As part of this year's eighth seminar of the Traveling University of Nature "Anima Animalia and the Rights of Nature" (DOTEK in Horní Maršov), on Thursday, August 11, leading Australian ecophilosopher Freya Mathews gave an online lecture "Let Animals and Nature Do More Work", in which she summarized some of the conclusions of her latest books The Dao of Civilization (Tao Civilization, 2023). She considered under what conditions it would be possible to transform the current industrialized technological civilization so that it could develop a true ecological consciousness capable of caring for the integrity of the biosphere as a whole. The author believes that the key to this is the development of our “co-practice with nature”. Translation: Jiří Zemánek.
In this talk, I want to approach the issue of animals through the lens of ecology. I argue that we cannot secure the future of animals – or at least of wild animals, which make up the vast majority of animal species – without building our civilization on a new ecological foundation.
The majority of the lecture will be devoted to the question of whether it is indeed possible for a highly industrialized society such as ours to evolve into an ecological civilization. In answering this question, I will base my answer on the arguments I have presented in my recently published book The Dao of Civilization: a Letter to China (The Tao of Civilization: A Letter to China). Later I will focus specifically on the question of animals, but I hope that by then it will be clear why I believe this question depends on ecological reasoning.
So is it realistic to hope that a transition to an ecological civilization can occur today? By ecological civilization I do not mean only a civilization that can manage nature well enough to ensure the preservation of the flow of resources on which industry depends, but rather a civilization that is primarily dedicated to developing the integrity of the biosphere.
Certainly, in the last forty years or so, an ideological movement has emerged in Western societies that aims to strengthen an ecological ethic and that challenges the environmental excesses of our modern hyper-industrial and extractive economy. This movement often takes the form of ethics a respect for nature that demands that our moral considerations extend to non-human beings, including living systems as such, regardless of their utility or other value for our human purposes. My own life’s work has developed within this discourse. Unfortunately, however, this discourse has remained largely an academic exercise – an ideology rather than a lived consciousness, a set of moral principles that may seem rationally perfect but which are not embedded in the living fabric of everyday life.
After all, if every detail of our lives is mediated by advanced industrial and information technologies, then our perception of reality will also reflect this technically mediated environment. Our default worldview will be imprinted with the principles that shape this technological environment and our own place in it. This default worldview will determine our everyday assumptions and guide our everyday decisions. In other words, it will be the consciousness we actually inhabit, however much we may be intellectually convinced of the truth of a more ecological alternative. Attending wilderness workshops, ecophilosophy courses, or even nature hikes will not actually change this basic consciousness if, upon returning to everyday life, we re-immerse ourselves in our old industrialized environment.
This view – that the worldviews that characterize different societies or historical epochs are based on the material conditions of everyday economic life within those societies – is, of course, the view that Marx called historical materialism. Throughout my life, I have become more and more convinced of the basic truth of historical materialism. Early in my career, I had initially thought that if we could refute our old mechanistic worldview on a rational level and show that a relational and holistic model was closer to the truth, then society would change its ways. But that turned out to be a vain expectation. Even those of us who had been actively working to develop these more relational and organic models had not changed our lifestyles in any significant way. How could we expect society as a whole to change? No, it seemed increasingly clear to me that it was precisely the basic practice of a given society – the basic ways in which people interact with reality in the pursuit of their livelihoods – that determine a society's particular worldview. People's lived consciousness is essentially a function of practice.
For example, pre-agricultural peoples who depended on natural ecosystems for their needs must have developed complex and intimate forms of ecological understanding that shaped their basic ideas about reality and their basic social and cosmological values. These assumptions and values reflected the relational, holistic, and self-generative structure of ecological systems and situated human intentions in a larger context than human intentions.
In contrast, agricultural peoples tended to separate themselves from the surrounding ecology and create their own spaces in which they provided for their own sustenance—by growing crops, raising animals, building permanent settlements, and filling the resulting human enclaves with goods created by their own human efforts. Agricultural practice thus naturally led to a consciousness of man's separation from nature—and ultimately to an almost exclusive focus on everything human at the expense of that which was more than human. It was during this agrarian phase that permanent settlements transformed into urban centers; wealth arose from overproduction; as a result, human societies became socially and politically stratified and labor specialized; and religions based on anthropomorphic gods and goddesses emerged. Anthropocentrism was born, and with it a dualistic and hierarchical understanding of the order of things.
