewed for a magazine. The interviewer was asking a lot of devil’s advocate type questions, so many in fact that I started to think that they weren’t devil’s advocate questions at all. I started to think that he seriously didn’t like the idea of acting ecologically. I wondered how I was going to convince him. Then I wondered whether convincing mode was the best way of addressing his stance. As I’ve just described, this mode might have some bugs in it, bugs from religious discourses that were originally set up in part to justify a massive firewall between humans and nonhumans (cattle over here, frogs over there, cats charmingly—or suspiciously, perhaps— in the boundary space between here and there). And ecological action is very evidently about not having such a firewall.
Then something occurred to me.
“Do you have a cat?” I asked.
“Yes,” he replied, perhaps somewhat taken aback by the oblique and simple question.
“Do you like to stroke her or him?”
“Oh, yes of course.”
“Well, so you’re already relating to a nonhuman being for no particular reason. You’re already being ecological.”
The journalist didn’t like it. Conventional wisdom says that being ecological is a special, different mode of being, akin to becoming a monk or a nun. And the theory of action that fuels this special being also has a religious patina to it, in an antiquated way. Let’s consider a different approach altogether.
It’s going to take us a little while to get the hang of the “no particular reason” part of the above statement. And it’s going to take a while to determine exactly what “relating to” means. Both have to do with a concept that I’m going to call tuning. I think we are already being ecological—we just aren’t consciously aware of it. And those of us who say they’re being ecological might be saying it in a mode that doesn’t have anything in particular to do with coexisting nonviolently with nonhuman beings, which is roughly what I take ecological ethics and politics to mean. This nonviolence doesn’t have to be as extreme as Jainism, perhaps. And perhaps it can’t pretend to be perfect or pure. It’s fraught with ambiguities, because sharks can eat you and viruses can kill you and it would be a good idea to protect our human selves from viruses and sharks. Furthermore, we can’t determine in advance how wide the net of our concern should be, because we don’t know everything about all lifeforms, and we don’t know how they are all interrelated—and our actions cause further interrelations, tangling us even more. Nonviolence in this respect is uneasy and shifting.
Excerpted with permission from "Being Ecological" by Timothy Morton. Copyright 2018 by Timothy Morton. Reprinted by arrangement with the MIT Press, Cambridge, MA..
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