Real people, real attitudes

A pragmatic approach to our ecological emergency is to find out what people actually think and feel about the world they live in. Do people really feel disconnected from the trees and the weather, the water and the soil? In many cases, for instance if you move through a shopping mall or an airport, a beach resort or a fairground, the sense is of humans engaged in human pursuits that don’t reflect any sense of interconnectedness with the rest of evolved existence, or if they do, the sense is latent and there is no awareness of it.

Attitudes, values and what we’re concerned with is a three way interchange, and people’s sense of who they are and how they relate to one another, themselves and the wider, more-than-human world is fluid, to put it mildly.

And yet we are animals. We can see and feel that in this pandemic because we’re vulnerable to disease in a way that only living things are. We can use technological fixes in the short term – bring in the army to control wildfires, bring in scientists (and test on animals not too distantly related to us) – to solve immediate problems. But unless we raise an awareness of our interconnectedness, and our being a part of the problem, we will not solve it at any but the shallow level.

We need to talk to people, and to ourselves, with a sense of acceptance, wherever our current attitudes and values lie. We need to move from here, now, and not from some theoretical framework of where we ‘should’ be.

Most of us are selfish, most of the time. That’s OK. That’s part of the human condition. The Self Preservation Society has a lot going for it. Individualism is a hugely attractive way of conducting ourselves. The self, the ego, demands our immediate attention.

Anthropocentrism is this individualism taken species-wide. We still centre our interests in what is of interest to our species. It’s hard to argue that we need to move beyond this unless we first acknowledge that we are all bound, to some degree, to put our species first. The pandemic has shown us this. The IPCC report shows us this: it’s concerned about the impact on humans. It doesn’t discuss the impact on other species, or if it does, it’s very much a secondary concern.

Could we live differently? A woman on the radio yesterday asked Joe to consider influencing the (Irish) nation to have fewer showers, pointing out that the daily shower regime is recent, and the plastic bottles of chemically laden shampoo, the laundry, the electricity, all have a huge cumulative impact. Could we have a ‘butterfly’ effect, one person moving this way, and the rest minutely, and then collectively influenced? It’s an idea, at least.

I’ve decided to attempt to pare things back, to simplify how I express what I’m trying to say. To do this without losing the detail is difficult.

Slavoj Žižek says he totally neglects himself in one respect. His example? ‘All my socks are from business-class flights.’

What do we really neglect when we take business class flights?

How we see ourselves influences how we see others, and this, in turn, influences how we see the more-than-human world.

The woman on the radio said that the world is on loan to us. This, at least in religious circles, is a common enough refrain. What if we turn it around? We are on loan to the world. On loan for what?

IPCC report, Al Gore’s educational courses, and my own take on what we can do

My philosophy is based on the traditions of scientific empiricism blended with East Asian traditions of thought, including yoga and Zen, in the context of the ecological emergency. What we see, what is emerging into our consciousness, is the fragmentation and collapse of systems on whose integrity our survival depends. We are systems within systems.
We need to realise this, fast. This is what the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) has found: what we do to ourselves internally, compartmentalising, and fragmenting ourselves and our ideologies into different categories, thinking we can look after ourselves without looking after the systems that created and sustain us, the land, the climate, the species, or without looking after one another, the marginalised, the vulnerable, the impoverished and disenfranchised, is madness.

Realising this is self realisation. It is also central to what I call realisation as agency. It is only when we realise what we are, where we are, and all that is going on, that we can be here now, and in doing so, shift our perspective, and our relationship to context. Then we can do what needs to be done. This is urgent and critical, but we require absolute compassionate love, humility and forgiveness – and indeed all those values that perennial philosophies so laud (kindness, curiosity, intelligence, patience). I would add that we can also have fun, be sensual, and realise that it’s messy out there and in here. We are not going to achieve perfection. But what we do matters. We need to talk to one another in ways that do not fan the flames. We need to communicate compassionately and clearly and create ways to respond to the ecological emergency.

