Heidegger, Politics and Climate Change: Risking It All 9781472546821, 9781847063809, 9781441197269

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The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave, The moon, their mistress, had expir’d before; The winds were wither’d in the stagnant air, And the clouds perish’d; Darkness had no need Of aid from them -- She was the Universe. Byron, 1816, Darkness

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Acknowledgements

This book is the result of 10 years of research. In many ways though, it is a result of all the myriad things that takes up a life. To that end, I would like to acknowledge my unique and special family, for being the vocal, argumentative, thoughtful and well-informed people that they are. The ideas I grew up with were full of egalitarian promise of a better and fairer way of doing things and this political sensitivity permeates my being and thinking. Thanks then, to Jim and Chris, Min and Gay, Nesta, Selwyn, Oliver, Jesse, Regan, Penny and all the kids. The book has developed out of my PhD, and that work was based on research and ideas from the University of Auckland in the 1990s. I would especially like to mention Jim Marshall, Michael Peters, Roger Dale, Alison Jones, Susan Robertson and Maureen Molloy, Julian Young and Charlie Guignon. My doctoral research in Scotland was possible through the generosity of the New Zealand Government’s Foundation for Research, Science and Technology ‘Bright Future’ PhD scholarship. My gratitude to the Ryoichi Sasakawa Scholarship that originally recognized my project, and the William Georgetti Scholarship that certainly helped with the extra costs of being in Scotland. The monetary exchange rate makes study in Britain a difficult transition for most students from the southern hemisphere and I could not have done it without this financial support. I would also like to mention some special friends and fellow writers from New Zealand: Claire Mouat, Adreanne Ormond, Andrew Gibbons, Richard Heraud, Melissa Spencer, Carl Mika, Ho-chia Chueh, Janet Mansfield, Maxine Stephenson, Makere Harawira, Kim Elliot. Thank you all for your companionable good cheer, respect and similar life trajectories. There have been several other friends, colleagues and students who made life really worth living in the West End of Glasgow, especially Brian Rodgers, Kate Adams, Ania Laing and Louise Welsh. Special thanks to Bernd Koch who helped me translate some of Heidegger’s difficult original documents. Most importantly of all, thanks to my son, James, who is a very special kid for cheerfully enduring so much change, travel, workaholism, monetary constraints and distance from those who love us best.

Abbreviations

Acronym

Definition

Brundtland Report IMF IPCC OECD OPEC ppmv

Our Common Futures International Monetary Fund Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Organization for Economic Development Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries Parts per million volume; ratio of greenhouse gas molecules per million molecules of dry air United Nations Conference on Environment and Development United Nations Development Programme World Commission on Environment and Development World Conservation Strategy World Conservation Union World Wildlife Foundation

UNCED UNDP WCED WCS WCU WWF

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Chapter 1

Globalization and the Environment

Pollution, overpopulation, overconsumption of scarce resources and climate change are problems that have caught the attention of sensitive people since the beginning of industrialization. Not surprisingly, environmentalism has been a deeply unpopular thesis. Pessimistic it may be; but increasingly, there is very good evidence to indicate that the environment is severely strained by the pollution from modern industrial processes and the lifestyle of consumerism. The planet’s climate is one example with a clear correlation between the pumping of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide into the atmosphere and the ‘greenhouse effect’ which is gradually warming the mean temperature of the globe. The purpose of this book is not to establish these facts but to explore its implications. If we take it seriously, it will have very real consequences on the consumer lifestyle that has been the objective and the norm of the betterdeveloped countries of the ‘West’ for some generations By and large, the aspirations for modern wealth and success permeate the poor of the world too. The technological, consumer lifestyle has become the primary goal, the marker of prestige, status and sex appeal. It also gained ground in ethics through the motif of meritocracy. In an ostensibly egalitarian world, massive disparities in wealth have been explained through such claims as ‘hard work’, ‘intelligent strategy’ and ‘perseverance in the face of failure’ rather than sheer good luck or callous disregard for the consequences of one’s actions on other people or the environment. Instead, the detrimental impact of consumerism has been swept aside as ‘externalities’ to the all-important market equation. Up until very recently, the issues of pollution, poverty and resource depletion have been talked about exhaustively but made little or no real headway in global policy or the mode of cultural practices in late modernity. Even at this late stage, the extinction of thousands of species as a result of the human culture of modernity has little impact or acknowledgement. Climate change has become the latest in a long list of environmental issues. In some ways, climate warming is not qualitatively different from any of the other problems issuing from industrial pollution, over-consumption and human over-population. However, it does present problems of a scale and urgency that have never been seen before. Global climate warming is extremely complex and caused by a variety of inter-related elements. The sun, for example, is the

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most significant cause of the temperature on planets in the solar system. Eventually, as the sun begins its declining years and heats up even further, the earth will be burned to a cinder. But for the present (measured in hundreds of thousands of years) the solar system is reasonably stable, which is what has made the earth so amenable to life. Sun flares, though, are probably contributing in some small measure to the present phase of global warming, as are the gases released from volcanic eruptions. However, a significant impact on this period of climate change is induced by humanity, beginning with the Industrial Revolution in the mid-eighteenth century (cf. IPCC summary, 2007). No one foresaw the greenhouse scenario in the past when the steam engine was invented but the immediate pollution was noticed – see, for example, Wordsworth’s resistance to the steam train through the Lake District at the turn of the nineteenth century. Part of our resistance to change is connected to that failure to take early responsibility for the side effects of industrialization. The signs have always been there, but we have developed sophisticated mechanisms, discourses and philosophical justifications for ignoring them. The greenhouse effect is the cumulative result of generations of people releasing a complex cocktail of gases as side-products of industrial processes, transport and energy, deforestation, mining and large-scale farming. This is not to say that all the gases in the atmosphere with a greenhouse effect are attributable to humanity. Far from it. However, by driving the levels of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide (to name the key players) higher than they have ever been before we have stimulated a new set of conditions that is now interacting with the previously existing circulation of greenhouse gases. For example, water is a greenhouse gas. Clouds trap light within the atmosphere, bouncing it back down onto the surface rather than letting it reflect out into space again. By heating the planet by 0.6 ºC, we increase the evaporation process, drying out the soil, heating the oceans and increasing the density of cloud and precipitation. There are some mitigating effects to cloud too. It shields sunlight from entering the atmosphere in the first place. Atmospheric conditions are vastly multifaceted, and we are only beginning to understand some of the processes and tendencies that are occurring. Nevertheless, the globalized culture of modernity is having a profound, and extreme, effect on the inter-related aspects of our environment (see Figure 1). Falling yields in food crops, changes in the supply of fresh water as a result of glacial melts, water reservoir exhaustion, rise in sea level, extensive damage to ecosystems and rising numbers of extinct species all characterize climate warming. Even more extreme weather conditions, including storms, forest fires, drought, flooding and heat waves, and increasing risk of ecological feedbacks and the possibility of overstepping the threshold necessary to maintain life, are all the results of pollution and the greenhouse effect (Stern, 2008). The scientific guesswork about where that threshold might be will never exactly be known, unless we overstep it. We do know that the Siberian permafrost has been melting

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(a) Global atmospheric concentrations of three well mixed greenhouse gases

CO2 (ppm)

360

1.5

Carbon dioxide

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1.0

320 0.5

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Methane

0.5 0.4

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1250

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1000

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750

310

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Radiative forcing (Wm−2)

1750 CH4 (ppb)

Atmospheric concentration

260

0.15

Nitrous oxide

N2O (ppb)

0.10 290

0.05 0.0

270 250 1000

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1400 1600 Year

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Sulphur 50

100 25

0 1600

1800 Year

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SO2 emissions (Millions of tonnes sulphur per year)

Sulphate concentration (mg SO4 = per tonne of ice)

(b) Sulphate aerosols deposited in Greenland ice

Figure 1 Indicators of human influence since AD 1000. Source : IPCC, Working Group I, Summary for Policy Makers, figure 2 available at http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/figspm-2.htm.

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for about 5 years, and that soils all around the globe are beginning to release greenhouse gases (especially methane) and that parts of the ocean have warmed to the extent that they are no longer operating as a carbon ‘sink’ but, from around 2005, have actually begun releasing more carbon than they absorb. For practical purposes, and for reasons of political will for change as much as the scientific analysis of the parameters, most environmentalists in the field suggest that a global average of 2 ºC warmer than pre-industrial levels is the highest threshold possible. Beyond 2 ºC to 4 ºC, the climate’s feedback systems are significantly altered and new configurations that are likely to be unpleasant, if not unbearable, for human civilization take hold (IPCC Summary, 2007). Which is why, I think it is a problem to continue to blindly obey the norms and technological faith of modernity (cf. Peters, 2001a: 116–117 for explication of the rationalist, scientist, capitalist and Idealist framework of ‘modernity’). Bringing our awareness to benefit the health of humanity and the health of the planet is the philosophical enterprise of this book. The aim is not to reject technology, out of some puritan ethos, or to optimistically believe that technology is capable of solving the problem that it helped to create. Rather, my aim here is to begin the process of thinking anew, the relationship humanity has assumed in hierarchical opposition to the natural world, in more ecological, integrated and ethical terms. The steps to achieving this very ambitious project involve engaging with the science, while recognizing how it helps and how it limits our knowledge and modes of being. It involves engaging with politics particularly the policy imperatives of pan-global organizations. Moreover, it involves interrogating the philosophical assumptions of modern epistemology and of the impact of modern technology. The extent of the environmental impact of modern activity is beginning to emerge through several important scientific studies. There are a number of methods used by paleoclimatologists to ascertain past geologic and atmospheric conditions. Among them, tree rings, isotopes in fossils and rock, triple-isotope composition in the oxygen trapped in historically bedded ice, all of which give evidence about the prevailing conditions in the past. There have been four of these immense ice ages over the lifetime of the planet, that we know of.1 We know that the earth has been in a long cool period, over the last 30 million years, and particularly over the last 4 million years. The contributing factors to these immense periods of climate warming or cooling seem to be the position of continents (large landmasses in high latitudes make ice build-up possible, the oceans are too volatile), tectonic uplift (high mountains), reduction in atmospheric carbon dioxide and the orbit, axis and position of the poles. Within these general periods of cool climate, glaciers advance and retreat in cycles that last tens of thousands of years. There have been more than 60 glacial advances and retreats in the last 2 million years. In the larger context of the 30-million-year cool period, our present climate is probably a short warmish recession, between two more intensive glacial periods.

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The last Ice Age (lasting thousands of years) peaked some 18,000 years ago. In the last 850,000 years, there have been eight ice ages, or increases and reductions in glaciers.2 The contributing factors seem to be levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit (where in its 100,000 year cycle, the earth is positioned in relation to the sun), the tilt of the earth’s axis (varying over a 41,000 year cycle from 21.6 º–24.5 º) and the wobble or oscillation of the earth’s axis which affects when the equinox falls. These variables can make a 15 per cent variation in the climate conditions in the higher latitudes, decreasing or extending daylight hours and affecting the distribution of solar radiation. All things considered, according to planetary conditions, we seem to be in a relatively mild period. Perhaps one of the most significant studies for understanding our planetary conditions is the Siple ice core samples from the Antarctic. Core samples of ice from the South Pole have given us very accurate information on the natural variation and rhythm of ice ages over the past 650,000 years (see Figure 2).3 Gases trapped in these samples enable us to know the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and they reveal that the amounts circulating before the Industrial Revolution was on average 280 ppmv (Barnola, Raymond, Loruus,

CO2 concentration (ppmv)

340

320

300

280

260 1700

1800

1900

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Gas age (A.D.)

Figure 2 Atmospheric carbon dioxide record from the Siple Station ice core. Source : Neftel, Albrecht, Hans Friedli, E. Moor, H. Lötscher, Hans Oeschger, Urs Siegenthaler, Bernhard Stauffer, (1997). Data available from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, US Department of Energy, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA available at http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/ co2/siple.htm, (accessed 26 April 2008)

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Barkov, 2003 and 1987 Nature 329: 408–414). 4 By 1984, levels of carbon dioxide had increased by 22.5 per cent to 345 ppmv (Neftel, et al., 1997). For our purposes, the most startling information to emerge from this study of 650,000 years of continuous history is that even during periods of warming the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere never exceeded 280 ppmv (ibid.). Since 1750, around the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, levels of carbon dioxide have steadily risen. From the ‘natural background’ levels of less than 280 ppmv that prevailed for hundreds of thousands of years, today the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is well over 370 ppmv. The same sudden jump can be seen for methane and nitrous oxide (see Figure 1). It is true that there are significant realms of the climate over which humanity is completely unimportant. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that as a species, and as a result of the practices of modernity, we are having a very detrimental impact on the global ecosystem, that is accelerating the greenhouse effect and causing a dramatic increase in the average global temperature. This may have pleasant side effects in some particular areas of the planet; but as a whole, it will increase storms, fires, drought, and could eventually tip environmental conditions beyond the point of viability for human life. Environmentalism is a vast field, and although most of us are aware that the modern lifestyle is having calamitous effects on various specific ecological niches, nevertheless, in general, we have found ways to shrug our shoulders and get on with life – because we have to. At the same time, we have felt impotent on a personal, individual level, about affecting any real change. The monolith of modern, consumer culture has just been too immense, and too caught up in its own success story to allow any capacity for a meaningful paradigm shift. Indeed, those elements of the population who have endeavoured to question, challenge or offer alternatives to the modern consumer lifestyle have been increasingly marginalized. Eccentricity used to be a common and reasonably acceptable aspect of life through until the 1980s, when corporate culture and technologies of surveillance extended their sphere into nearly every corner, every farmyard, every alleyway, office block and retail store, leaving very few perches intact for erratic, unpredictable, creative or ‘mad’ behaviour (Foucault, 1992a). Traditional communities got on with living and dying according to their own customs until ‘global development’ defined them as a poor underclass without rights (Esteva and Prakash, 1998). The element of environmental damage that is demanding a deep cultural shift, in ways as yet unforeseeable, is global climate warming. Climate warming is in itself, only a segment of the problem of over-population and environmental pollution, but the scale of it, and its global impact is bringing us up to a wall faster and more definitely than anything else we have experienced before. Similar frustrations to the Cold War are apparent. Under the Bush Administration, the American Federal government has refused to engage with the scientific

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data about climate warming or the global political pressure to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. The lack of commitment or leadership for change from a historically very powerful State has allowed other nations to publicly or quietly fail to enforce the Kyoto objectives for reducing greenhouse gas emissions to the levels of 1990 and preferably lower. The World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environmental Programme established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988. The IPCC has collated and assessed data from a wide variety of scientific studies and created climate change models that project possible future scenarios based on different responses and levels of emissions. The amount of data is incredibly vast, and, yet, our understanding of the very complex issues of atmosphere and climate is far from adequate. Not least of the issues is that once pollutants are introduced into the atmospheric cycle they can take unknown hundreds of years to bond in ways that make them inert again. The models produced by the IPCC in 2001 suggest that there will be a global increase of averaged surface temperature of between 1.4 ºC to 5.8 ºC between 1990 and 2100. The Chairman, Pachauri states that [t]his is about two to ten times larger than the central value of observed warming over the 20th century, and the projected rate of warming is very likely to be without precedent during at least the last 10,000 years, based on paleo-climate data. (Pachauri, IPCC, 7 December 2005) These estimates were revised in 2007. The newer models are based on a better understanding of data and the influences of various factors on the oceans, soils, ice sheets and atmosphere. There are a range of model scenarios that guess the amount of radiation forcing, or increase in global warming from greenhouse gases. The mean warming averaged over a decade is likely to be 0.2 ºC over the next 20 years. If we lower and stabilize our emissions at 2000 levels, the mean temperatures are still going to increase by 0.1 ºC (IPCC, 2007: 12). With better analysis of data in the Fourth Assessment Report, the best estimate for the lowest scenario has also risen to 1.8 ºC and the worst scenario has been lowered to a ‘likely’ 4 ºC (IPCC, 2007: 13). This kind of data presents humanity with several options. We can ‘bury our heads in the sand’ and continue to live following cultural practices and norms until the conditions of life are completely unsustainable and, most likely, a sudden collapse in environmental conditions will effectively finish human cultures of modernity. We can modify and adapt modern culture by promulgating eco-friendly technologies within the present economic and managerial paradigm, somewhat ameliorating the problem but fundamentally continuing to corrupt the ethos of care and meaningfulness of both the earth and the raison d’être of humanity. Or we can alter our cultural practices in a deeper and more

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fundamental way by reassessing the philosophical norms that underpin the policy and political paradigms of modern thinking and praxis. This book takes the latter option, oscillating amid philosophy and praxis, between environmentalist theories and the prevailing paradigm of global economic politics, between the arts and the sciences. Environmental problems such as climate change signal a lack of congruity in the relationship between humanity and the earth that presses for a shift in the culture of modernity. The environment presents ongoing technical and policy requirements on one level but more importantly far-reaching adaptation strategies which also challenge the basis of traditional philosophy. Global climate warming is bringing humanity to a threshold with viable conditions for human life on the planet, quite possibly within the lifetime of most of us alive right now. The finitude of the lives of any species is an inevitable component of all life-scales, but such a rapid ending is neither necessary nor, I would think, desirable. This book seeks to engage with global warming philosophically and politically. The threshold that climate change introduces brings the ecological relationship of humanity and the environment into stark relief in ways that have rarely been enunciated by Western philosophers or politicians in the past. Recognition of the integration and capacity of human meaningfulness has been limited to poets, artists and scientists. They have often been perceived as relics of a Romantic or Luddite past rather than the harbingers of the future. The book seeks to understand both the constructive and the nihilist elements of modernity, technology and theories of knowledge. Understanding the capacities of culture and the environment at this deep level enables a better grasp of political direction and the underlying premises of technology and culture which have driven us in the direction of a climate crisis in the first place. It raises questions about epistemology that derive from the traditions of philosophical Idealism and show up in, for example, the Methoden Streit, or struggle over method, in the Austrian school (Herbart, Menge). In contrast to the historical materialism of Hegel (and later Marx and Foucault), where historical events and content informs form and theory, Herbart was adamant that theoretical form has to separate from content – a view that prevails in Neoliberalism today. These debates continue to play out in the Neoliberal emphasis on the correctness of economic models, regardless of evidence that the market is inadequate to the task of describing, (re)distributing or any meaningful engagement of humanity with the environment. On the other hand, faith in the teleological improvement of technology as the means of increasing efficiency and continuing with the modern way of life seems just as over-optimistic and ignorant of a multitude of contra-indications. To this end, I have attempted to engage with the philosophical bases of modernity, technology and cultural change, with the aim of rethinking the basic relationship and phenomenological capacities that blend and separate humanity and the environment.

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Facts, concepts and causality In his book, On Human Nature and the Understanding, (1776), David Hume carefully teased out the limitations of human concepts from correlation with phenomena. He argued that all correlations are interpretative and, because the environment is extraordinarily intricate, there may be many aspects contributing to the events of which we are either ignorant or failing to take seriously. Concepts are only makeshift at the best of times and as more and more data that contradicts the accepted understanding becomes apparent, then, we have to amend, ‘correct’ or completely change our conceptual interpretation. Causal connection is exceedingly complex, and relies on empirical evidence, and our best, most fully informed, guesswork. Hume’s text is usually placed in the rational empiricist school, and he is part of the long philosophical tradition of Idealism. Like Kant, however, Hume is responsible for a crucial ‘turn’ or about-face in philosophy because his careful delimitation of the boundaries of human enquiry resituates the environment as concrete and with a continual impact on human reason. Hume reversed the representational flow that Descartes, Berkeley and even Schopenhauer attributed to humanity. Instead of being the prime mover, or in the Idealist sense, the prime conceptualizer of representations about the world, Hume posited that the world speaks back, continually correcting or arguing with humanity’s poor attempts to understand it. Without in anyway pre-empting Hegel’s faith in the telos of history, Hume’s position is another important argument against the ‘form without content’ argument of the eighteenth-century Austrian Methoden Streit. 5 In stark contrast to the pure method or form, Hume is far more cautious about the parameters of human epistemology. We have a rough patchwork of understanding of the environment that has the pragmatic purpose of creating a reasonably consistent field of understanding that we all agree upon, in a sophisticated interplay of linguistic exchanges, which are generally reliable yet flexible, our concepts ‘world’. Our view of the world makes sense of the flow of events, reactions, responses, alterations and change. A good worldview attempts to be all-encompassing, consistent and reasonably predictable. It correlates, as well as possible, with the events in the environment. This broad consistency allows people to function on a daily basis. Most of the time, we interchange the term ‘world’ with ‘earth’ or ‘environment’ completely unselfconsciously. Yet these terms name altogether different things, and they are only commensurate because our world-view has become so completely normalized that it ‘is’ the earth. Environmental events show up, in our world, in ways that often reinforce our reading of events in the plane of consistency that we attribute to scientific laws, or truths. Anomalies in our understanding often go unnoticed until their frequency or urgency begins to demand attention while a theorem can appear to explain events reasonably consistently. As Newton’s Law of Gravity illustrates,

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all laws can eventually be shown as inaccurate, and better explanations need to emerge. Correlations between conceptual interpretations and facts and events in the environment are always tenuous. Any absolute truth or ‘law’ never perfectly correlates with empirical events, even with the closest specification possible. In many ways, these questions have perplexed epistemologists for millennia. Aristotle tried to solve the problem by distinguishing between the ‘essential’ and the ‘accidental’ (Aristotle, 1972). To a certain extent, ‘accidents’ do not dissolve the applicability of a generalization or categorization, so we can still name things with relative consistency. At some point though, the large number of anomalies can mount a serious challenge to the definition of a particular category. Despite their purported absolute or essential characteristics, Aristotle’s Categories, and Descartes’ and Kant’s after him, have all been altered and amended in the years that followed. Hume argues that the logic of cause and effect is always inferred after the fact, such that ‘cause’ is attributed from the effect, rather than the other way around. This is because, even if we perceive the same event leading up to the same result 99 times, we can never be sure whether some secret unknown power has actually been promoting the effect all along, and continues to do so the hundredth time, or whether some other unknown power will disrupt the sequence prompting the causal connection to fail. The logical connections or relationships boil down to resemblance and contiguity (of space and time) because we can never know all the causes or all the effects. That is not to say that cause and effect does not occur; they are necessary relations. Nevertheless, we are only partially aware of their relationships. History (and science) is a selective genealogy of the unity of action. In a word, then, every effect is a distinct event from its cause. It could not, therefore, be discovered in the cause, and the first invention or conception of it, a priori, must be entirely arbitrary. And even after it is suggested, the conjunction of it with the cause must appear equally arbitrary, since there are always many other effects which, to reason, must seem fully as consistent and natural. In vain, therefore, should we pretend to determine any single event or infer any cause or effect without the assistance of observation and experience. (Hume, 1962: 51) Empirical contingency is based on nominal scepticism. The sceptical limits of true knowledge of natural order make it impossible to fully grasp or control the necessary order, without denying that in all likelihood there probably are tendencies that recur – the sun to ‘rise’ daily for example. Nominalism places scare quotes around all our categories or names and, in deeper ways than that, recognizes that essential characteristics are contingent on empirical evidence – which might change unexpectedly, at any moment, because it is never in human

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control. We make correlations between events and effects that function as normal and upon which we base our assumptions and world-view. However, as the Franciscans insisted in the Middle Ages, human beings are inadequate to the task of ultimate knowledge or ultimate mastery over nature. Causal connection has been one of the staple assumptions of human beings in many, if not all, cultures over time. The concept of causality itself may be essential to human functioning, as it grounds the consistent principles which we need to produce ourselves and our understanding of our environment as ‘calculable, regular, necessary’ (Nietzsche, 1989: 58, essay II, § 1). Nevertheless, any causal relation that we come up with is empirically and philosophically contingent: Elasticity, gravity, cohesion of parts, communication of motion by impulse – these are probably the ultimate causes and principles which we shall ever discover in nature; and we may esteem ourselves sufficiently happy if, by accurate inquiry and reasoning, we can trace up the particular phenomena to, or near to, these general principles . . . [that] staves off our ignorance . . . The observation of human blindness and weakness is the result of all philosophy, and meets us, at every turn, in spite of our endeavors to elude or avoid it. (Hume, 1962: 62) So for Hume, nominalist doubt maintains human ignorance as an ontological limitation. It forges our physiological parameters and, at the same time, it constitutes the imaginative, intuitive and scientific centre of our culture and subjectivity. Though I think he took many of his ideas from mediaeval theology,6 his secular turn takes away the chaotic devilry, or omnipotent agency, of a mischievous God from the equation. Interruptions to the expected chain of events are not miracles but mysteries. Nominalist doubt or scepticism stimulates speculation and thought whenever our previous generalizations and rationalisms are disproved by events. Our notions of causality are incomplete. We may have assumed that a contingent relationship was a causal one, when instead (or as well) other factors were also necessary to stimulate a given situation. The vastly complicated network of relations is often in excess of our simple associations. Hume has resuscitated Aristotle’s theme of necessary relations; it is just that nominalist doubt maintains inevitable distance between the truth of revelations of necessity and contingency. Even with the ‘laws’ of maths and physics he cautions that the discovery of the law itself is owing merely to experience; and all the abstract reasonings in the world could never lead us one step toward the knowledge of it. When we reason a priori and consider merely any object or cause as it appears to the mind, independent of all observation, it never could suggest to us the notion of any distinct object, such as its effect, much less show us the inseparable and inviolable connection between them. (Hume, 1962: 25)

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Experience generates expectations of predictable, repeatable series of events. When we say ‘I have always found this quality to be attached to that object or event in the past’ and then infer that this will always occur in the future, it is not a tautology, ‘the one proposition is an inference from the other; but you must confess that the inference is not intuitive, neither is it demonstrative’ (Hume, 1962: 57). Nor is the inference ‘experimental’ – it merely assumes predictability and repetition. Despite Hume’s insistence on the contingency of our ideas about cause and effect, and the precarious state of continuing predictability of factors that contribute to events we, as a species, have a huge necessity for conceptualizing a consistent and predictable world. Without common understanding and shared beliefs, any human will go mad. This imperative for conceptual consistency, or a ‘world-view’ is functionally necessary for the human animal. Changing the conceptual basis of our world-view meets with a great deal of resistance. Particularly for those who have the most to lose. Many of the sailors on ships heading towards the edge of a flat earth were not enamoured of newfangled ideas about a spherical globe, and some threatened to mutiny. In our times, the ‘flat earth’ is the Neoliberal separation of form from content, that is still promulgated by the pan-global organizations that have an increasing sphere of influence over national politics, infrastructure, amenities, services, education, health, welfare, the stockmarket and multinational corporations. With their world-view of a microeconomic formula that describes all aggregated, rational, individual behaviour in terms of statistics and predictable ‘populations’ they have managed to slot all elements of the environment into the metaphors dictated by the free market. While acceptance of these metaphors as normal encourages certain behaviours, cultural practices and economic assumptions, it bears very little resemblance to the actual drivers of people’s actions that are embedded in communities and ecological localities. Having separated form from content, Neoliberalism has cushioned itself from the empirical disparities that continue to demonstrate the inadequacy of greed as a model of behaviour and the Invisible Hand of the market as the best mode of making cultural and political decisions. With these leaders and policy directives, we sail ever closer to the edge.

Risk Events flow in a predictable manner, the world-view remains stable and human endeavour unfolds satisfactorily. Anomalies to this happy state of affairs are ignored for as long as possible. Eventually, when the anomalies are too frequent and invasive to be ignored, they often show up as crisis. This is not simply a failure in comprehension but because our generalized behaviour is governed by the ‘worlding’ of events according to our conceptual norms. However, because our world is patchwork and only partially adequate, the anomalies build-up,

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unnoticed. Einstein’s physics is a good example of the paradigm shift that anomalies often require. The examples that will keep cropping up in this book are the ‘externalities’ to the market system. The market has been attributed with the explanatory powers that bind the entire world. Externalities and the public good are the two exceptions to the ability of the market metaphor to influence and ‘balance’ all transactions, interactions, items and events in the world. Global climate warming keeps exposing the ways that the market metaphor is inadequate. As Britain’s Royal Economist, Nicholas Stern, made clear in his recently released report, ‘Climate change presents a unique challenge for economics: it is the greatest example of market failure we have ever seen’. The effects of long-term pollution, especially carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, on the atmosphere are far more intricate and pervasive than can be accounted for by the market. It is a crisis of such proportions that the world has never before acknowledged. Even the risk of nuclear devastation only partially prepared us for the looming finitude of an era tenable for life on earth that climate warming threatens. However, the market is purported to answer all questions and explain all events by most economists and politicians. The ease with which Neoliberal theory indicates the Ideal models that explain complex human behaviour has made it very beguiling for governing institutions. What is more, the theoretical models of the Neoliberal market seem to explain every event that occurs in the modern world. What were ‘anomalies’ eventually become included in the Neoliberal lexicon. Environmental finitude has been included through the rubric of ‘sustainability’, and instead of averting crises through a paradigm shift; Neoliberalism optimistically and inclusively encompasses crises through the calculation of ‘risk’. Risk gets included in the market metaphor through the apparatus of Insurance. Insurance commodifies risk, and any commodity can be included in the cost/benefit equations of the market. Ascertaining the thresholds and indicators of risk make it possible to makes a quota for ‘acceptable’ pollution and, in turn, the quota can be bought and sold (as vouchers or tax) on the market.

Oil The risk matrix can be seen in relation to oil. The depletion of the resource is an opportunity for producing nations to make a great deal of money, as we saw during the 1970s oil shocks. The latest shortage has produced very lucrative wars and destabilized otherwise wealthy and powerful areas of the world. The technological enframing of human culture has set alight the fastest consumption of oil to occur in ecological history. Oil generates the mass transportation that has made the globalization of capitalist production and individual consumerism possible across the earth. However, at the turn of the millennium,

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the oil industry began releasing information that the supplies of oil in virtually every field across the globe that is easily accessible to Western nations have peaked.7 ‘Peaking’ is when the subterranean pressure of the oil reservoirs will push oil out of the ground until the amount of oil has diminished to the point that there is no longer enough pressure. At this point, the fields have ‘peaked’ and the oil must be pumped to the surface: slowing production, increasing costs and exposing the extent of diminishment of the ‘resource’. In general, most oil fields in Alaska, Australia, parts of Africa and so forth are diminishing at a rate of between 4 per cent and 6 per cent per annum (ExxonMobil, 2003 cited in PSRAST, 2004). In the United States, Texas oil peaked and began to subside in the 1970s, stimulating the first ‘oil shock’ as the United States realized it was going to be forced to rely upon foreign oil. The 1970s oil shock was itself accused of being a discursive strategy aiming at trumping up scarcity to increase prices. For a while North Sea oil made Great Britain self-sufficient, however, production peaked in the 1990s. It has dropped 17 per cent since 1998.8 Political commentator, George Monbiot wrote in The Bottom of the Barrel as follows: On Thursday, the government approved the development of the biggest [North Sea oil] deposit discovered in British territory for at least 10 years. . . . You begin to recognise how serious the human predicament has become when you discover that this ‘huge’ new field will supply the world with oil for five and a quarter days. (2003) ‘Discursive strategy’ or not, recognition of the finitude of oil is making an impact globally. As a discourse of ‘crisis’ it has not transformed the world’s reliance on mass transport or altered the modern approach to environmental damage and pollution. The crisis should be a good exemplar of Hume’s argument that interpretations and world-view collapse when too much empirical evidence indicates how inadequate they are. Instead, the oil shock altered the political landscape but left the conceptual apparatus of modern consumerism, and the market, intact. Even while, to a certain extent, exhaustion of oil should have drawn attention to the finitude of environmental resources in general and subsequently changed our attitude to consumption. Oil has been the icon of tension for environmentalists and illustrates the scope of late-modern trade and macroeconomics. It has enabled large-scale, cheap transport that allows a majority of individuals in developed nations unprecedented movement between local and far-distant communities and places. The global distribution of multinational industrial production relies completely on cheap, large-scale transport. If the price of transportation of materials increases exponentially, it will no longer make sense to build component parts in far-flung reaches of the globe. Unless the technology for a viable

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alternative is developed, the finalé of the oil crisis will entail the return of localized material production. The end of the post-Fordist and ‘MacDonaldized’ era of production and consumption could be irrevocably transformed (Dale, 1997). Oil has been framed as a crisis of finitude. While there is undoubtedly truth in the argument, it is not the oil running out that is bringing us to the ecological limit. The real problem is the conversion of the oil reserves, that were inert, underground and not reacting with the rest of the surface climate of the planet, into active carbon dioxide that is circulating through the oceans, the atmosphere and the surface soils. Well before oil is even remotely near running out, carbon dioxide emissions will have helped shift the climate from moderate to overheated, making it unable to support most life forms as we know them today. The discourse of the finitude of oil averts us from the real crisis, which is pollution. We have been so saturated with the discourse of crisis, that we are not particularly responsive to any kind of clarion call. Due to the nature of the need for a consistent and predictable world-view, the process of a paradigm shift is entered into very reluctantly. Heidegger argues that we are in the vicinity of ‘the line’ or the threshold within which life is possible and past which we have no bearing because it is beyond our viability. Being near the line, or threshold, is ultimately richer than any previous era, because the finitude of beingsas-a-whole is fully lit up. There is neither escaping the nature of our way of being in the world, nor the constraints on our understanding and communication by the technological horizon. We can no longer blindly believe in the unfolding progress of modernity, when it has clearly brought us to such a brink. The deterioration in global climate must bring our attention to what is meaningful, what is possible and what is culturally healthy. This period of utmost necessity, when the status quo brings us to the brink of extinction, sets about conditions for new thinking and profound cultural shifts to take place. The models that have been projected by the IPCC are part of this process of reimagining. They have set up two basic types of future culture. One remains extremely multinational with large transport networks and global production intact. The other envisages a more segmented regionalism where transport and information flows are no longer as closely connected as they are today. All their other scenarios are on fine detail variabilities on these two basic models (IPCC, 2007). While there is still some controversy about whether or not global warming is a ‘fact’, whether it is a result of human activity or part of a natural cycle, there is no doubt that pollution and resource depletion are going to affect the consumer lifestyle that characterizes the customs of the ‘West’. Exponential increases in human population, pollution and the consumption of nonrenewable ‘resources’ have emerged concurrently with industrialization and the epoch of modernity. Now global climate warming is highlighting the unsustainability of industrial practices; we are in urgent need of new policy directions,

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new cleaner technologies, new philosophical imperatives and a new set of assumptions about the nature of humanity and the nature of Nature.

Policy This book begins with the global policy arena. Policy makers are putting real effort into understanding and responding to climate change, particularly at the pan-global level. In 1st section analyses the latest discussion documents on the environment and the concept of sustainability, especially the Neoliberal Third Way advocated by Anthony Giddens and the erstwhile OECD Minister for the Environment, Simon Upton. The total mobilization of surveillance and management are the guiding motif of Upton and Giddens (amongst others). The discourse of total management and the market balance of Pareto optimality at once recognize and unwittingly contribute to the risks of exceeding the necessary environmental conditions for human life. Upton argues that pollution vouchers are the only way of encouraging the United States to ‘account’ for and acknowledge the responsibility for exorbitant pollution levels. The economic ‘externalities’ of pollution need, they argue, to be included in the formula of costs/benefits so that the full expenses of consumerism can be paid for in the marketplace. The techniques of surveillance, management and the economic paradigm are subject to Heidegger’s critique of the technological enframing of culture. So, Heidegger’s ideas about technology and modernity are closely examined. Heidegger suggests that refocusing on the primary questions that make it meaningful to be human – the question of Being – could create the means for alternative discourses that both challenge and sidestep modernity’s fascination for total surveillance and total control. He advocates recognizing thoroughly the problematic relationship humanity has with the environment (or Being) and reinventing new trajectories of understanding for ourselves and our planet. This neither involves rejecting technology nor does it mean relying upon technology to ‘fix’ environmental problems. It is not by any means ‘intelligent design’. Heidegger’s focus on the question of Being creates a paradigm shift from positivist surveillance and management. He evokes creativity as a means to reinvigorate ways of being and knowing that do not rely narrowly upon consumerism. A brief summary of each chapter follows.

1. Globalization and the environment The conditions required for the existence of life are bounded and these thresholds are being compromised by modern consumption patterns, industrial scale production, pollution and overpopulation. The context in which we find ourselves after 250 years of industrial production is divorced in any meaningful way from our local ecology – having enlarged our niche to take advantage of

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every facet of resource in every corner of the globe. Capitalist production is only possible through incredibly sophisticated modern technology that allows us to wrest elements from the earth with little regard for the seasonal tempo, the environmental impact, or the changes to ecological niches of neighbouring species. Attempts at global-treaty making seek to reign over multinational capital transactions through relatively few mechanisms. Most pan-global organizations are wedded to the Neoliberal model of the market to explain and predict all events, facts and behaviours. Juridical enforcement at the global level is weak. Important nations like the United States have refused to make themselves subject to the International Court of Justice laws (they cannot be indicted for war crimes, for example). The World Bank has, arguably, the most impact on national policy making, but keeps ratcheting those policies to free market ideology, in a simplistic faith that the market will make balanced, apolitical decisions. Ratcheting is a one way process whereby policies can ‘progress’ towards the free market by removing tariffs but may not reverse the process by adding new ‘barriers and protections’ to free trade. This has created a situation of unparalleled reliance on the ideology of the market as the only means of altering industrial pollution practices, debates on over-population and the consumption practices of modern culture. The discourse of sustainability has become a very important mechanism for pan-global organizations to encourage corporations and nation states to stop completely ignoring environmental concerns. While clearly a genuine effort to deal with the growing problem of climate change, pollution and resource depletion, ‘sustainability’ has come to be co-opted by the economic discourse. Most recently, the callous financial opportunism created by embracing environmental risk makes the matter of devastation incidental.

2. Climate change and the crisis of philosophy During the 1930s, Heidegger developed one of the most cogent critiques of the shortcomings of modernity. He recognized that everything, from all aspects of the environment, to human beings themselves, are enframed by the ‘total mobilization’ of technology. Subjectivity, education, policy, politics and modes of governance are all affected by the encompassing enframing of technology. Heidegger has initiated the scope of the necessary question about the relationship between humanity and Being. Contemporary globalization, policy and politics are subject to Heidegger’s critique of the technological enframing of modernity and the representative calculation and rationalization of language. Heidegger developed his very substantial critique of modernity and the enframing of technology partly from his reading of Nietzsche, partly from the Catholic suspicion of modernity and

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partly from the Volk movement and the technological super heroics put forward by Oswald Spengler and Ernst Jünger (Jünger, 1993; Spengler, 2002). Spengler theorized technology as an overarching force that is shaping each person’s subjectivity. He argues that the modern interpretation of nature has radically altered from the feudal and the tribal. Making a living has changed from working together with the natural rhythms of the harvest to ‘challenging forth’ nature. The fluctuating cadence of the river, the seasonal growth and decay of crops, the slow cyclic regeneration of the forest, have all been transformed by a technological ‘challenge’ which channels and constrains the natural tempo and demands the storage, enlargement and redistribution of nature as a ‘resource’. The wresting of materials and energy has become commodified because technology has produced a capacity for storage so that the seasons, the flow and the fallow periods no longer radically constrain consumption. Following Spengler, Heidegger realized that technology has objectified everything, including humanity, as potential resource. Jünger took war as the heroic literary/aesthetic metaphor for the ‘destiny of the West’. He argues that work is totally at the disposal of the war machine, whether it be sewing, sowing or shooting. Even during times of peace, the war machine is at work. Unlike feudal Kings, who had to rally together temporary armies in times of war, modernity maintains standing armies in reserve during periods of war or peace. The war machine poses a constant threat of terror. Jünger called this continuous usurpation of all labour, ‘total mobilization’. The ‘turn’ in Heidegger’s thinking about equipment and technology emerged in the mid-1930s during the National Socialist rise to power in Germany. The politics of the day and the somewhat Romantic discourses that were circulating about technology and the Volk influenced Heidegger profoundly. He developed a highly critical approach to linguistic metaphors during this period, noting that ethics is imbued with monetary terms like ‘value’, ‘benefit’, ‘worth’, ‘usefulness’, rather than metaphors that rest on ‘care’. His argument is that Idealist philosophy has privileged reason and categorization over other forms of knowing. This lends itself to deterioration in the richness of language and understanding. His complex philosophy about the relationship between humanity and the ability to think and question our relationship to Being open up potentially powerful new ways of generating an ethical preparation for a type of poetics, an aesthetics, a musical resonance that may open up what he calls a new ‘world’.

3. Social conscience and global market Politics has ‘progressed’ in a historical unfolding from its early roots in the Enlightenment emphasis on rationality, the individual and positivism (cf. Irwin and Devine, 2006, Marshall, 1996a, 1996c, Peters, 2001a, 1989). Neoliberalism has extended the market metaphor so that it takes over all categorizations,

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pushing technological enframing into enclaves: traditions and relationships that have hitherto withstood modernity’s rational calculations. Humanity is increasingly individualized and commodified bearing barcodes and identification numbers instead of personalities and names. Liberal principles such as ‘freedom’ are subsumed in the marketization of ‘choice’. Descriptors of the environment and ourselves have succumbed in large part to Neoliberalism’s ‘paucity of metaphor’. Because of these mechanisms, the notion of sustainability has been emptied of its content of care towards the environment and increasingly stands in for ‘market efficiency’. Yet the ‘market’ of Neoliberal theory fails to adhere to either rational or divine order. The calculus and accountability of everything (including pollution, emissions, landfill, water contamination and so forth) in the paradigm of economic management has failed to find some magical market ‘balance’. This failure of the market to balance, according to Neoliberalism, is because it has not been allowed free rein. Even in an ideal situation, however, equilibrium at Pareto optimality has imperfections, demand never equals supply, the psychological impact of advertising is unacknowledged, full employment is a myth and so on. Interestingly, despite the constant allusion to science and positivism, whenever events demonstrate the flaws in the Neoliberal market model, the Aristotelian argument is put forward that an anomaly is ‘accidental’ which disallows it as evidence that more complex forces than the market are at work. Giddens is one of the few Neoliberals to recognize that the finance markets are grossly different from the simple eighteenth-century model first discussed in Adam Smith’s seminal work, The Wealth of Nations (1776), about the conflicts between domestic consumption and the European export in the corn trade (Smith, 1904). Global financial markets nowadays are 95 per cent arbitrage and 5 per cent actual commodity; so the direct appeal to market ‘balance’ is fundamentally corrupted. Giddens tries to incorporate environmental concerns into the economic system by arguing that efficient production will use fewer resources, energy and labour. He then continues to associate ‘sustainability’ not with ecology but rather with ‘efficiency’ no matter what the context. He advocates a ‘risk matrix’ that uses an insurance model to counter the potential problems of environmental disaster. Giddens puts great faith in global governance, the Neoliberal concept of ‘human capital’ and the social investment State to sort out the risks and costs associated with global warming (Giddens, 1998).

4. Categories, environmental indicators and the Enlightenment market Across the earth, environmental agencies are being set up and many national and local body governments are finally taking environmental problems very seriously. The OECD spokesman for the environment, Simon Upton, has been

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trying to use Neoliberal theories to incorporate environmental factors into the global market (Upton, 2001a, 2002a). He is attempting to set measurements and introduce exchangeable ‘vouchers’ that will bring pollution levels within the theoretical balancing rubric of the market’s ‘Invisible Hand’. When the notion of Pareto Optimality is used, the market is thought to adjust to the most efficient exchange rate, taking into account availability, efficiency and price. Upton presumes that permissible levels of carbon monoxide emissions will find a price where they strike a balance between ‘acceptable’ levels of environmental pollution and the continued possibility for wealthy individuals (or nations) to continue to drive their cars. Those ‘developed’ nations with high pollution rates9 could buy vouchers from poorer nations that either do not produce their world share of greenhouse gas emissions (through poverty) and/or have natural resources that counterbalance the problem such as large forest ‘reserves’. This effectively makes a situation where the richer countries in the world pay poorer countries not to cut down forests in an effort to ‘sustain’ healthy conditions in the atmospheric ‘commons’. Introducing a cap and trade Emissions Trading Scheme aims to bring pollution within the cost/benefit calculations of the market, so Neoliberals presume that the market will evolve an ethical balance that will solve the problem of climate warming. Certainly, carbon dioxide and methane vouchers will alter the markets’ familiar mode of transaction, shifting money from some arenas to others, but there is little evidence that it will alter trade or consumption to the levels required.

5. Pessimistic realism and optimistic total management The philosophical premises of the Enlightenment play a vital role in the assumptions and practices of modernity. The contemporary Neoliberal lexicon has taken over words such as ‘sustainability’ and shifted the meanings from egalitarian community concerns to the apparently apolitical discourse of market transactions. Blühdorn argues that Liberalism has always been concerned with security. Yet over time, security has shifted from a community basis to an issue of privatized individualism. Environmental concerns too, have been privatized and are more the responsibility of the consumer than the producer. The discourse of ‘risk’ has begun to shift from calamity to an entrepreneurial awareness of financial opportunity. Neoliberalism has emptied the older concepts of terms such as ‘sustainability’ of their content and shifts everything towards the enterprise of making money. Blühdorn is very despondent that environmental education is capable of introducing an ethic of care and ecological awareness or can alter the prevailing economic paradigm. Instead, the global policy impetus is forever increasing calculations, statistics and societies of control. The illusion of ‘mastery over nature’ is self-perpetuating.

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6. Population statistics and modern governmentality Thomas Malthus (1798) identified overpopulation as one of the primary causes for concern with Adam Smith’s modernization of economics and society in 1790. Malthus developed a statistical method of comprehending populations and trends at a national and international level. His work has been hugely influential on the science of governance. Combined with the Liberal emphasis on free individuals, statistical governance has availed corporations and governments of extremely accurate information on the needs and capacities of the population in its entirety. Health, education and welfare are closely tied to these techniques of statistical surveillance and governance. At the same time, the premises of modernity are self-responsibility and the enhancement of ourselves as a project of health, education and the accrual of wealth. As we each learn better and better ways of maintaining optimum health through nutrition, exercise and medical intervention our lives are getting longer and longer. Our general health is contributing hugely to global overpopulation particularly as there is a lag between change in birth rates and confidence in vastly reduced mortality rates. Development issues cut across overpopulation statistics. The apparent intractability of inequitable wealth has encouraged some extremely unsavoury attitudes and political programmes aimed at controlling the ‘plague’ of humanity in some countries. Poverty promotes high mortality and high birth rates; so poorer populations are less responsive to the modern tendency for healthy, wealthy and individuated lives. Furthermore, the concept of ‘development’ is highly problematic. It applies modern imperatives to traditional communities and describes ancient communities in monetarist terms. In some places, notably South America (the Chiapas of Mexico, for example) the Liberal Enlightenment rhetoric of ‘development’ has been fiercely resisted (Esteva and Prakash, 1998) and localized forms of barter and exchange continue to take place. Populations tend to stabilize when basic needs are met. This does not have to be achieved by the consumerist model. There is a widely held belief that technological innovation will ameliorate the environmental problems we have inherited. Democrats and Critical Theorists advocate a progressive socialist transformation in technological design. This helps produce technology that is kinder to the environment. They also believe that technology will enhance democratic processes. Their argument ignores Heidegger’s thesis that the technological horizon constrains the human relationship to the environment and that it is the central factor in our loss of the significance of what it is to be human. Feenberg derides Heidegger’s work for being ‘essentialist’. Instead of essentialism, Critical Theorists have faith in dialectical, democratic agonism producing technological innovation that serves

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the people rather than big businesses. While these thinkers are deeply embedded in modern thinking, their work is progressive and often politically and economically astute. There are no easy answers to the global problems facing modern humanity and the ecosystem, and wishing for a solution or a consensus diverts us from realistic engagement with the dilemmas at hand.

7. Pragmatism Environmental theorists influenced by Utilitarianism and American Pragmatism tend to maintain a nominal distinction between culture and nature that is fraught with axiological problems of measuring and attributing ‘value’. A strong thread in Pragmatism is that environmental problems require urgent attention and change is most effective when motivated by anthropocentric and economic reasons rather than ‘idealistic’ theory (Light and Katz, 1996, Light, 2000, 2001, 2002a, 2002b). In practice though, the environmental debates that have raged in the last 30 years about the significance of the massive explosion in human population on the environment have had profound implications on politics and policy that have deeply affected the lives of many families. Theory is not kept in the realm of the abstract but rapidly plays out in practical situations. Overpopulation has been an early example of a modern problem of global proportions. The way overpopulation has been theorized has profound implications for the physical parameters placed by the State and the medical profession on the lives and fertility of members of a given population. Far from theory, being a set of abstract ideals that get in the way of urgent and real change a conceptual framework is always at work guiding and reinforcing practical arrangements at the level of policy, institutions and implementation. People absorb ideas and allow concepts to govern their self-regulatory behaviours. The scepticism that contemporary Pragmatists have towards philosophy results in short-term consolations, promoting the conservation of the status quo rather than a re-evaluation of the tenets of modernity. Likewise, some Critical Theorists have too great a faith in the ongoing progress of technology to fix both environmental catastrophe and the problems integral to democracy. These tasks are too great for technology alone to sort out. This book engages with philosophy of technology without falling into the clichéd positions of technophobe or technophile. The interrelationship between technology, culture and subjectivity is carefully teased out. It is important to place due emphasis on technology, recognizing the ways in which it constructs social conventions and impacts on the phenomenological awareness of the world but without over-emphasizing it as ‘neutral’, potentially ‘redemptive’ or as an overpowering determinism. Contemporary Pragmatism has reverted to a traditional Idealism that was rejected by Dewey, James and Pierce. Contemporary environmental Pragmatists

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are a prime example of how Idealism fails to acknowledge the depth of change required by the anomalous catastrophe of climate change and overpopulation. Like Constructivism, contemporary Idealist Pragmatists effectively reinforce the status quo rather than take an evolutionary and adaptive position as Dewey himself repeatedly advocated.

8. Heidegger; the origin and the finitude of civilization Heidegger does not make the mistake of presenting us with off the cuff ‘answers’ to our predicament. He is an important figure in the genealogy of thinkers who recognize the scope of modernity and the politics of consumption as a problem that needs to be addressed. While he has a similar scope to Malthus, Heidegger is very critical of the modern tendency to calculate and evaluate everything in terms of the rationality of numbers and statistics. Rational calculations create an epistemological backdrop to everything that occurs in modernity. Nevertheless, it writes up the world in very technicist, often technological, terms. There is no space for comprehending ourselves or our environment in a multitude of other ways: spiritually, poetically, artistically and musically, with emotion, or intuition or even archaic aggression (to name a few). The emphasis on logic and ratio emerges from the deductive logic that is essential to the Idealist philosophy of human subjects as representing, rather than co-existing, with the world. Subjects are alienated from objects; the subject can never know precisely what it is to be a rock, a tree or an orangutan. So we speculate, we measure, we aggregate statistics and calculate norms and define categories. We name, claim and represent our world. Heidegger associated the rationality of calculation with the enframing of technology. Heidegger shows that the instrumental aspect of technology is extremely ancient; what has changed is the tempo and storage capacity – in other words, the sheer scale of modern technology. Economies of scale have removed the priorities of the economies of the household, which was the primary locale of the family’s production throughout the tribal and feudal period. Heidegger argues that two changes take place: first, we are alienated from our local landscape, as our food, energy, housing and welfare needs are met from more abstract, national and international sources. Secondly, technology should not be taken as ‘neutral’ tools that serve humanity’s purpose, but rather shape our thinking, and perpetuate their own reproduction via the human vector. Technology enables a modern humanity to function; modern humanity enables technology to exist. This situation would be all very well, one might argue, except that the alienation of communities from their local landscape has resulted in the problems of environmental pollution, species extinctions, resource exhaustion and the greenhouse effect of anthropogenic gases that exacerbate atmospheric changes.

