Seasonalight

Tag: Ecophilosophy

  • The Real Threat

    Sometimes, the tragedy is in words. 

    Caroline Lucas’s latest series for “The Rest is Politics” podcast is a case in point: “When Nature becomes a Security Threat.”* 

    Perhaps it’s the “genius stereotype” or “brilliance bias” towards the Intelligence Community that is supposed to move people to act. Shock tactics? Why demonise Nature? If we are not moved by science, then threat to Nationhood ought to do it. How very Nationalistic.

    The Labour Government’s 13-page DEFRA-commissioned report upon which this series is based was published earlier this year, and apart from the drama of its Downing Street redactions and ultimate public release, researchers from MI5 and MI6 appear to have raised it on previous iterations of standard, modern, and extreme (Western) Anthropocentrism. Nature’s Contributions to People are central, acronym NCP applied (as you might imagine), and include ecosystem “services”, value = growth economy, and externalities to “Nation,” mainly, the Savannah-isation of the Amazon Rainforest and Inter-State competition for “resources.”

    Nature is not coming for anyone, and particularly the British. There is no intent. The real threat is human actions towards Nature, making it into the report as a small byline, and with no detailed critique of values and consequent behaviours.

    Our entrenched culture of mental separation from Nature deepens.

    References include quantitative measurements—taxa and tipping points (Natural History Museum), Natural Capital (The Dasgupta Review), IPBES “ecosystem services” inter-governmental agenda, and various scientific papers on exceeding Rockström’s 9 planetary “boundaries” (hint: they are not particularly separate)!

    Emphasis is on uncertainty and risk to the United Kingdom as a nation-state, threats largely “external” ~ food imports forcing dietary change, and, of course, “migration”. Risks generated by collective values and behaviours are absent, and a question largely left literally to “customers” who might use the document for legislative decision-making (but they do find moments to mention pro-growth AI, laboratory-grown meat, and insect proteins)!

    This highlights just how devoid of understanding our collective role within nature remains. Mentally separate, we are agents for catastrophic and rapid change of the complex system upon which all life depends, with ignorant cultural and social responses to those rapid changes on top.

    Again, serious discussion on values and ethics falls down the deep, deep chasm that still exists between science and politics.    

    Ethical framing matters; readers and interpreters should be aware that these conclusions ARE A CHOICE, and bad ones at that. They shape how the report is used, nudging along all the same-old corrupt and Earth-damaging e-motivators without a whiff of critical thought.

    I’m not going to critique the paper line by line here. Many of the risks it identifies have been predicted and observed for a very long time, and the geopolitical map of power now shifts too quickly for a fixed security reading to hold for long. As I say, my concern is instead with the report’s ethical foundation: treating ecological collapse chiefly as a “national security” problem, while leaving the deeper ethical questions of value, power, agency, and human separation from Nature largely untouched. Here, read it for yourself.

    Recognising barriers of language and value is only the beginning, because those barriers are sustained by power. They determine which harms become visible, which causes remain unnamed, and which responses feel politically possible. The harder question is who holds the power to define values, protect them, and turn them into collective behaviour.

    Critically, disproportionate power via capital has accumulated through markets, competition, and institutions that reward extraction. These systems protect values that shape planning laws, trade priorities, food systems, energy choices, land ownership, finance, and the distribution of risk. To remain uncritical is to intensify behaviours across anthropocentric society — extreme competition, expansionism, colonialism, and highly extractive industries among them — a continuity despite the exclamation! An endangering of all Nature, with the greatest harms falling on the most vulnerable lives and communities, locally and globally. The result is not a marginal side-effect but a widening spiral of cause and consequence, with many effects already unfolding and others still unknown.

    Recognising root causes means naming the actual structures of power and agency that shape value priorities and behaviours. A national-security frame may generate “flash” public interest, and the risks involved are numerous and serious, but it can also narrow attention towards state protection, territorial interest, and crisis management rather than the hierarchies, core values, and behaviours driving ecological collapse. The fact that evidence has been suppressed or redacted only underlines how central those hierarchies of control remain.

