Necessary Quotes

Necessary quotes

Anthropocene context

the proposed new geologic era ‘Anthropocene’ – introduced in 2000 by chemist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Jozef Crutzen, to represent a formal recognition and acknowledgement of the “human signature” on the planet. Experts argue that the end of the current epoch has been marked by striking acceleration since the mid-20th century of carbon dioxide emissions and rising sea levels, the mass extinction of global species, and the transformation of land by deforestation and development.

We are living in a period of intolerable extraction, unequal human deprivation, multispecies extinctions, and blasted ecosystems (MASKED UNDER AN ANTHROPOCENE)

A new geological epoch dominated by humans

Paradigm shift in approach to environmental management

Coined by ecologist Eugene Stoermer and the Nobel-Prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen in 2000 to refer to the influence of human behaviours on the earths atmosphere, lithosphere, and hydrosphere

“In a single lifetime we have grown into a phenomenal global force. We move more sediment and rock annually than all natural processes such as erosion and rivers. We manage three quarters of all land outside the ice sheets. Greenhouse gas levels this high have not been seen for over one million years. Temperatures are increasing. We have made a hole in the ozone layer. We are losing biodiversity. Many of the world’s deltas are sinking due to damming, mining and other causes. Sea level is rising. Ocean acidification is a real threat. We are altering Earth’s natural cycles.”

Expanding discourse amongst academics, artists, humanists, politicians, scientists and the popular press, and taken up in cultural practices, exhibitions and publications

Need for a word to highlight urgency

We have left our imprint – ‘The hydrosphere, lithosphere, atmosphere, everythingsphere, the multiple worldings of the earth will show the effect of the activities of industrial human beings – we are evidenced for thousands of years to come

Sense of events before human domination to exemplify our minute existence and presence in the earths actual timeline,

God Species; Lynas argues ‘that the earth is far out of balance and human as ‘intelligent designers’ must help it regain stability, advocating for the controversial existing technological solutions of genetic engineering and nuclear power. Lynas further explores the ideas of the planetary boundaries group, identifying the interconnectedness of the planetary systems through 9 earth boundaries.

Today human activity affects almost every aspect of the Earth system; we have ‘catapulted our species – and the planet – into an entirely new geological era, the Anthropocene’ (2011, p. 29)

The question is, are we prepared to use our technological mastery to save the planet from ourselves? FIRE WITH FIRE

Capitalism

New aspects of the technosphere - metal mining structures, wooden beams, steam engines, long guns – humans who owned machines mastery over geological matter, industrial owners acquired the potential to cute any other material – giving rise to hierarchy – best exemplified in diamonds, the hardest known substance on earth, could be extracted and sold after 91 million years, feeding the formation of cities, corporations and institutions

Thus was established a legal infrastructure that favoured mining and a social infrastructure that established race-based disenfranchisement, ‘creating a class of black labourers who would serve the emerging white-owned mining houses’

Homogenocene: industrially induced monocultures, race and sex structures

Crimes of war are invented, concentration camps for women and children, economic plunder,

Fossil-fuel burning humanity, where energy autonomy is the highest form of power

Coal-fired power stations are still being built in South Afrca, despite being one of the highest per capita carbon emitters in the world, presenting the exploitation of poorer areas to feed the wests development

We have created structures to claim things that aren’t ones to claim, natural elements, productions we assert dominance over to gain power through resource gathering; as such we see more fragile economies turn to multinational corporations, following the ‘if you can’t beat them join them’ rationale, as the African National Congress hopes for an economic revolution strong enough to starve off rumblings of political revolution, choosing as its allies the oil companies Shell, Chevron, Falcon and Bundu.  The effects of colonialism still in place

Western European colonialism which exploited indigenous people and natural resources enriching the colonising countries, contributing to the current environmental and demographic stresses, an apt example of the consequences of pathology of dominator hierarchies (Ken Wilber SES)

Industrial humanities

Global state socialisms

Multinational corporations hardly embody pluralistic, compassionate vision logic – rather they are examples of dominator hierarchies that flatten the economic landscape by destroying smaller holons with significant political, social cultural, ecological and economic consequences. (Desser, 2007)