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The alienation of the subject from the object, the alienation of individuals from their community, the alienation of the family from its local ecology, is producing a vacuum of meaninglessness. Consumerism does nothing to alter the nihilism at the centre of modern culture. The vacuum has become increasingly encompassing, as technology and market metaphors take over every aspect of the world. What is lost, Heidegger argues, is an understanding of what it is to be human. We have lost the human capacity for genuine enquiry into the meaning of Being. However, as the alienation of nihilism becomes increasingly obvious, and particularly as we approach the threshold of viability as the earth reacts to the 250 years of industrial technological pollution, a ‘business as usual’ approach is harder and harder to justify. Out of necessity, humanity is increasingly ready to engage once more in meaningful thinking. From out of Heidegger’s despair about the technological enframing of Being emerged a hope that we can conserve the seeds of a preparation for a new beginning, a Romantic openness to communion with the environment, and with each other. ‘Poetically man dwells’. Heidegger calls for a poetic aptitude for allowing ecological Being to ‘shine forth’. This kind of aptitude lends itself to a thinking that is beyond calculation and logic (though it may include them). Poetics takes the risk of a new paradigm. Heidegger’s works on the problematic of modernity are an important component of stimulating the conditions for change in culture. From the modern tendency to accounting, calculation and rational certitude, Heidegger’s philosophy raises the openness of questioning. It is a tenuous aptitude, a mere ‘readiness’, for a new beginning. It initiates a process of stochastic change, a transformation and another very different threshold. It brings us from the brink of climatic catastrophe to the metamorphosis of culture into an acknowledgement of our interlinked relation with other beings and Being, and a prevailing open ethic of care and thinking.

9. Technology and the Kultur of late modernity Technology changes the way people apprehend phenomena. The lens of the telescope, for example, brings distant objects into the focus of sight, but obscures the sound, smell, taste, texture and malleability of them. Some things are exacerbated and other things are minimalized through the lens of various technologies. Bowers criticizes technology for generating a conduit model of learning that encourages the myth of the Liberal individual, at the expense of community and creativity. In contrast to Feenberg’s belief that technology will enhance democracy and critical thinking, Bowers takes a very determinist view of technology which restricts agency and social transformation. I try to distinguish between the problems generated by modern Liberal rationalism, individualism, managerialism and economic governmentality as opposed to the parameters and possibilities of the technology itself.

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10. Embodied subjectivity and the critique of modernity The debate keeps coming back to the philosophical assumptions that underlie political structures and motivation. Feminist philosophy has perhaps the best engagement with the political and the philosophical underpinnings of modernity. Feminism has taken the philosophical dualism separating the subject from the object, the mind from the body, men from women, humanity from nature, technology from nature, very seriously and developed some of the best theoretical tools for subverting those dualisms in a variety of ways. The justifications for the way women have been historically subjugated has been political, philosophical and most obviously biological. Women were thought to have ‘hysterical’, ‘wandering wombs’ that literally roamed the body and adversely affected the mind’s reasoning ability. Taking out the womb is still called a ‘hysterectomy’. Philosophers like Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva (among many others) have closely examined, from a phenomenological and psychoanalytic perspective, the relationships between bodies, minds, cultural taboo, the processes of learning and normativity, sex, gender and power. Heidegger may not reject technology outright but he certainly tended towards a more Luddite ‘simple’ relationship between human communities, the Volk and the earth. The notion of a ‘pure nature’ also harks back to the separation of human exercising creative productivity as ‘artificial’ and untrammelled nature as ‘pure’. This only reinforces the Idealist separation of the subject from the object once again. Donna Haraway’s work engages with late modernity, the technicization of cultural bodies and the collapse of the distinction between culture and nature. She argues that technology has made a ‘Cyborg’ of all our bodies. There is neither a ‘pure nature’ to the body, as opposed to the pure rationality of the mind, nor is the earth pure and natural, but rather is culturally manifested, through technology as much as culture.

Conclusion Philosophical Idealism separated out the human subject from the natural object and this has produced a welter of complex ideas, cultural norms, political assumptions about human behaviour, ‘wealth’, ‘resource’, institutional structures, industrialized production and economic transaction pathways, that all cohere together in the world-view of modernity. The population explosion is an outcome of the increasing expertise that humanity wields, as we master our universe. Seeking to turn the clock back by inverting the dualism so that nature dominates over nature is also doomed to failure. Heidegger’s critique of modernity shows the scope necessary for engaging with our problems at the level of

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technology, philosophy, politics and culture. The very real constraints of our context, both environmental and technological, pose limitations on our scope for thinking and acting. Haraway’s Cyborg gives us an inkling of just how integrated we really are, technologically, biologically and culturally. If the alienation that the dualisms set-off is actually the essence of the problem of modernity, then recognition of our role in the complex ecology of the earth as humans might possibly set us towards a transition that enables us to survive this 400-year surge in human numbers without completely annihilating the ecological parameters of life on earth. Reconnecting with our landscape involves understanding the ways we are circumscribed by the environment and the way we inscribe ourselves in our ecological locale. This is the simplest thing in the world but – given our world – perhaps the most difficult.

Chapter 2

Climate Change and the Crisis of Philosophy

Environmental problems have shifted from the periphery of global concerns to the key constraint that shapes the conditions and meaningfulness of human life. Environmental ethics have yet to catch up with the change in status that this entails. This is partly because of the enframing of the technological worldview which encourages everything to be understood in terms of consumerism and exponential economic growth. Modern technology has enabled the total mobility of everything and every person to be caught up in the yoke of potential consumerism. By and large, philosophy has retained its sceptical distinction between the natural world and the human subject making it extremely difficult to accommodate the shift of environmental problems to the centre of global attention. The world-view changes dramatically when the philosophical premise of subjectivity is its integration rather than separation from natural objects. The subtle attunement of human society within its habitat alters the philosophical and industrial premise of modernity. The world is dominated today by technological change. There is formidable alteration in capitalist production, patterns of economic exchange and the changing priorities of knowledge. Nowadays, economy is characterized by massive global financial transactions that bear little or no relation to the locale of production or local profitability. The deterritorialization of global finance and production has decoupled responsibility for care of people, places, species and ecosystems. Climate change has resulted from over 200 years of modern industrial production and it does not limit its affect to the richer nation states but is causing havoc and ecological change in every corner of the globe, from melting the polar ice caps to drowning subtropical islands and lashing industrial cities with frequent and unprecedented storms. The devastation caused by the cyclones in Louisiana, especially New Orleans, was not unexpected. New Orleans is lower than sea level and is protected from the tide by dikes or levies. The original swampy forest was stripped away long ago and the city sprawls out among the diked canals and lakes. There are seasonal hurricanes that go through the area nearly every year. Climate change is likely to exacerbate the hurricane season because the warmer ocean accentuates the cycle of evaporation and perspiration so that storms are often harsher and more frequent (IPCC, 2007: 6, 10, 15).1

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The political responsibility for the devastation in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina is well worked over. For my purposes, it is important to notice that the well-documented tardiness of the Federal government to support the maintenance of the dikes, in the first place, and rescue the trapped population in the aftermath is interesting as an example of a shift in the priorities of governance. Pastoral care is no longer at the forefront of government imperatives. The depth of belief in financial accumulation has changed the perception of devastating events such as Hurricane Katrina to an ‘opportunity’ and a ‘risk’ rather than a ‘tragedy’. The depth of the impact on the lives of families, domestic animals and wildlife is virtually ignored while the clean up and rebuild represent massive input onto the Gross National Product (GNP) spreadsheet. Louisiana is a good illustration of the global difficulties of climate change. It shows us what can be expected from the modern response of ‘total mobilization’ to environmental crisis. Louisiana is also a model indicator of the longterm patterns of modernity. Modernity starts with land clearances. There is a period of initial destruction and clearing of indigenous flora and fauna and subsistence farmers: dramatic technological change to the ecosystem to make it viable for farming or an urban environment; failure to maintain the needed technological infrastructure on the basis of financial cost-benefit and risk analyses; sustained ignorance of the human or ecological cost of disaster; financial reward of cleaning up generating economic advantage in terms of cost-benefit and risk policies and ultimately GNP. Heidegger describes this process as the illusion of technological mastery. The battle over nature appears to be won. Humanity understands increasing dimensions of the chemical, physical and biological processes that form events and is increasingly able to intervene in these processes. However, the successful interventions and creation of new substances along with methods of mass storage, transportation and distribution have failed to fully account for most of the pollution ‘externalities’ and interconnectivity of the planet’s ecology. The failure to respond to either the end result of climate disruption or the contributing factors of industrial pollution, draws humankind deeper into a completely unnecessary ecological crisis. We are just beginning to see the results of 200 years of industrial production and the release of massive quantities of carbon dioxide and other toxins into the atmosphere. The resultant ‘green house effect’ is melting the polar ice caps. The melting ice caps are driving a change in the world’s weather. Warm ocean streams are cooling, diminishing and shifting. Along with the moon, seasonal shifts and the earth’s rotational axis, these ocean streams generate evaporation, wind and perspiration. In other words, the melting polar ice caps are one of the driving engines of the increasing severity and frequency of storms. The results of climate change are difficult to gauge accurately but the predictions could not be more dire. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that a

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mean annual temperature increase of between 4 °C and 6 °C is probably still within the viable conditions for mammalian life on the planet (IPCC, 2001, 2007). Of course, the earth has had long periods when the temperature was outside of this range and inevitably, it will again – eventually. However, with our technical industrial practices, modern humanity has altered the tempo and dynamic of the naturally unfolding cycle of climate change (IPCC, 2001, 2007). Heidegger called the metamorphosis from a culture of subsistence to a modern culture of industrial production ‘technological enframing.’ The enframing of technology exacerbates the modern tendency to ‘forget the question of Being.’ One of Heidegger’s attempts to resist the ‘total mobilization’ of technology was a reviving of ‘home and hearth’ in an effort to reconnect people with the immediate conditions of our environment, rather than the ‘decoupled’ über-consumption of globalized production and the ever-widening scope of potential standing-reserve. He connects ‘poetic dwelling upon the earth’ with regenerating the authentic relationship between humanity and environment (Heidegger, 1977: 34) or Being as the moment of reflective thinking that will bring us back from the threshold of devastating meaninglessness. His philosophy is tinged with a sense of desperation that humankind is trapped in the momentum of the history of Western metaphysics and this is mired in the depths of nihilism. Heidegger argues that it is modern technology that allows this shift in tempo that characterizes modern industrial production. ‘Technological enframing’ has become the dominating horizon of disclosure through which we understand all things. Technological enframing arranges our understanding of all aspects of the world as potential resource or standing-reserve. That is, humanity as well as all other elements, of what is known, are either in use or waiting to be utilized in the process of consumption (Heidegger, 1977). During this period of technological development, humanity has become increasingly knowledgeable about the earth. This knowledge has lent us the false impression that we have mastery over nature – a mastery that was developed during the period of philosophical Idealism where individual human subjects are understood in juxtaposed contrast to objects. Yet, at the peak of this mastery and understanding over the earth’s processes, problems of pollution and climate change have also opened a deepening chasm that makes it even more visible that this mastery is an illusion (Heidegger, 1973b). The danger of technology is that as the perils of climate warming become more visible, we will remain under the illusion that technology is capable of fixing the problem. Technology alone cannot solve the issue. Heidegger argues that in the midst of the danger, the ‘saving power’ may emerge. He does not mean, however, that technology is capable of ‘saving’ us from ‘the danger’ of the effects of pollution. Instead, he hopes that the danger of remaining completely engrossed in technological mass production will shelter the unexamined question of Being and, eventually, we will remember what it is that makes it meaningful to be human (Heidegger, 1977).

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This has nothing to do with economic growth or GDP or accounting for previously ignored externalities, or even better methods of governance. It is about the ethics of the interrelationship between humanity and nature. The enframing technological Gestell is a horizon of disclosure which points to the essence of humanity; we are an animal that perceives horizons or ‘worlds’. That is our most special quality. Technology is one such horizon but it is not the only one to have dominated our world-view. Once we start to recognize its contingency, we open ourselves up to our own essence: different ways of questioning and understanding Being (Heidegger, 1977). At the time that Heidegger was writing, industrialism had been underway for over 200 years and Marx’s analysis of the modes of capitalist production coupled with Darwin’s ideas about the ‘survival of the fittest’ seemed to offer an adequate explanation for those species who were becoming extinct across the globe. Pollution was causing problems in particular localities but very few people recognized that extinction rates were escalating and that the scale of pollution would impact on the earth’s atmosphere and all ecological systems.2 Marx tends to cast capitalism as the virtually inescapable structure which crushes the possibility for authentic work, which has not been alienated from the land, to take place (Marx, 1887). Heidegger makes a similar case that technological enframing alienates people from their local dwelling place. He argues that technology is what inhibits a person’s authentic work that brings them into close proximity with earth, sky, gods and mortals (Heidegger, 1999b). Marx’s determinism is marked by the hope of dialectical reason gradually moving us through a teleological process – through the fallacies of industrial-scale production, the collapse of mass, urban, civilization and eventually towards a utopian era of small, close-knit communities with a direct relation to resources and production. Heidegger does not have the same faith in an inevitable telos, and while the utopian ideal is very similar to Marx’s, rather than rational progress (which is itself enframed by technology). Heidegger looks to the emergence of Being that is hidden within and beyond the enframing of technology. For the concealed aspect of Being to emerge we need to make ready so that the subject, Dasein, remembers to remain open to the revelation of Being. Heidegger encourages openness, questioning and a poetic encounter with Being that has the capacity to examine the processes of modernity, contemporary globalization and the environment. At the present time, the essence of technology has deepened its determining characterization of humanity’s relationship with the earth. It is increasingly impossible to think outside the horizon of Bestand – demanding that all things be understood as potential consumable resource. ‘Human Capital’ is the best example of the worker’s reduction to the mobilization of everyone and everything in the machinery of consumerism. The language of modernity is increasingly interpreted in these utilitarian ways. And yet, this danger perversely offers more hope than pessimism because vast numbers of people across the globe are becoming conscious of the inadequacy

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of modern consumerism. It has impoverished the rich diversity of world-views and it is meting out an unbearable burden that the planet cannot go on absorbing. Within the universal horizon of modern technology, there is a diffuse politicization of environmental concerns in a wide range of regions, ecological spheres and discipline areas. Environmental concerns revolve around many technological resource issues from fossil fuel consumption, emerging evidence of global warming, the health concerns of pesticides and fertilizer on humans, animals and water reservoirs, soil erosion, non-replaceable industrial-scale felling of virgin forest, genetic engineering and so on. Reservations about technological interference, overconsumption and overpopulation raise serious doubts by many and diverse people and are creating the site of readiness for significant change in the eco-social sphere. Of course, many sceptics still deny that there is a global climate crisis or that it is caused by fossil fuel emissions (George Bush and Administration, Lomborg, de Freitas). Nevertheless, during the 1970s the relationship between humanity and environment shifted from a marginalized issue to one of increasingly central concern. The ‘answers’ to the problems of fast capitalism and late modernity have been a growing interest in the threshold of ‘sustainability’. At one end of the spectrum, sustainability is interpreted as a socialist rejection of capitalism and at the other end of the spectrum is the intensification and efficiency of capitalism. The socialist rejection is either technophobic and/or is tied to the inequitable social divide between ‘developed’ and ‘non-developed’ nations. The intensification of capitalism measures and standardizes ‘acceptable’ levels of pollution combines ‘green initiatives’ and the transfer of responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions via the market to have the outcome of more efficient industry. Global warming, the transference of inert ‘sinks’ of carbon-fossil deposits (coal, oil, gas) into active carbon dioxide emissions released into the atmosphere, atmospheric ozone depletion, large-scale forest felling at a non-replaceable rate, soil erosion and desertification, water pollution, acid rain, population growth, rubbish disposal and so on have, in a variety of ways, required an ecological approach. These concerns have encouraged environmental efforts that ‘tread lightly on the earth’ (Carson, 1963, Schumacher, 1973). For policy makers at national and international levels, technology is looked to again for relief from the production of poisons and the long-term overconsumption of massive quantities of fossil fuels and other environmentally devastating practices of the Industrial Revolution.

Heidegger and total mobilization It is difficult to truly understand how to extricate ourselves from the double bind of technological enframing. At once, it seems imperative that technological solutions be put in place to alleviate and improve the clumsy industrial scale pollutant-causing technologies that, up until now, have dominated the scene.

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Surely, better governance would help alleviate some of the problems presented by global climate change. Yet, unless we understand what it is about technology that has essentially changed our relationship with the earth, we will effectively change nothing. In The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger (1977) writes that our initial understanding of technology is instrumental. Instrumentality pertains to both ancient craftworks and modern machines. It is a fundamental and enduring characterization. Instrumentality is not enough to explain the unique shift from the art and craftsmanship of ancient times that helped till and garden, sow and reap to the large-scale demands of modern technologies. Heidegger gleaned insight into the question of the essence of technology from two of his contemporaries, Oswald Spengler and Ernst Jünger. Spengler draws attention to the stockpiling that became possible with industrial production – changing the tempo of seasonal constraints to the tempo of production and consumption. It is drawing all things – humanity and machine into the encompassing directive of increasingly detailed organization and governance. Jünger shifted the emphasis from man as the creator to man as a cog in the machinery of modernity. Jünger noticed that the aims of cultural life had changed from rural, feudal, agricultural ways of life with occasional state power towards the modern ways of living, where the technological productivity of all aspects of life are submitted to the machinery of total mobilization. Spengler argued that man turns nature into a stockpile of raw materials. With remarkable foresight, he noticed that climate warming would result from things like the transformation of great forests into newsprint. In Man and Technics (1932) Spengler wrote that [a]ll things organic are dying in the grip of the vice of organisation. An artificial world is permeating and poisoning the natural. The civilisation itself has become a machine that does, or tries to do, everything in mechanical fashion. We think only in horsepower now; we cannot look at a waterfall without mentally turning it into electric power. (1932: 94) Spengler made an important reversal that was also followed by Heidegger – that humanity was not the locus of control in the invention and utilization of technology. Instead, machinery encourages us to behave and think in technological ways. Spengler wrote, ‘the master of the world becomes the slave of machine. It compels him, us, and indeed all without exception, in the direction of its course, whether we know and want it, or not’ (Spengler, 1932: 75 cited in Zimmerman, 1990: 28). Because our creative genius facilitates the emergence of specific devices, we imagine that we are in control of the instruments of technology. However, Spengler and Heidegger shift the emphasis to the industrial context. In the technological era of modernity, the creative genius or becoming the principle causa sui of new tools obscures our role as the vector of reproduction

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for technology. The demands on us are the construction of new and more efficient instruments to effectively participate in the unfolding technological horizon of disclosure. The enframing of technology occurs with the transformation of tempo, storage and distribution. For example, there is a profound technological shift from the waterwheel to the hydro dam. The waterwheel activates power with the rhythm of the river, grinding wheat into flour when the crop and the force of the water are both optimum. The latter stores the potential force of the river and expends it when it is consumable. This creates the illusion that humanity has increased its control in the war against nature. There is a direct parallel between Spengler and the example of the hydroelectric power station on the river Rhine in Heidegger’s important essay On the Question Concerning Technology. The meaning of the river has shifted from a poetic reminder of the ongoing changes in time, for example, or the peaceful sunny spot that is home to fish and waterweed and a few small river craft. The hydroplant connects the river into a grid of ‘interlocking processes pertaining to the orderly disposition of electrical energy’ that appears to bring the river into the rubric of human control. The power station changes the whole worldview that names and interprets the river so that it is ‘on call’ as power supply, or on call as the scenic spot that is at the service of the tourist industry. This technological change from natural rhythm to the challenge and storage of everything as potential resource has to profoundly alter the human mode of existing: our subjectivity, among one another, and in relation to the environment. During the gradual rise of modernity there has developed an emphasis on the individual subject as the centre of interpretation and the source of truth. However, Heidegger contends that ‘subjective’ interpretation is illusory within the overarching context, or horizon, that everything is calculated in terms of present or future use-value – Bestand, or ‘standing-reserve.’ Technology not only characterizes all beings as resource but both reaffirms the traditional notion of humanity as the solipsist master and, yet, inverts that solipsism from a free and creative nominalist relation to a proud, if anonymous calculating machine. As soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns man even as object, but does so, rather, exclusively as standing-reserve, and man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of the standing-reserve, then he comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile man, precisely as the one so threatened exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth. In this way the impression comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct. (Heidegger, 1977: 26–27)

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At the point where humanity is an object among objects, having forgotten the art of self-reflection in the enthusiasm and commitment to calculus and rationality, the technological horizon is at its peak. At this point of sheer objectification, humanity exacerbates the illusion that we are the locus of control. The enframing of technology exposes the loss of status of humankind as a meaningmaker and then, in the same moment, obscures the truth of nihilism by an immodest ‘posture’ of mastery. This very significant understanding of the combined affects of Idealist solipsism and technology on modern culture is crucial to reworking environmental philosophy and the processes of global capitalism. Ernst Jünger was another important influence on Heidegger’s work in the 1920s and 1930s. Unlike Spengler’s despondent technological determinism, Jünger was more inclined to refract technology ‘through the prism of literaryaesthetic categories’. Jünger was a veteran of the First World War and had spent a great deal of time on the front and personally fitted the German model of romantic heroism. He took the Nietzschean stance that, as there is no going back, all events in life must be ‘swallowed’ and affirmed. He willed war as a way of coping with it (Wolin, 1993: 119).3 Heidegger and Jünger carried on an intellectual conversation Über ‘Die Linie’, ‘Over The Line’ for many decades (Heidegger, Jünger correspondence, cf. Heidegger, 1999b). In ‘Total Mobilization’ Jünger argues that substantively, there was no longer a difference between war and peace (Jünger, 1930 in Wolin, 1993: 122).4 Jünger interprets war as a technological form of the sublime that profoundly alters the soldiers’ attitude towards death. Michael Zimmerman describes eloquently the thesis of The Worker ; ‘Jünger portrayed the titanic process of modern technology as an aesthetic phenomenon, as a terrifying but sublime spectacle that was “beyond good and evil”’ (Zimmerman, 1990: 46, cf. also Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 351–421). In feudal times, armies were expensive enterprises that were called up occasionally. The shift towards industrialization demonstrates the change in tempo, storage and distribution as standing armies are maintained and always waiting in constant reserve. All sectors of society would be ‘integrated’ into the mobilization for war whenever the call is made. Jünger describes total mobilization, ‘where no fixed budget is enough; taxation on every transaction, where every effort of each member of the populace is focused on the war effort be it sewing, sowing or shooting’ (Jünger cited in Zimmerman, 1990: 125). In other words, in the technological era, everything and everyone is potential resource including the circulation of effort, service, goods and currency. The shift to total mobilization is integral to the modern war machine. Jünger wrote that [i]n this unlimited marshalling of potential energies, which transforms the warring industrial countries into volcanic forges, we perhaps find the most striking sign of the dawn of the age of labor (Arbeitszeitalter). (cited in Zimmerman, 1990: 126)

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Jünger regarded Nietzsche’s theory of the will to power in these very determining warlike terms. The realization of the task of total mobilization as ‘an act which, as if through a single grasp of the control panel, conveys the extensively branched and densely veined power supply of modern life towards the great current of martial energy’ (cited in Zimmerman, 1990: 126–127). Heidegger’s reading was not unreservedly affirmative. He agreed with Jünger’s analysis of total mobilization as the ‘destiny of the West’, but was scathing of some of Jünger’s other ideas, including his reliance on Nietzsche’s concept of Will, as a metaphysical construct (cf. Nietzsche, 1909a). Heidegger wrote about the misinterpretation of the Will as biological, extensively, in his lectures on Nietzsche in the late 1930s (Heidegger, 1982, vol. iv). Heidegger regarded both technology and art as ways of disclosing the Being of entities. Neither can be merely pragmatic or purposive as Jünger proposes. Disclosure of Being is driven by the Will to Will, a paradigm shift, that focuses on the interaction between what is essentially human and the mode of human interaction with the context that is worlding (Irwin, 2000). The technological horizon as the paradigm cannot be changed at will, but can be understood ‘essentially’ and this awareness illuminates what is a production of the enframing of technology and what is extra to it. Heidegger understood total mobilization as the Volk being gripped by the technological Gestalt. Humanity overlooks the originary event, (Anfang), ‘the ontological movement’ of ‘jointing and fateful dispensing’ (Fügung und Schickung) of the destiny of Being (Zimmerman, 1990: 80). Jünger assumed it is humanity that ‘stamps’ meaning on an unformed existence. Heidegger’s correspondence with Jünger Über ‘Die Linie’, Over The Line (1999a) tends to criticise Jünger’s optimistic belief that humanity has the agency to ‘decide’ and shape the environment’s meaning in terms of ‘work’. You too think the relation of Gestalt to that which it ‘forms’ as a relation of stamping and shaping (Stempel und Prägung). However, you understand shaping in a modern sense as a conferring of ‘meaning’ or ‘sense’ upon that which is meaning- or sense-less. The Gestalt is the ‘source that gives meaning’. (Heidegger, 1999b [1955]: 299 responding to Jünger, 1993 [1930]: 148) Gestalt of a particular kind of human; the worker – a type, not a subject, but the generalization of subjectium ‘which comes to the fore in the consummation of modern metaphysics and is presented through its thinking’ (Heidegger, 1999: 299). The subjectium is the Idealist subject, separate and in juxtaposition with objects which it names and ‘interprets’. Subjectium is the illusion of master over nature in all its modern glory. Jünger’s worker is the archetypal subjectium. The worker remains an example of modernity. No matter how the worker aesthetically wills the inescapable fiery forge of total mobilization, there is no illumination shed on the process – just an accelerated acceptance of the

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‘pure form’ of technology rather than resentful resistance to it. Heidegger complains, ‘Gestalt, íδε′α and being belong together . . . [they] remain housed within metaphysics’ (Heidegger, 1999b: 299). Heidegger is much more deterministic about this era as the final phase of the historical trajectory of Western metaphysics. Metaphysics produces technological humanity to be orientated by continuous production and standing-reserve. In contrast to metaphysics, Heidegger argues that the ontological foundation is in the fluid coming-to-presence of Being, which, thus, shapes the parameters of human subjectivity. Human agency is not in control of social conventions or the manner in which work shows up.5 We are not in control. We cannot plan to end consummate nihilism or consumer greed. If we could, then surely we would solve the problem of carbon dioxide emissions, the greenhouse effect and climate warming by ordering multinational oil companies to stop extracting millions of barrels of oil per day, to reduce their production to about 20 per cent of the current rate of consumption, and only to supply essential communal services such as buses. However, rather than the control that we keep assuming we can wield, Heidegger argues that we need to recognize our own relative powerlessness as mere participants in an unfolding of forces that are far larger than we are. This recognition involves a shift from a focus on human willing to a paradigm perspective of the consummation of Western metaphysics in an era of nihilism. He describes it as a decision about remaining within the locus of controlling nature (through the representing subjectium, through representative science, through representative language) or of recognizing the essence of technology and beginning to seek the essence of Being and the essence of what it is to be human. It is not a matter of objects existing in juxtaposition to the knowing subject but rather a gathering of all things together, objects and subjects interacting in complex and unforeseeable ways, each impinging and co-creating a dwelling place. The gathering and the dwelling is culturally and historically specific; but it is as much developed by the environment as it is by the people involved. Landscapes impose upon people’s character and people impact in tangible ways upon the landscape. Rather than accepting the Idealist separation of the subject from the object, which castes suspicion on the very reality of objective bodies and reduces everything to rational deduction (Descartes, 1980). Heidegger is repositioning subjects within their landscape (without reducing us to objects among objects or to potential resource). Facing up to the fact that entities are involves risk because it calls into question the Idealist basis of the previous way of understanding and ‘constructing’ the world. Acknowledging and letting things simply ‘be’ risks is a new way of comprehending and generates a new path or series in an altogether alternative direction. The dynamic of Being, or physis, is a movement that tends to reverberate with the individual actions of each agent, and reinforces and enlarges the tendency that was already emerging. Like a

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frequency or a wave, physis resonates in series. The ocean has waves, swells and tides that might all be heading in different directions, echoing at different rates and crossing over and under one another all the time. There is no one telos to what is emerging. Wind, evaporation, stillness, rain, gravity, the moon, all these things along with the reinforcement or dissipation of underlying swells impact on the pattern of the waves, wiping them off the ocean’s surface or turning them into greater and more energetic breakers. Paradoxically, the exuberance of things simply being reminds us that there is no fundamental ground. Zimmerman puts this very well as follows: Most men avert their gaze from the overpowering presencing of things, which reminds them of their own ultimate groundlessness, and which also threatens constantly to overturn every historical project of community. Preferring security to the courageous venture with truth, most people focus on how to gain some control over entities that appear within the given historical world. (1990: 83) Whereas Heidegger brings forth the optimistic dispensation of Providence, of Fügung, and destiny in relation to the Gestalt or shape of things, Jünger has a more fatalist view of the enframing of technology. He regards total mobilization of the technological war machine as beyond good and evil, as a totalizing force that we must ‘swallow’ to preserve the illusion of our own potent agency and meaning: It goes against the grain of the heroic spirit to seek out the image of war in a source that can be determined by human action. Still the multitudinous transformations and disguises which the pure form (Gestalt) of war endures amid the vicissitudes of human time and space offers this spirit a gripping spectacle to behold. (Jünger cited in Zimmerman, 1990: 122) War is like a volcano; Jünger writes, ‘at the point where authentic passion breaks through – above all, in the naked and immediate struggle for life and death – it becomes a matter of secondary importance in which century, for what ideas, and with what weapons the battle is being fought’ (Jünger cited in Zimmerman, 1990: 123). Heidegger begins the task of rethinking the premises of modernity and reframing the question of human endeavour and the way we knit together with our habitat. Idealism ruptured the individual mind from the objects of nature allowing us the illusion of mastery and freedom. That luxury has been exhausted and the planet is at the limits of its ability to keep absorbing externalities such as carbon dioxide without rapidly transforming the overall climate. This puts us in the difficult position of taking the present situation and both continuing to successfully exist and yet start to project alternative modes of being for the

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future. The personal is political but isolated acts of recycling or abstinence from cars and aeroplanes does little to change the overarching technological horizon. A shift in regulatory guidelines so that instead of consumers, producers and manufacturers have to take responsibility for the pollution that consumes their products creates, will be one way of accounting for the problem of safely disposing of toxins (or better still, not generating them). Accounting and technology need not be abandoned in the drive to transform practices of modernity. The danger is that we continue to believe that these methods will absolve us of responsibility for the problem. The problem really is that we have become so alienated from the landscape, from the sea, from the rivers, from the mountains and the plains, that we no longer know how to tune in and allow the needs of a locality to impact on our ways of interacting and inhabiting it. Keeping perspective on technology and accounting sounds simple, but the prevailing Neoliberal paradigm tends to rely exclusively on these prescriptive and narrowly defined rationales.

Chapter 3

Social Conscience and Global Market

Climate change is affecting all parts of the globe. It is much greater than any one nation state and so it is not possible for one country alone to tackle. Political parties in nation states are in a difficult position – while democratic states are responsible to their national populations they are impossibly placed to implement challenging and unpopular restrictive legislation. While we are trying to get to grips with these multinational problems, we are still relying on the Enlightenment philosophical assumptions of individualism, the free market and the general will at a nation state level, and these assumptions keep holding us back.

The Third Way and free trade The polarization of Socialism and Neoliberalism into the ‘left’ and the ‘right’ wing of politics has been circumvented, rhetorically at least, by Anthony Giddens’ concept ‘economics with a social conscience’ put forth in his book, The Third Way; The Renewal of Social Democracy, (1998). Third Way politics has heavily influenced Britain’s Tony Blair, Germany’s Gerhardt Schröder and, arguably, North America’s Bill Clinton during the late 1990s. The softening of hardline market Neoliberalism with at least a veneer of social conscience has become normalized throughout twenty-first century late modern literature (cf. Peters 2001a, Chapter 6).1 In contrast to the straightforward Neoliberal regime advocated by the Organization for Economic Development (OECD)’s spokesman for the environment Simon Upton, Giddens meliorates Neoliberalism by arguing ‘market economy but not market society’. Giddens is apt to take a more nuanced account of economics than straight Neoliberal policy allows but still falls back on the familiar rubric of the market metaphor accommodating all spheres of life. Giddens has a list of Third Way values that tries to resurrect older Liberal notions alongside Neoliberal ones. Third Way values include: equality; protection of the vulnerable; freedom as autonomy; no rights without responsibilities; no authority without democracy; cosmopolitan pluralism and philosophic conservatism (Giddens, 1998: 66). To conjoin the traditional social principles of

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the ‘left’ with the market metaphors, and emphasis on individual autonomy of the right, Giddens argues, ‘The cosmopolitan nation helps promote social inclusion but also has a key role in fostering transnational systems of governance’ (Giddens, 1998: 69). To some degree, he is countering the Neoliberal call for a minimal state. Vaguely put, this allows the State to play some part in regulation along with the tax-supplied, welfare provision that is crucial to the Keynesian Settlement, ensuring that a safety net of welfare, education and health provisions are provided for workers so that the stable conditions necessary for capitalism are in place. The Keynesian Settlement is closely tied up with low levels of annual, exponential economic growth. Regardless of class background, economic growth allows most of the population, if they have merit, to have more goods and services next year than they do this year.2 This reliance on the Keynesian Settlement and exponential economic growth form the cornerstones to the Liberal Capitalist system. Merging ‘left’ and ‘right’ wing politics (Peters, 2001a: 115), these two platforms are advocated, completely unselfconsciously, in all pan-global organizations. The role of the State can be understood in terms of Human Capital theory where everything, as Heidegger puts it, is understood as potential resource which can have ‘value added’. ‘Government has an essential role to play in investing in the human resources and infrastructure needed to develop an entrepreneurial culture’ (Giddens, 1998: 99). The argument, from both left and right wing Liberals, is that State mechanisms for these provisions have room for improvement. With dubious understanding of ecology (which he has confused with efficiency) Giddens writes, ‘The restructuring of government should follow the ecological principle of “getting more from less,” understood not as downsizing but as improving delivered value’ (Giddens, 1998: 74). Although he acknowledged the ‘uncomfortable’ relationship between ecology and capitalism due to the increasing transparency of wealth discrepancies between the northern and southern hemispheres, Giddens is relying heavily on the tying together of the two concepts, efficiency and ecology. He argues that the cosmopolitan state needs to remain large enough to promote efficiently social inclusion and stability. It should also promote a democratically responsible form of global government to regulate global business. The State’s obligations to provide universally accessible welfare, education and health services are further expanded to include the calculation and regulation of pollution. In the past, both the owners of capital and the labourers ignored the pollution consequences of production as an ‘external cost’. Labourers were as culpable for passing on the redressing of pollution to future generations as the ‘owners of production’. Failures to insist on environmentally friendly production practices has been put down to the increasing accessibility of consumable items from low-cost, mass production that meant the workers

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had an increasing investment in industrialization too. The Brundtland Report specifically aims to make the present generation responsible for its own pollution and consumption practices. Thus, the State settlement must now also include the limitation and regulation of pollution. Giddens supports this role stating, ‘The reduction of environmental pollution, for example, is a general benefit. Indeed ecological strategies are a core element of lifestyle bargains, since most ecological benefits cut across classes’ (Giddens, 1998: 109). The facts are though, that in the face of increasingly globalized production, Keynes’ pragmatic social democracy falls down. The basis of Lord Keynes’ settlement was creating the stable conditions necessary for capitalism and requiring capitalism to meet social responsibilities to the working class through taxation. Increasingly, corporations are deciding to work in tax-free enclaves in traditionally poverty-stricken nations such as Malaysia, Indonesia and Polynesia, where indentured labour returns wages into the national economy even if the corporations are almost tax-free. Existing welfare societies in ‘developed nations’ can no longer contain negotiated worker settlements; for example, less hours for a moderate full-time wage because of the global nature of production and consumption. Even where governments settle agreements with each other over the location and levels of taxation from transnational production, the scale of global corporations are so immense that their legal and political weight overpowers the attempts by national governments to institute revenue gathering and environment regulation over resource extraction and pollutant externalities. Rather famously, the largest economies in the world are not countries but corporations: 51 of the 100 largest economies in the world are corporations. The Top 500 multinational corporations account for nearly 70 per cent of the worldwide trade; this percentage has steadily increased over the past twenty years. (Anderson and Cavanagh, 2000) Third Way utopian ecological modernization exists in the context of globalization where ‘domestic strategies of national economic management are increasingly irrelevant’ (Giddens, 1998: 19). Giddens’ response to the crisis in national infrastructure is a Neoliberal one. ‘The guideline is investment in human capital wherever possible, rather than the direct provision of economic maintenance. In place of the welfare state we should put the social investment state, operating in the context of a positive welfare society’ (Giddens, 1998: 117). Human Capital theory is the guiding paradigm that assumes that individuals desire, and are responsible for their own ‘added value.’ This goes hand in hand with policies such as Life-long learning and the Knowledge Economy where individuals continuously upgrade their skills and marketability in the workforce by investing in education (Wain, 2004). The ‘social good’ of an educated population is privatized, individualized and predominantly vocational.

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They belong to a culture that is internationally modern rather than specific to any given locale: In a world of globalisation, the role of the smaller nation state has become a residual one; advocating human resources and infrastructure, and passing over regulation and policing to pan-global organisations like the United Nations, the OECD, WTO, and the World Bank. The nation state remains a stabilizing force that is helpful for capitalism but it also fosters nationalist identity and is potentially divisive. National boundaries are becoming frontiers; not from inadequate control but rather the processes of globalisation. (Giddens, 1998: 129–130) In response to the globalization of capital and the expansion of the stock market, it makes sense that the responsibilities that used to belong to the nation state should be attributed instead to global infrastructure or global government. Global agencies and legal systems are pushing into the regulation of the markets, which includes making many market externalities like the pollution of the environment more possible to police. In practical terms, with the globalizing of the state apparatus, Giddens emphasis on social responsibility fades away. Certainly, the Keynesian Settlement does rely on nation states in a trade-off of minimal universal conditions of education, health, welfare (and now environmental regulation) in return for provision of optimal stable conditions for capitalist production and consumption. At the moment, production is being dislocated from these hard-fought legislative ideals and responsibilities. However, global governing bodies are not being asked to regulate against indentured labour, or ensure health, education and welfare provision in sweatshops in Indonesia, Malaysia, Polynesia and elsewhere. The only restraints on impoverished conditions, child and near-slave labour is consumer pressure, which relies on transparency – an extremely unreliable form of activism and regulation.

Sustainability The European Commission describes the ‘Three pillars’: the social, the economic, and the environment, as mutually supportive. This mutual support is achieved through efficiency of resource-use rather than decreasing the extraction of consumption of the resource to meet the ideal of environmental protection. Giddens endorses the shift from capitalism as the adversary of the environment to capitalism amalgamated together with the environment: In classical social democratic thinking, it had been assumed that there was a trade-off between economic development and protection of the environment. According to the new theme of ecological modernisation, environmental

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protection is seen as a source of economic growth rather than its opposite. (Giddens, 1998: 19) The idealism tying together the social, the economic and the environmental has gone a long way to both make environmentalism more acceptable and recognizable and to subvert the radical message of the necessity of change to the ethos of consumerism by earlier environment activists. Late modernity has changed since the massive expansion of the financial markets in the 1970s. There has been a huge increase in money circulation and ‘middle men’ who manipulate the exchange of goods, as opposed to the simple model of the cornmarket used by early economists like Adam Smith. In 1998, Giddens notes with awe ‘A trillion dollars a day is turned over in currency exchange transactions. The proportion of financial exchanges in relation to trade has grown by a factor of five over the fifteen years. “Disconnected capital” – institutionally managed money – has increased by 1,100 per cent on a world scale since 1970 in proportion to other forms of capital’ (Giddens, 1998: 30). From within his vast repertoire of books on topical issues, including class relations, civil rights, feminism and poverty, Giddens contextualizes environmentalism through the outpouring of ecological grass-root organizations, political activism, technical and popular publications as a 1960s crisis discourse (Giddens, 1998: 54). Neoliberal theory has an adequate response to the crisis discourse which is that scarcity will increase prices whereas oversupply will reduce prices. Therefore, the endangerment of resources such as trees, oil and soil run-off should result in higher prices for commodities such as wood, petrol and crops, resulting in consumption that is more careful. But in actual fact, rather than increase price, as the theory suggests, Giddens notes that prices have dropped in real terms. Giddens assumes that this is an indicator that there is abundance rather than scarcity affecting the market. In contrast, Nesta Devine argues that, unlike the rhetoric, the market is not a reliable indicator of all the empirical factors (cf. Devine, 2004: 133–150). In the past, faith in the market ignored ‘externalities’ such as pollution, which do not enter the producer/consumer equation in the short-term. Simon Upton is a good example of how increasingly sophisticated measurement of environmental indicators might include these previously ignored factors in the market equation. However, Neoliberal theorists continue to remain oblivious, as noted earlier, that the market has changed from a simple and direct trade of goods between suppliers and customers to now include a fantastic proportion of intermediaries. Production (and externalities) are now dispersed and globalized, and ownership is indirect through stocks and shares. There is no causal link between foreign investment and poverty reduction. 80 per cent of FDI is in the form of mergers and acquisitions with little in the form of productive investment that creates jobs and exports. (Alan Winters in DFID 1999)

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Even World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiators have to acknowledge that the stock market does nothing to ‘balance’ social equity in local or global terms. The disassociation of ownership from place or persons through shares, and the massive increase in corporate intermediaries and organizations are enabled by the shift from the technological enclosing of production from the family to the factory, into the assembly lines of early industrialism, to the globalized networked era of transnational production. Globalized ownership and production along with a concurrent lack of global regulation or taxation contribute to extreme unsustainably low prices for irreplaceable resources. The globalization of the market transgresses national boundaries. Perhaps, this helps source commodities from resource rich areas, thereby fulfilling the market requirement of cheap prices for abundant goods. More important, internationalism is a corporate mechanism for avoiding strengthening national laws that regulate the unsustainable extraction of raw resources from particular areas, nor to pay a reasonable wage to resident workers (Kirsch, 2004).3 Another reason for the decrease in prices in real terms in developed nations is ‘free trade’ agreements. These agreements are proselytized and enforced by irreversible, ratcheted agreements set up by the WTO and have resulted in lower and lower income flowing into poorer nations. Free trade agreements have effectively ensured that poor nations are encouraged to export raw materials, rather than selling more valuable finished products, while large rich blocs of consumers – such as the United States and European Union have benefited by domestically adding value to foreign raw resources which, in turn, protects local production and manufacturing: The latest round of trade talks has cost sub-Saharan Africa an estimated US$600 million per year. This could be why in June 1999, 30 African countries signed a declaration against new trade agreements. This could be why, also, developing nations used the opportunity of the Seattle protests to voice their opposition to WTO trade talks. (United Nations, 1999) This ensures effectively one set of rules applying to developing nations and altogether different rules applying to the wealthy. These uneven trade treaties are reinforced by World Bank loans that are only given to nations prepared to privatize more and more of State-owned assets and infrastructure, releasing significant assets to multinational corporations with no responsibility for local environments and populations. The WTO and World Bank attribute their failures to balance the market equitably to remaining trade barriers that are in place by states that are too powerful for the WTO to coerce into abolishing them. However, freeing all markets of tariffs would also not produce a miraculous redistribution of wealth from one part of the world to the other – why should it? In any case, powerful nation

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states are not in the position to give away so much access to wealth. Both the money from enormous corporations that funds their democratic election campaigns and the jeopardy that a potentially impoverished citizenry would withdraw their democratic mandate make a global context of genuine free trade impossible. The Doha Ministerial Joint Statement of Ministers of 24 Developing Nations makes the following point: Under the Uruguay Round Agreement on Textiles and Clothing, FW countries were obliged to have removed 33% of their quota restrictions on textiles by 2001 and all by 2005. So far, the EU has removed less than 5% of restrictions and the US 6%. Part of the Neoliberal armoury for improving development is using free trade agreements to attempt to lever the European Union and United States into reducing or abandoning their agricultural and manufacturing protections (Norberg, 2003). In Britain, for example, the agricultural subsidies have been in place since after the Second World War when having been terrified by their dependency on vulnerable supply ships from overseas, Britain initiated the selfsufficient food policy. This has resulted in a vast ‘improvement’ of efficiency of land utilization because land that is capable of bearing livestock is eligible for subsidies whereas land that ‘lie fallow’ is not. The demise of hedgerows and stone walls (habitat for many birds and small animals), and the shift to an industrialized scale of small fields into massive ones and small farms into factory farming is not a surprising consequence of the policy. As a result of the massive subsidies involved, Britain’s farms are over supplied with breeding stock. The industrial scale of farms, and huge centralized slaughter factories exacerbated the spread of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) disease in 2001. As opposed to the old, local, small-scale butcheries, centralized abattoirs require trucking of live beasts across very long distances. However, the large-scale destruction of Britain’s livestock, though distressing, was from the government’s viewpoint beneficial for meeting British commitment to the European Economic Community (EEC) to reduce livestock and spend less on subsidies to farming. The reluctance of Britain and France to abolish farm subsidies is forged in the democratic nature of their political systems. Free trade will never occur. Margaret Thatcher declared in the 1970s that Britain is sustainable. Declarations such as these suggest that the concept of sustainability is too loosely defined, too malleable, too easily co-opted to existing practices. Giddens makes the point that in Holland sustainable development aims to avoid ‘end of pipeline’ technologies that attempt to ‘clean-up’ environmental disasters after the fact, in favour of not generating the pollution at the stage of initial production. ‘Ecological modernization’ aims to anticipate rather than cure. Equating pollution with inefficiency provides Giddens with the defining principles of

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economic growth (Hajer, referred to by Giddens, 1998: 56). Regulating to inhibit environmental pollution and enhancing economic growth are seen as mutually beneficial. In 1972 when Meadows et al. put out the founding document of pan-global environmental policy, The Limits to Growth, the initial pan-global talks stuttered to a halt as people realized that making economic growth static, while excellent for the environment, was likely to be detrimental to ‘Third World’ nations who were still developing many of the industrial-scale dams, and infrastructure that make modern life possible. ‘Sustainability’ and ‘development’ were considered antithetical. See Steven Bernstein (2001) for more on the transition of environmentalism to economic sustainability in global organizations. ‘Sustainable development’ has drawn together these two disparate but related fields, and allowed North and South to discuss the environment in the same way, even if from a different set of interests. The vast tracts of global policy that Giddens has waded through results in the conclusion that ‘development’ and ‘environment’ are two problems that juxtapose uncomfortably: It is not really convincing to suppose that environmental protection and economic development fit together comfortably – the one is bound sometime to come into conflict with the other. Moreover, ecological modernisation is largely a matter of national policy, but environmental hazards mostly cut across the borders of nations and some are global in scope. (1998: 58) Making a distinction between environmental protection and economic expansion is vitally important – although not for the reasons considered by the Third Way. By making this separation, it is possible to argue that economics is not the only explanatory and theoretical principle capable of advancing arguments and solutions to the vast, interrelated cosmos of environmental problems, but more of this later in the book.

Natural management Giddens is British and, like most people brought up in this once famously forested island that is now heavily populated, he extrapolates and universalizes the intensity with which farming and management accounts for every inch of the United Kingdom to the rest of the world. There are layers upon layers of human history visible from every vantage point in the British Isles. It is hard to imagine from there, the wide and wild Steppes of Siberia, or the wandering dunes of the Sinai desert, or the teeming, plunging damp and rotten swamps of the Amazon. As Heidegger noted before the Second World War, it is easy, in Europe, to imagine human management pervades everywhere:

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We might think of ‘the environment’ as the natural world, but of course, it is not that any longer. Much of what used to be natural is now either the product of, or influenced by, human activity – not just the external world, including possibly the earth’s climate, but the ‘internal environment’ of the body. For better or for worse, science and technology have invaded the human body, and have redrawn the boundary between what can be humanly achieved and what we simply have to ‘accept’ from nature. (Giddens, 1998: 58) Globalization is characterized for Giddens by permeable boundaries. The Cyborg becomes the metaphor for human intervention in all ecosystems, and all ecosystems are increasingly understood as human artefacts. Dissolving the dualism between humanity and nature in some ways, Giddens’ version of the relationship between humanity and the environment elevates human technological mastery at the expense of the ‘wild card’. The human relation to everything means the measurement and calculation of it all on a human scale. It is the hubris of ultimate administration and management. From this position of total faith in the measurement of all-important environmental indicators, Giddens asserts that it is possible to assess and insure against ‘natural disaster’. Instead of being pessimistic, Giddens is positively entrepreneurial; ‘A positive engagement with risk is a necessary component of social and economic mobilisation’ (Giddens, 1998: 63). He wrote the book three years before the release of the 2001 IPCC Climate Change Report, and has little awareness of the gravity of environmental pollutants and their affects on climate warming. In the intervening few years, a very important shift in the general acceptance of these pollutant problems has taken place in global institutions and in the wider population. The Risk Matrix has no analysis for the ongoing detrimental impact of capitalism and consumerism on local ecosystems or social relations. Environmentally friendly institutions are linked to increased efficiency rather than any substantial shift in the relative importance of humans in relation to the rest of life. Despite the shift in our scientific understanding of the constraints of the natural environment in the face of immense consumerism and discharge of toxins, methane and carbon dioxide, the policies formulated as the ‘Third Way’ have permeated all pan-global organizations. Neoliberal environmentalism is becoming normalized.

