“Things Are in the Saddle, and Ride Mankind”

So said Ralph Waldo Emerson in the middle of the nineteenth century. As we proceed into the glowering gloom of the coming years, I always find it helpful—if not refreshing exactly—to place things in historic context. But also to recognize that there have been deep systemic paradigm shifts again and again—and those shifts don’t come at predictable times, and don’t have predictable effects, either at their moment of eruption, or as time passes and the “new knowledge” begins to percolate through other disciplines, other epistemological frameworks.

Sun setting in the west from Bernal Heights on Christmas Day, 2024.

As usual I’ve been reading a lot, and seven books will get a quote or a mention in this post. I absolutely loved The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth by Zoë Schlanger. Schlanger’s work contributes to a widening realization that our ideas of intelligence and communication are being radically revised. She spends a bit of time at the start of her book lamenting the role of the 1970s bestseller Secret Life of Plants for casting a long shadow over research into plant sentience and communication. That silly book took my generational cohort by storm and led actual scientists to distance themselves from any connection with such research. But Schlanger, who writes beautifully in addition to plumbing a wide variety of sources, makes it clear that a new sensibility is emerging. She visits labs where plant sentience is being researched and has the opportunity to watch as a clamp sends signals cascading throughout a plant from the spot where it is attached. She even discusses the work of Monica Gagliano, a plant scientist who showed that pea plants have the ability to follow water even in conditions of extreme isolation. Gagliano has since written about her experiments with psychedelics and insights she gained through such journeys, which has put her outside the boundaries of “real science” as maintained by those who police such borders. I wrote enthusiastically about Gagliano in a previous post “Plants are People, Too!” Here is Schlanger, helping to describe why the borders of our knowledge are in flux:

In 2012, a group of scientists gathered at the University of Cambridge to formally confer consciousness on all mammals, birds, and “many other creatures, including octopuses.” Nonhuman animals had all the physical markers of conscious states, and clearly acted with a sense of intention. “Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness,” they declared. (p. 41)

… plants could be said to have dialects, and are alert to their contexts enough to know when to deploy them. More than that, they have a clear sense of who is who; who is family, and who is not. They are in touch with their surroundings, and with the fluctuating status of their enemies. Their communication is not just rudimentary but complex and layered, alive with multiple meanings. (p. 66)

This all the more remarkable when you think about how hard our new Know Nothing (Own Everything) political and business leaders are doubling down on the false promise of Large Language Model-based “artificial intelligence,” which is demonstrably NOT intelligent in any meaningful sense of the term. Coming from a metaphysical angle to contemplate relationships between animate and inanimate worlds, Meghan O’Gieblyn (who I originally heard on the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast) writes in her fascinating meditative work God Human Animal Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

In the end, transhumanism and other techno-utopian ideas have served to advance what [Jaron] Lanier calls an “antihuman approach to computation,” a digital climate in which “bits are presented as if they were alive, while humans are transient fragments.” (p. 75) … But to blame the whole history of disenchantment on human egotism seemed too easy, and perhaps even at cross-purposes with what these new theoretical frameworks were trying to achieve. The discourse too often arrived at the strange conclusion that conceiving of the world, once again, as intelligent and alive would require renouncing those very qualities in ourselves. (p. 90)

Writing a few posts ago about Grove’s Savage Ecology led me to plumb his footnotes a bit and William Connolly came up a lot, apparently a mentor of sorts. He’s a prolific contemporary philosopher so it wasn’t easy to read his monograph Climate Machines, Fascist Drives, and Truth, but as a once-upon-a-time philosophy student I found my way. These same kinds of groping ruminations about where the boundaries are between different forms of intelligence, of life, of knowing, seep through his work too. In this longish quote he starts with Erasmus and ends with Sophocles (or is that Robert Johnson?):

Erasmus was impressed with what today would be called the self-organizing processes in species evolution. In such an image, the strivings of multiple intersecting entities, such as mutations, bacteria, and embryos, periodically enter into resonances with one another. Occasionally a new species emerges out of those that is irreducible to the simple replication of mutations alone. Evolution as self-organizing processes often enough includes horizontal processes exceeding the vertical processes involved in sexual relations.