    Isn’t this just the expected politics of adversarial opposition? I’m afraid there are no sides, no “heroes”, no “saviours” or “leaders” who are going to singularly turn things around – these cultural ideas, particularly Eurocentric in origin, are also constructions by a minority, like Nationhood itself – a body, decapitated — to separate us from each other and the rest of Nature. 

    I’d like to see the full list of the 81 rationalist “experts” who contributed, voting and consulting through various workshops and meetings, because I suspect most of them are men, and none of them is widely versed in the broad canon that is “Environmental Ethics.”  Most of them probably still consider it “religiosity.” Blah!

    Answers are deeply interconnected, and in no way final. Human food “security” is more about localism as embodied nature than any intellectualised, separate planetary boundaries, and real change far more about inclusiveness, collective knowledge sharing (causes, effects, imagining outcomes, correcting trajectories), REAL care, and responsibility for ALL life.

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  • Introducing andro-pyroclysm: when “wildfire” seems so tame.

    Image by me. Hand-drawn and then photo-filtered, NOT AI.

    For some time, my body has felt a visceral judder of injustice whenever the word “wildfire” is used across our ever-increasing media of meaninglessness (lately, every time I switch on my TV, radio, or social media apps).

    Like my neologism esranebula/esranebulous ~ the eerie blood-coloured ghostlight of the Anthropocene seeping from inter-continental crematoria smoke clouds ~ I think our English lexical simulacra could ironically do with shots of hyper-reality (see Baudrillard).

    In a new word, or term, I want to bring the lethality of unseasonal or uncontrollable fire-flow to mind instead of a celebratory evolutionary modulator. “Wild” is also broad, semantically (a bit like “love”), and “fire” is not always cataclysmic; beyond a fireplace or campfire, escapable, survivable controlled burns (a true craft, and learned through generations) have proved to be an ancient place-based method of preventing thermal runaway and ignition of vegetative matter.

    See the global scale of the anthropogenic cellular-burn that LiFE is experiencing right now.

    I thought about ash, breath, souls, and screams (imagine those collective screams). Ashanaman was my first idea, derived from a proto-Celtic “burning of souls”. But I felt it tripped off the tongue too easily; perhaps too spiritually loaded; reflecting no hardship.

    Pyre is funereal. Cataclysm is expansive.

    “Pyroclysm” alone may not point the finger of blame. Massive “floods” of fire have flowed from past formations of large igneous provinces, major meteor strikes, or supercell lightning swarms, though increases in the latter may also be attributed to human-induced climate surgence.

    Using “andro” as the modulator in a hyphenated compound serves to nail general causation – collective human behaviour (hierarchies of power aside). Humans are deliberate or accidental incendiaries, either by storing spontaneously combustible materials in bulk or igniting by match or broken glass.

    Critically, of course, our species is the catalyst for rapid global heating/ice-melts by persistent selfish cultures of burning fossil fuels and emitting greenhouse gases.

    So, to the catastrophic loss of trillionitudes of LiFE on land by anthropogenic fire, I offer “andro-pyroclysm.

    Perhaps, Andro-Pyromundi could be deployed as part of a wider Earth Crisis; precursor to a planetary extinction event? “Pyrocene” coined by Stephen J Pyne implies that geological epoch of Flame Earth as opposed to Snowball Earth – perhaps colossal sea rises from polar ice melts will put that idea to bed (I just don’t know).

    The blaze across the horizon created its own weather system, and all the screams fell silent. Airborne embers were bone-lignin-chitin, and the ash crossed oceans. This was never a flame gone feral; this was an andro-pyroclysm.”

    Perhaps the term doesn’t conjure the gargantuan micro-macro pain, death, and grief involved across all species of a burning floloca, but could I cope with that kind of responsibility? The reality is about as bleak as it can get ~ hell-like.

    ~~~

  • More on Praximund.

    By W. Bulach – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64587917 Photo – the mighty Kauri, one of the most efficient nitrogen process recyclers on Planet Earth. Click on the image for more information.

