Science and Sensibility: Negotiating an Ecology of Place
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Science and Sensibility: Negotiating an Ecology of Place
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Overview
Science and Sensibility argues for the need for ecology to engage with philosophical values and economic motivations in a political process of negotiation, with the goal of shaping humans' treatment of the natural world. Michael Vincent McGinnis aims to reframe ecology so it might have greater “trans-scientific” awareness of the roles and interactions among multiple stakeholders in socioecological systems, and he also maintains that deep ecological knowledge of specific places will be crucial to supporting a sustainable society. He uses numerous specific case studies from watershed, coastal, and marine habitats to illustrate how place-based ecological negotiation can occur, and how reframing our negotiation process can influence conservation, restoration, and environmental policy in effective ways.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520960756 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 03/22/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Science and Sensibility
Negotiating an Ecology of Place
By Michael Vincent McGinnis
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-96075-6
CHAPTER 1
Negotiating Ecology in an Age of Climate Change
Ecology is nothing but this: the evaluation of place.
— Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2013, 33).
The machine is stuttering and the engineers are in panic. They are wondering if perhaps they do not understand it as well as they imagined. They are wondering whether they are controlling it at all or whether, perhaps, it is controlling them.
— Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto
Imagine that as you watch the day go by you are sitting on your front porch whittling on a stick with a knife. With each whittle the stick is reduced. The wood shavings are at your feet. There is barely a stick left in your hand, and the shavings are swept up and used as kindling to light a fire that night. The whittling stick is a metaphor for how nature is whittled away by our continued use and abuse of the planet's ecosystems. The impacts of this whittling away of nature are often difficult to perceive and realize. For instance, the impacts of global climate change and other human impacts on nature and society are, at first glance, hard to recognize. Springtime may arrive late, or the sounds of spring birds may be missing from a forest. In his Nobel Prize–winning book Raga, Le Clézio describes the ocean as an "invisible continent" with its life flourishing unperceived or unnoticed. Akin to the sea life under the surface of the blue horizon, ecosystems are a mere shadow of their referential state. The natural world seems to be receding like a mirage in the Arizona desert. We are whittling away at the great circle of animals, plants, and insects that were once part of our communities.
"Precisely at the moment when we have overcome the earth and become unearthly in our modes of dwelling" (Harrison 1996, 428), we need to restore our kinship with the animate world and the places we inhabit. We are disabled creatures dislocated in a wounded landscape. Species loneliness in a wounded landscape moves us to want to restore our relationship with place and others, or, to put it another way, modern humanity yearns to re-establish and restore an ecology of shared identity. Rather than understanding the world through a relationship with earthly entities, our culture emphasizes the human ability to experience nature as a quality (or quantity) that springs from scientific, technological, bureaucratic, and economic understanding. Human beings remain isolated actors in an earthly cage; the world is technologically divided, scientifically categorized and manipulated, and perceived as absent of spiritual and intrinsic worth. Yet, the natural world is something more than the image depicted on the television or computer screen. Nature is more than an environment to behold, control, and manage.
How can we adapt to the social and ecological changes brought on by climate change if we hardly notice the changes? This chapter explores the wicked characteristics of global climate change, and the challenge of adaptation. Cultural adaptation requires a deep connection to place and one's region; it requires an understanding of the uniqueness of particular places that human beings are dependent on.
One consequence of industrialization is that we have created a "secondary nature" — a nature transformed by our use of it, by our technologies and machines, and by our behavior. Indeed, the science of ecology cannot tell us what is natural about ecosystems. The meanings of nature and place have significantly changed over time. Even the term landscape has lost its meaning. The root meaning of landscape is a forest stripped of trees, a hilltop cleared of native brush, a place where the natural terrain was removed and settled. The natural landscape is an oxymoron (Park 2006, 9). We inhabit landscapes transformed; so there is less nature or nativity to draw from, less to sense and perceive. This is particularly the case in marine systems, as marine scientist Jeremy Jackson (2001, 5411) explains:
The persistent myth of the oceans as wilderness blinded ecologists to the massive loss of marine ecological diversity caused by overfishing and human inputs from the land over the past centuries. Until the 1980s, coral reefs, kelp forests, and other coastal habitats were discussed in scientific journals and textbooks as "natural" or "pristine" communities with little or no reference to the pervasive absence of large vertebrates or the widespread effects of pollution. This is because our concept of what is natural today is based on personal experience at the expense of historical perspective. Thus, "natural" means the way things were when we first saw them or exploited them, and "unnatural" means all subsequent change.
For instance, polar bears of the Arctic face a secondary nature in the ice ecology, and their abundance and distribution will likely diminish as a consequence (Post et al. 2013). As the Arctic ice retreats, polar bears are changing their behavior. In some areas, white-beaked dolphins are moving to the northern pole where they have not been seen before. Polar bears have shifted from those species that are ice dependent, such as ringed seals, to these white-beaked dolphins (Aars et al. 2015). Polar bears are also moving farther north, where there is still persistent ice. In addition, scientists have discovered that polar bears are mating with grizzly bears (Barnosky 2009). These changes in polar bear behavior are consequences of the secondary nature they face in a changing Artic ecology.
