Troubled Ecology - Human and Otherwise

The more the ecological sciences advance, the more a sort of strange and unsettling thing happens: a picture advances into focus that paints our industrial nature as radically incompatible with existing ecosystems. What we're beginning to realize - well perhaps it was known within various scattered fringe disciplines for some time - is that the entire human ecosystem as it currently exists is fundamentally antagonistic to the natural ecosystems which ultimately sustain it.

Antagonism isn't a particularly abnormal force. Anything with mass necessarily antagonizes the matter around it; it displaces and rearranges the matter outside of it, by virtue of the fact that two particles can't occupy the same space at the same time. Life is in constant antagonism with itself; it is in constant flux.

But what is new here is the scale of the mass in question, or this human aggregate which has exploded in scale, scope, and quality in the last 200 or so years.

There is essentially a new classification that has been introduced for human ecosystems called the technoecosystem, which takes its unique designation from its radically new nature and its frequent incompatibility with natural ecosystems. The technoecosystem is situated in what has been labeled a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene.

Our industrial civilization gets its own epoch because of the profundity of its effect on the global ecology. We are seeing the beginning of the end of a massive geological timeframe, initiated by an extreme metabolic process touched off just two centuries ago, the catalysts of which were fossil fuel and the post-Christian/industrial sensibility, among other endlessly complex and varied factors of course.

It is difficult to conceive entirely of what has happened, as we are immersed in the world we have created, but maybe a couple of empirical observations coupled with an imagination can help.

Our industrial processes have not only disrupted the climate, they've disrupted all of the major natural cycles, one of the most important of which is the nitrogen cycle, which carries with it a host of consequences, and far reaching effects which are fractal and exponential in their nature.

The production of nitrogen fertilizers and the burning of fossil fuels has resulted in the hyperproduction of nitrogen compounds which in the past were limited to extreme energy disturbances. These compounds act as nutrients which essentially saturate ecosystems that paradoxically depend on controlled nutrient levels, resulting in acidification (a separate problem) and the loss of bio-diversity, since organisms which respond more quickly to the increased nutrients overrun other organisms.

An example of this is the eutrophication of a body of water which is caused both by the over-concentration of nitrogen and phosphorus in fertilizer runoffs and other chemical flows, which upon introducing rich concentrated nutrients into the water, cause exploding algae blooms. These blooms proceed to suck the oxygen out of the water, making the water virtually unlivable for most organisms. This isn't just a problem peculiar to various ponds or canals that you see in urban areas: there are entire dead zones along the coasts of developed countries, which ultimately are going to affect entire coastal systems.

That's one specific issue; there are plenty more. You're talking about multiple simultaneous fields of disruption, whose grim waves fan outward and crash into each other, producing greater instability. The disruption of multiple natural cycles and climatic tendencies is one thing; add to that rapid resource depletion, record species extinctions, and increasing internal instabilities of the human ecology itself - which are doubtless caused in large part due to the environmental antagonisms washing back after previous antagonisms - and you have the development of what amounts to a gigantic powder keg.

A living system has a tendency to re-establish homeostasis fairly reliably, but there are rare events in which there is catastrophic failure of multiple regulating systems, or there is an extreme environmental or climatic shock which completely rearranges the board. This is a complex problem that goes far deeper than merely isolating various causal chains of imbalance, though that itself is a useful exercise perhaps.

It is not that the manipulation of physical reality is an evil, it is the scale and the magnitude with which it is being done. Every living thing engages in some sort of manipulation to preserve energy differentials to sustain itself (a new theory in physics is attempting to use thermodynamics to make the argument that living things manipulate to disperse energy, which is another discussion altogether). This is the basis for complex life: as life forms manipulate their environment, this produces changing environmental landscapes for other life forms to live off of.

What we are seeing is the runaway growth and imperialism of a single species, whose mass scrambling and rearranging of the basic components of matter is generating an increasingly turbulent environment, which disrupts the processes of other life forms, processes that ultimately sustain the imperial species in the first place. What works in a limited and short-sighted manner for one species denies agency to all others. Collective industrial humanity is literally sawing off the branch it is perched on.

