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On missing things

Writer's picture: CroneCrone

My latest reading is Kin: Thinking with Deborah Bird Rose. This is a collection of essays edited by Thom Van Dooren. It has essays on extinction among other cheery subjects, like roadkill and the extirpation of the buffalo in North America. What it does do is answer the criticisms posed in these quotes...


Our hypothetical visitor from Mars, interpreting the éarth- organism ecologically, might wonder if bacteria did not perform a more important function by facilitating the decay of organic matter than humans do by mentalizing the cosmos - especially since mentalization seems so easily diverted into the production of ideologies that freeze process into rigid structures, turn the food chain into a caste system, and undermine natural limits and inhibitions by developing fanatical doctrines of inter-specific imperialism and intraspecific 'genocide'.


It is not so much that natural entities are degraded by being represented in human legal actions, or by not having us attribute to them moral obligations. They are degraded rather by our failure to respect them for having their own existence, their own character and potentialities, their own forms of excellence, their own integrity, their own grandeur —and by our tendency to relate to them either by reducing them to the status of instruments for our own ends or by 'giving' them rights by assimilating them to the status of inferior human beings. It is perhaps analogous to regarding women as defective men who lack penises, or humans as defective sea mammals who lack sonar capability and have to be rescued by dolphins.


Why do our 'new ethics' seem so old, and our exercises in exploring the 'unthinkable' so tame? Because the attempt to produce a 'new ethics' by the process of 'extension' perpetuates the basic presuppositions of the conventional modern paradigm, however much it fiddles with the boundaries.


- John Rodman "The Liberation of Nature'


I saved these quotes ages ago and wanted not to forget them as they speak so strongly of my critiques of much thinking and writing about animals and the environment.


Van Dooren's and Rose's approach is always situated - embodied and emplaced - trying to incorporate all interests. Trying to see as many angles as possible without inevitably privileging the human. Though both, Rose was after all an anthropologist, perhaps have more time for the human than I (un-ancestored as I am).


In Kin, there is an essay by Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers, whose name I have come across in many of the books that have inspired me recently. The talks of extinction as not just the loss of a species, but the cutting off of a foundation of future possibilities. Think how many different ways of being, how many different solutions to the problems posed by living on this planet have been denied before they had the chance to become. There is a harm done to the future as well as to the present. As well as the ending and laying waste of millions of years of evolution as represented in a species.


It is not just about missing things NOW, but all the future missing of so many different beings and species who would otherwise have evolved. It is not like cutting off the flower at the end of the branch, but pulling out all the goddamn roots as well. And, of course, the species that disappear may take with them, or threaten the survival of, many others with whom their lives are entangled... the plants they pollinate, the trees whose fruit they disperse, and more.


We have denuded the future a thousand thousand times more than we will ever know.

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maplekey4
2024年3月28日

"  The talks of extinction as not just the loss of a species, but the cutting off of a foundation of future possibilities. " Yes, indeed. That's profound.

いいね!
Crone
Crone
2024年3月28日
返信先

A typo there - was meant to be "She" talks of extinction....

いいね!
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