This is a reflection on the impact the New Ecological Discourses group on my practice. I’ve been in the group now for four years, maybe even five. The last year of indigenous philosophies of Country has me full to Dolly’s Wax – so many ways of thinking to work through! When we convened under the Moreton Bay fig in the Fitzroy Gardens at the start of 2018 and began to discuss the future reading, I rather ungraciously blurted out:

“The thought of reading anything more makes me want to throw up, I’m so full with what I’ve already read!”

After we’d had lunch and returned again to our reading. we agreed that since our commitment is to read the most interesting new things emerging in the field of environmental philosophy, and since one of the most interesting things right now seems to be indigenous philosophy, we should continue. We decided to finish off the last of the book we were reading at the end of last year, but then draw breath with a session for reflection on how our reading has been affecting our practice…..” and perhaps Ross would like to write something to kick us off??”

Read the full write-up here [PDF].

• Wohlleben, Peter (2015). The Hidden Life of Trees – What They Feel, How They Communicate, trans. Jane Billinghurst. Carlton, Vic: Black Inc.

Opening Comments by Peta Tait

I like the first four chapters of this book for a number of reasons over and above the strong environmental message about letting other species determine their own lives. The book’s ideas about other living forms – of trees – is exciting. The anthropomorphic way of framing knowledge about trees collapses the twentieth-century separation of rational thought and emotional feeling as it extends interspecies exchange into the realm of emotional relationships. It might draw on new knowledge based on scientific research but it is presented in ways that are closer to the humanities and the creative arts.
The basic material elements from which life is created such as chlorophyll and electrical impulses are expanded to encompass fear, protective care and love.

Audio recording: summary of group discussion

Disclaimer: We would like to thank the Kathleen Syme Community Centre for providing a new space to hold our meetings.

• UN Summary Report on Harmony with Nature addressing Earth Jurisprudence (A/71/266).

Introduction to the Harmony with Nature Report (UN) by Laura Brodie

Loss of biodiversity, desertification, climate change and the disruption of a number of natural cycles are among the costs of our disregard for Nature and the integrity of its ecosystems and life-supporting processes. As recent scientific work suggests, a number of planetary boundaries are being transgressed and others are at risk being so in a business-as-usual world. Since the industrial revolution, Nature has been treated as a commodity that exists largely for the benefit of people, and environmental problems have been considered as solvable through the use of technology. In order to meet the basic needs of a growing population within the limits of the Earth’s finite resources, there is a need to devise a more sustainable model for production, consumption and the economy as a whole.

In 2009, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed 22 April as International Mother Earth Day. In so doing, Member States acknowledged that the Earth and its ecosystems are our common home, and expressed their conviction that it is necessary to promote Harmony with Nature in order to achieve a just balance among the economic, social and environmental needs of present and future generations. The same year the General Assembly adopted its first resolution on ‘Harmony with Nature’.

Devising a new world will require a new relationship with the Earth and with humankind’s own existence. Since 2009, the aim of the General Assembly, in adopting its five resolutions on ‘Harmony with Nature’, has been to define this newly found relationship based on a non-anthropocentric relationship with Nature.

Virtual Dialogue of the General Assembly on Harmony with Nature

The first Virtual Dialogue of the General Assembly on Harmony with Nature concluded that:

1. The importance of applying Earth Jurisprudence principles to inspire citizens and societies to reconsider how they interact with the natural world in order to implement the Sustainable Development Goals in harmony with nature.
2. The need to recognize the intrinsic value of nature and to shift our perceptions, attitudes and behaviours from anthropocentric or human-centred, to non-anthropocentric or Earth-centred in which the planet is not considered to be an inanimate object.
3. The support for Earth Jurisprudence in laws, ethics, institutions, policies and practices, including a fundamental respect and reverence for the Earth and its natural cycles.

The Rights of Nature Movement

The Rights of the Nature movement recognizes that entire human societies, our global economic system and our structures of law, have been built from a colonial mindset that places humans not just apart from nature, but above it. The movement gained pace when Ecuador and Bolivia took steps to enshrine the rights of nature in their respective constitutions.

Audio recording: summary of group discussion

Disclaimer: the music in the background of this recording is not related to our discussions or intended as an expression on behalf of NED. This is due to our meetings taking place at the Gopal restaurant in Melbourne, which kindly allows us to use their facilities without extra charge.