Agricultural civilizations eventually developed into the scientific-technological form of civilization known today as modernity. Our current advanced industrial practices reinforce the anthropocentrism of agrarian civilization and encourage us to perceive reality mechanistically and, more recently, computationally, as data and that's how they treated her.
As long as we are supported and sustained by such practices, that is, practices based on science and technology, it will be difficult for us to truly live in a more ecological view, however much we might wish to do so on a philosophical or ideological level.1
So what can we do?
Is there a way to overcome our ingrained industrial consciousness and develop a truly ecological perspective on life – an ecological consciousness that we actually live?
Taking historical materialism as a guide, it seems that the only way we could make such a shift is through radical change in practice.2
What might such a change look like in practice?
A new form of practice would likely have to reproduce, in today's significantly changed environmental and social conditions, the basic structural features of the practice that were characteristic of pre-agrarian societies – that is, those societies in which ecological consciousness originally took root.
What are these basic structural elements?
Pre-agrarian practice revolved around wild ecology. People were materially dependent on the continued flourishing of this ecology, and ensuring its integrity was therefore a primary goal for them. However, in pursuing this goal, they were not just passive gatherers, but played an active role, providing ecological stimuli to the landscape when necessary – such as judicious burning or minor disturbance of the soil by digging with sticks – with the aim of promoting regeneration or biodiversity, if necessary.
These caregiving practices were in no way similar to agricultural practices, which consisted of clearing native forests and woodlands and replacing them with crops and domesticated animals. While agrarian practices sought to preserve nature control and change the natural ecology in an environment fully controlled by man, care practice seeks only in nature participate and to support its further flourishing so that it can continue to serve the needs of humans and many other species.
Unlike the ethos of control implicit in agrarian practice, pre-agrarian practice is based on sharing activity with other species, on sharing loads associated with the maintenance of life. Practice, understood from a pre-agrarian perspective, is not, as it was for Marx, the exclusive domain of man, but involves interspecific activity and interdependence. In other words, practice is always co-practice – an interspecific effort.
It is obvious that such a joint practice would require a high degree of ecological awareness on the part of man. It is also obvious that it would lead to a real respect towards all species involved in such a common endeavor: these species play their part in it of their own free will. They are not domesticated, confined, or otherwise subject to human will, but act in their own interests and govern themselves. As sovereign beings upon whose will human well-being depends, they demand respect.
However, this first basic feature of pre-agrarian practice is followed by another feature that is important to mention. It is the fact that such cooperation, which involves the sharing of activities between species – what I call synergies – is more efficientthan a practice that is solely led or controlled by a human.
Let me explain. By synergy, I mean a relationship between participants that ensures that each party, acting in accordance with its own needs, incidentally provides for the needs of the other party. To illustrate what synergy looks like in practice, we can look at what biologists call “ecosystem engineering.” A classic example of an ecosystem engineer is the beaver: beavers seek shelter from the raging waters of a river by building dams and beaver castles from tree trunks that they cut from the riparian vegetation. In doing so, they help to divert water into the floodplain, creating rich wetlands that provide habitat and resources for many other species. Building these dams and shelters is no burden to the beaver—it is what the beavers want most of all, of their own free will. They happen to want exactly what a number of other species need. And if true synergy is to prevail, the activities of these other wetland species – whether in the form of dredging river banks, fertilizing the soil, building nests or aerating the water – will contribute to the continued functionality of the wetland and thus ensure the supply of aquatic plants and wood that the beavers in turn need for their livelihood. In this way, all parties to the synergistic system are maintained without unnecessary effort – they act only in accordance with their own deepest motives and desires, but in doing so they support each other.
The key to synergy is, in a nutshell, that each party wants only what the other party wants. For example, if beavers decided to hide in hollow trees or logs instead of in stick dens, the wetlands would soon degrade, wetland wildlife would lose their habitat, aquatic plants that the beavers themselves need would become less available, and the entire system of relationships would begin to break down. The logic of synergy is adaptation and of least resistance – one does not fulfill one’s needs by controlling others, by imposing oneself on them, by overcoming their will and thwarting their wishes. That would require effort – an effort to overcome the other’s resistance. Rather, one tries to accommodate others and wants from them only what they voluntarily provide in taking care of themselves. (Of course, sometimes this logic of adaptation only applies at the population level, rather than at the individual level: at the individual level, predators do not adapt to the will of their prey, but must make an effort to overcome its resistance. However, at the population level, prey adapt to the needs of predators and vice versa, because predation keeps populations of prey species in check and prevents them from overgrazing or otherwise degrading their own environment.)
