I am now of the view that the scientifically validated discovery of nonhuman sentience and intelligence in the natural world offers the greatest potential for transformation in natural and cultural interpretation and education since the rise of the ecological movement 50 years ago, and the greatest opportunity for tourism, in Canada certainly, since the perfection of the wide-bodied jet.
Given the extent of Indigenous presence in this country, this validation could make Canada (and particularly BC) the premier world destination for the sharing of understanding of how cultures can interact with living systems in ways that align with the realities of living on a finite Earth.
I also believe that we stand potentially on the threshold of the greatest reset of the dominant modern worldview in 500 years.
Afraid of the Dark, and the Light: Colonialism At Last Confronts Its Disastrous Global Legacy
A Re-Ordered Summary Synthesis
by
R.W. Sandford
Global Water Futures Chair, Water and Climate Security United Nations University
Institute for Water, Environment & Health
Amitav Ghosh
Afraid of the Dark, and the Light: Colonialism At Last Confronts It Disastrous Global Legacy
So much of what Suzanne Simard teaches us in Finding the Mother Tree continues to be mirrored in the lessons we can learn from the pandemic. And so much of it is consistent with the findings of influential others that are also emerging in this moment of growing transformational potential.
After I finished and spent several days thinking and writing about Finding the Mother Tree, I read Amitav Ghosh’s new book The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, which to my utter amazement seemed to carry on from exactly where Suzanne Simard left off. The effect on my worldview of the two books together was tectonic. It was as if I had spent my whole life half asleep and suddenly, I woke up, and can now see what others have clearly seen before me, but which were obscured from view by the cultural baggage I unwittingly carried with me.
What We Can Learn from the Pandemic That Pertains Also to the Climate Emergency
Both climate change and pandemics have common causes. Both are effects of the ever-increasing acceleration in production, extraction, consumption, and environmental degradation that has occurred in the decades following World War II, and especially after 1989. What the pandemic has revealed is our “imperial optic,” our deeply ingrained assumptions and narratives that underlie our judgment that Western ways of thinking are superior in all ways to those of others. Our Western notions of “civilizational dominance” and “infallibility” which are a legacy of colonialism are so baked into our society as to be nearly invisible. If anything, however, what transpired during the COVID pandemic should shatter that optic. The unrest that shook America during the pandemic demonstrated, with startling clarity, how systemic societal inequalities can exacerbate the impacts of the planetary crisis. Nor was the United States the only country that discovered alarming flaws in their own perceived national character. Other nations did far better at dealing with the pandemic than many Western countries and, in so doing put into relief just how shaky the highly divided current world order has become.
If the COVID-19 pandemic has any clear message, it is that no part of the world, rich or poor, will be spared by the planetary crisis – precisely because it is planetary and does not recognize borders. The very nature of the crisis is such that in order to deal with it the world will have to think like a forest just as Suzanne Simard advised in Finding the Mother Tree. In Ghosh’s view, it will be those who fail to do so who will be at greatest risk.
From the pandemic we also learn that inequality is a far better predicator of the likely impacts of disasters than aggregate wealth. In general, the countries that have fared the worst are those that are most inequitable: the U.S. and Brazil, where class divisions are compounded by race; and India, with its entrenched hierarchies of caste. Over the past few decades – the very period in which the planetary crisis has been intensifying – the world’s wealth has come to be concentrated in the hands of a few dozen billionaires. It could be said that neoliberal capitalism creates an illusion of wealth while picking the social fabric threadbare, so that it rips apart during disasters and climate shocks. In that widening inequality pits cooperation against morbid forms of individualism that turns crises into tragedies, inequality is not only contributing to our current planetary emergency; it is virtually guaranteeing that many will not survive it. The degree of inequality we are experiencing in the midst of our current planetary crisis has deep roots.
The Mechanistic World View & Its Colonial Legacy
I am just realizing and confronting the extent to which I have been made so numb that I have denied what has been clearly before my very eyes in terms of the workings of the world because of a colonial mentality that exists so deeply, and has infected the culture of which I am part for so long, that we have come simply to live with it and accept it without so much as naming or mentioning it as matter of historical course. Over the past weeks I have come to see how the mechanistic worldview, and the manifestly unjust colonialism that we allowed to emerge from it, and which resides so deeply in the foundations of even my own identity that it has made it difficult to fight against. The society in which I live is so saturated with colonialism, I couldn’t possibly see and understand the depth to which it, against my deepest will and intention, has, by standing in the way of truth and stifling action, made me so frustratingly helpless in confronting the very real threat of ecological and societal collapse we have sought in our collective work to prevent.
