Today we present an extract from the opening essay ‘Economy as Ecological Livelihood’ from the collection ‘Manifesto for Living in the Anthropocene’ Edited by Katherine Gibson, Deborah Bird Rose, and Ruth Fincher and published by Punctum Books. The book is licensed with Creative Commons to be freely shared.
ECONOMY AS ECOLOGICAL LIVELIHOOD by J.K. GIBSON -GRAHAM AND ETHAN MILLER
Can we overcome our hyper-separation from the more-than-human world and take up membership in a thoroughly ecological community of life? While the demands of “the economy” are set in opposition to the needs of “the environment”; while the economy is seen as a vulnerable system that cannot accommodate allocations of social wealth to earth-repair and species protection without risking collapse; while the economic “we” continues to squander and ignore the gifts of the more-than-human world that gives us life, the answer seems to be a depressing “No.” To answer “Yes” we must begin to rethink and re-enact the relationship between economy and ecology.
We have inherited a vision of “the economy” as a distinct sphere of human activity, marked off from the social, the political, and the ecological as a domain of individualized, monetized, rational-maximizing calculation. This economic sphere rests upon and utilizes an earthly base of (often invisible) ecologies that are swept up into its domain to become “resources,” passive inputs for production and consumption measured primarily by their market value. Economy is “naturalized” in the sense that it is presented as a realm of objective, law-like processes and demands; yet this naturalization is at the same time a process by which the more-than-human world is affirmed as external to our economic lives, and thecomplexities of our interdependencies are rendered invisible and unaccountable. The economy thus assumes a presence and dynamism—manifest, for example, in the demand for endless growth—that appears to be independent from the living world upon which it depends.
This powerful and abstracted construction of the economy emerged from and enabled agricultural and industrial revolutions that gave rise to urbanization, increased standards of living for many, and vast and unprecedented mobilizations and transformations of energy and matter on the part of certain humans. But it also produced and legitimated tremendous violence and inequity, and has generated unforeseen impacts that are undermining the long-term viability of earthly survival not just for humans, but for myriad other species and more-than-human communities. Enabling as it has been for some, this view of economy-ecology relations now stands squarely in the way of imagining and enacting an ethics for living in the Anthropocene.
Recognizing “the economy” as a historical, discursive roduction rather than an objective ontological category (Mitchell 1998, 2008; Callon 2007) can enable us to begin exploring different ways of thinking and experiencing our processes of livelihood-making. What if we were to see economic activities not in terms of a separate sphere of human activity, but instead as thoroughly social and ecological? What if we were to see economic sociality as a necessary condition of life itself? What if we were to see the economy as ecology as a web of human ecological behaviors no longer bounded but fully integrated into a complex flow of ethical and energetic interdependencies: births, contaminations, self-organizings, mergings, extinctions, and patterns of habitat maintenance and destruction?
Starting from this premise, we might begin to see the history of economic thought as a discursive enclosure of ecological space analogous to—and, in fact, historically parallel to the material and legal enclosure of commons from the 16th century to the present (Perelman 2000). Just as the discourse of individual private property emerged with its legal rules of ownership, use and transfer, divorcing property (as a thing) from social relations, so the discourse of a separate economy evolved with and through terms, techniques and disciplinary practices that increasingly differentiated and distanced it from other spheres of human and non-human behavior and interaction. Economy, then, was produced when discursive boundaries, at once symbolic and material, were drawn around a particular configuration of ecological relation ships specifically those between certain humans and a world made into resources for their instrumental use. Diverse processes of human livelihood were reduced to narrow logics. Sociality was reserved only for those who count as “human.” And all more-than-human life was relegated to the domain of passive objects.
By making a certain kind of sense of the world, this discourse of “the economy” literally made sense—transforming our sensual perceptions and experiences, altering the material and conceptual conditions of possibility for our identifications with others, and changing our abilities to see, think and feel certain inter-relationships and the responsibilities that come with such experiences.
Our challenge is to engage in forms of thought and practice that undermine the conditions of possibility for thinking “the economy” as a hyper-separated domain beyond the reach of politics, ethics and the dynamics of social and ecological interdependence. How might we cultivate genuinely ethical ecological-economic sensibilities? How might we reconfigure our notions of economy and ecology in ways that
help us take responsibility for being alive together as life? We suggest three strategies that might bear some ethical fruit.
To continue to read the full essay and many others you can download the ebook for free from the publisher punctum books website – http://punctumbooks.com/titles/manifesto-for-living-in-the-anthropocene/
Downloaded, donated, read the whole essay. It is really good. Thanks for the tip.