Chapter 4

Categories, Environmental Indicators and the Enlightenment Market

Serious engagement with the problems of climate change and other localized environmental pressures is creating a climate of change in the pan-global policy arena. Most pan-global organizations are largely dominated by Neoliberal ideology which is systematic and consistent as well as adept at masking inequitable conditions with rhetoric that sounds fair and sits well within Enlightenment, Liberal, democratic, technological and positivist discourses (Devine, 2001, 2004, Fitzsimons, 1996, 1997, Irwin and Devine, 2006, Irwin, 2001, 2002, 2005, forthcoming, Kellner, 1995, 2000, Marshall, 1994, 1996b, 1996c, 1997, Peters, 1993, 1995a, 1997, 2001b). This chapter addresses the most progressive attempts by pan-global organizations to thoughtfully rise to the challenge of climate change, particularly by the OECD and the UN. The systematic approach to world governance through economic growth is failing to acknowledge the problems endemic to economic growth. Nor is it capable of changing the infrastructure and attitudes that are embedded in the lifestyle of late modernity. Economic growth relies on consumerism. Consumerism is the problem that is creating climate change in the first place. Even at its best, Neoliberalism still believes in its own myths, and ‘decoupling’ the finitude of the earth’s ability to provide resources and absorb toxins from exponential consumerism and economic growth is one of its most disturbing examples. Consumerism has been undergoing a process of deepening its hold on the cultural expectations of modern societies for several centuries. Environmental constraints have started to challenge the determinism of consumerism. The focus on the instant gratification of unbridled consumerism has given way (to some extent) to a longer view of the future, and risk management. Climate change has brought into focus the finite capacity of the planet’s ecological systems and the concrete and irreducible boundary conditions for life. The oceans, soils and biosphere are reaching their threshold for absorbing the massive quantities of toxins released by industrial processes of production. These thresholds present very real limitations to the consumerist lifestyle of modernity. The solutions to these problems are practical and infrastructural, not marketbased. Local national governments are in a much better position to actively

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implement conditions that encourage, and legislate for cleaner technologies, small-scale and immediate energy production and infrastructure that allows alteration in our lifestyle. The initiatives that Mike Rann in South Australia has been working on over the last 5 years create these practical conditions. Infrastructure in turn, makes it possible for citizens to have a ‘lighter’ ecological ‘footprint’ by using the cycle lanes or public transport, for example. In contrast, pan-global organizations tend to strategize along already existing ideological structures, such as scientific positivism and Neoliberalism. The OECD’s spokesman for the environment in the early 2000s, Simon Upton, for example, searches for ‘scientifically demonstrable thresholds’ in an ‘analytically tractable world’ (Upton, 2002b). Scientifically calculable indicators of normative levels of toxicity allow for simple, effective and accountable management practices, which are very plausible for these large-scale organizations. The ‘three pillars’ of the Kyoto protocol – social, environmental and economic – have provided the cohesive themes that are based on existing philosophies and politics. They interpret environment issues in anthropocentric and Enlightenment terms, based on the privatization of property, the continuous expansion and development of capitalism, worldwide exponential economic growth and the interpretation of the environment in terms of human comforts. The three pillars make reference to the future through sustainability. The social sphere provides a minimum safety net that ensures stable conditions for industrial production, the environmental sphere is interpreted as increasing efficiency and economic growth, and the economic sphere is increasingly encouraging the rhetoric of risk management, the inclusion and calculation of ‘externalities’ into the market equation, and ‘decoupling’ economic growth from the finitude of resources. The natural environment, as such, is rarely mentioned. This model of total management shows up as incapable of meeting its own objectives both philosophically and in practice. Yet, it is so tempting to find such sensible and cohesive solutions that it has produced an ongoing momentum. This chapter aims to unpick the serious problems with the Neoliberal model of governance. This does not mean abandoning all elements of technology, modernity or even economics. It does, however, challenge the consumer lifestyle as the dominant characteristic of modern cultures, and through showing the fundamental danger that consumerism presents, hopes to open up a space for new, environmentally ethical ways of moving into the future. Moreover, in terms of monetarist incentives as a policy tool, economic parameters only have limited use in terms of modifying people’s behaviour. Regulation and additional infrastructure are far better means for encouraging significant change in energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Regulation and infrastructure are also more amenable than businesses to appropriate democratic decision making.

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Sustainability Thus far, the discourse of ‘sustainability’ has dominated the pan-global rhetoric on the environment. Sustainability stimulates a shift from modernity’s emphasis on the present day towards the open possibilities of ‘futures’. Humanist self-help guides and maxims advise us that genuine appreciation of life is to ‘live in the moment’. In Neoliberalism, the ultra-modern emphasis on the present lends itself to maximizing consumption, with a faith in the market’s ability to meliorate decisions, scarcity and political considerations. However, this concentration on the immediate (live for today, tomorrow may never come) has been importantly modified by the notion of sustainable futures and the increasingly evident impact of human consumption on the environment. Neoliberalism copes well with this shift from the shortsighted focus on instant gratification towards one which looks up and towards the future. The shift in emphasis from the immediate to the future gets explained in economic terms. Up until very recently, the impact of pollution on the ecosystem had been ignored as ‘external’ from the assessments of costs and benefits (both now and for the future). Variables in supply and changes in ‘externalities’ are not always consistent, and Neoliberalism assumes that the market is optimally placed to respond very quickly to these changes in supply and demand. However, environmental concerns illustrate how inadequate the market paradigm is. Pressures on the environment can be overlooked by the casual eye, for long periods, and often the threshold where the environment is overloaded is reached very suddenly (Upton and Vitalis, 2002a). ‘Externalities’ can suddenly reach impossible levels and the negative feedbacks on species or resources can escalate in completely unforeseen arenas. While these catastrophes are focused in scale and in specific ecological niches, modernity has tended to accommodate particular extinctions as an ‘issue’ rather than evidence that the present mode of being human is, all too frequently, having unacceptable consequences. Instead, the market seems capable of absorbing the calculation of risk and putting a price on it. These risks are familiar terrain for those buyers and sellers of tradable ‘futures’ commodities, which amount to betting on the success or failure of following years coffee crop, or fish supply, or the volatility in next years’ oil prices. The first United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) conference at Rio, affirms the anthropocentric interpretation of sustainability and its approach to the natural environment. ‘Human beings are at the centre of concerns for sustainable development.’ The ‘ingenuity’ and ‘efficiency’ that humanity creatively applies to the transformation of nature are unending. One of the questions being raised is whether it is possible to carefully distinguish the social and economic aspects (such as distribution) of

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sustainability from the finitude of natural resources. Too close an association between development and sustainability is confusing. Development or social and economic redistribution and ‘sustainability’ or, more accurately, the physical fundamentals of ecological systems that sustain life, as we know it, are two different arenas. Clearly though, they each impact on the other. The concrete conditions that make it possible for the complex interaction between biological strata, atmosphere, ocean and geological strata to remain stable have a limited range (cf. IPCC, 2001, 2007). Simon Upton acknowledges, ‘there are boundary conditions for the stability of the linked biological, chemical and physical systems that form the global life-support system on which human life ultimately depends’ (Upton and Vitalis, 2002a). Not only can we intuit and sometimes find scientific evidence for the limitations of nature, in terms of resources, there is also no sure way of discerning what the threshold to overuse, or over pollution might be until it is too late. For many years, ecologists have been arguing that there is a threshold to the ability of the environment to absorb toxins generated by modern society. There is a point where ecological limits are reached and beyond which there is no return. For example, if there is little native habitat left without introduced predators for the flightless Kakapo parrot, they will survive for some time in diminished circumstances. It is difficult to know if some extra significant event will push them over to extinction. Nevertheless, with only 50 odd birds for the past 30 or 40 years and a 5-year breeding cycle, they are unlikely to retreat from the highly endangered zone fast. One douse of avian influenza or a wild cat in the two or three places they still inhabit will signal their permanent demise. They hover at the brink in environment circumstances that inhibits their potential to thrive. At the level of climate change, the threshold argument applies to the inhabitable temperate zone moving to erstwhile cooler latitudes. Mosquitoes are now being found 7,000 feet high. The spread of flora and fauna has uneven and unpredictable consequences. If climate change is too severe, the zone of habitability will entirely disappear. Figures 1 and 2 indicate just how radical a shift is underway. The IPCC has forecast a variety of scenarios that consider the continuation of the status quo or various drops in consumerism and pollution because of our heavy reliance on fossil fuel energy. However, the burgeoning human population bring all models dangerously close to the threshold of viability. This environmental threshold argument that has been put forward by scientists and ecologists is becoming co-opted by the Neoliberal economic paradigm of ‘risk’ and the costs/benefit analysis. It is possible to be Neoliberal and still take seriously the IPCC Climate Change Report. After extensive analysis of all known data, a team of scientists for the IPCC put together all the information into a range of models projecting global climate temperatures over the next century (and beyond), which they release every 6 years. In 2001, the models suggest a rise in temperature from at best 1.4°C to 5.8°C depending on a range

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of variables, including the extent of carbon absorption by oceans and forests and the rate of continuing release of greenhouse gases by humankind across the globe (Wigley and Raper, 2001: 79 cited in Upton and Vitalis, 2002 and Wigley, 2002). Climate change is directly attributable to complex byproducts of human technological industrialization, consumerism and globalized transport. For at least the past half a million years, atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions have remained within stable and specific limits of 180 and 280/290 ppmv. These levels have increased by absolutely astonishing factors since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, and by 2005 carbon dioxide concentration was at 379 ppmv, and rising (IPCC, 2001, 2007). Although many policy makers still prevaricate about the impact of carbon dioxide on climate, the records of carbon dioxide captured in bubbles of air from samples of polar ice, show clear correlations over the past 650,000 years between high levels in the atmosphere and warm temperate periods, and low levels of carbon dioxide and ice ages. Such massive quantities of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, as we have today, has probably only been seen during the end-Cretaceous extinction, 65.5 million years ago, which wiped out 99 per cent of all known life forms. It is impossible to know if we have crossed, or are poised to cross, a threshold that will result in rapid and catastrophic climate change – but it looks very likely. The threshold at which rapid climate change occurs could well be irreversible. The OECD, the World Meteorological Society and many other pan-global organizations are taking these concerns seriously: The trajectories of resource use indicate severe disruption to biophysical systems, in many cases at the regional level and in some cases (pre-eminently climate change) at the global level. While the thresholds at which the need for adaptation changes to crisis response are not precisely known, most trends indicate accumulating rather than decreasing risk, even allowing for technological change. (Upton, 2001) Scientific research is trying to ascertain which factors of modern human society are placing the biophysical sphere in jeopardy. Neoliberalism understands that environment disasters come at genuinely high social, economic cost and thus Simon Upton and the UK’s Royal Economist, Nicholas Stern, are putting real effort into global accountability for creating the conditions for environmental stability. Upton asks Can we identify which human claims on some key elements of the bio-physical environment place us at risk of crossing thresholds beyond which lie very significant environmental perturbations with high economic, social and environmental costs? (Upton and Vitalis, 2002) This involves drawing together the disparate problems that occur in different ecological niches into a cohesive whole for which modern societies in all

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corners of the globe can be accountable. Up until recently, in Western countries and still to a huge extent in Russia and Africa, vast amounts of pollution from industrial processes were not included in the total costs of production. These side-effects were called ‘externalities’ and they polluted the global commons. The oversight of excluding pollution as an externality from the cost/ benefit exercises of the market has lead to what Stern calls ‘the greatest example of market failure we have ever seen’(Stern, 2008: 1). Environmental Neoliberalism is trying to include the economic ‘externalities’ of pollution of the global commons into the market equation. In order to assess the real costs of pollution, quantities, normative values and statistics on ‘acceptable’ levels of toxicity are required. The attempts at calculations have generated controversy and debate on the definition and attainability of statistics for environmental indicators (Stern, 2008). Furthermore, economic cost/benefit calculations are in the process of being tied together with risk analysis that estimates the threshold when climate viability swings to catastrophic escalation (Upton and Vitalis, 2002a). This is similar to the estimations that insurance companies use to calculate the probable risks of earthquakes, volcanoes or accident rates for males between the ages of 15 and 25. Yet, the costs associated with dramatic global warming are on a vastly different scale from anything previously experienced, even the relatively global impact of the earth’s tectonic plate movement. The areas of social, political, physical and agricultural life that will be affected by climate change are very diverse and far-reaching. From the Neoliberal standpoint of minimal government intervention and economic assessment of the risks and costs of global warming, it is ironic to see Neoliberals arguing that pan-global organizations should be expanding to regulate for environmental hazards. Specifically, greenhouse gas emissions, clean water, coastal marine environments and fish stocks, terrestrial biodiversity and soil erosion have been highlighted as important sites of global environmental risk. Very real improvements are resulting from these changes in the economic model. The response of most pan-global organizations to industrial disruption of ecological systems is now acknowledging rather than ignoring them and hoping that the environment will disperse and absorb the pollutant effects of industrial byproducts. With the WTO as a notable exception, these outcomes of anthropocentric behaviour are no longer being framed in terms of economic ‘externalities’. For those fully engaging with the problem of environmental damage it is evident that it cannot be fixed miraculously or reliably by progressive technology, partly because the damage caused 30 to a 100 years ago will linger in the atmosphere indefinitely, and partly because there really is no viable alternative to fossil-fuelled transport. Furthermore, like the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) and UNCED, the OECD recognizes that sustainability is entangled with the massive economic disparity between the ‘developing world’ and the

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rich nations. In the United Kingdom, Stern is seriously advocating more equitable global economic conditions as part of the solution for climate change. However, not all the policy makers share these values. In 2001 Upton noted that non-renewable resource use in rich nations is careless, but ‘there is nothing environmentally sustainable about poverty’ (Upton and Vitalis, 2002a). However, in later texts, he extricates himself and the OECD from so much responsibility for equitable redistribution across the globe (Upton and Vitalis, 2002b).

Indicators Ever since the Rio conference in 1992, the United Nation’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs has had a firm commitment to environmental development. ‘Development’ is the progressive, and ultimately, universal spread of the technological culture of modernity to all corners of the globe, and all facets of modern life. There is no critique of modernity included in these assumptions of progress and universal applicability. No sympathy for older, traditional cultures, and no comprehension that elements of existing traditional societies might have more integrity and better symbiosis with the local landscape. Technological modernity is introduced at all levels and in all places as bigger, better, more abundant and easier. While its cultural familiarity in the West makes these assumptions almost invisible, they are actually highly contestable. The sweatshops and near slave conditions suffered by many peoples in less ‘developed’ nations are not anomalies but regular features of industrial production and global capitalism. The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs has been calling for more specific modes of measuring environmental indicators: ‘simple, elegant and effective measures that do not compromise the underlying complexity’ of sustainable development (quoted in Upton and Vitalis 2002a). Clear measurement guidelines make policy initiative easier and national comparisons possible. This type of environmental measurement is very amenable to Neoliberal cost–benefit equations. In order to stabilize the climate, there is a need to drastically reduce carbon and methane emissions. Many countries in the world have signed up to the Kyoto protocol which calls for carbon emissions to remain at 1990 levels. Inbuilt into this cause is the assumption that we can calculate what levels we are emitting and reduce them. The amount of reduction is arguable, but George Monbiot argues for 90 per cent before 2050, Arnold Schwarzenegger is looking for 80 per cent in California (Schneider, 2006) and Mike Rann, Premier of South Australia, is seeking a 60 per cent reduction below 1990 levels (Climate Change and Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reductions Bill, South Australia). If we do not reduce carbon and methane emissions, the economic or lifestyle costs will actually become harsher rather than better. The ability of

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the environment to continue absorbing pollution has passed. The soil and the ocean have warmed to the extent that in many areas they are emitting carbon dioxide rather than absorbing it. As the Siberian permafrost melts, it releases much more methane than the entire global cattle population (Smith in Pearce, 2005). In some cases, once warming has been triggered, feedback loops exacerbate and speed up the process. Stern’s review opens with the recognition that the economic effects will be worse if we continue as usual, instead of reducing our consumption patterns globally: Average global temperature increases of only 1–2°C (above pre-industrial levels) could commit 15–40 per cent of species to extinction. As temperatures rise above 2–3ºC, as will very probably happen in the latter part of this century, so the risk of abrupt and large-scale damage increases, and the costs associated with climate change – across the three dimensions of mortality, ecosystems and income – are likely to rise more steeply. In mathematical terms, the global damage function is convex. (2008: 55) To this end, the OECD, the United Nations, and the European Union are all working on developing environmental indicators. The European Union too, wants to ‘simplify complex information so that is it quantifiable [and] can be understood and communicated.’ There is a risk that indicators are piecemeal and arbitrary. Often they emerge from statistics that were incidentally gathered for other purposes and come loaded with political implications. While aware of the arbitrary lists and power implications of environmental measurements, the case is being made that positivist epistemology ought to enable us to roughly calculate the complex processes of the chemical reactions of pollutants on the biosphere. An example is the discovery that polyfluorocarbon use since the 1950s is responsible for the hole in the ozone layer. Accurate calculations might be possible to calculate the number of tonnes of carbon dioxide released that disturbs the ‘balance’ of delicate ecological systems. Often, economic and political contingencies keep ignoring the scientific and ecological evidence. The ozone hole did not begin to recover until all polyfluorocarbon use was halted completely. Risk calculations are attempts to place arbitrary measurements on ‘acceptable’ levels of toxic waste. ‘Acceptable’ levels might be so negligible, that most industrial production and private transportation could not continue to take place at all. This reliance on risk calculations is a good example of the philosophical problem that operates on a deeper level. Measurement and calculation are taken as irreproachable truths about the facts of the earth. Yet measurements, and facts, are fundamentally attributions that fit a series of experiences and events on the one hand, and an epistemological system on the other. Even with

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the most sophisticated machinery in the world, statistical information only encapsulates a narrow band of knowledge about the entwined complexities that constitute any given event or thing. The more we know about any specific item, even after exhaustive investigation, the more there is to know. Measurement will not fundamentally redress the failure of humanity to apprehend the needs of the earth because, paradoxically, it constitutes part of the problem, which is that calculation and measurement obscures our awareness, and our relationship with the planet, instead of enhancing it (Heidegger, 1996b). Accuracy can never be achieved. The hole in the ozone layer is beginning to recover – a wonderful illustration that we can change our consumption practices and lifestyles. However, the recovery is a result of a complete moratorium on hydrofluorocarbons worldwide and not from imposing estimates or risk thresholds for ‘acceptable’ use. Nevertheless, these types of cross-referential indicators are helpful comparisons for governments that are beginning to engage with the problems posed by pollution and climate change. They are a beginning. The danger is that they will be taken as the answer. Given that we live a consumer lifestyle that is devoted to the modern analysis of accountability, some type of environmental indicator helps international policy directives to define national accountability towards those policy agreements. A question might be, is it possible to initiate general accountability measurements while restraining from wholesale advocacy of improved technology as the answering intervention, so as to protect the consumerist lifestyle? The aim of rough estimates on elements such as atmosphere and water pollution is to insert some aspects of ecology into Categories that make sense according to the meters and metaphors of the commodity market and economic transactions. The reasoning is that a tradable voucher system is more likely to be acted upon and respected. Economic indicators addresses both ecological sustainability and global development because it encourages rich polluter nations to pay poorer nations that, the argument goes, are less developed and, therefore, have untapped resources such as forests will, to some extent, offset the pollution released elsewhere. Vouchers can be privatized – providing another set of commodities on the stock exchange. Taxes are usually seen as the opposition of free trade but both are top down, economic disincentives. A good example is New Zealand’s attempt to provide a financial disincentive with the animal ‘fart tax’ in 2003. Resistance was profound. These taxes and vouchers are inconsistent across sectors. Carbon dioxide tax was not attached to motor vehicle mileage. Unfortunately the ‘Clean Development Mechanism’ of introducing clean technology where nothing is yet in place or legislated has not yet generated much activity between ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ nations. Theoretically, rich nations can buy clean air vouchers off poorer (forested) nations, shifting money to ‘developing’ nations and alleviating the urgency of richer ones to pollute less.

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Under the Bush Administration, the US Federal government has been reluctant to admit that climate change is occurring, however many individual States and cities, like California have voluntarily joined the Kyoto protocol and are the Kyoto protocol and are setting about reducing greenhouse gas emissions. One environmental advisor to the Clinton Administration, Stephen Schneider, recommends the voucher system for meeting some of those reduction targets. It is going to be really difficult to reduce energy consumption by 90 per cent but vouchers offer some mitigation of the technical improvements and slowing of the economy that reduced consumerism entails. Schneider advises that the beauty of vouchers is that not all the cuts in emissions have to happen ‘at home’: This is a problem in which the Devil is deeply in the details, so we need to have an important component of it at home, but then we have to look more broadly, and the more association we have outside of the political entity involved and the more capacity to trade, the cheaper and easier it gets to do it. (2006) While trade looks equitable from the global market perspective, ethically, it is a startling admission that tradable vouchers will make it possible for richer nations to take less responsibility for reducing emissions than without vouchers. Should vouchers be globally implemented, their central function would be to appease (for a while anyway) the responsibility of populations in wealthier countries to really change consumer practices while environmental devastation continues with little real improvement throughout the world. The European Union has initiated a stock exchange (Emissions Trading Scheme) for greenhouse gas credits but there is not yet full global commitment to the scheme. Stuart Kirsch points out that ‘These initiatives establish the right to pollute as a form of property regulated by market forces’ (Kirsch, 2004: 27). Kirsch is highly critical of the reductionism of everything to a property relation. Privatization is rationalized on an argument deriving from the ‘tragedy of the commons’: The expansion of the commons leads to contradictory applications of the property construct in the creation of positive value in the form of natural resources and negative value through pollution. The use of property rights to manage both production and destruction is challenged by many communities in arguments about the value of place (Escobar 2001), including ideas about kinship and belonging that may invoke the duty of care. However, even these objections may render ‘nature’ the legitimate object of human management. (Kirsch, 2004: 35)

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The tragedy of the commons is that no one takes responsibility for over use of a commonly held resource base, for example, over-grazing on the village commons. Neoliberal assumptions about the market being the best arbiter of morality and politics on the basis that it is disinterested and fair are founded on the premise of privatized property. Pareto optimality is assumed to take place if all externalities are accounted, and if there are no legal or government hindrances (such as regulations) to impede God’s Invisible Hand balancing out the market (Devine, 2004). In contrast, a more communally orientated outlook could argue that overgrazing of common land may take place in the short term, but arguments and responsibility among the community are more likely to posit restraints, regulations and moratoriums. As a result of privatization, late modern capitalism has alienated local populations from their ecosystems and industrialized processes, to the point that natural systems are only meaningful as potential resources. The alienation and reductionism of nature to ‘resource’ inhibits the ability of local populations (rather than communities) to impose limits. Populations are further inhibited through expensive and time-consuming national legislative lobbying to compose and enforce regulations and moratoriums at a local level. Privatization has not reduced the tragedy of the commons. Instead, it is exacerbated. Reducing the ‘goods’ and the ‘costs’ effect of the public commons is part of the reasoning behind including the ‘externalities’ of pollution into the market equation. Effectively this privatizes ownership, and thus, responsibility, over more of the commons. While, on the one hand, it is undoubtedly important that industrial processes are accountable for the pollution they release, this accounting does not, in itself, change the relationship between industrial modernity and natural ecology. The attempt by pan-global policy makers to develop indicators of the levels of pollution released by any given nation is subject to the same problems. In Strategy for Sustainable Development, the European Commission proposed 36 structural indicators to assess the internal conditions of nations in a comparable way. The indicators were very general, along the themes of: economic background; employment; innovation and research; economic reform; social cohesion and the environment. A few examples on the European Commission’s list are life-long learning (employment); level of internet access (innovation and research); early school-leavers not in further education or training (social cohesion); energy intensity of the economy (environment) (2001). The list has been developed from existing data and modern economic concerns rather than with the cohesive aim for bringing about a better ‘fit’ between human societies and ecology. On one level, the list is problematic because it is the result of the priorities of particular members which makes it difficult to use it as a comparative tool between vastly disparate nations. On another level, each nation resides in very particular geographical, temperate and biological localities that have very specific ecological requirements. International standardized

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indicators have no way of responding to these particularities but only to generalizations. Small wonder, for example, that the hot, arid, but developed regions of California and South Australia are making the first concerted effort to reduce pollutant emissions. These regions of the planet are prone to desertification and are highly sensitive to global warming. By contrast, (in the short term at least) parts of Russia and Canada might be quite pleased to have a more temperate climate. It is understandable that policy makers look for theoretical structures that can clearly outline consistent approaches to global problems. The simple market metaphor of Neoliberal theory serves this purpose well: the establishment of firm economic measurements so that economic transactions can be created, presumably with some transparency, and can enable the market to magically adjust the political dimensions of redistribution. Instead, the real complexities of the global disparities between north and south mean that sustainable indicators, especially social ones, tend to reflect the normative values of the host nation. The physical conditions of north and south are so disparate it is impossible to make any universal claims for ‘fair’ indicators, or in many cases, make any real comparisons. For example, the first OECD social indicator of retirement funds is a matter of primary concern to the baby boomers about to retire in Western nations, but of absolutely no relevance to Sub-Saharan Africa where the average life expectancy is 49; there is no pension or welfare scheme, and the elderly and the very young rely on family bonds of gathering and sharing to survive. An intelligent case can be made that the concept of ‘sustainability’ ought to be applied to the solid boundaries of absolute poverty and morbidity as thresholds in the same way that rates of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere present a real toxic boundary, the limits of which are the limits of life (Upton and Vitalis, 2002a). This still takes an anthropocentric ‘bottom-line’ as the environment provides ‘ecological services’ rather than being meaningful ‘in itself’ as grass, or sand, or the flight of an albatross. The OECD has developed its own list of ‘critical indicators’ that do seem to be more cohesive and less erratic. Nevertheless, clearly the Neoliberal tendency to reduce all things (human or otherwise) to potentially consumable resources in the marketplace prevails. Their descriptions of ‘human capital’ and ‘resources’ are highly prominent. The categories that include production are set in financial terms that occlude many aspects of global corporations (such as offshore tax havens, the alienation of ‘ownership’ in international tradable shares, stock market arbitrage) whereas the consumer end is more visible and susceptible to policy initiatives and legislated responsibility. The OECD’s Sustainable Development – Critical Issues list indicators under the headings: ‘Environmental assets’, ‘Economic assets’, ‘Human capital’, ‘Outcome indicators’ (OECD 2001d: 72). While we might register the important steps that sustainable development entails, it is also vital to keep in mind the constraints that these ideas perpetuate. The association of ‘development’ with ‘sustainability’ further complicates the

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relation of human beings with the natural environment. In our globally orientated, consumer culture, poverty is certainly intricately bound up with environmental concerns. At the international conventions, it has been an important task to educate wealthier countries – who have often already largely consumed their irreplaceable natural resources – that environmental conservation in poorer nations might impact on their potential for economic ‘development’. Important questions about economic standards of living need to be raised, such that most tribal people did not regard themselves in financial terms – as ‘poor’ – before global development began to impact on their ways of life. Poverty is not the same as wealth. By which I mean, it is possible to have modern standards of infrastructure for water, power, transport, education and health without the additional accoutrements of consumerism. And this shift in perspective, from accrual of financial wealth to the health of communities and ecosystems, is a vital change that needs to be put in place in ‘developed’ and ‘undeveloped’ nations. Instead of focusing exclusively on duplicating modern culture everywhere on the globe, enabling infrastructure that contributes to stressed nations being in a better position to cope with larger populations – without the emphasis on GDP – is a better aim for policies of ‘sustainable development’. There is no point focusing on the devastating potential of pollution on global warming if the aim is not to alter the dominant industrial processes and consumer lifestyle of fast capitalism. Separating out ‘sustainability’ from ‘development’ without this critical aim results in, yet, more excuses for wealthy nations to fail to engage with the impact that their consumer lifestyle has upon nature and upon crisis-ridden countries like Nigeria, whose population is impoverished even though they live in one of the most resource-rich areas in the world. The ‘three pillars’ – economic, social and environmental – that are espoused by pan-global policy makers to create an ‘eco-society’ are inextricably tied together in the literature. However, all three are interpreted entirely in anthropocentric terms. ‘Economics’ is understood as ‘growth (that supports social progress and respects the environment)’, ‘social policy’ is framed as important because it ‘underpins economic performance’ and ‘environment’ has little or nothing to do with nature, but is policy that is ‘efficient’ and ‘cost-effective’. Interestingly, Simon Upton describes this virtuous triangle as ‘artful’ (Upton, 2002b). The mutually supporting arrangement occludes inevitable trade-offs – environmental sustainability is not just about ‘efficiency’. The three pillars imply that everything is tradable and, as Upton himself criticizes, there are ‘no environmental bottom lines’. The three pillars of social, economic and environmental sustainability, along with the loosely organized, issue-by-issue approach of the OECD, threaten to ‘empty’ the concept of sustainability by enlarging it beyond the point where it ceases to have meaning. There is only one approach to environmentalism proposed and that is the Neoliberal market in association with analysis of scientifically based environmental indicators, no matter how rough they may be

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as guides, because it is only with positivist measurement that nations can be held accountable. Some of the current economic and social indicators that are already in use are the ‘health, wealth and wisdom’ of the UN’s Human Development Index that relies on data about health, education and income indices (such as GDP). The regulations of global organizations like the UN and the OECD have to begin by scientifically ‘establishing whether there are global thresholds within which humanity must stay if it is to avoid significant disruption to the planet’s life support systems’. Furthermore, there is the Neoliberal wish to make use of trade – the magical market – to illuminate how environmental indicators can help negotiate the minefield of political anxieties that cause friction at the UNCED conferences. Wealthy nations might present a healthier version of pollutants or resource consumption than is fair, if accurate indicators do not show how globalized trade impacts on carbon release, for example. Carbon is embedded in plastics, steel, aluminium and many other goods that are consumed in the North but produced in the South. Taking the mobility of trade into account would more accurately reflect how the North is more responsible for the carbon release in poorer nations. This is a classic Neoliberal argument that the market will account for and ‘balance’ all the significant factors without resorting to political interests. Many in the environmental community share the desire for more transboundary information to fill the scientific gaps. Institutions are opening several new discipline areas, especially ‘earth monitoring’. For example, International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, Oslo’s Centre for International Climate and Environment Research, worldwide Meteorological Institutions and many universities are establishing the extent and development of global warming with a vast array of scientific evidence and analysis. Better understanding of the interconnected fabric of the earth’s ecology is essential. However, it is susceptible to being co-opted into a statistical mode of governance that predicts and generalizes risk situations – turning them into property rights, rather than producing a responsive cohabitation within the ecological niche. What is needed to alter the relationship of humanity with the environment is a change in style, in the guiding metaphors, in the heroic figures, in the aspirations and types of events that are highlighted as worthy of veneration. A general structure of pan-global policies based solely on economics does little or nothing to bring about this change in the cultural mores and ethics of humanity’s care and concern for our habitat.

Decoupling economic growth Free trade is premised on three things – efficient production, cheap labour and availability of resources. Production and labour practices are the signature of the merit of governance but access to resources is specific to particular localities.

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Contemporary Neoliberalism is moving beyond WTO’s cry for the abandonment of national trade barriers and subsidies and attempting to factor in these distortions and disincentives by ‘weighting and bundling’ these government interventions. For example, a ‘synthetic indicator’ of the ‘aggregated impact’ of trade subsidies versus charity could be included in the normal flow of market factors. Consumer choice will struggle with scarcity of supply due to biophysical limits, until a market value is set and ‘balanced’ (Upton, 2002b). The utopian ideals of market balance are always misplaced, according to Neoliberals’, by interference from the government. Yet interference from arbitrage, international tax dodges, the alienation of responsibility for the conditions of workers by companies whose main shareholders are in different parts of the world, unequal access to legal advice and the lack of lasting liability for the pollutant results of production1 are much more significant reasons for the inability of the market to ‘balance’ the real costs of the modern consumer lifestyle. It makes no sense that one small part of the practices of exchange – the market transaction between producer and consumer – could be fully responsible for the complex flows of power, transport, resource extraction, labour, management and multilayered ownership in the era of fast capitalism. The initial goals outlined by the OECD state that one of the primary objectives is to ‘decouple’ economic growth from environmental limitations. The idea is that continued exponential economic growth can be achieved in environmentally sound ways by increasing ‘efficiency’ in production and distribution and, presumably, increasing price while diminishing costs. The consumption of products is inevitably linked to the constraints of resources and energy. The service and information sector, however, specifically the ‘Knowledge Economy’, also offers opportunities for economic growth that potentially could be ‘decoupled’ from environmental constraints. Uniquely, the ‘Knowledge Economy’ has relatively few problems with end-of-line disposal of consumable products except for the increasing mountain of outdated computers, paper and ink consumption and so on. Evenso, costs of electricity, storage and surveillance remain hidden in the expenditure accounts of the general population’s living standard. However, the best demonstration of how the Knowledge Economy is also embedded in the problems of modern consumerism and exponential extraction of the earth’s resources is the copper that is vital to computer hardware. Much of this comes from opencast mines in places like the Congo and Zambia where the miners scrabble in the dirt for enough ore to exchange for that day’s food.2 In some villages in China, there are literally huge piles of old computer hardware that is sorted and recycled by hand. Leachates are polluting the soil, children run around bare foot and no protective gloves or clothing is worn while the people sort and strip the world’s mountain of old machinery for recycling. Obliterating the economic and environment impacts of extracting resources to build computer hardware makes it look as though the economic expansion in information technology is ‘decoupled’ from the finitude of the earth’s resources.

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The increased capacity and abundance of information technologies expand the opportunities for making capitalist profit through both the distribution and the withholding of knowledge and services. Ken Wain demonstrates how lifelong learning plays an important role in promoting this sector of the economy by making individuals responsible for continuous upskilling to compete in a rapidly changing and casualized job market (cf. Wain, 2004). Life-long learning shrouds problems of the casualization of labour and domestication of unemployment. Life-long learning is no longer about the emancipation of underprivileged adult learners but inserting each and every individual as ‘human capital’ in the total mobilization of modernity. In general, the concept of ‘decoupling’ economic growth from the increased consumption of the earth’s natural ‘resources’ is fanciful. Increased economic growth relies upon an increase in consumption every year. Economic ‘growth’ is not like the regeneration of the seasons – it is exponential production and consumption. A question to ask ourselves, given this situation, is whether it is possible to be an economist, or to acknowledge the uses and worth of the market, without being Neoliberal? It is quite possible to support the use of the market – even in something approximating its present form – and yet, reject the meta-narrative of the market as a formula for comprehending our world-view. The market does not describe all interactions and should not be held in a position to universally reduce all aspects of humanity and nature to potentially consumable resource. Yet in a very limited fashion, the market is a very useful mode of transferring and distributing commodities from one community to another. As a means of interaction, it is ‘invaluable’. As a metaphysical apparatus, it is not merely dangerous but brings us to the ‘end of history’. As metaphysics, the market is the means of our own extinction. Interestingly, it is not only green economists like Schumacher, Small is Beautiful (1973), who is advocating a shift in consumerism. There are a few important members of pan-global organizations who no longer remain wed to the notion of economic growth. Herman Daly, a senior economist for the World Bank in the early 1990s has recognized the historically contingent belief in continuous economic growth. Daly writes that [i]t has really been only in the last 200 years that growth has been really a part of our lives. Prior to [the Industrial Revolution], on an annual basis, growth was negligible. The idea that we must either grow or die is just not supported by history and I think that the contrary is much more likely: if we continue to grow, then surely we will die. (1996) Joseph Stiglitz was the Vice President of the World Bank and he published Globalization and Its Discontents in 2003. The illusion of stability to the global economy is sustained by practices that refuse to genuinely acknowledge the

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finitude of both the earth’s resources and availability of environmental sinks for pollution. The global economy simulates an entrenched ‘ground’ to the way we do things, but there are many examples of that ground falling away. The worldwide depression of 1929 and the early 1930s; the collapse of the currency in Argentina in 1999–2002; the Enron scandal over energy sales and corrupt over-estimation of profits in America; Richard Grasso’s corrupt leadership of the New York Stock Exchange; the collapse of the US mortgage giants, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae in 2008; not to mention the overvaluation of the American dollar are all indicators of the instability of the economic system – before unsustainable pollution and resource consumption have really made a big impact. Dramatic alterations to the ‘self-regulating machine’ of the environment pose unknown, but potentially calamitous ‘risk’ to the maintenance of conditions of life on earth. Global organizations are beginning to engage with the problem of climate change and pollution through the discourse of sustainability. As spokesperson for the environment for the OECD, Simon Upton’s position is a complex and sophisticated amalgamation of environmental scientific ‘realism’ and faith in the Neoliberal market. He believes that environmental problems can be included in the accounting of cost/benefit and risk analysis. His acceptance of the global climate change as traceable to the technological industrial lifestyle of humanity in many countries in the world is refreshingly straightforward. As yet, however, the technological enframing of the theoretical methodology that permeates all pan-global institutions is almost entirely uncritically received. Admittedly, it is improbable that any other means of changing the technological and economic approach to environment problems could have such immediate short-term effect influencing policy at national and regional levels. However, the Emissions Trading Scheme, of carbon taxes and carbon credits, which integrates the externalities of pollution into the market equation, will allow national governments the illusion that they are being far more effective than they actually are. The immediate drawback to the Neoliberal approach is that it will exacerbate the unequal distribution of wealth and resources, rely too heavily on arbitrary categories and statistical generalizations, and refuse to theorize the immense changes in the globalized, technical juggernaut of management and ownership of multinational corporations. Its long-term shortcomings will emerge from the essential inability of humankind to fully anticipate and regulate all the unknown factors that result from industrial practises and contribute to global climate change. Carbon trading and the concept of sustainability itself, deepen the illusion of mastery over nature. No matter how detailed a knowledge we have over aspects of the environment, the ecology of the whole is far too complex, the necessary interactions far beyond the limits of our information or our ability to conceptualize. In its present form, ‘sustainable development’ has replaced the older Neoliberal rhetoric of the Invisible Hand of the market. God’s Invisible Hand is the

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overarching meta-narrative that defines every element of nature and culture. ‘Sustainable development’ renders all aspects of the landscape and societies as ‘resource’ and subsumes the planet and, potentially, the solar system, the universe, as smaller subsets of the overall economic project of resource management. The alternative is to view human societies in an evolutionary fashion, where cities and towns occupy particular territories, among other species, and geological formations. Economic activity is simply a particular vector of interaction that links widely distributed human colonies. All species are subsets of the larger territory, the planet, the solar system, the universe. The landscape is the context for all human activity. The technological mastery that we wield has taken over our other ways of knowing and being. Technological mastery and the meta-narrative of market Neoliberalism are built on the subjectivist anthropocentricism of philosophical Idealism. Idealism has introduced a hyper-separation of subject from object, of humanity from the earth’s ecology. This hyper-separation forges the ‘ground’ for contemporary politics and the ethos of unremitting consumerism. It is in danger of killing us all with a wilful ignorance of our part in the ecological niche. When we forget that we are one species among many others, that the landscape forms us, as much as we form it, we are in danger of forgetting what is meaningful about life. However, as the failures of the Neoliberal regime become more apparent, the door opens for a significant paradigm shift in the resolution of the environmental problems of modernity. The trick will be to hold two modes of knowledge in our hands at the same time: technological accuracy and intervention on the one hand, and an ethos of environmental integration on the other. Cultural transformation could continue to evolve core elements of the Enlightenment and abandon the rigid hubris that is pushing thousands of species over the brink of extinction. I hope that this critique begins to challenge the reliance on Neoliberal financial incentives to initiate real change in people’s behaviour. Most people would really, really like to be able to live more ecologically friendly lifestyles. It is simply impossible to achieve in the context of modern consumer society. Better, environmentally friendly infrastructure will enable people to make the decisions that help lower their ecological footprint. Nevertheless, they cannot achieve this in isolation. Economic incentives or disincentives do nothing to alter the context of their lives. What is required is real investment in eco-friendly infrastructure and local enforceable regulations that include bringing existing structures up to more rigorous standards. It is beyond the scope of the best policy implementation to deeply change cultural ethos, so that each of us ‘naturally’ considers environmental imperatives in every single activity and decision. How to activate these habitual motivations will become clearer as we set up more possibilities for ecologically friendly lifestyles in every country.

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Chapter 5

Pessimistic Realism and Optimistic Total Management

Environmental concerns are forcing us to reconceptualize the age-old assumption that humanity has mastery over nature. The exponential growth of the global economy creates a situation where every year market turnover and consumption increases and the rate of increase is greater and greater year upon year. We are now at the stage that the atmosphere, the forests and the oceans cannot carry on absorbing the ‘externalities’ of pollution, and dramatic climate change is beginning to be upon us. Given these facts, and assuming for a moment that we have the capacity to reconceptualize the traditional ‘hyperseparation’ of humanity from nature – how do we begin the process of education and cultural change? The Kyoto Agreement attempted to bring exponential increase to a standstill and halt consumption and pollution to 1990 levels. However, the Agreement rests on market assumptions about the mode of interaction between humanity and the earth (or resources). The Brundtland Report rarely mentions the physical environment, ecology or wilderness. Instead, it refers to ‘sustainable development’ which is another metaphor for ongoing, progressive technological improvement and universalization of modern cultural practices of consumerism. While the market metaphor structures all interaction and ways of knowing, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to withdraw from the rubric of economic growth. Ideas are not ‘constructed’ first and then followed by material conditions. Neither do material conditions exist independently of the world-view by which they are interpreted. An avenue to a freedom beyond technological enframing is the collapse of the dualism between culture and nature, which simultaneously collapses the position of technical mastery held by Man over an innocent, if wild and savage natural environment. One of the recurring problems with dealing with environment issues is the pessimistic belief that nothing can really change. Many people have a despondent view of the world yet see their own efforts to change things as futile or falling on deaf ears. Sometimes this feeling of futility is based on the minimal scale of individual effort – a small drop in a vast ocean of ongoing environmentally destructive behaviour and beliefs. No single one of us can stand outside

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the system we are thrown into; so that, even while we may abhor using fossil fuels and cycle each day to work, we still wear clothes with synthetic, petroleumbased material, or we eat food packed in plastic or we fly occasionally to a conference on the other side of the planet. Even those who live in closed communities and grow their own organic food, refuse to use money, and live wonderfully ecologically friendly lifestyles are still at some points tied into the global economy. Their very antagonism and self-imposed exile is a reaction that confirms the dominance of modernity.1 Given the unavoidability of participating in the culture of modernity, the question arises about how to institute cultural, technological and economic change that will deeply alter the ethical relationship between humanity and the earth. The first step is to recognize the conditions into which we are thrown. This can be a depressing and disempowering stage where one wonders if there are any possibilities of emerging from a pathway that appears determined to carry on along the lines of anthropocentric economic growth no matter the anxiety about sustainable living in our ecological niche. The next step is to try to discern which aspects of the modern system relies upon industrial production, which upon the Enlightenment, which upon monotheistic religion, which upon democratic Liberalism, which upon positivism and which upon technology itself. Having teased some of these aspects apart, it is simpler to dismantle and reassemble a culture that keeps some aspects of modernity: environmentally friendly technology, for example, and egalitarian forms of political power but disposes of consumerism and commensurately, large-scale industrial production for its own sake. Optimistic management of environmental issues fails completely to honestly engage with the full implications of modern behaviour. This is partly because the technological enframing of our world-view inhibits us from seeing the earth or ourselves in a way that is outside of ‘standing-reserve’. Sustainable development has become fully integrated into the enframing of technology and the optimistic mastery over nature. The enframing of technology has reached global proportions in combination with the colonial spread of modern Liberalism. It is not unlikely that technological enframing could have sheltered under other forms of governance such as communism, which after all, emerges from the same Enlightenment ideas. Germany tried a ‘Third Way’ during the 1930s and 1940s between the godless communists in the East and the greedy capitalists in the West. At present, we are trying the ‘Third Way’ of Giddens Neoliberalism, residual Keynesian welfarism and globalized apparatuses of regulation and law. Technological enframing has thrived in each case. Oswald Spengler and Ernst Jünger both wrote about the characteristics of modernity; the massive storage that has changed technology from craftlike equipment to the enframing of technology, and capitalist efficiency as the ‘total mobilization’ of all aspects of life to the war machine. Part of Heidegger’s

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critique of modern Liberalism is the machine-like ‘total mobilization’ of technological enframing which challenges both human beings and natural entities to become ‘standing-reserve’. There is not much room for ‘freedom’ in total mobilization, although individuals are not necessarily aware that their choices are shaped to cohere with modernity’s objectives. Jim Marshall (1996c), Colin Lankshear (1982), Nesta Devine and I (Irwin and Devine, 2006) have argued that the ‘free’ and ‘autonomous’ individual is a necessary fiction for enabling modern cultures to function. Jünger argues that total mobilization has collapsed the distinction between peacetime and war. At all times, governments function to enhance the aggressive surveillance and coordination required to mobilize all people, modes of production and raw material, into the cohesive machinery required for exponential technological expansion. From the relatively simple organization of traditional societies, technological ‘civilization’ has increasingly enhanced the calculation, measurement, surveillance and conceptualization of things as potential resource. Technological civilization has probed the skies, learning to fly across vast areas of the globe, pushing satellites beyond the atmosphere into orbit, tapped into frequencies of sound, light, microwaves and more. Technology has pushed through the depths of the oceans and charted sea floors and mineral deposits, peeled back the surface of the planet to unearth seams of coal, gold, crystals, oil, clay and rock. Technology has probed the veins, muscles, bones, the brains and genes of various species, including humans. All these things have been redistributed, creating pathways for further vectors of communication and reconfigured. Modern civilization is the gradual colonization of every aspect of planetary Being into the totalizing conduits of technological functioning.

Discourse, politics and environment Security and freedom are two key issues guiding modern Liberal democracies that have undergone subtle historical change. In the post-war period, the emphasis was on the security of the entire community and the freedom to buy commodities. Ingolfur Blühdorn examines the way the discourse of sustainability plays into these two key principles of modernity. The Neoliberal trope makes use of the same Enlightenment principles of freedom, equality, individuality and justice but reads all of these concepts through the metaphor of the market. The selfish individual becomes homo economicus, a ‘rational utility maximiser’ who makes choices in the marketplace that will enhance their own ‘well-being’ (Peters, 2001a: 116). Like the general will of Rousseau and the Utilitarians’, the pragmatic choices of individuals in the marketplace is supposed to balance out the relationship between demand and supply ‘as though by an invisible hand’ (Devine, 2004: 46, 106–109, 118–119). The shift to the ‘Neo’Liberal paradigm has coincided with the saturation of commodities on the affluent market of the

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West. Security and freedom have become increasingly individualized. Consumable goods and services are also individuated rather than community-oriented. Neoliberalism has taken over key concepts, emptied them of their previous meaning and used them as a political framework for uniting groups that had once polarized over ‘left’ and ‘right’, community or individual, religious or atheist, conservative or broad-minded. Blühdorn describes how the concept of sustainable development ‘has united previously intransigent enemies and forged unexpected strategic alliances’ (Blühdorn, 2002: 59). Neoliberalism has managed to move us into a post-ecological era ‘in the sense that the ecologist patterns of thought (diagnoses, values, strategies) have become outdated and have been abandoned’ (Blühdorn, 2002: 60). There is no genuine attempt to achieve environmental goals of social justice or ecologically friendly behaviours. Rather, he argues, Neoliberalism has a discursive strategy of disguise that serves to maintain consumer culture. Ecological thinking emerged in the struggle over the technological changes of the Industrial Revolution. The cultural shift initiated by the modern Industrial Revolution created new ideas in reaction to these changes in circumstances. Some had echoes of earlier notions such as Christian stewardship, Romanticism or Volk thinking, but some were direct products of the rapid change of urbanization, new technologies, new pollutants and dramatic collapse in previously stable eco-systems. It has become fashionable to attribute the emergence of ideas and attitudes as a function of the purely cultural: rhetoric, discourse, linguistics and thinking. Clearly, discourse formulates a conceptual lens for understanding given environmental conditions (in the social as well as ecological sense). In the terms of Nietzsche and, later, Foucault, the sociohistorical conditions impose regulations, schedules, dietary conditions and so forth that concurrently shape the morphology of our bodies, our surroundings and our understandings (Foucault, 1977, 1979, 1980, 1983a, 1990b, 1990c, 1991b and Nietzsche, 1974, 1982b, 1989, 1986). There is no discernible separation between discursive regime and environmental conditions. With these caveats on Constructivism firmly in mind, it is possible to analyse the way that Neoliberalism has generated a type of landscape that is endlessly parcelled in proprietal bundles. No matter what aspect of nature we look at, it is interpreted through the eyes of potential ownership and utility. The discourse of the market is shaping our world-view. There are levels of agency and overt commitment to advocating this discourse, and there are plentiful examples of people propagating this world-view with no consciousness of its origins or its implications. Blühdorn teases out the discursive normativity that shapes our judgements on contemporary events and conditions: In examining the ecologist or post-ecologist frames of mind, we are implicitly acknowledging the important fact that climatic change, decline in bio-diversity, contamination-induced epidemics, or any other phenomena or conditions in

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the social and natural environment are not in themselves problematic but are charged with normative content by being confronted with a pre-established value system. (2002: 60) Generating a discourse happens in many ways. Neoliberalism incorporates existing terminology into the economic paradigm. ‘Sustainability’, for example, as discussed in Chapter 4, has shifted from its ecological roots towards efficient production. ‘Threshold’ is also becoming an important Neoliberal term because it chimes with risk/cost analysis of insurance management. The discourse of environmental crisis has long been associated with green politics. Its normative content is to maintain atmospheric, ocean and surface conditions within parameters that make life on earth possible. Meaning operates at different levels and takes on different roles depending on the normative discourse within which it operates. In this case, we saw ‘sustainability’ shift from being embedded in a wider normative paradigm of environmental conservation to a wider normative paradigm of economic liberalism. What becomes interesting is how that wider world-view is set into place, and how it might be possible to introduce a paradigm shift. In the Neoliberal case, there appears to be a lot of active agency in how meanings are manipulated. Bernstein (2001) mentions a business think-tank with representatives from some of the largest multinational corporations in the world that forged a very close alliance between its Chair Stephan Schmidheiny, and the UNCED Secretary-General Maurice Strong. In 1992, they put out a report called Changing Course which was very similar to the later Rio outcomes. Bernstein cautions that by the 1990s, these ideas were already well-established in the OECD and the EU (Bernstein, 2001: 15). Nesta Devine illustrates especially well the way Neoliberal think-tanks in the 1950s and 1960s, such as the Mount Pelerin Society, the Independent Economics Association, and New Zealand’s Business Round Table, consciously sought to influence public opinion along individualized, marketization and management principles of efficiency and self-interest (Devine, 2001). Blühdorn is inclined to understand the normative values of Neoliberalism as an unconscious and, perhaps, inevitable iteration of the modern paradigm. He states, ‘The politics of simulation simulates the ongoing validity of the modernist project for society as a whole’ (Blühdorn, 2002: 67). He argues that simulation is an unconscious project rather than a conscious strategy. It results in the meaningless nihilism critiqued so harshly by Heidegger (see Chapter 8). ‘Environmental crisis’ too, has been co-opted by the market metaphors of cost/benefit and risk analysis. The insurance industry has been making money out of crises for generations. More recently, environmental devastation, tornadoes, lightening and cyclone damage, mean a financial opportunity for those businesses that can participate in the clean-up. Environmental crisis has shifted its meaning from deadly risk to financial opportunity.

