review: nicholsen on the bio-meltdown

Shierry Weber Nicholsen, The Love of Nature and the End of the World: The Unspoken Dimensions of Environmental Concern(MIT Press, 2002)

Those concerned and alarmed by the biospheric meltdown need to understand the obstacles that are blocking effective responses. These obstacles are mainly of two kinds: social and psychological. The unsustainable logic of accumulation that drives our contemporary capitalist society is also driving the biospheric crisis. But to change this logic would be to change the form of society itself. To do that, we would have to overcome formidable processes of social reproduction, including the addictive enjoyments of commodified life and the coercive enforcements of war machines and state terror.

The psychological blockages are no less formidable. To respond effectively to catastrophic ecocide, we would first need to bring it fully to awareness and attention. The extent of the damage being done is staggering and the implications are intimidating. We would need to acknowledge the destructiveness of our current way of life and our own deep implication in the global social process. Such awareness is painful and distressing. The feelings of fear, anxiety and guilt it may arouse are so threatening, in fact, that they provoke all our psychic defenses: we avoid this awareness by repressing and disavowing it, or by projecting it outward in the form of more violence or self-violence.

The social and the psychological are of course knotted together. The social process conditions our formation as individuals and shapes the forms of our subjectivity. Both kinds of blockages must be confronted and worked on, if we are to change the social process in the ways needed to achieve self-rescue. Reasoned critique of the given is certainly necessary, but even the most compelling evidence and arguments will not suffice to transform accumulationist modernity into a more sustainable and symbiotic form of inhabiting the biosphere. Such a transformation will also require working through the intense emotional attachments to the given that society mobilizes, as well as the anxieties and guilt we would much prefer to avoid. The needed work of mourning ‘involves both feeling and thinking.’ In its absence, we are doomed to act out our avoidance or despair in unconscious and uncontrolled ways.

The psychological blockages are the focus of Shierry Weber Nicholsen’s The Love of Nature and the End of the World. Nicholsen is a practicing psychotherapist, and her reflections here are informed by the psychoanalytic insights of Harold Searles, Wilfred Bion and Robert Jay Lifton, as well as Donald Meltzer and D.W. Winnicott. She also draws on a wide range of cultural figures, from artist-writers David Abram and Christopher Alexander, to novelists John Fowles and John Steinbeck, to philosophers Merleau-Ponty and Arne Naess, to poets Gerard Manley Hopkins and Gary Snyder. 

But Nicholsen is also steeped in critical theory. Some will know her as the translator of Adorno’s Notes to Literature and co-translator of his Prisms. She has also written a study of Adorno’s aesthetics, Exact Imagination, Late Work (MIT, 1997). This background is evident even in the form of her current book, which unfolds as a series of paratactical meditations, sequentially developed as Adornian ‘variations’. The critical grounding is especially welcome, given that attempts to register the emotional trauma of ecological devastation have so far been fairly disappointing, tending too often to regress into New Age fluff and magic or else to harden into furious and self-righteous ranting. So Nicholson’s approach, tempered by psychoanalysis, the critical theory of society and close readings of art and literature, promises the kind of careful cross-disciplinarity we need to work on our impasses. It is encouraging to learn that Nicholsen is a sensitive naturalist and is passionately committed to remediating the damage we are inflicting on the nonhuman.

In its courageous exploration of the emotional loss and trauma of ecocide, this is a most helpful book. It is also, although to a lesser degree, a practical book: in its modestly programmatic moments, it sets out some conditions for productive collective mourning. My one complaint is that Nicholsen does not sufficiently consider the social conditions that would permit this mourning to become responsibly politicized. Nicholsen is well aware that we cannot mourn alone, merely as individuals: ‘We need the psychological safety of a loving bond, in order to dare to face our conflicts, our fears, our apathy and our loyalties.’ One role of culture is to ‘communalize grief’. However, the psychological and social blockages are entwined and mutually supporting; they cannot be coped separately. I wish Nicholsen had risked following the psychological further into the social and had offered more of a reflection on the social forces that liberated critical subjectivities must contend with, particularly if they aim at transforming the dominant social logic as a strategy for collective self-rescue. Nevertheless, what she does offer here is richly inspiring. 

 

Nicholsen’s point of departure is two uncompromising sentences written by Harold Searles in 1972, in an article pertinently titled ‘Unconscious Processes in the Environmental Crisis’: ‘Even beyond the threat of nuclear warfare, I think, the ecological crisis is the greatest threat mankind collectively has ever faced. My hypothesis is that man is hampered in his meeting of this environmental crisis by a severe and pervasive apathy which is based largely upon feelings and attitudes of which he is unconscious.’

Nicholsen agrees that the biosphere is relegated by the public mind ‘to the periphery of concern’ and sets out ‘to explore the psychological reasons for what appears as willful stupidity’. Her thesis is that we all, as infants growing within the aesthetic space constituted by the supportive relation to the mother, have had early and formative experiences of bonding with the natural world. As a result of these experiences, we share a ‘sense of connection with the nonhuman environment – its beauty, its mystery, its provision of a sheltering home for us’. Under the social pressures of adulthood, we may lose, forget or repress this sense of connection. But if we have lost or buried it, we can also recover it. It is through the trace of these early experiences, recovered or not, that we register and recognize the damage inflicted on the biosphere as a terrible loss – so terrible that it triggers the defense mechanisms of avoidance and disavowal.

The psychoanalytic point is thus a basic one: unconsciously, we know what we are doing to the biosphere and hence to ourselves. But because we grasp that we are destroying what we love, we defend ourselves from the pain of this knowledge. We don’t allow it to reach the full consciousness that would compel us to change and act. We cannot form an understanding and responsible relation to the biosphere as individuals until we have worked through this embodied conjunction, or more precisely this splitting, by which we carry an attachment of love for nature that we refute in practice. Working through our losses, we can begin to acknowledge these emotional legacies and put them to work productively, as an ethos. Until we do, we remain stuck in an inability to mourn.

As an example of how we become alienated from our love of the natural world, Nicholsen relates a very American story of boyhood trauma. The passages convey the unpretentious flavor of her prose and something of her modus:

‘A friend told me this story. He said he had never told anyone before. As a boy, he used to visit his “cowboy” grandfather during the summer, the one who carried a Magnum in case he encountered a rattlesnake. He feared his grandfather and dreaded those summer visits. Going fishing for catfish in the cowpond during those summers was part of the ritual of coming into manhood his grandfather’s way. One day his grandfather landed a big catfish and asked the boy to grab it. The boy let it slip by mistake, and it escaped into the pond. He was ashamed, and he cried; he was failing as a man. He tried to make up for it by catching a catfish himself, and he did catch one. Then it had to be cleaned. His grandfather’s way of cleaning a catfish was to nail the snout of the living fish to a board and then pull the fish’s skin off with a pair of needle-nosed pliers. The fish the boy caught must have revived a little during the process, for it screamed – the horrifying, chattering, unforgettable scream of a creature in agony. The boy could never forget that scream, or ever make up for what he had done by catching the fish, or ever speak of the experience to the one he had shared it with, his grandfather. The scream of agony was matched by the silence and shame with which the experience was buried.’