Further information and links

• Harmony with Nature
• Knowledge Network
• Do Trees Have Standing, Christopher Stone (PDF)
• UN Declaration on the Rights of Mother Nature (PDF)
• The Rights of Nature

• Vinciane Despret and Michel Meuret, “Cosmoecological Sheep and the Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet” Environmental Humanities 8.1 (2016): 24-36. PDF.
• Hugo Reinert, “About A Stone: Some Notes On Geologic Conviviality“. Environmental Humanities 8.1 (2016): 95-117. PDF.

Introduction to Hugo Reinert’s text by Blanche Higgins

Reinert considers a stone, and the geologic more broadly, in order to wrestle with the living/non-living or organic/inorganic binary that he sees as a limit within current multispecies approaches.

He uses the concept of harm to ask ontological questions about what exists: e.g. can a stone be harmed, and if so, can it be considered a being? He thus explores whether and how animism can function for the inorganic/non-living.

Beginning with an articulation of how capitalism and modernity inform our ontologies, which understand the inorganic as purely a resource, he contends that animism, and animating and subjectifying the inorganic/non-living, can function as a political tool to resist capitalism.

He therefore raises methodological questions about what is foreclosed by the belief that one already knows what a stone (or other entity is), before entering into relationship with it. He thus provokes multispecies approaches to consider what is foreclosed, or assumed, when focusing on ‘species’, and whether the inorganic is reproduced as a resource for capitalist consumption within this approach. Although he considers that perhaps the ‘species’ within ‘multispecies’ is perhaps a placeholder for a more appropriate term.

Audio recording: summary of group discussion

Disclaimer: the music in the background of this recording is not related to our discussions or intended as an expression on behalf of NED. This is due to our meetings taking place at the Gopal restaurant in Melbourne, which kindly allows us to use their facilities without extra charge.

• van Dooren, Thom; Kirksey, Eben & Munster, Ursula; 2016, “Multispecies Studies: Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness” (Introduction), Environmental Humanities (special issue Multispecies Studies), Volume 8, Number 1: 1-23

Introduction by Freya Mathews

In introducing Multispecies Studies (MS) as a new discourse, the authors distinguish MS from existing ecological and environmental discourses in the following ways:

• MS takes as its focus of study particular tangles or nexuses of intercommunicating forms of life –  “lively relationalities of becoming” – rather than singular organisms, species or pre-defined ecosystems.
• MS is ethnographic in its method ie it involves participant observation and qualitative immersion of the researcher in the communities that are being studied rather than merely quantitative methods of observation or, far worse, merely abstract reasoning from pre-defined categories (in the manner of, for example, investigations into the questions of intrinsic value or moral considerability in traditional environmental ethics).
• MS is as interested in observing contingent human entanglements in these communities as it is in observing the roles of non-human forms of life.
• MS tries not to make categorical assumptions with regard to either ontology or values ahead of its studies ie it tries not to presuppose what will count as species, for example, or what will count as animate or what will count as a morally significant ahead of an attentive, immersive engagement with the “relationality of becoming” in question. Nor does it seek to arrive at universal definitions of relevant categories and norms on the basis of its studies, but sees such categories, whether referenced to science, philosophy or ethics, as needing to be continually renegotiated in the context of particular contexts of  study/immersion.

So the authors say, for example, that
“this work must … hold open ‘a question of who—and what—is taken to exist and of how certain modes of existence are (and are not) made to count.’ (Hugo Reinert)  None of this is simple, and nor does it mean that there is no right or wrong; rather, it means that right and wrong must be carefully crafted, again and again, inside larger processes of contestation.”

And also:
“Staying with the trouble, [MS] aims to hold onto competing ethical obligations, multiplying perspectives on what counts as “the good.” There are no neat and final answers here, nor are there any trump cards that shut down the political process through appeals to incontestable principles or expertise. But nor are easy relativisms allowed. This kind of relativism—you have your truth and I will have mine; you inhabit your world and I will inhabit mine—is both lazy and dangerous. At the end of the day, decisions must be made about how we will get on inside a world that is, however multiple, also shared, finite, and (in many ways) struggling.”