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Neoliberals have been overtly strategic in shifting the meanings of older terms (such as ‘equity’ to mean merit) and it is possible to be cynical about the method by which meanings are contorted to fit the narrative that the market explains everything. Having made this Constructivist critique, it makes no sense to make a similar accusation that the rapidly arising environmental changes could have been given meaning other than ‘crisis’. Constructivism tends to place a great deal of weight on the agency of players to generate discourse. Events are always interpreted, and those interpretations are malleable. In some cases, this is definitely a factor (see the think-tanks above and the whole arena of ‘public relations’ which overtly aims to influence normative discourse). Yet, I think it is too demanding to expect society always to be in control over its own discursive reactions. It is only some way down the line, once the abrupt immediacy of dawning awareness is to some extent accommodated and understood that self-reflection can define the flashpoint as an ‘early reactive phase’. It is also worth registering that the environmental effort to ‘save the world’ is in itself, merely a discourse that can be contextualized by the earth’s continued existence without the occupation of human beings, or even life forms. The earth’s finite ability to cope with the consequences of modern consumption and pollution is only ‘problematic’ if we occlude the notion that the planet will continue to exist, as many other lifeless planets do, regardless of our continued presence. This is not entirely irrelevant; it gives perspective on our efforts to conserve conditions of life. In fact though, the normative values that served to write up, as it were, environmental change as problematic had to fight to be heard; as such, they were not the ‘norm’. The discourse of environmental crisis took on renewed energy during the Romantic period at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, but even during Greek and Roman times, philosophers and writers have argued for the simple life and against unnecessary profligate consumption. In modern times, once the battles over civil liberties in the 1960s had largely been won, the environmental ‘crisis’ re-emerged with some urgency. The subsequent shift to the ‘post-ecological’ is also a battle for community attitude, acceptance and willingness – only this time, far from advocating the simple life, the economic and technological discourse tries to institute stasis, rather than substantial cultural change. The processes by which discourse becomes normative are complex. They are helped along by significant actors, by a ‘fit’ with the historical context, by widespread affinity with already existing ideas, and by the maintenance of the status quo. It is easy to view entrenched discourse as a sort of inevitable cultural outcome of the teleological unfolding of history. There have been important conceptual shifts in cultural attitudes in late modernity. Jünger developed the theory that the brutality of war imposed a new kind of heroic subjectivity that was a vital cog in the war machine, forged in fire and ice. During the post-war period, Ronald Inglehart suggests the two concepts of security and autonomy showed up in the pursuit of stable

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conditions for material production and distribution. Blühdorn adds that security and autonomy were characterized in the post-war period by community and collectivism. The combined effect of radical new technologies that had been developed during the war and the Cold War climate raised awareness of risk. Collective security and social autonomy were threatened by apocalypse: both nuclear and ecological. The following years were characterized by eco-pessimism. By the 1970s, the post-war emphasis on material goods was in large part sated. The ‘marginal utility of further economic growth’ shifted the emphasis towards autonomy: self-determination, self-realization and self-expression. The saturation of material goods also allowed attention to be directed towards the needs of civil rights and finally ecology. Hence, the publication of books like Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful (1973) and the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al., 1972). The change entailed a shift towards individualism from the previous focus on the security of the entire community. Many debates on Liberalism, democracy and the ratio of communal versus individual rights emerged during this period. ‘To the extent that the self and autonomy, which shifted into the centre of the new frame of mind, were the individual self and individual autonomy, postmaterial politics might be described as ego-politics’ (Blühdorn, 2002: 62). Earlier on in this process of cultural change, a high value was placed on pluralism, egalitarianism and the collective good. Classical Liberalism emphasized culture but this was replaced in the 1970s and 1980s by Neoliberal accountability and economics and the application of the market metaphor to every sphere in life. As autonomy and security shifted in emphasis from the community towards the individual, it became, paradoxically, easier to estimate the aggregate choices and behaviours of people, as they conformed to behaving along lines of self-interest instead of in the less predictable, more altruistic behaviours of close-knit communities. While technology and wealth offer some individuals greater mobility and consumer choice than ever before, with more opportunities for tourism, or satisfying our curiosities and whims, autonomy and mastery over nature are also subject to strict conditions of governmentality (Foucault, 1979). Security turns its gaze at the domestic population as much as the Other. Security it appears, has to a significant extent, come at the cost of freedom. There is a third shift in late modernity, Blühdorn argues, from the materialist, towards the post-materialist and finally to the ‘post-ecologist’ frame of mind that is once again ‘rearranging the parameters that determine the way in which the social and natural environment are perceived’ (2002: 61). The post-war risk society has been taken over by a complacent ‘end of history’ attitude at the fall of communism. The concept of ‘risk’, he argues, has largely been replaced by ‘opportunity’. Environmental issues have been privatized and the responsibility for pollution has been attributed to the consumer rather than the producer. The crisis discourse has been reenvisioned from global calamity to ‘risk’ which

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presents entrepreneurs with opportunities and the population at large with a need for investing in insurance. The two defining concepts of modernity – security and autonomy – are being reinterpreted through a harsh individualism. Given that general material security is now replete (for the West anyway), the shift from the ecological to the post-ecological frame of mind is constituted by an egoistic, exclusive ‘hyper-materialism’. The opportunity society is primarily concerned with individual accumulation and consumption where risks for some are opportunities for making money for others. Entrepreneurial opportunism is justified by the belief in perpetual economic growth: that the population has ‘disposable’ income. These practices of individual security rather than the earlier focus on community have produced a ‘framework of neo-materialist, neo-authoritarian, and socially exclusive security politics [that is] the post-ecologist frame of mind’ (Blühdorn, 2002: 65). Blühdorn argues that ecological integrity and social inclusion have been factually abandoned by late modernity and that it is no longer viable to expect to develop a countering ecological frame of mind. Indeed, Environmental Studies in schools and tertiary institutes may serve to promote the ‘empty’ Neoliberal version of ‘sustainability’ and depoliticize any attempts by people to think their way out of the contemporary individual market orientation (Blühdorn, 2002: 67). This kind of despondency is entirely understandable. Staying despondent that the situation will never change is not really an option. Life is incredibly versatile and dynamic. There are important lessons to be learned from this sort of honest appraisal of the implications of Neoliberalism. The critique lays out the next step as a requirement for reclaiming language and meaning; an honest appraisal of the state of late modernity’s economic principles and a clear espousal of the integrated and dynamic relationship between individual subject, ecological community and culture. One of the most important areas to appraise honestly in this way, is the oil industry. The realistic, if pessimistic, view is that releasing fossilized oil back into the active circulation of gases on the earth’s surface is threatening to permanently collapse the delicate zone of climate that makes life viable. The enframing of technology has challenged forth all aspects of culture and nature as objects and potentially consumable resources. Jünger argues that the total mobilization of war is the prevailing condition for modernity. To some degree, humanity has some agency over our collective interpretations, our discursive norms, the spread and manipulation of ideas, finance, goods and services (cf. Devine, 2004 and Bernstein, 2001). Heidegger argues that we need to return to the ‘origin’ of Western thinking in the ancient Greek awe at the arising of physis (dynamic becoming) and aletheia (revealing truths) for a more ethical relation between humanity and Being. The integration of humanity, thinking and the earth, is not for survival – of the fittest – but of integrated, interconnected assemblages, ecology of (an)organic life. Blühdorn is pessimistic

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about education providing a shelter for reimagining the environment outside the disguised Neoliberal discourse of objectification, resource and consumption. Whether we can come up with ways out of the predicament of totalizing technology, globalized capitalism, and rampant consumerism is open to question, particularly given the time constraints that climate change is imposing upon us. Some of the options that are circulating are explored in the next few chapters. Maintaining the combination of politics and economics that form the status quo is reliant upon an epistemology of categorization, accountancy, calculation and rationality. Humanity is the vector of reproduction for technology. We have thus far allowed technology to take over our way of understanding ourselves and every other thing objectively as ‘standing-reserve’. As it stands, the technological frame reduces all ways of knowing to the consumerist ethos of the market. Presently, the two greatest institutions for disseminating knowledge, the media and education, are both complicit in this technological paucity of metaphor and thinking.

Romanticism, Idealism and societies of control The constructivist position that we imagine our world, and that the ideas and discourse we produce about it are under our control. This is another form of what Heidegger calls ‘subjectivism’. Part of Heidegger’s thesis stems from the critique of the over-emphasis on the subject in philosophical Western Idealism. Heidegger’s precursor, Schopenhauer describes ‘The World as my Idea’ (Schopenhauer, vol. II, chapter 1, cited in Heidegger, 1968a: 40) explaining that the inevitable divide between subject and object means that humanity relies upon images or representations to develop truths about an object. We think representations. Our representations present us with a world. Heidegger is critical of representation as the mediating factor between Dasein and Being, subject and nature which privileges the ‘Idea’ of the subjectivist mind. However, he agrees that dominant ways of knowing ‘world’ in particular epochs. In late modernity, technology is ‘worlding’. The enframing of technology has permeated our understanding of the world and ourselves, and shapes our bodies, actions, language and thinking. The enframing of technology has produced globalization as consumerism and governmentality. Effectively the enframing of technology has ‘de-coupled’ the integrity of communities (or nation states) from the constraints of the rhythms and flows of their local ecological niche. We are grappling to find meaningful human interactions within the constraints of technological enframing. In the 1970s and 1980s, ethical environmental awareness was based on an understanding of the crisis of nihilism and environmental devastation as a catalyst for an epistemological shift.

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A countervailing force has seen ‘environmentalism’ being shifted away from politically engaged, if pessimistic, ethical concerns, towards more optimistic ‘sustainability’. While recognizing the nihilist environmental threshold for the maintenance of life, the discourse of ‘sustainability’ has emptied any moral content from the environmental debate and tried to replace it with economic calculations of cost, benefit and risk analyses. The economic model owes a debt to scientific positivism or ‘objectivity’ that apparently does not rely on subjective representations, so much as the statistically verifiable Truth of the matter (Bernstein, 2001). The representation of correctitude as truth has been held under some suspicion by contemporary sociologists for several decades. Contemporary ‘postmodernity’ (Lyotard, 1993, Peters, 1989, 1995b) prefers to hold itself sceptically aloof from a finally verifiable truth, showing, instead, a multitudinous presentation of views which approach the same subject from a variety of angles (again, often the ‘plural’ perspectives lend themselves to critical assertion of the most correct interpretation, see Chapter 7, on Pragmatism). In his text, What is Called Thinking? (1968a), Heidegger addressed the problem of the separation between subjective interpretation and the ‘reality’ of the object through representation. When we stand in front of a tree in blossom, no representation can possibly acknowledge the full significance of smells, sighs and rustles, the dappled light, the patter of branches, the multitude of leaves and petals and so on. Nor does representation, especially in its form of the calculating logos of rationality, begin to approach the process of thinking. Heidegger wants to direct our attention to the emergence of thinking, before the categorization of what presents itself to our view is named by language; the treeness of the ‘tree’, the poetic apprehension of perfumed blossom, mulchy soil and oxygenated air that is lost in the linguistic system of representations. To discover What is Called Thinking? Heidegger draws connections between language, meaning and empirical environment. Heidegger asks us to stand before a tree in bloom. To stand face-to-face with the tree. It is a meeting, a relation, both tree and human are. At this stage, it is not a thinking about, or a rational calculation and picking apart of the elements of the tree. The meeting is a leap out of the realm of science and philosophy. What occurs is – ‘A curious, indeed unearthly thing that we must first leap onto the soil on which we already stand’ (Heidegger, 1968a: 41). Heidegger’s concept of Being ‘shining forth’ is reminiscent of Wordsworth’s romantic poem, ‘There is an active principle alive in all things . . . All beings have their properties which spread/Beyond themselves, a power by which they make/Some other being conscious of their life’ (Wordsworth, 1798: 676, cited in Nichols, 2001: 17). Heidegger suggests, ‘The tree offers us food for thought. Somehow, the tree presents itself to us – and we can ask whether it be to our consciousness, our soul, our experience, or world? Is the tree in our head?’ (Heidegger, 1968a: 42). Like the Romantics, Heidegger assumes that there is a certain ordering that underlies all things. It is not chaos, mayhem or disarray but an undisclosed

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arrangement that produces the entities that shine forth. During Wordsworth’s time, Edmund Burke (1757) developed a philosophy of the sublime and the beautiful, which permeated life beyond the merely human (Burke, 1987). The Copernican Revolution had shifted humanity from its central position on a finite and flat earth, as the image of God, at the peak of the Great Chain of Being. Scholars like Goethe and Erasmus Darwin took Ancient Greek ideas about the interrelated flow of atoms, a holistic metaphor for the universe, and posited the connections as passions and intellect in all aspects of Being, from the pairing of swans, to the attraction of magnetism (cf. Nichols, 2003). Since the eighteenth century, and prevailing in the Neoliberal management at global and national level, the integration of all things has disintegrated into minutely classified fields of expertise under scientific positivism. Now the prevailing understanding of ecological systems ignores emotion and intellect in favour of the economics of ecology – sustainability as technological enframing. There are objects, movements, power relations, but no thinking. Paradoxically, at the same moment the modern individual becomes free and exerts more mastery over nature than ever before, there is an absence of agency about the enframing of technology. Humans lose all subjectivity and become objects among objects. Just at the moment of total mobilization, of total environmental control, humanity has lost something ineffable. The tree has to be understood as wood, as a resource, as a consumable commodity. Under the planetary horizon of total mobilization, both tree and person become objects among objects. How then, do we let the tree stand where it stands? How do we simply stand before it? If all nominal categorizations emerge from rational deduction, then ‘intrinsic nature’ is unspeakable. Adorno comments, ‘If thought really yielded to the object, if attention were on the object, not on its category, the objects would start talking under the lingering eye’ (Adorno 1973: 27–28). There are two apparently incommensurate themes emerging; the first is the critique of subjectivism and the categorization of nominal representations. The second is the physical, empirical entities, in holistic ecological relation, independent of language. Truth is initially attributed to the subject’s participation in the language game. Heidegger’s important enquiry is about how ‘the real’ erupts into language in the first place. Rather than science, Heidegger looks to poetry to evoke the Being from hidden concealment and allow it to ‘shine forth’ into the light of the subject, the apprehension of Dasein. The second broad theme of physical, empirical things is also about the patterns and underlying structure of ecology. This time it is dryly scientific: the strata, networks, interlocutions within and between identifiable systems of integrity. It is characterized, according to Heidegger, by the Gestell of technological enframing. Humanity is still trapped in the closed circuit of subjectivist representation; yet now, we ourselves are included in the categorizations and governmentality of technology. We are objects among objects, and determined

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by the ‘worlding’ of the technological frame. Deleuze and Guattari (1999) evoke ‘lines of flight’ to escape the prevailing closed circuitry of schizophrenic capitalism. Yet they too, find it difficult to cross from the empirical domain of tongues, cheeks, teeth, spittle, expelling air, volume, to the linguistic domain of meaning. The line of flight is either a thin chain of molecules that reach between the subject and the object, or is recaptured by the nominalist fallacy, and the subjectivist reference to pre-existing categorizations of meaning. Gregory Bateson (1979) looks to the way birds and animals understand pattern rather than counting in their communication and use of tools. The patterns of repetition and difference reach between the two distinct domains of empiricism and meaning, ontology and epistemology. Heidegger’s reference to poetry does not closely examine pattern, style and meter but clearly these are important elements of poetry, music and art. The eco-poetic movement is a subtle epistemological shift away from accountancy, and the volume and measurement of mass storage, mass consumerism, and the paucity of Neoliberal metaphor towards an open receptiveness, a respectful aptitude for existence – as life, as Being, as Dasein. It is not an exclusion of science but it does revoke the status of rationality, science, and ‘evidence’ as the ground of knowledge and ethics.

Cultural transformation The question I want to consider for a moment – is how to introduce a new paradigm of thinking – a new world-view to the global culture of modernity, especially in the face of the monolith of Neoliberal capitalism and the technological enframing of all things as resource or potential resource. Traditional educational institutions, the media, think-tanks and public relations, books and conferences are the established tools for disseminating information. Even if these avenues were originally established to respond to Kant’s call for the critic and conscience of society, to a greater or lesser extent, they are now embedded in the Neoliberal paradigm as a state apparatus, to borrow terminology from Gramsci. Education cannot abandon the norms, the policy directives, the curriculum requirements, the timetables, exams and endless paperwork that provide ‘accountability’ and surveillance. In 1933, Heidegger accepted the Nazi education policy of Gleichschaltung, the bringing together of political directives and educative aims (1993). He did not see that this necessarily engaged with positivist governmentality, and tried to elevate the educational side of the association into a leadership position rather than locate education as necessarily conservative institutions, that reproduce societies’ prevailing discourses, economic structures and vocational possibilities. It seems to me that Heidegger accepted education’s self-understanding as operating on lines of meritocracy, producing the future leaders of society who would rise through the ranks, learn to become philosopher Kings

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through exposure to a vital and relevant curriculum, who could demonstrate their prowess both within the institutional structure and out in the political world. Sadly, Heidegger’s experience demonstrates how flawed a belief this can be. It is easy to put this down to the peculiar political and economic conditions of Nazi Germany or to the inadequacies of Heidegger’s philosophy or his skills as a teacher. But despite the criticism that the Volk movement levelled at the individualism and greed of Britain, and the totalizing levelling of Russia, Germany’s Third Way remained within the rubric of modernity. Heidegger took pedagogy very seriously. Most of his books after Being and Time were first written as lectures. He recognized that teaching requires as much, if not more, openness to learning by the teacher as the student (Heidegger, 1968a, chapter 3). Thus, we need to regard educational institutions in the context of their modern emergence, as part of the historical equipment of modern governmentality – and not expect them to operate as an apparatus for generating the transformation necessary to move to a post-modern world, or at least not in isolation. In his much more careful, even bitter, post-war works, Heidegger only requires education to encourage the conditions of readiness for new ways of thinking and enquiring into the relationship, the patterns, the differences and repetitions between human beings and Being. At the moment, education is deeply engrossed in the busy pursuit of producing docile bodies, increasing human capital, assessing students on curriculum aimed at vocational ‘skills’. Yet, education will never simply be subservient to political exigencies. There is something irreducible about pedagogy. No matter how tightly controlled curriculum documents and assessment procedures become, even with the intervention of computers and distance learning, embodied teachers will still ‘stand’ before their students. Both teachers and students will present each other with the complexities of their physical, emotional, sexual, aesthetic health, aptitude, resistance, style and comportment. They will engage and communicate with one another and with their politicoecological surroundings. Extra to the eternal busyness demanded by Neoliberal education policy are the demands of ecology. Eco-philosophy can only prompt society to include ecological needs to be heard; enlarge the niche; people the environment with its diverse networks of inclusive and exclusive demands. The difficulties with new existentialities, new ways of being and thinking, are that they feel frightening and unspeakable. For most people there is a range of responses to globalized capitalism, from a belief in modern progress to an inability to verbalize their informed and overwhelming fear of cataclysmic devastation that continuing economic consumerism entails. Furthermore, in a society that accentuates economic efficiency and positivist accountability, wholehearted environmentalism seems wishy-washy, vague, unfashionable and unattainable. If education, or the media, and other mechanisms are not in a position to transform society alone, then political mobilization has to occur alongside it.

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George Monbiot tries to rally political action by first recognizing the cultural reluctance of the British to be uncivilized, immoderate or reckless. Political activism is, somehow, perceived as irresponsible. Monbiot points out, however, taking to the streets and speaking aloud our dissent does have political results, although they may not be immediate. Political dissent disables some pathways that had been considered possible; Monbiot advocates getting rid of Blair for war crimes in Iraq. He writes that British politics is still bound by the spell of Gladstone and Churchill. Every prime minister attempts to emulate them. To be a statesman, you need a world stage on which to strut, and if you don’t have one, you must borrow it from someone who does. This is why the ‘special relationship’ persists. The establishment might break Blair, but it will not break the spell. Only the people can do that. If we dispose the prime minister through direct action, he will doubtless be succeeded by someone almost as bad, but the political context in which that someone operates will have changed. (Monbiot, 2004) Felix Guattari wrote a book, Three Ecologies (2000) that discusses the network, or ‘rhizome’ of green politics. While the overarching framework of capitalism presents itself as a totalizing force, taking over policy and practice and controlling the bulk of the mass media, the web of connections is always prone to disruption and drastic change. Capitalism has no inevitable telos; yet, disrupting the unfolding of technological consumerism is demanding. The fabric of society might have continuities and patterns, but it also produces completely new possible frameworks for existence. This ‘resingularizing’ of the territories of institutions like education, the media, and government insist that reconceptualizing the framework of society outside of global capitalism and its religion of consumerism is possible and that it is our responsibility to invigorate the lines of escape. Guattari writes of the difficulty of enunciating new ways of acting and Being: At the heart of all ecological praxes there is an a-signifying rupture, in which the catalysts of existential change are close at hand, but lack expressive support from the assemblage of enunciation; they therefore remain passive and are in danger of losing their consistency. (2000: 45) Vectors of dissent open up the possibility of real change in surprising, often frightening ways. The process of change is inevitable and disrupts any systematic attempt at stable management: capitalist or otherwise. The chaos of the unexpected is continuously present and unaccounted for. A philosophy of environmental depth that reintegrates the subject with the natural landscape involves anxiety, guilt and pathologies associated with leaving behind the known arrangement of societies’ relations of consumption, production and greed

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concerning the surrounding planet. Students sometimes seem better able to enunciate these fears and hopes, perhaps, because, as yet, they have ‘invested’ less in the current system. Technological enframing has de-coupled the community from integration in the local environment. Early industrial modernity enclosed and privatized the commons, evicting communities from their traditional lands in favour of more profitable pursuits. Late modernity incorporates the enclosure of the commons but is characterized by the network. Factories have been transformed by global corporatism. Information technologies and cheap transport make possible globalized industrial production and a global diaspora of advertising and consumerism. Taylorist methods of production still prevail but the location of resources, manufacture, management, ownership and consumerism has become global in scale. Since the 1970s, the realization that resources are finite, and that consumerism in the West is largely saturated has driven globalization and Neoliberal governmentality. Technology has diminished the problem of distance and the dialectic of industrialization between owners of capital and their workers has expanded beyond the borders of the nation state. The Keynesian Settlement has, likewise, been disrupted as major corporations make governments bid for their employment opportunities by lowering taxes and making favourable legal conditions for the exploitation of human capital. Even the saturation of the ocean, the soil and the atmosphere to carry on absorbing methane and carbon dioxide has failed to alert most policy makers (save Stiglitz, 2003, Daly, 1996 and recently Stern, 2007 – arguably) from fully recognizing the unpopular truth of just how fundamentally modern lifestyles need to change. Blühdorn argues that education is unable to counter the Neoliberal era of post-ecology (Blühdorn, 2002). In contrast to educating for environmentalism, education for sustainability is likely to simply reinforce the market metaphor that confuses ecology with efficiency, sustainability with reproduction of resources and thresholds with insurable risk. Shifts in ideas, then, will not necessarily come from the institutions that we reserve for training the population. Only small moments of the ‘critic and conscience of society’ occupy the universities. The source of change may well be unexpected. But as we get closer and closer to the 2 °C threshold over which the climate will probably no longer be habitable, the unexpected is more, rather than less, likely to happen. Heidegger’s emphasis on the meaningfulness of the relationship between Dasein (authentic subjectivity) and Being puts an entirely different weight on education. Nietzsche (1974) and Deleuze and Guattari (1999) recontextualize humanity in connection with the anorganic life of the planet. These philosophies displace economic growth and consumerism as the founding principles for organizing global society. It remains to be seen whether pollution, exhaustion and effects of global warming will be so severe that the so-called ‘balance’ of environmental conditions

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will prevail, thus ensuring the maintenance of diverse animal species as has existed upon the planet up until now. Yet in all likelihood, even a massive ‘extinction’ such as the one that wiped out the dinosaurs will not annihilate all life from the planet (until the sun eventually burns the earth to a cinder). Hundreds of species of dinosaurs died out during the last mass extinction, but many species of plants, insects, lizards and mammals survived and from them a plethora of new life emerged. However, it took tens of thousands of years for diversity to return after the Pleistocene extinction – a result of massive carbon dioxide poisoning from a volcanic eruption. As far as a human friendly habitat is concerned, problems with pollution and global warming are forcing us to rethink philosophical assumptions of the Idealist separation of subject from object, human culture from nature. This book is an attempt to move beyond the frame of modernity and create an ecophilosophy. It involves an immanent recognition of the real, and making a decision to act upon that recognition. Heidegger is particularly important to this endeavour because he began to frame the right questions. The Utilitarians want to know ‘is it good for the greatest number of people?’, the Pragmatists ask ‘how can we fix it?’ the Critical Theorists demand to know, ‘ how is it powerful and whose purpose does it serve?’ the Neoliberals only want to know ‘how much will it make us richer?’ Heidegger asks, ‘What is the question of Being?’ The scope of the question is of paramount importance. It sets up the beginning of an enquiry that is worthwhile enough to pursue. That scope invites an amplification in thinking. And thinking is not popular. It is political and risky. Finally, we need to ask, questioningly, about Heidegger’s term ‘Being’. As Heidegger indicates, it is the questioning itself that is most fruitful. Ecology as the philosophical basis of human endeavour cannot be confined to an isolated subject area that informs policy on efficient manufacturing and production. Eco-philosophy constitutes an approach to subjectivity, to politics, to economics, to biology and geology, to physics, chemistry, aesthetics and to progress and change. A philosophy of the environment challenges the framework of modern civilization. Resistance to this conceptual realignment is strong, and conformity to market and consumerist norms continues to dominate the policy, practise and physical locality of education throughout the globe. The challenge to resituate ourselves through positive and creative change that will nurture future generations and the future of the planet is also strong. It is not an either/or dialectical situation, but a case of reterritorialising the conceptual framework of our minds, our behaviour, our interaction, our assumptions and our world-view. We cannot abandon the repressive system of de-localized and alienating capitalism at will. Resorting to a nationalistic romanticization of ‘home and hearth’ as Heidegger did is not the answer, nor is completely abandoning technology. However, opening up alternative nomadologies, rhizomes of interrelating might encourage ethical styles of human communication and

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being in relation with global ecology – that might technologically store consumables to a certain extent – while restraining from total mobilization, by remaining cognizant of the necessary rhythms and cadences of anorganic life. From the dialectic between pessimism and optimism with one entrenched in sacrifice and the other in relentless technological improvement, it is becoming important for a complete paradigm shift to occur. Cultural transformation creates the readiness, the conditions of possibility, for change to emerge – for a new world.

Chapter 6

Population Statistics and Modern Governmentality

Exponential economic growth is a huge factor in the difficulty nation states have in reducing their carbon footprint to 1990 levels. The other major factor in the battle against climate change and environmental resource depletion is rapidly increasing global population. Humans have been likened to a plague, to cancer, or a virus, to a disease on the planet. Overpopulation is a significant factor in climate change, fossil fuel pollution, resource exhaustion, deforestation and unsustainable farming and fishing practices. Such variety of problems on such a grand scale invite a diverse set of responses from different environmental philosophers. With the argument of overpopulation as a motif for contextualizing the scale of the problem, this chapter aims to examine wealth distribution, technology and governmentality in contrast to the ethics of population control. In more ways than one, Malthus introduced us to the problem of global overpopulation. His book, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) argued that the human population was increasing ‘geometrically’ or exponentially, and the increase in food production was ‘arithmetic’ or lineal, and limited by the finitude of arable land. The rate of increase of human population would far outstrip the increase in food and, thus, Malthus worried that we were heading towards inevitable hardship, difficulty and death. Malthus could see that the Ideal of a progressively improving society could not come about unless the population explosion was taken in hand. Never before had communities, nations, peoples been understood as statistical populations. Malthus introduced a whole new way of understanding statistics as useful for estimating vast scales, and predicting what might occur far distances into the future. The concept of ‘population’ has encouraged a mode of governmentality that was unavailable to the Kings and Queens of feudal times. The gathering of census data, the continual surveillance, the endless questionnaires, the detailed statistical analyses that we take for granted owe fealty to Malthus.1 The emergence of population as a way of understanding community is itself commensurate with the shift from feudalism to democracy. In Foucault’s famous text Discipline and Punishment (1991b), he describes the changes in modes of governance from occasional outrageous acts of cruelty that demonstrate the

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power of the monarch over the people to more insidious techniques and technologies of power that revolve around architecture, institutions, technologies, methods of individuation and accountancies of surveillance. Techniques of surveillance become internalized so that people start to self-monitor their own behaviour. Punishment becomes less overt and more educational. It is no longer necessary to create deeply disturbing spectacles of power because individuals remonstrate and correct themselves and one another. Part of this shift to modern techniques of surveillance and self-discipline has been the ‘science’ of self-care. As more knowledge about the health of the population becomes available, there is increasing pressure through these selfdisciplinary techniques to practise constituting the self as healthy, long-lived and productive individuals. Therefore, there is pressure on practising safe sex, healthy food, hygiene, sanitation, clean water, preventative medical diagnosis, drug regimes, mechanical intervention like operations, scans, X-rays and a plethora of other techniques of constituting the self as a long-lived and productive individual. The methods of self-care are indicative of the industrial model; the body is a machine that is understood in better and finer detail every year. Regimes of diet and exercise initiate the self-aware care of the self. The regimes include tabletted vitamins, dosages of vitamin C, folic acid and other supplements. This is additional to preventative or interventionist medicinal procedures. Modern techniques of being promote a variety of mechanisms that prolong the life of each and every individual. Effective self-care has clearly been extremely successful. It is this amazing success that now creates a new problem of scale – massive numbers of humans are having long and fruitful lives, the infant mortality rate is much lower than in previous millennia and so the survival rate and longevity of the population is burgeoning. Inevitably, it has an extremely detrimental impact on the planet’s ecology. I want to argue in this chapter that these techniques of surveillance and accountancy that have produced ‘populations’ rather than communities, clans or fiefdoms have been another vital component of the excessive ‘success’ of the human species and, most likely, a significant contribution to its oversaturation in the eco-system. This argument deviates significantly from those put forward by Pragmatic and Critical theory approaches which tend to argue for political policy interventions to the ‘problem’ of overpopulation. However, although intervention must have some effect on controlling population increases, on a given base line of industrial scale technologies, I argue that it is the science of statistical analysis wedded to the development of regimes of self-care that is the most essential aspect of population growth. The most important governmental tools that inform policy and policy discourse rely upon population statistics to inform the economic arguments that contribute most of the significant analysis for governments at both national and global levels. Statistics, technology and care of the self (Foucault, 1990b) are probably the same tools that enabled the expansion to occur in the first place. Draconian intervention to limit birth

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control in poorer populations might have an impact on global expansion of the human population; however, unless the constraints are held in place with consistent rigidity, the results may well backfire in a rapid baby boom. The modern techniques of self-regulation that have promoted the rapid expansion of the human population may well be the same techniques that encourage the population to stabilize and drop – in wealthy and poorer nations. Part of the problem is how to sustain living conditions and encourage demographic stabilization to occur. The discourse of ‘sustainability’ is another example of the large-scale management of populations through surveillance, econometrics and devolved responsibility. ‘Sustainability’ has itself become a technique that operates at all levels of modernity, from pan-national organizations, through national and corporate policy, to site specific and individuated commitment to sustainability initiatives. As sustainability gets embedded in the way that is being advocated by pan-global organizations, then policy makers and leaders will have more accurate statistical information to better manage the utilization and distribution of resources around the globe. Rapid and exponential increase in human population is straining the planet’s ecosystem in all sorts of ways. The response to global population growth demands the most from theories of social science. The scale of population growth and its future impact needs to engage with history, colonization, modernity, industrialism, global production and consumption, international relations and world politics, equity, particularly for the ‘Third World’, evolving technologies including health technologies, changes in governance from tribal, feudal, dictatorships, modern democratic nations and pan-global institutions and treaties. The population ‘explosion’ began in the mid-1700s and challenged and frightened leadership for some generations. In 1984, the British Queen Consort, Prince Philip Mountbatten gave an anxious and thought-provoking speech. His speech illustrates the statistical governance techniques available since Malthus wrote his treatise in 1798. Prince Philips’ anxiety entrenches his own class position and the privilege of Great Britain as a whole by denigrating efforts at equitable redistribution between all nations that has been advocated by the Breton Woods Institutions since the end of the Second World War. The crisis discourse illustrated by Prince Philip has lead to extreme, conservative and reactionary positions that have almost shut down discussion about global population growth. His Royal Highness Prince Philip Mountbatten is one of the many influential figures who have taken Malthus’ warning, and his statistical method of governance, seriously. By 1986, HRH Mountbatten was alarmed at the incredible surge in human population: As long ago as 1798, Malthus explained what happens when the factors limiting the increase in any population are removed. One of the factors noticed

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by Darwin was that all species are capable of producing vastly greater populations than can be sustained by existing resources; populations did not increase at the rate at which they are capable was the basis for his theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. (1997) Mountbatten’s 20-year-old account is historically interesting for several reasons. It shows how statistical information is used to extrapolate and predict the future but the statistics cannot account for all the contributing factors; so, the future scenarios are invariably askew in some way. In this case, the population numbers were still increasing rapidly, and the statistical peak of the growth curve had not yet been reached, making the extrapolation of numbers look as thought they would continue to grow at the same exponential rate: the projection was for 6 billion by 2000 and 16 billion by 2045: Well, take a look at the figures for the human population of this world. One hundred fifty years ago it stood at about 1,000 million or in common parlance today, 1 billion. It then took about a 100 years to double to 2 billion. It took 30 years to add the third billion and 15 years to reach today’s total of 4.4 billion. With a present world average rate of growth of 1.8%, the total population by the year 2000 will have increased to an estimated 6 billion and in that and in subsequent years 100 million people will be added to the world population each year. In fact it could be as much as 16 billion by 2045. As a consequence the demand on resources of land alone will mean a third less farm land available and the destruction of half of the present area of productive tropical forest. Bearing in mind the constant reduction of non-renewable resources, there is a strong possibility of growing scarcity and reduction of standards. More people consume more resources. It is as simple as that; and transferring resources and standards from the richer to the poorer countries can only have a marginal effect in the face of this massive increase in the world population. (Mountbatten, 1997) The estimation of 6 billion by 2000 has, sadly, proven very accurate – the number was reached in late 1999. However, the rate of increase has not continued to escalate as that early data predicted but instead peaked in the late 1980s and is continuing to drop. These revised projections estimate that total population will not go beyond 10 billion and it will take another couple of hundred years to grow to that level. Taking Malthus’ points on the limitations of natural resources seriously, however, suggests that even the numbers we have now are detrimentally impacting on the earth’s capacity to bear such large number of human beings (especially the consumption heavy societies of the West). Furthermore, our technologies are producing so much pollution that the atmosphere is thickening and changing – causing havoc to the global ecosystem and radically affecting global climate.

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Like many people worried about overpopulation, Mountbatten’s anxiety is directed at the symptoms – developing nations, pollution, resource exhaustion – rather than the context of modern medicine, living conditions and the localized benefits and detriments of modern economic growth. Darwin’s theory of evolution combined with Malthus and his tools for statistical analysis have influenced other environmentalists. They are prepared to engage directly with the scale of the problem of overpopulation and global pollution; yet, the results of some of their social solutions are racist, sexist, classist and highly problematic. His Royal Highness Prince Philip Mountbatten comes within this category as does the renowned populationist Paul Ehrlich (Mountbatten, 1997, Ehrlich, 1971 and Ehrlich and Harriman, 1971). Techniques of modern governance rely upon statistical evaluations and factual correlations that paint a picture of the predicted outcome of existing tendencies. Statistical governance often determines the causal modes of behaviour on a few sets of assumptions and leaves little room for unexpected modifications, disruptions or radical alterations in events. In contrast to those biological and political solutions, other environmentalists look to technology and social democracy to redress ecological problems. Barry Commoner and Andrew Feenberg, for example, both hope that a deepening of the democratic process in technological design may encourage more egalitarian and ecologically friendly progress enabling cultural change in the approach to the earth and its resources (Commoner, 1971 and Feenberg, 1999). They approach the problem of overpopulation with an ‘optimistic’ outlook that is highly critical of existing inequities between the rich and poor nations and aims to enhance the fair distribution and democratic resolution of global ecological problems. Democratic debate relies upon access to critical evaluation of information. The corporate control of international media by large-scale conglomerates such as Rupert Murdoch’s News Group makes it unlikely that the population of nation states will be exposed to voices of variety and, in some cases, dissent. Guattari makes the case that the paucity of metaphor and ideas in the media results in most people in modern nations behaving like boring automatons who continue the monolithic cultural imperative to consume and produce and have almost no will for cultural change (Guattari, 2000). There is surprisingly little discussion about population expansion or climate warming among the middle classes. This is partly because the implications of policing and regulating population growth tend to be Draconian. However, it is also because the middle classes have the most to lose by implementing a more frugal lifestyle that would ease the impact on the environment and make it possible for a larger number of people to co-exist in the ecology. Not surprisingly, the political will to implement the regulation for such changes is hard to generate. The same classes that have so much to lose control the media.

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Data Thanks to the incredible data collecting and surveillance techniques of modern governance, we now have remarkably accurate census statistics on the global population (United Nations, Population Division). Global population began to escalate sharply, from its earlier relative stability, during the period of agriculture (see Figure 3). An extra 20 years on the average life expectancy indicates that it was not the birth-rate, but the survival rate that has significantly impacted on the enormous numbers of living human beings. The population continues to increase at a very alarming rate. The scale of escalation increased between the 1800s and the 1980s, peaking at an annual increase of 86 million people through the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s (UN, 2000).2 Although the net population continues to increase, the rate of increase has peaked and is slowing. It has taken 12 or 13 years to add another billion people to the planet since about the 1960s (when birth-rates were highest at over 2 per cent) but that rate of increase is set to

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decline gradually (1.3 per cent in 2000), so that it will take about 25 years to add another billion people after 2028. The population continues to expand due to the maintenance of our considerably longer life cycles but the numbers of children per couple has dramatically dropped from between eight and eleven children to roughly two (varying considerably according to nation). This drop is not restricted to ‘developed’ nations, but is showing up across most countries in the world. Most extrapolations from census data estimate that the global population will stabilize at just over 10 billion people after 2200. That is only going on current trends which are for an aging population, declining fertility and much higher rates of birth control in many areas of the world (UN Population Statistics and Geohive). However, the projections take absolutely no cognizance of the exhaustion of key resources such as global fish stocks or oil, resulting in famines or significant changes in climate. The statistics do show very disturbing projections that the percentage of the population living in dire poverty (or ‘undeveloped’ nations) will increase from 70 per cent of the global population at the beginning of the century, to 80 per cent now and to 90 per cent by 2050.

Industrialization, war and biology In one sense, the massive explosion in the human population is simply a biological event like any other population explosion in other species. Yet, while the sudden jump in the rate of increase of the population lagged somewhat behind the very early emergence of the Industrial Revolution, it had a lot to do with industrial practices beginning to impact on the lifestyles and health of the mass of the people. Hence, population is amenable to culture, politics and ethics. Malthus noticed these links as early as 1798. The subtitle of his essay aims its remarks at the early Liberal democratic, ‘Speculations of Mr Godwin, M. Condorcet, and other writers.’ Liberalism was producing a new ethics, a new set of governing principles and a new mode of redistributing and governing people that was closely tied to the overthrow of feudal tyranny and its replacement with egalitarian principles, individualism and the free market. Population growth is linked to the extraordinary developments of modernity. These developments are not merely technological; they are the regimes of discipline that have made factory lines, road networks, school timetables, hospitals, and the regulation of the self through health, diet, dress and conduct, possible. The science of population statistics has long been associated with a discourse of crisis and fear: the virus overpowering the host organism; oppressive state control; medical intervention and genocide; famine and pestilence as beneficial natural disasters; the problem of free will; individual choice as opposed to state prerogatives; the desperate shortages of staple necessities and the class

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problems associated with redistribution; these class differentials writ large in the disparities between rich and poor nations. The massive population, when it is considered at all, is regarded with a great deal of unease. It is over population. At the same time, population growth is considered very good for national economies; so, while the global situation is of unsustainable overpopulation, ironically, there is, at present, a strong promotion of family friendly policies in the most developed nations where the local population is dropping for the first time in industrial history (particularly Japan and Germany).

Industrial tempo, population statistics and climate change The circumstances in which we now find ourselves require us to draw together some ideas and facts into constellations that are not often thought about together. Climate change is illustrating Malthus’ worst fears in far more dramatic form than even he imagined. His predictions of the finite limits of food creating difficulties of huge proportion for the burgeoning modern population have proved to be both less and more of a problem than he forecasted. This is a recurring problem in the art of statistical analysis and projecting existing trends into the future. Often the trends are indicators of events that are either larger or more interconnected than they first appear. Malthus has been criticized for failing to understand the evolution of technological change and its subsequent impact on increasing food production. Yet, the emergence of climate change as an immense global problem that is directly linked to technological productivity indicates that Malthus may have been wrong in the detail, but his overall fears were well-placed. Understanding the role of technology in the emergence of modernity is a key factor to comprehending the population explosion and the impact of modernity. Heidegger argues that industrialization was the turning point in technology, from craftworks to mass produced consumer items. Economics is a good example of this shift in the scale of technology. Since the emergence of settled villages during the agricultural period, households grew and prepared most of the years’ production and storage was labour intensive and relatively short-term. For thousands of years, it was literally a case of ‘home-economics’. The seasons dictated the rhythm of work and production. Industrialization changed the reliance on seasonal tempo so that materials could be extracted, stored and transformed according to the needs of a widely distributed consumer base. Instead of the needs of household economies or small villages, entire populations could access products from far-flung locales. In any given household, there will be items whose providence can be traced to tin and copper mines in Africa, labour and manufacture in India, the Pacific, China, marketing and technological development from Europe, America, Australia, electricity for smeltering from New Zealand and Iceland. Economics has become global.

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Heidegger’s philosophy is not particularly amenable to Darwin or Malthus, both of whom he would bracket as ‘calculating’ and ‘biological’. Yet despite these differences in approach, Heidegger’s theory of the shift in tempo through industrial technology and storage derived from his perspective of the entire history of the West, goes together with certain conceptual breakthrough by Darwin and Malthus, which is not about methodology but about the scope of analysis that perceives populations as a whole and evolution over thousands of years. The daily routine in personal lives has been affected by these changes in technological scale and seasonal rhythm. The total mobilization of economics has alleviated the reliance of any given household on the local landscape. At the same time, our understanding of ourselves has shifted from a plethora of pastoral, vitalist, religious, romantic, filial, experts to mechanistic, value-added, individuated, free, human capital. Each individual needs to slot into the vast, technological, increasingly urbanized, machinery of modern production and consumption. The rhythm is dictated by the tax year, rather than the seasons. Without Heidegger, Jünger and Spengler’s insights into the essential transformation in modern technology the population analyses of Darwin and Malthus have been an addendum to the tools of modern governance, rather than a critique of modernity, and an indicator of a need for more vital and inclusive modes of human habitation in the global ecology.

Global development, structural unemployment The role of economics, industrial technology, medicine and a changing pace of life have been made oblique in the debates on the rapid expansion of human population. All too often the debates are framed either in terms of technological salvation through democratic ‘progress’ or through Draconian global regulations, centralized either to the United States or to pan-global organizations like the International Court of Justice. Overpopulation tends to be conceived in three ways: in terms of management and control; as a Marxist dialectic that divides rich and poor nations; or with the assumption that technology can ‘solve’ the problem of energy and food production. I understand the population explosion as tied to the Industrial Revolution in the first instance; secondly, to the techniques of self-regulation and self-care (associated with medicine, hygiene, fitness, food-science) that result in longevity; thirdly, to exponential dynamics of market consumerism and the associated global discourses that local governance employs to ensure the stability or volatility of social cohesion. Families tend to be large in less-modernized countries where social services are almost non-existent, and mortality rates are relatively high. Despite poverty, in most ‘undeveloped’ countries, the high birth rate far outstrips the high death

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rate. Although birth rates in most countries are coming down with birth control technologies. The topic of overpopulation is fraught with the difficulties associated with development; racism, poverty, material redistribution and the normative values of modernity. The human population has saturated nearly every available corner of the globe. Our ecological niche has been inhabited, modified, improved upon, invaded and reinvaded and finally, in many instances, exhausted. The results of the saturation of most localities are climate change, melting polar ice caps, changes in the ocean currents and the weather, depletion of coral reefs, forests, tundra, and animal, insect and fish species. It is as important to engage with the problems of overpopulation as it is to understand the (associated) problems of ever-expanding, exponential economic ‘growth’ and the absurd lengths that are being resorted to in an effort to keep expanding consumer markets. The ecological basis to the population argument tends to be framed in Darwinian terms; the success of human populations as survival of the fittest. Competition is seen as producing excellence, whereas disease and famine are signs of weakness and necessary decay. Survival of the fittest is also a key concept in economics, where financial success is attributed to moral and evolutionary superiority and economic failure is blamed on the sufferers because of their lack of effort and intelligence. Comprehending communities as ‘populations’, instead of identifiable social groups, has a modern association with statistics that combine with modern methods of managerial governance. Recently, econometric statistical modelling has developed indicators and forecasts that highlight the problems in developed nations such as aging and declining populations, the economic problems of a top heavy population to support social services like pensions through taxing a small age group of working people. Marx’s arguments can be expanded by both left wing and right wing theorists. Migration from oversaturated poorer nations solves the ‘underpopulated’ economic problems of richer nations. Global redistribution is seen as the aim of ‘development’. The modern lifestyle, including resource use, technology and preferably democracy is exported to poorer nations as a progressive ideal. None of these measures: statistical managerialism; ecological competition; economic modelling; migration; redistribution; development; or technology, encourage the simple life. As Malthus pointed out, progressive Liberalism encourages exponential increase of human population without cognizance of the finite limitations of the landscape. Yet, the smaller our environmental ‘footprint’, the more likely that we are able to bring about the rich creativity necessary for the long-term viability of humanity on earth.

Evolution and capacity Malthus has been a major influence on understanding the implications of increasing human population on contemporary environmental philosophy.

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In his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), Malthus wrote about the overproduction of infants in many species, requiring predation or disaster from the environment to maintain a ‘balance’ of population in relation to available resources. This emphasis on population rather than the details of local political or economic feuds led Malthus to the first analysis of the thresholds of population pressure on ecosystems. ‘Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will shew the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second’ (Malthus, 1798). Malthus was interested in evolutionary survival, primary needs and the capacity of the earth to provide them. The scale of Malthus’ thinking: population increase, civilization and the limitations of natural resources and the way these limitations impose upon the possibility of civilization enables him to approach philosophical utopianism from a new perspective: This natural inequality of the two powers of population and of production in the earth, and that great law of our nature which must constantly keep their effects equal, form the great difficulty that to me appears insurmountable in the way to the perfectibility of society. All other arguments are of slight and subordinate consideration in comparison of this. I see no way by which man can escape from the weight of this law which pervades all animated nature. No fancied equality, no agrarian regulations in their utmost extent, could remove the pressure of it even for a single century. And it appears, therefore, to be decisive against the possible existence of a society, all the members of which should live in ease, happiness, and comparative leisure; and feel no anxiety about providing the means of subsistence for themselves and families. (Malthus, 1798) It turns out that technology has enabled food production to expand at ‘geometric’ rates too alongside the expansion in human population.3 Subsequent writers (including Marx) have substantially dismissed Malthus’ primary argument; although he began to be taken far more seriously as the population increments peaked in the 1960–1980s. Though his pessimistic study on overpopulation was not given much thought for several hundred years, Malthus contributed a new methodology that has now permeated science and governmentality. Biological and environmental determinism have influenced many discipline areas and produced Malthus’ perspective on population and large-scale estimates and projections that have evolved into the modern emphasis on statistics and modelling. Malthus’ ideas have become an early blueprint for statistical analysis as a tool for projecting probable trends, global governance and the development of social and environmental policy and assessment of risk.

