Thoughts on ecology, reductionism and capitalism

I have spent the last few days with my parents and submitting applications for different after-school positions. No, I'm never going to have a job...I hope. I haven't sat down to write recently, and I'm not sure why. But, I have been reading. Deep Routes: The Midwest In All Directions is a book I picked up recently, one that my friend, Sarah Lewison--an artist, activist, and professor at Southern Illinois University--has contributed to, along with other community organisers, academics, and artists from the Midwest. The book is about radical activism based in the Midwest, and a key theme of the book is territoriality and connection with place. Connection with place is something deeply lacking in a world in which we constantly seek upward mobility. While "settling down" is something I don't agree with, I wonder how our constant mobility obscures our ability to see connections between the our daily choices and their multidimensional outcomes. Indeed, what is the ecology of choice? 

Reductionism is the foundation of current expertise, education, and capitalism. Reductionist thinking gives us only thinly cut slices of complex pie. In a globalized world, we know very little about the roots of the products we buy, or the roots of the food we eat. Instead, we are made to think of dollars and cents, and when we valuate using the great reductionism of money, we tend to undervalue. Writes Claire Pentecost in Deep Routes,

Capitalism is deracinating: it must separate anything of value from its roots in order to convert it into a sign that can be efficiently circulated and exchanged. It reduces both needs and desires to a system in which the fungible and often proprietary signs of value trump the organic ecology of values. In this deracinated circular flow, the universal equivalent--the sign that makes all commodities exchangeable--is money. Whatever we need and love may have inherent value, but under capitalism, anything and everything is reducible to a monetary sign of value. This is efficiently paralleled by informationalism, a paradigm of knowledge in which value is reduced to an isolated register that can be exchanged as pure sign. In these ways capitalism and its companion informationalism are constitutionally deterritorializing. 

Ecological thinking is a powerful antidote to reductionism, even when not applied to the "environmental" reduction; it allows us to see connections and understand the roots of the choices available to us socially, politically, and economically, whether at the voting booth or in the aisles of supermarkets. Our capacity to think ecologically fully appreciates and takes advantage of our vision, foresight, and creativity. Yet we are stuck by constantly narrowing and reducing the scope of our questions and investigations into the failures of capitalism and public policy in public health and the environment. Pentecost continues by writing,

...our food paradigm reduces the value of a food to those elements that can be easily read as quantifiable information. We are trained to think of nutrition in terms of a handful of vitamins and minerals. So we grow acres of corn, which are deemed to be all the same in quality, process them to extract their exchange value as oils, starches, sugars, and materials that can be used industrially for glues and plastics, reconstitute some of those ingredients by adding certain readily identifiable vitamins and minerals--and voila! It serves a food. But it ignores the complex nuances of human digestion, and does so tragically in the light of the misery and disease propagated by the "American diet."

Indeed,

How can we pour millions of pounds of toxic chemicals into our environment and not think that we will be poisoning ourselves, as well as all that makes our existence possible and palatable?  

Education and expertise

It is no secret that education, or what is commonly thought of as it, changes us. Education has the capacity of changing our perspectives on human relationships, our interactions with the man-made parts of our world, as well as with the biophysical parts of our world. It changes, fundamentally, the way we think. In the hyper-specialised culture that has developed out of "competition" and industrialism, our education has become hyper-specialised, too. But there is one thing that I haven't really thought much about, and that's one reason why I love being around people that know so much about so many other things!

As Avik told me yesterday, there is a whole body of literature that has studied expertise. What has been particularly defining of the recent environmental movement, is that scientists have tried continually to raise awareness about the dire situations and scenarios we face with climate change and yet, we see very little mass acceptance of their findings in this country. There are several reasons for this. One, of course, is that people's lives, and what defines them, are fundamentally challenged because of what issues of the climate dictate we ought to do. Secondly, different people comprehend issues differently because of their cultural identities. Thirdly, and quite interestingly, those people that are aware of the issues actually view the world differently because of their "education." When I say education in the post, I mean the education that most of us think of--become a scientist, or a doctor, or engineer, or lawyer, or accountant, or whatever.