Exchange networks, financial networks, extraction practices, wealth creations, maldistributions – our unconsented exploitation of other animals

The resourcing of everything on earth for commodity production

Perspective: three-hundred-million-year-old subterra, now the subject of parliamentary debate, whether or not to fracture the shale from Carboniferous, numbers beyond our comprehension

Necropolitics, coined by philosopher Achille Mbembe; the replacement of reciprocity with commodification between humans, and in human relations with the geosphere, arguing ‘the geological effect of a necropolitical technosphere, on a planetary scale, is the Anthropocene’ (Green, Lesley 2015)

Homogenocene, referring to the massive, global scale homogenisation of biological and cultural diversity that we otherwise call modernity’ – Keiran Suckling, Centre for Biological Diversity

Lynas ‘could not find any convincing evidence that genetically engineered crops of foods ever harmed a single human being or animal’ (2011, p. 103) Transgenic disease-resistant bananas and yam banks show the success of new technology across Africa, the continent which missed out on the Green revolution

The increasing globalisation of the planet, embodied by GATT and NAFTA (“modern forms of ecological ignorance” i.e. “the free market will save us”) and the homogenisation that globalisation entails, will diminish biodiversity and cultural diversity and this loss of complexity will be ecologically (and therefore evolutionarily) devastating. (Desser, 2007)

Colonialization = thingification; philosopher Amie Cesaire 

Alexandra Pirici and Raluca Voinea exclaim the feminist environmentalism needed to assert change, protesting that ‘rather than continue to contemplate our annihilation, contributing to it or declaring hopelessness in front of it’ we must ‘exclude patriarchy in all its expressions and institutionalised forms of violence: domination, exploitation, slavery, colonialism, rofil, exclusion, monarchy, oligarchy, mafia, religious wars.’

If there is to be multi-species ecojustice, which can also embrace diverse human people, it is high time that feminist exercise leadership in imagination, theory, and action to unravel the ties of bth genealogy and kin and kin and species.

Petrocapitalism

Nacogdoches Texas, Wen Stephenson; “we live alongside drilling, pipelines, fracking, compressor stations and chemical storage tanks. Because my family doesn’t own our mineral rights, Exxon has been able to do pretty much whatever they want on our land…my father was diagnosed with leukaemia, a cancer with known links to petroleum production”

Here we see a Marxist capitalist structure, they are killing the local small-scale communities that have lived amongst this previously untouched expanse of natural landscape for generations.

Eriel Deranger, activist and spokesperson for the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation

Tar Sands Exposed Tour – organised by the climate group 350 Maine, fighting to prevent tar sands oil flow, who has documented the…biblically-proportioned devastation and dire human cost of industrial tar-sands oil extraction – a form of strip-mining considered the most ecologically destructive resource extraction project on the planet

The massive tar sands extraction projects in Alberta are not only ecologically devastating and life-threatening but culturally devastating, threatening indigenous communities to maintain their way of life and their traditional, sacred connection to the land and water – even as that land and water is poisoned, posing legal threats to their health – raises questions of cultural sustainability questions, dominance of white male government, sacred land heritage, smaller communities most in danger / localised threat, collateral damage 

Deranger speaking in Boston; “projects can no longer continue to expand…the causalities being our people, our livelihoods, and who we are…we will fight to the highest levels of law.” “this is my homeland, these are my people…my family. I know people with cancer I know people who are dying” affects of a centralised government concerned with petrocapitalist motives “All we need is the political will to change the course of where we’re going, and respect those who are so impacted by out-of-control, psychotic, bottom-of-the-barrel resource development…indigenous people have become the canary in the coal mine. I don’t want my children to have to be the sacrifice for humanity to wake up.”

This issue becomes one of race when considering “

No one should have their land taken, no communities should be cut through with tar sands exportation, no more tar sands should be extracted at the cost of indigenous life and land, no more oil should be refines in the gulf at the expanse of human health in what are mostly communities of colour

The ongoing, daily work of my community’s resistance to tar sands is completely left our of conversations that centre only around the concept of the “national Keystone fight” – the way that new media ecologies generalise bottom-up issues, whitewashing the extent to which thousands of livelihoods are being threatened. The scale of news that media outlets now cater for in this globalised system fail to present accurate narratives as they must both simplify and embellish for a broad spectrum of audience, as well as being controlled by those whose interests are not with local communities.