‘Sometimes the bond with the natural world is forged through suffering. The scream of the catfish is received by the boy, who knows suffering. But how loud and how excruciating is this suffering that cannot be acknowledged and talked about! And how strong a role fear plays in this unspokenness. The boy is afraid of his grandfather, who has shown how he can deal out pain to living creatures, and he is afraid to acknowledge this experience of shared suffering, of which he and his grandfather are the witnesses. And the pain in the grandfather, which led him to be so hard? Unspoken, the food of truth denied, the child condemned to silent shame.’

Nicholsen chooses to leave undeveloped the obvious eco-feminist resonance of this story of macho violence and hardness, but she returns to it at some key points in her text, allowing it to develop some of the density of a haunting musical motif. Through this and other stories, she probes the knots of trauma and ‘the unspoken dimensions of concern’. The sequence of variations does not pretend to exhaust the possibilities and combinations that lead to blockage and apathy. Instead, Nicholsen gently teaches us how to recognize the signs and symptoms of damage and loss and suggests some ways for recovering our attachments to the nonhuman. The gist is that we cannot do it alone. We need an emotional ‘safe place’, a sympathetic milieu, within which we can try to express such intensities in language and share them with others. This process of mourning, growing and maturing is the basis for individual change and responsible action.

There are treats and surprises, too, as these meditations unfold: wonderful discussions of aura and the aesthetic field, re-framings of familiar figures such as Cézanne, and careful illuminations of a latent ethics of reverence and reciprocity. Among the many references that were new to me, I greatly enjoyed learning of Christopher Alexander, an artist and builder who recovers a tradition of craft and ideal of beauty as he learns to ‘see’ and read early Sufi carpets from Turkey. The ‘art’ Nicholsen recommends to us here is understood as a form of gifting rather than commodity. Taking a basically Adornian line, she emphasizes that encountering art is a lesson in relating to difference, and in keeping the delicate balance between the shared and the singular; this radical use-value is the template for non-dominating relations – both to other people and to the natural world. Seen in this light, the archives of human culture are full of traces of more respectful and reciprocal relations to the nonhuman. In such relations, eros and ethics meet, and the pain and suffering of existence, mortality and human limits can be accepted and coped through productive cultural processes.

 

The young Marx famously suggested that the social process of liberation changes us ethically and bodily: as we learn, we literally ‘grow’ new senses, capacities and practices. What we badly need to grow, Nicholsen suggests, is what Wilfred Bion called ‘binocular vision’: the ability to see and think together the general and particular, local and global, the past and the possible, our losses and dead and our potential to change and transform a deadly process. It is very late in her book, in the context of an extended meditation on this dialectical optic, that Nicholsen finally gives a name to the global social process:

‘Capitalist-oriented globalization and “economic development” are based on abstract and infinite notions of commodity production, proceduralization, and standardization, notions that obliterate the particularity of place and local context. Such processes effectively “psychiatrically disinherit” not only the individuals who live in particular places all over the globe but also all other living beings.... To deal with problems in external reality, however, we require localization of attention as well as the broad categories that identify general issues and large-scale processes. This is why local control, sense of place, and collaborative decision-making have become such prominent themes in our efforts to deal with the environmental and social crisis. They represent efforts to turn attention back toward particulars and away from the mania of growth, expansion and abstraction.’

Capital encloses the commons and commodifies the local, thereby alienating locals from their place and devastating its ecologies. I only wish she had developed this passage further, or at least placed it earlier. That, I suppose would have made a different book. True as these lines are, they beg too many questions for such passing treatment. This self-restriction was no doubt a tactical discursive decision – and one we can well understand. Certainly in her national context (the US) direct criticisms of capital and the logic of accumulation still provoke conditioned reactions: eye-rolling, fist-clenching and the falling curtain. And yet, if we fail or fear to name the process, how can we critique the futility and false promises of ‘green’ development and consumption? If it does not question the logic of accumulation or challenge its grip on us, 'sustainable development' is a mere slogan, behind which the posthistoire assertions of neoliberalism are still hanging on: there is no alternative to capitalist modernity as the master form for satisfying human needs. 

Go slow, the wise counsel, with reason. Yet a binocular ethos would have to balance tactical discretion with the urgent demand that violence end now, immediately, right away. (Derrida’s point, as some of us remember.) Every hour, three more species go extinct – an ‘end to birth’ that is forever. And a just-released study commissioned by Climate Vulnerable Forum, a group of twenty countries from the Global South, warns that global warming could claim 100 million lives by 2030. Whatever the actual figure, debates about what is no longer questionable need to end. The current social process is both genocidal and ecocidal. The debate must now move on to how we shall respond to this.

To her credit, Nicholsen does not duck the ‘what to do?’ moment. She devotes her concluding pages to some indications. In order to mourn and cope the biospheric crisis, she summarizes, we need a ‘safe emotional “place” in which we can feel supported enough to notice the irrational churning away in ourselves’. In these mutual support groups – we might think of local affinity groups, informal reading groups, film nights, seminars and workshops – we can share our experiences, losses, fears, hopes and dreams, and begin to articulate the commons of a practical vision for the future. (Nicholsen suggests as an example, Thomas Berry’s collective ‘dream of the earth’. The building and proliferation of networks of such ‘reciprocal nurturing relationships’ focused on the meltdown are therefore a high priority. Extrapolating from Nicholsen a bit, these could serve as learning laboratories and platforms for adaptive change that fosters relations of concern rather than domination and ‘mobilizes intelligent collaboration’. Careful attention to group dynamics is needed to keep these processes from lapsing into bad phantasms and vangardist hierarchies.

This prescription is wonderful, but, alas, is hardly news. We recognize the same points and emphases, for example, in Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘lines of flight’ and ‘nomadic machines’. Whatever idiom we choose, we also have to confront the realities that Nicholsen downplays at this point: these ideas, circulating for many decades, have not yet opened a durable passage beyond the impasse of capital and accumulation, nor have the ecological movements succeeded in slowing the pace of meltdown, let alone stopping it. If this is the best we can do, it will be too little, too late.

At this point, Nicholsen’s discrete deferrals become more serious. We need to think the social and psychic blockages together – through, yes, an adequate dialectical optic. If networks of mutual support groups, affinity cells and labs of intelligent ecological adaptation have not sprung up everywhere and accomplished their urgent work, there are specific social reasons for it. In the US and elsewhere, enormous funds are expended to propagate confusion, division and fear about any deviation from business as usual. This ‘investment’ makes reciprocal nurturing a very unlikely prospect and rapidly marginalizes any voice that dares to speak for the interests of the nonhuman. Nicholsen probably was not aware, when she wrote this book, how a new and powerful apparatus of enforcement, heavily bankrolled and manufactured, would emerge to make ‘warming denial’ a new core badge of right-wing identity in the US. Through its dark mediations, sober and well-meaning scientists appear as fools or frauds.

 

As soon as any network of ecological concern emerges into view and becomes effective, it becomes a target of enforcement. If it is a militant network, it is quickly called terrorism and the war machines are deployed. That is the reality of our social process, not be avoided. We need either to anticipate such attacks with adequate defenses (which we have yet to discover or invent) or we need to accelerate the learning and growing process to reach a level of robustness that deters attack. Both tacks are problematic: even defensive violence can be corrupting and traumatic, and the pace of mourning cannot be forced or rushed. These dilemmas and aporias are the forms of our tactical and strategic challenges, the constraints imposed on our campaigns, movements and struggles. They have been fully on view over the last few years, among the Indignados, Occupy and the Arab Spring.