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Pessimistic Malthusian publications began with Rachel Carsen’s book, Silent Spring (1962). It was followed by Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), the Meadows’ Club of Rome study, The Limits to Growth (1972), Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful (1973), The Ecologist’s Document Blueprint for Survival (1974) Robert Heilbroner’s Inquiry into the Human Prospect (1974) and Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis (1979), all of which predict a cycle of growth and crash both in population and economic terms which eventually escalates to complete conflagration. The apocalyptic message has even been tied to radical governmental population controls, and the tolerance or outright advocacy for the devastation caused by famine and diseases such as AIDS.4 Shortly thereafter, more books were written about environmental disaster, including, Falk and Brownlow’s The Greenhouse Challenge (1989) and innumerable others. The texts are characterised by scientific data and an increasingly shrill recognition that Malthus’ ecological limits were beginning to show up in diverse situations across the globe. Humanity began to be labelled with the metaphor of ‘virus’ or ‘plague’ as our numbers impact so severely on the ecological niches of countless thousands of square miles, and countless numbers of other species. From the 1960s, population pressure began to be regarded pessimistically as a greater threat than wars, pestilence, famine or flood, fire and earthquake. Age-old disasters were turned around in the new governmentality of population statistics, and viewed in a new light, as mechanisms for constraining a run-away plague of human expansion. The way in which the new science of statistical analysis has been put to use has generally fallen along class lines – the British Monarch’s consort, Prince Philip Mountbatten, for example, joins the ranks of reactionary population theorists like Paul Ehrlich and the Paddocks. Their desperation about global population has lead them to advocate harsh international relations policies which leave poverty-stricken nations with dauntingly large populations to fend for themselves when plagued with famines or pestilence. The Critical theorists and Constructivists on the other hand, like Barry Commoner and Andrew Feenberg, take a more democratic and technologically utopian view that worldwide redistribution policies will enhance the ability of poverty-stricken nation states in the ‘Third World’ to cope better and need less children. Both sides of the population argument have valid points to make and both have very problematic political implications. The most famous controversy about tackling global overpopulation arises between Ehrlich and Commoner in the 1970s and 1980s. Ehrlich relies on a Malthusian analysis of population pressures and basic needs. Commoner is more politically astute and notes the political and economic implications of the Malthusian argument on specific places and peoples. Feenberg’s excellent analysis of this debate is instructive, though he ends up relying too heavily on

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the potential of democracy and technology to amend the relationship between the environment and humanity. Most famously, Paul Ehrlich, professor of Population Studies at Stanford University wrote a book in 1968 about the human population explosion, The Population Bomb, How to be a Survivor (1971). His argument has become familiar to many environmentalists, ‘the causal chain of deterioration is easily followed to its source. Too many cars, too many factories, too much pesticide . . . too little water, too much carbon dioxide – all can be traced easily to too many people’ (Ehrlich, 1968: 66–67, cited in Feenberg, 1999: 46). Ehrlich’s campaign for zero population growth resulted in ambiguous politics – no-growth economics, the Chinese population policy, counter-cultural anti-consumerism, US opposition to Mexican immigration and high minority birth rates. He wrote, ‘Basically, then, there are only two kinds of solutions to the population problem. One is a “birth rate solution” in which we find ways to lower the birth rate. The other is a “death rate solution”, in which ways to raise the death rate – war, famine, pestilence – find us’ (Ehrlich 1968: 34 cited in Feenberg, 1999: 46). The Malthusian overpopulation argument is that too many billions of people create environmental disaster and that basic needs will not continue to be met. Water, food, oil and materials for shelter will no longer meet the needs of the rapidly expanding population and there will be political struggles over preserving the environment, distributing necessities to the very poor and maintaining wealthy Western lifestyles. There is no Idealist dialectical unfolding of history that eventuates in the ‘perfectibility of society’. During the 1960 and 1970s, the statistical projections for population growth were an unending exponential curve, skyrocketing towards infinity with the only limitation being the physical constraints of space and resources on the planet. That finitude was doubly amplified by the first photographs of earth from space on Christmas Eve 1968 which showed a delicate small swirly blue globe in the wide, wide arc of uninhabitable space. Overpopulation has important implications on the political, economic and social conditions that exist between ‘First’ and ‘Third’ world nations. An example of the apocalyptic argument wrought by environmentalists in the 1960s is the book by Paddock and Paddock, Famine – 1975! (1967 cited in Feenberg, 1999: 51). The Paddocks propose that Western food aid to the ‘Third World’ ought to be based on a ‘triage’ approach: trade, aid and abandonment. Like the class antagonism writ large, the Paddocks argue that those third world nations with enough food should be left to fend for themselves, those on the borderline would be given maximum aid presumably resulting ultimately in permanent self-sustaining capability. Ehrlich summarizes and agrees with their ultimate thesis: Finally, there is the last tragic category – those countries that are so far behind in the population-food game that there is no hope that our food aid will see

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them through to self-sufficiency. The Paddocks say that India is probably in this category. If it is, then under the triage system, she should receive no more food . . . In my opinion, there is no rational choice except to adopt some form of the Paddocks’ strategy as far as food distribution is concerned. (1968: 160–161 cited in Feenberg, 1999: 51) The apocalyptic population argument maintains a ‘brutal and heartless’ political ‘realism’. Another aspect of the same set of assumptions is the centralization of power from poorer nations to richer ones, such as the financial manipulation of other nations’ domestic policies on population by America that was advocated in 1968 by Ehrlich: Coercion? Perhaps, but coercion in a good cause. I am sometimes astounded at the attitudes of Americans who are horrified at the prospect of our government insisting on population control as the price of food aid. All too often the very same people are fully in support of applying military force against those who disagree with our form of government or our foreign policy. We must be relentless in pushing for population control around the world. (1968: 166 cited in Feenberg, 1999: 51) Feenberg notes a similar set of ideas about global governance in Garret Hardin a couple of years later, How can we help a foreign country to escape overpopulation? Clearly the worst thing we can do is send food. The child who is saved today becomes a breeder tomorrow. We send food out of compassion, but if we desired to increase the misery in an overpopulated nation, could we find a more effective way of doing so? Atomic bombs would be kinder. (1971: 72 cited in Feenberg 1999: 51–52) Hardin finishes by favouring the white population; ‘Fortunate minorities must act as the trustees of a civilization that is threatened by uninformed good intentions’ (ibid.). Ehrlich believed that in developing countries ‘the stork passed the plow’ in 1958, so ‘only’ 5 million people per year, in a 10-year ‘die-back’ was required to return to a balance of population and resources. Feenberg writes that Ehrlich was aiming to influence ‘moral, financial and especially coercive legal incentives, applied on an international scale by the US or a world government’ (Feenberg, 1999: 50). Many black people in the United States rejected Zero Population Growth as the ‘movement of prosperous, well educated whites anxious to shift the ecological burden to poor blacks’. Ehrlich tried to redress this with a ‘babytax’ and wrote, ‘The best way to avoid any hint of genocide is to control the population

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of the dominant group’ (Ehrlich and Harriman, 1971: 23 in Feenberg, 1999: 50). Despite his best efforts, Ehrlich never succeeded in avoiding racist associations. The statistical governance of population resulted in highly controversial ‘law and order’ policies of birth control and sterilization of impoverished and vulnerable groups. Good examples of these policies in action are the sterilization programmes that were imposed on unknowing Gypsy women in Romania and the Czech Republic during the Cold War era and the State’s One child One family policy in China. The attempt as controlling an apocalyptic problem shows up in diverse countries in many and sundry ways. A common thread running through all these policy initiatives, and indeed, through the emergence of the problem of overpopulation in the first place, is modernization and the industrialization of agriculture. The levels of corruption and redistribution might vary significantly, nonetheless, from the poorest nations to the wealthiest, only tiny pockets remain truly living subsistence lives and the rest are exhibiting similar changes in lifespan, family structure and population growth. By 1971, Ehrlich backtracks from such a hardline position on food aid and black sterilization and with Richard Harriman, published How To Be a Survivor. In this text, he suggests a massive Aid programme for the Third World, saying, ‘The population problem cannot be “solved” by withholding medical services or food and letting people die of disease or starvation’ (Ehrlich and Harriman, 1971: 17 in Feenberg, 1999: 52). Force might still be required but now Ehrlich modified the role of the United States in favour of a more democratic world government, which could enforce what Hardin called ‘mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon’ (Hardin, 1970: 45 cited in Feenberg, 1999: 52). The population bomb resonated with similar arguments then circulating about atomic weapons, that a world government, or failing that, Western powers such as the United States, France and Britain could maintain control over ‘rogue’ states by owning and threatening with nuclear capabilities, paradoxically enforcing a world ‘peace’. Twenty years later Feenberg critically notes that, ‘The kind of world government which would use force to impose demographic controls would be a government of the developing countries by the developed ones’ (Feenberg, 1999: 53). With the benefit of hindsight, Feenberg regards Ehrlich’s earlier books (like Malthus) as failing in their ‘earlier alarmist predictions’. Despite Ehrlich’s modified politics, these early errors over the limits of food and resources get carried through to the later writing. Feenberg complains, ‘he writes as though The Population Bomb had been confirmed on the whole by events’ (Feenberg, 1999: 54). Demographic transition has recently shifted modern nation states into a population decline and this transition could also take place in other countries once they have stable, predictable patterns of health, welfare and educational provision. The explosion is beginning to dissipate but its ripple effects will continue to impact for generations to come.

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Ehrlich’s specific speculations on the production and distribution of food and resources may have been inaccurate, but it is even more inaccurate to imply that humanity is increasingly able to sustainably manage resources through better statistical quantification. The same arguments mounted against Malthus apply to Ehrlich: that technology will intervene and improve the situation, allowing the population to progress without the constraints of finitude. Feenberg criticizes Ehrlich for having a stagnant assumption that technology will remain in its 1970s state – reliant upon massive consumption of petroleum, releasing vast quantities of greenhouse gases, pouring thousands of kilograms of nitrate fertilizer onto the soil and so forth. In contrast, I believe that Feenberg relies too heavily on the potential of technology to become increasingly environmentally friendly, thus, ‘saving the day’. Allowance has been made neither for the toll of decades of soil loss that mass food production and large-scale deforestation has encouraged, nor for the effect that pesticide run off is having on underwater reservoirs and the, hitherto, rich ecosystems of lakes and coastal areas. In point of fact, it is already too late for many species. Extinction rates are some thousand times higher than the estimates of the ‘normal’ background rate.5 According to UN Indicators and the World Watch Reports the planet is exhibiting many indications that it is not able to ‘carry’ the human population with its technological lifestyle at 1990 levels let alone its present levels of consumption and pollution (cf. IPCC 2001, 2007). Feenberg rallies powerful arguments to legitimately criticize Ehrlich’s political ‘solutions’ to the apocalyptic argument of overpopulation. The class and ethnic bias of Mountbatten, Hardin, the Paddocks and Ehrlich are unpalatable. The population statistics they were working with were incredibly alarming; but most recently, the projections have been significantly downwardly modified. It is no longer thought that the population will reach 16 billion but probably (possibly) (without the constraints of finite resources or the effects of global warming complicating the picture) population will peak at between 9 and 10.5 billion in 2200. Nevertheless, we are still dealing with an unsustainably high global human population. The thesis that there is a threshold for a healthy ecosystem to support the global human population remains of great importance even at today’s level of some 6.5 billion people.

Econometrics In the ‘First’ world, it is not overpopulation that is the problem, it is an aging population. There is a clearly visible correlation between a well-organized society with government provision of social services and a rapid demographic transition in the numbers of births in the average family. Modern societies cut their numbers in child births from an average of between 8 and 11 in a family to between 1 and 3. This shift happened from one generation to the next.

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But before the drop in birth rates, a nation usually exceeds its carrying capacity, sometimes several times over. Ireland is a classic example. The population in Ireland hovered at about 2 million for most of the feudal period. After the introduction of potatoes from South America, and other facets of early modernity (the printing press and the steam engine, for example) Ireland’s population exploded. By the mid-nineteenth century, it had reached some 10 million people. The potato famine highlighted how ecologically fragile the excessive population was. Even before the periodic famines caused by potato blight many families started to emigrate creating the now famous Irish diaspora that has helped populate the United States, Australia and New Zealand, among many other places. Since then, Ireland’s population has settled at roughly 6 million but the country is denuded of most of its forest and is heavily reliant on foreign imports and trade. Migration continues to take place but there is no longer the ‘wild’ Western frontier.6 Nowadays immigrants do not have any technological advantage and the existing populations are unlikely to shift aside. Some nations, like Holland, and increasingly, Great Britain, are finding the policy of integration or absorption of migrant populations to be failing, or at least problematic. Nevertheless, poor migrants from different cultural backgrounds are entering modern technological society, albeit, with their own cultural imperatives. It is cultural absorption rather than population increase that is causing the anxiety. Modern societies like Europe have falling populations as birth rates have stabilized at, or below, replacement. In many ways, ecologically speaking, population decrease is a very encouraging sign. However, that is not the way it is perceived by modern governments. The continuous need for economic expansion or ‘growth’ is impelling new discourses of underpopulation and a heightened anxiety, especially by white Europeans that they are rapidly being outnumbered in regions where they have held sway for many decades. Expanding populations mean an expanding consumer base, and this allows the exponential expansion of domestic economies to keep ‘growing’ steadily and satisfactorily. These anxieties, like the earlier ones of the 1960s, are a result of econometric modelling – an extension of Malthus’ statistical methodology about predicting the expansion of entire populations but with much greater detail and therefore amenable to more finely tuned policies. The aging population and likelihood of inadequate state provision for such large numbers of people of pensions, hospitals, nursing facilities and respite care is altering the needs of the modern welfare state once again. The bulk of the policy makers are advocating market solutions – in other words, privatizing and devolving responsibility for these problems. But nagging doubt about the adequacy of these provisions are encouraging domestic policies that are family friendly and promote childbirths, like parental leave and reasonably open immigration policies.

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Redistribution and success International relations policies are largely based on economics. There is a historical power displacement that has been in position so long, that it has become functionally normalized, particularly, among pan-global organizations. Demographic transition from large families and increasing population to low birth rates and stable or decreasing population has already occurred in richer countries and lags, some way behind, in poorer nations. Poverty plays an important role in the communal safety and ability of families to effectively participate in their own health and well-being. Wealthy, stable nations create conditions where families can reliably expect that their children will survive and this spontaneously lowers the birth rate. The dynamics of aid has been closely aligned, through the policies of the World Bank, for example, to late modernity and Neoliberalism. The World Bank lends money to contribute to infrastructure, energy, and water supplies, medical, and education provision and so forth but at the same time, to privatize state assets and deregulate protective trade tariffs, effectively exposing poor nations to the economic demands of richer ones. This dynamic reinforces, rather than corrects, the disparity in economic strength between traditionally poor and traditionally powerful nation states. Conversely, wealthier nations have already gone through their demographic transition and the average family size has greatly reduced. Nevertheless, consumption patterns have exploded so that the ‘First World’ wrests far greater raw material from the finite resources available on the planet than their much more populated, poorer neighbours. Population levels do not create, in themselves, the impossible levels of consumption that worried Malthus. How to redress the problem of escalating consumption in the richer parts of the globe is as much a problem, if not greater, than the continuous expansion in human numbers in the poorer areas. Barry Commoner, the Director of the Centre for the Biology of Natural Systems at Queens College, argued with Ehrlich’s political position throughout the 1970s. Commoner’s approach to environmentalism is through socialist engagement with inequitable social relations and the effects of that on human habitat. His writing is polemical against overpopulationists. Optimistically, he puts emphasis on regeneration and unpredictability of change, especially technical change. He writes that ‘Environmental degradation is not simply the outcome of some general expansive process, growth of population, or demand for goods, but of certain very specific changes in the ways goods are produced which are themselves governed by powerful economic and political considerations’ (Commoner, 1973a: 53 cited in Feenberg, 1999: 46). Of primary importance, he argues, are the economic and political north/ south divide; richer nations concerned with running out of resources, who

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advocate economic and population controls, and poorer nations hoping to gain from economic growth emphasize, not growth per se, but, its unintended consequences: pollution and health hazards. Feenberg explains Ehrlich’s position, ‘Fundamentalist environmentalism emphasizes control of growth because it can conceive of no change in the industrial order that would render it ecologically compatible. Technological determinism thus leads straight to a Malthusian position for which environmental and economic values must be traded off against each other’ (Feenberg, 1999: 47). Instead, Commoner (and Feenberg following him) believes in a radical technical transformation that will reconcile economics and environment. ‘Demographic transition’ occurs when the society is capable of providing stable sustenance, education and health care such that large number of children are no longer required to increase the chances of surviving infancy and supporting parents in their old age. The wealthier developed nations have, long since, slowed their rates of reproduction. International aid disguises the new wave of marketized colonialism that privatizes and makes transferable the environmental abundance of a given nation state. International aid is a short-term measure that is designed to introduce ‘undeveloped’ nations into the global market, more than it is to provide essential infrastructure that will promote and stabilize living conditions for the poor. Economic solutions to global population seem fraught, as do technological ones. It is necessary to make a more sophisticated picture than Ehrlich’s reliance on raw population data. He draws attention to the impact of consumer lifestyle in America. Commoner notes that between 1946–1966 the population of the United States increased by 42 per cent, pollution rates during the same period increased from 200 to 2000 per cent (Commoner, 1971 cited in Feenberg, 1999: 56). Of population, affluence and technological pollution, Commoner argues that it is the last that is the disproportionate culprit in environmental degradation. ‘Productive technologies with intense impacts on the environment have displaced less destructive ones’, including escalating pesticide and fertilizer use, larger cars, synthetic fibres instead of cotton and wool, and detergents replacing soap (Commoner, 1971: 175 in Feenberg, 1999: 56). Rather than regard this shift from labour intensive and ecologically friendly technological craftwork towards economically efficient, mass-scale consumer items as an essential aspect of modern technology, Feenberg declares that it is, ‘Thus not biological and technological determinism, but economics [that] lies at the root of the environmental crisis’ (Feenberg, 1999: 55). Feenberg is raising some interesting questions about the status of technology. Is technology the progressive, evolving mechanism by which humanity continues to master the world or is it a more insidious technological horizon that enframes all ways of knowing at such a fundamental level that we rarely notice that our world-view has been so thoroughly coloured? Are we the vector of technological

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reproduction, as a bee is a part of the reproductive mechanisms of flowers, or is technology neutral tools that are wielded in ways dictated by democratic decision making? Perhaps we need to start asking ourselves anthropological questions about what access to vast quantities of consumer goods offers people. If, for example, it is status, or sex appeal, that drives the need to accumulate so much stuff, then it will be possible for the status markers to change. The impetus is there for society to shift from economic gain as the defining markers of excellence to other forms of merit. This might amount to a profound transformation in the nature of technology. Feenberg’s emphasis on economics implies that the technology can be easily disassociated from capitalism. By laying the blame for overconsumption squarely at the door of economics, both Commoner and Feenberg are free to rely heavily on improvements in efficiency and imaginative new devices find solutions for ‘the inescapable demands of the ecosystem’ (Commoner, 1971: 282 cited in Feenberg, 1999: 56). This is no light task either. According to Commoner, ‘most of the nation’s resources for capital investment would need to be engaged in the task of ecological reconstruction for at least a generation’ (Commoner, 1971: 284 in Feenberg, 1999: 56). George Monbiot’s recently released book, Heat (2007), makes a specific case for technological improvements that can realistically reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 90 per cent over the next 25 years – thus increasing the likelihood of humanity being able to keep climate temperatures from rising over the 2 per cent threshold of viable life conditions.7

Technological evolution Intensive debate over the interface between technology, efficiency, economics and democracy occurs at this jointure. Importantly, technology is neither static or fixed, nor is it tied inextricably to consumerism. Modernity is susceptible to closing down all cultural difference by entrenching consumerism in the ‘end of history’ and failing to register or engage with global inequity. Up until now, the debate has been polarized with technology understood as being either static or radically corrective to environment disaster. If technology is static and fixed, as Ehrlich presumes, more pressure has to be applied to coercing human behaviour to alleviate population pressure on the planet. Finding biology easier to adjust, Ehrlich’s ‘solution’ is reproduction politics, birth control or sterilization administered either by individuals or by the state. ‘Social control over personal acts’ as Commoner criticizes (Feenberg, 1999: 59). By contrast, Commoner assumes that technology is changeable and that the locus of the environmental problem is not the immense and growing population but in the organization of society. This might require, for example,

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increased public transport to cut carbon dioxide emissions instead of decreasing the population that requires cars. Ehrlich responded to Commoner’s criticism in a fierce debate about population pressures on the threshold or natural limits: resource exhaustion that results in diminishing returns. Diminishing returns then require greater pollutant practices, like increased fertilizer on marginal land, to continue use. Commoner replied that increased fertilizer on marginalized land in the United States was a result of national policies to keep some land out of production, rather than an exhaustion of possible resources. The threshold of diminishing returns was a result of policies designed to maintain capitalist value through scarcity rather than the limits of the land itself. It is quite possible that manipulation of diminishing returns for financial gains has taken place. Increasingly, it is becoming clear that diminishing returns will be considerable once the externalized costs of downstream pollution (nitrogen run off changing the acid/ alkaline balance of the ocean and encouraging toxic algal bloom, for example) are directly included in the consumption costs. The political argument that production is driven by economic concerns to increase wealth for big business rather than from environmental constraints is compelling. However, both sides of the debate have significant contributions to make to the regulation of human practices and the recognition of environmental factors. Whether or not we attribute environmental degradation to capitalist modes of production and unfair ownership or to overpopulation, environmentalists today would not deny that depletion of natural ‘resources’ is occurring (take fish stocks, for example). While the political ramifications of 1960 and 1970s overpopulation arguments are unfortunate, Malthus’ theory of physical ecological constraints along with the affects of pollutants on diminishing returns are important considerations. Ehrlich’s proposals on population control have been criticized for being insufficiently cognizant of the very real political implications of policy on lives; population measures either require Draconian state measures such as China’s one birth per family policy and the State sterilization of particular disadvantaged groups, or it is voluntary and individualistic. Neither extreme aims to alter the structures of civil society or alter the dynamics of capitalism. The debates about genetic engineering, interventionist fertility treatments, contraceptive drugs and devices have a role to play in the way cultures approach the control of population through fertility and family. The techniques and technologies of monitoring and intervening in the production of the self has long-since permeated nearly all cultures across the globe. ‘Third World’ nation states have more difficulty accessing and taking up some modern medical items (such as condoms). This disrupts the effects that the gradual acclimatization of poorer cultures to the possibility of longer lives and lower mortality rates might have on lowering birth rates. Religious moral imperatives, as with scientific knowledge and new technologies, each have very real,

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political consequences. Yet the social consequences of technology, science, religion, politics, economics and education can have very constructive effects too. If the will were there, it would take a much shorter time period than the two or three generations it took the West to gain confidence in technologies and techniques of the self, and, thus, of the need for fewer children to guarantee the future. With less emphasis on consumer goods, and more on primary health, welfare and infrastructure, we might spontaneously bring the expectation of 10 billion people on the planet down even further.

State settlements Economically, pollution is an ‘externality’ that production can ignore in its early stages. Both labour and capital can allow the problem to be absorbed unnoticed. Commoner’s proposal is that environmentalism should be a ‘progressive’ movement in the Marxist or Critical Theory tradition. ‘But in fact pollution represents a debt to nature that must be repaid. Later when the environmental bill is paid, it is met by labour more than by capital; the buffer is suddenly removed and conflict between these two economic sectors is revealed in full force’ (Commoner, 1971: 271 in Feenberg, 1999: 63). In human terms, those with capital can offload the negative impact of pollution by buying a nice house in the suburbs and filling it with bottled water, air-conditioning and imported healthy organic food. The poorer part of the community have to bear the physical affects of toxicity and pollution. Furthermore, some ecological niches: whole valleys, plains, rivers, forests, even skylines are rearranged and are made unacceptable habitats for millions of species. Feenberg thinks that Ehrlich and the other ‘pessimists’ have it wrong because they redress the environmental threshold with individualistic spiritualism rather than constructive technological, political, economic and social change. If contemporary standards of wealth and current technology are the best the human race can hope for, then all adjustments to environmental constraints appear as economic regression (Feenberg, 1999: 67). The crux of Feenberg’s argument is that ‘since technology is routinely adapted to changing social and economic conditions, there is no reason of principle why it should not be redesigned to conform to the requirements of such a culture’ which values clean air and healthy surroundings (Feenberg, 1999: 66–67). Feenberg remains within the progressive humanist tradition that believes that humanity is in control of its own destiny. Technology may have caused environmental problems, but in the right hands, and with the right direction for innovations, we, the agents of change, can fix it. The actual process by which environmental science is taken up and given technological, political and economic attention is not at all clear-cut. Tim Forsyth has written about this in his book, Critical Political Ecology; The Politics of

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Environmental Science (2003). Forsyth points out that there are many scientific networks, often working from different core belief systems. Core belief propositions are hard to adjust. Empirical studies may show that received truths, for example, population is not causally correlated to environmental degradation (cf. the discussion on Hume in chapter 1). Yet, the weight of the empirical study will remain under scrutiny and may fail to alter the fundamental orthodoxy (Tiffen and Mortimore (1994) in Forsyth 2003: 138). Furthermore, different scientific networks have different core beliefs both within and between various nation states. Some of those scientific networks have access to the ear of policy makers and others do not. The ‘progressive’ nature of democratic development of technology is rather more random than its proponents admit.

Progress or paradigm shift Central to the global problem of overpopulation and overconsumption is the polarity between G8 nations and ‘developing nations’. Feenberg believes that the present precarious environmental condition intensifies the very horrors and upward struggles that threaten survival and yet promise also a precious spark of light to those hitherto excluded from the benefits for technical advance. Insensitivity to this ambiguity leads to a politics of despair that would freeze the current relations of force in the world – and with them the injustices they sustain – as a condition for solving the problem of survival. (1999: 69) The suggestion is that progressive technology is essential to improve the living conditions (and presumably, the potential for consuming the comforts of technological goods and services) of the ‘Third World’. Likewise, Commoner made a similar argument by drawing attention to the lower birth rates of richer countries, which tends to suggest that wealthy consumerism needs to be universalized throughout India, Africa, China, Asia, South America and the Eastern Bloc, as a mechanism to bring birth rates in the ‘Third World’ down too. Alternatively, an increase in consumer goods might have nothing to do with the promotion of reducing birth rates but an increased confidence in reduced child mortality rates (we can predict that most of our offspring will reach maturity). Better health inspires confidence that families will continue into the future and that fewer children are capable of providing the social provision of security for their parents’ old age. Technologies of the self increase the longevity of the existing population, decreasing the continued need for great numbers of children to guarantee the future. The impetus towards a genuinely ‘sustainable’ way of life across the globe will emerge from a combination of principles and practices. A decrease in global

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population figures would certainly help matters. Preferably, demographic transition will be a result of social confidence rather than famine and pestilence. Lower populations combined with a lighter ‘footprint’ can contribute to increased cultural and political awareness of the needs and pressures on the environment. It is a mistake to assume that technology on its own, however, or even ‘democratic technology’, will produce ecologically sustainable lifestyles for the global population. The environmental debates around resource depletion and overpopulation have lately tended to rely too heavily on a democratic and ‘progressive’ principle of technology to cure existing environmental problems. Even grass root development of technology, such as the internet, remains embroiled in the capitalist mode of production and consumption which, along with Idealism, configures the estranged relationship that humanity maintains with the earth’s ecosystems. The Critical theorist Tim Luke explains how technological innovation fails to extricate us from this fraught engagement with the planet’s ecology: The technological myths of modern production assert that the new industrial state produces abundance for all at little or no cost to anyone through technical innovation. Much of this ‘technical innovation,’ however, actually can be tied to reorganizing world trade to benefit capital-controlling regions as well as overriding the ecological balance of Nature, to produce what appears to be an unlimited or inexhaustible supply of material goods and services. Thus, the demands of markets force contemporary farms and factories to overdraw on finite renewable stocks of natural resources available not to the present and, in effect, borrow against the future by using the yet unborn generations’ potential frugal use of resources for truly profligate consumption. (2003: 246) Luke’s analysis of earth’s finite carrying capacity is firmly tied to the present conditions and the underlying assumptions that contribute to the acceptability of flagrant consumerism. With a paradigm shift away from profligate consumption of hydrocarbons and towards lower energy societies, technology could contribute to a cultural shift that will enable the long-term inhabitation of ecosystems by human societies. At the moment, technology is tied to the massive scale extraction of energy and resources – no matter how detrimental it is to the local ecosystems or the global climate. As people become more cognizant of how problematic this really is, there is more chance that technological reproduction will evolve in more ecofriendly ways. Improving technological design and efficiency is an important step towards sustaining 6.5 to 10.5 billion people on the planet. In the long-term, however, it can only achieve genuine sustainability if the culture of consumption and continuous economic growth is replaced with an alternative system of redistribution and governance. What that

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might be is difficult to ascertain right now, but it requires some creative thought based on all the best elements of the Enlightenment, including egalitarian justice, an awareness of the interconnectedness of all things and consideration for the reciprocal well-being of planetary ecosystems and geographically defined human populations. The Neoliberal solution for previously discounted ‘externalities’ such as carbon dioxide will be included in the market’s cost/benefit equations and technological inventions will gradually become more efficient – benefiting economies through lower production costs and the environment through lower rates of pollution. The net result, or at least the aim, is for larger population to have a relatively smaller ecological footprint. Yet devolved Neoliberal responsibility and the litigious mindset of the ‘risk’ economy often fail to produce actual reductions in energy consumption, as Monbiot alludes to in his book Heat (2006). Whatever way you look at it, the population, which had been climbing steadily since the Industrial Revolution in the 1600s, started to explode in the 1920s. By 2000 there were 6 billion people living throughout the globe. Surprisingly, it is not so much the contribution of new births which has caused the incredible expansion of the human population within our lifetimes but the survival rate. The emergence of industrial agriculture, changes in lifestyle, improvements in technologies of the self, have resulted in a worldwide average increase of age from 45 in 1950 to 65 now. Not only are more babies surviving infancy, but all cohorts of the population are remaining alive a lot longer. At present, it is not just excessive population, but consumption patterns in the richer nation states that are affecting the ecology of the planet. Late modern culture is exhausting finite resources and discharging high levels of methane and carbon dioxide emissions that are contributing to global warming. Poverty however, is no more ecologically sustainable than profligate consumption. The effects of global warming are really starting to show up. The ice caps are melting, the glaciers are undergoing recession everywhere, soil is warmer and dryer and there are increasing incidents of forest fires in California, Australia, Indonesia, Brazil and other countries. As the mean temperature has risen, the ocean reached its threshold for carbon dioxide absorption in 2005, and is now releasing more than it absorbs. This indicates that in many ways we have already fully occupied the planet. The predictions of Malthus are showing up in more complex ecological system breakdowns rather than a simple arithmetic of population numbers and food supply. Many of our problems are to do with lousy technology, massification of storage and distribution, industrialization of agriculture and production, global distribution, huge outputs in energy, cars, lights and soil erosion. All of which contribute to the environmental difficulties that constrain the possibility for the welfare of the present population and the projections of additional billions in the near future.

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The good news is that the population explosion is slowing down. The disastrous policies advocated by the Paddocks, the Ehrlich’s and HRH Philip Mountbatten, are not only unethical but also obsolete. It turns out, that improving living conditions results in radically reduced numbers of offspring within two or three generations. ‘Improvement’, though, is not readily consumable items but primary needs like clean water, widely available medical healthcare, good food, clothing, shelter. Before the demographic transition takes place, intermediary generations continue to have very high birth rates and much better survival rates. If we can manage this huge anomaly in human numbers, then gradually the population will reduce by natural attrition and low fertility rates. The crucial problem is maintaining the earth in a healthy state until our numbers reduce sufficiently from the threshold of environmental crisis. That requires ethics, good policies, clean technologies and a very serious engagement with the real production of the atmospheric greenhouse effect in direct correlation with the levels of methane and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It will also require a hard look at the practices of consumption, the ethics of tying success to financial reward and the continuous expansion of economic growth in relation to resource extraction and energy use. From a historical perspective, 400 years is a manageable time frame. Four hundred years is a blip of intense overpopulation, but if we can somehow get through this period and survive with most ecosystems relatively intact, it is likely that the population will naturally reduce to numbers that are far more manageable. The initial ‘geometric’ increase in human population proposed by Malthus in 1798 is evidently slowing down. The peak of increase has been reached and the escalation in numbers is reducing. The slowing of the rate of population growth is a crucial indicator that at some level, beyond agency or control, humanity has registered the thresholds of viability and has already begun to respond.

Chapter 7

Neopragmatism in Late Modernity

Given the scale of the problem: climate warming; the population explosion; over-consumption of energy products resulting in carbon dioxide; and methane emissions from various sources including animal stock and rubbish dumps, we are looking at a huge transformation in the way we live our lives. This raises some serious questions about the ethics of the existing philosophical principles of modernity and, particularly, the mechanisms for cultural transformation. There are several alternatives, and they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. What is primarily at issue is scope or scale. We have altered our technological mastery over nature on a huge scale since feudal and tribal times. Yet, modernity is best facilitated by minutiae of details and minor scales; ‘live for the moment,’ 3-year, or at most, 5-year democratic terms of office. People only project into their futures by short increments, at most by their 25-year mortgage repayments. Even marriage has stopped being a lifetime commitment, as our lives are getting longer, and self-interested short-term gain prevails over longterm pledges. The problem of climate warming is on a scale we find difficult to comprehend and we have few philosophical, political (or economic) mechanisms to engage with it. Environmental ‘ethics’ tends to limit itself to the self-regulation of individuals, in a forum with different disciplinary edges, but remarkably similar goals as the technologies of the self that are informed by medicine, food science, exercise regimes. Often, environmental ethics aims at overhauling specific community projects. Or else it enhances the centralization of regulation, as, in different ways, we saw advocated by the Ehrlichs, Commoner and Feenberg and more overtly by Neoliberals like Upton and Giddens. There are other methodological approaches to the environment that have some currency in the community, that are not bound in a straightforward manner to the Neoliberal paradigm. One of the more popular of these is contemporary Pragmatism. Pollution, overuse of natural resources, the exponential increase in the global human population and increasingly, global climate change are seriously challenging existing modes of philosophizing about the environment. Pragmatism, especially in the United States, remains confident that it can adapt to these challenges and accommodate environmental issues.

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I am not aiming to write a survey of all the different positions that environmental ethics, philosophy and politics have taken. However, it is useful to take a look at contemporary American environmental Pragmatism for several reasons. Though not prolific, contemporary Pragmatism has positioned itself as normative and dominated the discourse as the ‘voice of reason’ in opposition to the more ‘hippy spiritualism’ of Deep Ecology and feminist ecology. It is also situated in the country which consumes more oil per capita than any other in the world. America has 300 million people and there is a lot of diversity among those working to enhance the environment there. Yet, most environmentalism is issue-specific – the protection of the Seneca forest park, for example, or saving the whales. Pragmatism tries to engage across a range of environmental issues and forge a ‘consensus’ regardless of nation state or the particular cultural approach to environmental ethics. Contemporary Pragmatism has an unusual confidence that is a result of its long pedigree, and successful engagement and development with democratic Liberalism, almost from the beginning of the American State. America has never announced its conversion to the Neoliberal settlement in the same way that the United Kingdom or New Zealand did. Yet, the realities of the Liberal State have changed significantly since the era of Dewey, Pierce and Mead, James and Royce. The shift in the culture of nation states is due to several factors: the emergence of ‘public relations’ after the Second World War; the influence of the Chicago School of Economics; the normative Neoliberal paradigm in all the pan-global organizations; and the market orientation of the oil cartels. Every type of environmentalism now has to engage with the realities of the Neoliberal world-view. Environmental theorists influenced by Utilitarianism and American Pragmatism tend to maintain the traditional philosophical distinction between nature and culture. The Idealist distinction between culture and nature is fraught with axiological problems of measuring and attributing ‘value’. A strong thread in Pragmatism is that environmental problems require urgent attention and change is most effective when motivated by anthropocentric and economic reasons (Light, 2000, 2001, 2002a, 2002b and Light and Katz, 1996). The contested space of democratic debate might suggest that variety in the response of environmental philosophers is desirable and productive. Nevertheless, contemporary Pragmatists employ a number of devices to insist that their viewpoint is the correct one. They endorse democratic ‘pluralism’ but wish to distinguish this from poststructuralist ‘relativism’ (cf. Olssen, 2006: 75–94, Peters, 1995b). At the same time, while only addressing very localized environmental problems and refusing to engage with the large-scale global dimensions of climate change or overpopulation, contemporary Pragmatists tend to disparage theorizing in favour of local practical initiatives. This fails to examine any prospective deep cultural change in the industrial processes or modes of exchange in the modern (or post-modern) era. It also glosses over the political

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predisposition of global conglomerates controlling the media, and creates a conservative attitude towards cultural change. Neopragmatists overestimate the unchangeable stasis of the State, the market, and labour relations. Tacitly accommodating the overwhelming universalization of the market as a metaphor for all kinds of interactions and communication: between individuals, between institutions, between classes, between peoples, between humanity and nature, Neopragmatists have forgotten the turn of the century philosophical critique of conventionality for which Pragmatism was once famous. It is true that the depth and breadth of surveillance, normalization and categorization, that is occurring under globalized Neoliberalism is of enormous consequence. Yet, philosophers have discussed for over a century the limits of categorical truth, the inevitability of exceeding all universalities, and the many and myriad complicating factors that disturb simple equations of cause and effect. The strength of Neoliberal confidence and the familiarity of the progressive unrolling of the machinery of industrial consumerism do not dispose of philosophical cautiousness about ‘universalism’, ‘truth’ or ‘cause and effect’. Understanding the prevailing cultural conditions, as fully as possible, is vital, but remaining caught in the Neoliberal rubric is not only unnecessary, but also short-sighted and detrimental to both the environment and humanity. Globalization has transformed the nature of industrial capitalism, information flows, social ties and labour relations. Societies and environments have gone through epochal transformations, from the tribal condition of intimate and intuitive reliance on the local surroundings to feudal principalities of various kinds, through the comfort of a family wage and 40-year career that contributed to the modern nation state. Nowadays, society is characterized by an intimacy of globalized surveillance, a science of estimates and normalized comparisons, in the post-modern epoch that Donna Haraway calls the Informatics of Domination (1991). Nation states have changed in make up from the early description of the dialectic of industrial relations put forward by Marx and from the following post-war ‘compromise’ initiated by the Keynesian welfare settlement. We have entered the era of late, fast capitalism. As Roger Dale and Susan Robertson (2000) put it, we live in an era characterized by the Contractual State. The proliferation of cheap consumer goods (in the industrial nations at least) has encouraged a vastly different relationship between humanity and nature. The alienation of production has not resulted in wide-spread revolution but rather on compromise and complicity across class lines. Even the poor have access to the unlimited consumption of natural ‘resources’, resulting in the pollution and depletion of environmental ‘capacity’. A massive increase in transport and information flows has allowed the globalization and deregulation of corporations on such a scale that traditional categorizations have collapsed. Such fixed conceptual definitions that served in the nineteenth century as national boundaries or the currency gold standard,

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or even state responsibility for domestic security, economy and welfare have eroded into the shifting sands of the globalized market. The ‘externalities’ that technical-industrialization produces – pollution, resource depletion, alienation, are all inextricably tied to the local, and the transnational organization of corporate administration further removes people in control from industrial responsibility. Timothy Luke describes the devolved responsibility of the contractual, consumer State: By developing new informational modes of production, which are designed and managed by decentralized networks of professional-technical workers from a web of large complex techno-bureaucratic firms and small flexible corporate alliances, local and global capital are reconstructing the economic and political conditions of social reproduction as the ultimate guarantor of humanity’s ‘sustainable development’ and ‘environmental security. (2003: 246) Globalization of production relies on incredibly cheap freight transport, which allows manufacturing to move to nations where labour is cheapest and tax reduction is largest. Thus, sweatshops in China, Malaysia and parts of Polynesia create the labour intensive elements of manufacturing in textiles, electronics, automotive industries and so on. Disparate, labour and energy intensive parts from all over the planet may be collected and assembled in a location close to their markets in Britain, Europe, America and other wealthy nations. The transnational location and large-scale mobility of manufacturing displaces responsibility for the preservation of primary resources, the maintenance of pristine conditions in the manufacturing locality or the maintenance of fair working conditions and national welfare, education and health provision. Since the late 1970s, saturation of goods and services has left entrepreneurial capitalists in a bind. The Neoliberal ideology that has pervaded governments and pan-global organizations like the World Bank has proven to be the perfect vehicle for private capitalism to expand into the sure money-making areas of fundamentally necessary realms such as energy, transport and telecommunication provision (if not infrastructure). The Neoliberal belief in the ‘minimal state’ is based on the assumption that State Owned Enterprises (SOE) have expanded because of ‘provider capture’ where employees expand their empires to safeguard their jobs. Neoliberalism also assumes that self-interest includes laziness and that SOEs are full of people who, having lifetime job security, would operate in semi-retirement. The assumption is that the corporate model of administration would limit these self-interested behaviours thereby making gains on efficiency. On the grounds of efficiency and free enterprise, it was advisable to minimize the State by privatization. However, if the assets held by the State were sold at genuine market prices, the State would effectively remain as economically ‘large’ as before. On the

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stock exchange assets or money, both contribute to the estimation of the financial value of a corporation, or in this case, a corporate State. Thus, to decrease the size of the State, the public assets must be sold at a loss. This has resulted in massive energy, telecommunications, water, transport, health and education sites and institutions being sold for scandalously low prices. The Neoliberal theory advocating the privatization of SOEs is supposed to improve the economy through a combination of improved efficiency, Pareto optimality, the ‘Invisible Hand’ and the trickle-down effect. The market balance of Pareto optimality is where a certain number of inefficient or unsustainable producers might go bankrupt until the product has scarcity value and the prices increase producing viable conditions for increased production. The effects of price-fixing between providers counteracts Pareto optimality and must be regulated by the State, which still has a role in protective legislation and the judiciary. The Invisible Hand is a divinely inspired metaphor of the miraculous way that the competitive forces of the market drives down prices to the level that producers and consumers can bear, creating market ‘balance’. The ‘trickle down’ effect is the increased spending power of those wealthy individuals who newly own and make a profit out of institutions that had previously been ‘locked up’ by the State. The trickle-down effect is assumed to improve the circulation of money through the market by stimulating the economy (Devine, 2004). Since the 1980s the markets in developed nations are largely saturated as opposed to the post-war period when demand was immense for consumer goods. Manufacturing has dropped in Great Britain from around 75 per cent of GDP in the post-war era to less than 20 per cent now. Some new regions have broken open to increased consumerism – most notably Asia. In the 1990s and 2000s, many ‘Third World’ nations have either gone bankrupt trying to keep up (Argentina, Brazil) or simply been unable to participate in globalized consumer culture (most of Africa). To some extent, wealthy nations have resolved the saturation of goods barrier to economic growth by placing more emphasis on built-in redundancy, the knowledge economy and, along with that, the service industries aimed at the ever-changing technologies of the self (tourism, gymnasiums, health spas, fashion). In developed nations, consumption patterns have moved from absorption with goods to an emphasis on service, transport and information. Having expanded dramatically (and as far as possible continuing to expand) into the fundamentals of the energy, water, transport and telecommunications infrastructure of nation states in the last 25 years, privatization is now encroaching into communication technologies and the ‘knowledge economy’. Britain’s experiment with the ‘private/public partnership’ of school assets being owned and maintained by private corporations and rented back by State schools is one good example. Rupert Murdoch’s expansion and commercialization of newspapers is another example. The invasion of advertising on television, the Internet

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and mobile telephones are another. More profound, perhaps, is the sheer expansion of access to vast quantities of banal information. Luke argues that corporate reality is pervading all aspects of society and nature. Neoliberal administration is closely bound to the technological capabilities of information technologies: Not only can the raw resources of the earth, the manufactured things of social production, and the social services of human institutions be submitted to capital’s logic of reproduction, but even words, codes, memories, sounds, images, and symbols now are designed as value-added, fungible products to circulate in mass markets as efficient instruments of production, accumulation, reproduction and circulation. (Luke, 2003: 243; see also Guattari, 2000 and Haraway, 1991) The fine degree of minute calculation, commodification and surveillance is astonishing. Paedophiles in England are being trailed with GPS satellite surveillance systems that can identify their position to within 3 metres. They have to carry a mobile phone with them at all times so that they are constantly contactable if they stray into tempting areas like school playgrounds. Some supermarket items (for example razorblades) have a minute chip on them that traces their whereabouts from production line to dissemination. The networked ‘bits’ that make up computer memory are changing the nature of governance of peoples, individuals and things: The flow of bits over telematic networks is moving many to think about forsaking the government of people to embrace the administration of things, which, in turn, will remediate new modes of control out of bits as a vision for digital governance over people and things is expressed in many more partial, privatised, and productive practices. (Luke, 1997) Along with the intensification of the technological ability to assess, monitor and manage the mechanics of bodies, reproductions, organizations and flows is an overload of information. The disorder of the criminal is a good indicator of how the surplus of surveillance overloads the ability of policing systems to sift through an ever-increasing abundance of evidence. One street might have thousands of hours of video footage for each hour of real-time. Luke’s argument is that like atomic particles, digital bits are the new model for consumerism. Recasting the world as bits in order to surpass, but also acquire greater control over, the world as atoms, is today’s commodification project. Like all previous markets, these global informatic exchanges also are devoted to ‘systematizing something that is resolutely unsystematic, and historicizing something that is resolutely ahistorical’. (Luke, 2003: 244)

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Neoliberalism embraces wholeheartedly the digital metaphor of measurement and administration and the globalization of production through cheap transport and information. In contrast to this enthusiasm for technological efficiency, surveillance and categorization of increasing spectra of our environment in all its various states, critical environmentalism begins by ‘illustrating how the creation, circulation and accumulation of commodities on a mass scale now mutilates the ecological order of the planet’ (Luke, 2003: 244). What has been present throughout the industrial period is a counterdiscourse of eco-friendly living that can be set against the dominant paradigm of surveillance, economic efficiency and the marketplace. It involves recognition that the planet has a limited carrying capacity of biotic production. Eco-friendliness involves planning for longevity rather than obsolescence, sustaining biological diversity rather than efficient monocultures, negotiating regeneration of existing sites of industrial damage with current needs and future ecological renewal. It is not, therefore, the anarchic absence of planning, foresight or technology. Nevertheless, there is a different emphasis and meaning to the production of culture – and it is not about capitalist consumerism, or the objectification of everyone and everything as a potential resource. Neoliberalism has emptied the meanings of many of our metaphors so that all things are co-opted to the utility value, or potential resource value in the market place. It is difficult to invigorate languages, metaphors and discursive practices that are not tamed by the market rubric. However, all practices have philosophical underpinnings whether overtly discussed or not. Allowing those underpinnings to rise to the surface enables conscious decisions to be made about their beneficial or corrosive influence on the ways we interact with one another and with our environmental context. The normalization of practices tends to obscure their philosophical premises, and the separation of theory from practice, finance from politics, policy from implementation and so forth, means that responsibility for our actions can always be attributed to the other side of the equation.

The political conservatism of practice versus theory Post-modern governance relies upon totalizing surveillance and a series of arguments that presumes a logic of cause and effect. Capitalist production produces a hierarchy that needs to maintain hegemony by discouraging critical thinking about that prevailing logic or the manufacturing of certain sets of understandings of our own motivation (individual consumerism) and our relation to the environment (consumable resources). Post-modern governmentality discourages really affective change in the relationship between the environment and people by casting thinkers as ‘politically correct’ or unnecessary to the unfolding of the historical imperative.

