Thanks for sharing the piece, as well as your thoughts! I was very interested to read them. I haven't quite yet drawn any conclusions, which is why the end is perhaps short and maybe a little abrupt. In this first paper, I'm also not passing any judgement on whether I think these are 'good' or the 'right' approaches to MOTH governance, rather trying to draw out some understanding based on what is being done today.
We've had so many discussions that implicitly fell along anthropocentric and biocentric lines, and I finally feel like I understand now where your preference towards the humans (ok, I guess, we humans) comes from. I had not really characterized it this way before, but it is useful and helpful to understand the delineation that you have called out. I did not know there had been such debate about it, or that you had engaged so thoroughly with it (although I suppose I should not be surprised at all really).
Thus the crux of where we tend to disagree becomes obvious (also helpful). As a religious person, you believe in the salvation of humanity, and thus your anthropocentric stance is inherently hopeful. Because if humans can be saved, can become good, we will then understand our place in the universe and appreciate the systems that support us and inherently support them back. Not out of pure altruism or because of legal regulation, but because as saved and enlightened humans, we understand their importance for ourselves. What a lovely thought.
Unfortunately, as a non religious person, salvation that involves a deity is not something I believe. I hold a much more biocentric position. One could even say that I resented (still kind of resent?) my own species and hoped for our destruction, because of how careless, selfish and destructive WE are to the natural world. How could I objectively root for such a species? Of course, I am human but to prioritize humanity just because I am human seemed again...selfish. In a biocentric framing, we are invasive and out of control. If we were any other species, we would take it upon ourselves to stamp us out. However, I have recently realized that the biocentric worldview has a similar salvational prospect, through as close of a deification as one can achieve - mother nature (or natural cyclical evolutionary principles I suppose you could say).
Because humans are a species. We are just like any other species. The notion of human exceptionalism is imo, again self-centered (and kind of American tbh...or proto-European - what is it with thinking one group of something is inherently better than others and not just lucky af?). To think that no other species has ever been as dominant as us is foolish. Rats probably dominated after the fall of dinosaurs. In the primordial ocean world, undoubtedly there was some top predator. The history of the natural world is long and many species have come and gone. And some species have grown out of control, due to some mutation that gave them a huge advantage or use of tools or some resource boom. Until Mother Nature (I give in; lets just deify her, but she's FEMALE, no no resist....science prevails! nature does not need to be personified...humanized to be real, to be powerful!)...until the system can no longer support their growth and it contracts, figures out a way to control them. This could be population collapse due to lack of resources, but it could also come in many other forms, including new mutations, new behaviors.
I will slightly back out of what I said before regarding human exceptionalism. Exceptionalism is in itself a hugely human notion. What we are is an outlier. There are no exceptions to the rules in science. There are outliers, huge spikes along a continuous distribution. Undoubtedly we are such a spike. We managed to exist at the right point in the Earth's history, to mutate fast enough, to develop use of technology efficiently enough, that we have progressed faster than any other species...at least in our era. Who knows what slime mold existed in the Jurassic period. And I would say that our dominant traits are adaptability and speed of mutation, which I suppose are the same thing.
Of course, the reason we can mutate so fast is that we are no longer reliant on DNA alone to carry information from one generation to the next. We are not even reliant on verbal communication anymore. Now we have the internet. Now we have AI. The pace of developing and evolving new intelligence is still increasing. [Of course, part of what is fueling this IS the very fast consumption of resources. Part of why nature moves slowly is because nature does not waste. Systems evolve AS SYSTEMS, that is, altogether. Or at least generally. Because we are evolving so much faster (and our effects on the natural world so strong) we are outpacing everything else.]
Like the finches that exist in slightly different species around the world, we too are evolving into separate...species?...populations?...kinds? (What even is a species really. Can they still mate? I guess thats really the cutoff between different ones). At the risk of skirting issues of race (and yes there's lots of awful thorny stuff around all that), I realized that as humans, we ARE adapting to the degradation of the natural world. We are still part of the system. The depression that can only be cured by forest bathing. Climate anxiety. The natural tendency for first world countries to start having fewer children due to women's liberation and overemphasis on economic value. The homesteading movement. We are adapting to the pressures at the edge of the system. And as the weather gets weirder and the effects of our behavior clearer, and the old dinosaurs governing our countries like its still the 1950s die off...we will mutate faster and faster. To fit back into the system. Not because we are human and above everything else and in our mastery, we choose to do so. And not because a God of our making will save us and restore our divine spirit. Because we are a natural species, and all natural species respond to changes in their environment, one way or another.
Have you read Mann following Margulis following Lovelock on the Gaia Hypothesis? It's both myth and science. Personification helps tell the "story of the data." (Data storytelling seems to be all the rage today. How else are you going to make numbers and charts relevant to non-experts? Heck, even AI built from LLMs is mere data crunching under the hood -- but it sounds like Somebody talking to you.)