Nicholsen’s book appeared in 2002, and much has occurred in the decade since. The magnitude of climate change and mass extinction is far clearer to us today. It may be, and I hope that it is, that networks of mutual support, eco-affinity and change are forming and bubbling all around us. We need every precious one, and for each one ten thousand more like it. But if our networks cannot become effective in slowing the loss of species and collapsing ecologies, the world will soon be a far more dismal place, and our work will be even more difficult. We need to live this problem as urgency, and let it jump like a current through all our relations, rather like that vivifying enervation Benjamin wrote of in his Surrealism essay. In this way, can we spread our values of care, concern, the refusal of domination? More crucially, can we spread the practices that actualize these values? It may be alarmist and even presumptuous to speak of self-rescue on a global scale, but it is not untruthful. The fires have arrived and are on us.

The Love of Nature and the End of the World is, I think, required reading in these times. We will need what we can learn there. And something else - still latent or emerging, clear enough in impulse but in form still obscure.

GR

Coming soon, reviews of:

Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am(Fordham UP, 2008)

Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life (Little, Brown, 2002)

Andrew Biro, ed., Critical Ecologies: The Frankfurt School and Contemporary Environmental Crises (U of Toronto, 2011)

Mooshahary bats for uranium mining in Meghalaya

Shillong, Sep 28 — Favouring early mining of uranium in Meghalaya, state Governor R.S. Mooshahary Thursday said mining of the radioactive mineral would benefit state's power requirement.
"The state will stand to benefit if there is uranium mining as Meghalaya will be getting subsidies on the power generated through uranium," Mooshahary said.
"Uranium is essential for electricity and this mineral will help to produce perennial electricity and it can perpetually create power," he said, addressing a national seminar on "Mining: Impact Assessment on the Economy, Ecology, Technology, Polity and Society".
In fact, the proposed open-cast uranium mining in Meghalaya's West Khasi Hills district has been hanging since 1992 after several groups cited radiation effect on human health and environmental degradation.
"We cannot compare mining of uranium with any other forms of mining since modern technology will be used by adhering to safety norms," Mooshahary said.
The Uranium Corporation of India Limited (UCIL) had pegged Kylleng Pyndengsohiong Mawthabah project in Meghalaya for Rs.1,100 crore (about $240 million).
The ores are spread over a mountainous terrain in deposits varying from eight to 47 metres from the surface in and around Domiasiat, 135 km west from here.
The UCIL plans to produce 375,000 tonnes of uranium ore a year and process 1,500 tonnes of the mineral a day.
Chief Minister Mukul Sangma said his government would not bulldoze the uranium mining project in the state.
The union ministry of environment and forests has given clearance to the UCIL to start mining in the state.

Doctors cease work in Meghalaya

Shillong : Medical services in the government-run hospitals in Garo Hills region in western Meghalaya were hit Thursday as doctors struck work to protest "wrongful detention" of a medic by the police.

Emergency services in the Tura Civil Hospital and other health centres came to a standstill due to the 24-hour cease-work sponsored by the Meghalaya Medical Service Association (MMSA) in the five districts of Garo Hills region.

The work stoppage began at 9 a.m. Thursday morning and will end at 9 a.m. Friday.

"The 24-hour cease-work has brought the entire government-run medical services to a standstill in Garo Hills as over 160 government doctors are on cease-work to protest the wrongful detention to one of our members by the police," MMSA general secretary Aman War, told IANS.

However, authorities in the Tura Civil Hospital have arranged doctors to attend emergency cases in the hospital.

"Most of the doctors who are MMSA members did not attend hospital Thursday, but we have made arrangements to ensure that the emergency facility in the hospital is not affected," Tura Civil Hospital Superintendent G.K. Marak said.

On Tuesday, a doctor in charge of Chokpot primary health centre in South Garo Hills, W.N.Sangma, was detained for not allowing police personnel to park their vehicles in the hospital premises.

The police personnel handcuffed and detained the doctor in Chokpot police station without any instruction from senior officials.

The Meghalaya government has ordered a magisterial inquiry, headed by Additional District Magistrate A.M. Sangma, into the wrongful detention of the doctor.

"The inquiry officer has been given 15 days to probe into the police action against the doctor," David Sangma, deputy commissioner of South Garo Gills district, said.

Meanwhile, the MMSA warned of intensifying agitation if the government fails to punish the police personnel by Friday.

"If the government fails to take stern action against erring police personnel, we will launch a series of agitations across Meghalaya to force the government to punish them," Aman War said.

!Khwa ttu Awarded Golden Shield Heritage Award

Natural Justice partner !Khwa ttu, the San Education and Cultural Centre, has won the inaugural Golden Shield Heritage Award in the Outstanding Community Project category awarded by the National Heritage Council (NHC), the South African government institution responsible for "the preservation of the country's heritage." The Outstanding Community Project category recognises exceptional achievement for NHC projects that contribute to changing lives in the communities it targets and contribute towards making communities aware of their heritage, contribute towards poverty alleviation, and empower communities with skills for self-sustenance.

!Khwa ttu is a training centre for San youth on heritage and skills and has a fully equipped conference centre and restaurant. Its work is based on the theme “A celebration of the San culture, present and past, for a better future”. Its mission statement emphasises the restoration of the heritage of the San,  educating the general public about the world of the San, and providing training to the San in various areas.

Natural Justice is collaborating with !Khwa ttu in developing training workshops for San youth based at !Khwa ttu. The trainings will cover relevant national and international legal instruments such as the Convention on Biological Diversity, the United Nation's Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and intellectual property law relevant to indigenous plants and associated traditional knowledge. It will include case studies on claiming traditional knowledge over Rooibos and Honeybush.  

Read more about the Golden Shield Heritage Award at The New Age here. Read more about !Khwa ttu on their website here. 

Railways to make fresh entry into Meghalaya

SHILLONG, Sept 27 – After a century, the hills of Meghalaya has signalled in the Railways once again, with Chief Minister Mukul Sangma laying the foundation of the Dudhnoi-Mendipathar railway station in Garo Hills recently.

Incidentally, Railways in Meghalaya is not something new. Although this is for the first time the railways would chug into Meghalaya after it attained Statehood in 1972, but the State is one of the first places in India to have the railways.

In 1895-96, the British Provincial Government of Composite Assam built the Cherra- Companyganj State Railways (CCSR) and was one of the first railway projects of that era. It was a contemporary of the Darjeeling Himalayan Railways or “Toy Train” now listed as a World-heritage.

CCSR was in fact a Tramway of 2’6” gauge and was a feeder line to transport passengers and goods between Cherrapunjee to Sylhet (Bangladesh).

On June 16, 1886, people from this quaint hill-station, undertook the first journey aboard one of the most romantic Mountain Railways of the world between Tharia near Cheerapunjee and Companyganj (now in Bangladesh) covering a distance of 7.5 miles.

CSSR at the end of its first year of service in 1887, chugged away to earn Rs 4,734. It doggedly toiled on to increase its earnings to Rs 17,490 by 1890, thus reducing its total loss to about Rs 2,000! But after 10 years, the Earthquake of 1897 consigned the CCSR to the pages of history.

The proposed 19.47 km new railway line would connect Dudhnoi in Goalpara district of Assam and Mendipathar, North Garo Hills district of Meghalaya.

This project of the Indian Railways was approved in 1992-93, but, faced hurdles during its initial days due to opposition from the local population. However, this time, it is slated to be completed by 2013.