Extraction industries hold ultimate power in many communities, and incidences of cancer and petroleum industry related illnesses leaver their mark on families – As a unites movement we must work to improve these conditions and circumstances or risk condemning millions of people right now to living a life impacted by climate change and runaway industry development

Cyberspace

‘I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us’ such a statement juxtaposes this manmade entity with organic freedoms

The naivety of the manifesto exemplifies the tehno-utopian desires of the unregulated tyranny-free technosphere; ‘cyberspace does not lie within your borders…it is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions…our world is different…[it] is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live’. Here we see how the importance of understanding design implication – that which comes after – consequentialism

The manifesto presents an interesting contextual retrospective of Cyberspace; ‘We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.’ They essentially threaten this space to be their safe-haven however just ignorantly give motive to the opposition to pursue its counter revolt

Contest the pathology of domination hierarchies with smaller, globally linked, bioregionally based institutions operating out of rational vision logic. Decentralisation, when combined with effective communication, readily accessible information and a democratic sensibility (precisely what computer technology and the internet offer) seems preferable (Desser 2007)

Mass Extinction

The mass extinction events are related to the resourcing of the earth for commodity production, the resourcing of everything on the earth, most certainly including people, and everything that lives and crawls and dies and everything that is in the rocks and under the rocks. We live in the third great age of carbon, in which we are witnessing the extraction of the last possible calorie of carbon out of the deep earth by the most destructive technologies imaginable, of which fracking is only the tip of the (melting) iceberg. Watch what’s going on in the Arctic as the sea ice melts and the nations line up their war and mining ships for the extraction of the last calorie of carbon-based fuels from under the northern oceans. To call it the Anthropocene misses all of that; it treats it as if it’s a species act. Well, it isn’t a species act. So, if I had to have a single word I would call it the Capitalocene.

God Species; ‘The Earth’s living biosphere depends fundamentally on the maintenance of a broad level of species diversity’ (2011, p.45)

‘In order to sustain today’s seven billion inhabitants and a future of nine billion people will require a radical rethinking of traditional environmental opinions.’ Emma Rawlings Smith, Geography 2012 vol 97 part 2

Living in a time of excess mass death, much of it human-induced

Donna Haraway – ‘has inspired generations of readers to think critically and creatively about how to live and work inside the difficult legacies of settler colonialism, industrial capitalism, and militarised technoscience’ (Martha Kenney)

Any geologist of the future will find the synthetic chemistry of DuPont in the composition of the rocks, will find in the hydrosphere the synthetic chemistry of multinational pharmaceutical and petrochemical corporations

Sym-poiesis

Multi-species worlds where suffering and flourishing are unevenly distributed and always at stake

Humans and other earth-bound critters

Human beings within manufactured scarcity apparatuses

We are living in a period of intolerable extraction, unequal human deprivation, multispecies extinctions, and blasted ecosystems (MASKED UNDER AN ANTHROPOCENE)

Decolonising lands, animals and peoples in the US Southwest, or the vulnerable multicritter webs of coral reefs

Complex, biodiverse assemblages like coral reefs can undergo rapid and irreversible changes of state

Rich worlds crucial to human and nonhuman flourishing can and do disappear. Things can be very gradual and then boom _ systems changes mutate life and death radically and suddenly

We need to be committed to radically reducing this obscene weight of reproduction, consumption, and production

Reducing human numbers must involve more social justice, more wealth (EVENLY DISPERSED SYSTEMS)

This commitment must be intrinsic to reducing human demands on the earth

Response-ability – the cultivation of the capacity of response in the context of living and dying in worlds for which one is for, with others –  you and me live here together so we both protect our house

Donnah Harraway is interested in “how figures help us avoid the deadly fantasy of the literal”

Biologit Scott Gilbert and colleagues have started using “holobiont” and “holobiome” rather than “organism” and “environment” to signal the webbed multiplicities that make up any “one” in time and space. This goes beyond textbook, where over-simplification ends up being innacurrate of our multi-faceted existence and constructions

Chthonic figures / gaia

We must consider the mythologies that came before us and set the foundations of our imbedded cultures. Where the death of Medusa gave way to hordes of othercritter existence, her head of which sprang the coral reefs and her decapitated body of which Pegasus derives, the winged horse.