    Fluminism brings together my thoughts over a number of years. I offer an alternative to Biocentrism (Taylor), Ecocentrism (Naess) and, importantly, Anthropocentrism (Passmore, et al).

    To be a Fluminist is to recognise oneself viscerally as part of the interconnectedness between all beings ~ Symnexia (Sanguimund), and in this realisation, to act with love, respect and responsibility in protecting these interconnections, minimising the breaking of their flows, to find fluministic ways to proliferate and send new flows ~ Praximund.

    The following is an extract from my dissertation, including narrative scholarship.

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    5.4 Praximund: Responsibility and the Sacred.

    There are problems with the theory of Rights taking precedence over Responsibilities. Many indigenous people understand this. Rights are merely human constructs, legislatively fixed (when processes are not), but politically vulnerable and impressionable by further human culture/population dominion.

    Natural processes and fluministic interconnections have evolved, are evolving. There exists intrinsic, self-willed, complex patterns across space and time. Free-willed, save for our excess. We participate, as part of nature, yes. But because of this excess of destructive behaviours, rivers, forests, mycelium and migration need more than ‘Rights’ afforded only by humans, and a minority of humans at that… for this too is dominion.

    So I have a name for the responsibilities and an adherence expected. A unity of opposites ~ a natural law, but not a law. I call it Praximund (latin; process/Earth) the deepest possible respect for natural processes, and a fundamental requisite of fluministic action. Infringe only with negative consequences to oneself and all life, the biosphere, as we are all interconnected. There is honour and pride in celebration and ritual of it.

    There’s credence in declaring ecological interconnections sacred as a route to the protection of life, a full sanctity of life (Kumar). Nurtured this way, perhaps, the sacred become inviolable. Constituent lives are liberated to evolve with a free-will, a flourish of nature’s effervescent, green fuse. More, by cultivating a collective reverence for the presence of a community of living beings ~ through narratives, ritual and rules ~ we may look and ‘see’ life in new ways, a wave of sanguimund spreading though each one of us, the wonder of interconnected life. There have been many before us using sacred words with similar meanings now lost, and I hope many after, with words yet to be created. All I ask that we think about creating our own sacred in and with the natural world (Milton, Bateson), building narratives and exercising rituals in what is of utmost meaning to ourselves and together. Then, defend from the profane. And that defense, in sanctity and in love, will need to be strong.

    Narrative Scholarship.

    Guarding the sacred is not limited to protection from human intrusion. Sometimes, the opposite is vital. Sometimes, the sacred is one’s presence or consciousness and the tending of ecosystem in a loving, fluministic way. Fenced-off zones around Chernobyl have led to non-human life returning in abundance. There is a sanctity in the absolute devotion of ecological networks of that place. But the absence of humans is not a pre-requisite of the sacred.

    Churches may seem at their most holy when the bells toll loudly, when the stalls are heaving with parishioners singing hymns at the top of their voices. The sacred seems to exist somewhere in the union of the people in the nave, all facing east, a sense of reverence helped along by those clever architects placing windows in the clerestory to remind of God’s presence in beams of moted dust light.

    The land can hold us with a similar sense of direction, commitment and devotion. And God need not be involved, unless he is simply love. A private moment, no less, can be the touch of grace, with such strength that it can change one’s perspective forever.

    I lean over my Grandmother’s grave and remember her strength. Fused into my memory cells, she’d garden with such force as to create her own weather system. This memory seems sacred, but not her grave. I feel the difference in remembering I am her kin.

    It may not be a surprise the reader that I feel the sacred most in perceiving those bristling interconnections in the living world, the living, quietly seen or unseen. A humble field maple will do it, with birds in the gnarly branches and fungi at the roots. Their Autumnal yellow glow takes my breath way and I am minded to sit for hours and just be present. It is a profound love, intense and moving.

