A Damaged Planet
Agents of the Edge of DisasterOur planet is damaged (Morton, 2013). The ‘Capitalocene’ has shredded our wild places for farmland, urban sprawl, landfills (Haraway, 2016)(David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet, 2020) (Kovacs, 2023). This planet is overpopulated by *human* ideas, the most destructive being that *humanity* cannot coexist with non-humanity. The binary opposition between *man* and *nature* shows this (Bridle, 2022, p.17) (Haraway, 1991). Western creation stories depict *humanity* as ‘passing through an alien world on a rough road to [our] real home in heaven’ (Kimmerer, 2013, p.7). It matters what ideas we use to think with (Haraway, 2016). A hopeful divinity that is not scared of death, nor uses this fear to control its population, sees outside of life/death binaries, sees material entanglement, inherent embedding with(in) Gaia, and our decomposition as becoming-her. This latter thought pattern has been prevalent within *human* communities indigenous globally, all of which were subject to genocide in the name of property law, ownership, man/land, white/non-white distinctions as made by colonising forces throughout Europe. The tailoring (through bloodshed, human and non) of a world to a thought pattern has seen Gaia choke, sweat profusely, tremble with rage, swing her seasons out of balance until we come to the tipping point. On that cliff is where we stand, with an English language and a capitalist culture, neither of which are equipped to tell stories that might aid us in healing.
‘The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.’ – Audre Lorde, 1984, Sister Outsider, p.112
*Independence* is one of the most damaging of these stories (Butler, 2021, p.40-41). It is a ‘phantasy’ (Butler, 2021, p.36) thought too often, although our material world is deeply, erotically entangled, ‘to pick up an object up, is to pick up everything that is attached to it,’ (Muir, 1869). This school of thought is defined as “ecology” within academia, though its fundamental value has been understood in depths unimaginable to western minds by native communities for millennia, manifested through language, spirituality, and practice. Life/death, me/you, dream/dirt binaries fall away, soil: our rotting place, birthplace, sustenance, material history.
The western mind and its binary infusion sees an
argument against individualism as an argument for compliancy. Striving for
comfort sees system thinking as an out – if I am not an individual, then I am
not responsible (Morton, 2013, p.4). We are not individuals, we exist in a mesh
of various states of matter, in constant effect/affect-with one another on
scales from atomic to molecular to cultural to planetary. Within this mesh, a fractal,
ever complex, we are points of agency dragging it, directing it, making
decisions in its unfolding. Within our scope of scale, we are powerful beings, able,
we contain thinking chemistry, we have ‘response-ability’ (Haraway, 2016). Our
response-ability is to actively step out of nihilism, comfort, compliancy, as it
is enforced by western paradigms, to see these paradigms as limited,
destructive, optional (Fisher, 2008). Our response-ability is erotic love
with(in) Gaia, as she is ourselves (Hildyard, 2017). We must listen, learn from
the more-than-human-world, appearing as divine ‘idiots’ to the status quo
(Posthumanism and Technology, 2021). We must commit to eating each other
kindly.