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This last tendency to separate practice from theory pervades contemporary Pragmatism. Separating practice from concepts is extremely detrimental and serves to maintain a very conservative position among Pragmatic environmentalists. For example, in the prologue of their book Environmental Pragmatism, Light and Katz (1996) make extraordinary claims against theorizing about the environment that ‘ideas within environmental ethics are, apparently, inert – like Hume’s Treatise, they fall dead born from the press’. They ‘argue that theoretical debates are hindering the ability of the environmental movement to forge agreement on basic policy imperatives’ (Light and Katz, 1996: 7). The aim of these contemporary environmental Pragmatists is to stifle some elements of environmental debate, especially poststructuralist positions, in favour of a consensus of ideas which are presumed to guide policy from above. Unlike their predecessors (who were more like Hume than their later namesakes), contemporary Pragmatists make a stark distinction that separates practice from theory, and they valorize one side of other dualisms such as anthropocentricism over non-anthropocentricism, instrumentality over intrinsic value and culture over nature. The common sense assumptions of contemporary Pragmatists emerge from a very explicit group of Classical Grand Masters: Pierce; Royce; James; Mead; Dewey; and a less explicit set of theoretical influences, most notably, Hegel and Liberal Utilitarianism. Cultural conservatism makes contemporary Pragmatism inadequate for attempting the kinds of cultural transformation that are necessary to adequately achieve a more ethical and genuinely sustainable interaction between human societies and the ecosystem. They address the perceived gap between environmental theorists and policy analysts, activists and the public. To achieve this cohesiveness contemporary Pragmatists theorize a normative basis that will provide the ground for the convergence of activists on policy choices and, at the same time, win theoretical and meta-theoretical arguments about moral pluralism as opposed to ‘relativism’ in ‘normative’ environmental theory. Light and Katz complain that there is a ‘political correctness’ about the debates between individualism/holism, anthropocentricism/non-anthropocentricism, instrumental/intrinsic value and pluralism/monism. The politically correct view results, they argue, in a unified theoretical field that bears no relationship and, thus, has no practical effects on policy. ‘Thus methodological dogmatism may account for the failure of environment ethics in the realm of practical affairs’ (Light and Katz, 1996: 7). Confusing, as many people do, postmodernity (Lyotard, 1993) with Poststructuralism (Peters, 1996a, 1996b, 2001a), they warn that pluralism could easily be confused with a lack of a standard for truth in postmodernism. Moral pluralism ‘sounds dangerously close to the abject relativism of deconstructive postmodernism. And this relativism is something that we may agree ought to be avoided during periods of crisis’ (Rosenthal and Buchholz in Light and Katz, 1996: 4). In contrast to the poststructuralist suspicion of metanarrative (Lyotard 1993, with a debt to the philosophical tradition of the nominalist fallacy and,

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particularly, Hume), pluralism incorporates different theoretical stances. That is, post-structuralism can cope with diverse thinking whereas pluralism tries to draw all ideas into the centre. Light and Katzt claim, for example, ‘Peter Singer’s criterion of sentience and Paul Taylor’s criterion of respect for all teleological centres of life’ can be subsumed into a coherent ‘single moral enterprise’. Light and Katz argue that Pragmatism is a ‘radical correction of modernity’ (Light and Katz, 1996). Juxtaposed against postmodern relativism, they require ‘a workable, robust and critical environmental philosophy, [that] at best may provide the foundations or guidelines for the types of theory development needed at this stage in the growth of environmental philosophy’ (Light and Katz, 1996: 10, my italics). Their concern about the relativist problems of postmodernism is because such theorizing delays the urgent actions that are required to help the environment. Pragmatism might not have it entirely sorted out yet, they assert, because pluralism is at the immature beginning stages. Gradually however, a Pragmatic approach will forge some sort of focal point for environmental practices. This assumes a Hegelian telos that regards the ‘birth’ of Environmental Pragmatism as a discipline (in 1996) as too ‘immature’ to have discovered its ultimate, progressive form. Weston writes that [o]riginary stages are the worst possible times at which to demand that we all speak with one voice. Once a set of values is culturally consolidated, it may well be possible, perhaps even necessary, to reduce them to some kind of consistency. But environmental values are unlikely to be in such a position for a very long time. The necessary period of ferment, cultural experimentation, and thus multi-vocality is only beginning. (Weston in Light and Katz, 1996) This is no light matter. These assumptions about a teleological unfolding towards a consensus also prevail in the scientific community and have been the justification for both believing and undermining the scientific ‘consensus’ that has been published by the IPCC in 2001 and 2007. See, for example, the role of Chris de Freitas as editor of the Climate Change Journal and Sallie Baliunas as two of the expert petitioners against the Environmental Protection Agency in the Supreme Court case contesting the veracity of scientific consensus on global warming (Goodness, 2003: 13 and American Supreme Court documents No. 05-1120). But while Environmental Pragmatism claims originary status in the 1990s it also harks back to the classical theoretical underpinnings of the nineteenthcentury Pragmatists, Pierce, Royce, James, Mead and Dewey. Like Hume, (and later Nietzsche) classical Pragmatists argue that there is no indubitable Truth as foundation for knowledge (Parker in Light and Katz, 1996: 22). In his contribution to the volume, ‘Pragmatism and Environmental Thought’, Kelly

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Parker argues that the classical Pragmatists were critical of the universal assumptions of traditional Western metaphysics and epistemology because humans, along with other organisms, are embedded in a particular location, so knowledge and value are a result of interactions within the world-view of that particular place. According to Parker, James’ theory of epistemology is that belief succeeds in making sense of the world if it is not contradicted by experience (in which case new beliefs need to be developed) creating a progressive evolutionary dialectic between concept and practical experience of the environment. It could be argued then, that classical Pragmatism collapses the dualism between theory and practice because at its most basic premise the two are empirically bound together (cf. Garrison, 2000). Before we take Parker’s word for the ecologically friendly philosophy of Classical Pragmatism, we should heed Mary Midgley’s warning. She notes that far from being environmentally friendly, William James also makes a less palatable argument for taking human aggression and subverting it by directing it against nature, ‘The Moral Equivalent of War’ (Midgley, 1994: 105). ‘Epistemology’, for Pierce, has conceptual meaning derived from the subsequent effects on thought and experience. Parker explains, ‘We have no indubitable beliefs; only a stock of importantly undoubted ones.’ Concepts are not immutable but comparatively stable and sufficiently clear to make good sense of experience. Experience though, can demonstrate that our concepts are too vague or just wrong. With uncanny resemblance to Hume’s critique of causality, and writing during the same period as Nietzsche, Pierce contends that epistemology is always contingent; ‘if we forget that our understanding is fallible, the philosophical quest for wisdom may devolve into a pathological crusade for absolute certainty’ (Parker in Light and Katz, 1996: 22). In classical Pragmatism, there is a ‘matrix of conceptual constructs, both tacit and theoretical, that bring order to raw experience.’ Parker’s acknowledgement of wide unknown existence and its unfathomable structures or lack thereof, is akin to the best of all three traditions (Pragmatist, Hume, Poststructuralist). ‘The world we live in is surrounded by the fringe of the unknown, an ineffable but insistent existential reality that is larger than ourselves and our settled knowledge’ (Parker in Light and Katz, 1996: 23). Pierce keeps coming back to the limits of human knowledge drawing attention to the necessary conditions and limitations of human understanding and also to the phenomenological experiences and culturally located roots of epistemology. The earth always exceeds the ‘world as known’. Nietzsche, Heidegger and the Poststructuralist tradition along with the early Pragmatists owe a profound theoretical debt to Hume’s critique of causality (cf. Hoy, 1994). So Light’s and Katz’s antagonism towards theory, and Hume in particular, becomes less and less understandable. For Pierce, mind is a part of the world. An ever-shifting universe of complex relationships occupies a primordially continuous field of experience. It is an

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uncertain, doubtful, indeterminate situation that is reconstructed to make sense, to become intelligible. This transforms both the knowing subject and the known object. Pragmatism’s theoretical roots confirm pluralism, indeterminacy, chance, change, development, novelty, structures and relations, reality, beings and radical empiricism. Parker describes ‘subjectivist’ experiences in radical terms that dissolve the separation of the subject from the object. He explains the ontological imbrication of the subject within the environment, ‘experience as such is just another name for the manifestation of what is. What is is the ongoing series of transactions between organism and their environments’ (Parker in Light and Katz, 1996: 29). Pragmatic axiology seeks to enquire into what it is that people actually need and desire. They do not place value on the utilitarian pleasure – pain axis. The emphasis is on desire and growth as a creative or aesthetic richness of experience rather than the material ‘growth’ such as measuring well being through per capita Gross Domestic Product. (1996: 27) The richness of experience is fundamental to early Pragmatic philosophy because experience reinforces or contradicts our assumptions about truths. Tying the pleasure/pain spectrum of utilitarianism to more recent assessments of national ‘happiness’ through GDP is a thoughtful critical analysis, but in other regards, Parker abandons the careful approach to environmentally conditioned truth and resorts to anthropocentric self-interest. This angle still includes a rejection of instrumental mastery of nature on the grounds that if everything is completely predictable then there is no change, or novelty, so humans can no longer grow in experience. Effectively this emphasis on novelty and change disputes the ‘end of history’ thesis of continuous consumerism (and the growth of GDP) that characterizes Neoliberalism (cf. Fukuyama, 1992). However, novelty as a critique of the ‘end of history’ is not utilized to dispute contemporary Pragmatic faith in teleological change. Sustainability is favoured for the anthropocentric reason that through diverse ecological environment a diversity of experiences and knowledge are promoted for human beings. The roots of classical Pragmatism are in an evolutionary theory of interaction with environmental conditions: noting the problematics; inquiring into necessary adaptations; challenging the species and the circumstances to be rethought and introducing a new dynamic to the exchange (Dewey, 1916). Classical Pragmatism is so radically empirical that it is critical of absolutes or dualisms. ‘The world of experience deals harshly with absolute distinctions’ (Light and Katz, 1996: 23). This ought to dissolve dualist generalizations that privilege one pole of an oppositional pair, understanding them instead as integral aspects along a spectrum, but of the same phenomena. The metaphor of the spectrum (and better again, the rhizome, Deleuze and Guattari, 1999) dissolves the dual-

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ist distinctions by not privileging either side of the divide: object or subject, nature or culture, man or woman and so on. In contemporary hands, there is an interesting shift from empiricism towards Idealist subjectivism. While contemporary Pragmatism remains critical of the concept of the objective environment as separate from humanity, it goes on to privilege the ‘subjective’ interpretation of the environment and fails to acknowledge that nature always exceeds the human ‘world’ such that epistemology, is always, beliefs that are contingent upon our natural experiences. For contemporary Pragmatists the privileging of the human side of the culture versus nature dualism results in the statement that there are no non-anthropocentric or intrinsic values. Pragmatic theory derives axiology from the immediate socially empirical context and actively engages in existing political, social and presumably environmental issues. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Pragmatism was radically engaged developing a dynamic theoretical framework that cast off subjectivist Idealism. Now these contemporary environmentalists, who should be in a position to take the most challenging, forward thinking and creative aspects of Pragmatism are instead allowing these ideas to coagulate and stiffen into a protective normative paradigm that results in reinforcing the separation of nature from culture and therefore the alienation of global production and mass consumerism. The rejection of dualisms and the interconnection of environmental and subjective experiences is designated a one-sided anthropocentric outlook. Pluralism is reduced to a ‘single moral enterprise’ and the fragile unknowability of the manifold world is simply occluded. Contemporary Pragmatists pride themselves on their active engagement with social issues and fail to see that their engrossment with the short-term is at the peril of the environment and humanity in the long term. At times, the critique of dualisms is put to good use. Rosenthal and Buchholz’ critique of the modern scientific view is that it objectifies nature and separates humanity from the natural world. Science is better understood as creative human activity rather than the excavator of the essence of things. These are important ideas for confronting the exaggerated belief that technology and science can provide definitive environmental solutions (should they be so employed). Rosenthal and Buchholz emphasize a relational context, or organic unity, such that the individual is embedded in the locality. Biological creatures are continuous with nature, so there is no need for dualisms such as anthropocentricism/biocentrism, individual/holism, intrinsic/instrumental and so on. They explain the rational and conscious organization of experience to produce future value as a basis of Pragmatic ethics. Rationality and consciousness get underlined here, to produce a ‘correctness’ of world-view that only Pragmatism can provide (Rosenthal and Buchholz in Light and Katz, 1996). By emphasizing subjective solipsism and the nominalist gap at the expense of the empirical integration of everything, contemporary Pragmatism has leaned

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towards the rationality and dogmatic thrust for absolute Truth promoted by Idealist, Anglo-Analytic philosophy. The underlying ‘radicalism’, in the nineteenth-century Pragmatism that resides in its philosophical roots is unnecessarily stiffened by the contemporary tendency to separate theory from practice. The result of separating theory from practice is a tendency to accept normative values as empirically and rationally given and allowing a very narrow window for reconceptualizing the reciprocal relationship between human beings and the environment. In an article published in Metaphilosophy titled ‘Contemporary Environmental Ethics: From Metaethics to Public Philosophy’ (2002a), Andrew Light writes an important and up-to-date survey of the field of environmental ethics. He has developed an analysis of different theoretical views which predominantly slot into two main camps; the first and apparently dominant is the ‘non-anthropocentric’ theorists who also tend to place inherent, ‘intrinsic’ or ‘non-Utilitarian’ value on the environment. The second is the more traditional type of philosophy that remains anthropocentric and approaches the environment in a humanist manner, which tends towards the Utilitarian. Light argues that the antagonism towards anthropocentricism is so pervasive in environmental ethics that it has become dogma. His complaint is that theories about the environment based on non-anthropocentric values (or nonUtilitarian values) are mere ‘intramural’ word-play. The many different theoretical approaches in environmental ethics, whether they be anthropocentric or non-anthropocentric, all seem to end up in a practical ‘convergence’ which tends towards protecting or creating ecological habitats. Bryan Norton developed this theory of ‘convergence’ arguing that in the end, if taken in their ‘pure’ form, both anthropocentric and ecocentric environmentalisms would eventually turn up the same policy results (Norton, 2005: 508). So, even the animal rights theorists such as Singer will prudently advise the humane hunting of exogenous rabbits, for example, for the larger good of the Australian Outback. While I sympathize with the desire for urgent and practical action on particular issues, I do not agree that it is a matter of postponing environmental care while we have a think. It is naive and even dangerous to relegate the myriad debates about Utilitarian versus intrinsic value, or anthropocentric versus nonanthropocentric, or individualist versus community aims and even monad versus pluralist beliefs, to a ‘convergent’ interest in environmental protection. Norton believes that non-anthropocentric ethics will turn out to converge with anthropocentric ethics because, in the end, humans politically contest both (Norton, 2005: 508). While political dualism may collapse towards the same ends, the notion of a mature political convergence, or dialectical synthesis, is not necessarily going to be the case. Clearly, not all, political views are interested in environmental protection. Some interest groups claim to be environmentally motivated such as big business including ‘sustainability’ in

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their mission statements and advertising without any genuine attempt to alter capitalist practices in a far-reaching way. Conflicting strategies produce divergent politics that play out in the practices of activists, politicians, citizens and schoolteachers. Theoretical premises affect the organizing paradigms, selfunderstanding and the actions of societies, communities and individuals. In a global world, anthropocentric capitalism dominates the ‘view’ that the media, advertising, education, work ethic, consumerism and so forth, take on the environment. As Heidegger cogently argues, everything in the modern world is enframed and understood as potential resource. So thinking our way out of these conundrums is vitally important, both short- and long-term, for realigning the relationship that humanity as a whole has with the earth in all its aspects. Diverging ideas about how the relationship between humanity and the earth can be best cared for are a constructive way forward (and impossible to annihilate) because different contexts generate different relationships (cf. Mouffe). Thought is like biodiversity; difference shelters contingent possibilities for unexpected problems, monoculture fails when confronted with new disease, or new weather conditions, new predators, new constraints, and new conditions of possibility. Suffice to say at this point, that Neopragmatists have not recognized the relationship between philosophy, political ethics and practical implementation. The philosophies of Hume, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Poststructuralism are utterly different to the Idealist position of universal truths that are beyond the temporal or geographical iterations of this world, and are only accessible by objective, rational thought by privileged beings such as humanity. The fundamental difference in approach to time, place, epistemology and subjectivity have real consequences in our ethical, political and economic approaches to everything, including, and especially, the natural environment. The polarization of theory from practice, and anthropocentric from intrinsic values is a philosophical dead-end. The landscape shapes our subjectivity and, for generations and generations, humans have had a profound impact on the landscape. Neither ‘side’ has a privileged position of either ‘pure’ nature or ‘knowing’ subject. Subjects roam nature knowingly (the fish, the cat, the hawk, the antelope) and nature is always evolving its interactions, boundaries and biological systems, of which we humans are a part. This may sound like simple evolutionary science – and it is – but somehow, through the long history of philosophical Idealism, the interaction, imbrication and interdependence of humanity and nature have been denied any importance. Resurrecting it has profound political implications. Strangely enough, the major gaps in the surveys of Brennan and Lo (2002) and Light (2002a) from the environmentalist canon are the outright evolutionists, Dewey at the turn of the century and Gregory Bateson, who argued in the 1970s that the basic unit of anthropocentric calculus should not be the individual, nor even the species, but the family-and-ecological-niche. Dewey, along

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with Hume, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Bateson, all disintegrate the harsh, Idealist philosophical separation between human-subject and earth-object while retaining a nominal space for reflective thinking. Their arrangement recognizes contingent ethical demands, as in the example of the rabbits in the Australian outback, without falling into the either/or polarization between anthropocentricism and non-anthropocentricism that Light is suggesting dominates the field. There is one example of contemporary Pragmatism which makes the same, important, move in the relationship between humanity and nature. With Dewey in mind, Larry Hickman argues that nature is not independent from humanity, as either a self-contained machine, or a self-directed being (Lovelock’s Gaia). Nature is a human construct, he argues. It is a cultural artefact: ‘Nature as Culture’. For nature to remain purely nature is a matter of raw experience. Nature’s immediate ‘value’ is posited in retrospect. Nature as culture constructs cultural artefacts and connects experiences into a coherent verified whole. This, Hickman argues, is valuable as guides to future human experiences (Hickman in Light and Katz, 1996).

Epistemology and praxis The nominal imposition of value still takes place but in subtly different ways than advocated by the dualisms of yester-year. As Hume argues, empirical events can show up in ways that disturb the overarching view of the world that has acceptance and normative value. With too many of these ‘anomalies’ the normative interpretation breaks down, leaving a gap while people search for better ways of understanding that takes cognizance of all the previously ignored ‘externalities’. Dewey and Hume decompose the position of mastery while maintaining narrative authorship with human beings. Nature as culture is a doubled dynamic. Culture as nature works just as well. The flow of power fluctuates like AC/DC current. As a rhizome any particular iteration of a dualism or spectrum extends and deviates and joins up (or fails to) with other related elements of the universe (known and unknown). Like couch-grass, the rhizome sends out runners, and new plants grow at intervening periods along the runners. Even if the connections break , the new plants continue to thrive independently. Truths or narrative formulae can be understood through the metaphor of the rhizome, as much as the metaphor of a mighty tree, whose branches are disciplinary distinctions (or racial, or species distinctions) of the trunk’s absolute truth (Deleuze and Guattari, 1999). The rhizome does not represent one mighty hierarchical enunciation of life. The rhizome spreads flowers and shoots that iterate truths in similar but singular fashion, each with specific claims to thrive as an authority and responding with specific form and content to environmental conditions.

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If the environmentalist project is to generate action then a genuine epistemological shift among the global population is required. The piecemeal pockets of revegetation, nature ‘enhancement’, isolated national parks, sustainable management, urban recycling and so on may only contribute very limited environmental ‘good’ and preserve narrow ecological niches; but at the same time, they contribute ideas towards a paradigm shift that normalizes concern for ecology rather than the present atomized alienation of humanity from our surroundings. Light is intrigued by the need to ‘convince people’ to pursue environmental ends. This is really the only element of importance in his essay, ‘The Case for a Practical Pluralism’ which is a superficial skate over, what is for him, familiar terrain. He does little to explain the various forms of pluralism apparently advocated by the authors he surveys. He blithely avoids any engagement with ‘deconstructive poststructuralist différance’ (Light, 2002b: 15) by naming and shaming it as moral relativism: Relativism entails abandoning the view that there are some moral stances better than others that could guide our ethical claims about how we should treat nature. If we admit relativism then, one could argue, we would give up on attempts to form a moral response to the cultural justifications put forward to defend the abuse or destruction of other animals, species or ecosystems. Relativism entails that ethics is relative to different cultural traditions. (Light, 2002b: 7) This kind of Pragmatism maintains a North American faith in the ‘normative force’ of American cultural superiority. Denigrating relativism neglects the emphasis on critique, where evaluation based on mutual respect for differing view points can still come to an ethical decision – but quite possibly not a consensus. ‘Pragmatic’ resignation to Western prejudice avoids the hard ‘development’ questions about uneven global wealth distribution, skewed global economic and environmental policy. Avoiding theory results in ignoring the absorption of old Liberal and more recent environmental terms, such as ‘choice’, ‘freedom’, ‘equality’, ‘sustainability’ into the Neoliberal lexicon and its resultant policy initiatives that are being implemented in nations around the planet. Ignoring theory is to ignore what is actually going on. Misgivings aside, the educational project is central to the protection of the environment. Given the circumstances, social transformation is vital and, thus, the theoretical understanding of change is very important. Neopragmatists assume that teleological convergence will ‘correct’ modernity. Yet, the endpoint of modernity seems to increasingly show up as the Neoliberal ethos of consumerism as the perfected ‘end of history’. Change is understood as convergent modification rather than radical epistemological shift. Light’s pluralism is

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based on a despondent view that the American status quo is insurmountable: ‘when possible we should work within the traditional moral psychologies and ethical theories that most people already have and direct them, where we can, at the same environmental ends’ (Light, 2002b: 15). This social conservatism is combined with a very modern sense of urgency – an urgency to avert impending doom immediately. ‘Given the environmental crisis we face, how could we afford the sort of delays seemingly implicit in such talk of “cultural experiments”?’ (Light, 2002a: 7). This feeling of crisis dominated popular psychology of environmental books ever since the late 1960s. Books like Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring (1963), James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis and many others gave voice to the widespread misgivings of the Cold War’s nuclear proliferation, together with growing but largely disbelieved body of evidence about global warming. At the same time, the realization that fossil fuels might become exhausted, Ehrlich’s population bomb and mounting numbers of species extinctions and habitat destruction contributes to the discourse of crisis. By now the majority of people, in every nation have become somewhat familiar with the discourse of environmental crisis. I think Light underestimates the significance of this familiarity. The general acceptance that there is a massive, global, environmental problem is providing the conditions for a ‘sea change’ in the ways humanity interacts with the earth. If we are merely pragmatic and remain with the traditional common sense ideas then we will not be ‘urgently’ helping environmental protection and enhancement to take place. We will be inhibiting the potential for a dramatic and irreversible change, recognition of the anomalies not described by the modern, Idealist view of nature, an epistemological shift, for which the world is increasingly ready.

Chapter 8

Heidegger; the Origin and the Finitude of Civilization

My interest in Heidegger tends to focus on his unique views on the relationship between the practical emergence of tangible Being, and truth, concepts and ideas. Drawing from the history of philosophical ideas and the very contemporary concerns with climate change, this chapter examines Heidegger’s concern with the threshold of nihilism as a regenerative force in our conceptualization and relationship with the earth. Heidegger has a strong critique of modernity which engages with the finitude posed by nuclear devastation. More recently, and with even fuller dimensions, the looming boundary of climate change points to the nihilism inherent in modern thought. Somewhat surprisingly, Heidegger’s approach to the zone that threatens to draw modern culture to an untimely close, is not entirely pessimistic. He regards the ‘line’ or boundary of the planetary conditions for human life as generating a new ‘beginning’. That beginning (or the contemplation of the ending) generates the conditions for rethinking what it is to be meaningfully human. So, the line of nihilism exemplifies the openness required to fully care and love our planet and ourselves. That might sound airy-fairy, but it actually generates an entirely new set of conceptual conditions to work off. If we accept the division of subjects from objects, mind from body and culture from nature as set up by ontological realism and also the philosophical traditions of nominalism, then it is not, at all, surprising that we assume mastery over nature. In turn, that mindset facilitates the construction of a technological framework that wrests material from the earth and productivity from the population and insists on all things participating in the total mobilization of consumerism. Whereas, Heidegger suggests that the prospect of the ending of civilization (whether through nuclear devastation or climate change) puts our lives into a new perspective. The line allows us the clarity and insight that is necessary to remember what it is that makes us feel refreshed, alive, energized and meaningful. Far from the clone-like, mesmerizing and tiring forces of capitalist consumerism, this new feeling is set on entirely different ground. It initiates a new vista to our behaviour, our cultures, our relationship to technology and, most importantly, our attitude and awareness of the earth itself. Heidegger’s philosophy is broad in scope and many-faceted.

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This book can neither describe all the detail of his critique of modernity, nor the shortcomings in his understanding of mathematics and science. My aim, here, is to make use of Heidegger’s approach to onto-epistemology which brings together subject and object, culture and nature, without losing the nominalist space for thinking or reducing all people to objects among objects, resources potentially available for consumption. Heidegger’s critique of technology, rationality and concepts of truth and ontology are put to use in relation to contemporary science and climate change. The chapter also repositions Heidegger’s entire oeuvre from the perspective of his crucial correspondence with Ernst Jünger, Über ‘Die Linie’, Over The Line (1999a, orig. 1955).

Science, metaphysics and climate change Modernity has created the conditions that encouraged whole-scale pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and, ultimately, climate warming. Climate change is, already, seriously affecting nearly all regions of the planet and potentially (and astonishingly quickly) could shift into a planetary epoch with conditions far too harsh for human habitation. Under our present regime, technology is often positioned as the solution to environmental problems. Modern technology is not just a matter of an appropriate instrumental tool. The technical utensil builds into a very specific approach to the environment – one that requires statistical analysis, close attention to detail and itemized accounts of how technology can intercede and make useful environmental ‘resources’. Technology has become associated with a faith in correctitude. It is a matter of finding the correct mathematical formula that accounts for events, and then manufacturing a technological device that can intervene at the appropriate, strategic moment and alter the circumstances to better suit humanity. This type of rhetoric often comes up in relation to climate change. One of the unfortunate results of our long history of philosophical ideas has been an overemphasis in the division, both physical and intellectual, between the environment and individual human subjects. One of the things that I am most interested in is the way that philosophical ideas affect the social norms and political ideologies that permeate societies. Particularly, because of its huge impact on global social relations and the ecology of the entire planet, I am interested in the ethos of modern culture. The question is how philosophy facilitates the modern alienation from ecology. Underlying that interest, is my faith, I guess you would call it, that philosophical ideas might also be of service, as Nietzsche put it, as ‘cultural physician’. Unlike the Neopragmatic goal of a ‘radical correction of modernity’, I believe that the cultural physician can make an honest appraisal of the facts, ethos and modes of society without reducing all the variables and non-commensurate attitudes to a consensus on one correct path or teleology for all cultures.

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Global climate warming remained in the realm of fairytales and hippy scaremongers for decades. The evidence has been gathered since the late 1950s but it has only been taken semi-seriously by politicians, and policy makers (if not the population at large), since the IPCC released their third report with a ‘consensus’ of scientific data in 2001. I can only speculate about why the IPCC find it necessary to produce the document in ‘consensus’ form, but I suspect that it emerges from scientific method, where many experiments take place and anomalies are reduced to the point where they are probably contaminations rather than falsifying the data. Karl Popper conceptualized the negative proof, which takes into account the nominalist fallacy, whereby some fact or event can always be interpreted in new ways, making an absolute, verifiable and positive truth impossible. Nevertheless, Popper argued, a weaker or negative truth can stand if some fact or event can be taken as true unless, or until, it is falsified. From this position of negative truth, which by now is the normative model in science, normative consensus about scientific facts or events is very important and constitutes the acceptability of any given scientific discourse. In order for global climate change to be taken seriously outside the particular realms of specific disciplines: biology, climatology, geology, oceanography, palaeontology and so forth, the difficult task of amalgamating data across disciplines, and attempting to comprehend a vast, very complex and necessarily detailed situation, takes place. The consensus building that has occupied the IPCC since 1988 is, at last, starting to prove effective. The United Kingdom’s chief economist, Nicholas Stern stated recently, ‘The body of evidence and the growing quantitative assessment of risks are now sufficient to give clear and strong guidance to economists and policy- makers in shaping a response’ (Stern, 2008: 2). The IPCC wields the weight of science together with the close coordination by pan-global bodies, combining the expertize of the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme and bringing the factors of climate change into direct contact with institutions of governance. In some ways, consensus is a scientific anathema. In an evidence-based set of disciplines, people’s agreement should be irrelevant. The data should dictate results, building an interpretation that fits all the known information. ‘Consensus’ about the interpretation of the data is an epistemological non-sense because wide set agreement implies that some data will have to be ‘shaped’ or suppressed to fit the overall picture. Positivist epistemology is glossed over by many people who accept positivism as having direct and privileged access to truth. This belief in positivist truth can go so far as to claim direct correlations between events or facts and the linguistic explanation we attribute to them as touching upon an underlying truth or structure. At the root of all positivist epistemologies is only ‘negative truth’. The normative interpretation only stands while most of the data confirms that interpretation – or consensus, if you will.

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If there are too many anomalies, then the evidence has falsified the accepted discourse and a new interpretation needs to emerge. For these reasons, the IPCC insists on having developed a ‘consensus’ on climate change, and some commentators have insisted with equal vehemence, in newspapers, profession climate journals, in books and through the American Supreme Court, that there is significant data that challenges the findings of the IPCC. The bone of contention is the IPCC’s summary that it is 90 per cent probable that ‘most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century [actually since 1911] is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations’ (IPCC, 2007). Within a week of the February 2007 release of the IPCC summary report, one of over 2,500 expert reviewers that contributed to the report, Ross McKitrick, complained that the summary document glossed over conflicts and anomalies between the contributors. Instead of finding it obvious that there would be different interpretations and a wide range of data from so many independent scientific studies, over a very broad range of disciplines, and from so many scientists, McKitrick saw the lack of consensus as damning. The focus of his disagreement is the ‘consensus’ that climate change has anthropogenic causes. McKitrick begs to differ. Sun flares and volcanoes may also contribute to climate warming. The basis of his claim is not simply scientific, nor is it merely political. Whether he is aware of it or not, his criticism is based on epistemology and metaphysics. He is assuming a direct correlation between the underlying order of the universe and truth that is mathematical, accurate, timeless, universal and irrefutable in nature. Climatology is no simple science. The atmosphere and oceans behave like fluids; but as yet, McKitrick complains that no mathematicians have managed to associate the formula for fluids that Claude-Louis Navier and George Stokes created over a century ago to the complex and largely unpredictable ways that climate behaves. This perhaps explains why the weather reports are so notoriously wrong! Such is the faith of positivist science in a structure underlying every aspect of the world that the Clay Institute of Mathematics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has offered a 1 million dollar reward for the equations that link the formula to the complex behaviour of fluids. It is this faith in the mathematical equations, the formula and the idea that we can predict flux and change: not just model it, but also control it – that lies at the heart of the account of science as objective, and nature as fixed and essential. It is simply a matter of understanding the underlying forces at work. McKitrick complains, ‘In lieu of a solution, scientists use computer models to approximate how the countless processes affecting the climate might behave over time’ (2007: A15). These assumptions, about the essential nature of the universe, are at the bottom of some science and most economic theories of behaviour. Sure enough, the ‘scientist’, McKitrick turns out to be an Associate Professor of Economics, rather than a climatologist of any kind. The idea that there can be a definitive

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case for anything is never verifiable. This is straightforward Karl Popper, and both economists and scientists should know better. The prevailing faith in ‘a solution’ raises some interesting questions about the nature of truth, the earth, the universe and everything: Where did the assumption of a singular, timeless, metaphysical basis to everything arise? How much of a role does the subject play? Is our world-view an individual representation or a community-orientated language game? How does technology and science feature in the development of climate warming and how does it feature in any resolve the community might have for ameliorating the situation? Is our understanding of technology as instrumental sufficient? How do the ecological limitations of the environment impact on our philosophical ideas? Of all these many questions, I am only going to directly address the first and the last in this chapter: the metaphysical basis according to Heidegger, and the impact of the finitude of modern civilization on Western philosophical ideas. Some of the other questions have been addressed, directly or obliquely in other chapters of the book.

Instruments and Gestell Heidegger, rather notoriously, rejects the concept of metaphysics altogether. He is also highly disparaging of the tendency for calculating, categorizing and accounting, all of which he regards as the tedious result of the degeneration of philosophy into nihilism or meaninglessness, and the overarching horizon of technology on every aspect of the modern world-view. Equipment and technology have been at the centre of Heidegger’s philosophy from his early magnum opus, Being and Time through to his late work on modernity. Yet, the status of technology underwent significant change, beginning in the early 1930s. Equipment served, in Being and Time, to close the sceptical gap opened by Descartes between individual subjects and the alwaysalready world. Habituated behaviour easily negotiates the objective environment without separating subjective representation from the way an object coheres with the locality as a whole. Equipment ‘worlds’ (cf. Dreyfus, 2002). There is more detail about the significant shift in Heidegger’s thinking about technology in Chapter 2 ‘Climate change and the crisis of philosophy’ in the section on Heidegger and total mobilization. Under the influence of his contemporaries, Spengler and Jünger in the 1930s, and his reading of two of the greatest German intellectuals, Nietzsche and the poet Hölderlin, technology was made responsible for altering the culture of modernity. This approach to modern technology, as both the danger and the saving power, has profound implications on contemporary life. Heidegger was very much a man of his time whose life, like others, was complicated by the rise of the National Socialist party to government in 1932 and

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who was anxious about the impact of technology, the disintegration of traditional German culture and the emphasis on individualism inherent in modernity, at the expense of the Volk. Heidegger’s development of the Gestell, or enframing of technology was greatly influenced by original texts from two contemporaries, Oswald Spengler and Ernst Jünger. Heidegger did not simply take up their work but consistently criticized theorists such as Spengler and Jünger for reducing their analysis of humanity to questions of biology. However, he gained a great deal from both of their ideas on the profound impact of technology on modern culture. Yet, in turn, it is possible to closely examine technology to both reveal the profundity of Heidegger’s ideas and some of the philosophical constraints that bound his onto-theo-logy to the modern project. Heidegger’s concept of Being is not reducible to ‘ecological environment’. In fact, he explicitly rules that association out. The critique of technology flowered during the Nazi era and, in many ways, German National Socialism illustrated the most obvious forms of late modernity. It is, however, over 40 years since Heidegger, Spengler and Jünger developed their ideas. Critique and development has occurred through Arendt, Adorno, Foucault and others. Yet this critical tradition looks, far earlier than the crisis of the Second World War, for inspiration. Heidegger looked to the Greeks for the birth, origin or Ursprung of Western metaphysics. He is interested in the finite lifespan of a civilization. In his later work, he looks to the poets, Hölderlin and Rilke for a romantic critique of Idealism and modernity and a focus on death or finitude as the ‘second beginning’. Birth is the first beginning, highlighting death as the second beginning serves to view the life of an organism or civilization, as-a-whole (Heidegger, 1999b). Heidegger’s concept of the technological horizon was worked through quite thoroughly in Chapter 2; so this is a very brief gloss because I want to concentrate here on his ideas about emergence of truth and its relationship to Being. The enframing of technology is an excellent illustration of the way that ontology and truth coincide. Technological enframing is an example of a new understanding of ‘essence’ and ‘authentic’ truth. Ultimately, focusing on the mode in which truth emerges allows us to begin to think our way beyond, or deeper into, the technological world-view. Heidegger argued in A Question Concerning Technology (1977) that there had been a very important shift in the way technology was shaping up culture. The most significant change is one of tempo and storage. In the pre-industrial era, the tempo of production was governed by the seasons, and the technology that we had in place made use of the seasonal flux and in no way constrained it. The waterwheel is Heidegger’s example. However, the Industrial era has completely, radically changed that earlier relationship with the seasons and the earth. Now, technology is put to use, elongating the constraints of the earth’s cycles, and the tempo is about the rate of consumption rather than production, hence ‘just in time’ production. We imagine that we are in control of this whole change, but

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Heidegger argues that it is technology that wields humanity, rather than the other way around. All our cultural practices have become limited to the calculation and efficiencies that are promoted by the technological forging of the earth (and human beings) as items at work in the consumerist machine. The essential character of humanity and technology both changed commensurately. At stake, is the understanding of ‘essence’. Philosophically, Wesen is usually translated into ‘essence’ but in common German parlance it is better understood as ‘are’ or ‘being’ but more a dynamic: changing; coming; getting; going; becoming; altering; developing; arriving, and so on. It also has the ancient Aristotelian meaning of form, shape and genus. What wesen is not, is fixed, static, absolute or metaphysical. Aristotle himself drew attention to things ‘being’ physically present, not abstracted beyond time and space, into the Ideal realm of the Forms, as Plato proposed. Even Aristotle’s version of essence tries to overcome the limitations of the particular iteration of a thing; for example, the chair with its flawed wood, or the tree, which suffered its young shoots to be eaten by birds and no longer has the perfect spiral pattern of branches that would perfectly indicate its potential or ‘essence’. Aristotle proposes that it is possible to know a better approximation of the essence of a species, or genera, by aggregating as many examples over time as possible, minimalizing the ‘accidents’ that have damaged any particular item and deriving from aggregation the essence of the species. As human beings are also constrained by time and space this has been extrapolated to mean that only God has the perspective to truly know the essence of things. Heidegger believes that focusing on the biological is a mistake. It implies that there is one, static pattern underlying all things, and that each example is an imperfect iteration of that underlying, metaphysical pattern. The dynamics of Being shows up in beings, as Aristotle thought, but nothing is accidental because the underlying pattern is itself in a constant state of flux. The immanence of how things are means that there is no way to ascertain the total truth, the solution, the technological mastery over anything with assured completeness. At the moment of maximum knowledge, something slips away. The assumption that there is a static metaphysical pattern underlying ontological Being narrows the scope for human understanding to a very dry, scientific, calculation of the Categories and ascertaining the universal formulii of the metaphysical universe. Heidegger is highly critical of this fixed view of the world. He regards it as closing down the openness that is required to genuinely become aware of a more nuanced understanding of Being. Metaphysics is nihilistic because it forgets to truly apprehend Being in all its fullness. Furthermore, the ‘subjectivism’ of Idealist metaphysics places huge emphasis on the human subject ‘representing’ the object (bearing in mind that only God has overall access to time and every iteration of the essence of things in the universe). In combination, subjectivism and the older version of metaphysical essence or universal truth ruptures humanity from nature and alienate our

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cultural practices, our modes of work, our education, our political discourse and our policy initiatives, from the natural environment. Clearly, technological enframing is at play (in a completely unreflexive manner) in McKitrick’s understanding of climate change, where the calculations necessary for the technological intervention are still needed. The blind assumption is that humanity can ascertain the underlying, fixed and essential mathematical formula for understanding and predicting the circulation of weather, and then humanity can invent, or reproduce, technological devices for ‘correcting’ the ‘imbalance’ of the weather (and thus the climate). Unfortunately, it looks increasingly likely that it is the alienation from the natural tempo and the intricate interweavings of the ecology that has caused climate change in the first place. The illusion that technology lent humanity mastery over nature is beginning to show up as a trick, not a truth. With all our best efforts, with the best political will in the world, we can only keep trundling along the same path that has caused the problem in the first place, umbrella’d as we are, by the enframing of technology. To this end, Heidegger keeps delving back, to the Ursprung the original springing off place of philosophical ideas that have shaped up the assumptions and world-view of modernity, of Being and of truth. Right from the beginning of his work, Heidegger places great emphasis on very early Greek thinking (aletheia) as the crucible of the beginning of thinking in the West (Heidegger, 1968a, 1969a, 1970, 1973a, 1975b). Heidegger kept alive the relevance of the history of philosophical ideas by constantly referring to the beginning from which the multitudinous facets of modern civilization spring. Later, in the late 1940s he began to seriously attend to the other end of the spectrum of modern civilization – its finitude. Just as he regarded authentic subjectivity as regarding life as a whole, from one’s birth to one’s death, Heidegger looked to the birth and the death of human civilization as a whole to reflect upon what it is that makes human life viable, meaningful, divine (Heidegger, 1999a, 1999b, 1996d).

Being and truth The status of truth and Being, as Heidegger conceives of them, challenge the paradigms that support the modern claims of the positivist Enlightenment. Being and truth have been variously attributed with transcendental, universal or essential status. Usually they are held apart as different branches of philosophy privilege, either ‘ontology’ or ‘epistemology’. There are many approaches to ontology, or Being, and epistemology, or truth. Being has several distinct meanings, from the existential to existence, from the divine to the earthly. Truth too, has a range of attributes designated for authenticity. Truth goes from the absolute and universal to the contingent and pragmatic, from the transcendental

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to the temporary. The relationship between ontology and epistemology has become of increasing importance in an era of environmental damage. Heidegger argues that instead of being held apart in distinct discipline areas, ontology and truth each interact (Heidegger, 1968a, 1973a). Ontology, or Being, lends truth authority and scope, and truth creates the meaningfulness of ontological Being. The way ‘nature’, ‘biology’, ‘world’, ‘existence’ and ‘earth’ are defined supports some aspects of the traditional philosophical distinction between signifier and signified, or subject and object, but it also creates affiliations, relationships, reciprocities and detachments that have been hitherto largely ignored. More often than not, the way truth and ontology are used by modern philosophers, social scientists, economists or scientists is to present them as though they were privileged with universal status, if only we could ascertain what that is. Yet, that attitude obscures how much these terms are highly fraught, contested and changing. In contrast to the separation of Being from truth, Heidegger brings together the ontological, Being, with the epistemological, truth and language. He does not hold apart ontology from epistemology but, instead, presents an ‘ontotheo-logy’. As an aside, it is important to note that Being is not ‘environment’ (cf. Haar, 1993: Chapter 1). Making the two interchangeable just does not work. It would be worth following up the incommensurability in the future, as it is a good indication of just how modern (or how human) Heidegger’s conception of ontology remains. The earth ‘thrusts up’ into the World, but much of what is earthly remains completely outside the possibility of human knowledge. (Heidegger, 1975a: 42) Unlike the Enlightenment tendency to accentuate the sceptical gap between subjective mind and nature as the object of knowledge, Heidegger integrates them by recognizing the human need to seek truth in the ground of Being. Instead of the sceptical gap, Heidegger takes a leaf from the Franciscan ‘intuitive’, direct relation between God and individuals, and assumes that direct intuition is possible if someone is open to authentic attunement. Heidegger argues that thinking and language (and especially poetic language) are a potent force for surmounting the subjectivism of Idealist principles that have separated human society from Nature (Heidegger, 1975a, 1996a, 1996d). For Heidegger, thinking is not representational (Heidegger, 1973a). It does not hold apart the objects from subjective experience through a rational understanding that alludes to a Universal categorization. Nominal interpretation is still at work, but instead of believing it emerges only from the individual’s subjective mind, truth for Heidegger, is firmly anchored to the erupting forces of Being as it pushes forth into unconcealment in relation to human beings. To better understand how Heidegger arrives at this unique view of ontology and epistemology, it is useful to know about phenomenology, and how his mentor Husserl influenced him, his reading of Nietzsche and his knowledge of Ancient

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Greek philosophy. Aristotle is the topic of many of his books and lectures. He also constantly refers back to two of the pre-Socratic Greek thinkers, Heraclitus and Parmenides, finding in their work ‘the origin of Western thinking’ (Heidegger, 2003: 97). I have also found it really helpful to begin to understand the arguments about ‘Being’ in the mediaeval debates between the Scholastics and the Franciscans or Ontological Realism and Nominalism. Heidegger was steeped in theology from early childhood. As a result of tense theological argument his father was evicted from his post of looking after the large Catholic Church in Messkirch when he was a little boy. Heidegger’s Master’s thesis was on Duns Scottus, William of Ockham and Franciscan Nominalism. From this range of influences, Heidegger gradually developed and challenged the commonly held meaning of Being from its ‘stale obsoleteness’ in traditional ‘metaphysics’. Of particular importance, to really understand the way Heidegger both invokes and irrevocably rearranges the relationship between Being and truth it is necessary to examine how he returned again and again to surviving fragments of two Ancient Greek philosophers, Parmenides and Heraclitus. Parmenides fragment 3 is at the core of all of Heidegger’s work on Being. τò γαρ αυ′τò vοειv ε′στι′v τε και′ ει′vαι ‘Thinking and being (i.e. perceiving and presencing) belong, namely, to one another’. (Heidegger, 2003: 93) In his text ‘The Provenance of Thinking’, which he wrote only three years before he died, Heidegger re-examines the fragments of Parmenides, asking again about that crucial connection of perceiving and presencing, which is the keystone to thinking and being, or in Ancient Greek terminology, aletheia and physis, truth and Being. Heidegger is fully aware that Being and truth are not usually regarded as functioning together. He asks, ‘Yet from where is this belonging to one another (thinking and being) determined? What preserves here the possibility of this “to one another?”’ (Heidegger, 2003: 93). Part of the conditions of perceiving and presencing belonging together is that the things that come to presence need to ‘show themselves’ in a way that encounters the perceivable. Heidegger is extremely careful about the way he puts things, which makes it difficult, even in German, to get the point sometimes. He is trying here to make the presencing just as active as the perceiving. Nothing can be perceived unless the presencing comes forward, so to speak. It cannot be noticed unless it ‘speaks up’. At the same time, ‘perception’ itself, seeing as it is bound together with ontology, has to have a presence too. What’s more, the perceiving has to have a presence that itself is perceivable. Perception needs to show itself as itself. Heidegger says: For perception to be able to be encountered at all by the perceivable, it must hold itself open for . . . for what? For presencing [An-wesen]. Now for presencing

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to reign as such, it must be able to bring itself from itself into the open and the free dimension. (2003: 93) That free dimension, Parmenides also names, according to Heidegger. He calls it Aλη′θεια, aletheia. For Heidegger, the ‘never trembling heart’ of aletheia is how truth is characterized. Truth is the context for things to call towards the subject who can notice it presencing. Something coming about (or being) is registered by human beings as the same as the truth about it. This is vastly different from the Idealist separation of the subject from the object whereby the subject represents an image, or name, or conceptual framework about the thing or object. Heidegger brings the being together with truth instead of holding them apart as subjective representations about a virtual or unobtainable object. The consequences of this difference in the reciprocity of Being and truth in Heidegger cannot be underestimated. Effectively, he is bringing humanity back together with the profound Being of the earth. He has abandoned the alienation between culture and nature that was put in place by Idealism. As this change in our understanding gently permeates our language, our assumptions, our world-view, it will start to have an impact on cultural expectations, policy, politics, education, media and technology. Heidegger’s philosophy is not ‘the source’ of this change, but emerges in part from the context of the ‘other beginning’; the close proximity of the end of an epoch, the end of modern civilization. The end of the modern epoch which came about as a result of the alienation of nature from human beings. The situation Heidegger is trying to describe is complex and he has made many attempts to explain it. He calls truth variously, the ‘clearing’, ‘coming to light’, unconcealment from the concealment of Being. In his last interpretation of Parmenides’ poem he refers to it as ‘the well rounded, unshaking heart of truth’ (Parmenides fragment I, 29 in Heidegger, 2003: 94). Most importantly, Heidegger emphasizes that truth is not easily granted. In large part, what prevails is concealed in Being. To make things more difficult, if something has come to light, it necessarily obscures other ways of understanding the same thing. To this extent then, interpretation is taking place, as we are attuned to understand things within the rubric of our world-view. For example, modern technology enframes our understanding so that the flower comes to light as stamen, pollen, veined and denoted petals of a specific type, species, genera, rather than the lilting, delicately scented, hard to place example of exquisite and humming life. To understand more comprehensively and disclose the truth of things from concealment in Being more revealingly, Heidegger says that thinking requires attentive attunement, or Gelassenheit. Truth as unconcealment (aletheia), is not, Heidegger is at pains to point out, ‘truth’ if truth is understood as the ‘validity of propositions in the form of statements’. (Here, he sidesteps the whole issue of non-contradiction as the most vital condition of truth proposed by William of Ockham.)

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Heraclitus’ becoming Parmenides’ famous exposition on Being as the ‘unshakable heart of truth’ has usually been understood as ‘ultimate and enduring’. On the face of it, at the root of Greek thought, Parmenides’ Being appears to oppose the saying of Heraclitus’, panta rhei, everything is in flux. Accordingly, the traditional interpretation of Heraclitus is that there is no Being: everything ‘is’ becoming (Heidegger, 1973a: 97). However, through emphasis on ‘is’, the flux of becoming is subsumed in the endurance of Being. Heidegger brings Parmenides’ Being to bear on Heraclitus’ flux, arguing that they are both essentially talking about the same thing. Becoming is an engagement of Being with the existence of beings. At the centre of this engagement is dynamic struggle. Perhaps one of the most important departures of Heidegger’s concept of Being from the philosophical tradition is this dynamic, precondition of change. It shows up in his exploration of Heraclitus and the concept of strife. Heidegger cites Heraclitus as the first to ‘think’ Being as conflict and the ‘becoming’ of flux: In the conflict (Aus-einandersetzung, setting-apart) a world comes into being. (Conflict does not split, much less destroy unity. It constitutes unity, it is a binding-together, logos). (1973a: 62) Being has an affinity with beings and has a particular relation to Dasein, but its origin is in struggle, which Heidegger finds in fragment 53 of Heraclitus. Heidegger’s translation reads as follows: Conflict is for all (that is present) the creator that causes to emerge, but (also) for all the dominant preserver. For it makes some to appear as gods, others as men; it creates (shows) some as slaves, others as freemen. (1973a: 61–62) Struggle initiates rank (gods, men, slaves) and ‘sets forth their Being’. This is a surprising analysis of struggle, which brings it into a different register than the usual ethical realm. Struggle is part of the a priori conditions of life. It is unavoidable, even if we introduce regulations and laws to provide an ethics or modulate its acceptability. The traditional view of the concept of struggle is to conflate it with violence. Violence is a form of evil that causes suffering and must be corrected through retribution. The struggles and conflicts over comparative rank and the competition for resources are significant components of the field of ethics. It is important to be wary of a conception of Being that is anthropocentrically ranked (like Darwin’s Great Chain of Being, for example). The ordering of chaotic existence into hierarchical rank inevitably brings with it conflicts of

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interest. Ethics will continue to grapple with these problems but could leave behind the utopian ideal of a world without struggle. The subtle shift is, as Guignon deduces, that gods or men do not initiate (an ordered) ‘world’; struggle itself does. By amalgamating Heraclitus’ idea of struggle as flux, or dynamic ‘event ontology’ with Parmenides direct relation between thinking and Being, or aletheia and physis, Heidegger goes on and reinterprets Parmenides again. That which presences: presencing itself thoroughly attunes the fitting revealing unconcealment, encircling it. (2003: 97) With this interpretation, Heidegger grounds ontology and epistemology in thinking and language. Epistemology and ontology together forge the conditions of human subjectivity. Together, they create Being. Once separated from epistemology and thinking, ontology is lost, because it becomes meaningless, mere atoms in various compositions but without any location or relation to entities that will reflect and notice what they are. That lostness is what Heidegger calls the nothing or mere existence. Likewise, if humanity becomes too alienated from enquiring into the ontological status of Being, we lose what is peculiar to reflective thinking, the dynamics of thinking Being. Without that relation, that onto-theo-logy, humanity is just fully absorbed in the horizon of technology and continues its destructive path until the conditions of life are unviable. Hence, understanding the nothing or the meaninglessness of nihilism becomes vitally important. Not only does it give us insight into the limitations of the technological horizon, but also, Heidegger argues, the nothing is actually essential to Being itself.

Being and nothing; mere existence Traditionally, Being has been opposed to Nothingness. Heidegger circumvents that dualism by viewing nothingness as indescribable and best approximated through poetry rather than philosophy.‘Authentic speaking about nothing always remains extraordinary. It cannot be vulgarized. It dissolves if it is placed in the cheap acid of a merely logical intelligence’ (Heidegger, 1973b: 26). His notion of nothingness does not appear to rest significantly on ‘the void’, or ‘madness’, or even outer space, which might be juxtaposed with Being, but rather on not-being which is the removal of the once-being such as the absence of the cup from the bench or death. The question for Heidegger in 1929 is – ‘Why are there beings rather than nothing?’ (Heidegger, 1973a: 2). Being elicits the possibility of nothing – and in that possibility reveals itself (Heidegger, 1973a: 29). He says that nothingness coalesces with being because it ‘is nothing’. So how then? – How is nothingness conflatable with Being?

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Heidegger distinguishes between ‘existence’ and Being in a manner that is surprising: Nonbeing means accordingly to depart from such generated permanence: existasthai, ‘existence,’ ‘to exist,’ meant for the Greeks nonbeing. The thoughtless habit of using the words ‘existence’ and ‘exist’ as designations for Being is one more indication of our estrangement both from Being and from radical, forceful, and definite exegesis of Being. (1973a: 64) Later, in 1949, when thinking through the essence of technology, Heidegger began to nudge up upon the idea that technological enframing, of which he was highly critical because it has caused humanity to forget the question of Being, might actually in some perverse way, protect and conceal Being. That is, the technological horizon prepares us, in readiness, for a moment of appropriate attunement to Being. In the midst of the danger, the forgetting, Heidegger finds the possibility of the preserving: ‘the saving power’. It is not until Jünger writes his text Über Die Linie, ‘Over The Line’, which he dedicated to Heidegger on his 60th birthday, that Heidegger manages to better think through the relation between the nothing and Being. On reflection he writes: Only because the question ‘What is metaphysics?’ from the start recalls the surpassing, the transcendens, the being of beings, can it think the ‘not’ of beings, that nothing which is equioriginarily the Same as being. (Heidegger, 1999a: 218)

The second beginning; concerning finitude During the 1930s, his thinking underwent a ‘turn’ that was influenced by Nietzsche, and his contemporaries, Spengler and Jünger. Heidegger continued a dialogue with Jünger, Über ‘Die Linie’, ‘Over The Line’ for many decades. Heidegger’s concept of the enframing technological horizon turns on its head most conventional understandings of the role and status of technology. Far from a neutral tool that human beings create and wield, Heidegger argues that technology wields humanity by shaping our phenomenological experiences, our cultural expectations and our understanding of our own subjectivity. We are not in control of technology but rather utilized as a vector of technological production. Technological enframing has altered the craft nature of work in scale and capacity. With this move towards massification and ‘efficiency’, the relationship that human beings have with nature has profoundly altered. Technological enframing and modernity go hand-in-hand.

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Not only has the scale of production altered in the modern epoch of technological enframing, the horizon of disclosure has become completely dominated by technology and consumerism. The change in lifestyle has alienated us from the fragrance, the tempo and the immanent needs, changes and transformations of the local ecology. The loss of the meaningfulness of our locale is echoed in the loss of connectivity and meaningfulness in ourselves. The Idealist tendency to separate out the subject from the object and make nature reliant on subjective representations reinforces modernity as the epoch of nihilism. Heidegger was writing the notes for Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), (1999b) at around the same time as he wrote his reply to Jünger ‘Over the Line’ (1999a). He stipulated that Enowning be published after all of his lectures were released in print (as preparation). Heidegger evokes a second ‘other beginning’ that derives not from the springing off (Ursprung) of the ancient past but rather from the finitude of the future. The other ‘beginning’ is recognition of the finitude of civilization itself and of human life as-a-whole on the planet. Heidegger’s concept of Ereignis, which he developed in this post-war period, is probably his clearest alternative to what he sees as the philosophy of metaphysics. He is trying to articulate something of Aristotle’s essence, as the ‘ownmost property’ belonging to a particular iteration of Being, the oak its oakness, the kiwi its kiwiness, without falling back into the interpretation of Aristotle as ‘static’ essentialism, or obsession with form at the expense of content that was advocated by such classic German philosophers as Herbart (Landerer, Christoph, personal communication). Ereignis is the event. It is an event-ontology. It is immanent, though not itinerant. The event-ontology of Ereignis takes in the onto-epistemology of aletheia and physis, or Being and truth. For shorthand, I am going to take a leaf from Julian Young (2002), and translate Ereignis as ‘Event’. Its dynamic, truth encapsulating, encircling of presence and attunement contrasts to the tendency for a determinist, enclosed, uniform conformity that belongs to the metaphysical view of calculating logic that attends the technological horizon. Where technology has narrowed the modes of knowing to efficiency, and potential resource, Event opens everything out again so that multitudinous ways of knowing can come to light. For Heidegger, Gestell takes on connotations beyond its normal German usage of ‘frame’ or, as William Lovitt translates it, ‘enframing’. The Gestell has to be understood in reference to Heidegger’s schema of the unfolding and revealing of Being. Julian Young describes the Gestell as a horizon of disclosure (Young, 2002, cf. 44 in particular). This definition allays the tendency of ‘enframing’ of technological determinism which would bring the technological Gestell into the same problematic as the absolute universalism of metaphysics. Heidegger rejected metaphysics on the basis that it only allowed one perspective of Being to become revealed to humanity. Its truth was too absolute, too determining, too closed a world-view. The Gestell of technology is world-defining, or should

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we say with more historical awareness, ‘epoch-defining’. However, Heidegger is careful that this should not create the impression of an unmitigated ‘end of history’ with no possibilities for other ways of knowing. The end of history, with its metaphysics of consumerism (Fukuyama, 1992), is the ultimate iteration of nihilism. In contrast, Heidegger finds the human capacity for thought as the abundant presence in the midst of both Being and nothingness.