This is ultimately a problem of imbalance, which seems to lie at the base of most existential problems. You could imagine a nominally "sustainable" society, upon undergoing a process of successful growth, run into the same sort of problems.

Success, growth, absolute mastery, all of these things paradoxically undermine themselves at their peak. What else is there to do? This is life. It has happened before.

The baseline input to this process is usable energy. Fossil fuel consumption and refining, along with other chemical processes has managed to artificially extend the duration of our experiment in mass matter manipulation and experimentation. Our powers of manipulation have produced a bubble within which billions of mouths can be fed (barely) with petroleum-fueled industrial agriculture, which literally takes petroleum and phosphorous-derived chemical compounds to artificially boost soil fertility. Otherwise we are talking about a carrying capacity of one billion or so (from most figures I've seen) if we are relying on natural processes.

Declining oil reserves - it takes more energy to pump less energy-rich stores from the ground - put a strain on this process. This process relies on a baroque, functioning human ecology to keep the machinery running, the fragility of which is showing itself in parallel to the increasing fragility of environmental supports.

Time will tell whether the energy runs out before we do lasting damage to the environmental landscape, rearranging the coordinates within which life conducts itself. Maybe we've already done plenty already. Or maybe we will learn the error of our ways and reverse course, or maybe not. Well, as they say, the earth will be just fine, and so will the universe. It just depends on what we as a species want for our future.

One thing is for sure: this state of affairs is producing a collection of events that is rarely seen in human history (though in geologic history that is a different matter altogether). The experience of these events will reach down into the deepest crevices of our collective consciousness (and unconscious), which will produce not just a revolution in thought, but a revolution in emotional sensibility, upon which countless future ideologies will be built.

Still Kicking

It seems I've slowed down on this thing again. But it will be OK. When a lot of things are happening at once, I tend to sit back and see what themes emerge out of the chaos and then use those themes to structure the writing a bit. 

I've been studying various lines of thought that demand a restructuring of the old worldview, which is a process that has been underway for a couple of months now. On top of that I'm trying out modes of living that I'm not quite used to. As usual, some shapes are arising out of the murk that I can eventually cultivate and work with in the future. 

For now, just writing about virtual mountains, and then I have a doom and gloom ecological piece in the works. More to come I'm sure. 

Mountain

Mountain is a curious indie game that came out a bit ago in which you sit and watch a randomly generated disembodied mountain rotate slowly in space. There is disagreement about whether this is even a game; it certainly raises the question of what a game should actually do.

The game is closer to a screensaver or a virtual snow globe. You watch and listen and wait. You can spin the mountain around, or zoom out to space, or re-locate objects which have fallen on to the mountain (more on this later), but that is about it. The developer tells you there are no controls. No controls. He tells you to relax. To have patience. This short-circuiting of the traditional mode of gaming in which you are constantly active and feverishly striving toward some goal or metric is unpleasant to many players. Many casual passerby take a sniff, grimace, and move on.

The sun rises and then falls rhythmically, changing the lighting on the mountain. Trees grow and die. All of the seasons are cycled through complete with spring rains, buzzing summer nights with crickets and fire flies in the trees, autumn tree colors, and winter snow and bare trees. Clouds pass over the peak and condense to produce the rain and snow. 

The ambient soundtrack is wonderful. There is a steady hiss of wind, crickets at night, rainfall, those sorts of things. And they continue on, and on. You can put the game on and let it run in the background, with the sounds continuing on. 

There is something mysterious and intoxicating about the game. You find yourself coming back again and again to watch this mountain, to see what happens. I think part of this is because the mountain has occasional thoughts, which are often quite touching, with some of the thoughts evoking serious existential issues. 

The mountain often expresses its loneliness. It wonders to itself: "Am I alone because I'm not good?" Or "Am I alone because my trees are ugly?" It has metathoughts. It asks itself whether this is all just a simulation. Sometimes it is just content with a beautiful day. It has its ups and downs. It is certainly a sensitive mountain. 