As we become more and more educated, while we are exposed to more and more things, we also bin ourselves more and more in our worldview. As I said previously, when you have a hammer in your hand, everything looks like a nail. Therefore, the more educated we become, the more we forget about what it was like to be uneducated, or what it is like to be educated differently. What this can result in then is a loss of capacity to communicate with those that are different than you. As a scientist, it may be entirely obvious to you that increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leads to global warming, increasing hormones in water leads to hermaphroditic frogs, increasing the efficiency of something doesn't lead to decreased overall consumption of it. How do we explain to those that aren't experts? How much danger is there in being experts? Many have talked about the guardianship model of policy-making, in which 'experts' in a 'field' are given full responsibility to decide the course of actions that need to be taken about something--those that 'know' about health insurance decide national health insurance policy. This, of course, comes at the expense of so-called 'democracy'.

In the environmental movement, it would do us well if we are able to relate to those that do not accept what we say, to those that are not 'experts' in pollution or deforestation or fracking. We must be able to have the capacity to think like those that don't agree with us, so that maybe we can communicate with them in ways that are more approachable to them. More thoughts on the expertise literature to come.

The loss of nuance

With the scale and vastness of the problems that face us, it is difficult to not view these problems as monolithic problems. This is not to say that "poverty" or "climate change" as problems are disputed. But what these problems mean for different people, in different places, is different. This is something we cannot get away from, and something that comes up time and time again in thinking about sustainability. What this means is that the outcomes of these problems in different places is different, and it depends on where you lie socio-economically, and so forth. Climate change means something for us here in Michigan than it does for those in Zimbabwe. Consequently, how to deal with the problems changes depending on where you are.

But if you were to hear any politician or any large engineering firm PR person speak, you would think that they have the answer to the problem (however they choose to define it). You might hear someone say, "What we need are two hundred solar energy farms in Arizona, and all of our problems will be solved," or "We need to create a large entity that will regulate and oversee how things happen on Wall Street, and our economic problems will be solved." You might notice that party A wants to do B, and party Y wants to do Z - it's simple black and white. Party A thinks that B should solve it all, and party Y thinks that Z will solve it all. The real issues, and the real solutions, are more complex, and more nuanced than this.

And so this sort of rhetoric is dangerous for many reasons. First, it makes us think that the problems are monolithic. Second, it makes us think that the solutions to those problems are monolithic. Third, it makes us think that they have the solutions (to the problem that many times they created in trying to solve other problems), not us. Fourth, it reduces our thinking to sound bites and Tweets. The problems we face are because of the loss of nuance - the bulldozing of unique places and cultures to give them all the same feel, the homogenisation of tastes and of "development." This is why people think that lawns in Phoenix are okay. 

The loss of nuance is seen in our education, in which we are trained to be one thing or the other, a doctor or an engineer, or a sociologist for that matter. We've applied the same mentality of "secularity" of science and technology to our society and to education, and we are now seeing the outcomes of such a mentality. The problems we've created for ourselves (yes, we) are so vast and intricate that there cannot be blanket solutions. Yet at times what science and technology, government and industry want to do is to centralise these problems, and apply blanket solutions.

As a first step, we must get rid of this reductionism in our lives, though, and not bin ourselves as A or B, but rather a complex melding of A and B, as well as C and D. To give you something to think about, complete the sentence for your life -  "I am not solely an engineer (or whatever you are), but I am also..."

Secularising the mystical

I am in New York City for a few days before going to a conference in Boston. I am here visiting my sister and some friends. It is not difficult to see here the investment that humans have made in taming nature, providing themselves with a tempered climate in which to work and spend their lives, in which fluctuations are averaged out, in which the ebb and flow of nature is beyond the daily experience. At the same time, we've done a tremendous job at secularising nature, by reducing it down to numbers, algorithms, cells, and DNA. This secularised knowledge we are always compelled to use, no matter what the outcome.

While I agree with Richard Feynman in that a knowledge of the world only adds to its beauty, it seems to me that science and its resultant technology have secularised the world that allows us to to not view it mystically, but many times only through the lenses of our science, our technology. Maybe it is safe to say that even with a few hundred years of industrialisation and secularisation under our belts, we are no where nearer to understanding the meanings and complexities of life and nature, so much so that people continue to flock towards organised anthropomorphic religion to find "answers" to life's "questions." Of course, while there are positives to such religion, the negatives are plain to see. In a sense, it seems that anthropomorphic religion also tries to secularise the world in trying to provide universal answers, just like science - of right and wrong based on some conceptualisation of a human-looking god.