Such an image of species evolution encourages less hubristic practices of science than those advanced today by proponents of climate geoengineering, cloning, nuclear physics, behavioral social science, neo-Darwinism, and—most generically—the pursuit of human mastery over a docile earth. It rather encourage scientists to watch and study life forms to gauge the multiple strivings, resonances, horizontal intersections, and bifurcation points through which evolution proceeds. A bifurcation point issues at least one if and one course actually taken. Sophocles would call it a crossroad. (p. 31)

I recommend checking out his short book for some important insights into the underpinnings of today’s neo-fascist politics, the deep roots of which go back to early Christianity, Calvinism, and the Church of England’s deeply racist world views, to be secularized by authoritarian political theorist Carl Schmitt and now taken up by vicious simpletons like Steven Miller. Connolly is great at drawing very disparate things into a coherent whole, though his run-on sentences are exasperating! He is equally attentive to the rising fascist tide as he is to the machinic progress of the climate catastrophe. He recognizes the collision course that we find ourselves on as implacable physics steadily overwhelms the willful stupidity that insists if your head is in the sand, nothing is happening above the surface. Connolly offers the thought that perhaps it’s in the very structure of our language where our misshapen sense of life is rooted:

The subject/predicate form of Indo-European sentences may misread the way of the world. That form tends to focus on objects as settled things and to underplay their temporal entanglements in a processual world. It also exaggerates the primordial unity of the subject. (p. 75)

Wintry sun over Mission Creek, new buildings dominate south side of water.

Leila Philip spent years tracking down the history of that most remarkable rodent, the beaver. In her Beaverland, she shows how capably beavers are at wetland creation, expansion, and maintenance. And as new research on riparian environments and the actual fractal structures of rivers in the wild become better understood, the essential engineering by beavers looms large—as much for their decades-long absence as for their sudden re-emergence on a burning, drying planet. She reaches the end of her wonderfully entertaining book with a parallel rumination on our connectedness to other species:

Increasingly, the identification of a strict line between what is purely human and purely animal seems dated. New research on “mirror neurons”—the name given to the part of the brain that enables us to understand one another’s behavior—for example, suggests that there is a neurological basis for the ways we can have “cognitive empathy” for the emotional and mental state of others. And if there is a neurobiological underpinning to empathy, why would it not exist in some form in animals? (p. 260)

Or as William Connolly puts it in a related comment:

The more aware we become of a multitude of microagencies—such as microbes, neuronal infusions, hormonal flows, and communicating rhythms and vibrations across milieux—that help to compose our moods, prejudgments, and thinking, the more we sense human subjectivity to be a biosocially organized multiplicity on the move. (p. 83)

Schlanger asserts in The Light Eaters, that “every level of life is an ecosystem, that all biology is ecology.” Dovetailing with Connolly’s point about how language structures our very thoughts, she offers this brief story:

When … a researcher [was asked] whether she thought plant structures could be considered analogous to the human nervous system, the researcher said no. She thinks trying to use human language for plants “cheapens plants,” because “it assumes we are the ultimate being.” Instead, plants are far more advanced than humans in multiple categories. Take the remarkable fact that they can produce complex chemicals, like caffeine. “These are skills we don’t have,” the researcher says. Comparing them to humans erases those capacities. (p. 250)

So we are in the midst of a paradigm shift of momentous proportion. At the bleeding edge of science, categories that most of us take for granted in our everyday lives are breaking down. Whether it is the notion that humans are uniquely aware, uniquely capable of communication, or even at its most crude, the only conscious beings on a planet full of objects that happen to be “alive,” we are beginning to see ourselves in the dense web of life. For sure, this is not new to indigenous peoples the world over. But after centuries of settler colonialism and the brutal destruction (ongoing) of so many ways of life, human and more-than-human, a lot of people who are products of that long arc of barbarism are finally (re)discovering our real place on Earth.