It is these little hints that keep you coming back. It is that glimpse of substance which glimmers beneath the surface, which tells you to keep checking back, because perhaps this person is trying to tell you something. Otherwise the novelty would have worn off long ago. So you sit and watch, and then something makes you think, or the simple beauty just puts your mind in a relaxed, meandering state.

You do start to get bored here and there. But then these random objects of differing sizes begin falling out of the sky and embedding themselves in the mountain. You get planes, and blocks, and fans, and keyboards, and a record player that actually played a couple of songs to my surprise. So you sit and wait to see what else is going to land on the mountain. 

But then something interesting happens. As more objects fall and embed themselves on the mountain, you begin to feel uncomfortable. They start to look less like fun random objects and more like clutter, littering your beautiful mountain. And they just keep coming and coming over time, aggregating on the mountain surface. Soon there are no pristine surfaces for you to enjoy the natural expressions. The objects go from interesting things to just garbage. You grow more agitated and try to pick them off the mountain, but they keep sticking on.

Some of the objects do mysteriously disappear after a certain amount of time, perhaps to address memory concerns and keep things running smoothly? Other random things happen: some plants grow to freakishly huge proportions with no discernible explanation.

Mountain ends with a sudden eruption of anguished groans from some demonic choir, which signal the arrival of an incoming meteor that obliterates your mountain. The event is actually very sad; there is a deep feeling of loss. The player thinks back about all of the thoughts this sensitive mountain had – thoughts both mundane and profound – and feels a regret for the loss of an entity with character.

This is certainly anthropomorphizing the mountain, which is precisely the spirit of the coming era, and which will most likely form the basis of a future spiritual sensibility. It is all quite appropriate in any case. There is no telling what the rest of the universe “feels,” though it follows that we are certainly products and expressions of the universe itself, and that we are indeed the universe 

“feeling.”

A mountain, a landscape, strip-mined and littered with dead objects, appears to be "sad" or "dying." Human beings look upon the rapid deterioration of the environment, and the suffering of what were once considered “lower” lifeforms and a new tenderness and compassion for surrounding living systems is restored after a millennia of alienation from the natural world. Suddenly the world around us is buzzing with tender feeling; the solipsistic human self-pity is retracted from its deep inner existential recesses and is cast out over the cosmos as a glowing fabric, in the hopes of restoring this multitudinous connection.

A necessary feedback mechanism considering the catastrophic damage we have done and continue to do at a brisk pace, but which, in the end we must admit, is something the universe has done to itself. And so the healing process itself continues on even as we grind ourselves firmly into past ruts – both in a physical and metaphysical sense. The question now is what forms of life exactly will make it out intact, and what will be ground down into the chaotic and elementary dusts that are to be recycled back into the life system as the earth rights itself. 

Is this the sort of line of thought the developer intended? Well maybe some of it, maybe not. That's the point of a good work of art: it leaves room for extrapolation, so that the audience can participate as well. It was a nice experience anyways. 

Inside this Body

Yes, this is a strange body we've been living in, all of us sort of suspended, kept carefully separate in sterile compartments and connected through the approved media. A human face, or at least a superficial smiling facade has to be pasted over the skull, to reassure you and keep you coming to the trough. In a similar manner, researchers will wear primate costumes or masks to feed the primate young.

This social body takes its shape both through violence and nurture. It hardens at the points in which violent fire breaks out, softens at the points in which a human reassurance is needed to maintain a structural, communicative integrity.

The center right and the center left are charged with the task of maintaining this body, while the far right and the far left lap at its edges, either to restore the body to a mythical state or reshape the body entirely.

The body is in constant adjustment, to maintain homeostasis against destabilizing forces coming from all directions. Softer here, harder there. The masculine impulse strikes with assured violence at the enemy, while the feminine impulse nurtures and maintains its shape. Both impulses maintain the body.

And so but what happens to this body as the destabilizing forces overwhelm its equalizing mechanisms?

All this esoteric talk is just a loose attempt to describe the forces of maintenance and destruction that shape and shear a civilization I guess. There's no easy way to explain any of it really, save writing a book, and even then...