But this awakening is only part of the story. I have also seen how the pursuit of science – and faith in its relentless pursuit of the truth – have delivered me to this transformation. And that, in itself, may be the larger transformation from which hope for the future will emerge for all.
Ghosh cuts deep in his condemnation of colonialism. By representing a vast continuum of human and nonhuman beings as “brutes” colonizers justified turning them into “resources” to be used as slaves, servants, and commodities. What we are seeing now is, in his eyes, an on-going bio-political war on an increasingly global scale that resembles the genocide of the American Indians which included the destruction of the ecosystems upon which they relied for their existence. This genocide and many others like it, was accompanied by an extended treaty-making process, with declarations of good will on all sides. Often these treaties were negotiated by people of good intention, and were signed in good faith. Yet, all sides understood that the treaties, no matter how lofty their language, could and would be torn up when they clashed with what the wealthy and powerful saw as their vital interests. The resemblance of these treaties to global climate negotiations is by no means accidental. (See addendum.)
Now, as before, the fact that the devastation is being effected by non-human “natural forces” makes it possible for many people, especially in the West – and especially in countries with settler-colonial histories – to claim that climate change is occurring entirely independently of human intentions and agency. The grounds for this claim lie precisely within the gap that modernity created between nature and culture, human and non-human. In other words, if we deny we are the cause, we can also deny colonialism.
But the fact remains that the ideologies and practices of settler colonialism have been actively promoted, in their neoliberal guise, by the world’s most powerful countries, and have come to be almost universally adopted by national and global elites. It is those settler-colonial practices that are now being implemented by China, in Xinjiang; by Indonesia in Papua; and by India, in Kashmir and many of its forest regions. We have colonized not just the Americas or the East Indies, but the entire world.
This could not have been accomplished, however, without the right financial incentives. In Ghosh’s view, colonialism and its attendant genocides are among the foundations of contemporary capitalism. Without the pillage of the Americas, there would be no capitalism, no industrial revolution and maybe no Anthropocene either. Ghosh makes the case that capitalism is not a given and that, in fact, with the unravelling of the mechanistic world view, its doom may now loom adding one more dimension to the uncertainty of the current planetary crisis. But capitalism is only one of the givens in our modern industrial culture that has deep roots in colonialism.
Ghosh is also of the view that, by way of colonialism, the mechanistic world view that emerged in Europe was imposed everywhere. Modern science was used wherever colonial rule came into existence to breathe life into the view that nature was essentially inert and existed only to be exploited. The mechanistic worldview went so far as to redefine how every form of life on Earth was identified and named. Blessed by empires, Linnaeus’s system of taxonomy became the foundation of a way of knowing that would claim, from very early on, a monopoly on truth, discounting all other knowledge systems and their methods. Yet, secretly Western science was often dependent on other ways of knowing.
In Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer tells a story about a plant scientist who goes into the rain forest with an Indigenous guide whose ability to accurately identify various plants is so impressive that the scientist is moved to compliment him on his knowledge. “Well, young man, you certainly know the names of a lot of these plants.” The guide nods and replies with downcast eyes. “Yes, I have learned the names of all the bushes, but I have yet to learn their songs.”
Ghosh traces how the Linnaean system robbed rare and wonderful plants like nutmeg of their wonder and reduced them to an inert resource and, by way of colonialism, further insisted that to think otherwise – and see that wonder in them – should be viewed as childlike and fantastical – even savage – a diminishment in worldview that we now see has come at considerable cost.
What may be seen as the fault here is the very idea of a single species. Maybe, in fact, there may not be such a thing. It is now known that the human body contains vast numbers of microorganisms of various kinds; biologists estimate that 90% of the human body consists of bacteria, rather than human cells, and one microbiologist has suggested that under a microscope a human body looks like a coral reef, “an assemblage of lifeforms living together.” It is also known that microorganisms influence moods, emotions and the human ability to reason.
