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Micro-Landscapes of the Anthropocene

"Real Nature"

From Uncommon Ground, Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, William Cronon. Looking at what constitutes as "natural"

When discussing their found objects, at the suggestion of Donna Harroway, the most interesting they found as a group was about the Rockies where huge amounts of toxic waste were dumped at natural sites during and following world war II. This deeply affected local populations' willingness to live near or develop the sites. As a result, nature flourished, and some local fauna became some of the most diverse in the region, because of the unique circumstances the pollution created and their isolation from human intervention. This presented an ecological problem - cleaning up the area of "non-natural" waste could interrupt the delicate ecosystem that evolved, but not cleaning it meant the ecosystem would remain "contaminated".
This speaks to the division between natural and non natural, which is more valuable, and what to prioritise when the boundary between the two becomes blurred. I found the question of the existence of real of "unfettered" nature here very interesting because it made me think about that division, that prioritisation, and how we somehow need broader guidelines as to what is "natural" in an increasingly "unnatural"because the interaction between the two is sometimes apparently beneficial. How do we choose what "deserves" protection, and what "needs" cleaning?

William, C. (1996) Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. Norton: USA

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A Correlationist Fantasy Morton derives his theory of 'correlationism' from fellow contemporary philosopher Quentin Meillassoux, who describes it as a quality of thought that maintains that we, as humans, will only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, but never to either state independently of the other (5). In that way, understandings of 'being', the correlationist argues, will always ever be dictated and mediated by the nature of human thought.

Take for example, the garden lawn. In a house without children or an avid gardener or backyard cricketer, lawns become perceived as a classic Augéan non-place (in the other examples, they become purposed as leisure space). The lawn is subconsciously envisaged (and laid) as an area that is bereft of any particular characteristics other than its embodied, self-reflexive purpose as a medium through which one transits. Sure, it's prettier than an airport or escalator but it is still often conceived in human-logic as merely the space you cross to get between street and front door threshold, or back-door and compost bin. In ecological thinking there would be no non-places, or for that matter, spaces falsely endowed with a specific purpose.

The 'correlationist fantasy', which Morton theorises, is founded on his belief that human society has long been blinded by a fantastical human-centred ontology. Why, he asks, should things only become meaningful when defined by their relationship to the human (39)? In the presence of the non-human, particularly the hyper-object, other beings have made themselves known - ones that are decidedly foreign to the human thought in their affective temporal and spatial vastness, but oh so enmeshed in our beings.

A few of my particularly favourite quotes are:

On the idea that nature is infinitely dynamic, malleable and plastic-
"Infinite malleability sounds great until one confronts a large enough entity, such as a black hole, or entropy. Malleable Nature is a dream about a certain tiny set of objects, a set that is malleable enough to maintain the stability of the dream. Since to be an entity at all is to be vulnerable to 1+n entities that can destroy you (there is always some externality, as I shall argue here), this dream must be limited. It cannot talk about the entire set of objects in the universe. To be physical is to be fragile. Dreams end somewhere" (40).

On the idea, that in recognising the plurality of worlds that are evoked and understood by each one of the Earth's agents (as per von Uexküll's Umwelt) there is not real 'pure', 'unfettered' nature, just as there is no infinitely malleable nature either -
"The very notion of pristine wilderness is just the reified inverse of the infinite plasticity of things [...] If we subtract human specialness and the uniqueness of human agency, we see that every entity in the universe is ruthlessly at work reifying every other object to suit its own nefarious ends" (40).

Perhaps next time you walk across that lawn of yours, consider what else it might look like to who-else.

RELATED CONCEPTS: flat-ontology, thing-theory, hyperobjects, entanglement, intra-action, eco-skeleton, post-humanism, post-human ethics, vibrant matter, umwelt, bioblob

Meillassoux, Quentin, et al. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unsw/detail.action?docID=742294.

Morton, Timothy. ‘From Modernity to the Anthropocene: Ecology and Art in the Age of Asymmetry’. International Social Science Journal, vol. 63, no. 207–208, 2012, pp. 39–51. primoa.library.unsw.edu.au, doi:10.1111/issj.12014.

- Bridget