[Framework Post] Week 12: Critical Environmentalism.

In describing this week’s discussion, the first thing that needs mention is the very concept of “critical environmentalism”. The “critical” here refers to a discretion required of our thinking of the environment, hence questions of sustainability (like what are we actually sustaining?) or if there were thinking of nature as a separate space outside of our environment, etc arise to refocus environmental concerns from a, hopefully, more useful perspective.

The key difference as Verna Andermatt Conley says in Eco-Subjects (1993), is in the “necessity of thinking a human subject in the world”, which refers to the better sense of what the term ecology means—a system of inter-dependable relationships amongst entities. This is a departure from conceiving ecology as a definable and limited system, reducible to “subject and object” (79)—in turn lending power to the definer or categoriser of the system (namely the human species). Conley denounces this “subject and object” relation, and instead encourages “hear[ing] the language of things”, organic or otherwise (79).

This is an important first step in truly understanding ecology as a holistic environment in which we all preside in. There is no escaping into nature because that very concept of nature as a natural reserve or an unfound patch of 8 by 8m turf of forestation does not help in realising any objective in perpetuating life’s cycles. Whilst most people seem to know this as an instinctive concept within themselves, what doesn’t appear obvious however is if we also instinctively know what is it that we are (not) doing in our day-to-day pursuits to sustain our environment.

William Shakespeare unearths human’s conceit best in the play The Tempest (1612). In it, the leading character and exiled of his own land Prospero finds the time on an island to master his art of magic. With which he commands the obedience of natural forces:

The noontide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds,
And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire and rifted Jove's stout oak
With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory
Have I made shake and by the spurs pluck'd up
The pine and cedar: graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let 'em forth
By my so potent art. (5.1.125-132)

This art that Prospero commands is often read as man’s productive hubris of his rational abilities in science, language and other forms of human institutions. And in every way similar to Prospero, humans have been known to apply this hubris in a ceaseless project to better human lives, up to a point where ultimately it boils down to attaining longevity, even eternal life at the expense of his environment.

Are our lives’ pursuits and lifestyles inevitably geared towards such a fatality? And really, are we capable of drowning our art, as Prospero does to face and accept the ups and downs of life’s cycles?



References:

1. Conley, Verna Andermatt. “Eco-Subjects.” Rethinking Technologies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. 77-91.

2. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. 1612.