These ways include biomimicry https://biomimicry.org/janine-benyus/first-chapter-biomimicry-innovation-inspired-nature/

They include implementing legislation for the crime of ecocide

They include social justice as ecological justice

They include calling multinationals to account

They include non-violent civil protest and non-violent communication on all issues

They include creating resilience in individuals, communities and in the more-than-human world through re-wilding, regenerative farming, and allowing natural systems to regenerate and recover

They include allowing intelligence to be respected, in humans and other systems: intelligent people are often sidelined, intelligence in other systems are barely recognised.

They include investment in nature based solutions to infrastructural issues

They include education of our place in the biosphere – as a member, not an owner

These are just a few examples. Let’s talk!

And let’s listen, and be silent, too.

A piece just published with Tripe and Drisheen and a deep bow to Jack O’S.

Tripe and Drisheen are a fantastic team of two journalists working from Cork to inform and entertain with some excellent investigative and descriptive writing. They have kindly published a piece by me on The Blackwater in northeast Cork, where I live, and the impact of various pressures, as well as my vision for the river and the region in 2040. Please have a read! https://tripeanddrisheen.substack.com/p/cork-2040-seeing-through-to-a-clear

Also, I’d just like to acknowledge the generosity of Jack O’S, who has sent me a donation to support my work as a philosopher and writer researching and attempting to practice a non-dual response to the ecological emergency. Thank you so much, Jack, for your kindness.

Tackling ethics in an ecological emergence(y): the importance of vigil(ance)

Emergence and emergency don’t just sound the same. They encompass a parallel set of initiatives, the urgent and the critical, the calling for attention, the insistence of vigilance in what is arising into awareness. In thinking about the ecological emergency, which includes climate change and biodiversity loss and all the associated suffering, but also the human reactions which include attitude and ideological polarisation, I eschew an ethical approach. Ethics won’t save us since its grounded in ideology, and ideology leads to polarisation. I believe in this god, you don’t, so our views are fundamentally divided. You’re a hypocrite because you don’t live up to the values you ascribe to. I’m a nihilist because I have no values. So the vitriol spews and we spin into further realms of suffering. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/21/world/middleeast/israel-palestinian-rap-video.html

In environmental ethics terms, attempts to describe what to do in moral or ethical terms only creates further layers of difficulty. Robin Attfield (2003), described and outlined the spectrum of responses to the ecological crisis as running from anthropocentric stewardship to ecocentrism. Each response depended on where it located value and this has become the core feature of debate and contention: does it lie only in the sphere of human existence and understanding? Is it a feature of individual sentience that can it therefore be extended to include other so-called ‘higher’ animals? Or is it an emergent characteristic of harmonious relationships? If you think about it hard enough, though, it becomes clear that we’re not separate from either the air around us, the water we ingest, the land that crops grow on, or the fact that everything that comes out of us stays in the system we are enmeshed in. And that’s not even to begin thinking about attitudes that shape these circumstances, including how we treat one another, other species, and the systems that created and sustain us. Any ‘centrism’ suggests a centre – but the centre has no substance. It’s a mesh!

Garett Hardin used an ethical characterisation of the response to limited resources to defend his account of the ‘lifeboat’ ethic that says we can only protect a few. How easy that is, when you’re in the boat. For the rest of us, primarily impoverished and disenfranchised in the global South (but, as we have recently experienced, also in the global North), we’re at sea. The vast majority of us have little control over how we source the material from which we extract energy to survive – land, farming and forestry, building materials (including highly polluting cement factories), petrochemical companies, pharmaceuticals that take materials and blend them into medicines, transport and communication mechanisms that enable us to eat tropical fruit in the winter in Ireland or buy into currencies that are virtually untraceable. We have little control because we are part of the mesh, the substrate is us. We can only look at it when we take a particular perspective: one of vigilance.

Elinor Ostrom responded to Hardin with practical examples that undermined his image of the grasping desperation that dictates a tragedy for the commons but Hardin, like others before him, including Charles Darwin, depended on the Malthusian theory of population boom and bust to advocate a contracting field of moral responsibility. What she was really talking about was self awareness, awareness of our partisan point of view, vigilance and attention that allowed the conversation to continue despite different and often conflicting interests. This is what we need to learn to do.

