ESTRANGEMENT AND EXTINCTION
2011
On Extinction: How We Became Estranged from Nature by Melanie Challenger
So great has the human impact on the planet been that some geologists are beginning to call for the recognition of a new era: the Anthropocene. There is no denying the impact, the evidence is all around - radioactive material from atomic bomb tests, plastics pollution, increased carbon dioxide levels and human-induced mass extinctions. The impact of human activity has been written into the geological record. ‘One can see from space how the human race has changed the Earth human exploitation of the planet is reaching a critical limit.’ (Stephen Hawking 2007).
Engineer Stewart Brand thinks that human beings have become as gods. Those mass extinctions tell another story. Gods create, the human species has been busy destroying all the way through its history.
Most of the extinctions are of tiny creatures, many unknown. The number of our fellow species has been estimated at 8.7 million. Many of these will become extinct before they have even been named and recorded. It’s the finality of the extinction of species that is most terrible to contemplate. At least it should be. Looking around, one sees a deadening of the senses amongst human beings, an obsession with the trivial and the ephemeral, an inability to appreciate life. Individuals in a species live and die, and the species carries on. Extinction is the end of that continuity. It renders life and evolution meaningless. That is why the loss of a large and familiar like the blue whale saddens the heart – it registers finality.
But there is hope. ‘It's a taint that will be readable down the ages, and it will signify forever a time when humanity, with an appalling lack of wisdom, decided to wage war on nature. That war has continued almost to the present; now, at the eleventh hour, hope of decisive change has arisen.’ (Flannery 2010).
The so-called Anthropocene could be the best of times or the worst of times, depending upon how the human species understands and relates to its worldchanging capacity. In Whole Earth Discipline, Stewart Brand declares that human beings have become as gods, charging that we need to get good at being gods. He then spends chapter after chapter venerating technologies such as nuclear power and GM food. He also dismisses theories, ideas, and ethics. Such a morally blinkered approach will assuredly bring about the worst of times. The power of our technology is not in doubt, it’s use and the ends to which it is put most certainly is in doubt. The central lesson of the toxic industrialisation we have pursued for a couple hundred of years or more is that it's the way we relate to each other and to the world, rather than the power of our technology, that determines whether we prosper and thrive or wither and die. To become good at being gods, if it means anything at all, requires that humankind come to assume moral responsibility for the planet's welfare. And that requires a change in the way we relate to the world, to our technological power and to ourselves. To overcome the calamitous way in which we have been conducting our interchange with nature, we need to understand ourselves and our world better. Up until now, the human race has just looked upon nature as an external world to exploit, command and control.
As Melanie Challenger makes clear in her book On Extinction: How We Became Estranged from Nature, that is an evasion. We should be looking at ourselves and seeing the nature outside as ourselves. There is no such thing as external nature – we are nature.
From a cabin in West Penwith, Cornwall, Challenger writes on the estrangement of human beings from nature: "the whole landscape expressed the once intimate but now almost entirely broken relationship of the inhabitants to the natural world".
Challenger places the focus upon the demise of certain human economic activities. Whilst "extinction" applied in the field of industrial archaeology would be evidence of a category mistake, since the obsolescence of old technologies and the adoption of new technologies is evidence of human continuity and change, Challenger’s real target is human rapacity all the world over. Human beings have exploited resources to extinction all through history but the difference now is that this rapacious instinct is magnified and intensified by our industrial and technological power. Whereas before the techno-industrial era we exploited the earth by blind instinct, now we know what we are doing. The challenge before us is to assume responsibility and organise our exchange with nature consciously, as a matter of deliberate purpose, framing our demands within a respect for natural boundaries.
The problem is, as Challenger argues, this possibility for conscious control is undercut by the fact that this era of maximum power and conscious awareness is also the era in which human beings have become most "estranged from nature". Human beings are less able to relate to nature at the very time they need most to do it. Industrial processes and extinction of species will proceed hand in hand until human beings invest their technological powers with a conscious moral purpose, one which recognises the symbiosis of human and planetary flourishing.
Challenger pursues her industrial archaeology in the Antarctic. She examines the disused whaling station at Grytviken, where huge tanks and boilers lie rusting in the snow, an industrial wasteland or scrap yard in the middle of pristine nature indicating the hollowness of progress. It’s an image that conjures up visions of Shelley’s Ozymandias. However, industrial imperatives are relentless. The inhabitants understand that their traditional close-to-nature ways have been undermined, that civilisation has been accompanied by alcohol dependence and violence, and that mineral extraction rather than living on the land, is the future, the immediate future, that is, the short term. The land endures, industry and technology will be left rusting in the snow.
Challenger is concerned to understand how humankind has got itself into this mess, and whether and how there might be a way out of it. The tone is not optimistic. Challenger details the extinction that human beings are capable of causing. The whole book is permeated with an atmosphere of great loss. It’s a world of losses and Challenger seems to fear the worst. As she walks through the Antarctic snow, Messenger admits she could not survive in that world without modern technology. She laments the fact that she has no landscape in which she can be "truly native".
To which I say ‘join the club’. That’s modernity, a terrain of dis-placed people. Indeed, human beings have been searching for a home ever since we were expelled from the Garden of Eden, ever since Cain killed his brother Abel.
10The lord said, "What have you done? Listen! Your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground. '"Now you are under a curse and driven from the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother's blood from your hand. 12When you work the ground, it will no longer yield its crops for you. You will be a restless wanderer on the earth."
13Cain said to the lord, "My punishment is more than I can bear. I4Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me."
15But the lord said to him, "Not so;e if anyone kills Cain, he will suffer vengeance seven times over." Then the lord put a mark on Cain so that no-one who found him would kill him. 16So Cain went out from the lord's presence and lived in the land of Nod, east of Eden.
And we have been East of Eden ever since.
The creation of a world in which we can be truly native is also the creation of a truly human world. The question of seeing ourselves in a world we have created was central to Hegel’s philosophy.
I am at home in the world when I know it, still more so when I have understood it. (Hegel).
The ignorant man is unfree because he faces a world which is foreign to himself, a world within which he tosses to and fro aimlessly, to which he is related only externally, unable to unite the alien world to himself and to feel at home in it as much as in his home. (Hegel).
Well, a truly human life in a truly human society was Marx’s goal beyond alienative and exploitative relations. Marx writes of ‘the community of man, or the self-activating essence of man, man's attainment of a species-life, a truly human existence through the mutuality of men’ (Marx EW JM 1975: 266). The problem is that the capitalist economy seeks that community through the alien mediation of exchange and trade. So the attainment of a landscape in which we can be ‘truly native’ is part and parcel of the achievement of the truly human society beyond alienation. This is not a case of being against technology for what it does to the landscape, but of so humanising our technological power so that we can realise our essential powers. Humanising nature is also a matter of naturalising human beings.