Terming the occasion as “historic” Sangma said that Meghalaya has missed many opportunities in bringing the Railways in the past. “We have to open up and also change our mindset,” Sangma said referring to opposition against the railways from some groups in Meghalaya.

UDP alleges nexus of Congress with GNLA in Meghalaya

Shillong: The United Democratic Party (UDP), a ruling coalition of the Congress in Meghalaya, Wednesday said the state government’s 'laxity' in action against Garo National Liberation Army chief Champion Sangma 'confirmed' the nexus of the militant outfit and the party's legislators.

"The non application of state laws like the Meghalaya Preventive Detention Act to the arrested chairman of the GNLA, Champion Sangma, confirms the Congress party's nexus with militancy," UDP working president Paul Lyngdoh told reporters after the party?s central executive committee meet here.

"The decision not to book him under MPD Act appears to have been coloured by certain consideration which reconfirms of our views of the nexus. The party is clear and we suspect that there is a nexus if not wholly, but partly Congress and partly GNLA," Paul said.

Champion Sangma had told reporters that he and the GNLA supported the Congress in the Garo Hills except in two constituencies and had said that he would contest the 2013 assembly elections in the state.

The Congress had distanced itself from the controversial 'support' by the arrested GNLA chairman.

CBD Alliance COP 11 Briefing Notes

The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) Alliance, a consortium of activists and representatives from NGOs, CBOs, social movements and Indigenous People’s Organisations, has prepared 12 briefing notes for the CBD’s 11th Conference of Parties (COP 11) in October in Hyderabad, India. The notes are based upon the discussions, debates and points of agreement which emerged from months of conversations amongst CBD Alliance network members on their priorities for COP 11. The summary of the notes can be accessed here in English and here in Spanish, and the notes themselves can be downloaded here in . 

The briefing notes, and their corresponding agenda items, are: 

• Nagoya Protocol on ABS: A tool to fight biopiracy? (Agenda item 2); 

• Implementation and Integration of the Strategic Plan: Are we up to Speed? (Agenda item 3); 

• Biodiversity is a public good that needs public money. (Agenda item 4); 

• Article 8(j) and Related Provisions: focus on Article 10(c) on customary sustainable use (Agenda item 7); 

• Marine and Coastal Biological Diversity: Balancing on one leg? (Agenda item 10); 

• Forests and REDD+ Safeguards (Agenda item 11.1 and 13.2);

• Geoengineering: Dead End for Biodiversity? (Agenda item 11.2);

• Biodiversity and Development: Bridging ‘The’ Gap (Agenda item 12); 

• Inland Waters (Agenda item 13.3); 

• Agricultural Biodiversity for Life: Providing food, improving health and well-being and regenerating the environment (Agenda 13.5); 

• Biofuels, Bioenergy and the Technologies of the new Bioeconomy: Are we continuing to fuel Biodiversity Loss? (Agenda item 13.8); 

• Synthetic Biology as a New and Emerging Issue for the CBD (new and emerging issue).

Meghalaya Cong distances from GNLA chairman's 'support'

The Meghalaya Congress today distanced itself from the controversial support announced by arrested chairman of the proscribed Garo National Liberation Army, Champion Sangma.

Champion Sangma who was arrested on July 30 from the Indo-Bangladesh border, has said that the GNLA would support the Congress in the assembly elections in the Garo Hills except in two constituencies.

"At no stage it (the Congress) entered into any negotiation on such a matter. The Indian National Congress is immune to rhetoric aimed at maligning its impeccable time tested ideals, principles and values," state party chief D D Lapang said.

He said "the issue is purely confined only to the domain of debate and deliberations in the press and the party has no knowledge whatsoever on the matter."

He asked the party to distance itself from any controversy that might have been generated on the matter.

"In a democracy, freedom of speech and expression of opinion is a reality that perhaps some groups still fail to grasp, in the light of electoral fever overpowering their reason," the former chief minister said.

Meanwhile, the judicial custody of Champion Sangma who has also said he would contest the assembly elections, was extended by another 14 days by a local court here.

Major Khoe and San Genome Study

via SABC.co.za

A genomic study has revealed that the Khoe and San communities of southern Africa are “descendants of the earliest diversification event in the history of all humans - some 100 000 years ago, well before the 'out-of-Africa' migration of modern humans.” Over 200 individuals from around southern Africa participated in the study with around 2.3 million DNA variants analysed per individual. The research was conducted by a consortium of international scientists. 

Entitled ‘Genomic variation in seven Khoe-San groups reveals adaptation and complex African history’, the study has been published in the renowned scientific journal, Science. The genome-wide data will be shared widely. 

The report in Science can be accessed here. SABC’s story on the study can be accessed here.

Lou lends voice to song of harmony

Meghalaya musician’s sonorous voice resonates in Assamese film

ANDREW W. LYNGDOH

Lou Majaw records a song at the studio on Monday.

Shillong, Sept. 25 : It is an Assamese song with a Khasi touch to promote social harmony among the inhabitants of the Northeast.

For the first time in his glittering career, the unassuming legend, Lou Majaw, today lent his voice to a song, Hengulia akaxot xurujor khela (the sun’s games on a vermilion sky), in an upcoming Assamese film, Xurjyasta.

Much like the legendary Bhupen Hazarika, who had sung Shillongore Monalisa Lyngdoh in his heydays where the pronunciation for Monalisa Lyngdoh was loaded with an Assamese twang, one could hear the Khasi touch to Hengulia akaxot xurujor khela when Majaw’s voice resonated in the recording studio at Nongrimmaw locality in Laitumkhrah here this afternoon.

“The pronunciation of the words is indeed difficult since I am not used to singing in Assamese. At the same time, I added a Khasi twang to the song. I wanted to sing in Assamese like a Khasi,” Majaw, who had an Assamese gamosa flowing down his shoulders, told this correspondent while taking a break from the recording.

Perhaps the essence of the whole project lies in the “originality” of the people of the region.

“If we had wanted the song to be sung the Assamese way, we could have taken somebody from Assam. But we deliberately chose the accomplished Majaw, who would add a Khasi touch to the film. After all, the film is about promoting harmony among people living in this region,” the film’s music director, Kishore Giri, said.

Dwelling on harmony, Majaw recalled the fifties, sixties and seventies when all and sundry irrespective of their identity coexisted in perfect harmony.

“We are seeing a lot of rift these days. Earlier, the scenario was different,” he recounted, while pointing out to some Assam-type houses located within the vicinity of the studio, which, he said, were once inhabited by Assamese and Bengalis.

Citing the boundary dispute between Meghalaya and Assam as an example, Majaw said compromise from both sides was required to ensure harmony.

“If the people of Meghalaya move one step ahead from the boundary line, Assam should move two steps back, and vice-versa. Compromise is the key to attain harmony,” he added.

At the same time, the renowned vocalist said Assam, “as a mother state, should have a wide sense of understanding”.

On an optimistic note, he said “music”, which has no barrier, can usher in “peace and harmony”.

“This is the first of its kind project that I have undertaken. I have received a lot of offers to sing in Assamese but I had rejected those. I hope the project bears fruits, good fruits,” Majaw said before hurtling back to the studio to complete the recording.