If we can subvert the issue of what moral obligations we have to the non-human world, and even to one another, entirely, then these problems become illusory. Instead, we can consider other ways of deciding how to act that are independent of ethical judgments. These ways require understanding how we communicate compassionately. We may not be able to do it all the time, we may stumble and fail, but it’s a practice. It’s bringing attention to our own shifting and morphing place in the mesh that allows us to see, to realise, to create enough space to honour that another has come to their point of view for just as many arbitrary reasons as we have. That doesn’t make them wrong and us right. It gives us a place to start seeing what we can do from here.

Island Clearances

Looking west, over the brave waves, he took his voice, and stretched

Out a song in a language as close as possible

To the sea, to mingle with the shingle

Being shunted up along the beach, to explore

round stones, bleached bones, seaweed, fishbreed, egg of flesh and fowl,

Flotsam and jetsam scattered off ships, carried from distant

Places to indifferent spaces; to express

Love of this unplace. The gulls scream, wheeling,

Flocks of oystercatchers, an old movie look, flicker white to black,

Plovers together turn and catch a glint off the winking

Cusp of sun. Opulent tones of ochres purple the open hills.

A landscape

raped and haunted by losses. Glad to see them off, the wind remembers

People, trees, language to him more beautiful than tracery.

Words that held in the tone and tongue-tip the fierce red mosses,

Waterlogged, that don’t hold still long enough for simile. The fierce red

Fox, the ptarmigan, moving, changing colour, hidden.

Looking in the mirror of these words he sees a new

Reflected self, the old words dying with his out breath. The unforgiving

Barrenness of rock draws him like a lodestone to long for an undoing,

Reflesh the old words, end up there, bleached on the wind scattered sand,

There to resound.

Respect means to look again, compassion means with appreciation of suffering

We all suffer from a nagging sense of fear, or anxiety, or dissatisfaction, or loneliness, at some point. To recognise that this is in some sense an illusion brought about by the patterns that contain and occupy us like fractals which then bloom into other possibilities related to the last. Seeing this is not to relegate everything to the realm of myth. If I’m real, so is my experience, and so is yours, so are the fires and floods, pandemics and plastic pollution, corruption and courage that occupy the airwaves and our conversations when we are not thinking about sex, or food, or how to win an argument.

We are certainly the creators of our experience in the sense that we experience what we pay attention to, and that’s a creative act. But of course there is an ‘out there’ to contend with too. To pretend otherwise is to risk the kind of arrogance that drowned King Canute. There must be something that links these two, a line between what is happening, and how we bring it into awareness. It is this ‘how’ that matters.

With just enough effort, and just enough surrender, we can align with the liminal edge that is awareness of existence as it is happening, a respect which is reflective watching, but which is also an opening, like a portal, to love.

This kind of awareness can become as habitual as the worries and nagging fears, as the addictions and desires, that have previously consumed us – or me. Let me speak for me. I can  see just what is here, and see too how such disparate events as previous experiences and the weather have brought it all to this, and thus both compassionately but also dispassionately disengage until there is no more accumulation of previous experiences and activities based on reacting with rage, jealousy, resentment and greed, but only the kindness of respect, watching. I cannot do much about the torrential rain, or blistering sun, but I can engage in the ecological emergency as an emergence, an opening into the possibility of altering direction to allow every possible opportunity to mitigate suffering to open to me so I can respond. Almost all that happens to us does so as a matter of one damned thing after another in the unique, and largely random, order we experience things. Reflecting on that I can see I, too, emerge in context. Awareness takes me to the edge of this, where there’s a shift, the universe aware of itself here, now, through me. What else can I allow to come through this being me if I respect what is happening now?

Covid – fact checking the fact checkers

Someone sent me this video today. https://odysee.com/@vaccines-covid-nwo:3/JgxEMA02opvp:6. They asked me about my thoughts on this. I’m interested in bodily integrity and rights erosions in the interests of ‘the common good’ so this is a philosophical issue. But obviously this is also a hugely emotive and controversial issue. I’ve gone through the video and the Fact Checker (USA Today) site to see if I can check what’s being claimed.

This is my understanding of Covid-related research to date. 