How different this pre-agrarian practice of synergy is from the energy-intensive nature of our current industrial practice! As our desires for goods multiply and expand without any regard for the availability of the ecosystem, the effort and therefore the energy required to produce these commodities increases without limit. We use external sources of energy to produce them instead of depleting our own bodies, burning the planet in the process.
So a practice that is built on synergy is far more energy efficient, and therefore far more logical, than a practice based solely on human control, imposition, and effort. But in exchange for less effort, such a practice requires that we align our desires with ecological possibilities—that we desire only what the ecosystems need. And that is a condition that we have not yet shown any sign of accepting.
When we discover this key truth that synergy results in much greater efficiency than the ethos of control that underlies agrarian and industrial practice, then I believe we will essentially rediscover the Law, sometimes called the First Law, that is central to many pre-agrarian societies. As Aboriginal people here in Australia point out, such a Law is not merely a social construct or convention like legal systems in the West, but is inherent to the land itself—it is part of the logic of being. The First Law in this sense finds its echo in the original Chinese tradition, in Taoism, where it is known as wu wei – that is, the path of least effort or least resistance, which is decisive for anyone who seeks to align with the dynamics at the core of the cosmos, with Tao. [For a full account of the parallels between synergy, the First Law, and Taoism and their relationship to practice, see my book Dao of Civilization / The Tao of civilization, Anthem Press, London–New York 2023.]
So now that we have a clearer idea of the essential features of pre-agrarian practice – that it follows this synergistic logic of adaptation and least resistance – let us return to the question of whether we would be able to create such forms of practice under the vastly different conditions that we find in our contemporary, ecologically degraded and overpopulated world.
I think the answer is yes. The examples we have so far are few, but some of them are quite remarkable, so let’s start with those in the hope that as this approach becomes more widely known, more examples can be thought of. I will call these forms of practice “nature-driven practice” as opposed to “human-driven practice” to suggest that these practices allow nature to do most of the work in creating the outcome we desire.
My first and favorite example of nature-led practice is Pleistocene Park.
Pleistocene Park is an experimental reserve in far northern Siberia, founded in the 1990s by Russian biologist Sergei Zimov. In this project, Zimov is trying to show that the melting of permafrost, the permanently frozen soil that is one of the main causes of potential global warming, could be slowed or even stopped mass the return of Pleistocene megafauna to the Siberian tundra. This tundra was once – until the end of the last ice age – a vast grassland, the so-called mammoth steppe, which stretched from the Arctic through China to parts of Europe. These grasslands were maintained and farmed by huge herds of Pleistocene megafauna – mammoths, musk oxen, bison, reindeer and horses, along with their predators, wolves and tigers. During the winter, these large herbivores trampled the snow, allowing the soil beneath it to freeze to a great depth, instead of warming up under the thick snow cover. In this way, permafrost was maintained. Herbivores also grazed all the shrub vegetation, thus preventing the degradation of the steppes to shrubland. Thanks to their deep root mats, the grasses held the soil in place and sequestered carbon much more effectively than tundra or taiga. Zimov's idea was that restoring the mammoth steppe would help regulate the climate on a planetary scale. Zimov reintroduced large herbivores into the Pleistocene Park that functionally corresponded to the Pleistocene fauna. His experimental findings to date have confirmed his expectations: the soil temperature inside the reserve was found to be up to 25 degrees lower than the soil temperature outside.3
If the Pleistocene Park project were to be scaled up, it would represent a wildlife-led approach to solving our climate problem that would not only allow us to solve this problem with minimal effort on our part, but would also permanently restore large populations of wildlife in the Northern Hemisphere.