Nouveau film intitulé "Protocoles bioculturels communautaires: Articulant et Affirmant l'intendance des communautés"

Au moment où les protocoles bioculturelles communautaires se propagent dans le monde entier comme moyen d’auto-affirmation et de protection juridique des communautés, un nouveau film intitulé «Protocoles bioculturels communautaires: Articulant et Affirmant l'intendance des communautés» vient d’être diffusé. Le film a été réalisé par Sanjay Barnela et produit par Natural Justice, en collaboration avec Moving Images, Inde. Ce film a bénéficié du soutien financier de la Fondation Shuttleworth. Le film s’inspire de l’expérience de deux communautés, les tradipraticiens de Bushbuckridge, en Afrique du Sud, et la communauté Raika du Rajasthan, en Inde. 

Le film est accessible ici. Pour en savoir plus sur les protocoles communautaires cliquez ici. Le Protocole communautaire de Bushbuckridge peut être téléchargé ici et celui des Raika ici.

elegy for an albatross

 

A juvenile albatross desiccate on sand, feathers cupping the fist of flotsam that starved it. As the biosphere melts down and species disappear forever, Chris Jordan documents the real appearance-forms of accumulation. On Midway Atoll (Pihemanu Kauihelani in Hawaiian), in the middle of the North Pacific, he photographed the carcasses of albatrosses killed by plastic. These are hard images, documents of barbarism in Benjamin’s sense: alarms that call us to awake.

This archive, which Jordan subtitles Message from the Gyre, is a lesson in dialectics. In a forensic sense, these images are evidence of a deadly process: capitalist modernity interacting with and transforming ‘nature’. In the commodity, capital animates and inspirits dead things with living relations: they are made to move and dance and flow on a global scale. Here, in these images, we can see in a flash the terrible, indifferent truth of this social process: accumulation, our master, grows within life like an incubus. The commodity – or its traces and refuse – acquires its life at the expense of life, a process that ends in the starvation of living things and the slow disappearance of life-forms. Modernity has launched a new mass extinction event, which now, steadily, comes into view.

The plague of plastic now reaches everywhere. Last year, off Akamas, in the northwest corner of Cyprus, a drifting gyre of plastic soup came close to shore. With a mask or goggles, you could see that the first half-meter below the sea’s surface is full of small plastic fragments, from tiny colored crumbs to finger-sized translucent shreds. Many, hanging suspended in the sunlit water, look uncannily like plankton, marine eggs or jellyfish. Having seen that, it’s no surprise to learn that fish, seabirds, turtles and marine mammals are filling their stomachs with plastic. On some parts of the shore, the sand and pebbles are filling in with pastel grains of plastic. 

Albatrosses are surface feeders. After sighting their prey – squid, cuttlefish, jellyfish, small fish and fish eggs, crustacea and offal – they land on the water and catch it while floating or swimming. Once they leave the nest, young albatrosses go to sea and must teach themselves how to do this. If they survive, they won’t touch land again for a year.

Nine hundred miles north of Honolulu, Laysan (Kauo in Hawaiian) is a tiny remote island also, like Midway, in the leeward chain. Albatrosses gather there to breed and nest. Along with real food, the parent birds are bringing plastic flotsam back to the nests and feeding it to their chicks. Carcasses of starved nestlings include bottle caps, fishing lures, cigarette lighters, even golf balls, among accumulations of smaller fragments of plastic. One study found that 97.5 % of chicks had plastic in their stomachs. Four in ten starve of it on the nest.

Contents of one Laysan albatross carcass

The indifference with which these animals suffer and starve to death is obscene, and reflects the indifference of capital accumulation, the sheer, impersonal power of social forces and dynamics. Yes, we can and should bring our own cotton bags to the grocery store or farmers market. But we know this is merely a gesture, a placebo to assuage us in the awareness of our own entanglement in a vast and global process. It is the master logic of that process itself that we need to confront, restrain, resist, transform and escape. No easy order. It begins, probably, only when we confront our own addictive enjoyments and, perhaps, our repressed sorrow for the damage and violence we unconsciously know we are involved in.

These sentences are cold commentary. In truth these images of ecocide call for warm-blooded grieving. These birds, we know, are but the visible tip of a process that mostly unfolds beyond our view or awareness. But we know, too, our shared complicity with the secret. Although we collectively killed them, these living beings died slow agonizing deaths without our respect, attention or concern. That, surely, is our ethical failing. How can we begin to take responsibility for that? How to express the wound we ourselves should feel in the face of this ongoing loss? What kind of singing or keening, in place of words such as these, would unlock the plastic blockage in our hearts? When the last albatross starves, how will we mourn it? With miming and rhyming, another poem?

The tightening plight, the endgames of art, the awful indictment of the ‘after’: the need to change what so far has been unchangeable. In a continuum of disastrous domination, the need for a ‘real state of exception’.

    

Helplessness is a headlock to be slipped. Practices in the wrack: lines of flight, struggles, solidarities. For the human and nonhuman alike: respect, concern, compassion. Productive mourning: to build and plant and tend, now, against the flow. To render care. Rescue, refuge, sanctuary: these are passwords of the day.

GR

For more: Chris Jordan, Laysan albatross

 Wandering albatrosses, South Georgia Island. Photos: Frans Lanting

capital and biosphere

Modernity and Biospheric Meltdown:

Rethinking Exits, Austerities and Biopolitics

by Gene Ray

In setting out the agenda for this conference, Yannis Stavrakakis calls for a critical and postcolonial reflection on the Greek crisis. He asks us to think about the current politics of debt and austerity within the historical force-fields of “Heterodox Modernity”: “A global crisis provides the opportunity for the enforcement of one more project of ‘modernizing’ Greek culture under circumstances of a quasi-state of emergency.” The terms constellated in this formulation point me to the emerging crisis within modernity itself.

    

My thesis here is that modernity exists but cannot be sustained. It stands exposed today as untenable and unviable – indeed, terminally so. Why? For all the good old reasons set out by critical theory long ago, but also, now, for some new ones. Today, biospheric or ecological meltdown and mass extinction announce the end of modernity. Our challenge now is to rescue ourselves from it: we need an exit from the logic it imposes, not a fix that would prologue it.

    

Given the stakes, which I clarify below, this challenge should be at the very center of political discourse and debate. It should be included now in every serious discussion about the so-called sovereign debt crisis, or art, or the postcolonial. Instead, we continue to leave it out. For many reasons, we’re avoiding this challenge. It’s too huge, too unthinkably catastrophic, too difficult and uncomfortable on so many levels. But avoidance and disavowal won’t make the biospheric crisis go away. It will impose itself now as the absolute material limit of modernity – the real constraining objectivity that will shape all politics, all possible futures.

Limits of a Master Logic.Modernity. What is that, what are we talking about? Is it a process, a logic, an object, a program, an ideology? All of the above: modernity is a global social process that, unfolding, transforms the world. But it’s not a random process; it has as logic. Modernity cannot be separated from the processes of valorization and capital accumulation. Indeed, the history of modernity is the history of capital: from the so-called primitive accumulation of the colonial era to the new enclosures and postcolonial debtors’ prisons of our time. Modernity develops and takes hold unevenly, the pain and the benefits of capital fall differentially, domination is asymmetrical. In this postcolonial sense, we speak of multiple or heterodox modernities.