  1. There has been an increasing recognition of the risks of pandemics on a growing global population. In response, laboratories worldwide, but particularly in nations with highly developed scientific research facilities, have been investing increasingly in the implications of mutation and transmission, response and impact. 
  2. Since all this requires finance, some of the financial risks were taken by drug companies already heavily invested in looking into the profitability of producing a pandemic vaccine which would likely have high usage and therefore reap high profits. 
  3. “A key driver is the media and the economics will follow the hype … investors will respond when they see profit at the end of the process.”  Daszak
  4. The interviewee, David E. Martin, is a national intelligence analyst, founder of https://www.m-cam.com/about-us/ with a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. He has a LinkedIn page and seems, to all intents, legit. His claims are as follows: a) the CDC patented the genome of Covid to make a profit and stop others from making a profit; b) therefore either the virus is manmade (in which case its development was illegal – creating a bioweapon is an act of war) or it is natural (in which case patenting it is illegal) and c) research was moved from the US to China, to Wuhan specifically, but the financing was hidden through a series of intermediaries. 
  5.  It’s always worth asking: qui bono? What has he to gain from his analysis of the patenting of Covid? The man he is speaking to in the video is a lawyer from California who has a vested interest, as a lawyer, in creating law cases from which he could profit. Martin, however, doesn’t appear to have any immediate means of benefiting, except perhaps through receiving high levels of publicity. The video has been taken down several times by ‘fact check’ organisations.
  6. The patenting of Covid: the Centre for Disease Control says they did this as ‘defensive patenting’ so no commercial or private company could patent and therefore control access to the genome. They also said that the genome is published on their website. That may or may not be true. I couldn’t find it. I found this: https://github.com/CDCgov/SARS-CoV-2_Sequencing. It makes sense to defensively patent something you’re working on, if what you’re working on is manmade; but if what they patented was a lab-produced genome of  SARS-COV (not SARS-COV2) then i) they’ve patented something to which they would have had access in any case as they came across the natural product (which cannot be patented, because wild creatures cannot be patented) and ii) you run into the issue with why they created a simulacrum of the original virus – sequenced its genome – and then worried about other people doing so when, if it’s natural, there’s nothing to stop them.
  7. As far as research being moved to China, it’s obvious that some research collaboration was taking place between the US and China. This from “Fact Check):  In 2014, the NIH approved a grant to EcoHealth Alliance designated for research into “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.” The project involved collaborating with researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology to study coronaviruses in bats and the risk of potential transfer to humans. The original five-year grant was reapproved by the Trump administration in July 2019. In total, $3,378,896 in NIH funding was directed from the government to the project.
  8. My conclusion is that no, the virus wasn’t created and spread in order to allow companies to profit from the creation of the vaccine. BUT yes, the virus may well have escaped from a lab and yes, yes, yes, the pharmaceutical companies who knew that the possibilities of profit would benefit them enormously were no doubt thrilled that there was an outbreak and have profited massively. As far as the vaccine not being a vaccine is concerned, no, I don’t believe that the vaccine is either deliberately harmful to humans or not a vaccine. I do think that it has been developed far more quickly than can allow for a full analysis of its impacts on human health. They simply have not had time, by their own admission, to test for long term effects or rare side effects (as we have seen). Moreover, the lipid nanoparticle into which the RNA fragment is placed in order to inject the vaccine are long chain polymers which, as far as I can understand, originate from the oil industry (long chain polymers are also used to make things like clingfilm, contact lenses, etc, as far as I can discover. These details may be ill expressed but the gist of what I’m saying is that the pharmaceutical and hydrocarbon industries both benefit in this). 
  9. The bottom line? The virus wasn’t created in order to kill us. Whether naturally or artificially evolved, it’s an inevitable response to the pressure of human exploitation of other systems putting those systems under pressure. The vaccine wasn’t created in order to kill us either and unless we are prepared to live in isolation from the rest of the human and animal community, we don’t have much choice about taking it. However, we can’t technofix ourselves out of the pandemic, any more than we can technofix ourselves out of the ecological emergency by seeding clouds for rain or installing “Citytrees” . We need to use biomimicry, sure, but not unless we realise that we are part of other systems, and the vaccine is not ‘evil’ and doesn’t need to be ‘eradicated’ but is a clarion call for us to recognise our dependence on other systems being able to flourish alongside us.