I was initially intrigued by this. Who doesn’t love a good manifesto: at once a compelling critique of the “is” and a vision of how things “ought” to be. The destruction of one paradigm and the creation of a new more fitting set of concepts. Unfortunately, for the new reader in this area, the foundation, the central premise, on which this new thinking rests: the replacement of what is variously referred to as the “Western division”, “traditional separation” or “hyper-separation” between the human and more than human worlds and the creation of a new thinking that conjoins the conceptualisation of the two worlds is inadequately set out and probably misconceived. The “separation” is, in my view somewhat loosely attributed to the “Enlightenment tale of progress” as “human control over a passive and ‘dead’ nature that justifies both colonial conquest and commodity economics” (Plumwood 2007). Now is the time according to Plumwood for “Homo reflectus, the self-critical and self revising one” to replace our current selves : “Homo faber, the thoughtless tinkerer”.
Whatever shortcomings there may be with Western philosophy a lack of reflection is surely not one of them and neither has it failed since classical times to wrestle with the relationship between man and nature or the “more than human world” as any cursory exploration will show! The idea that somehow there has been a “settlement” in philosophical thought around this enlightenment tale is to misread the history and misconstrue philosophy with ideology, with bourgeois hegemony. Homo reflectus and Homo faber have walked hand in hand since our ancestors began using technology (sticks and stones) to exploit and change the environment to improve the species’ prospects of survival. Homo faber and Homo reflectus are one and the same interdependency. If the Enlightenment did anything it began the conjoining process by overthrowing the prevailing judo-christian world view. Here the theology has it that man is created in Gods image and holds God’s sovereignty on earth and “dominion” over the natural world. This is an idea of “man” set outside of and above the natural world. Materialism challenged the word of god as delivered in the bible and through the authority of the church and the divine right of kings. The Enlightenment places man in nature, a part of nature a natural thing, yet capable through observation and rational thought of changing the environment and understanding human agency in the change process. The Enlightenment created both climate change and our ability to understand how and why and the prospect of doing something about it.
What would be more useful to the idea of new thinking for the Anthropocene would be an appreciation of Counter-Enlightment ideas and the harnessing of some enlightenment ideas to the task of justifying and supporting the new capitalist reordering of society.
For further insights in to this area “separation” its worth reading Z A Jordan on Marxian Naturalism.
Ultimately, the question is not whether we are “tinkerers” or thinkers – human’s are technologists a species that makes tools and adapts the environment and then seeks to improve on the process. The question is not one of whether we can control or influence the environment at any scale but can we become any good at it, in the sense of not destroying ourselves as a species by living beyond the carrying capacity of the blue blob that gave birth to humanity. Can we achieve fulfilment of human potential through the creation of a new homeostasis. At this point in the game I’d suggest we need the one element of thinking that is absent from the manifesto: rationality. More and better science! This is a manifesto for the future that fails to reference the most amazing piece of technology so far created – the internet, world wide web, information technology. we’ve just built a world accessible repository for knowledge and global communication and it is absent.
I was initially intrigued by this. Who doesn’t love a good manifesto: at once a compelling critique of the “is” and vision of how things “ought” to be. The central critique of the manifesto is focused on the limits of current or dominant thinking that has since the Enlightenment, in the view of the authors, created “traditional separations” (p16) or “hyper-separation” between the human and “more than human” worlds. The solution and the task of the “social scientists and creative scholars”, is to “conjoin nature and culture, economy and ecology, and natural and social sciences. To tackle this task of removing the separations and effecting the conjoining of seemingly hitherto differentiated and discrete categories the manifesto proposes a praxis based on Thinking differently, telling new Stories and using new Research practices. Through this new approach humanity in the Anthropocene period might just be able to repair the damage and achieve a kind of stasis or balance within the ecosphere.
The fundamental problem with the thesis, that there is “separation” or “Western division”, whether philosophical or practical between human history and natural history and that this is traceable to the Enlightenment is not supported with evidence. Perhaps because the evidence is not there and/or is misunderstood. Even a cursory reading of the categories on wikipedia shows that humanity has been wrestling with its relationships with the world it inhabits since classical times. If the Enlightenment did anything it challenge the received teachings of the Judeo-Christian (ideological) paradigm and replaced them with scientific enquiry and rational thinking – things are not as they are because of God (intelligent design) but have purpose and can be explained in their own terms. Dominion over the natural world is to be found in the bible
“Can we overcome our hyper-separation from the more-than-human world and take up membership in a thoroughly ecological community of life?”