In Chaos in the Heavens: The Forgotten History of Climate Change the French historians Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher uncover a largely overlooked and forgotten history from 250 years ago. Rather than seeing our contemporary preoccupation with Climate Change as something entirely new, they delve into the early period when climate theories were a key element of thinking about history—when history itself was just beginning to be a category of careful contemplation.

Throughout eighteenth-century Europe, historiography was inseparably bound up with climate theories, some of which were organized around an anthropogenic change in climates. In this way, people sought to explain the ebb and flow of artistic greatness; to shed light on the origin and history of European nations and monarchies. And, at a time when the history of ‘peoples’ (Romans, Celts, Germans, etc.) was beginning to be written, the air was full of questions about the interconnected trajectories of populations and climates, which mutually and continuously shaped one another. (p. 43)

Of course at that time, before the takeoff of fossil fuel combustion, the interest in climate was framed quite differently. Instead of a sense of climate as an intelligible planetary system, climate was then understood in much more localized ways. Among some thinkers in the colonial center, climate served as a way to rank societies, and agriculture was thought to be a way to improve climates. “[The thesis of anthropogenic climate change’s] emergence marked a redefinition of the criteria of the savage and the civilized, in which religious and moral criteria receded in favour of the capacity to mould nature and, accordingly, to reproduce oneself as a biological entity, a sensitive being, a thinking subject.” (p. 51)

Deforestation was understood to change weather, which could then affect crop yields, fresh water supplies, etc. The French Revolution accelerated such concerns when crop failures contributed to that radical break with the monarchical society. Revolutionaries soon took up the rhetoric of “improvement” to bolster their revolutionary aspirations.

Against a feudal regime that blocked waterways, multiplied swamps, left plants to rot and the population to degenerate, revolutionary discourse pitted a republic that made things flow, drained and cultivated, warmed climates and rendered them healthy. (p. 89)

This logic spread quickly during the early 1800s and by the time settlers were spreading across the middle of North America, they were easily convinced by a Nebraska entrepreneur named Charles Dana Wilber that “rain follows the plow.” During most of the late 19th century, American farmers were convinced that by destroying the web of life that knit together the Great Plains, including plowing up the ancient grasses that fed the vast herds of buffalo, replacing it all with commodity wheat and cattle farms, that they were “improving” the land and helping to humidify the arid “Great American Desert” west of the 100th meridian and east of the Rocky Mountains. The1930s Dust Bowl put those fantasies to rest for good.

But the idea that we have a role to play in improving nature does not die easily. A posthumously published book by Karen Bakker called Gaia’s Web: How Digital Environmentalism Can Combat Climate Change, Restore Biodiversity, Cultivate Empathy, and Regenerate the Earth is a case in point. It’s hard not to be sympathetic to the author’s goal to pragmatically “direct digital innovation to environmentally sustainable ends.” Her stated goal is “to explore a different set of narratives for humanity’s relationship with the nonhuman, both natural and digital: kinship, regeneration, collaboration.”But Bakker has written a book that takes a profoundly Pollyannish approach to the use of digital technologies in ecological contexts. Thankfully she takes time on numerous occasions to point out that the uses of technologies she is proposing could be used for the opposite ends she favors.

She starts out by insisting that “planetary governance of the environment is possible only with planetary-scale computation.” One might ask if planetary governance itself is desirable? Not that national governments are doing a great job, but maybe the problem is with all governing structures that have come to dominate society? That’s a bit beyond her purview in this book. For anyone wanting to see the glass half full when it comes to digitalization and ecological management, this book will feel refreshing and hopeful. As Bakker suggests,

Digital Earth technologies enable continuous monitoring, and detection and potentially enforcement, when environmental harm is starting to occur. This is akin to the real-time, responsive digital technologies used in Smart Cities, but expanded to include a much wider range of ecosystems. By increasing the capacity to detect polluters and poachers in the act, regulators can enhance deterrence. (p. 37)