It’s definitely a philosophy, but it’s also a practice

I will, eventually, begin to categorise these posts, although it’s hard to do so with any real accuracy since the boundaries between philosophy, yoga, and my personal musings are not at all obvious to me very much of the time.

This piece is adapted from an outline of the first chapter of my thesis, however, so it has some clear delineations: it’s definitely philosophy. But the philosophy implies, and creates, a practice. The practice arises out of considering a couple of questions: what are the key aspects of the narratives with which we approach the issue of the ecological emergency? What are the practical implications of focusing on these key narratives?

The first thing is to understand that there is a spectrum of approaches to the ecological emergency. While others have laid these out before (from deep to shallow ecology, for instance, or from anthropocentrism to ecocentrism; from utilitarian to deontology, or from blue-green to red-green), my focus is on how ‘agency’ is envisaged across the literature and from the different points in the spectrum of approaches.

The narratives of how to respond to the ecological emergency, from a philosophical perspective, fall almost entirely into the field of environmental ethics. Here, they depend on various views of how humans are seen to fit within other physical systems and indeed what kinds of responsibilities humans have, and to whom.

Since I am focusing on human agency, I look closely at how the distinction is drawn between the capacities for response that humans have (and their responsibilities for their impacts) and the capacities that other organisms, communities or species have. This leads me to the view that our most developed understanding of how humans fit is summarised by the narrative of enmeshment that Tim Morton has developed and explored. How we view ourselves has implications for how we see our responsibilities, and therefore for how we respond. In other words, seeing ourselves as enmeshed has implications for how we see agency.

I put this in the context of Paul Taylor’s view of human agency because I want to return to the field of environmental ethics so that the thesis I come up with emerges from that field. This is the context from which I approached the issue, and it’s also the most potentially potent area for influencing political or strategic policy. Think of Peter Singer influencing the debate on animal rights, or the way that philosophers (including Singer) have influenced the debate on poverty reduction. I wasn’t interested in developing a thesis that had no practical applicability and the field of practical ethics seemed quite a promising place to begin (it turned out I was wrong about this: practical ethics was not the approach I ended up advocating, but that comes later in the story).

Taylor had written a brilliant, thorough and timely investigation of the question of shifting how we see how humans fit, and indeed how we see other organisms, communities and species. It was as a result of his thinking about other organisms as being somewhat directed towards, or teleological, beings that he realised that not only humans have interests that need to be considered. If we allow that humans have interests to be considered (‘goods’ of their own, in Taylor’s language) then we have to allow that other organisms have interests, and once we allow this, there’s no reason not to consider them. In fact, not to do so would be unjustifiable. They want to live and survive and thrive just like us. We don’t have the right to stop them. So we have to take them into account when we’re deciding how to live.

This was quite a radical proposal (Taylor wasn’t the first, and there were more radical proposals than this, like Leopold’s ‘community of life’ ethic, and Naess’s ‘self-realisation’ ethic) but this was an analytical approach. It was reasoned out. It was a logical extension into ethics from the most recent explanations given to us by the natural sciences.

I was really interested in Taylor’s idea that we see other organisms, communities, etc as having their own interests that they had just as much right to pursue as we did. It set us in context. But I was also curious about how he could claim that we were moral agents if we were just as much evolved beings as everything else. I decided to review how we might understand our agency. I had to set aside the idea that we were ‘moral’ in any sense for the purposes of this review (I came back to it later).

“All conservation of wildness is self-defeating. For to cherish we must see and fondle and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wildness left to cherish.” Aldo Leopold

I don’t know if it was Aldo Leopold’s words that first inspired this debate for me: what basis could there possibly be for getting people to curb their actions when those actions were motivated by the urge to see beautiful places, or experience unusual or extreme situations? An image of a line of footprints, then tractors, trailers, concrete laid, spreading across tundra, slicing it into increasingly compressed squares. Perhaps Europeans see it more clearly because we have less room. Particularly those of us living on these islands flung into the Eastern Atlantic, knowing that the edge is very close, that there is not a huge stretch of prarie and beyond that, range upon range of snowcapped peaks.