    

The global social process is the sum of many divergent logics, many tendencies and counter-tendencies, many modes and forms and flows. But there is hierarchy in this force-field: the postmodernist thesis of the death of master logics and narratives does not hold up. The logic of accumulation continues to dominate, integrate and order all rival logics and does so in the most impersonal and indifferent way. Capital, profits, economies must grow, must be made to grow, at whatever cost: this is what we’re living through, the austerity-immiseration program that is devastating Greece and so many other places today is the enforcement of a master logic.

    

The accumulation process is a viciously expanding circle: Marx called it an “automatic subject” – an “animated monster.” It’s not reducible to the greed of bankers or financiers; the current banking and finance system is just a symptom of the master logic. And the pressures of this logic long ago overwhelmed the political process of so-called democracy. Since 1945, technocratic governance has become the norm. In the spectacle of what some call post-politics, politicians provide the faces and personalities, but the important decisions are increasingly made by technocrats - the managers and directors of economies, corporations and war-machines. No need to elaborate here, we’re in the grips of this.

     

From a biospheric perspective, the relentless imperative of growth and acceleration is precisely the problem. The ecological limits of capital have been recognized and probed by a growing group of theorists and writers, including James O’Connor, Midnight Notes, Iain Boal and Retort, Eddie Yuan and Joel Kovel, to name a few. Even some global elites of capital have been worried about the inevitable Limits to Growth, as the study commissioned by the Club of Rome had put it in 1972. These limits are now arriving, and scientists warn us that a real hell is brewing. But it doesn’t seem to matter. Public attention, ever pulled and prodded, remains unfocused and confused, while time after time, the political process fails to confront and address this crisis – as the debacles of the Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change and more recently the Rio+20 Summit clearly show.

    

Two new disarticulations seem to be at work here: the growing gap between science and policymaking and an opening fissure between technocrats charged with planning and risk assessment and politicians bound to short-term election cycles. Rationally, the technocrats should address what is clearly a threat. But the conflicts between risk assessment and the pressures of quarterly earnings reports is already reflected in the divergent positions of the insurance industry and energy sector regarding global warming. But if the technocrats have been unable to bridge these fissures, the main reason is because the master logic strictly forbids it. Aside from the psychological factors that support inaction, we are paralyzed before the biospheric meltdown because acknowledging it calls into question the master logic itself. The solutions cannot be found within the given paradigm of growth and accumulation. The hard numbers, some of which I’ll review shortly, show that “green capitalism” and techno-fixes are rosy delusions.

     

Addressing the biospheric crisis would require a passage to a different social logic, one not based on ceaseless growth and the domination of nature. We need to rethink our "common sense" assumptions about quality of life and standards of living. But this rethinking must go beyond the menu of lifestyle choices on offer in the given consumerism – or, better, the given modernity. We need to work out new enjoyments, grounded in transformed experiences of time and place, and in transformed relations and ways of producing. Collective self-rescue entails changing our values, habits and material relations on a global scale. But the immense investments in the given social process, enforced by war machines, block any such transformation. Besides, haven’t all attempts so far to organize such a passage as an oppositional project failed, or at least been defeated? And yet, that, and nothing less, is what is required.

    

Whatever hope can be found in this impasse derives from the survival imperative. Biospheric meltdown will eventually teach even the most stubborn of us that capitalist modernity has become a terminal race to bottom. Can we stop racing?

     

Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment is the now classic analysis of how reason, a product of the drive for self-preservation, tends to recoil into a logic of self-repression and social domination. But now there is a new twist to the dialectic. The same drive for self-preservation now becomes a point of counter-pressure that pushes us to find a new social logic. There are no guarantees, of course, but this challenge could potentially bring us together, against the real force of everything that normally tears us apart.

    

The biospheric crisis, like modernity, falls on us differentially. To begin with, the Global South will suffer the most. The wealthy North, by accident of geography and inherited privilege of past crimes, will manage to muddle through. But only to begin with. In time, this maelstrom threatens to pull us all in and under. To grasp this and take it seriously realigns and reorients everything. To be sure, one response to this will be a cynical instrumentalization under the rubric of the politics of fear. New states of emergency and a new official war on terror will certainly be declared at some point. We will have to resist and contain the kinds of bad catastrophism Eddie Yuan and Iain Boal have discussed, even as we engage with the actual catastrophe. 

    

But we clearly have an urgent common stake in global self-rescue. On that basis, just possibly, humanity, which until now has been merely an unrealized cosmopolitan promise, might yet emerge. There is at least an opening here to the good universal, to the shared aspiration to be free of terror and domination. And non-dominating relations to nature would also open up new prospects of ecologically-inflected enjoyments, beyond the pressures of capitalist time. The poet Gary Snyder points to these enjoyments that come with slowing down and taking the time to find out how to inhabit our places; gently, he suggests that we “learn the birdsongs and wildflowers.” We should not assume too quickly that every exit from the logic of growth and consumerism dooms us to an impoverishment of life. Weaning us off our current addictions, the needed shifts would bring different enrichments and foster different values and qualities. Unhappily, we don’t have unlimited time to find the keys to this passage or exit.

Phantasms of Progress. On the level of ideology, modernity has been animated by the myths of enlightenment and automatic progress. The more knowledge and science grow, the better off we are and the closer we approach some vanishing point of total knowledge and ethical perfection. We know it didn’t happen that way. Under the pressures of self-preservation, we developed magic, then myth, then reason, science and technology. These gave us increasing power of mastery over nature, but also became the tools and weapons of societies based on domination and state terror.

    

Step by step, every gain in the domination of nature was turned into a new means for the domination of man by man. This is the dialectic of enlightenment: reason in the service of domination recoils into unreason and distorts the yearning for freedom into actual unfreedom. The division of manual and intellectual labor, in which art and culture is implicated to this day, gives rise to class societies of incredible complexity and, eventually, global scale. Under the regimes of accumulation, certain directions of development tend to win out over others, absorbing and pulling the others into alignment.

    

Adorno saw two dominant tendencies in late capitalism: what he called “integration” and “administration.” Both turn out to be genocidal. Integration denotes the tightening net of social control and the increasing elimination of difference under the reign of identity-thinking. Integration produces forms of subjectivity that deeply internalize the master logic. Administration refers to the expanding powers of bureaucratic concentration and managerial direction – what in the context of today’s struggles against austerity we call technocracy.

    

Under a globalizing social process empowering expansive states and corporations tending toward “total” administration and integration, the process of subject formation is increasingly hijacked. Critical, autonomous subjectivity is increasingly blocked and restricted. Under these conditions accommodation is the subjective imperative: toe the line or risk social banishment or worse. Freedom is the freedom to obey and conform or starve on the streets.

    

The systems of social control become very sophisticated, from culture industry to spectacle. “Commanded enjoyments” are on offer, at least for some: the corrupting phantasms of identity, lifestyle, consumerism and virtuality, as discussed by Yannis Stavrakakis and others. We have learned that the housing bubble and associated derivatives markets floated the illusion that consumerist standards of living could be sustained, even as neo-liberal economics imposed a general precarization of labor and widened the global gap between rich and poor to levels not seen since the nineteenth century. The consumer debt crisis expanded into the sovereign debt crisis, but the ever-hoped for “recovery” confirms our deep shared investment in a system reaching its limits. The wish, that our lifestyles are sustainable, dies hard. We all share, more or less, a stubborn resistance to change that willfully disavows the evidence. In any case, for those who rebel against this menu, there is enforcement. Coercion and violence are applied continuously: probably never in history have we been so tracked and surveilled and made the objects of continuous, official terror.