We must listen more to all other worlds and histories that exist within and formed our cultures, all that came before; what has already panned out; and learn from that.

GAIA – iconography as goddess but is neither he nor she but it, genderless

These concepts connote the fantasies of the world we inhabit and the magic of the natural phenomenon’s are highlighted (coral reefs / mountains / ecologies)

Holobiont (assemblages of different species that form ecological units) that is Gaia, Terra, Medusa (of the west) and Incan Pachamama, Navajo Spider Old-Woman – around-the-world mythologies and other-than / non-human narratives, globally acknowledged beings of creation

When we tell the parabolic tales, tales of the Modern and the Traditional, we get off easy. We don’t have to do a thing. We are not urged to action, we aren’t urged to caring, we aren’t urged to decomposition and recomposition. I want non-Euclidean ruffled tales, studded with tentacles for risky tangling. Ongoing caring requires that we work with figures of re-mediation that are risky and also fun, that we work, play, live, die, that we are at risk with and as mortal critters, that we don’t give in to the techno-tragic story of self-made final death of the Anthropocene, but that we do inhabit the realities of excess mass death so as to learn to repair, and maybe even flourish without denial. ­­

Gaia Hypothesis developed by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, conceiving the earth as a living entity (ecosexuals, ecosexual bathhouse)

Idea of a world soul, a planetary Logos is an ancient one found in both Eastern and Western culture; a “formative force” an active, intelligent, purposeful spiritual presence at work in the material world to guide an guard the course of planetary evolution – the GESTALT, the wholeness of all the lives and patterns that manifest upon, and as, the earth. (Sprangler, 1990)

The sense of living earth enjoyed and practiced by earlier non-industrial cultures grew out of living experience and a closeness to nature that our culture has set aside. It was woven into the fabric of life and culture. The Judeo-Christian tradition arises…from patriarchal social structures, where sacredness has overtones of authority, power distance and maleness, that would have been alien to the spirituality of the ancient Celts of the Native Americas, two cultures that incorporated a sense of the living earth.  

Immanent, accessible sacred presence pervading all things

Gaia practices these days have lost the focus, it is no longer a way of life but a shiny ideal, with contextual folk stories being sugar-coated by the likes of Disney

We are the products of a materialistic, technological, rational, male-orientated culture, that over 200 years ago set aside the medieval notions of the ‘Great Chain of Being’ in which each and every life had a purpose, a place, and a meaning. – we will not survive unless we all exist, the holistic value of a person, a plant, an animal, or a place – each is as important as the other

We have a sense of incarnation but not of co-incarnation, of the many ways in which the fabric of our identities are interwoven and interdependent in ways extending far beyond just the human milieu. Thus our definitions of life become very reductionist, individualised, and utilitarian. (We must advocate for the whole through coexistence)

Latour, ‘ecologization’; the understanding of our interconnected dependence upon the non-human world in which we are embedded and of which we are composed

‘Because of the Anthropocene, the destiny of Gaia is connected to ours in a way that’s not predictable’ … ‘futures are multiple and there are many ways in which humans will cope. The question is what politics anticipate the catastrophe sufficiently so that these futures stay open’ Bruno Latour

Desser considers lateral thinking, investigating the potential for preserving biodiversity, cultural diversity and indigenous spiritual traditions through the mechanism of organising along migratory routes. Her project seeks to preserve the multiplicity (as opposed to homogenisation) of global culture, since the geographic span of a particular migratory route will encompass diverse cultures and traditions.

Her motive is to help people begin to understand that ‘no place is as important as the place where they live (wholeness), except…every other place (partness), and that all places are evidence of Nature.’