The only thing that seems universal to me then in nature is the uniqueness of each place, each species, each river, such that they cannot be binned or secularised or dammed, but can only be well cared for and protected if we recognise graciously what they give us - a ground to stand on, water to drink, and food to eat. Therefore, the uniqueness of environment and place resists secularisation. While we can appreciate the understanding that science gives us of the world, it gives us only a partial understanding. The rest will not be known, and cannot be known. Altogether, the powers of nature are as mystical as ever, and it would be prudent for us to recognise and behave with such understanding.

False dichotomies

This morning, I had a wonderful conversation with Ethan about turbulence. He's has been thinking about the contradictions between measurements of various turbulent phenomena, and what is 'accepted' knowledge about those phenomena. So we talked for a while, in the presence of Kristin, a Ph.D. student in English. (Kristin shares my enthusiasm for conceptions of nature and place, and has been lending me her favourite books on the subject.) At the end of the conversation, she, heretofore quiet, said, "It's interesting. The way you two were talking is just the way some conversation would happen in contexts I am in." That was especially interesting coming from someone studying literature, but it further reinforced to me the false dichotomies that exist in our society, our culture, our educations, our colleges, and our minds.

There have been boundaries erected between people and thoughts, a reductionism of the world, that pits one group of people against the other. The scientist might think, "Oh, well, you probably don't understand what I'm talking about because you are and English major." This sort of thinking has led to specialised languages that further reinforce these boundaries, these dichotomies. What it has also done has been to allow people to act within their so-called "disciplines" without a grasp, without an understanding of what goes on outside of those "disciplines." Even within "disciplines" exist "sub-disciplines" that barely have any communication between each other. This can of course be extrapolated out to larger scales and broader contexts that truly have significance on the world. Think about the BP-Macondo well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico last year. The insularity of something like decision-making for oil drilling from the implications on the marine environment is a sort of ethical framework that leads to terrible decisions, and terrible consequences. In the end, however, we must break down the dichotomies, the boundaries, and furthermore live our ethics. We must suffuse our daily activities, our choices, our lives with ethics that we can justify no matter what. There should not be any dichotomies between our lives and our ethical ideals, our moralities.

In that light, I would like to share some words with you by the Powhatan-Renape-Lenape man Jack Forbes, modified slightly by Derrick Jensen in his book What We Leave Behind. (Jensen replaced the word "religion" with "morality," but you can read it any way you please.)

"'Morality, is in reality, 'living.' Our 'morality' is not what we profess, or what we say, or what we proclaim; our 'morality' is what we do, what we desire, what we seek, what we dream about, what we fantasize, what we think - all of these things - twenty-four hours a day. One's morality, then is one's life, not merely the ideal life but the life as it is actually lived." 'Morality' is not prayer, it is not church, it is not 'theistic,' it is not 'atheistic,' it has little to do what white people call 'morality.' It is our every act. If we tromp on a bug, that is our morality. If we experiment on living animals, that is our morality; if we cheat at cards, that is our morality; if we dream of being famous, that is our morality; if we gossip maliciously, that is our morality; if we are rude and aggressive, that is our morality. All that we do, and are, is our morality."

On bridging the macro and micro

One of the goals of this blog has been to explore the interconnectedness of the issues that face us, from war to medicine, food to poverty, law to nature. The problems facing us in each one of these "fields" or "bins" of thought are one and the same, they stem from the same trunk. They are branches connected to the same base, and the morality and ethics that feed any one of these branches are the same morality and ethics that feed the other. Indeed, we cannot tackle any one issue in isolation; that is the sort of reductionism that has lead to the issues and problems facing us. To paraphrase Wendell Berry, we cannot do one thing without doing many things, we cannot undo one thing without undoing many things.