     

Permanent war and emergency have specific origins in the last century. Auschwitz and Hiroshima are leaps in state terror that signal the end of the myth of progress. They are the proof that modernity itself is genocidal. Auschwitz – and yes, that place name must resonate in very specific ways, here in Thessaloniki – points to a potential for industrialized mass murder lurking irreducibly in the tendencies of integration and administration: a political program is rigorously pursued by combining the standard processes of industrial production with official bureaucratic planning and accounting. Which group or community is attacked is important of course, but is not the essential point. Any group can be targeted. Once demonstrated, this is a potential any state can actualize with the powers at its disposal.

    

Hiroshima actualized a different potential: the terminally genocidal power of weapons systems produced under the merger of science and war machine. Since 1945, this terror has operated on us continuously, even when only deployed as threat. The rise of the vast national security-surveillance state and the administered politics of fear that goes with it, unfolds from the tendency of weapons technologies to overwhelm politics. Together, Auschwitz and Hiroshima gas and bomb the myths of progress and enlightenment. To grasp the implications of these demonstrated potentials is to understand that that they threaten all of us, without exception. There are no more safe places. After 1945, the future itself is in doubt.

Only psychological repression and disavowal of this global trauma, supported by the manufactured optimism of consumerism, can avoid confronting the new reality. And yet avoidance has prevailed. We have not succeeded in understanding, confronting, controlling and eliminating these powers of terror. In fact, they have continued to grow and proliferate – from robotics and drone warfare to nano- and biological weapons of mass destruction.

    

The biospheric meltdown, driven by spiraling growth and production, would appear to be the real endgame of modernity. Now, the imperative of social self-preservation comes into conflict with the instinct for bodily and species survival. Now, evidently, we transform the social logic or allow it to terminate us. Adorno, inflecting Benjamin, set out three entwined relations of domination: the domination of nature, external and internal, and the domination of man by man. All three – the violent plunder of nature outside us, the self-repression of our bodies and psychic processes, and our dominating relations to each other – all are the sites of a struggle not just for liberation but now also for survival. The difficult condensation of these relations is behind Adorno’s quip that “Nature does not yet exist.”

     

We would also, of course, have to register the other qualifications that critical theory has outlined. We need an approach to the biosphere that both is critical and gives scope for feeling and experience. It won’t help to wrap and obscure nature in all kinds of New Age pseudo-mysticism. “Nature” and “the human” are both dynamic, historical constructions rather than static, eternal essences. They are inseparable non-identicals: neither makes any sense except in relation to the other. More, nature and the human mediate, mutually condition and change each other. However, this cannot change the fact that humans have animal bodies that are part of nature and its ecological systems. We cannot escape our dependence on the ecological base. The biosphere remains the inescapable necessary condition for human presence on earth. Or, to express this in Foucault’s idiom: all possibilities for “biopolitics” are bound to and limited by the fate of the biosphere. Strictly speaking, all biopolitics should link up explicitly with the challenge of rescuing the ecological commons.

    

We can know and experience nature and the biosphere in many forms, on many levels. Because the knowledge of nature that science produces has been so powerful, modernity has valued it more highly than other forms. But science, too, is a social fact, with origins in history and subject to historical development. Modernity grants science a relative autonomy, but this has not protected it from the compromising and distorting pressures of the master logic. Undeniably, modernist science has tended to merge with capital and war machine. Corporations and the state fund expensive scientific research, and control over funding has inevitably shaped the setting of research agendas and led to development in certain directions rather than others.

    

Keeping in mind this critique of modernist science, we can note that the gap that has opened between science and policymakers over the biospheric crisis, above all regarding global warming, is a major disruption of these tendencies toward merger with capital and the state. It favors a reassertion of scientific autonomy that should be welcomed. Indeed we might hope the insubordination of climate scientists becomes a more robust correction within a comfortably servile post-Hiroshima scientific establishment. That said, we should not forget that scientists are not critical theorists: they are not routinely trained to critically analyze the social process and their own place within it. We can expect that the biospheric crisis will push many of them to grow beyond this disciplinary limitation.

The very last Rabb's tree frog, in a zoo in Atlanta, 2011

   

Meltdown and Mass Extinction. This has all been terribly theoretical and abstract. Let me try now to make it more concrete. We are all aware of global warming and the scenarios predicted: melting ice caps, rising sea levels, droughts, plagues, rogue storms and massive displacements. Two degrees Celsius is the number widely held to be the threshold of acceptable, “manageable” warming, and this number was even acknowledged by politicians in Copenhagen. Many scientists, though, think this number is too large. James Hansen calls it “a prescription for long-term disaster.”

    

In a recent article for Rolling Stone (2 August 2012) ominously titled “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math,” Bill McKibben reviews the numbers from new climate simulation models and energy sector reports. We have already raised the planet’s temperature by 0.8 degrees, almost halfway to target. Scientists calculate that we can release a maximum of 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by mid-century and still have a reasonable chance of holding warming to two degrees. At the current rate, as one researcher puts it, “we will blow through our 565-gigaton allowance in sixteen years.”

    

McKibben points out, however, that the proven coal, oil and gas reserves of the world’s largest corporations and states – reserves that are already on the account books, planned for and in-line to be extracted and burned up – is 2,795 gigatons – more than five times the allowance. The worth of those reserves is estimated to be $27 trillion. Under the current logic, there is no chance that $20 trillion of value is going to be left in the ground. Forget about two degrees.

     

We tend to think that warming and climate change are the big problem, but these are but aspects of the biospheric crisis. Pollution, ocean acidification, habitat destruction and loss of biodiversity are also game-changing ecological factors. It is the combination of all these processes, each intensifying the effects of the others, that is crashing the planet and leading to what a growing number of biologists call a mass extinction event.

    

Paleontologists have identified five major extinction events in the earth’s history. The largest of these, the so-called “Great Dying,” was the Permian-Triassic event of 250 million years ago. At that time 90% of all marine species and 70% of all land species went extinct. The last mass extinction was the Cretaceous-Tertiary event that killed off the dinosaurs. That one took place 65 million years ago. Biologists warn us that a sixth mass extinction event is now unfolding, and unlike the others, we ourselves have initiated this one. We are disappearing species at a shocking rate: 100 to 1000 times the background rate, or the rate before humans arrived on the scene, as legible in the fossil record. This is roughly three species every hour. The eminent Edward O. Wilson predicts that the rate of species loss could reach 10,000 times the background rate within the next two decades. A monoculture world of reduced biodiversity and collapsing ecologies is not just an aesthetic and emotional impoverishment of quality of life, it is a survival risk for us as well. No one can say how far a mass extinction will go.

    

Moreover, our response to the extinction of other species is the true ethical test and measure of our relation to the non-human. In 1975, the philosopher and bio-ethicist Peter Singer published his now classic critique of what he called “speciesism,” the bias humans have for valuing the interests of their own species above all others. Singer pointed out that such a bias is no more ethically defensible than racism or sexism. The treatment of the animals we industrially raise and slaughter for our food is a well-known – and ongoing – scandal. The ecological sciences, of course, teach us that consideration of any species outside its context of relations with other species is very problematic.