And finally:
“rather than simply celebrating multispecies mingling—a basic fact of life—[MS] also engages with the more analytically interesting and politically charged questions that follow from asking …. who benefits when species meet? In so doing, work in multispecies studies is concerned with the cultivation of what we have called arts of attentiveness. This attentiveness is a two-part proposition: both a practice of getting to know another in their intimate particularity … and, at the same time, a practice of learning how one might better respond to another, might work to cultivate worlds of mutual flourishing. … In short, the arts of attentiveness remind us that knowing and living are deeply entangled and that paying attention can and should be the basis for crafting better possibilities for shared life.”

My comments (for  discussion)

I find the whole project of MS, as outlined in the article, deeply congenial, and rooted in feminist epistemologies of loving attention or attentive love  (Sara Ruddick, Iris Murdoch, Evelyn fox Keller). However, I also think that for political purposes ie for the purposes of conservation as a political project, we need to distinguish between certain different functions of discourse.

1. Discourse can serve as both injunction and instruction for cultivating consciousness in a certain way eg by practising the arts of attentiveness. These arts are advanced on the understanding (correct, in my view) that when consciousness is so cultivated, norms uniquely appropriate to particular communities of life will emerge spontaneously. In other words, from this perspective, appropriate forms of conservation will emerge from the cultivation of alternative forms of consciousness (forms of consciousness strikingly comparable to those of many indigenous peoples). Such discourse thus serves the end of cultural change.
2. But discourse can also serve a more overtly political end when human parties are in contention over the fates of specific communities of life.  On one side stand developers anxious to destroy those communities in order to get at certain exploitable resources. On the other side stand conservationists anxious to protect those communities from destruction. It is generally of no use, in such circumstances, to enjoin the developers to engage in practices of attentiveness, or even to read stories that may have been written by practitioners of attentiveness who have immersed themselves in the environments in question. In the context of the many aggressive and urgent conservation battles currently being played out all around the world, conservationists need a rhetoric of rights and moral entitlements as short-hand to which they can appeal to resist developers’ arguments for economic benefits. Such abstract and universalist forms of environmental ethics serve the same kind of purpose in conservation campaigns that abstract and universalist notions of human rights serve in campaigns for social justice. A discourse couched in such abstract and universalist terms may indeed be a blunt instrument, philosophically speaking, but it is also needed as an effective weapon of political resistance in advance of the long term cultural transformation envisaged in discourses of the first kind. It is in these abstract and universalist terms that charters and constitutions are written, and it is only such abstract  and universalist notions that can eventually be turned into law. And while a culture of attentiveness may be required to mandate laws affirming, for example, the “rights of nature”, laws and charters are also required for the political purpose of restraining powerful interests that seek to profit from violating vulnerable communities of life.

Aren’t both these kinds of discourse then vital to our cause today as we face the tsunami of impending extinctions that is bearing down on our world?

Audio recording: summary of group discussion

https://soundcloud.com/user-707619302/multispecies-studies-cultivating-arts-of-attentiveness

Download the audio (mp3)

Disclaimer: the music in the background of this recording is not related to our discussions or intended as an expression on behalf of NED. This is due to our meetings taking place at the Gopal restaurant in Melbourne, which kindly allows us to use their facilities without extra charge.

The NED discussion forum serves as a virtual “memory bank” of our discussions. It is also an experiment to allow those, who cannot attend the meetings, to add to the discussions.

Please keep the following in the mind:

1. In order to add your voice to the discussions, you have to register first.
2. All posts and discussions are public.
3. This is a moderated forum and participation requires everyone to be considerate.

Our basic guidelines are:

• Be supportive of each other
• Criticize ideas, not people

What we mean by this:

• Collaborate
• Be generous in giving and accepting criticism
• Respect people’s boundaries
• Be kind
• Don’t make it personal

• Ted Trainer, “The Degrowth Movement from the Perspective of the Simpler Way”, Capitalism Nature Socialism  26, 2, 2015.
• The Simplicity Institute (Ted Trainer and others)
• #ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics by Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek (the critique of “folk politics”)
• Jonathan Rutherford and Samuel Alexander, “The Deep Green Alternative: Debating Strategies of Transition”at Permaculture Research Institute
• Briefing papers from  the Centre for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy

Introduction by Jonathan Rutherford

• Degrowth is an emerging perspective on our global crisis. A diverse school of thought, but stresses the need for affluent-industrialised societies to undergo a process of planned economic contraction and reorganisation of their economies as a first step towards the eventual goal of a steady-state economy.
• The Simpler Way perspective (TSW) fits within the broad degrowth perspective, but offers makes some key points that are often not stressed/emphasised within the movement. These include:
  • The sheer magnitude of the ecological overshoot is very large (i.e see evidence such a footprint numbers etc), suggesting the need for profound changes to all aspects of society before we could reach a just-sustainable world order
  • Economic growth is deeply embedded within the basic operation of capitalist society and cannot easily be removed
  • The degrowth movement needs to pay more attention to spelling out an attractive and plausible vision of a sustainable post-capitalist society – this is one of the main aims of the TSW project (see elaboration in much greater detail here.