Just a few pages later she admits,

If left unchecked, it is likely that many digital technologies discussed in this book could advance this paradigm of biopolitical control, aligned with surveillance capitalism. Moreover, Digital Earth governance may exacerbate the problem of algorithmic bias, as it shifts environmental regulation to automated decision-making systems. Such biases might express structural inequalities of race, gender, or species membership. Specific individuals and communities might be unfairly targeted, or summarily excluded, by automated tracking systems. Scholars have also voiced concerns that citizen sensing is not, a priori, collaborative and democratic. Do data flows feed into predetermined interests of experts, scientists, and corporations, or do they enable citizens to provide meaningful input? Crowdsourcing may ironically entrench the expert hierarchies it purports to challenge. These concerns are further underscored by the increasing interest of Big Tech in digital environmental monitoring.

Later she repeats her concerns that the Digital Earth agenda rests on environmental degradation, human rights abuse, and socioeconomic injustice. She acknowledges the dirty reality of AI and high tech as prolifigate users of energy and water and knows where the raw materials come from. But like many people in our world, she wants to exonerate the physical realities by reminding us of the social relations that underpin it all. “It is not the digital nature of the technologies that is critical, but the systems of ownership, enterprise, and governance in which they are enmeshed.” (p. 106)

The most provocative part of her book is when she argues for a Parliament of Earthlings, something she claims digital technologies could help make possible.

Planetary computation, in other words, is not merely a set of tools for monitoring and manipulating the planet but also a potential means of extending political voice to nonhumans. Digital Earth networks are thus not merely extensions of the old engineering mantra of “command and control.” Instead, they offer us a new paradigm: “communicate and cooperate,” which extends a form of voice to nonhumans, who become active subjects co-participating in environmental regulation, rather than passive objects. The environmental becomes inescapably political, but the political is not solely human. (p. 126) … by using AI to decode patterns in nonhuman sound, we can gain new insights into how nonhumans communicate, while also enabling rudimentary attempts at two-way communication, mediated by robotics. Digital technologies, in short, offer new ways of engaging with nonhuman agency and voice. This is by no means novel (Indigenous traditions offer powerful ways of nonhuman listening) nor neutral (digital technologies can be misused and abused). But with caveats and safeguards, digital bioacoustics offers humanity a powerful new window into the nonhuman world. (p. 130) As humans deploy digital technologies to enhance our ability to monitor and decode this information, we create the potential for a new type of environmental governance, and a new type of multispecies politics. If communication is ubiquitous in nature, and is not unique to humans, then nonhumans can be said to possess a political “voice.” Indeed, nonhumans already exercise voice, in other words; but modern humans have been hard of hearing. (p. 131)

This all sounds rather rosy if you ignore the actual ways humans treat each other, let alone our typical relationship with the rest of the living world. As she concedes later, the power imbalances between humans and other species are a major shortcoming to this line of thinking. “… mobile marine protected areas or honeybee monitoring systems do not exist on a level playing field; the recognition of nonhuman “voice” does not automatically imply that humans will cede control to other species… it is a fine line between surveillance and political dialogue.” (p. 134)… Is it a fine line? Or a Grand Canyon? Bakker argues that in the absence of “equal rights,” the mutualism she hopes bio-digital technologies can promote stands little chance of standing up to predation or domination. She spends such a long time in this book laying out all sorts of creative ideas of how digital technologies could be deployed to augment and support a radically different way of life for humans and the more-than-human world, but very little time coming to grips with the power and inertia that prevents that way of life from being given a chance. At the end of the book she seems to realize that her boosterish vision stands little chance: “Why would powerful humans choose communion rather than dominion, kinship rather than ownership?”

Coalition on Homelessness protest camp under City Hall xmas tree, December 18, 2024.

