Opinion piece 3, 2024
How do we love a wounded world?
How do we love an ecologically wounded world? Certainly not by refusing to gaze at the disturbances, the declining and the dying that’s all around us by only paying attention to those Holocene relics—the forests, meadows, wetlands, crags, ravines, ice-fields, seas, rivers and reefs—that still remain for the time-being, viable or inviolate. Not by pretending the ecological crisis doesn’t matter because, after all, nothing survives or stays the same forever. Or that it’s caused by something other than us (like the sun), that it’s ‘natural’ and nothing to do with us. Or to argue, as some have, that ecological ravaging is necessary collateral damage on the way to our species glorious, techno-future colonizing other planets, and the galaxy. That’s not loving a wounded world. That’s caring for the earth so little you’re happy to trash it and leave. It’s also empirical nonsense. No other reachable, potentially habitable world exists and, even if it did, all the money and tech imaginable couldn’t terra-form it into our current biosphere. We have evolved with earth to be alive at this (and only this) moment in her (and only her) bio-geological evolution. We are not just from earth. We are part of earth. Metabolically. Psychologically. Socially. Spiritually. There is not and can never be a Planet B. In his masterful Iphigeneia at Aulis, Greek playwright Euripedes 2,500 years ago modelled the doomed transaction adroitly: just as Agememnon’s murder of his daughter Iphigeneia to enable his colonial ambitions in turn precipitated his own demise, justifying the sacrifice of what should be most precious—our biosphere—for a monstrous delusion, can only end in tragedy for us too. Which is another way of saying the human destruction of nature really is, at base, a moral crisis. The most paralysing ethical emergency our species has ever faced.
Nor can we love an ecologically wounded world if we decide the idea of ‘ecology’ undoes the need to disentangle, and differently value, what is human from what is not. Wading as we are into the Anthropocene, to dismiss the idea of nature as distinct from culture is not to express a love of ecology or the planet but of ourselves. That’s not biophilia, loving the living world. It’s human self-love, sapiens narcissism: anthropocentrism. No, learning to love an ecologically troubled planet behoves us to embrace what is human, what is not and what is both without losing sight of any of them. It means loving what is culture (not nature), what is nature (not culture) and what is both, by accepting that the difference between them matters and matters deeply but also, by acknowledging that the difference between them is becoming increasingly difficult to discern. We need to try to love it all, by knowing, accepting and valuing the limitations, the realities, the subjectivities and the suffering of those who are and that which is also sullied, unrealized or imperfect. It is a principle applicable to how we perceive, first, our own and other human bodies, minds and lives; second, specific non-human beings, systems of beings and places; and third, the ecological fabric—that which is human, nature and human/nature—in which we are embedded.
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It is easier to love a wounded world if we loosen our attachment to familiar ecological binaries of what is whole and what is broken, what is normal and what is not, and what is worthy and what is worthless. A field of moral philosophy called Crip theory (after cripple), which draws on queer theory (the critiquing of sexual, gender and identity conventions of normality) and critical disability theory (reframing prejudices against the unwell and disabled as power relations equivalent to racism or sexism) might help us do this. Crip theorists probe the stigmatizing of difference, vulnerability and dependence and displace capitalism’s fetishizing of speed and productivity with crip time and crip space: the sensitive acceptance of differing psychological, intellectual and bodily capabilities. Crip’s subject is oppression, exclusion and othering within our species, but its relevance to the non-human, to the ecological, and our relationship with it, is apparent. Canadian environmental scholar Catriona Sandilands calls for ecocrip thinking, a ‘queer ecology’ predicated on “seeing beauty in the wounds of the world and taking responsibility to care for the world as it is”. Like the disabled and the ill, the very old and very young, the marginalised and the poor, most of this planet’s ecology of non-human others and systems of others are similarly disempowered, invisible, outcast and vulnerable. Like their crip-human counterparts, the earths exploding medley of shrunken biotas, displaced and endangered species, exhausted soils, contaminated atmospheres, acidifying seas and hybrid habitats can be—no, must be—nurtured and valued, not only for what they once were, nor for what they might again be, but for what (and, being other selves and systems of selves, who) they are. Part of us. Part of the ecological whole.