What is the ecological thinking that is required at a time like this?

Perhaps you deem this to be a rather unnecessary question. After all, surely ecological thinking is all that is needed at a time like this!

Here is the story we tell … Once upon a time, we thought in terms of a dichotomy between “humans”, on the one hand, and “environment”, on the other, two separate entities seeking an uneasy accommodation. But now ecological thinking has allowed us to see things differently. We’ve come to appreciate the complex, delicate and inter-connected relationships between living beings and the physical environment. That is, we’ve come to see the Earth as a system. This systems-thinking (codeword: ecology) allows us to move beyond the anthropocentrisms that have haunted us in the past and contributed directly to the crisis we now face. Via ecological thinking, we finally embark on a genuinely new trajectory.

And yet, in some contemporary critical theory there has been a move to query this story a little bit. This line of thought probes ecological thinking, asking where it might be generating unintended consequences that are enabling the former dichotomy to return – however paradoxical that might sound.

This short essay will proceed in two sections. First, I will introduce the critique itself, showing how it may indeed shed light on pitfalls lying in wait for ecological thinking. But in the second part, I will push back a bit, showing how ecological thinking does indeed have resources to resist these pitfalls, and how these may be bound up in interesting ways with the religious concept of transcendence.

My aim, then, is ultimately to renew our confidence in ecological thinking as a means to face the present crisis.

1. What critique can be made of ecological thinking?

As a point of departure, I’ll turn to the work of Frédéric Neyrat, Associate Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

In his 2016 book, translated in 2019 as The Unconstructable Earth: An Ecology of Separation, Neyrat challenges the idea of “geo-constructivism”, that is, the belief that the Earth, and everything in it, is potentially available for technological intervention by humans.

So far, so good. Neyrat here seems to be echoing well-established critiques of ecomodernist ideologies that encourage human beings to understand themselves as masters, stewards and governors of the fix that is required at the present time.

But what is most interesting here is what Neyrat says about the origins of this sort of thinking. For he does not follow the account given by Whitehead and others that in the early modern period, under the influence of Cartesian dualism, a “bifurcation” of human and material worlds took place, the implications of which are still with us today. Nor does he follow the account of Lynn White and others that arraigns Christian theology for promoting a mode of human exceptionalism over the created order that has persisted to the present day. On the contrary, Neyrat identifies the origins of geo-constructivist attitudes closer to home, namely, in systems thinking. He has in mind the work of Michel Serres, Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour, whose ideas can be summarised as (quote) “philosophies of complexity, unstable flows and interconnectedness” (p.12).

Perhaps we might find this surprising. After all, are these ideas not the soil out of which ecological thinking and indeed Earth System Science itself has been nourished? How could these possibly be a trojan horse for the smuggling-in of ecomodernism?

But Neyrat argues that they have been. For these philosophies have led us to understand society as being (quote) “ontologically established […] around the concept of turbulence; chaos, disorder and disturbance” (p.71). “Nothing is ontologically anchored; nothing is definitively stable” (p.73), as he puts it. For Neyrat, this has the effect of submerging humans in a world of endless flux. To survive, “the best we can do is adapt ourselves to this ontological chaos and to its programmed uncertainty” (p.71). And yet, he argues, if all we can muster is a sort of pragmatic accommodation to the complex flows of ecological attachments present all around us, then we lose a sense of discernment as to the effects of particular things. Agency is so dispersed across the broad, interconnected system that we call an ecology, with its vast number of aleatory feedback effects, that individual actors are unable to achieve the critical distance to discern actually what to do. We welcome ever more complexity, we embrace ever more attachments, but we lose discrimination as to which of these lead to positive outcomes for the system itself.

Paradoxically, says Neyrat, this provides an opportunity for those who wish to usurp ecological thinking for their own purposes. He calls these “vertical slippages” (p.112). For here, power has simply been shifted one level up and is now attributed to the Earth system itself. If this can be harnessed, then human-centred managerialism can be smuggled in once again through the back door and used to defend behaviours that are selfish and harmful.