Firstly, and most obviously, it is the human species, that connaisseur of beauty, that loses most. Most of us will never step on pristine shores that have never felt a human foot. Most of us will come to places that have been marked and emblazoned, even if only virtually, with brandnames, that have been photographed and pawed over in the minds and words of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of eager human others. Does this matter? Many people might say that it makes no difference to them at all. But if you were the first that ever burst into that silent scene, to shift Coleridge’s image marginally, can you even imagine how utterly, extraordinarily humbling and at the same time, stupendous and exhilarating, that would be? It would be like being the exploratory eye at the very forward edge of the wave of curiosity. It would be like going beyond anything anyone had ever been or done before and standing out alone, at the precipice. There would be a sense of loneliness, of course. One can never share these experiences, by definition (unless, of course, one goes in a team, but even then, each sensation is individually felt). Yet there would be a sense of collapsing boundaries, of opening into something utterly new.

Some places will never be fully explored. The heights of the Himalaya will no doubt remain mysterious, at least as long as the climate makes them an arduous adventure (though the climate, we cannot forget, is changing fast). The depths of the sea are hidden to all but a select few. Antarctica now has strictures on it. The Galapagos is expensive – and money is an effective ring-fence for many places that might otherwise attract more populous attention.

Secondly, although we are in an inevitably unsustainable relationship with the world around us (we will all, after all, die, and, in the end, so will the species) nevertheless, there are good reasons to suppose that we can do something about the kind of relationships we have, both with the world, and, indeed, with one another or even with ourselves. Just because we are going to die does not imply that we make no effort between birth and death to make the experience, whenever possible, marginally less painful for ourselves or, indeed, for those around us (even if most of us usually include in that later only our loved ones).

There might continue to be arguments about the truth or otherwise of climate change for some considerable time to come (make no mistake, I am of the strong opinion that climate change is a fact, and human-engendered), but there is no reasonable way around the notion that the human race is having an exponentially negative effect on biosystems and biodiversity and that a simple mathematical calculation will prove that, given the finite nature of the planet, and our reliance on it in every conceivable way for our survival, continued growth and consumption at increasing levels does not compute.

So, we, humans, are both all in this together, and all in something unsavory together. Can we do anything about it? Determinists or those who deny that we have any degree of freedom can legitimately jump ship at this point: if you don’t believe we have a choice in anything, then you might as well ditch the notion of voluntary action altogether. This is an argument for voluntary action, so it doesn’t apply to you. Everyone else can stay tuned in: we are agents, in a strange sense, but in a sense, nonetheless.

We are not agents in the sense that we conduct and control the flesh within which the mind resides. This is the fallacy that we fell for long ago but against which we must (metaphorically) beat our wings, because metaphors are tricky, dangerous illusions that manipulate and distort our relationship with reality. The best clue to our agency lies in our evolutionary roots. We evolved as survival systems, more or less successfully, along with all the other processes and systems, large and small, that we see either around us or in the fossil record.

We do not choose. We are propelled. Not towards. Away from. Paul Taylor suggests we build our characters and that this makes us virtuous. I think he’s got a point but it is not building – that’s too mechanistic and mechanistic metaphors (as I have said before, and will say again, no doubt) are misleading. Instead, it’s responding, at a very basic level. Our very cells respond to the feedback processes that allow us to watch how we breathe, and to breathe more deeply. This breathing more deeply is itself the result of a series of other strange coincidences and accidents of our personal history and physiology, but it brings about a new direction for us, where we can watch the process of past unfolding into present and into potential futures. So instead of building our characters, perhaps what we do is realise, more and more, and so bring into being a broader, but a looser, set of systematic dynamic connections and relationships, relationships that already exist but which require attention to come into focus. Brought into focus, even metaphorically, they begin to come into the realm, like conscious breathing, of awareness. Imagine an infinite number of infinitely fine threads linking each and every relationship and creating the woven fabric of our own existence. If we cease to think of ourselves as solid constructions in, and separate from, space, this image invites is to see ourselves as holograms through time, gathering and discarding connections as we move, and we are always moving.