     

Derrida and others have further unsettled the common sense assumptions and prejudices here: on one hand, the borders separating us from the non-human are unclear, unstable and do not hold up; on the other, our relation to the non-human is a form of our relation to radical difference or otherness. The ethical and political stakes of the latter relation are enormous. If we give ourselves permission, by means of whatever rationalizations, to do whatever we like to non-humans, then the way is clear to reduce groups of people to non- or sub-human status, in order to do what we want to them. This moment, in which a targeted group is pushed outside the category of humanity, is a recurrent one in the history of genocide, and should give us pause in this context.

In the present crisis in Greece, we are justly worried about the treatment of immigrants and the rapid rise of the neo-fascist Chrysi Avgi, or Golden Dawn. Just consider, then, what is likely to happen when millions of new ecological refugees are cast adrift by global warming and climate change, and the imperatives of rapid adaptation begin to pull us through the eye of the needle. The biospheric meltdown is going to constrain politics in very specific ways. The longer we wait to address it, the more likely all moderate and humane options will be squeezed out. If we do nothing and allow the worst-case scenarios to materialize and develop, then the political choices we will face will be very repugnant ones.

     

Beyond Disavowal and Helplessness. Marx had already given us an early, but very important analysis of the human-nature relation. We cannot think of this relation as simply the way we as individuals feel or think about nature. The subjective emotional and affective aspects are important, but the relation operates on a more material, objective and impersonal level than that. The true structure of this relation is found in the way we organize what Marx called the “metabolic interaction with nature”: in other words, how we produce the things that satisfy our basic needs, namely food and shelter. In that primary production is encoded the true facts of our treatment of the biosphere, and everything else, including art and culture, is built on that basis. And indeed, the way we produce the most basic things we need is the problem, from an ecological or biospheric view. A quick look at the global food production system will illuminate the whole ecological problematic and confront us with the scale of the crisis.

    

A recent study in Scientific American (November 2011) analyzed the current food system in light of the challenges facing it. Here’s how this article begins: “Right now about one billion people suffer from chronic hunger. The world’s farmers grow enough food to feed them, but it is not properly distributed and, even if it were, many cannot afford it because prices are escalating.” There are 7 billion people alive now, and 1 in 7 – a billion people – are literally starving. By 2050 there will be 9 to 10 billion people alive and the demand for food is expected to double.

     

Industrio-chemical agriculture – the so-called Green Revolution – has always justified itself by high yields compared to subsistence and traditional farming. But we now know those yields are unsustainable, since they come at extremely high ecological cost. The real justification of the Green Revolution has been the profits produced by this mode of food production. The postcolonial truths are inescapable here: all over the world, over and over again, the new enclosures are driving small farmers and peasants off their land and turning people who were able to grow their own food sustainably into wage laborers dependent on imported food that they cannot afford.

     

The unsustainablities are also well-known. The cash crops of industrial monoculture are drenched in chemical fertilizers and combat-grade toxins. Most of it runs right into streams, rivers and eventually the sea, producing algae blooms and dead zones. Despite the fertilizers, the soil is more depleted with each crop, because the pesticides kill off the good insects and microbes along with the targeted pests and the cycles of soil fertility are broken. 80-90% of all human water consumption is directed to farm irrigation, sucking up aquifers and reservoirs and running many streams dry. Much of the water is sprayed on fields, and much of that is immediately lost to evaporation.

But it is shocking to learn that industrial agriculture is also the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions – more than other commodity production, more than global shipping and transportation, more than the military-industrial complex or the energy sector. And it’s not just the tractors, pumps and machinery involved: most of the emissions come from tropical deforestation, methane produced by livestock animals and rice paddies, and nitrous oxide released by over-fertilized fields.

     

The scientists’ recommendations include more organic farming and an end to deforestation, more efficient use of resources, a dietary shift away from meat and the reduction of food waste. This is all wonderful advice, but of course Jonathan Foley and his panel of experts has bracketed the problem of capital and the logic of accumulation – this crucial obstacle to change is, no surprise, outside the purview of their study. But the overview at least helps us to see how the productive processes articulate modernity’s real, material relation to nature. To change this – to change the way we live – we need to change the way we produce. It is a question of liberating ourselves from a master logic.

Eating in Public, Honolulu, Hawai'i

What to do? We need to start grappling seriously with these problems among ourselves. How? We probably need to begin, most of us, by looking inside and unlocking some of the blockages that have been preventing us from focusing on the violence and damage being wrought on the biosphere. Critical theorist and psychotherapist Shierry Weber Nicholsen has argued that we all share a love and concern for nature, based on early experiences of intimacy, astonishment and joy; if we avoid too much awareness about what is being done to the biosphere that sustains us, that is because this awareness is deeply traumatic and triggers unconscious defensive responses. Maybe we first need to find the courage to acknowledge to ourselves our own capacities for emotion in this regard, and probably we only begin to do this as we risk sharing our concerns and responses with others. This may involve a surprising recovery of some forgotten bonds and attachments of childhood. Unconsciously, we know how much has already been destroyed and lost; it is for the sake of what remains and can be saved that we need to express and share our grief and distress about it. Rendered productive and politicized, mourning opens a passage to rescue.

     

What is certain is that we cannot wait for the technocrats and politicians to solve the biospheric crisis for us. We need to begin living it as the urgency it is, working it into all our discussions and reflections and shaping it into a daily ethics and practice. On that basis, we build our commons, make alliances, and choose our struggles. If we are artists, our concern will guide our practice: there are many models and precedents, and many still to be invented. Responding to the biospheric meltdown is also going to require coordinated state action – the scales involved make this unavoidable. And yet, largely for the reasons sketched, policymakers are paralyzed and politicians don’t dare confront any of this. So we will have to find the forms of struggle, resistance and invention that move us beyond this impasse.

    

Meanwhile, “lines of flight” are an available “other means” to begin helpfully addressing this crisis at the level of everyday life. The needed ethico-politics, to repeat, must go beyond green lifestyle choices. I don’t want to denigrate conservation efforts and so-called responsible consumerism, but we all understand these micro-efforts do not confront or undo the master logic. Stronger lines of flight are already emerging. Since I sketched the problem with modernist food production, I want to end by mentioning a promising alternative.

     

Permaculture, a form of organic gardening and farming that also fosters biodiversity and remediates ecological damage, offers a much more robust line of flight. Cooperating with, rather than fighting against the ecological principles of natural succession and symbiotic relations, permaculture fosters the growing of edible forests that, when mature, will require no extra water or fertilizer and less labor than conventional forms of cultivation. An integrated movement for safe and sustainable food production, permaculture is a practical subtraction from the profit-driven industrial food system. It can be practiced on any scale, collectively as well as by individuals and families. The more organized and collective, obviously, the better. Permaculture indicates how it is possible to change our mode of production in ways oriented to a non-dominating relation to nature and man. It also offers a radically different basis for autonomy that is highly relevant to debates about sovereignty in Greece and elsewhere today. Something similar is needed all along the line.

     

This is a very quick and cursory treatment, I know. But I’m convinced it’s necessary to keep the biospheric crisis in the discussion, and that critical theory supports and demands our concern about it. Certainly, any serious discussion of modernity has to take it into account. Acknowledging the emotions and understanding the challenge and stakes, we can begin to move on to the possibilities for rescue.

This essay began as a talk at the conference “Art and Politics at the Limit: Claiming a Heterodox Modernity,” in Thessaloniki, Greece, in September 2012, in the context of the exhibition Action Field Kodra.