"The reason our current system of material production is killing the world is that it has come to view it as dead. So what is there to love then?"
Charles Eisenstein
A thought-provoking new book by Charles Eisenstein Climate A New Story (North Atlantic Books, Berkley 2018), which ecophilosopher David Abram has described as indispensable, comes with a fundamental corrective to the current climate change scenario. The author draws attention to the necessity of reassessing the current tactics and goals of how to heal the current planetary ecological destruction. According to him, climate change is not a “problem” that can be solved from the perspective of the currently dominant utilitarian worldview. Climate change calls on us to develop a new integral worldview that recognizes the intrinsic value and sacredness of nature and our interconnectedness with all life on Earth. It is a shift from a geomechanical worldview to a new story of coexistence that places the living Earth at its center. Eisenstein points out the limitations of the current approach to solving the climate crisis, which he calls “carbon reductionism.” He argues that many of the climate disruptions that we blame on greenhouse gases actually come from the breakdown of ecosystems. Vitally healthy ecosystems and all species are essential to successfully solving the climate crisis. If we continue to destroy them, then even if we reduce carbon emissions to zero, the Earth will continue to die. It suggests that we are facing a fundamental challenge of how to articulate the rights of nature and how to create a new society on this basis, which is aware that it does not live in a world of inert resources and raw materials, but in a more than human world of living natural subjects. The following excerpts from chapters 5 and 6 of the author's book (pp. 109-112, pp. 150-153) were selected and translated by Jiří Zemánek. Published in the journal Seventh generation 6/2018, pp. 63-67.
Of all ecosystems, forests are widely considered to be the most critical to maintaining a healthy climate. They currently absorb around 40 % of global anthropogenic emissions, and about a third of that is released through deforestation. The more CO2 there is in the air, the more forests absorb it – up to a point. It’s as if forests are doing their best to keep the atmosphere in balance. But we humans are not helping them. By some estimates, the total number of trees on Earth has fallen by almost half since the dawn of civilization; today, hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of forest are disappearing every year. The losses may be even worse than generally estimated; deforestation statistics fail to accurately quantify the loss of trees, which in the case of tropical forests, some researchers say accounts for up to two-thirds of the total biomass loss. Deforestation, like wetlands and grasslands, turns land from a carbon sink into a carbon source.
Forest degradation is considered less of a problem than deforestation; it is primarily the result of logging and damage from insects and forest fires – three factors that are intimately linked. Logging makes forests more susceptible to catastrophic fires, not less, as the timber industry claims. It creates drier conditions by reducing evaporation and increasing runoff and erosion. Logging also disrupts the ecological balance that keeps insects in check; it characteristically homogenizes the forest, making it more susceptible to insects and diseases – the stumps of felled trees provide a breeding ground for both disease and insect infestation. At the same time, as logging eliminates standing dead trees and older hollow trees, important habitats are also lost and the risk of insect and pathogen outbreaks increases. Roads and tracks used by heavy logging machinery compact the soil and fragment ecosystems, further reducing forest resilience. None of these impacts are properly included in carbon measurements or climate models.
The forest is a living being
Moreover, if we understand that forests themselves are living entities (rather than just collections of living things), another kind of damage becomes apparent. Phenomenally complex mycelial networks tie together all the trees and other plants in the forest, creating a communication network through which trees share information, warn each other of pests, and sometimes even share resources with each other. Roads and paths cut this living network into smaller, disconnected pieces. Conventional logging also prevents trees from reaching old age, falling to the ground, and gradually decaying over decades or centuries. What if the oldest trees, the “grandmother trees,” contain wisdom—or, if you prefer, chemically encoded information—that is useful in helping the forest withstand unusual conditions once every century? What if the rotting trees host slowly evolving fungi that play an important role in maintaining ecological balance? Quantifying each of these phenomena is much more difficult than counting metric tons of biomass.