Hello! Our established idea of what a species is could be wrong. Would this not suggest, then, that we may wish to broaden the whole concept of what taxonomy means? Should it not also demand that we give new consideration to what intelligence means? If it is true that the human ability to speak, and think, can only be actualized in the presence of other species, can it really be said that these faculties belong exclusively to humans?
We see from this that even the idea of a forest far exceeds human comprehension; a name given by humans to a tree, and the forest itself, also exists as an image, and it is this that keeps it alive. In no way does this realm resemble the orderly, mechanistic universe conjured up in our society by the term “nature; this world, in its uncanniness, is much more akin to the reality unveiled by the plague year of 2020.
But if we want to adopt a new way of thinking as a society that transcends our current dominant worldview that holds that nature has no being beyond utility, we had better hurry. The fires, rumours and confrontations we have witnessed at the same time we have been fighting COVID are all, in different ways, residues of human history interacting with one another in a widening spiral of catastrophe. We face a crisis that is all-pervasive and omnipresent, in which geopolitics; capitalism; climate change; and racial, ethnic and religious divides interlock, each amplifying and accelerating the other. In these upheavals the residues of human history interact with nonhuman entities and agencies in ways that no one would have thought possible even a few years ago.
Many are those who are now of the view that a sentient world has just about had enough of us, and wouldn’t mind seeing humanity scrubbed off the surface of the Earth. Today, as we look at the floods, wildfires, and droughts that afflict some of the most intensively terraformed parts of the Earth – Florida, California, the American Midwest, southeastern Australia, and so on – it is hard not to wonder whether those landscapes have now decided to shrug off the forms imposed upon them by European settlers.
In any event it is increasingly clear that the Earth can, and does, act, except that its actions unfold over scales of time that shrink centuries of colonialism to a mere instant, like that which separates the slipping of a boulder on a mountain slope from the landslide that follows. From that perspective, the planet may at last be responding to centuries of terraforming just as the colonial project, in its neoliberal guises, has come to be universally adopted by global elites.
These developments are making it ever more evident that many “savage” and “brutish” people understood something about landscapes and the Earth that their conquerors did not. This, perhaps, is why even hard-headed, empirically minded foresters, water experts, and landscape engineers have begun to advocate policies that are based on Indigenous understandings of ecosystems. Experts even have a name, and an acronym, for this now – Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). Yet the very name is suggestive of a fundamental misunderstanding: it assumes that Indigenous understandings are useable “knowledge” rather than an awareness created and sustained by songs and stories.
“You cannot relate to Gunung Api as the Bandanese did unless you know that your volcano is capable of producing meanings; you cannot relate to the Dinétah as the Diné did unless the Glittering World glitters for you too.
The planet will never come alive for you unless your songs and stories give life to all the beings, seen and unseen, that inhabit the living Earth – Gaia.”
Moving Forward
The mechanistic worldview to which we have subscribed for 500 years is unravelling. Our fierce study of our own self-referential and self-justifying colonial history has upended it and the inconvenient truths it concealed. Science itself has upended its own vision of nature as machine. Every protest occurring now against inequality and ecological overshoot is an unequivocal assertion that the planetary crisis is rooted in the past and cannot be understood without it.
It is now clear that the questions of who is a brute and who is fully human, who makes meaning and who does not, lie at the core of the planetary crisis. At this moment in time, when we look back on the trajectory that has brought humanity to the brink of planetary catastrophe, we cannot but recognize that our plight is a consequence of the ways in which certain classes of humans – a small minority, in fact – have actively muted others by representing them as brutes, as creatures whose presence on Earth is solely material. It was because of these assumptions that it was taken for granted that the greater part of humanity was intellectually and culturally incapable of industrializing – and that delusion is itself an essential component of the crisis that is now unfolding across the planet.
It is perhaps only in the last two decades that the West has awakened to something that it had not imagined possible: that the non-West is fully capable of adopting extractive, carbon-intensive economies, and all that goes with them, like scientific and technical research and certain genres of art and literature. Had it been accepted earlier that all human beings are, and have always been, essentially mimetic creatures, perfectly capable of learning from one another, then perhaps sustainability would have become an urgent issue much earlier. But this possibility was precluded by long-held elite assumptions until the brutes began to unbrute themselves.