Put any quickly reproducing organism in a petri dish and it will grow exponentially until it runs out of resources -- hits the "limits to growth" -- and then the population crashes. Margulis warned Mann about this. (She was extremely unsentimental.) Does an anthropomorphized Planet Gaia control the process? Will it intentionally put the limits on upstart humans? Reading it both ways, scientifically and mythically, is actually helpful, I think, as long as your modes of expression don't become alienated from one another.
Yes! Mann's later writings seem to take this into account. Tbh I've pretty much wholesale lifted my POV from him (after he has taken this into account).
Sheesh, Gab! Too much to respond to everything. We'll have to have an IRL conversation. :)
But I want to correct a couple things. The reason in grad school I was so worried about biocentrism being "incompatible" with evolutionary theory was that I was very partial to it. I was/am more biocentric than anthropocentric. The Anthropocene is a descriptive fact, not an ethics or approval. On the other hand, that doesn't mean I'm ready to wipe out half or all the human species for the sake of saving the planet. (And yes, biocentrists have been known to advocate such things.) Humans have (huge) moral status, too, and I'm not a utilitarian. But humans are not the only beings with moral status with everything else relegated to "resource." Hence MOTH ethics and governance. Realistically... selfishly or not... "they" (those humans) are us. We are them. There's no God's eye view for us.
As to religion, again you misread my commitments. I make very few (if any) religious statements in my writing here, whatever my personal adherence. The single one I made in this post was extremely specific and had to do with the "mode" (as it were) of how "salvation" (to put it in religious parlance) works, in one particular tradition, as I have come to think about it. Please note all the qualifiers in there. It was prompted by Abram's "at the very moment" (cited by Chwalisz) and has to do with how "solutions" ("salvation") appears in direct relation to how problems (finally, exhaustingly) also appear. I actually believe this is a truth that inheres in the "structure of reality" and is the deep basis of hope. As a pre-existing truth (as it were), all wise religious traditions pick up on it. Call it created order, providence, God's economy, revelation, whatever you like.
I'll dare to advance one other religious point. It bothered me greatly for a long time that (to put it in vastly overly simplified Christian terms) "Jesus came to save humanity." Was it because only humans matter? Only humans are worthy of salvation or have "souls"? God cares only about them? Creation was made "for us"? Lots of Christians believe this. I do not. Jesus came to save humanity because WE are the royal mess needing salvation.
So many other questions and comments you make about humans... yes, it all comes into play with respect to Anthropocene anthropology.
Thanks for sharing the piece, as well as your thoughts! I was very interested to read them. I haven't quite yet drawn any conclusions, which is why the end is perhaps short and maybe a little abrupt. In this first paper, I'm also not passing any judgement on whether I think these are 'good' or the 'right' approaches to MOTH governance, rather trying to draw out some understanding based on what is being done today.
I’ll be watching for the follow up paper. Maybe it’s time finally for new ideas to gain attention and traction. Thanks for reading!
We've had so many discussions that implicitly fell along anthropocentric and biocentric lines, and I finally feel like I understand now where your preference towards the humans (ok, I guess, we humans) comes from. I had not really characterized it this way before, but it is useful and helpful to understand the delineation that you have called out. I did not know there had been such debate about it, or that you had engaged so thoroughly with it (although I suppose I should not be surprised at all really).
Thus the crux of where we tend to disagree becomes obvious (also helpful). As a religious person, you believe in the salvation of humanity, and thus your anthropocentric stance is inherently hopeful. Because if humans can be saved, can become good, we will then understand our place in the universe and appreciate the systems that support us and inherently support them back. Not out of pure altruism or because of legal regulation, but because as saved and enlightened humans, we understand their importance for ourselves. What a lovely thought.
Unfortunately, as a non religious person, salvation that involves a deity is not something I believe. I hold a much more biocentric position. One could even say that I resented (still kind of resent?) my own species and hoped for our destruction, because of how careless, selfish and destructive WE are to the natural world. How could I objectively root for such a species? Of course, I am human but to prioritize humanity just because I am human seemed again...selfish. In a biocentric framing, we are invasive and out of control. If we were any other species, we would take it upon ourselves to stamp us out. However, I have recently realized that the biocentric worldview has a similar salvational prospect, through as close of a deification as one can achieve - mother nature (or natural cyclical evolutionary principles I suppose you could say).
Because humans are a species. We are just like any other species. The notion of human exceptionalism is imo, again self-centered (and kind of American tbh...or proto-European - what is it with thinking one group of something is inherently better than others and not just lucky af?). To think that no other species has ever been as dominant as us is foolish. Rats probably dominated after the fall of dinosaurs. In the primordial ocean world, undoubtedly there was some top predator. The history of the natural world is long and many species have come and gone. And some species have grown out of control, due to some mutation that gave them a huge advantage or use of tools or some resource boom. Until Mother Nature (I give in; lets just deify her, but she's FEMALE, no no resist....science prevails! nature does not need to be personified...humanized to be real, to be powerful!)...until the system can no longer support their growth and it contracts, figures out a way to control them. This could be population collapse due to lack of resources, but it could also come in many other forms, including new mutations, new behaviors.