Changes in the Arctic ice ecology will also lead to further economic exploitation of the coastal and marine areas of the region. As the United Nations Environmental Programme (2013, 5) reports:
Warming and melting of the sea ice and land snow offers greater human access to the Arctic region. Limited offshore oil, gas and mineral exploitation is already underway and will certainly increase in coming years, bringing new opportunities as well as increased risks of oil spills and pollution. Summer shipping through the Northern Sea Route along the Russian northern coast is beginning to increase, and traffic through the Northwest Passage is expected to grow, as is tourism and marine transport of goods. Some Arctic marine fisheries will become more accessible to regional and foreign fishing fleets.
While climate change will contribute to serious ecological and cultural impacts, economic growth and development in some areas will contribute to the globalization process.
Historically, indigenous peoples adapted to and responded to climate-related events (Barnes and Dove 2015). Cultural adaptation has long been one product of the coevolutionary relationships that exist between diverse peoples, places, and regions (Costanza, Graumich, and Steffens 2006). Cultures have adapted or failed to adapt to food and water insecurity brought on by climate change (Barnes and Dove 2015). Cultural adaptation requires a knowledge of place that is gained through direct human participation in nature. In time, experiential, intuitive forms of knowledge are developed and serve adaptation. These knowledge systems are based on a unique and intimate understanding of an ecology of place.
There is no guarantee that a culture will adapt to change, and there are many examples of cultures that failed to respond to changes in their ecological conditions. In many cases, adaptation required a deep place-based knowledge system that took thousands of years to develop. In Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), Jared Diamond describes five key factors that contribute to cultural collapse: climate change, hostile neighbors, collapse of essential trading partners, ecological problems, and failure to adapt to these ecological threats. Diamond describes several serious ecological threats that jeopardize our capacity to adapt: habitat destruction, loss of soil, drought, overuse of resources, the introduction of invasive species, pollution, energy shortages, and climate change. Whether we can adapt to the challenges we face will essentially be based on choices we make as individuals and as members of institutions. This places the burden of responsibility on each of us and on our respective communities. It is not merely a question of relying on government to respond.
The choice to continue to whittle away at nature's substance and integrity (the metaphorical stick) threatens our shared capacity to adapt. My fear is that our capacity to adapt and respond to the social and ecological changes brought on by the overuse of resources and climate disturbance is being diminished. Ecological insecurity is the direct result of turning away from the places we once depended on for nourishment and sustenance. We have little control over our own destiny — our water is transported from thousands of miles away, our food is imported by container ships that travel thousands of miles across the ocean, and our energy is derived from sources well beyond our horizon. As a consequence, we are increasingly vulnerable and at risk from the changes that are likely to occur in water, food, and energy availability. Substantial declines in water, food, and energy resources will result from climate change. Our dependence on the global economy leaves us increasingly at risk from climate-related changes to ecosystem services.
The scale of climate-related impacts has a tragic dimension. We live under threat of tragedy. The tragedy endangers what we hold in common and is produced by how we act in common. Everything is fundamentally at stake. If we are to adapt and respond to both the overuse of resources and the multiple impacts of climate change we will need to face tragic choices — choices about how we consume resources, how we treat and relate to nature, how we treat one another, and how we begin to restore our relationship to nature and community. Calabresi and Bobbitt (1978) describe the inevitability of tragic choices in modern institutions. Basic to the tragic form is the recognition of the inevitability of unresolved tensions that exist between diverse interests, beliefs, and values about government, nature, society, and our economy. In this case, the continued growth orientation of modern society is in conflict with the basic life-giving values associated with the planet. Simply reducing greenhouse gas emissions, for example, without addressing the deeper cultural (e.g., economic) and biophysical consequences of globalization is a tragic choice that contributes to ecological injury and social degradation. The question is whether human beings and their institutions are willing and able to make the tragic choice to protect and sustain the life-giving values carried by nature. If so, we will need to change the way we use resources, and protect enough of the remnant nature that exists to forge a future that can maintain the life-producing values of the biosphere. Industrial society lacks the ecological and communal sensibilities that are needed to respond and adapt to the substantive loss of ecosystem health and integrity. As consumers in a global economy, we remain disconnected from the place we inhabit, and are less aware of our surroundings. We are less capable of noticing the changes that we are causing. At diverse scales of social interaction we avoid taking the necessary steps to change and respond to risks and vulnerabilities. At stake is the diversity of the planet's life-support mechanisms, and the likely diminishment of the planet's cultural diversity.
At the same time that we are losing ecosystems we are losing the traditional cultures and their knowledge and ways (Maffi 2008; Maffi and Woodley 2010; Berkes 2012). In this sense there are biocultural impacts from climate change and overuse of resources. First, climate change has impacts on the biosphere by changing the life-giving characteristics of the planet. Second, climate change erodes the diversity of language and knowledge systems associated with the ethnosphere (e.g., the ethnic diversity of the biosphere). Ecological collapse is proceeded by the loss of a profound knowledge base that once served adaptation and cultural resilience. As we lose traditional cultures and their knowledge systems, we lose the capacity to learn from them.
SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES
One answer to the crisis is to turn to one's home place. A necessary first step to address the range of social and ecological threats and impacts we are facing is for individuals and communities to become more familiar with the places they inhabit. We need to cultivate an intuitive and experiential knowledge of our respective place, bioregion, or community.
A local farmer and I are walking his walnut orchard. He tells me that this is the first year in four generations that the walnut trees have not borne fruit. His cattle no longer have feed, and the grass is dry. The river has vanished. He has had to sell off his herd. We sit under a great old oak tree, and look across the Santa Ynez River valley. The branches of the walnut trees are blowing in the wind, and in the distance the fingers of a distant fog are spread out across the valley and foothills. There is a chill in the wind. He wonders out loud. He describes the impact of climate change on his crop and cattle, and wonders if his family ranch can survive.
A similar story is told by a fisher. His nets are empty. The sardines off the coast of California have crashed, and the federal government has closed the fishery this year. He tells me stories of fishing with his father for giant black sea bass and swordfish. Swordfish were harpooned while they slept on the surface of the sea. But now the big fish are gone. In their place, new marine resources are caught and exported. We have been fishing down the food chain for fifty years.
Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes(1962) is a novel that reveals the conflicting nature of good and evil that exists in individuals and society. Climate change is the wicked and dark by-product of our thirst for the "black gold" and coal used to feed industrialization and economic growth. For some, this dark side of modern civilization and our continued dependence on fossil fuels will culminate in a social, economic, and political diaspora, an unraveling of industrial civilization and biospheric destruction. Rather than perpetuating the denial of the inevitable collapse, the Dark Mountain Project is a network of writers, artists, and philosophers who are committed to reflecting the ecological reality of this diaspora. The project grew out of the despair and the belief that the humanities were failing to be honest about the scale of the impacts of wicked climate change. The members of the project hope that by writing and creating art they can offer a way of healing to establish a new foundation for changing the world.
This chapter represents a more hopeful response. There is a light emanating from the hearth and firepit. The darkness exists beyond the hearth, and is worth recognizing. The darkness exists on the horizon. But closer to home and in the warmth of the firepit we can find a hope and avoid the fear of that darkness.
There is no "silver bullet" that can resolve the climate crisis. Climate adaptation will require a variety of responses at diverse scales, and across different locations and regions. Richard Lazarus (2009, 1159) refers to the challenge posed by climate change as a "super wicked problem" that "defies resolution because of the enormous interdependencies, uncertainties, circularities, and conflicting stakeholders implicated by any effort to develop a solution." The super wicked nature of the multiple threats posed by climate change has to do, in part, with the complexity associated with the multiple scales of the impacts of the changing climate. While we are members of particular places we are also dependent on the life-giving values of the biosphere. The biophysical scale of climate change has local, regional, and global characteristics.
The wickedness of climate change has impacts on local ecosystems and the global biosphere. In this sense, the global impacts of climate change can vary from one region to another, and it can be difficult to predict local impacts on species diversity, habitats, and ecosystems. The diverse scales in the ecology of the planet's biosphere are analogous to the notion of the Sri Yantra. The yantra is a ritual object of Nepal, which represents the nucleus of the visible, and knowable, a linked diagram of lines that reflect particular energy sources. There are different kinds ofyantras, such as the Sri Yantra or Great Yantra. Other lesser yantras (Om Yantra, Kali Yantra) are segments of the great embracing Sri Yantra. The notion of yantra serves as an analogy for the substance and energy of earth — the source of life, the connecting energy source that unites all earthly entities, including places and the people who inhabit ecosystems (see figure 1.1). It is this maintenance of the energy of the Sri Yantra or Planet Earth that is at stake today. The life-giving values of ecosystems produce our water, energy, food, and the air we breathe. We remain dependent on healthy ecosystems to survive. We also inhabit many of the lesser yantras of earth. The sea can be considered a lesser yantra of the earth, and most of us depend on it for the protein it produces. The ocean is also a major contributor to the oxygen we breathe, and stores the carbon emissions from our burning of fossil fuels. A creek or river can be considered a lesser yantra of an entire watershed or river basin, with its tributaries linked to the sea. Water is the source of all life. Our hydrological modifications, pollution, overuse, and degradation of watershed ecosystems also contribute to our rising ecological insecurities. Each animal and habitat is connected to the greater yantra of the biosphere. The salmon swims upstream and downstream.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Science and Sensibility by Michael Vincent McGinnis. Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Preface: Conversations with Sea and Stone1. Negotiating Ecology in an Age of Climate Change
2. Household Words: Cultivating an Ecological Sensibility
3. Re-inhabitation: Watershed-Based Activism in Alta California
4. A River between Two Worlds: Watersheds and Wastesheds in Aotearoa (New Zealand)
5. Organic Machines and the End of Offshore Oil
6. The Politics of Civic Science: Marine Life Protection in California
7. The Challenge of Place-Based Ocean Governance in New Zealand
8. Toward a Blue Economy: Songs of Migration and the Leviathan of Global Trade by Sea
9. Islands in a Turbulent Sea
10. Restoring Place in the Theater of the Anthropocene
Bibliography
Index