Extensive Veta La Palma aquaculture farm in Spain represents another example of a wildlife-led approach, this time linked to food production. It is described as an example of "extensive" agriculture as opposed to "intensive" or factory farming.4 Extensive ‘agriculture’ involves restoring habitats for a range of wildlife, which are then selectively hunted. At Veta la Palma, extensive land reclamation was initially carried out to restore marshes that had previously been drained for cattle farming. These marshes have since become both the largest waterfowl reserve in Europe and a major commercially viable supplier of wild seafood. The huge populations of waterfowl – sometimes numbering up to 600,000 individuals and comprising up to 250 species – maintain the habitat in optimum condition and provide food for life in the salty sea water. Rather than seeing these birds as competitors to fish, the estate managers understand them in a classical way. wu wei for allies, for ecological helpers who help do the hard work of maintaining conditions favorable for fish development.
Another example of a nature-based approach to addressing climate change and securing food and fuel is reforestation of coastal ocean areas with seaweed. It is estimated that if 9 % of the ocean were to be reforested with kelp and other seaweeds, a huge 53 billion tonnes of CO2 would be removed from the atmosphere every year. Other benefits would include deacidification of the surrounding seawater, thereby restoring an ideal environment for molluscs and therefore crustaceans to grow; according to one study, kelp forests at the scale envisaged could support sustainable fisheries, providing 200 kilograms of seafood per person per year for 10 billion people. Kelp itself is also important as a raw material, as a fertiliser and a source of biogas, while other seaweeds are suitable for human consumption. All of these benefits could be achieved with very little effort on our part: kelp reforestation requires only minimal infrastructure. In addition to the benefits it brings to us, it significantly increases marine biodiversity.
[More examples of nature-led forms of practice can be found in my aforementioned book.]
My conclusion is that if we want a world full of wildlife, then we need to find synergistic ways to connect our own practices with wild populations, rather than relegating them to ever-shrinking nature reserves on the fringes of a global industrial empire. This would ensure their place in the world while helping us meet our own needs with minimal effort on our part. It would also create the conditions for a truly ecological consciousness to re-emerge in society, one in which respect for other species emerges spontaneously from the lived experience of our co-practice with them.
Comment
1 How this division of modern consciousness has played out can be seen in the history of the conservation movement over the past forty years or so. Throughout this time, industrial development has accelerated around the world, disrupting and decimating ecosystems on a scale and scale not seen on Earth perhaps since the last great extinction 66 million years ago. Meanwhile, these processes are also spewing waste on a scale not seen perhaps since the transition from anaerobic to aerobic microbial life 2 billion years ago.
This onslaught has been limited to some extent by the sense of moral considerations that are reflected in environmental ethics. Under the influence of these considerations, conservationists have sought to set a certain limit to permissible development, often contenting themselves with the requirement that development projects must not lead to the extinction of the affected species. For several decades, conservationists have tried to maintain this limit—to enforce the moral rule that if a development project was likely to lead to the extinction of the affected species, such as golden salamanders or spotted frogs, it should be stopped.
At the same time, conservationists were also establishing protected areas – national parks and the like – where fauna and flora could be protected from the worst impacts of industrial development.
But in recent years, the moral imperative that development projects not cause extinctions has been quietly shelved as conservationists have come to terms with the fact that in the face of the current threat of mass extinctions, even this minimal restriction can no longer be insisted on. On the other hand, conservation reserves continue to be created, but everywhere, and especially in the global South, they are under relentless pressure from many sides, including poverty, war, and political corruption, as well as from the economic imperatives that drive corporate capitalism.
At the end of forty years of conservation efforts, we are left with a landscape devastated by human exploitation, mitigated only by small island “reserves” set aside here and there to protect ecologically significant plants and animals. This landscape reflects the divided consciousness of modernity—divided between a dominant, ingrained technological consciousness that serves as modernity’s “operations manual,” so to speak, and a marginal, merely intellectual corrective to this operating system that we might call environmental ethics.
2 This would require those of us who are already ideologically committed to ecological ethics to not limit our work to the level of philosophy or discourse, but to actively engage in the question of practice. This means that it is no longer enough for us to proclaim “the need for a new, ecological ethic” on a philosophical level. We must work with designers, biologists, climatologists, and so on, to invent appropriate new forms of practice that we can then promote at every level of policy, planning, design, and decision-making. This is how we can solve this difficult problem.
3 Pleistocene: 2.5 million years ago to 12,000 years ago.
Last Ice Age: 115,000 to 12,000 years ago.
Permafrost – deep subsurface layers of soil filled with organic material frozen for thousands of years that has not been able to decompose. When permafrost thaws, this vegetation decomposes and releases carbon and methane gases. See: https://pleistocenepark.ru/