I will slightly back out of what I said before regarding human exceptionalism. Exceptionalism is in itself a hugely human notion. What we are is an outlier. There are no exceptions to the rules in science. There are outliers, huge spikes along a continuous distribution. Undoubtedly we are such a spike. We managed to exist at the right point in the Earth's history, to mutate fast enough, to develop use of technology efficiently enough, that we have progressed faster than any other species...at least in our era. Who knows what slime mold existed in the Jurassic period. And I would say that our dominant traits are adaptability and speed of mutation, which I suppose are the same thing.
Of course, the reason we can mutate so fast is that we are no longer reliant on DNA alone to carry information from one generation to the next. We are not even reliant on verbal communication anymore. Now we have the internet. Now we have AI. The pace of developing and evolving new intelligence is still increasing. [Of course, part of what is fueling this IS the very fast consumption of resources. Part of why nature moves slowly is because nature does not waste. Systems evolve AS SYSTEMS, that is, altogether. Or at least generally. Because we are evolving so much faster (and our effects on the natural world so strong) we are outpacing everything else.]
Like the finches that exist in slightly different species around the world, we too are evolving into separate...species?...populations?...kinds? (What even is a species really. Can they still mate? I guess thats really the cutoff between different ones). At the risk of skirting issues of race (and yes there's lots of awful thorny stuff around all that), I realized that as humans, we ARE adapting to the degradation of the natural world. We are still part of the system. The depression that can only be cured by forest bathing. Climate anxiety. The natural tendency for first world countries to start having fewer children due to women's liberation and overemphasis on economic value. The homesteading movement. We are adapting to the pressures at the edge of the system. And as the weather gets weirder and the effects of our behavior clearer, and the old dinosaurs governing our countries like its still the 1950s die off...we will mutate faster and faster. To fit back into the system. Not because we are human and above everything else and in our mastery, we choose to do so. And not because a God of our making will save us and restore our divine spirit. Because we are a natural species, and all natural species respond to changes in their environment, one way or another.
So yea, biocentric salvation I guess.
Have you read Mann following Margulis following Lovelock on the Gaia Hypothesis? It's both myth and science. Personification helps tell the "story of the data." (Data storytelling seems to be all the rage today. How else are you going to make numbers and charts relevant to non-experts? Heck, even AI built from LLMs is mere data crunching under the hood -- but it sounds like Somebody talking to you.)
Put any quickly reproducing organism in a petri dish and it will grow exponentially until it runs out of resources -- hits the "limits to growth" -- and then the population crashes. Margulis warned Mann about this. (She was extremely unsentimental.) Does an anthropomorphized Planet Gaia control the process? Will it intentionally put the limits on upstart humans? Reading it both ways, scientifically and mythically, is actually helpful, I think, as long as your modes of expression don't become alienated from one another.
Yes! Mann's later writings seem to take this into account. Tbh I've pretty much wholesale lifted my POV from him (after he has taken this into account).
Sheesh, Gab! Too much to respond to everything. We'll have to have an IRL conversation. :)
But I want to correct a couple things. The reason in grad school I was so worried about biocentrism being "incompatible" with evolutionary theory was that I was very partial to it. I was/am more biocentric than anthropocentric. The Anthropocene is a descriptive fact, not an ethics or approval. On the other hand, that doesn't mean I'm ready to wipe out half or all the human species for the sake of saving the planet. (And yes, biocentrists have been known to advocate such things.) Humans have (huge) moral status, too, and I'm not a utilitarian. But humans are not the only beings with moral status with everything else relegated to "resource." Hence MOTH ethics and governance. Realistically... selfishly or not... "they" (those humans) are us. We are them. There's no God's eye view for us.
As to religion, again you misread my commitments. I make very few (if any) religious statements in my writing here, whatever my personal adherence. The single one I made in this post was extremely specific and had to do with the "mode" (as it were) of how "salvation" (to put it in religious parlance) works, in one particular tradition, as I have come to think about it. Please note all the qualifiers in there. It was prompted by Abram's "at the very moment" (cited by Chwalisz) and has to do with how "solutions" ("salvation") appears in direct relation to how problems (finally, exhaustingly) also appear. I actually believe this is a truth that inheres in the "structure of reality" and is the deep basis of hope. As a pre-existing truth (as it were), all wise religious traditions pick up on it. Call it created order, providence, God's economy, revelation, whatever you like.
I'll dare to advance one other religious point. It bothered me greatly for a long time that (to put it in vastly overly simplified Christian terms) "Jesus came to save humanity." Was it because only humans matter? Only humans are worthy of salvation or have "souls"? God cares only about them? Creation was made "for us"? Lots of Christians believe this. I do not. Jesus came to save humanity because WE are the royal mess needing salvation.
So many other questions and comments you make about humans... yes, it all comes into play with respect to Anthropocene anthropology.
I see. So you're saying we agree after all? That would be neat.
💚 (and 🥰)