Let me briefly illustrate what I mean. I’ve recently been engaging with an article published in the journal Critical Inquiry written by the environmental historian Leah Aronowsky.

Leah takes us back to the late 1960s, the time when James Lovelock was beginning to formulate his ideas about the Earth as a “biological cybernetic system” (p.313).

At this time, Lovelock was investigating the natural processes by which certain algae and seaweed were excreting sulphur compounds into the atmosphere. What if, he pondered, these biological emissions were having planetary-scale regulatory effects on the climate? As we now know, Lovelock’s work at this time was seeding the ground for his subsequent announcement of the Gaia hypothesis, a concept of great value for all our ecological thinking.     

And yet, there is a biographical detail here that is quite revealing. In the late 1960s, Lovelock was actually working for Royal Dutch Shell, the multinational oil and gas company. Shell had sponsored Lovelock to write a report on the impact of fossil-fuel combustion on the atmosphere and to advise on potential communication strategies to deal with this in the public domain. So, as Lovelock was pondering how the metabolic products of algae and seaweed might contribute to a whole-Earth regulatory system, he was doing so with one eye on the interests of his employers. What if the systemic adaptability of the biosphere was such that it was able to neutralise these emissions, thus restoring the status quo? If that was the case, then the Earth as a system could be harnessed in service of a PR strategy for the company. Yes, our emissions are polluting the atmosphere. But fear not, the Earth is a system that will heal itself. Thus, in his final report, published in 1969 and available in his archives, Lovelock wrote the following: “the ecosystem itself may have the capacity to adapt to the input of combustion gases, and this may prove to a be a message of great value as we seek to manage public relations in the decades ahead”. In her article Leah finds examples of how this strategy was indeed pursued in advertising messages by oil and gas companies, including Shell, right up to the present time.

Now, I would suggest some of this diagnosis needs refining in light of what Lovelock understood himself to be doing at this time (as it happens, I am writing a response to Leah’s article for publication in Critical Inquiry at the moment).

But I think the point stands: even at this early date, fossil-fuel corporations were beginning to sow doubt not by denying the phenomenon of climate change, but by naturalizing it, that is, by promoting an understanding of the Earth as a resilient system, capable of rejuvenation. “Could it be,” Lovelock would later ask, “that pollution is natural? If by pollution we mean the dumping of waste matter there is indeed ample evidence that pollution is as natural to Gaia as is breathing to ourselves”.

This is just one example. But I offer it here as to illustrate Neyrat’s broader point. For even within the highly-developed ecological thinking we associate with Gaia theory, human-centred managerialism finds a way of re-instating itself, not in spite of, but because of, its core commitment to the idea of a system.

2. What resources can ecological thinking show in response?

And yet, I also want to push back. For I believe that ecological thinking, that takes seriously the idea of the Earth as a system, does indeed have resources to resist these pitfalls.

Neyrat himself points the way in the very title of his book, which advertises the need for an “ecology of separation”. Both aspects of the phrase matter. Yes, we must embrace the idea of “ecology”, that is, an Earth System Science that thinks in terms of interconnection, feedback loops and embeddedness. But we must not do so to the neglect of the idea of “separation”. For without the slight gap that is introduced by the idea of separation, we cannot conceive of two things coming together and negotiating arrangements for their co-existence. As he puts it, “there is only relation where beings recognise their incompleteness, that they’re lacking something, and as a consequence are called by the other toward each other” (p.15). If this difference if flattened, the system itself becomes vulnerable to take-over by those with ulterior motive. “So we must indeed return to Earth”, Neyrat writes, “but without returning into the net of a flat world, rendering all beings equivalent and annulling all exteriority” (p.15).

Neyrat himself offers some thoughts in the realm of politics.

But in this final part of this essay, I wish to suggest that theology – and theology alone – can provide the critical nuance that is needed.