Threshold of possibility Much of the concerns of this book are with the gradual increase in global climate and the immanent arrival of the threshold over which the possibility of life is severely diminished or annihilated. These concerns are not new; although until very recently, they have only rarely articulated and listened to even less (by the sector of the community with most influence over consumerism and infrastructure, at least). ‘Perhaps’, Heidegger wrote to Jünger in 1955, ‘the zeroline will emerge suddenly before us in the form of a planetary catastrophe’ (Heidegger, 1999a: 297). Heidegger dialogued with Jünger over many things including technology and concerning ‘the line’ of nihilism. Jünger speculated that stepping over the line completely would transform the priorities and possibilities, even the physiological parameters, of what it is to be human. Jünger proposes that nihilism goes through phases (in much the way that Nietzsche described in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1982a). A metamorphosis of the will might take place. Jünger developed the belief that human generosity of spirit might be highlighted by the knowledge of devastation and horror during the Second World War. In 1939, he published a novel called On the Marble Cliffs which is an analysis of the emergence of a tyrant and its impact on the lives of well-meaning people. The proximity to devastating violence and the annihilation of what it is to be ‘civilized’ results, Jünger writes, in an acute sense of what is truly important. Sweeter still becomes the memory of our years by moon and sun when their end has been in the abyss of fear. Only then do we realise that for us mortals even this is great good-fortune – to live our lives in our little communities under a peaceful roof, with pleasing discourse and with loving greeting at morning and at night. Alas! Always too late do we grasp that, if it offered no more than this, our horn of plenty brimmed with riches. (1947: 7) Likewise, Heidegger’s approach was to find in the heart of nihilism, at the threshold of possibility, the most profound source of hope. In the face of the utter finitude of our world and the concurrent complete loss of meaning, Heidegger draws ultimate strength. Or more accurately, Heidegger had a playful dispute with Jünger about the concept of lines, of the grenze or border and whether it is possible to speak about a post-nihilistic epoch ‘over’ or beyond the line. Heidegger holds, instead,

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the line itself as a focal point for bringing Being and nothingness into the realm of discussion – this side of the line – within the daily language of modernity and yet, hopefully, with a more ethical relation between human beings and the earth. As meridian, the zero-line has its zone. The realm of consummate nihilism constitutes the border between two world eras. The line that designates this realm is the critical line. By this line will be decided whether the movement of nihilism comes to an end in a nihilistic nothing, or whether it is the transition to the realm of a ‘new turning of being’. (1999a: 32/292) Backed into a corner by climate change, it is impossible to retain the same ways of doing things that have characterized the last epoch, especially the culmination of late modernity in the industrial era of ‘consummate nihilism’. The position we find ourselves in now, globally, of immense population pressure, exhaustion of several key resources including clean fresh water, and at the brink of a major climatic shift, is actually a unique opportunity. As Heidegger puts it Über ‘Die Linie’ Over, or concerning, ‘the Line’, crossing the threshold of life conditions is actually impossible. Across the line drawn by climate change, there is no longer any life. The planet might look closer akin to the geology of Mars than to the verdant green hills of Earth. Over the line, the metamorphosis consists of new dimensions in poisonous vapours, absorbing colours on rocks that have been hidden by ice for thousands of years and strange odours that saturate the soils and atmosphere – but with no beings to smell, or notice, any such changes. There is no ‘other’ side. We either exist or not. Dwelling on the line, however, is of utmost importance. As Jünger makes emphatically clear, ‘The whole is at stake.’ ‘It is a matter of the planet in general’ (Jünger in Heidegger 1999a). However, Heidegger’s point is that the line is a zone, rather than a border. The zone of the line constitutes the new ‘beginning’ of finitude that reflects back on all our activities and redefines them as life affirming or nihilistic: The human being not only stands within the critical zone of the line. He himself – but not taken independently, and especially not through himself alone – is this zone and thus the line. In no case does the line, thought as a sign of the zone of consummate nihilism, lie before the human being in the manner of something that could be crossed. In that case, however, the possibility of a trans lineam and of such a crossing collapses. (Heidegger, 1999a: 311) Heidegger argues that humanity belongs, essentially, to Being. They are neither held juxtaposed (subject against object), nor separated by the nominalist gap. Meaningfulness emerges in the turn from ‘blind’ ‘existence’ to the acknowledging awareness and care (sorge) of human beings for beings-as-a-whole. The same

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is true of nothingness. Nothingness is held together with Being. Likewise, humanity has to be together with nothingness for thinking about nothing to take place. Without humanity thinking, the nothing would be obliterated. It would have no meaningfulness as meaninglessness: The human essence, in its thoughtful commemoration, belongs to the nothing, and not merely as some addition. If, therefore, in nihilism the nothing attains domination in a particular way, then the human being is not only affected by nihilism, but essentially participates in it. In that case, however, the entire ‘subsistence’ of human beings does not stand somewhere on this side of the line, in order then to cross over it and take up residence on the other side with being. The human essence itself belongs to the essence of nihilism and thereby to the phases of its consummation. (Heidegger, 1999a: 311) Thus it can be seen, why Heidegger is at such pains to recognize the potential Event that is constantly in flux, in a state of emergence and attunement, and must be as present in the horizon of technology as the nihilism which is essential to modern culture. The total determinacy of mobilizing everything as component parts of the machinery of consumerism is brimming with planetary characteristics that cannot be subsumed by the metaphysics of technological enframing forever. The ‘saving power’ of technology has nothing to do with ‘fixing’ the anomaly that has disrupted the normal, essential character of the climate. Instead, technology as the horizon of our world-view has not only promoted a metaphysical way of understanding truth and Being, but also hidden and preserved other, less dominant characteristics of Being. Heidegger’s concept of onto-epistemology, or perceiving and being encircling each, as the same, illustrates that other ways of knowing co-exist with the horizon of technology. If we remember to open up to caring, responsibility and attune ourselves to these deeply hidden or concealed ways of understanding our world, we can initiate a paradigm shift that integrates humanity with nature rather than holding both to the separate, alienated, unfulfilling, nihilist limitations of the horizon of technology. Yet, because technology preserves as well as conceals these other ways of knowing, bringing them to light does not necessarily mean abandoning technology at all. Instead, it is a task of repositioning technology (and one might add, economics) so that they are no longer the essence of our world-view, but rather an element of our world. Heidegger’s perspective on the history of Western metaphysics, from its early conception in pre-Socratic Greek thinking to the finitude of nihilism presents itself more and more clearly as climate change indicates the scope of rethinking that needs to take place. Just because modernity has become deeply familiar and habitual does not make it a healthy mode of being-in-the-world: The essential possibilities of nihilism can be pondered only if we think back toward its essence. I say ‘back’ because the essence of nihilism is not already

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its end. With the consummation of nihilism there first begins the final phase of nihilism. The zone of this end-phase, because it is pervaded by a condition of normality that sets in, is presumably unusually broad. For this reason the zero-line, where the consummation becomes an end, is not yet visible at all in the end. (1999a: 297) By thinking back through the horizon of technology and the origins and unfolding of metaphysics, Heidegger brings to light the potential for constructive change from the seeming boundedness of the consummation of nihilism. Ereignis, or Event is at work, emerging in its ownmost way. Perhaps because we are increasingly aware of the zone of the line, we are increasingly enabled and ready for a more originary (as Heidegger would put it) comprehension of what makes it meaningful to be human and what is meaningful to apprehend in earthiness. Heidegger is no technophobe and the saving power is present within the nihilism of the consummation of metaphysics. In other words, we forget to attune ourselves to Being during this period while calculating logic dominates our relation with the earth; but at the same time, living in the zone of consummate nihilism increases our readiness for genuine enquiry into the Beingness of being. Being in the zone of the consummation of nihilism is not, however, enough. What is necessary is for humanity to remember the attunement and care, or love that will enable alternative ways of knowing, and a new epoch of earthy habitation to emerge: The responsibility of whoever participates in this manner must gather itself in a responsive word that springs from a persistent questioning within the greatest possible worthiness of question that nihilism displays, and which is assumed and sustained as responsive to such worthiness. (Heidegger, 1999a: 294) That is the Ereignis, or the ownmost potential of humanity itself. Without this attuned caring attitude, this capability of inquisitive intuition, human beings are just blind existence, and we might as well continue over the line, to the extinction of nothingness and the unabsorbable. We can never be ‘there’ (da sein) so the import of what is ‘over’ the line can never matter. The philosophical works of Heidegger and Jünger on technology are some of the most important contributions made to philosophy in the last century. The significance it has for cultural change is not being felt yet but the ideas are circulating and it will be interesting to see how they shape future approaches to culture, politics and particularly our ability to adapt to climate change as a boundary of possibility. One early writer to make the connection between Heidegger’s philosophy and the role of technology shaping personality and knowledge is C. A. Bowers. Bowers application of Heidegger inadvertently shows up some of the gaps and slippage between the association of modernity with technology. Modernity and

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technology are closely associated; yet they do not always equate to the same thing. The next chapter attempts to look at the early development of the concept of Gestell or technological horizon, in Spengler, Jünger, and Heidegger, and then to draw out the implications and constraints that occur with close examination of Information Technology from the perspective of Bestand or enframing. Technology neither completely determines culture or subjectivity nor does it necessarily (in a philosophical sense) lend itself to enhanced democracy and a more egalitarian world. Heidegger blames the modern tendency to forget the question of Being as the root of nihilism and the destitution of modernity. There is no doubt that the technological horizon has created our world but the critical recognition offered by Heidegger offers the possibility of a historico-political engagement to heed the dangers of overconsumption while not mistaking technology as some unequivocal evil force behind the culture of modernity. The ethos of nihilism as the consummation of metaphysics lies behind the philosophical principles of democracy. Heidegger’s new approach to truth and ontology requires a ‘free dimension’. He warns against the habituated modes of modern culture not because they are normalized and comfortable but because of the consequences that we have almost completely ignored. Heidegger’s work is neither anti-modern, nor is it technophobic. In his ‘Letter on Humanism’, Heidegger argues for a ‘deepening’ of Humanism. That deepening can be extrapolated to an expectation for truer freedoms for persons (rather than individuals) than the ‘free’ market is capable of providing. While thinking of the task at hand, I will leave the last, precursory words to Heidegger: The essence of nihilism is neither healable nor unhealable. It is the heal-less, and yet, as such, a unique pointer toward the salutary. If thinking is to approach the realm of the essence of nihilism, it must necessarily become more precursory, and thereby become other. (1999a: 293)

Chapter 9

Technology and the Kultur of Late Modernity

Technology has made possible the spread, the speed and the saturation of industrial consumerism across the globe. The turn towards scientific examination and the impetus to know and classify all aspects of life stimulated European exploration and colonization. Once begun, the process of globalization entered unsuspecting nations from the far ‘corners’ of the globe into the codified monetarist, consumer system of early modernity. Sophisticated and far-reaching transport, through the air, the sea and over land has condensed the parameters of time and space, contributing to the expansion of regions of resource depletion. The present crescendo of global consumerism has been made possible with the advent of the internet and the ability to distribute massive quantities of information very quickly. According to Heidegger’s concept of the Gestell, technology constitutes a view of the planet as a global resource ready for consumption. It is a misapprehension to assume that technology is a neutral tool in the hands of human agents. Technological equipment pre-exists each of us, and creates alwaysalready conditions into which we are born. We find our way around this technological world; it creates our cultural identity; we fit into a mode of being that puts effort into reproducing technology, storage and efficient processes of consumption even further. Instead of regarding technology contentedly as neutral, Heidegger requires us to ask the prior question of how the technological Ges-tell places the horizons that narrows the frame of human awareness. Bearing in mind the constraining factors of technology as a horizon of disclosure, how much agency is possible for shifting our cultural paradigm from the modern emphasis on individualism and consumerism in relation to the environment and ourselves? Or possibly, from within the technological Gestell, it might be possible to limit or contextualize our understanding of all beings as potential capital resource and introduce something quite different, and at this stage, less well known. Pushing at the limits of technological enframing exposes, reflects, or helps something emerge about physis, the ‘becoming’ of nature, Being and the mode or syntax of ‘disclosure’ as a bestowing or stamping, or reverberating repetition

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and flux. In its many guises, philosophy enquires about the meaning of technology and whether Continental or Analytic it questions the implications of methodological approaches: what knowledge is and how it is communicated, the way language concepts and grammar predisposes the meanings we associate with technology and the interrelationship of humanity with the environment.

Subjectivity, language and machine The narrow perception of technology as tools to be skilfully wielded sets humanity up as the master of nature and encourages the forgetting of our own objectification as standing-reserve and potential resource under the enframing of technology. In the desire for universal calculation of more and more efficient means of production and consumption, humanity, Heidegger argues, has lost the focus on enquiry and meaningfulness that are the peculiar and most important aspects of what it is to be human. Rational calculation might enhance technological innovation but it also reinforces the illusory view that humanity is in control and has mastery over nature. This chapter aims to analyse the limitations of subjectivity, language and machine, particularly our transmission of meaning and understanding from and between one another, whether pedagogical or merely coexistence. What collides in Heidegger’s philosophy is the culture of individualism and consumerism that characterizes modernity and the change in the nature of technology in scale, efficiency and long-term mass storage. With special attention to information communication technologies I wish to examine what elements of technology ‘enframe’ our subjective experiences of the world as distinct from the interpolation of people into the modern paradigm. Computer programmes, institutional set-ups, approaches to materials, curriculum and pedagogical relationships are dominated by modern capitalist concepts of subjectivity, society and the environment. It is impossible to bracket technology out of modern culture as the two are so intertwined; yet, technology and modernity are not exactly synonymous. Technological equipment affects our subjective phenomenological experience of our environment. Distinguishing technology from modernity as two interlinked but separate elements makes it possible to forge a new Ursprung, or origin, which begins new modes of social and environmental interaction with a deeper commitment to ecological, equitable and ethical living arrangements. It opens the possibility of an ecological future that includes technological innovation rather than assuming the moderation of consumerism is inevitably backward looking, utopian Romanticism. It is often argued that humanity is unique among living beings because we are capable of self-reflection and thinking about the world that we live in. While individualism has been co-opted by a surveillance regime and governance style based on consumer choices, it is very difficult to abandon the notion that we each have personal, active agency that is a result of reflective thinking and from

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which we might influence predominant world-views and instigate change. The determinism of Jünger’s Gestalt and the usurping of all aspects of nature and character into the war machine closes down the possibility of anything more than ‘swallowing’ and ‘willing’ consumerist culture. Heidegger describes the emphasis on mastery as creating the illusion that each individual has more ‘choices’ than ever before. However, these choices are circumscribed by the technological horizon of disclosure which obscures any other ways of knowing or enquiring into the meaningfulness of being alive. Yet, these kinds of discussions make the narrow limitations of the technological Gestell, or horizon, more visible and, paradoxically, introduce a window into a new paradigm. The environment has been in sore need of reflection and requires a commensurate change in the attitudes and life style that dominates Western culture and is increasingly becoming a global phenomenon. The global phenomenon of modernity has become a victim of its own ‘success’. Modernity and change that will result in new philosophies, new attitudes, new narratives and interests and new lifestyles. How this transformation might take place is still difficult to foresee. It has been to the detriment of the entire planet that consumerism has become the ‘right’ of people everywhere. The ability to think our way out of the enframing of technology has some potential, although such thinking is often sidelined as impossible dreaming, or it is co-opted into the ever-increasing science of governmentality (Foucault, 1979). Close analysis of institutional practices, and the use, and presentation of computers, allows us to shed some light on the nature of technology itself and the contemporary approaches to culture through the pedagogical practices of teaching, learning, language, meaning and the question of thinking. According to discourse analysis, ideas present in generally circulating language ‘enlist’ a particular response which over time, becomes normalized and habituated as personality. Discourse then produces certain types of subjectivity. In his book The Cultural Dimensions of Educational Computing; Understanding the Non-Neutrality of Technology, Bowers (1988) points to a ‘widespread failure’ by people ‘to recognize the deep symbolic roots of the ecological crisis’. In the case of computers and computer language, Bowers argues that the subjectivity produced is based on a nineteenth-century positivist, and rational individual. He develops the Heideggerian argument that the computer amplifies a rationalist, technicist framework of understanding the world. Technicist discourse assumes that language is a conduit that has a reductionist impact on the emotional, corporeal, historically contextualized aspects of culture. Bowers argument is an important and valid application of Heidegger; however, there emerges several assumptions that require more examination, exposing the flaws and gaps in Heidegger’s work as much as Bowers. In ‘cyberspace’ the body is extracted and the mind is abstracted into a new, clean dimension, sexy but unsullied. This assumption fits neatly into the Cartesian separation of the mind from the body, individual subject from the

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world of objects and rational universalism from the illusory, temporally specific, emotions, dreams and madness. The tendency of cyberspace to alienate individuals is, too often, linked with abstract thought and the historical specificity of the body with practice. Bowers makes this easy assumption and builds from it an unfortunately very common, crude and clichéd separation of theory from practice. Actually, there is a complex interaction between the mechanics of cyberspace, the bodies of its clientele, the ‘world’ disclosed in language and the ‘world’ shaped by material conditions. Technology is a specifically human artefact but has an impact far larger than any individual, any community or any generation. Some anthropologists have characterized humanity as the ‘tool wielding animal’ which suggests that humanity controls and manipulates the environment through tools. It might be more helpful to understand humanity as being wielded by technology as a vector of reproduction, or coming into being – in much the same way as plants make use of bees and insects to cross-pollinate, reproduce and diversify. The social sphere has altered profoundly in response to technological enframing. Technology shapes discursive and political reality as much as it amplifies or diminishes our phenomenological interaction with the material environment. Like many other discourse analysts, Bowers tends to overstate the socially constructed, linguistic element in discourse. The focus on discourse analysis of computer programmes and curriculum obscures the physical repercussions of technical devices on human corporeality. It means that the body’s excessive and unavoidable invasions into the dominant discourses of ‘cyberspace’, except in terms of sociology, are ignored. It is not only the physical implications of the body that are ignored in the discourse of ‘cyberspace’. The term suggests a clean and refracted ethereal ‘space’ that is far from the complex, material conditions of the internet: The will to virtual hygiene is so powerful because the really existent animating force of digital life is dirt. Noise in the machine, liquid in the wires, waste in the system, accidents in the codes, distortions in the .gifs, mutations in design: it’s the absence of dirt that haunts the virtual hygiene machine and without which the system as a whole loses energy, and runs towards digital entropy. (Kroker and Kroker, 2001) The sterile image of computer interaction is not ‘clean’ and indeed, the Krokers suggest, requires ‘dirt’ to generate new pathways and, new ‘thought’. Notwithstanding my objection to the simplistic separation of material practice from abstract theory, Bowers soundly argues the Heideggerian position that computer programmes and the IT curriculum reinforces a technicist, rational framework of calculation and measurement and ignores and obscures the specific corporeal and historico-cultural forces at work when people interact with machines. Thus, computer interaction obscures the ecological and

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social nurturing required in the locale, alienating us from the ‘home and hearth’ and the ‘holy’ relation with the earth. Information technology has been touted as a key ingredient of the vocational revolution, encouraging people from all walks of life, from all age groups, to engage in ‘upskilling’ and become computer literate. Ken Wain (2004) argues that ‘lifelong learning’ has become a key ingredient in the educational policies of all OECD nations. This does not, sadly, derive from a desire to see all people keep up a critically acute and informed approach to society and the world. Rather, lifelong learning sets out to reorientate the workforce to be more flexible and encourages people to be able to continually retrain as redundancies and short-term contracts become the norm in the labour market. Each person is individually responsible for seeking qualifications in a bid to ‘add value’ to their own commodification. Computer literacy is vital to the enterprise as both a marketable skill in itself and a valuable ‘search engine’ for finding new employment niches. It adds further value to the potential resource of each person as standing-reserve in the labour pool. Vocationalism should not necessarily be in dualistic opposition to critical thinking or creativity. However, the technicist view of the world that is employed by market capitalism tends to be reinforced by the language and values of vocationalism. Bowers argues that the binary language of computers also amplifies a technicist emphasis on rationality and universal consumerism and reduces the historical contexts of a richer variety of concepts and metaphor. The technicist view manages to presents itself as apolitical by universalizing the market but the consumerism it promotes constrains us to reduce our understanding of the planet and ourselves as mere resources to be efficiently exploited. Heidegger argues that technological enframing radically changes our relationship with the earth from the natural tempo of seasonal growth and decay to a technological capacity that challenges forth every thing as Bestand, or standing-reserve. Technology affects our phenomenological responsiveness to our ecological locale, at once broadening and at the same time obscuring regions of the planet never before comprehended. Gloves for example, protect, yet, desensitize the fingers, or microscopes allow us to examine and intervene with hitherto unknowable microcosms, or microchips which allow the processing, manipulation and storage of massive quantities of data. Heidegger argues that technological enframing encourages us to forget the sublime, the poetic, the way the earth thrusts up into the world. Technological enframing encourages an illusion of mastery over nature that, in the long-term, may well prove our undoing.

Artificial intelligence Technology alters our phenomenological experience of the world. Examining an item with a magnifying glass or telescope, for example, results in a loss of

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smell and tactile impressions while it accentuates the ‘view’ of that which is usually unseen. Technology either amplifies or reduces different forms of sensation. Computers reduce the activity of the physical body and enhance a remote and decontextualized self that can interact in cyberspace. Some aspects of personality can be accentuated and played around within this space but the physical body and the cultural context the body inhabits is largely untranslatable through such a medium. The technology alters our sensory perception, mitigating corporeality, personality and culture in the process. It is important to remember, though, that the clean abstraction of cyberspace is an illusion. While technology enframes our relationships with each other and our environment, it also presents us with a ‘saving power’ from the total mobilization of capitalist consumerism. In an online commentary on cyber-reality, the Krokers illustrate that [t]he ruling illusion of digital reality is its antiseptic cleanliness. A virtual hygiene movement that launches a global tech style that is so clean, so cool, so cold that it shifts the myth of virtuality from the conceptual realm to material experience. Not alienation, reification or simulation, but virtualization as about the digital scrubbing of the world. (Krokers and Marilouise, 2001) The absence of the body is itself a myth. The cyber-self still relies on fingers to punch the keyboard, stooping shoulders to weather the tiny incessant movements combined with a badly positioned desk and chair, an aching bottom, slumping back and jutting chin. The guiding metaphor of cyberspace is of a floating personality decoupled from a physical body. This amplification of the mind is reinforced by the nature of the technology and, in turn, the obscurity of the body reinforces the Enlightenment and Liberal paradigm of the rational individual. Culture and politics also invade cyberspace. The technological frame has altered our emphasis but older discourses are also perpetuated online. Sexism, including ‘cyber-rape’ (Dibbell, 1993), ethnic and class relations and other unnameable cultural assumptions that have shaped the personality of the realtime human being continue to show up in cyber-personalities, webpages, academic texts and all cultural artefacts. The prevailing Neoliberal paradigm of rational calculation and selfish individualism are included (among broader Liberal concepts) in the political assumptions about access, authority and whose cultural norms are universal. Contradictions to the prevailing Neoliberal assumptions about rational self-interest have emerged in the debate over ‘shareware’, for example, because sophisticated programmes have been made freely available on the web without participating in capitalist profit making. The politics of consumerism cannot be automatically associated with the technological paradigm.

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Virtual people and artificial intelligence form the stereotypical, science fiction basis of associating people and computers. The debate tends to fit in neatly with the traditional dualism of the mind versus body, so that the intelligent, learning machine is the most reified mind possible. Mary Midgley is scathing that computer intelligence can be analogous to human thought. The debate assumes a telos where computers will become conscious, and humans ‘are already, in some fairly literal sense, themselves programmes run on computers made of meat’ (Midgley, 1994: 9). This critique is fairly understandable in the light of how much the literature on artificial intelligence makes use of age-old philosophical presumptions that separate the mind from the body, making it plausible to posit ‘programs’ (mind) that could run on any given ‘hardware’ (body). The cosmologists John Barrow and Frank Tipler write, ‘The essence of a human being is not the body but the program which controls the body; we might even identify the program which controls the body with the religious notion of a soul, for both are defined to be non-material entities which are the essence of human personality’ (Barrow and Tipler cited in Midgley, 1994: 9). The impetus behind Barrow and Tipler’s push to recognize people as machines seems to make us immortal: ‘An intelligent program can in principle be run on many types of hardware, and, even in the far future of a flat Friedman universe, matter in the form of electrons, positrons and radiation will continue to exist’ (ibid.). Although, as Midgley points out, this immortality prolonged into an epoch where there is no organized matter at all, hardly provides circumstances for much conversation (or personality) except, perhaps, abstract mathematics. It is this interest in language, thought and the unexpected meaningfulness that emerges in conversation that is often presented as the significant difference between the meaty human machine and the mechanics of artificial intelligence. With close attention to various teaching programmes, Bowers outlines how he thinks that the technologies of print and computing have constructed language in a manner that accentuates nineteenth-century positivist views of knowledge and subjectivity. The body tends to be separated from the mind; some forms of information are readily transmitted while the subtleties of spoken communication are often lost. A technicist framework produces certain metaphors and ignores others. The technology also reduces the recognition that language, and thus the foundations of thought itself, is metaphorical in nature. The binary logic that so strongly amplifies the sense of objective facts and data-based thinking serves, at the same time, to reduce the importance of meaning, ambiguity, and perspective. (Bowers, 1988: 33) Binary code, with its logic of 0 and 1 or no and yes, forms the syntax of all computer languages. Bowers argues that this limits the capacity for allegory,

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metaphor and metonym, paradox, alliteration and countless other subtle examples of communication that must be missing from the territory that computer technology occupies. Not only does the machinery promote an alienated individual mind, such as that in Descartes’ Methodologies, but also the abstract mind it stimulates has to remain within the technicist framework because of the limitations of binary code. Heideggerian philosophy is bound to arrive at this conclusion because Heidegger refutes the evolutionary, mechanistic or biological approaches to Being as mere existence as opposed to the profound, thought-provoking, combination of earth, sky, gods and mortals. According to anthropologist Gregory Bateson though, the human brain works on a similar combination of algorithm and stochastic change. In brief, Bateson’s argument is that synapses in the brain are like a binary system. They respond to stimulus and fire – yes – or do not – no. Hundreds of nerves are stimulated at any given time and the binary yes/no of each synapse combines statistically to form a resulting analogue: ‘maybe’. The combination of binary and analogue enables the brain to interpret complex phenomena into sophisticated ideas in black and white and shades of grey (Bateson, 1979: 18–19). The distaste for relating the subtleties of human personality to a machine may just be technophobia and a lasting desire to maintain the high status of humanity in relation to the mechanics of everyday existence. In short, relics of the Enlightenment discourse of human transcendence in an immanent world. The question to be asked here, is whether it is possible to live in technological communities that are ecologically and socially in tune. If we accept that the thinking and communication that is mediated by machines does not constrain the poetic, metanymic approach to nature or community, then the technological horizon is not located in tools per se. The technological horizon of disclosure makes its stamp – through the physiological and phenomenological constraints of the machine, and at some broad, cultural level, it promotes the obscuring of the forgetting of the question of Being in just the way outlined by Heidegger. Nevertheless, the assumption that technology is neutral is also a misnomer. Bowers is particularly critical of software packages. He makes the important point that interactive educational materials available on computer tend to decontextualize the cultural and environmental parameters of social existence and instead promote a rational, universal model based on efficiency, maximum utilization and individualism. Software packages tend to assume a Liberal model based on the basic tenets of modernity, but this may be a historical interpretation of the possibilities presented by the technology rather than parameters defined by the machine itself. Indeed, the network possibilities of computers have hardly begun to be tapped. At present, the most common examples of interactive networking are often found mostly in internet war-simulation games but these popular past-times barely scratch the surface of potential networking possibilities. The social limitations seem to me, to be about access: access to end user interface and more

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crucially perhaps, the resources and confidence for marginalized peoples to write interesting and constructive programmes. The physical constraints of the machine do lend themselves to the Enlightenment tendency towards calculation, rationality and the separation of the mind from the body. The extent of the reinforcement of the consumerist values of modernity is the focus of interest, and the potential for other ways of knowing and becoming with machines that might enhance an ecologically and socially friendly future. For Bowers, the significant limitation to binary code is the cultural bias of software programming and the general assumption that the computer is an excellent and neutral conduit through which information can pass. Furthermore, he argues that the binary code, inevitably, results in the logical reduction of all languages to a true–false dichotomy. Bowers writes that ‘Since computers function on an algorithmic system, it is impossible to program forms of knowledge that cannot be made explicit and organized into discrete components or whose operational rules cannot be formally represented’ (Bowers, 1988: 33). This is why, for Bower’s, despite the phenomenal capabilities of computers to accumulate, ‘remember’ and calculate information, they will never have ‘real’ intelligence. They are too black and white. Human consciousness is ‘hardwired’ to accommodate paradox, humour, play and contradiction, as well as emotion, sexuality, irrationality, madness, mood, self-reflection and creative inspiration and countless unnameable sources of comprehension and communication. Nothing is neutral, the machinery itself does set up certain parameters for the software. These limitations are about the social orientation of readable print language, and furthermore, on the mediating languages of Basic, Pascal or Fortran operations that computers use to convert binary code into language. Computers operate essentially on a logic of yes or not-yes, one or zero. A key difference between Bowers’ assumptions about the binary code and my own is that he believes the binary – yes/no, one/zero – sets up a finite range of capabilities. I think that Gregory Bateson’s theory of stochastic change illustrates how there are infinite possibilities for combining zero, one in multitudinous and often ambiguous ways. For those who know the problems of sending and decoding files through the internet, you will have met up with some of the incompatibilities between these different configurations of code, language and systems. The software programmes completely vary from company to company for the same reason. IBM has developed remarkably similar word processing programmes to Apple; but, the languages between binary code and ‘natural’ programming languages are different and not easily translatable between one system and another. Bateson’s association of the human mind with the analogue mechanics of other brains, and even machines like the computer raises a serious challenge to the privileged position that humanity holds in relation to language, to making meaning, to raising the question of Being – in the face of ‘mere’ natural existence.

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Conduit model The critical problem lobbied by Bowers is that the algebraic nodes of cyberspace displace bodies and their cultural contexts. Alongside invisible bodies, the cultural relativism of the end user and the software writer’s interpretative frameworks are out of focus. The technology intervenes in the phenomenological communication possible between people, resulting in an alienated and technicist mode of interaction that forgets the ethos of care for each other and for the local ecological niche. The technology obscures the specific cultural ethics and discursive norms and fails to attend to the personal cultural bias of the writer of software. The ethnic, gendered, class-orientated perspectives are pushed into the background in favour of highly abstract, spatial, statistical, pixelated and textual forms of knowledge. Obscuring sociological awareness is not good enough, Bowers argues, and computer literacy ought to shift from a technicist emphasis on manipulating the neutral machine to include a critique of the political and historical context that the machine reinforces. ‘From technical questions of how to input and output data to a concern with how the symbol-manipulation processes of computers alter consciousness and reinforce certain cultural orientations’ (Bowers, 1988: 27). The critique begins to undermine the prevailing Neoliberal paradigm that ‘individuals are assumed to have the autonomous rationality and agency to control the throughput of information/knowledge’ (Bowers, 1988: 41). Individualist and Neoliberal assumptions about the rational Cartesian subject can be seen clearly in some educational literature where the case is made that computers will enhance individual choice; for example, it could free up students from school bureaucracy and make education ‘more of a private act’ (Papert, cited by Bowers, 1988: 23). The state might be further reduced such that schools themselves might be made redundant and education be almost entirely privatized allowing students to work from home, each individually networked. Cyberspace certainly challenges conventional methods of pedagogy. It generates networks of isolated and lonely individuals where the physical and sometimes subtle components of communication and touch and gesture are unavailable. Bowers argues that computers tend to reinforce the conduit model of language and information. Computers are seen as an instrumental conduit of language that originates with one individual and is delivered via a neutral delivery system. The metal, plastic and glass of the computer are considered a neutral tool which assists the input, output, storage, memory and retrieval of data or information to the individual end user. This ‘assumes [computer] language is an efficient transmission system of transferring ideas that originate in the first speaker, inputted into code, transferred, stored, manipulated, and then retrieved and decoded by the listener or receiver’ (Bowers, 1988: 39).

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Technological enframing can be perceived in the message’s mathematical encoding which constrains any potential for poetic meaningfulness. The machine is far from neutral and intervenes, alienates and individualizes the people who are utilizing the interface. That individualization is based on assumptions that people are willing on a purely rational basis to enhance their own utility as potential resource in the consumerist world of technological enframing. The conduit model fails to encompass any philosophy of language and interpretation, hermeneutics or even Idealist scepticism. The ‘conduit’ sender– receiver model takes a positivist view that unadulterated facts or information can be ‘contained in a transmitted message’ (Reddy, 1979 quoted in Bowers, 1988: 42). The dynamic alterations that occur during every repetition (however subtle) are ignored. The computer is assumed to be a neutral storehouse that various people load with information and end users then access and absorb this ‘same’ information. The conduit model reinforces the idea that knowledge (or information) is a commodity in the economy and as such can be reduced to data entry, storage and data retrieval. It assumes a straightforward transaction of information, with no associated deviation in understanding or interpreting, or any need for explanation or intervention from others in the community (teachers) except as technicians that facilitate programming or computer faults. Ideally, as lifelong learners, the self-motivated student learns to independently sift and uplift data to become knowledgeable. Despite years of emphasizing critical interpretation of written or ‘authoritative’ material, the conduit model obscures the haphazard or selective bias when the information was gathered and assumes and presents the printed word as unadulterated facts and certainty. The blind authority represented by the conduit of the computer is obscured by the interactivity of the tool – it appears that personal agency directs the pathways and ‘answers’ the programme. A critique of the dominant rationalist assumptions of the software needs discussion and engagement with a community of peers – to interrogate the language and content of the programmed information. ‘If language is viewed as non-neutral – that is, as a dynamic process that shapes our thoughts as we use it to communicate with others – we would be forced to rethink our view of the autonomous individual and the rational process as free of cultural influence’ (Bowers, 1988: 41). Taking ideas from Heidegger about how ‘language speaks us’ (Heidegger, 1982: 124) Bowers explains how the conduit model has a series of implicit assumptions: Far from being a neutral vessel that can transport and transmit meaning to others, language metaphorically constructs and translates, in other words, it ‘names and frames’ conceptual boundaries and delimits or constrains the scope of thinking. (1988: 45)

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The view that knowledge is a commodity that can be conducted from one source to many end users through neutral machinery is a misrepresentation of the culturally specific and continuously changing ways knowledge is generated and communicated between people. Commodification leaves no room for aletheia, or events. In the conduit model, the dynamic interplay between language and thought also gets lost. Master narratives and metaphor condition the social organizations we live in and form the relationship between humanity and the planet. This function of language still operates in the conduit model of language. The rational packaging of individualism and consumerism is the governing metaphor promoting an approach to the environment based on use value: The educational use of the microcomputer reinforces the more Cartesian view of the individual as the detached observer who is empowered through the acquisition of objective knowledge. This Cartesian view of knowledge is based on a mind-body dualism that not only established the primacy of procedural thinking and a mechanistic view of the external world but also a sense of detachment from the rhythms of culture and nature. (Bowers, 1988: 71–72) The networked society has alleviated the need for local communities to fit in with the seasonal cycles and tempo of local production. The storage capacity generated by a wide variety of technologies combined with cheap transport and immediate communication technologies have generated a consumer culture that is ‘virtually’ ‘decoupled’ from the restraints of the natural cycles and limitations of particular areas. It is only in the last decade that the globalized effect of pollution and resource depletion have begun to impact on this phenomenon of ever increasing consumerism. The point Bowers makes about the primacy of procedural and mechanistic world-view is important. However, although the dominant discourses surrounding technology tend towards the Cartesian mind/body dualism, we need to draw attention to the fact that when closely analysed this separation fails on a number of levels. The body exists somewhere; it is fingers that punch keys on the keyboard, and electrical impulses are transmitted on physical wires. Cyberspace is not merely ethereal; it is physically located – often in government sponsored computer banks. The networked society does not simply alienate and individualize people through the technological reinforcing of Descartes’ dualism between the mind and the body. It increases the domestication and docility of communities by individualizing and numbering people via their bank accounts, net accounts, access cards, their mobile phones, their ipods and by tying technological networks to surveillance (cf. Foucault, 1979). This is classically the case with the internet, which was illustrated beautifully in 2006, when Google released a tiny chunk of the data it keeps into the public domain. Every keystroke from 300

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anonymous internet users became available for perusal and their character, personal interests and idiosyncratic typos, and ultimately, their identities, were soon exposed. Shopping store cards and mobile telephones are more examples of the increasing flexibility of communication technology and its enhancement of surveillance. Each mobile telephone can be located via satellite tracking its owner’s movements and conversations (and not just their telephone conversations). Information technologies lend themselves to the total mobilization of everything as a resource, and most importantly, every human to reservoir of potential ‘producers’ and ‘consumers’ in the destitute nihilism of late modernity. If we are to transform our relationship with nature and community from its style of alienation and busyness then we need to closely examine all technology and critically illuminate how it reinforces a culture of alienated individuals and where it might be possible to transfigure it in ways that are more constructive and better embedded in the local landscape.

Alienation and individualism Bowers finds evidence of Cartesian individualism in the technological enframing of computing software and also in older forms of print technology. Following Walter Ong and the Scollons, Bowers argues that the early technological shift from oral traditions of disseminating knowledge to the written tradition introduces an alienating and individualizing abstraction to the field of social relations (Bowers, 1988: 80–81). Quoting Ong, he writes that ‘writing, print, and electronic verbalisation . . . have restructured consciousness, affecting men’s and women’s presence to the world and to themselves and creating new interior distances within the psyche’ (Ong, 1977: 1 cited in Bowers, 1988: 80). Literacy contributes to two basic forms of modern alienation – what the Scollons (1985) refer to as the separation of the word from the body (the reification of the printed word) and separation in our personal relationships . . . This reordering of our psychic space, where the abstraction of the printed word becomes more real than experience itself is complemented by the alienation that literacy fosters between persons. Writing – whether it takes the form of an article, novel, or instructional program – separates the sender from the receiver, turning communication . . . into an asymmetrical power relationship. The writer and reader do not stand in an immediate relationship that allows for reciprocal communication. Instead, the writer and reader must enter into a highly privatized world wherein the writer transmits and the reader receives and reflects on the message. (Bowers, 1988: 80–81) Like the computer, this assumes a conduit type of interaction between writer and reader. It obliterates the idiosyncratic history and degree of attention and

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agency that any given reader brings to the text. Moments of quiet aloneness do not necessarily constitute lonely isolation. Furthermore, distributions of power do not adhere so simply to the model writer-has-power, reader-is-passive. Although I think there is some merit in Bowers’ argument that the (Neo)liberal individual is often the underlying metaphorical figure to whom various software ‘speak’, the analysis of all print media to an individualistic framework underestimates the specifics of mass publishing and the networked nature of computers. It could be argued that a speech to an audience of hundreds is a communal and physically immediate form of communication; but in Bowers’ analysis, this form of communication is also uni-directional in that, short of a mass walk-out or some other mass response, there is no means for the audience to reciprocally dialogue with the Speaker. He thinks the printed book operates in a similar manner. It is mass-produced and seeks a large audience. I would argue that there is an important response factor, carefully orchestrated via journals in the academic world, but practised informally by all readers through the personal and selective interpretation of the ideas presented in the text. It is an activity of reading, and individual only to the extent of all acts of interpretation (cf. Barthes, 1989, Foucault, 1977). Reading is individual but it is also in the context of a shared speech community and often the ideas are discussed informally or formally among acquaintances. The network capacity of computers adds a further dimension of sharing where both immediate interaction with the text and forwarding it (sometimes altered) to other people interested in the content, forecloses individualism as too narrow an understanding of computergenerated communication. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome is more apt to describe computer interaction (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994). Having said all that, the technology may not ensure an individualist framework but the content posted often does. The confusion of the constraints of technology with the constraints of Enlightenment individualism is aroused by the conflation of the invisibility of the body in cyberspace with the sceptical separation of the body from the mind set up by Descartes. Following Heidegger’s critique of Cartesian modernity, Bowers disapproves of the dualist approach to bodies and minds as the governing motif of male-dominated cultural imperialism; Bowers develops a tendency towards anti-intellectualism. There are some fundamental problems with Bowers’ interpretation of the activity of reading. ‘As a technology print amplifies an autonomous sense of individualism (the isolating nature of writing and reading) and analytical thought’ (Bowers, 1988: 81). He is trying to find evidence of the problematic Liberal individual who is the base metaphor of modern society. However, while his thesis has merit, his examples are not always helpful. This emphasis on the isolation of the activity of writing and reading confines it to a form of alienation and abstraction. The elements of engagement and communication are obscured, just as the body is obscured in his understanding of

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cyberspace. This emphasis on alienation and abstraction produces a crude theory versus practice distinction that tries to disparage abstract thought: Analytical thought involves this mental distancing, which is facilitated through print. Ironically, the fixed nature of the text, which provides the needed reference points for analysis, also means that the content is no longer part of lived experience. (Bowers, 1988: 81)1 Clearly, Ong, who Bowers quotes in relation to the alienation and individuation of writing and reading, influences these ideas in unfortunate ways: ‘to assume that the printed word is the real word, and the spoken word is inconsequential. Permanent unreality is more plausible and comforting than reality that is transient’ (Ong, 1977: 21 cited in Bowers, 1988: 82). The aim of this critique is the Analytic faith in universal and permanent or absolute truth. Nietzsche and Heidegger keenly argue the brittleness of the Analytic faith in permanence as a standard for absolute verity. In Bowers, the inflexibility of Analytic truth has itself become cauterized into the ‘unreality’ of writing as a result of the texts’ permanence (a relative concept at the best of times). ‘Permanent unreality’ misses the point that any statement, oral or textual, confines the chaos of the moment into a fixed position. Written and oral speech acts order, confine, and delimit the manifold possibility as a premise for making ‘sense’. If we do not impose some limits then there is nothing to say. Or, impossibly, all to say. Modern consumer society deserves to be the centre of acute critique: it has an extreme and detrimental impact on ecosystems; it reduces communities to a conglomeration of individuals, and it elevates some areas of expertise to exorbitant levels and devalues other (usually feminized) forms of labour to below the survival line. Individualism is the basis of modern society, and combined with capitalism, responsible for the exponential escalation of resource depletion and pollution on the planet. Individualism has been critiqued by feminist theory for postulating that the lone male is the core unit of society, rather than the more communally orientated unit of mother-and-children. The emergence of individualism is usually attributed to Descartes’ Discourse on Method (1980)2 which transformed the nominal tradition of philosophy by sceptically separating the mind from the body (of the individual) and postulated that nothing was certain except that which could be reasonably deduced. Descartes has had an enormous, and by now often, unacknowledged influence on modern thought. As Bowers cogently points out, the premises of individualism, positivist objectivity and a male orientation permeate our language and are thus conceptually almost unavoidable. From this critical perspective, and somewhat ironically for a man clearly competent as an intellectual himself, Bowers falls into an anti-intellectual disparagement of ‘abstract-decontextualized knowledge’

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(Bowers, 1988: 11). There is a well-placed anxiety about the tendency of computers, software programmers, technicians and teachers to adhere to the dominant paradigm of individualism, separating the mind from the body and regulating the sphere of knowledge through the sceptical metaphor of positivist objectivity. Insights into the premises of modernity are important to raise. Heidegger’s insights about the enframing of technology and the phenomenological implications of highlighting one form of sensory experience (often sight) at the expense of occluding other sensory apprehension is important and Bowers has shown how computers reinforce the activity of the mind and obscure the cultural practices, the movements and the very existence of the body. The prevailing understanding of technology as ‘neutral’ feeds into Cartesian theories of dualist scepticism that separates the individual’s mind from the body via rational objectivity. Holding this critical attitude towards technology and computing in particular, Bowers shows how teaching the technology curriculum often utilizes these discourses without evaluation or any attempt to ascertain the relevance or detrimental impact to the particular cultural context. While computers are assumed ‘neutral’ tools, the technological sphere can expand without limitations. Vocational lifelong learning commodifies knowledge into curriculum packages to be consumed. Computers are the neutral conduit for accessing colossal quantities of information by consumers and rather than teacher’s being active participants in the learning process, they are reduced to technological facilitators. In stark contrast to the faith that Feenberg has in the ability of technology to improve democratic processes, Bowers is almost entirely pessimistic about the role technology plays in communities. He takes the communitarian route, steering away from the individualism and bourgeois consumerism that underlies modern institutional organization and instead, associates technology with reinforcing, as Heidegger puts it, the destitution of modernity. The result is, ironically, an anti-intellectual antagonism to abstract thought. Bowers’ book clearly articulates complex ideas that are not reducible to measurement or objectivity, but he complains that printed texts are inevitably tantamount to Cartesian dualism and the reduction of all knowledge to objectivity. This muddling of anti-intellectual suspicion of abstract thought is combined with high levels of anxiety about Liberal individualism at the expense of community cohesion: The possibility of viable communities may be further weakened by internal processes, including a form of education that strengthens a form of rootless individualism by socializing students to a decontextualizing forms of thinking, by ignoring the forms of knowledge and values essential to the authority of community life, and by reinforcing the liberal ideology that represent the person as an autonomous, self-directing individual. In effect, the educational process carried on in schools may equip the individual to operate within the

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larger society by undermining the symbolic foundations of the community. (Bowers, 1988: 13) The contrast between individual freedom and community law has worried Liberals for many generations. Yet the networked society is no longer particularly interested in free individuals, but rather in itemized, numbered, coded masses. The surveillance techniques made available by information technologies is enhancing the governmentality of the masses, offering them autonomous consumer choices and advocating a ‘calculus of consent’ (Buchanan and Tullock, 1962) without developing the subject capable of critique, independence or genuine creativity. Bowers makes a powerful critique and my reservations about his work is limited to its rather unsophisticated association of abstract thought with alienated individualism through a faulty understanding of the processes of print technology: writing, reading and dissemination. He highlights the limitations of the dominant discourse surrounding computers that obscure the historico-political context of the body at the computer. However, the body or the cultural context impacts on cyberspace anyway, the network fails to live up to its clean and sober image by crashing, failing to load, accepting spam mail, succumbing to a virus, und so weiter. Technology is not neutral. But neither is it evil. As Heidegger put it, rather famously bringing together art and technology in association with a quote from Hölderlin: But where danger is, grows The saving power also. (1977b: 34) Where could that take us? The question prior to technologies’ supposed neutrality is how does it frame human understanding? Bowers has in large part begun to process this question. He has recharged the educational task, so it hums with questions about meaning, context and power dynamics, so the environment and our relationship to it is brought to the forefront instead of hiding behind the rhetoric and practices of consumerism. Theorizing Information Technology requires asking critical questions about what is obscured, and what is emphasized instead of dryly reducing information to a consumable product available in the technological marketplace. What I have attempted to do in this chapter is begin to distinguish between the dominant narratives about technology and modernity. Heidegger argues that modern technology has overlaid all possible ways of knowing about ourselves and our world with the rhetoric of potential resource consumption. Modernity tends towards individualism and the separation of the mind from the body. The technology of personal computers is attached to an abstract domain called ‘cyberspace’, which reinforces modern assumptions about the nature

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of subjectivity. I have tried to ascertain where the parameters of subjectivity and communication are set up by the machinery and where the parameters are set up by the narratives of modernity. The chances are, that the technological horizon is capable of a new poetics of apprehension. Stretching to the outer limits of the known Universe, the telescope reintroduces us to the sublime. This time, it does not taste or smell. In fact, at this point of realization it presents a boring and monotonous buzz of ‘background’ X-rays emitted, it is thought, by the Big Bang. However, this is an example of how technology can reinvigorate our association with our environment and recontextualize our place in it. For the last 200 years, technology has enhanced the regime of consumerism to the point of annihilating many species and habitats, and more recently destabilizing the global climate so that it is endangering humanity too. It may be the case that technology can ‘make right’ some of these catastrophes but many events, extinctions for example, are already irreversible. Nature, however, is not dead. Moreover, the phenomenological affects of technology, including the computer and the internet, may open up and awaken our understanding of our relative importance (or lack thereof) and the unique significance of the planet we inhabit. Technology has the chance to address these powerful and vital issues. Through a ‘turn’ towards a new set of metaphors and the potential for a new grammatology that does not separate the subject from the verb, culture can enlighten and constructively engage with the way we produce technology and technology produces us. Heidegger’s concept of technological enframing was taken up by Bowers and applied to classroom internet technology. Bowers also tried to show how technological enframing produces the modern individual. These are important critiques but they can ossify into a new determinism that is less than helpful. I have tried to show where the critique of modernity, individualism and technology has significance, and where processes are a result of other, contingent forces. Showing up the limitations, the parameters and the constructive associations of interaction between humanity and machine can help us to begin to think in new ways, with new stories, new metaphors, new languages and the possibility of a new ‘world’.

Chapter 10

Embodied Subjectivity and the Critique of Modernity

To adequately address the question that the limits of climate change raise against modern consumerism, it is useful to go to the very basics of Enlightenment premises about the relationship of human beings and the natural environment. Many philosophers have been in the process of carefully examining the assumptions embedded in the philosophical traditions, particularly of the West. Some of the most interesting of this work has come out of feminism. Feminism is broaching the ‘hyperseparation’ as Valerie Plumwood put it, between human solipsist individuals and the body of nature. Feminist ecophilosophers draw on feminist resources of critical thought about the male/ female power dynamic and concepts of masculinism in philosophy to interrogate the dualistic construction of the human/nature boundary. They query both the discourse of the human as a hyperseparated category outside nature (Midgley, 1978, Plumwood, 1991, 1993) and conceptions of humanity, animality and nature as naturalized categories beyond politics (Plumwood in Jagger and Young, 2000: 215). There are a variety of modes that philosophers have employed to collapse the artificial distinction between subject and object, nature and culture. This chapter looks at some of the primary approaches of critique and reconceptualization, including the critique of grammar, of dualisms as over-used mechanisms of definition, a reinvigoration of the status of the body, and a new understanding of the role of technology. Nietzsche and Heidegger have also contributed a great deal to the critique of Enlightenment thought. Heidegger begins to frame the question of the meaningfulness of humankind in relation to the earth, but his mode of questioning is steeped in Catholicism, along with andro- and anthro-pocentric culture. Nevertheless Heidegger contributes to the critique of Enlightenment philosophy on a number of levels, including the separation of the solipsist subject from the natural object, the transcendental role of rationality with truth, and the role of language and grammar in ossifying meaning into Enlightenment premises that separate becoming from being, verb from subject; thus congealing meaning into the essential Truth rather than the unfolding of understanding.