In his book Das geheime Leben der Bäume (The Secret Life of Trees), forester Peter Wohlleben draws attention to the forest’s ability to sense and the social nature of trees. Using radioisotopes of carbon, his team found that healthy trees nourish diseased trees and that parent trees nourish their offspring. Sometimes, tree communities even keep the stumps of felled trees alive for centuries. Trees communicate through airborne chemicals as well as through mycelial networks; they also learn individually and collectively from experiences with drought and other threats. Some trees form mutual friendships with other trees, cooperating rather than competing for access to sunlight. Trees also cooperate to create microclimates: in one study, which Wohlleben mentions, naturally growing forests maintained temperatures three degrees cooler than those in managed forests. Perhaps the ecological crisis we frame in terms of climate change and global boundaries will only be resolved when it brings us to a place where we recognize the sentience of forests and all things. Only then will we have the knowledge and skills necessary to properly care for the tissues and organs of Gaia’s body. But this sentience, this sentience, becomes invisible to us when we reduce a forest or any other being to a data set.
The living entity we call a forest includes not only the trees but all the creatures that live there. How could we quantify the benefits of, say, a wolf population? Top predators are crucial to maintaining resilient ecosystems, even though they have no direct contribution to carbon storage. Their contribution is indirect, systemic, and diffuse. The elimination of wolves and cougars in North American forests has led to a rapid increase in deer populations, which consume forest understory vegetation, leaving new saplings and soil exposed. This increases runoff and erosion, reducing soil retention capacity, contributing to reduced rainfall during dry periods and flooding during wet seasons. Changes in soil and understory vegetation are also reflected in communities of insects, fungi, and bacteria, making trees more vulnerable to insects and disease, and ultimately to fire. Deforestation, acid rain, ozone pollution, and changing climate patterns exacerbate these effects in an incalculable synergy. For reasons unique to each location, forests are declining everywhere in the world today.
I could cite more calculations for aboveground and belowground carbon storage for different types of forest: tropical forests, temperate forests, boreal forests, native closed canopy forests, secondary forests, and so on. But, folks, do we really need to know these numbers if we want to preserve our precious forests, if we want to care for them? If we could live on a bare planet without trees, would we? When will the killing of trees stop? I hesitate to get into more numbers, I don't think these are the numbers we should be talking about. Will it help us to accumulate more quantitative reasons why we should do what we already know we should do? I don't think so.
If we don’t already know that forests are sacred and precious, more numbers won’t help us. The forest is a living entity of unimaginable complexity. When we reduce it to a small set of typical relationships and numerical quantities, we create a space for violence: the physical reduction of the forest with chainsaws and bulldozers follows its mental reduction to measurable quantities and services. This is why I hesitate to articulate the value of forests in terms of carbon. For when we focus our conversation on numbers, we neglect their non-carbon ecosystem services, as well as their intrinsic value. Reducing forests to numbers, as is the case with biomass and its capacity to sequester and store carbon, is not so different from reducing them to planks and dollars. It’s the same way of thinking. I refuse to continue in this way. (…)
Rights of nature
The revolution is love. It is not about a smarter appreciation and use of nature. It is about a genuine respect for nature that can only come when we see nature as a being in all its entirety and when we hold it sacred. Where is the sacredness when we have reduced nature to its ultimate value? We need a better reason for caring for the world, a truer reason. We need to connect with a source of motivation that is not even rational. In writing this book, I was tempted (and advised) to avoid saying things like “The Earth is alive and responsive.” Such statements exclude me from the attention of politicians who need arguments couched in rational terms. But can we even rationalize our path to love? “Rational” in this context is usually code for utilitarianism, for profit-seeking. Because when is love rational? The truth is that we love the Earth for what it is, not just for what it provides us. I suspect that even the most practical ecologist, who loudly mocks the Earth's being alive in public, harbors a secret longing for the very object of his contempt. Deep down, he too believes that the planet and everything on it is alive and sacred. He is afraid to touch this knowledge, even though he longs for it.