TSW vision involves:

1. Simpler lifestyles
2. Moving to small, highly self-sufficient local economies
3. More cooperative and participatory ways
4. A new economy
5. Some very different values.

TSW advocates make the argument that something like this vision is not optional…if humanity wants to achieve a satisfactory world order.

Once the above points are made it become obvious that the new society could only be brought about through a long process of grassroots transition involving ordinary people taking the initiative at the local level to build new economies and cultures – this will be the first step in a multi-phased transition, which will later involve radical policy change at national levels etc.

Audio recording: summary of group discussion

https://soundcloud.com/user-707619302/discussion-of-degrowth-w-johnathan

Download the audio (mp3)

Disclaimer: the music in the background of this recording is not related to our discussions or intended as an expression on behalf of NED. This is due to our meetings taking place at the Gopal restaurant in Melbourne, which kindly allows us to use their facilities without extra charge.

Blanche also sent a short, lively, heart-felt piece by Donna Haraway exhorting us to “make kin, not babies”:

• Donna Haraway, 2015, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin”, Environmental Humanities, vol. 6, 2015, pp. 159-165

Jan: Just as follow-up from this over-popluation thread — here a short excerpt from a related discussion on the nettime mailing list that happened parallel to this discussion. It includes a comment by Patrice Riemens.

Patrice wrote:
“‘Population control’ is indeed the elephant that regularly comes in stampeding in the chinaware shop of discussing a sustainable future. But it is a myth that has been put long ago to rest, first in moral terms by Mahatma Gandhi (“there is enough for everyone’s needs, not for everyone’s greed’), and scientifically by Mahmood Mamdani in his epinomous book (the Myth of Population Control).

Here’s a short review.

I think the answer is not reducing the number of people but to reduce excessive inequalities and consumerist habits. In a better society, numbers decrease by themselves.“

• Tim Palmer 2012 ‘Beyond Futility’, in P Camaro & E Crist (eds.) Life on the Brink – Environmentalists Confront Overpopulation, University of Georgia Press: Athens, Georgia pp. 98-107

Introduction by Blanche Higgins

Palmer contends that efforts at conservation and reducing consumption have only ever worked for short periods of time, until the population increased at which stage the environmental protection previously achieved is overcome by increased impact due to increased numbers of people. His key claim is therefore that population and population growth must be reduced as this is the ultimate cause of environmental degradation, and pursuing conservation or consumption reduction without pursuing population reduction is futile. Central to this argument is the claim that population growth provides a continual source of new labour willing to accept lower wages, thus fueling capitalism. Palmer is particularly concerned about population growth in high consumption countries, like the US. He therefore believes that such countries should limit immigration, as this is the major source of population growth in rich nations, and that the world should support women’s empowerment in developing nations, as this is the most effective route to reducing fertility rates. To address the moral/political issues raised by his anti-immigration stance, he argues that family planning would benefit people in developing countries more than accepting just a few of them into high consumption countries like the US.

Audio recording: summary of group discussion

https://soundcloud.com/user-707619302/discussion-of-tim-palmer

Download the audio (mp3)

• E. Crist, “The Reaches of Freedom: a Response to an Eco-modernist Manifesto”, Environmental Humanities 7, 2015, pp. 245-254
• The Ecomodernist Manifesto

Introduction by Freya Mathews

Outline of article

The Ecomodernist Manifesto aligns the goals of environmentalism with those of development: environmentalism will be served by societies’ completing the project of modernization on earth, where modernity is understood in terms of humanism. Why?

1. There is no alternative. Biocentric values do not have sufficient traction – conservation goals have to be shown to bring human benefits – they have to help bring people out of poverty and oppression. Conservation goals can be integrated into development projects, as incidental benefits.
2. Modernization leads eventually – after a period of peak impact – to a natural stabilization of human population, thereby solving the population problem without need for coercion.
3. Widespread affluence also results eventually in consumer saturation and a falling off of consumption and hence of economic growth. It also results in greater interest in conserving nature for its own sake.
4. Centralization of human activity – through urbanisation and industrial agriculture – frees up lands which may then be re-wilded.