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The philosophical presumption of alienation underlies modernity. The different conceptual breakthroughs that emerge out of feminism, contribute a distinctive and fascinating approach to culture and nature, technology, subjectivity and epistemology. Irigaray, Kristeva, Midgeley, Plumwood and Haraway do not merely build on the ideas of Nietzsche and Heidegger, but recognize and articulate profound modes of what it is to exceed the cauterized individualism of modern political thought. Irigaray is possibly the best example of feminist philosophy rejecting the Cartesian split between the mind and the body, between the human subject and the natural object – by radically embracing the physicality of being woman. Irigaray’s explicit discussion of women’s corporality is not just a feminist celebration of the victimized half of the human population. She has clear political and philosophical objectives, which are to reject the overemphasis displayed by the Enlightenment on the individual, and to re-politicize the body and nature. In other words, rather than invert the powerless to the powerful, she seeks to dissolve the phallocentric individual (which she argues is universalized from the male model) to a more fluid merging of physicality, subjectivity and culture. This involves phenomenology, psychoanalysis and the philosophy of language (Irigaray, 1975, 1981, 1985). The ‘individual’ is supposed to be the smallest possible unit, the solid, cohesive, undividable, isolatable, denominator. Radical feminists like Irigaray and Kristeva take insights from psychoanalysis to show that the stark separation of the individual is not as clearly demarcated as it had been assumed. Examples of the permeability and connection rather than solid individuation litter any close examination of subjectivity. Irigaray emphasizes the fluid excesses of subjectivity which exceed the static, bounded, essential model of the rational individual (Irigaray, 1985). Physical excess and sexuality dissolve individuation. Sublime moments of tuning into the manifold fabric of life highlight a recognition of how integrated we are in the much larger evolutionary unfolding of species, ecologies, solar systems, being and nothingness. Freud’s description of the polymorphous subjectivity of the very young infant indicates a state of utter dependency, little self-reflection, and an identification with everything rather than a bounded, somewhat awkward and incomplete self-containment and ego (Freud). In fact, absorption is probably the norm, and individuation is actually a struggle which we have to insist upon and strive for. Lacan proposes that noticing one’s reflection in a mirror at about 6 months old offers the baby the illusory image of seeing him or herself as complete and unitary for the first time (Lacan, 1953). It does not cohere with the phenomenological impressions of the world, or experience as an incomplete, excessive, needy, exuberant person though. However, patriarchal signifiers of solid containment that are the register of modern language and culture, reinforce the illusion of completeness that is visible in the mirror. The abject absorption and expulsion of breath, food, drink, saliva, menses, semen, sweat, excreta forms a

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challenge to the distinctly segregated individual that, Kristeva argues, is highly emotionally charged and strongly made ‘other’ so as to preserve the illusion of a cohesive separate body (Kristeva, 1982). Moments of experiencing the sublime also corrode the separation of the individual from the manifold, making it awesome and dangerous, exacerbating the modern tendency to alienate nature as the other. It might be argued, that this struggle for individual definition is what forms the dualisms of language, where a definition is arrived at by distinguishing one in opposition from another; A from not-A. Feminists allude to the problems of this overzealous dualism which alienates A from not-A, man from woman, human from animal, culture from nature. Clearly, at some level there are connections and as Hegel puts it, a synthesis of the two binary opposites, thesis and antithesis. Men and women are both human, humans are animals, culture shapes nature and nature shapes culture. The binary system that defines words by their antithesis tends to exacerbate power differentials rather than reflect the full scope and variable connections of the conceptual relationships involved. Val Plumwood explains a commonly held motif in feminism about dualisms and power: The conceptual and historical framework which has shaped the dominant Western concept of reason as a sphere of mastery and nature as a sphere of diverse subordinated others is therefore that of rationalist philosophy. Reason has been constructed in this context as the privileged domain of a master subject who conceives nature as an instrumentalized and interiorized other, representing the sphere of materiality, subsistence, and the feminine split off and constructed as a lower sphere identified instrumentally as providing raw material for his needs. Reason and nature are constructed in terms of a dualism of contrasting oppositional spheres which are arranged as radically distanced, as higher and lower, as center to periphery, as active to passive, as mind to mindlessness, as unmarked all-knowing subject to marked object of knowledge. (1998: 216) Grammar in Western languages separates the subject from the object. The verb acts as the link but not the ground. Verbs both link and hold apart the isolated subject and the object of the sentence. Heidegger’s concept of Ereignis contrasts starkly with the metaphysics embedded in Western grammar (Heidegger, 1999b). Ereignis is both the dynamic event and also the particular properties or ownmostness of what is coming about. The dynamic doings of the verb are the basis of the coming into being of subjects-and-objects. They all emerge in co-relation; nothing is extricable from the context. Nothing stays static but is forging in relation to the genealogy and the future of the event, the context, and the eignis or ownmost properties. Modern, Western grammatical structure makes Ereignis almost impossible to understand. Instead, existing grammatical structure reinforces the Idealist assumptions about the fixed

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essence of the subject and the object that are carefully distinguished and associated by the movement of the sentence’s verb. In modern languages, such as English, the relationship of the natural object is artfully disassociated while it is related to the person’s subject. The relationship is in contra-distinction between two distinct poles: (human) subject and (natural) object. The separation allows the introduction of mastery, one side of the dualism exerting control and status over the other. The colonization of nature occurs through, as Heidegger puts it, the technological horizon, the rational engineering of all things as potential consumable resource. The problem with the technocratic, rationalist paradigm that puts humanity at the centre of the universe, is that, walled off from nature, it is all too easy for us to assume a relationship of exploitation. We lose our ability to situate ourselves as a part of our habitat. Eco-feminists want to counter these long-held assumptions by drawing attention to the emotional, phenomenological and hormonal comportment of minds and bodies. Bodies are continually swapping molecules with the ‘me’ and the ‘space’. Far from being individual, women are often pregnant with multiplicities, quite literally. The feminist assignment is often irregular and distasteful, drawing attention to how difficult a task it is, for women to speak eloquently, fluidly, fluently with words that are already structured and systematised in a way that reinforces fixed segregation and completeness rather than excessiveness, interconnection, immanence, and evolvements. I have laid out the importance of the feminist critique of language and individualism on the ecological inter-relationship of culture and nature. Yet the critique of grammar and the individual by feminism does not necessarily address the relationship between humanity and ecology. Social constructivism, for example, lays a lot of emphasis on the possibility for social transformation by re-imagining, or in Butler’s terminology, performing our identities in new and unforeseen ways to challenge conventional social structures and gender roles. However, this says very little of the way in which human beings associate with the natural world and tends to fall back into a subjectivism possibly reminiscent of Berkeley – that the subjective interpretation creates – constructs – and legitimates the world. All appearances of nature are just that – appearances (inserted into the mind by God). Appearances and nothing more.

Challenging anthropocentricism Donna Haraway is critical of the view that nature is ‘a blank page for social inscription’ (Haraway, 1991b in Plumwood, 1998: 217). She posits that nature too has independency and agency, in a similar fashion to human beings, and that knowledge emerges as a mutually dependent manifestation between human knowers and the non-human known.

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Anthropocentricism has dominated most branches of philosophy, with a few exceptions (most notably, Jeremy Bentham, 1789) throughout the Enlightenment and modernity. Bentham’s aim was to universalize democracy and ‘rights’ to the extent that all sentient beings could be included. His criteria for inclusion in democratic society, and especially having ‘rights’ to justice, are vitally different from most other Liberals; it is not rationality that qualifies one for inclusion but the recognition of the axis of pleasure and pain. Thus, slaves should have rights, freedom and the franchise, because they feel. So too, should women and animals be included (cf. Singer, 1986 for a later version of the same idea). On the whole though, the anthropocentric viewpoint has been argued on rational and representative grounds. Nature is the non-reflective object of knowledge, and the human subject is unique in its ability to compose meaning and impose it on the raw material of natural objects. Eco-feminism has not, thus far, been entirely successful in its challenge to anthropocentric claims. ‘Geocentric’ alternatives, like the ‘Gaia hypothesis’ put forward by James Lovelock (1979), which posits the earth as a living, sentient organism in its own right, have neither been taken very seriously by society at large, nor radically altered the governing dynamic of human mastery over nature. Lovelock recently issued a statement that nuclear energy was better than fossil fuels (2004). Plumwood argues that the sophisticated feminist thinking that has been developed about androcentrism, phallocentrism, ethnocentrism, heterocentrism and eurocentrism could be put to the cause of nature: For example, the colonizer locates the colonized on the value periphery and places himself at the center of importance and value. Simone de Beauvoir’s classic analysis of women’s positioning as Other shows how, in andocentric culture the identity of the male, as the conceptual center, is defined as ‘absolute,’ while that of the woman is defined in relation to this ‘colonizer center’ as a lack, an absence of valued qualities; the colonizer assimilates the Other, treats them as deserving respect just to the extent that they can be reconstructed as a version of self, as copies or inferior versions. The colonizer backgrounds the colonized, conceiving them as inessential in relation to the self, and denies dependency on their labour or contribution, as the basis of exploitation. And the colonizer defines the colonized in instrumental terms, denying the existence or importance of their agency and self-definition and conceiving them in passive or in purely functional terms as mere means to the colonizer’s ends, as resources. The gaze of the colonizer, as unmarked epistemological centre, can completely unveil the marked, objectified Other, recognising no resistance, limitation, or excess. If dualism characteristically enforces exclusion and polarization as a philosophical expression of privilege,

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this gaze from the center characteristically builds on this exclusion by taking the right to define the difference of the Other. (1998: 218) Feminist epistemology is doing a lot more than rewriting ‘her-story’. It is engaging with the difficulties of pollution and climate change in ways that conventional philosophy, sociology and especially economics are completely failing to do. Feminism then, through its openness to complete and radical change, is forging the most viable and realistic rethink of Enlightenment ways of knowing. Whereas Neoliberal assumptions about the selfish individual and the objective fairness of the market keeps going in an ever increasing spiral of shallow consumerism tied to economic ‘growth’ and thus drains more and more from the environment each year – bringing us closer to the brink of environmental devastation. Effectively, feminism opens up the future. But to do this, over the coming years, we need to re-embrace feminism, for its philosophical critique of the object as much as its egalitarian recognition of difference. We need to be prepared to critique the very basis of the way things are now. Without throwing away important Humanist concepts such as fairness, the people, freedom to politically critique governance, some form of justice and equity – without disposing of all these things, we need to activate a more honest and powerful reappraisal of modernity and the Enlightenment. That reappraisal allows the body and nature a significance that Classical Modernity has denied them. The body is not individuated in ways we previously thought. It is part of its context, its locale and its ecological niche. The body is the body-politic; it is written and inscribed by culture and environment. The body is neither one, nor merely two. The body multiplies, in fact and in fiction. At the height of second wave feminism in the 1970s and 1980s when Liberalism was in the ascendancy, the feminist critique has tended to focus on the concept of rights and the power dynamics of gender politics. However, even as these ideas emerged Liberalism was moving away from the Keynesian Settlement and towards a more overt focus on capitalism as the raison d’etat. The shift towards privatized property has been prized by both egalitarian democrats (for wresting privilege from the aristocrats) and market-driven ‘neo’ Liberals, since the time of Adam Smith (1776). The Neoliberal individual is not merely rational but also understands how to maximize their own ‘utility’ on the marketplace. Just as importantly, for Neoliberals, the market is the antidote to all political partisanship as it administers all deals on an ‘equal playing field’ and while some participants may ‘win’ or ‘lose’ on particular deals, overall, the ‘Invisible Hand’ guarantees fair prices and fair opportunities. All decisions are understood in market terms; education, for example, becomes a mode of increasing one’s own value in wage exchange rather than the exploration of knowledge and enlightenment for its own sake. The market becomes a metaphor for all human interactions and decisions. This is not merely metaphorical but rather, metaphysical.

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Women have long been regarded as the irrational side of a dualism that privileged men’s logic and political acumen. Far more complex decision making that includes the needs and responsibilities of the community (and the environment) have been scathingly denounced as irrationally feminine. In a simple reversal, feminism is particularly scathing about individualism because human beings are not merely rational, or physically individual (which is the assumption behind the ‘even playing field’ and ‘fair’ ‘a-political’ basis of market decisions). Taking a leaf from Freud’s analysis of civilization (Freud, 1961), Lacan (1993) argues that the phallic ‘law of the father’ is the normative authority in modern cultures. Irigaray counters that the fluid metonymy of feminine subjectivity is not merely ‘equal but different’ from the male metaphor of phallic authority, but that, female fluidity overflows any attempt at individuation and solid, static authoritive grammar (Irigaray, 1985). The fluidity of feminine subjectivity exceeds any individuated political or economic structure. Loss of the rational individual is neither anarchy nor individual freedom. Freud’s two texts, Future of an Illusion (1961, orig. 1927, vol. XXI) and Civilization and Its Discontents (1961) indicate, somewhat tragically, that repression is fundamental to civilization. It is necessary for people who live in close proximity to repress their raw desires on many, if not most occasions. Abandoning the metaphysics of the rational individual does not abolish normative morality in the service of living in a bearable, stable community. Civilization will be built around new norms and ethics but those could be more responsive to the needs of the environment and have a wider and more egalitarian basis than is the case under rational, individual, consumer meritocracy. Haraway’s concept of the Cyborg is a good example of the reworking of subjectivity away from the mind/body separation without reverting to a phlegmatic pastoralism (1991, 1997). The Cyborg participates in technology at all levels – there are metal or plastic fillings in our teeth; bones are set with pins and plaster-castes; we have a wrist-watch attached semi-permanently to our arm or else a mobile phone constantly in our pocket; we wear jewellery for adornment. All of these things constitute who we are. In some instances, technology keeps us alive, and at other times it signals concepts of beauty and identity. Technology is a fundamental part of our bodies and it shapes and predisposes our interpretations, our identity and our personality in particular ways. Haraway is as aware of the technological horizon as Heidegger. Instead of struggling for poetic loopholes and romantic home and hearth, she reconceptualizes subjectivity and technological culture and nature so that each are interdependent, commensurate, expositions of a larger multifarious ecology. The agricultural/pastoral is as much complicit in Cyborg materiality as the urban youth or the bourgeois businessman. However, the Cyborg should not be understood as justification for the status quo. Rather, the interdependence of culture, nature, technology and subjectivity make all aspects of culture responsible for the well-being of ecology-as-a-whole. Wearing platinum braces

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on one’s teeth makes you a key player in the mining industry, as does diamonds from war-torn countries or polyester clothing and the petroleum industry. The interconnectedness might make us more aware of the consequences of our market decisions (individual and en masse) whereas the more purely Idealist view alleviates objects from any connection to subjective decisions, deductions or even experiences. When we start to consider the impact of the feminist reworking of Idealism, rationality, individualism, technology, nature and to a lesser extent, the market we find that the critique is radical and earthy, but not necessarily pastoral, romantic or anti-technological. It is not a case of rejecting modern individuated political formats, of disrupting the information gathering of the State census or throwing out the consumer-surveillance plastic cards. There is a place for technology and for some elements of the tools of governance historically developed from Idealist views of humanity and the ‘objective’ world. I was recently surprised to discover a shrimp farm utilizing the ‘waste’ warm water of one of New Zealand’s thermal power plants. It is reassuring to see these kinds of symbiotic doubling or trebling of energy returns happening all over the place. Likewise, market transactions are a useful cultural mechanism, that allows the development of expertise and institutional structures that a culture of generalized home-economics would not enable easily. Yet the capabilities of the market does not entitle it to universal or metaphysical status. Modern culture has become heavily reliant on the private car and this technology has had a huge impact on the spread and layout of towns, cities and industry. People live long distances from their employment and their sources of food and leisure activities. If the car is suddenly unavailable, people will be in genuine hardship because the infrastructure of modern cities relies on mass, privatized transport. Cities like these have grown quickly, in response to the enormous global population boom and urbanization. Europe is best placed for adapting to the extinction of private motorcars because, historically, its cities are dense and have excellent public transport infrastructure. The ‘New World’ cities tend to sprawl which creates difficult circumstances for people who are not within walking distance of their work or a transport network. These concerns are being increasingly addressed, as the global population continues to increase and the sprawling cities buckle under the weight of air pollution, water exhaustion, sewerage disposal and so forth. The pan-global template for solving these problems is based on Neoliberal, Enlightenment assumptions about the Idealist, rational, individual subject and the autonomy of the market to make equitable political solutions. These premises are based on philosophy that has been widely criticized at its most basic assumptions. The critiques I offer here show alternative modes of approaching subjectivity, technology, nature and culture. These new premises do not annihilate the historical modes of governance. They offer a more fluid mode of interacting such that each city, each district, each nation, can ascertain

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its own particular problems and address them without reducing all their attempts at sustainable environment to a Neoliberal one-size-fits-all template. This adjustment in attitude is much more subtle and possible, more difficult to adequately compare across nation states, but it can be far more affective at making real, far-reaching change. The separation of nature from culture, of man from woman, and subject from object has been over-stated by the Enlightenment. Dualisms such as these have introduced a rhetoric of mastery of one pole over the other, and this mastery has forced us into a cultural dead end. Climate change illustrates the ‘line’ of nihilism over which we cannot cross, and thus highlights the problematic hyper-separation that Enlightenment philosophy has promoted. Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan, Irigaray, Kristeva, de Beauvoir, Midgley, Heidegger, Haraway and Plumwood have begun the process of unravelling the overstated insistence on individuation. As we modify our infantile insistence on separation and mastery, and are better able to respond to the necessities of living within the ecological constraints of planet Earth, we may withdraw from the nihilism of global warming and allow the natural unfolding of planetary finitude more time and a slower pace.

Conclusion

The global awareness of environmental issues has escalated steeply, since I began to write this book. It is wonderful to see awareness of the problem in the eyes of everybody we meet, even if the ‘solutions’ remain hard to achieve. The danger is that blind faith in technology combined with the discourse of ‘sustainability’ will sap all this good will, and direct it in ways that may have some short-term compensations, but will do nothing to reconsider the alienation of human beings from our natural ecology. Sustainability has taken on the mantra of market, efficiency and economic development. It now enframes all aspects of planetary existence (humanity and nature) in a metaphysical synthesis. Economics, and more recently, sustainability, has been promoted beyond its competency, to a metaphysical status that explains all aspects of our world-view. We need not do away entirely with economics to redress this problem, but it does need reconceptualizing and repositioning as a minor field of surface transactions rather than a reiteration of Idealist conceptual mastery over nature that permeates our entire world-view. Exponential economic growth cannot be satisfactorily ‘decoupled’ from resource depletion and pollution. It is inextricably linked to consumerism. Exponential growth is a direct factor in producing the anthropogenic greenhouse gases that are contributing to climate change. Exponential economic growth is a key factor in modern politics. It is justified by the right and the left, by the market and the Keynesian Settlement. While the bulk of surplus value gets siphoned off towards the owner’s of production, a reliable 2 or 3 per cent of ‘surplus’ goods gets redistributed among the workers, and this superficial improvement inhibits them from revolting against the alienation of modern capitalism (Keynes, 1936). The discourse of unfairness – as redistribution and equality – caught hold of Marxists and Liberals alike and they missed the more profound point made by Marx about the alienation of human ‘Species Being’ from nature (Marx, 1887). It is the alienation that is causing the crisis of Climate Change. Furthermore, Keynes institutionalization of low inflation (legislated by the Reserve Bank Act) makes exponential economic growth fundamental to the continued stability and structure of late capitalism. Exponential growth was not a problem when a couple of hundred more bushels of corn were consumed from one year to the next. But it is an inescapable problem when the factor of exponential consumption has grown to millions of barrels of oil more per year.

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The mode of politics that is normative now is based on a complex and very long-standing history of philosophical ideas. Those ideas tend towards Idealism, reifying truth and ontology, or Being to an abstract realm beyond time and space and separating the individual subject from the objects in their environment (Irwin, 2002). The result has been a tendency to see all things as objects. Idealism sets up items in the environment as flawed examples of universal categories and alienates them from humanity. As the tendency towards aggregation and a reified form of ‘pure’ Idealist calculus (but not all forms of mathematics) has deepened, statistical and positivist science has become more and more viable to understand everything as aspects of a fixed metaphysical whole, that all serve the purpose of potential resource in the unfolding machinery of modern production and consumption. Modern politics sits comfortably in this state of affairs, relying heavily on the governmentality made possible by statistics and simple old-fashioned rational individualism, that assumes that each person will behave according to selfcentred avarice and greed. This enables modern forms of governance to rely upon microeconomic assumptions about behaviour that informs policies at the national and the pan-global level. The anomalies that occur when these policies fail are ignored because it is assumed that the market has been constrained from free reign and thus the metaphysical Ideal of (God’s) Invisible Hand has been interfered with. Any and all objections by specific states or peoples are ignored on this basis. The monetarist policies of late modernity rest on earlier more Keynesian programmes and both take cognizance of both Adam Smith’s (1776) promotion and Marx’s critique, of capitalism (1867). All of these ideas constitute fundamental truths uncovered within the realm of the horizon of technology. Likewise, the philosophical premises that underlie the generation of Liberalism, from its earliest forms in the European and American Revolutions to its latest iterations in various countries around the world, rely heavily on Idealist philosophy. Individualism at its best, purports to be egalitarian, in the face of earlier feudal tyranny. However, the tyranny was transferred to the new regimes, originally in the form of the ‘general will’ (Robespierre, 1794) but perhaps more pervasively in the meritocracy that rewards making capital success regardless of the ethics of wresting resources from many regions and people and siphoning it to a very elite proportion of the globe’s population. Democracy has some very important values enshrined in its philosophical basis (notably the dimension of free critique, cf. Kant 1784); yet it is also inextricably linked to the privatization of all things into property and therefore the estrangement of the environment into an alienated relationship, subordinated to the mastery of man. There is no doubt that modernity has been exceptionally successful. Modern man occupies nearly every corner of the planet. Nearly all ecological niches have been turned into potential resource for our consumption. Nearly every

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element of things falls neatly under the rubric of the horizon of technology, human population included. The numbers of human beings have exploded commensurately with the successful spread of modernity. Today we have well over 6 billion humans alive at the same time across the planet. The numbers continue to expand although the exponential rate of increase has peaked and is just starting to slow down. Optimistically, if we do manage to better engage with the basic needs for tranquillity, love, food and shelter of all peoples in the world, the rate of decrease will occur faster. At the moment, it is very likely that there will be 9 billion people alive on the planet by the year 2200. Despite the downward forecast of population numbers from 16 billion at 2200, 9 or 10 billion is still a very scary number of people occupying the lands and oceans of the planet. How that number can be sustainable in any scenario, modern, technological, or post-humanist is very difficult to foresee. It is particularly hard to comprehend if the alienation and mastery that pervade modern culture continue to prevail. The mastery over nature that has promoted population and economic growth has been all too successful. We have now reached an impasse where our own success has overfilled every aspect of the planet, and many examples of environmental overload are being exhibited. Not only has the background species extinction rate been far surpassed during the epoch of modernity, now modern cultural practices of consumerism and the treatment of all aspects of the environment as resource are altering the climate of the entire planet. The result of massive energy consumption that has created the ‘greenhouse effect’ is changing the ecological conditions of many habitats and, as we now know, increasingly causing havoc in the form of storms, droughts, desertification, forest fires, melting polar ice, melting glaciers and so forth. As ecological conditions change unforeseen feedbacks set in, exacerbating the original problems of climate warming. The Siberian tundra, for example, has began to melt as global temperature has increased, and as larger areas turn from ice to water and earth, less sunlight is reflected off white surfaces, and more heat is absorbed by the soil. As the soil defrosts, the tundra decomposes and releases thousands of tonnes of methane, exacerbating further the greenhouse gas effect. Feedbacks result in a situation of increasing warming, and diminishing the possibility of reversing the process, every year. If we limit the ways we address climate change to the modern parameters of technology and financial (dis)incentives, we will have done nothing to alter the fundamental problem of alienation between humanity and nature. Tremendous hope for reversing the problems of climate change has been placed in the Kyoto Agreement, based on the Brundtland report. Pan-global organizations are in a unique position to think through the environmental problems that are bigger than any given nation state. Yet, while they rely exclusively on the discourse of sustainability and its templates for reducing pollution via economic

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efficiency and economic development, we will still be caught in the trap of continuous, exponential consumerism. The Kyoto Protocol has had to engage the voluntary compliance of the widest range of countries imaginable: the whole world. The Brundtlands’ finished writing their report in 1987 and with the best possible intentions attempted to halt pollution levels at 1990 levels, worldwide. This line in the sand has been extremely important in subsequent attempts to enlist agreement across nations so that people can work towards a practical, simple goal. Other elements of the Brundtland Report remain amenable to normal pan-global policy with its heavy focus on continuous economic development. Efficiency and decoupling economic growth from pollution have been the very limited tools available for achieving the difficult task of limiting pollution. It is not, at all, surprising then, that the United States and China are both resisting the 1990 level of pollution. It is simply impossible for such large nations to continue to expand their consumerist ethos, based on the monetary policies advocated throughout the world and, at the same time, remain within the 1990 benchmark of emissions. The Kyoto Protocol attempts to straddle two camps: business as usual, and scientific, ecological awareness. The Brundtland Report focuses on ‘sustainable development’ for the continued ‘use’ of ‘resources’ for future generations (of humans). Implicit in this rhetoric is an assumption of utility, mastery and control. There are many examples of greenhouse gas emissions that are not amenable to financial disincentives. In many places on the planet are burning coal seams, and they are good examples of how technology and financial tools linked to the Kyoto Agreement fail to fully engage with the problem. The Strongman coal seam fire in New Zealand is immense, for example. In 1967 as the result of a mining accident igniting the methane prevalent in mines, the coal was set alight. It has been smouldering away intensely for years. The seam is too big, and the combustion too great for firefighters to do anything about it. Globally, uncontrolled burning coal seams contribute about 1 per cent of greenhouse gases per annum. The combustion of this coal seam is not subject to financial incentives. It is difficult to see how this type of event could be captured by the market in any way, particularly because it is impossible to accurately gauge how many million kilogram’s of greenhouse gases a specific nation is releasing into the atmosphere. There is no technological fix to this catastrophe. While market incentives and technology might be an avenue that can redress a few of the specific problems relating to decades and decades of intensive pollution, it is a limited tool, that can make improvements in specific areas but cannot address the problem as a whole. The Brundtland Report has achieved an immense amount of change. While not wholly ‘successful’ for either economists or ecologists, along with the IPCC, the UN protocols have raised the awareness of the scale of the problem to the very forefront of world politics.

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New forms of realism Engaging with ‘risk’ in a monetarist manner is in some ways optimistic and adaptive. Instead of pessimistically wallowing in the horror of catastrophe, the risks of environmental disaster are seen as an opportunity for new and inventive, entrepreneurial activity. The discourse of ‘risk’ manages to include severe damage to ecosystems in the model of the market. However, it does little or nothing to redress the actual loss of habitat, the extinction of more species or the effect on the lives of countless poor people who are victimized not empowered by such events. The discourse of risk, which makes environmental problems seem more manageable, results in the superficial engagement with the real problems of pollution, resource exhaustion and climate change. This failure to address the alienation of human subjectivity from environmental objects, of culture from nature, will fatally inhibit any redress of wrongdoing. Neoliberal optimism falls short of genuinely acknowledging and addressing the extent of the problem. Pessimistic, realist accounts of the state of the environment are in general more accurate and depressing, and because of this deep anomie they are more prepared to consider the role of humanity in producing the problem. While it is important not to wallow in pessimism indefinitely, it is a part of the process of realistic evaluation and recognition of the need for a deep cultural and economic paradigm shift. Heidegger’s philosophy suggests that we are caught in the horizon of technology. Yet, with appropriate attention, care and a loving awareness of the familiar environment that helps constitute who we are, we may circumvent alienation, living both as thinking and natural living beings. Thinking and Being are the same: It appears as though the human being is excepted from ‘Being.’ However, people are not only not excepted, i.e., not only included in ‘Being,’ but ‘Being,’ in needing the human being, is obliged to relinquish this appearance of independence. (Heidegger, 1999: 310, translation adapted) Heidegger is an important figure in reconceptualizing technology, and what it is to be meaningful (rather than merit-ful). He also retains a significant element of his Catholic and metaphysical philosophical roots. He tends to co-opt ‘authentic’ humanity into an epoch associated with ‘Being’ rather than raw natural ‘existence’ (Heidegger, 1973a, 1985). This is highly problematic, very Eurocentric, and arguably develops the separation of human subjectivity and culture from ‘mere’ nature all over again. In conjunction with Spengler and Jünger, Heidegger conceives the extent of the problem of modernity. His approach spans the entire Western civilization, from its roots in Greek philosophy and

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politics, to the ‘line’ of nihilism presented by both the risk of nuclear devastation and the industrial annihilation of so much ecological habitat. The attention to the tempo of industrialization and the totalizing mobilization of all elements in the machinery of consumerism are extremely important recognition of the scale of the problematic of modernity. Heidegger’s reduction of all meaningfulness to the question of Being, foreshadows the limits of his approach to technology. There is a tendency to conflate the parameters of the machine with the discourse of Idealist subjectivity and modernity. With these caveats in mind, Heidegger, Spengler and Jünger’s critique of the technological is cogent. The integration of landscape, culture and subjectivity cannot be limited to the mode of calculation and machinery of consumerism that prevails in modernity. Because the language associated with the dry statistics and measures of governmentality and science tend to prevail in the normalized discourse of late modernity, alternative discursive modes of understanding nature lend themselves to disparagement as fairy tales, paganism, witchcraft, or other older, outdated and denigrated narrative forms. Unless, of course, these older discourses have themselves been co-opted into the capitalist rhetoric of the market – the hippy notion of sustainability, for example. Heidegger and Kristeva make similar points – that total integration and absorption of humanity with nature is not desireable, thinking itself requires a nominal space, and this ‘between’ must be fought for. What is in question is the extremity of the nominal separation. Modernity is built on the conceptual separation of subjects from objects. This separation shows up in many diverse ways. For example, separation of subjects from objects. For example, the concept of sustaining ecology tends to separate nature as pure from culture as contaminated. Sustainability-as-economics maintains the separation of humanity from nature but this time reduces both to resources that need managing for maximum, continuous and efficient use-value (Irwin, 2008). The body is never entirely separate from the ecological environment. Breath mingles external air with the subject’s circulation system, food from the land literally becomes ‘me’ until a bit of the ‘I’ gets excreted and becomes fertile earth again. Each individual life exists in a larger cycle which takes from and adds to the general turnover of the species and the ecosystem at large. The disgust, or abjection that we feel in relation to these fragile boundaries, is necessary to the functioning of subjectivity at all (Kristeva, 1982), otherwise, if we completely identified with everything around us indiscriminately as ‘me’ we could not function as a reflective human. Rather we would be unadulterated environment, mere nothing as Heidegger puts it. My thesis is simply that the abjection that is crucial to individuated identity has become disproportionate. It has been promoted through Idealist, subjectivist philosophy and through individualism, that provides the basis and justification of modernity to such an extreme, that we

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are now in the alienated situation that is proving our undoing. Human beings are animals. We belong to the environment and the environment belongs to us. The artificial separation that has prevailed for so long needs to be consigned a far smaller role. Nor is technology exempt from this mode of continuity. Equipment is as much a part of our subjective understanding of ourselves, our community and our landscape, as it is a tool to intervene in the natural unfolding, the progress and the entropy, of things (Heidegger, 1962). Haraway’s concept of the Cyborg indicates how integrated all elements of the cultural/natural really are. Technology constitutes our very bodies. However, technology does not, of itself, necessarily alienate humanity from nature. The Gestell, or horizon of technology is not easily superseded, but if, as Heidegger indicates, it protects the question of Being at the same time as it encourages its oblivion, then there is the possibility that a new paradigm, with larger questions, which technology sits within but does not dominate, may emerge. Culture and nature can no longer be viewed as two separate domains. They each impact on one another. Just as perceiving and presencing are ‘the same’, so too is culture and nature ‘the same’. Let me use my own experience as an example.

Attunement On an island in the harbour where I live, there is a spooky place. It is a point above Palm beach on Waiheke Island. There is something profound about that place which makes it stand out in my memory, even with the passing of decades. The place has a ‘vibe’ – some kind of intensity that is disturbing, frightening and yet compelling. The place does not look like much – a clay cliff that is difficult to scrabble up from the beach. At the top is a knoll and you can look out at the huge embrace of the Waitemata harbour, through the branches of the Pohutakawa tree that holds on to the clay for dear life. The knoll itself is unremarkable. A little further back the land has been subdivided and modern houses squat, individually, on the reasonably flat surface. But right on the point there is only long bright grass, big sky, looming bush on the wings of the bay. The place shows little obvious sign of earlier inhabitation. The landscape suggests only a couple of troughs in the clay ground that are probably pre-colonial Maori fortification trenches, and no pits for food storage. But to an informed eye, the site is pre-eminent for Maori settlement. Yet, there is something embedded in the land that, while not obviously or readily identifiable, is arresting and odd. It feels dark even out in bright sunlight. Later, I discovered that this apprehensive and fascinating bay is the site of a very old massacre of one iwi (tribe) by another. The islands were perfect dwelling places in pre-modern times, abundant with seafood, water, fields for kumara

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and they were fought over and defended many times. Somehow that point of land is imbued with the bodies of times long past and it evokes a response in my body which has to do with my experience, and understanding of ancient Pa sites, and pre-historic hunter-gathering, but little to do with language or what commonly gets taken for deductive reasoning. Places exhibit their past just as humans embody their habitual movements, repetitive paths of thought, enduring patterns of personal identity. Dancers walk tall and elegantly, scholars have somewhat slumped shoulders, tight necks and poor eyesight. Places too are landscaped by the events of history and they are both contextualizing and contextualized by the interaction with other beings: the clinging Pohutakawa, holding on to and holding up the steep bank; the narrow steep path grooved into the upright cliff, relic of a thousand footfalls and hand-grips. There are signs of ancient events, too subtle for conscious recognition; the naked knoll, covered only in Kikuyu grass, exposing the lie of the land, and allowing a good view of all goings-on in the bay; a vantage point once vital to a fortified village, with the smell of the weather, the swell of the tide, and the shellfish beds and fishing grounds; the vista over the large bay and access to the massive harbour beyond. Maori are accustomed to bring attention to this ‘spiritual awareness’, for want of better terminology, this ambience, or vibes. So do the Irish. But except for New Age hocus pocus which, like the New Right, associates the ‘essential’ subject with ‘success’ and making money, it is rare to find any self-respecting modern individual tuning in to the pre-historic elements of their own backyard. However, the element of perceptive attunement (Gelassenheit) is precisely what is missing from philosophical discourse about the relation between contemporary human beings and the environment. The lack of awareness – and discussion – has rendered the environment alien and inaccessible to the norms of cultural empathy or any recognition about the way the landscape shapes culture and subjectivity. This leaves very few narratives in the concepts of modernity to bring awareness or attunement of the integrity of the constitution of both humanity and environment. Without recognition of the imbued residues that constitute the historical identity of place, it is easy to relegate all spaces as properties, owned assets to be traded on the marketplace, developed and utilized as a resource – and nothing more. And in itself, this resource-ful-ness has shaped and delimited places, expunging their archaeological traces, bowling over trees, clearing brambles and rearranging rocks, digging, shaping, replacing – landscaping – vast regions into the resource structures they are today. These places too, have a vibe and its injury hurts the senses. So much so, that most people are desensitizing themselves to the vandalism of modernity and trying to shout down the noise, light, and toxic pollution of the urban environment with busy and industrious lives.

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The lack of meaningfulness of most aspects of our lives is also not without consequence. We have relegated the environment to a number of narratives of Otherness: z Frightening wilderness that needs mastering. z The thing-in-itself that is unattainable, unknowable, and therefore either

uninteresting; mere existence, or sublime, esoteric sheer beauty. z Equipment that ‘world’ in human terms as { resource or { potential reserves for the production of goods and services in the market practices of consumption z Pure nature { ‘balanced’ ecological system, in need of protection from human intervention. { {

None of these narratives position us as part of the ongoing becoming of landscape, a mammal predator, scavenger, forager and gardener. All events have an impact on scaping the land: the erosion of past sediments and rocks; the deep exploration and nutrient interaction of root systems with soil; the curve, ripples and shapes of wind swept sands, soils and trees; the paucity or abundance of plant life in well-watered or dry areas. All aspects mingle together in complex and changing ways that adapt through sensitivity and malleability or perish in a sudden overcoming of the necessary sustainable conditions in the locale. Global climate warming is the result of the obliteration of this sensitivity from the cultural narratives and norms of modernity. The relegation of the natural world to an alienated thing-in-itself has divorced humanity (the mind, if not the body) from hearing the resonances that imbue each place. It is difficult even to talk of these things in a modern academic format. All the metaphors have been co-opted by capitalism, or denigrated as mysticism, leaving no space for allowing the restful absorption of a place into the well-being of a person – and vice versa. Heidegger tried to talk about this awareness of ambiance (Gelassenheit – Heidegger, 1970) in terms of ‘home’ and ‘dwelling’. In modern times, the ‘home’ has given way to the ‘house’ or ‘apartment’ and these bear little relation to place as belonging. Nor does awareness or Gelassenheit, rely upon dwelling as static absorption in one spot. It happens all over the place and only requires honed receptivity, enquiring surfaces, acknowledging ears, nose and eyes. A thinking mammal wandering through a knowing landscape is a very different proposition from the Idealist isolated and doubting mind set against reified objects as alienated thing-in-itself.

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The colonization of places and subjectivities are very similar projects and freeing the self and the locale may well derive similar strategies. Narratives of modernity are inscribed into the landscape as they are inscribed into the self. Deconstructing them from the inevitable telos of technological ‘progress’ is increasingly necessary as the unfolding of exponential consumerism pushes human society closer and closer to a threshold where the planet is no longer viable for many life-forms, including our own. Mastery over nature has produced a virus-like effect such that the host is so thoroughly modified that it is overthrown and dies. To be ‘sentient’ is to become aware of these problems at all levels, from the sociological, the physical and the biological, through the alienation of production to the hole in the ozone resulting in personal sunburn on exposed skin. Awareness raises a multitude of possibilities for reconnecting human society with the environment as cultural place. As Heidegger describes it, this involves an ethos of care. Philosophy of the environment is not merely an issue of ethics. It is the transformation of the basic tenets of ontology and epistemology, of thinking, dwelling, Being. The environment is challenging philosophy into the necessary reformulation of culture beyond modernity and Idealism, towards a caring ethos of perception and attentive inhabitation. No longer at the behest of mastery over nature, humanity will be free to truly care for the mortality of the world as earth, sky, sea and fire. This will mean the ethos of technology will also change. Spengler and Heidegger make an important point about the massification and storage capacity of modern technology that enables the tempo of the natural unfolding of the seasonal cycles to be ‘decoupled’ from production and tied instead to the pace of consumerism. Once mastery over nature no longer imbues our interactions with our habitat, technology is freed to garden rather than control the particularities of a place. Hydro dams, for example, can respond to the seasonal demands on power and on soil conditions, minimalizing winter flooding, supplying winter electricity and summer irrigation. Houses can become homes once more imbibing the needs of the local landscape with eco-friendly design that makes use of sun or wind to maximize local power generation and reduce water consumption and the production of waste. These changes require some policy direction, but they are too particular for general policies or a global template to regulate or enforce. It requires a sea change in environment consciousness. That shift has already begun, and global initiatives like the Kyoto Protocol can be understood as an early model of transition from one cultural imperative to another one. However, in large part, the Kyoto initiatives have missed the opportunity for genuine change by relying on the relics of modern thought: the economic market and the narrow managerialism of its accounting systems. The transformation that I am suggesting has few metaphors or narratives that are presently in circulation that have not

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already been co-opted by Neoliberalism. Sustainability stands in for the metaphysics of the market, as an all-determining horizon that reduces all things to potential resource. The task of philosophy is to get thinking, and open-up new ways of knowing and becoming. A good start has been made, through the Brundtland Report, Agenda 21 and the Kyoto Agreement. Real commitment from governments is essential if humanity is to make the most of the window of opportunity that we still have, to avert climate catastrophe. Neoliberal solutions may begin the process, by introducing measurements and constraints that begin to initiate a shift to a smaller environmental footprint by industry, energy, transport and consumerism. Ultimately however, market forces are incapable of shifting our cultural imperatives from economic growth and the assumption that everything is a standing-reserve for future consumption. That shift will occur from elsewhere. The positive signs are a real engagement with climate change at all levels of all populations, worldwide. The opportunity for really meaningful change is in readiness. It is up to us to get it underway.

Notes

Chapter 1 1

2

3 4 5 6 7 8

9

Proterozoic, Ordovician and Silurian, Pennsylvanian and Permian and the Neogene to Quaternary. Ice Ages are glacial advances and retreats rather than the climate change over vast millennia. Analysis had only been made on the last 420,000 years. Vostok ice core provides 1,60,000-year record of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Struggle over method that, through the Austrian School, premises Neoliberalism. Particularly William of Ockham, it seems to me. These figures vary wildly and are very difficult to verify. The majority of production (although arguably Africa is an unknown quantity in these figures) with major supplies of oil are Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kurdistan and Turkmenistan in the Middle East and Kenya, Zimbabwe and Angola in Africa. Even the production and distribution of Iraq’s major field is estimated to supply the world’s needs for only 4 or 5 years. Shell is estimating that production costs will increase to such an extent that the resource is exhausted worldwide by 2020 – although in March 2004 Shell admitted that it had over-estimated its own established oil reserves by 20 per cent. BP estimates exhaustion will occur sometime between 2014 and 2018. Other experts in the US say 2017 and independent advice in Britain estimates as early as 2010 (although these estimates may be hiping the ‘crisis’ in the hope of reigniting the price increase of the first oil shock in the 1970s). The relationship between technological development and pollution is very uneven. Scandinavian countries manage both high technology and low pollution whereas Australasia and the USA have both high technology and high pollution.

Chapter 2 1

2

3

The association between climate change and cyclones is still debated, as there is little means of ‘proving’ the evidence. Although such diverse people as Wordsworth, Thoreau and Leopold intuitively recognized the profound shift in the way humanity relates to the earth and the potential disruption that would ensue. Wolin’s rather jaundiced view is that Jünger played a vital role in the shift between the ‘idealized, pre-capitalist’ ideas that were circulating before the First World

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4

5

Notes

War, and the ‘conservative revolutionary’ ideas of the 1930s that promoted a Kultur community that restored German values while meeting the demands of industrialization. Jünger saw the ‘masculine warrior virtues’ as a counter-force to the (British) ‘effete, decadent, and materialistic bourgeois Zivilisation’. Jünger, (1993) [orig. 1930] ‘Total Mobilisation’ in Krieg und Krieger. Walter Benjamin criticized Jünger for imposing wholesale the Romantic ‘art for art’s sake’ argument on the business of war. Benjamin’s contemporaneous review is explicitly titled ‘Theories of German Fascism’ (Wolin, 1993: 122). Heidegger’s speeches as Rector of Freiburg University to the students in 1933 and 1934 reflect the impact of Gestalt on work.

Chapter 3 1

2

3

Even typically ‘left wing’ Liberals and contemporary sociologists have begun to accept increase in regulation as ‘after Neoliberalism’ (cf. Larner and Craig, 2002). The evidence from this permanent exponential growth in ‘First world’ countries is that it relies upon the continuous exploitation of resources and populations in less powerful nations. ‘In 1980–1996 only 33 of 130 developing countries increased growth by more than 3 per cent per capita, while the GNP per capita of 59 countries declined. Around 1.6 billion people are economically worse off today than 15 years ago’ (United Nations Human Development Report, 1999: 31). The Ok Tedi mine in Papua New Guinea is a classic example (Kirsch, 2004).

Chapter 4 1

2

Kirsch’s comment on the way BHP Billington slipped from future indemnity regarding environmental damage of millions of tons of mine tailings to the Ok Tedi valley is a case in point, ‘Even given the influence of Neoliberal economic policies that promote corporate self-regulation, the agreement represents an extraordinary transfer of rights from the state and ordinary citizens to a private company’ (2004: 28). Approximately 13 million people, 1 million of them children, are casual, opencaste miners in 55 countries, according to the International Labour Organization.

Chapter 5 1

Perhaps very few tribes deep in places such as the Amazon might genuinely remain oblivious to the culture of modernity.

Chapter 6 1

Although numerical ordering has a much longer precedence than Malthus. The Roman legions are a good example.

Notes 2

3

4

5

6

7

193

See also Lambert Dolphin (1987) for an example of earlier scenarios with no known maximum to the parabola of increasing population. However this is by no means universal. Jack Hollander points out that 1 billion people do not have enough to eat, and 525 million are chronically undernourished (2003:19). Data on contraception use and the AIDS pandemic can be found on the population website run by the US Census Bureau. A point not lost on Paul and Anne Ehrlich, who wrote a book called Extinction in 1981. The description of terra nullus that was attributed to places like Australia was a complete misnomer and existent indigenous peoples were simply annihilated or displaced by the waves of new immigrants. Monbiot points out that 2 per cent increase in mean global temperatures is our best guess rather than a definitive threshold. It may be too high (for many species and islands, it certainly is), but Monbiot thinks it is the limits of what is realistically achievable given that 90 per cent reduction in energy outputs is already extremely high.

Chapter 9 1

2

Bowers also conflates ‘Abstract’ with ‘Analytic’ which are two entirely different concepts. An interpretation of Descartes influenced by Berkeley and possibly not what Descartes intended.

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Index

abject 121, 172, 185 aggregated statistics (see calculus) alienation 26, 165, 166–7, 180 animals 30, 82, 86 anthropocentricism 126, 174–5 Aristotle 12, 13, 139, 142, 147 attunement, Gelassenheit 188 Bateson, Gregory 82 Beauvoir, Simone 175 becoming 144–5 being 18, 32, 37, 38, 80, 86, 140–3, 144–8, 151, 154, 184 Bentham, Jeremy 175 Blühdorn 74–5, 77–8, 85 body 89, 135, 155–6, 158–9, 164, 168, 169, 176 brundtland Report 43, 71, 183 calculus 21, 169, 181 categorization 20, 81–2 causality 11, 13 climate change 3–7, 9, 10, 15, 29, 30–1, 41, 50, 53, 54, 95, 135, 179 Commoner, Barry 92, 105–8, 109, 110 consensus 135 constructivism 74, 76 consumerism 3, 15–16, 26, 50, 153, 155, 158, 164, 185 cost/benefit exercise (see risk: cost/ benefit exercise) crisis discourse 77–8 Cyborg 177 Darwin, Charles 92, 96 decoupling 50, 63–5 Deleuze, Gilles 82, 85, 124 demographic transition 102, 105, 106 Descartes, René 160, 167

desire 63, 124, 157 dualism 49, 71, 123, 145, 164, 173 ecocentric, biocentric 126 ecofeminism 175 ecological feedback 4, 6, 57, 182 economics 15, 41, 48, 62, 95–6, 107, 180 education 82–3, 85, 129, 164 egalitarian 3, 92, 112, 176, 181 Ehrlich, Paul 92, 99–103, 105–8 end of history 124, 129, 148 energy 20, 51, 76, 111, 182 enlightenment 67, 73, 171, 178–9 Environmental Protection Agency 122 epistemology 123, 128–30, 140–1 equality 98, 180 egalitarian 3, 92, 112 equity 46, 90, 176 essentialism 23 ethics 29, 32, 94, 114, 145 event – Ereignis 147, 173 evolutionary theory 92, 124 externalities 3, 15, 18, 45, 52, 55, 117 extinction 3, 86, 103 extreme weather 4 Feenberg, Andrew 92, 99–103, 106–7, 109, 110 feminism 27, 171, 176, 177 finitude death 138 end of civilization 133, 143 end of the planet 4 extinction 151 fossil fuels 33 Foucault, Michel 74, 88–9 free trade 41, 46, 47, 63 Freud 172, 177, 179

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Giddens, Anthony 18, 21, 41–5, 47–9 globalization 3, 46, 49, 116, 117 governmentality 120 grammar 173, 174, 177 greenhouse gas emissions 3, 4–9, 22, 33, 55, 183 (see also climate change) Guattari, Felix 82, 84, 85, 92, 124–5 Haraway, Donna 27, 174, 177, 186 Heidegger, Martin 18, 19–20, 25–6, 31–2, 33–40, 79–83, 86, 95–6, 133–4, 152, 184–5 human capital 32, 43 Hume, David 11–14, 121, 128 idealism 11, 24–5, 27, 45, 67, 79, 181 individualism 78, 154, 165–6, 167–8 informatics of domination 116 Irigaray, Luce 172, 177 instrumentalism 25, 34, 175 invisible hand 14, 66–7, 118 IPCC 9, 17, 49, 53, 135–6 Jünger, Ernst 20, 34, 36–7, 39, 72–3, 78, 146, 148, 192nn3, 4 Kant, Immanuel 82, 181 Keynes 42–3, 85, 116, 180 Kristeva, Julia 172, 173, 185 Kyoto Protocol 51, 56, 59, 183, 189 Lacan, Jacques 172, 177 language 32, 141, 154, 155–6, 162, 163–4, 174 Leopold, Aldo 191n2 liberal ideals 21, 160, 166, 168 Lovelock, James 99, 130, 175 Luke, Timothy 111, 117, 119–20 Malthus, Thomas 23, 88, 90–1, 97–8, 108 manifold 167 Maori 186–7 market 15, 21–2, 44, 45–6, 65, 118, 176 Marx, Karl 32, 97, 180, 181 mastery 31, 67, 128, 157, 179 meritocracy 3, 82, 177, 181

metaphysics 38, 136, 139, 148, 150, 190 Midgley, Mary 123, 159 modernity 4, 26, 27, 30, 34–5, 45, 56, 78, 114, 129, 134, 151–2, 155, 169–70, 181–2, 185, 189 Monbiot, George 16, 56, 84, 107, 193n7 nature 128, 170, 173, 174–5 narrative, discourse 76, 155, 164, 169, 185 neoliberal risk 18, 53, 55, 75, 86, 112 Nietzsche, Friedrich 37, 74, 85, 134 nihilism 26, 133, 145, 148–52 oil 15–18 optimism 72, 92, 105, 182 Pareto optimality 22, 60, 118 pessimism 3, 22, 78, 184 pleasure and pain 175 Plumwood, Val 171, 172, 175–6, 179 pluralism 115, 121–2, 125, 129–30 poetics 26, 35, 170, 177 political will 6, 92, 140 population 3, 8, 23, 27, 53, 88, 89–106, 107–8, 110–13 post-ecological 74, 76 postmodernity 80 poststructuralism 121, 122, 127 power pragmatism 24–5 privatization 59–60, 118 progress 19, 20, 56, 110–11 property 59–60 provider capture 117 rationality/reason 25, 125, 171, 175 realism 22, 66, 101, 184–6 reflective awareness/self-consciousness 6, 22, 79, 162, 180, 183, 187, 189 relativism 121–2, 129 rhizome 84, 128, 166 rights/justice 175 risk cost/benefit exercise 15, 22, 30, 55, 56, 66, 75, 80, 112 environmental 15, 19, 21, 55, 57, 66, 75, 184 neoliberal 18, 53, 55, 75, 86, 112

Index Robespierre, Maximilien 181 romanticism 74, 80–1 Schneider, Stephen 59 Schopenhauer, Arthur 11, 79 Schumacher, Eric 65 self-discipline 89 Smith, Adam 21, 23, 45, 181 societies of control 79 Solipsism 35–6 speciism 3, 10, 57, 67, 86, 124, 129, 180 Spengler, Oswald 20, 34–5, 72, 189 statistical governance 23, 102 more 90 subjectivism 79, 139, 141 subjectivity 154, 155, 172, 177 sublime 36, 172, 173 surveillance 18, 89, 119–20 sustainability 22, 44–8, 52–6, 61, 75, 90, 180 technocratic 174 technological enframing, horizon Gestell 32, 81, 147, 153, 186 technology 6, 10, 18, 20, 25, 26, 31–3, 72–3, 79, 85, 107–9, 134, 138–9,

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146, 150, 153, 156, 157–8, 162, 170, 177, 186 teleology 134 theory versus practice 167 third Way 18, 41, 43, 72, 83 third World 90, 100–1, 102, 110, 118 threshold 75 total mobilization 18, 20, 31, 36–7, 39, 72–3, 81 traditional community 8, 23 truth (see epistemology) United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Kyoto Protocol 9 universal categories 181 universalism 42, 147, 156, 175 Upton, Simon 18, 21–2, 51, 54, 56, 62 utilitarianism 86, 115, 124, 126 wilderness 48 will 6, 37, 41, 73, 92, 94s Wordsworth, William 4, 81 world, worlding 14, 37, 79, 82 virtue 192n3 volk 20, 83