It is the tremendous acceleration brought about by the worldwide adoption of colonial methods of extraction and consumption that has driven humanity to the edge of the precipice. Half the greenhouse gasses that are now in the atmosphere were emitted in the last thirty years. It is this compressed time frame that has made sure that non-humans are no longer as mute as they once were. Other beings and forces – bacteria, viruses, glaciers, forests, the jet stream – have also unmuted themselves and are now thrusting themselves so exigently on our attention that they can no longer be ignored or treated as elements of an inert Earth. Both the living and the “inert” Earth together have agency.
Surprise! The very people who were regarded by brutes and savages – the people who could see signs of vitality, life, and meaning in beings of many other kinds – were right all along. The Earth teems with other beings who act, communicate, tell stories, and make meaning. So as the mechanistic world view continues to unravel, where do we go from here?
How can we begin to move toward ecological and cultural sustainability if we cannot even imagine what the path looks like? Our relationship with land cannot heal until we hear its stories. But who will tell them? – Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
We must rely in this planetary emergency, not on billionaires, technology and geoengineering, but on the proven resources of the human spirit.
To survive we have to decolonize ourselves of the deeply baked-in justification of conquest and all its related forms of genocide and extraction as inalienable elements of human nature and inevitable drivers of history. We have to wake up to the live and living world.
What does it mean to live on Earth as though it were Gaia – that is to say, a living, vital entity in which many kinds of beings tell stories? And how does the planetary crisis appear when seen from that perspective?
It is perhaps impossible to regain an intuitive feeling for the Earth’s vitality once it has been lost; or if it has been suppressed, through education and indoctrination. Even to retrieve a sense of it from the documentary record is very difficult, because written accounts of Gaian conceptions of the world are rare – simply because those who are most powerfully aware of non-human vitality have largely been silenced, marginalized, or simply exterminated by the unfolding of the very processes that lie behind the planetary crisis.
To move forward we need to recognize and transcend the increasingly obvious limitations and ideological and practical short-comings of western elite environmentalism. What is of utmost urgency at this time is to find points of convergence on Earth-related issues between people whose concerns, approaches, life experiences and identities may otherwise be very different. While experts and scientists have a great deal to offer, this is not a project that can be left solely to the credentialed, who are by definition a tiny group of formally educated people.
A step forward would be to recognize that, as the environmental historian William Cronon has noted, there is a fundamental difference between a mere succession of events– a chronology – and a story. The difference is that the story joins events together in ways that invest them with meaning. What is really at stake is not so much storytelling itself, but rather the question of who can make meaning. Conventional wisdom has been that nonhumans cannot make, or discern meaning. If non-human voices are to be restored to their proper place, then they must be allowed to share their stories.
As they do, we may well discover again that the long-repressed vitalist instinct is universal. One does not need to be Bandanese to understand what a volcano might be to these islanders any more than one needs to be Greek to be utterly moved by the Iliad. It is universal empathy that makes it possible for humans to understand each other’s stories: this is why storytelling needs to be at the core of a global politics of vitality.
For those who experience the Earth as Gaia, as a living vital entity, a landscape doesn’t spring to life because its inhabitants happen to share a common origin. It is, rather, the vitality of the place itself that creates commonalities between the people who dwell on it, no matter what their origin. We must see the landscapes upon which we live as being capable of making their own meaning and narrating their own stories. It is the land that makes us who we are. Not the people, the land.
“All Our Relatives”
Among the most insistently vitalist are Native American movements of resistance which have long been based on an ethic that foregrounds the familial instinct to protect “all our relatives” – that is to say, the entire spectrum of nonhuman kin, including rivers, mountains, animals, and the spirits of the land.
This approach is essentially spiritual or religious, yet it has been surprisingly effective. In its simplicity and power, the idea of protecting “all our relatives” may well be the key to creating bridges between people across the globe. An important indication of this lies in the many significant legal victories that Indigenous peoples around the world have won in recent years, precisely on vitalist grounds, by underscoring the sacredness of mountains, rivers, and forests, and by highlighting the ties of kinship by which they are bound to humans.
