Just watched an episode of Blue Planet about the green seas and am feeling so inspired by the natural world! The sea otter population rising, after being hunted nearly to extinction, & keeping the sea urchin population in check, which keeps the kelp forests alive as an ecosystem for the rest of the living things that depend on it!
My time at Sierra Nevada Journeys, this outdoor school in the mountains of California, has had an immeasurable impact on my perspective of the world, and one principal way has been a shift in perspective from anthropocentrism (human-centred, as was taught all my life through university studies) to ecocentrism (locating humans as ultimately and irreducibly in & of their natural environments as part of an ecosystem).
These past couple of months, I've been digging into the graduate school 'application process,' which has mainly consisted of trying to figure out what exactly my interest, my angle of entry into the vast body of philosophical & theoretical thinking on culture, aesthetics, & history, might be. I feel compelled to at least narrow this question down, while at the same time "living the question," as Rilke reminds us, in order to find programs that will nurture this rhizomic knot of interests.
The more I investigate, the more it becomes apparent that many of the intrigues & ills in society that are cast as utterly human or cultural, as opposed to 'animal' or 'natural,' are rooted in humans as biotic factors in an environment. The housing crisis & homelessness, wealth inequality, which presents itself concretely in the disparity of access to resources like food & water, medical insurance, homophobia, misogyny, & racism all have political & cultural dimensions to them, which are the most immediately visible to us, having been conditioned to view things primarily through this anthropocentric lens, but are ultimately based in humans having bodies & living together in spaces that can sustain our lives with food & shelter.
Murray Bookchin puts it plainly, though I'm not totally convinced, when he writes in his 1964 essay "Ecology & Revolutionary Thought," that "The imbalances man has produced in the natural world are caused by the imbalances he has produced in the social world." The root of what has led us astray, according to Murray, is greed & the never-ending pursuit of profit (i.e. unbridled neoliberal capitalism, a.k.a. the only form of capitalism that I have known in my lived experience). This radically posits that the Civil Rights movement, seeking to end an age in modern human relations of racial hierarchy, & the human factor in climate change, due mainly to the burning of fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution, can be viewed as intrinsically, causally tied.
To briefly follow this rabbit hole: England was driven to settle the 'New World' in the first place as a means of acquiring more 'raw material'—wood for the Navy, in this case, having run out of that resource on their geographically limiting island—in order to be able to compete with other European imperialist powers...for what? A feedback loop of more land for more resources for more land, all driven by an ideology of hubristic, bottomless, aimless greed for control, riches, & moral superiority. As for the brown folks who already lived there, they were dehumanized based on their melanin complexion & less-civilized lifestyles (one could also so, more in resonance with how humans had adapted to life in those regions) in order to justify their domination & extermination; as for who would end up working this new land in order to make it as productive & profitable to the homeland, black folks were stolen from their homes in Western Africa and likewise dehumanized. The motives for racism were based in acquiring & farming the land; racism has long outgrown these roots, and has persisted on its own in culture.
In his odd, new-agey, Socratic "Ishmael," Daniel Quinn explains that there are 'Leavers' who live in accordance with the basic ecological principles of competition & diversity, and there are 'Takers' who wage war on life & seek to dominate the environment, ultimately leading to a decline in diversity of life. A clearly-identifiable trend on this planet is that life becomes more complex, and this ever-augmenting diversity is essential to the stability of every ecosystem. According to Quinn, the moment in history when the Takers diverged from the Leavers is the advent of settled agriculture, the moment of the Adamic fall from grace. Along with this lifestyle shift came a cultural shift to justify itself, based on the principle that the world exists for humanity to dominate.
I'm still mulling it all over, but it does strike me as of the utmost importance that human society shift its standard perspective from anthropocentric (us vs. the world) to ecocentric (us in & of the world). This shift can not only drive us toward turning the tide, or at least stemming the flow, of climate change, but also reestablish a lodestar to guide us toward rebalancing human society with our planet-home.
Some recent reading:
this article about the new form of power that Facebook wields, not quite a government, not quite a tech monopoly (humans as social creatures)
this article entitled "Cruising in the age of Consent" (humans' diverse sexual practices)
this journal article by Robert Pollin entitled "Degrowth vs A Green New Deal" (what humans can do to maintain our standard of living while remaining in harmony with our environment)