From an EM point of view, we must urgently address climate change, pollution, conservation of resources and issues that affect food security, such as over-fishing and ecological degradation of oceans and farmlands and water security, because these issues impact upon the development project. However, issues that do not do so, such as loss of habitat and species extinctions, will have to be set aside. Eventually there will be a recovery of some habitat to accommodate those wild species which remain.

Crist emphasizes the failure of EM to address the issue of mass extinctions and contests claim 4. She argues that “peak impact” is likely to lead to the biological wrecking of the planet and that if land and oceans and waterways are maximally exploited for human food production and resource extraction, the amount of land, ocean and water left over for re-wilding is likely to be minimal, and, after peak impact, maximally degraded. This is, she implies, not a conservation alternative but precisely the conservation nightmare.

However, in fairness to EM, Crist may not be adequately factoring in here the kinds of environmental interventions the EMs are advocating. They are advocating the cleaning up and re-design of cities and industrial agriculture so that human impact on the biosphere will not be so great, nor its footprint so huge.

Even so, it seems naïve to assume that, without the regulation of either its numbers or its levels of consumption, humanity will not find ways to exploit virtually every environment on earth, whether marine or terrestrial. It also seems naïve to propose consumer saturation. What is the evidence for this? The wealthy don’t appear to get weary of their wealth, turning to such things as bushwalking and philosophy instead of consumerism!

Crist also points out that the EM claim that there is no evidence of definable limits to economic growth overlooks the cost of such growth to the biosphere and other species. It is other species that have absorbed the consequences of humanity exceeding the limits to growth ie the limits to growth so far have been ecological limits – which have long been passed.

Crist rounds off her argument with the plea that freedom – the core value of humanism/modernity, and hence of the EM project itself – be extended to all beings, including the biosphere. The grounds for this are

• That all beings are capable of freedom ie they are autopoietic, and ought to be free.
• That human “freedom” which rests on the crushing of the freedom of others is not true freedom.

Questions for Discussion

1. Can the value of freedom, in the sense in which Crist intends it, actually be universalized? The exercise of freedom is important for human self-realization because freedom (in the sense of free will) is a condition for moral choice, and moral choice is, according to some philosophers (eg Kant), the core of our humanity. But free will may depend upon reflexiveness, and not all non-human beings have the capacity for reflexiveness. Moral choice will therefore not be involved in their self-realization. Is there another value that may be universalized to serve Crist’s argument?
2. I read the Ecomodernist Manifesto as saying that, rather than seeking to re-situate ourselves in ecology, as the environment movement and environmental philosophy have urged, we need to complete the process of separating ourselves from nature, because then we can contain the impacts of our presence before they totally destroy nature. (This is what they call de-coupling the human from nature.) It’s a provocative thesis, as the whole thrust of environmental thinking has been the reverse of this – the need to overcome nature/culture dualism. EM’s are arguing that we will afford the best protection to nature by fully actualizing culture/nature dualism!Crist reads the EM as saying that we achieve decoupling from nature when modernization is completed. By this time, she thinks, there will be little land and sea left over to rewild.
   Questions:
   • Is it possible to de-couple ourselves from nature in the way proposed by EM’s?
   • If we commit to decoupling now, can we contain the impacts of the modernization project enough to ensure that there will be some nature left over for rewilding by the time modernization is complete?
3. The EM argument depends on the assumption that development will continue to deliver “progress” in the sense of lifting societies out of poverty and oppression. EM’s do not equate development with capitalism, but they do enthusiastically urge the conservation movement to partner with industry and the corporate sector etc. But is poverty alleviation and emancipation really the main trajectory of development today? Isn’t the main trajectory the exponential increase and consolidation of the wealth of the already wealthiest? What would it take to get development back on a social justice track? Wouldn’t it take much the same kind of political movement that would be required to secure the rights of species? (As in Naomi Klein, the papal encyclical, etc.) In this case there is no getting around the need for such a radical movement.

Audio recording: summary of group discussion

https://soundcloud.com/user-707619302/summary-of-group-discussion-of-e-christs-response-to-the-ecomodernist-manifesto

Download the audio (mp3)