    A mother fox licking her young, a tender petal opening to a bee, these are all things bright and beautiful. Light is important to me, I have been to the darkest of dark. That the direct or diffused sunlight gives succour to life seems profound. I love the light around waterfalls. So do the mosses and the liverworts.

    There are also the green rays at sunset, or during eclipses, the last and first moments of light bent and scattered through our thin atmosphere like moments of magic.

    Hokianga

    The sacred can also be a memory, an event marked at a place only by the truth-myths passed down through generations. From the eastern sunrise, I once arrived at the spectacular Hokianga Harbour, North Island, New Zealand, an area brimming with sacred Māori sites. Yellow dunes on the far side of the bay shone brightly sucked back into a baby-blue vacuum. An incoming tide from the Tasman sea swept the bay clean with crested wave upon wave, and variable oystercatchers flew low at blistering speed (I could just make out their uncanny calls).

    I followed a sign to a look-out point high above the harbour entrance and sat on a low wooden bench. I felt an immediate essence of something profound here. I was positioned somewhere on the edge of it all, and it felt like sanctuary.

    Later, I walked along nearby Omapere wharf and talked to a Māori man from the village who was fishing with a simple line and hook. I was just a tourist, yet he was so generous in conversation.

    He told me his Māori oral tradition, that legendary Polynesian explorer, Kupe, of the Matahourua canoe, made first Aotearoa landfall and lived here. The story goes that he named it Te Puna i te ao marama ~ the spring of the world of light ~ until in his old age he decided to return to his island birthplace, Hawai- ki. The words he spoke as he left were, Hei konei ra i te puna i te ao marama, ka hoki nei ahau, e kore ano e hokianga-nui mai ~ this the spring of the world of light, I shall not come back here again ~ and so, granted Hokianga its name.

    The vessel of the sacred contains a good measure of vulnerability. Maybe this is an essential tension that drives us to protect.

    Great sacrilege occurred at Hokianga, long after Kupe’s departure, against the endemic and the Māori. The mighty kauri trees, like the blue whales of the world’s forests, were wrenched from inland Waipoua and floated down the river for milling and global export, mainly by the hands of Pakeha (non-natives). Unlike the Māori, who would take chosen trees with a reverence, for canoe- building, the Pakeha took nearly all.

    And without the kauri, large parts of the forest died and many endemic species lost forever. What was left was turned over to dairy, and again those products exported globally from the Harbour. To destroy the interconnections between living things is to destroy the most sacred ~ life.

    Another Pakeha, William Roy McGregor, professor of Zoology, successfully campaigned to end logging of the Waipoua Forest in 1952 and created the Waipoua Forest Sanctuary. The sanctuary is still weak from attack, with Kauri Die-back disease laying claim to regenerating forest, and climate change will be having its effect. Let’s hope this small part of a once vast, ancient forest recovers to it’s truest dynamic state of being, given full protection and time.

    Unlike the great Kupe, perhaps, I’ll return to Hokianga again one day. Modern technology makes it easier for me, though I’ll have to watch those emissions (always some kind of price to make such returns). The harbour and surrounds are a wealth of flora and fauna and, until then, it will be the distant sounds of the oystercatchers, torea-pango, that will remain in my memory as symbol of the sacredness of that place. If I am quiet enough, I can still hear the sacred, right now in my head.

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    The story also told here Te Ahukaramū Charles Royal, First peoples in Māori tradition – Kupe, Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand.

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    For more on Māori reverence, customs, ritual and stories, including the mauri of the forest (the life-force) invested in objects and buried under important ecological places or tane trees, as acts of protection.

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    End note: Waipoua Forest was bought by the settler-colonialist Government from the local Te Roroa Māori in the 1870s for around £2000, no doubt putting them under immense pressure beforehand. Locals were disenfranchised from the receipts of logging, except to be employed in some of the most dangerous work. McGregor’s protected area was a legal entity under the Laws of the New Zealand Government, yet was suspended in the 1970’s for further logging. After yet another campaign, it was stopped. I wonder, if the practices of mauri “life-force” had been continued by all, and regularly, would this infringement have ever occurred?

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