Takeaways
Much, if not most, of humanity today lives as colonists once did – viewing the Earth as though it were an inert entity that exists primarily to be exploited and profited from, with the aid of technology and science. Yet even the sciences are now struggling to keep pace with the hidden forces that are manifesting themselves in climatic events of unprecedented violence. As these events intensify, they add ever greater resonance to voices that have stubbornly continued to insist that non humans can, do, and must speak. It is essential now, as the prospect of planetary catastrophe comes ever closer, that nonhuman voices be restored to our stories.
The fate of humans, and all our relatives, depends on it.
This is the great burden that now rests upon writers, artists, filmmakers, and everyone else who is involved in the telling of stories: to us falls the task of imaginatively restoring agency and voice to nonhumans. As with all the most important artistic endeavors in human history, this is a task that is at once aesthetic and political – and because of the magnitude of the crisis that besets the planet, it is now freighted with the most pressing moral urgency.
Addendum
The Liberatory Potential of Renewable Energy
We, as a society, have been distracted from the full realization of the extent to which energy derived from sources like the sun, air, and water is imbued with immense liberatory potential. In principle every house, farm, and factory could free itself from the grid by generating its own power. No longer would power lines and gigantic, leak-prone tankers be needed for the transportation of energy, not longer would workers have to toil in underground mines or in remote deserts and rough seas; there would be no need to the long supply chains required by fossil fuels.
he liberatory potential of renewable energy has broader geopolitical dimensions as well. If adopted at scale, it could transform, indeed completely revolutionize, the current global order. No longer would countries have to be dependent on unpredictable petrostates; no longer would they have to set aside huge portions of their annual budgets for oil payments and subsidies; no longer would they have to worry about their energy supplies being disrupted by wars or revolutions in faraway countries, and perhaps more importantly, no longer would they have to rely on superpowers to keep open the sea channels through which oil tankers must pass. But this, in itself presents new risks and exposes deeper aspects of our planetary crisis; the crisis of global power. Climate negotiations are not just about emissions reductions targets; they hinge precisely on issues that are not, and can never be, discussed – issues that are ultimately related to global power.
Addressing the global climate change threat cannot but result in a great disruption of the status quo. It would mean that you don’t need as much fossil fuel infrastructure and there would be no need for the power and wealth structures associated with it. This would affect the United States in profound ways. We have seen that the U.S. is not happy with just reducing its own dependence of foreign oil. Its geopolitical power resides in controlling the flow of oil globally and in strategically denying oil to its rivals. Here climate change presents the irony of ironies. How does America reduce its own fossil fuel use when as a principal duty, its military is to protect fossil fuel reliance and delivery globally?
The geopolitical reality is that it is a grave mistake to imagine that the world is not preparing for the disrupted planet of the future. It’s just that it’s not preparing by taking mitigatory measures or by reducing emissions: instead, it is preparing for a new geopolitical struggle for dominance.
It is increasingly clear today that a transition, albeit partial, in energy regimes is not only possible but inevitable. It is hardly surprising, then, that a great deal is being written about the economic and technological implications of this transition. By contrast, there is far less discussion (at least in public) of the geopolitical repercussions of this transition, although they will be momentous. Some countries, the United States among them, will not take kindly to the downgrading of its geopolitical standing. Other countries as well will be unwilling to shrink their carbon footprint if it means that their geopolitical footprint shrinks with it. In the end, how many countries will respond to climate change will depend on whether their populations are willing and able to accept and adapt to changes in the global geopolitical order.
There is little question that, if fully released, the potential of renewable energy could liberate our society and in so doing completely free humanity of the yoke of the current unjust and dysfunctional world order by putting an end to the corrupt economic and political hegemony of the global petrostate.
This will not happen, however, without significant resistance. The current global geopolitical order will not go down without a fierce fight, a fight that has already begun. And in this fight, we should never discount the extra-sovereign power of the most powerful superpower of all: the fossil fuel sector itself.
We have the opportunity with renewable energy to remake the world; to make it safer, cleaner, more equitable and possibly even sustainable. The fossil fuel sector, it appears however, is not prepared to leave colonialism behind and would rather poison the entire planet than let that happen.