By contrast Ashley Dawson harbors no illusions that power will roll over for such hopeful visions without an all-out struggle. His recent Environmentalism From Below: How Global People’s Movements are Leading the Fight for Our Planet is a bracing tour of desperate struggles mostly in the Global South. He gets us situated at the start of his book, a project to examine what global ecological restoration might look like if it were carried out by those who have been most fucked by the climate crisis. Starting from his participation in the 2012 People’s Summit in Cochabamba, Bolivia, he takes us through La Via Campesina’s efforts to promote an agroecological revolution among the world’s poorest farmers, the efforts of South African slum dwellers to appropriate electricity and begin to shape their own urban futures, and the campaign by Indian farmers and forest dwellers to resist fossil fuel extractavism that has its roots in British colonialism, and more! He starts by defining our predicament succinctly:

If humanity once faced an opposition between socialism or barbarism, in the words of Rosa Luxemburg, today we are at an even more chilling crossroads: “Humanity confronts a great dilemma,” the People’s Agreement [from 2012] argues, “to continue on the path of capitalism, depredation, and death, or to choose the path of harmony with nature and respect for life.” (p. 11)

I picked up this book hoping I’d be surprised to find successful movements across the planet, already wrenching the direction of society away from the plunderers and deranged billionaires, but no. I found many movements that I’m aware of and support, whether La Via Campesina or water protectors or any of the many other grassroots efforts to stake a claim to a future worth fighting for. But in terms of sheer power and magnitude, we are still a long ways off from being able to wrest control from the horrible people running the world. It remains an ongoing mystery how they maintain their power and control when almost nobody supports them or their way of organizing life. Living alternatives remain elusive, to say the least. Dawson denounces the Biden administration for approving over 7000 oil and gas drilling leases, far outpacing Trump’s first term in pushing us down a path of ecocide. He helpfully explodes the pious platitudes of the liberal version of the Green New Deal:

So, yes, a truly decolonial Green New Deal will ground private jets, it will heavily tax luxury penthouse apartments, it will defund the police and the military, and it may even make hamburgers more expensive. But it will also fund public parks and playgrounds, public art and public transit, public housing, libraries, and green schools. In short, it will be characterized by what the journalist George Monbiot called “private sufficiency and public luxury.” (p. 21)

That’s an agenda I can get behind. How grassroots movements will rise to the challenge and redirect everything in society remains a major challenge, to say the least. I like the way Dawson frames it:

It is important to understand that the climate emergency forms a political unconscious that is a constitutive feature of all contemporary public events. Urban climate insurgencies, in other words, don’t just include uprisings that explicitly challenge planetary ecocide; they extend all the way to struggles to guarantee social reproduction in the city. The urban climate insurgency should consequently be seen as an inherently intersectional form of mobilization . . . as the great radical urbanist Mike Davis puts it in a seminal essay, the question of who will be the protagonists of low-carbon urbanization in the Global South is perhaps the most momentous question facing the planet. (p. 79-80)

Mike Davis, who died a year ago, concluded that escaping the exterminist logic undergirding today’s fossil fuel frenzy will be on “a new Ark [that] will have to be constructed out of the materials that a desperate humanity finds at hand in insurgent communities, pirate technologies, bootlegged media, rebel science, and forgotten utopias.” (cited in Dawson, p. 107) Having spent almost a half century in my version of insurgent communities, using pirate tech and bootlegging our own media to promote forgotten utopias based on rebel science, I resonate with this vision. But I am also painfully aware of how far short it has fallen when faced with the actual dynamics of modern capitalism. The steady rise of neo-fascism as the capitalist “solution” to the cascading crises of our world is unlikely to succeed for long. But how will a counter-hegemony, a movement that is based on a reversal of the barbaric logic of this society, actually win? The steady emergence of new sensibilities, new ways of understanding the porous boundaries of life and its many forms, offer some real hope. As Zoë Schlanger found in the work of another writer, “the figurative membrane that separates organisms from the rest of the world doesn’t just leak; it lets the rain all the way in.” Now, how do politics emerge from that new understanding?