Ken Wilber SES “how to get people to internally transform…to a worldcentric consciousness…that can grasp the global dimensions of the problem…and eagerly embrace global solutions” (p.518)

Comprehensive ramifications of ones actions and how it fits into a global context

Chris Desser 2007 believes the evolution of consciousness depends on ecological sustainability which can only be achieved if people come to understand the interrelationship and interconnectedness of life on this planet and modify their behaviour accordingly

‘mall-proliferating times’ Humans may have more depth and complexity than trees, carrots and dirt, but the things that humans fabricate generally do not. And those things are reducing the complexity of our biosphere (rendering species extinct and diminishing biodiversity)

Desser developed a project that linked communities based on the migratory species that pass through them, to achieve an ‘integrated mode of awareness’ as the seasonal migrations of many species simply and effectively illustrates the interconnectedness and interdependence of life on this planet and the whole/part nature of things. WITH THE HOPE of developing an awareness of the need for an environmental ethics that is based on rights and relationships, as all places along the route contribute to the entire systems survival. She further notes the cultural, artistic and social manifestations of species in various communities along the way (the presence of a species in the art and music of a people and a place)

Hopes for ‘an understanding of commonality along a shared migratory corridor will emerge and give rise to the “healing impulse…that comes from championing…mutual understanding and interior qualitative distinctions”

What impact can the media have in bringing about a centauric epoch (consciousness above the ego-self) – stating that the electronic media is a primary agent in the homogenizing of culture.

Christina Desser proposes a centauric epoch that focuses on the consciousness above the ego-self, calling for Wilber’s vision of the “bodymind integration of the centaur anchored in woldcentric vision-logic” in the hope of providing a different way of thinking about activism and politics.

Conclusion: perspective

‘I don’t think it’s a concept that’s going to last, but while it’s here we should use it because it is a connector, and it brings together artists, scientists and philosophers.’        Interesting alternative view on the Anthropocene’s potential to unify our minds, cover perspective, and as a result, draw well informed decisions.

It asks in this time of urgency, to think slowly about what we have done

‘global perspective and universal pluralism’

Despite condemning the misfocus on the terminology of a proposed Anthropocene, he notes its important contribution ‘as a public and scholarly dialogue that has put artists, cultural critics, political economists, historians, geographers, biologists and many others into conversation.’ as we begin to address and define our effects on the planet. 

This dialogue suggests something of the zeitgeist: the intuition that Nature/Society dualism cannot serve us in an era of accelerating climate change and mass extinction. At the same time, the responsibility of the radical is to name the system and identify how the Anthropocene is implicated in capitalist power, symbolically and materially. That the Anthropocene, at its core, is a fundamentally bourgeois concept should surprise no one. 

‘it remains urgent to bring these critical humanities-based resources to bear on scientific discourse in order to disrupt specialist divisions, democratise debate, and pose critical questions of political significance to discussions regarding environmental developments that in one way or another are having major impacts on the lives of all’ explains the necessity of checks and balances, as seen within political systems

The aim of the project is to ‘illustrate in detail the unfolding of the thesis of the Anthropocene in its many streams of influence’ – Anthropocene observatory

The Anthropocene discussion is really just important to draw the conclusion that climate change is imminent and we must act now and change all our capitalist ridged petrocapitalist structures and necro-politics to call for immediate offset of our climate impact

Fossil fuel burning plastic use as well as our mentality on how we see our home and that nature and humans are not two separate entities

This shift in perspective and socio-economic structures with the hope of affecting climate change is the only way to secure our future INTERCONNCTIED STRUCTURES OF FLOWS RATHER THAN RIDIGID LINEAR STUCTURES – ECOSYSTEMS ALL AFFECT EACH OTHER,

Capitalist society means few companies at the top overselling their singular product – this causes the overuse and extracting of one single resource that disrupts the harmony of our entire natural ecosystems and processes (e.g. fossil fuels / oil / crops) over-extraction that will not end until our global structures are drastically changed to more sustainable ones that are less far-reaching and singularly dominating

And this cross the board discussion from all highbrow industries? Is what is needed to begin the imminent rebellion…as seen with extinction protests – people have lost all shame as this is so much bigger than us – it is life or death and our home and our future and our children future

CHANGE OF PERSPECTIVE - OUR HOUSE SITS ON OUR HOME, WE NEED TO UNDERSTAND THAT ROADS, STRUCTURES EVERYTHING WE KNOW CANNOT EXIST WITHOUT OUR HOME, SURFACES  AND RESOURCE