Some ecotheology argues for an act of total transference between God and the world, whereby divine qualities are transposed into nature. Nature is God’s face, God’s voice, and the Earth becomes a self-enclosed system with God included in it. This sort of thinking does indeed risk the saturation effect that Neyrat identifies above and, I would suggest, does not take us very far in the direction we need to go.

But I believe that ecotheology at its best offers a more nuanced account of the God-world relation than that. It asserts divine transcendence, but shows how this serves as a guarantor and safeguard of earthly immanence. God is incomparably unlike the world. And yet, He is the one “in whom we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). It is not God’s absolute identification with the world, but God’s infinite transcendence over the world, that enables His connection with it, without for a moment intruding on its freedom to act for its own good or harm. 

Ecotheology in this vein, I would argue, provides a foundation for ecological thinking. On the one hand, it joyfully celebrates the complexity, the unstable flows and the interconnectedness of the world as an expression of the super-abundance of the One who created it. And yet, on the other hand, it avoids an excessive sacralisation of nature by asserting the world’s separation from the One who called it into being. This allows the critical distance that is needed for moral discernment. The Earth itself is not the redeemer, in the tradition of John Muir and the Transcendentalists who regarded wilderness as redemptive. On the contrary, an ecotheological response to “the cry of the Earth” is not to resign oneself to the inevitable working-out of the teleology of a system, but to exert oneself afresh, as a moral agent within the system, to judge what is harmful and to exert our will to bring about change. This response will be impossible to achieve if we are immersed in a system that allows no critical distance.

It is odd, then, that Neyrat critiques the work of Serres, Stengers and Latour for confusing this distance. His argument, basically, is that these thinkers submerge us within systems-thought to such a degree that there is no way of lifting our heads to make a moral judgment. With regard to Latour, for example, he writes: “his unilateral taste for association, composition and attachment makes access to any dimension of separation, division or opposition rather difficult” (p.101). For Neyrat, Latour’s world is so flat that it ends up collapsing all distinctions and generating a sort of moral turpitude when it comes to saying no: “nothing in Latour’s discourse allows for any kind of resistance to GMOs, to the hegemony of biotechnologies, and so on” (p.105).

This is odd, for in his recent work Latour is at great pains to emphasise the role of transcendence in facilitating the sort of “ecology of separation” that Neyrat deems necessary. In his Inquiry into Modes of Existence,Latour calls these the “small transcendences”, the hiatuses that exist between individual actors within a system as they encounter one another and make decisions as to how to move forward with respect to each other. There is no automation, there is no determinism, there is no Providence in the thought of Bruno Latour. And yet, there is religion. For Latour, religion is that which draws attention to the myriad links and assemblages that constitute the reality of the world as a system, nurturing a sense of care and responsibility to acknowledge the ongoing, constitutive role we have to play in the flow of these networks over time. Religion is not that which takes us away from the plural world; rather it “sensitizes” us to it. That is its essential moral quality. And it does that by reminding us that we are actors and agents within a system.

The work of Latour is rarely engaged within the discipline of theology. And yes, the language and concepts he employs often strain at the boundaries of orthodoxy. But “I am a professing Roman Catholic”, he announces. And I believe there is great potential for his work to be analysed, alongside Catholic Social Teaching, as a resource for inculcating in us an appropriate sense of our moral responsibility within an Earth system that far exceeds us in size and scale.

Conclusion

But let me conclude.

I think that Neyrat’s critique of ecological thinking is worth considering. It behoves us all to ask where we may have ceded moral responsibility to the idea of system that is above and beyond us, and that asks of us nothing other than pragmatic orientation, thereby opening the door for new schemes for human managerialism. Where might this be detected in the proposals put forward for sustainable finance, in the public policy arena with respect to climate mitigation and adaptation strategies, or in the discourse of sociologists and anthropologists who proclaim that there is no common world and so it is up to us to build one?

And yet, there are resources within ecological thinking to resist this flattening and to safeguard an understanding of moral responsibility within a system. It is perhaps no surprise that those philosophers most committed to “complexity, unstable flows and interconnectedness” also find recourse in the language of transcendence as gifted to us by our religious tradition.