December 6, 2015 - 22:49
“Take only pictures, leave only footprints.” --hiker’s maxim
Galaxies spin just outside our tiny corner of the universe. Voids, bigger than we can comprehend, stretch billions of light-years across the cosmos. Each new advance in cosmological science is a new realization of how very small humanity actually is. And yet our discoveries don’t stop with the macro-universe. All around us, inside of us, trillions of tiny organisms are interacting with and influencing one another. Bacteria, viruses, parasites, and other organisms, too small for us to observe, make up their own microbiome inside and outside a human body. The world outside of us is staggeringly complex, but so too is the world within. In such a system, where do humans find their place, if they do at all?
In fact, there are several humanity-related implications to these new discoveries about our environment. The first is that we realize how very interconnected we are with the world -- in fact, 90% of the cells that compose our bodies are not “ours” at all. Instead, they’re composed of miniscule organisms that we cannot live without – in other words, we are our own individual ecosystem. “Each body is a heterogeneous and complex network of entities that is itself an entity or unit” (Wordpress). In this case, we can no longer see ourselves as separate identities, but as “hominid ecologies” (Wordpress) that are both in and of the environment. The distinction between nature and culture becomes significantly more blurry. This leads to a second implication-- the recognition of our influences on the systems which we are a part of. Just as our small microorganisms influence us, we in turn influence the environments around us, raising the question: how aware do we need to be? What influences (footprints, so to speak) do we leave, and how do we act in an attitude of awareness towards these ecological systems?
The idea of “ecological intelligence”, or the understanding of both the global environmental and small ecological influences of our choices, is something that comes into play here. Bowers introduces this idea in his “Steps to the Recovery of Ecological Intelligence”, but Ursula LeGuin explores it even further in her short story, “Vaster Than Empires”. In it, she describes an empath named Osden – one who is acutely aware of his surroundings and of the feelings of people around him. However, instead of being a sympathetic character, Osden is a troubled one. His great gift of empathy is also a curse that causes him to sense everything that others feel, be acutely aware of his surroundings, and in the end give himself up to the fear in the forest that the group explores. It’s unclear how LeGuin feels about this, but the fact remains that although the fear in the forest affects each member of the group, most of them fail to recognize that it influences them. It makes one wonder: what are the influences in our lives that we are not environmentally sensitive enough to recognize? And if we were successful in discerning it, as Osden is, what consequences would that have?
Latour considers the possible consequences in his essay, “Agency in the Time of the Anthropocene”, where he states that recent discoveries have changed how we think about the earth. The earth is no longer a passive object, not easily moved by humanity – instead, it is an “active, local, limited, sensitive, fragile, quaking, and easily tickled envelope”, and we are forced to see our influence on it. But it’s not only our influence: the world affects us as much as we affect it, and the subject-object narrative is in fact rendered inapplicable. In other words, nothing is passive and everything is an active; there are so many new elements and bodies in our environment that act on one another that any boundary between the two is inevitably mistaken. Because of this, Latour notes that “there is no distant place” – everything is connected, as larvalsubjects pointed out previously, and there is no “elsewhere”, no divide between the social and the natural environment. Any contract or agreement with the earth is simply not feasible because it implies two sides (society and nature), rather than unification.
This begins to answer our questions of environmental influence and awareness by turning our understanding on its head. Yes, we affect the system, but so, too, does it affect us – in both good and bad ways. Earlier in the course, my friend and I noted – half in jest, half seriously – that perhaps the world would be better if humans didn’t exist. In a way, perhaps, if we were never there to leave footprints, the damage would have never been done. But what Latour leads us to recognize is that “erasing our footprints”, or attempting to cease human influence upon both macro- and micro- systems, is the wrong approach. By now, of course, it’s impossible -- but more importantly, it’s the natural order for things to influence and be influenced by their environments, humans and non-humans alike.
In other words, ecological intelligence helps us find and claim our place in the system, neither solely subjects nor objects. As bodies within a much greater system, our job isn’t to erase the mark of humanity upon the earth or destroy any evidence that we changed the world; instead, it’s to recognize and take responsibility for the imprints that we leave in the places that we have been.