I am that person too. The idea of a living, sentient Earth both attracts and repels me; it mirrors the polarities of opinion I observe at conferences between advocates of essential rational information and the spiritual faction. Accusations like “naive!” “weak-minded!” and “unscientific!” constantly rattle around in my brain, expressing my inner wounds. Perhaps if I join the ranks of the critics and turn my criticism outward, accusing others of ignoring science and succumbing to confused thinking, I can find some temporary relief. But it would be more honest of me to embrace my irrationality. And it might be more inspiring for others: to evoke in them the same biophilia—love of life—that I recognize in myself. The idea that our planet is alive, and that every mountain, every river, every lake, and every forest are living beings, even sentient, purposeful, sacred beings, is not a sentimental emotional distraction from the ecological problems that beset us; on the contrary, it disposes us to feel more, to care more, and to act more. We can no longer hide from grief and love behind the ideology that the world is merely a mass of material to be instrumentally used for our own purposes.
Given how crucial instrumental utilitarianism is to the operation of the “world-destroying machine,” the environmental movement must be mindful of this story and its rhetoric, not amplify it. It must embrace, introduce, and promote a different story: one of care, beauty, and love. This does not mean that it should ignore the consequences of ecocide for human beings—after all, we too are among Gaia’s beloved—but that it should avoid giving these arguments primary importance. And yet this is the language, almost the exclusive language, of “serious” political debate on climate and other environmental issues. It cannot work. Perhaps we should try again for the language of love.
By denying the nonhuman material world the qualities of a beloved self, we render nature and the material world incapable of evoking love in us. If the world is fundamentally composed of a collection of standard, purposeless particles, governed by impersonal random forces, what does it mean to love? Terms like “natural resources” and even “environment” further reinforce this kind of ideological separation. Compassionate love comes from the realization that you are a subject (“I”), just as I am. A child looks at the sun and knows that the sun is looking back at him. Then we grow up and “know better” and dismiss these perceptions as childish anthropomorphic projections. The scientist does the same when he claims that only humans have the full range of consciousness, the capacity to act, the capacity to intend, desire, and experience being; that animals have these qualities perhaps to a lesser extent – “lower” animals (that is, animals that are more different from us) have them less; that plants have them only in rudimentary amounts, if at all; and that rivers, mountains, soil, water, and rocks certainly lack these qualities of “self.” But we intuitively – as children, as older cultures – “know better.” We know that the entire world that surrounds us is a “self” (subject) in all its entirety and also in each of its parts.
Since money cannot reflect the value of what goes beyond price, we must use another instrument of human agreement: law. A growing movement for the rights of nature is seeking to secure legal status for nonhuman beings; so far Bolivia, Ecuador, and New Zealand have written such rights into law. Earth rights advocate Polly Higgins is campaigning to extend these rights globally by adding ecocide to the list of crimes against peace, alongside genocide, war crimes, crimes of aggression, and crimes against humanity, and by placing it under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court in The Hague. This would elevate coexistence to something more than a personal philosophy or religious orientation. It would enshrine it as a fundamental principle of a different kind of society. Science once understood concepts as personalities from nature’s playful side. Even as science changes—for example, a growing number of biologists are seriously considering the possibility of plant intelligence—to this day, many scientists would be inclined to accuse us of muddled thinking if we said, “Who cares about cost and benefit. Let’s save this forest just because we love it. Let’s save it because it’s so beautiful.”
This is not to say that we should never cut down trees. It is to say that such an act should not be facilitated by an ideology that considers trees—and all life—to be anything but sacred. When we understand forests in terms of cubic meters of wood or the financial value of lumber, when we view oceans in terms of tons of protein or dollars in fish catch, when we talk about nations as economies and people as “consumers”; when we understand place as the source of iron ore or bauxite or gold, when we see these minerals as nothing more than minerals, deposited quite randomly in the ground and with no relation to the processes around them, when we view a forest or a peatland only in the context of its potential to capture and store carbon, then we see the Earth as a machine rather than an organism, as dead rather than alive.
The reason our current system of material production is killing the world is because it has come to view it as dead. So what is there to love then?