More important to me, however, has been trying to articulate our role and our complicity in the creation of these problems, and to hopefully allow us to be more introspective about our positions in the world, and the power that each and everyone one of our choices, individually, have in either patronising systems of oppression and dominance over nature (and consequently people), or in taking a stand against these systems, and taking them down. Meaningful change can come from nowhere else but from within one's own life. Furthermore, the change on larger scales that we advocate for is a reflection of our willingness to be the models of that change. For example, it is entirely plausible that someone that is willing to give up something like plastic out of sacrifice and respect for the environment cannot envision the world without the existence of plastic. Consequently, when it comes to thinking about what this world ought to look like for everyone, we may have limited our imagination to a world with plastic as a given.

Now, as I recognised in a previous post, these issues are complicated, as we are stuck in systems that necessitate ecological degration. These systems are ingrained in our culture and act on scales much larger than our individual lives. Yet, each one of our lives serves as a microcosm for these systems. We form the DNA and RNA of the system, and it is our choices that determine what is commonly accepted and what isn't. In a cell, the DNA and RNA dictate the responses of the cell to stimuli. These cells in turn form the complexity that is our body. While our bodies operate at a scale much larger than our individual cells, it is the choices of the individual cells that determine the overall health of the body. In the same manner, if we, as individuals, lead lives that are healthful and respectful, caring and kind to the environment, there is no way these systems of oppression cannot be taken down. After having talked with a friend yesterday at length about the nature of the writing on the blog, I can see that I haven't continually addressed the "micro" side of issues, which to me is of utmost importance. Introspection on the micro scale is the goal, and I will try to write more consciously toward that end.

Objects and materials: On creativity

My posts for the last few days have tried to explore some of the issues surrounding our interactions with objects that populate the world, and the materials they are made out of. Again, I am no expert on these issues, and it would be wonderful if I can get a designer to write about the psychology of objects and materials. But until then, I'll continue to muse and surmise.

There seems to be a massive social learning and association component to materials. It seems like when you are growing up, someone (say, a parent) may tell you, "That is a disposable plate." On asking why so, that person may say, "Because it is plastic." (or whatever...Styrofoam). Maybe the connections between materials and their fate are thus made, never mind the actual potential use of the object after its initial use. The next time you may come across something made of a particular material, you may not feel bad about throwing it in a trash can. And if you don't know otherwise, why would you feel bad? Everyone around you is doing so, and maybe your mum or dad, someone you trust and learn from, tells you that it is okay. What I am trying to say that is maybe the compulsion or tendency to throw something away has more to do with material than it does with the functionality of the object. Maybe...What do you think?

Maybe it is a lack of creativity, though, that plays a significant role in why we feel something can be thrown away, or gotten rid of. I can absolutely see this in the West, having grown up in India, where when I was growing up at least, you would see people make use of objects until they are able to be blown away and disintegrated by the wind (just like how men, me included, will wear underwear until each and every underwear molecule can't retain the properties of a solid...it turns into underwear vapour). Books are continuously handed down from older students to younger ones, as are school uniforms and shoes. Every morning, a "plastic bucket repair man" comes on his bike to your home to see if your plastic buckets need repairing. Once we eat a watermelon, we peel the skin of the watermelon off, thinly, and cut up the white part and curry it and eat it. Old flat breads are given to the cows that stand outside of the temple. There is a creativity of use. I guess that may be an outcome of the heretofore lack of abundance of objects, and it is actually sad to see how India has changed since I've moved to the US.

Creativity is something we lack in almost all aspects of our communities. A reductionist world necessarily devolves and doesn't consider things outside of the well-defined topical areas. A reductionist world can make us think that a bottle can't be used as a cup, because it just isn't a cup. But what exactly are we trying to do? If you're trying to drink something, a bottle can serve as a cup, and a cup serves as a bottle.

Reductionism and trash

If you look at the titles of Ph.D. theses today, you wouldn't be admonished for thinking that a lot of the work academics do can have no bearing on things outside of their sub-discipline. We have created walls and artificial boundaries between fields of study, and created specialised languages that we within specific disciplines use to communicate with others in "our" field. Also, we have given proxies to invisible companies and men in suits to provide us with essential services such as food, clothing and shelter. We have centralised the production and distribution of the necessities of life. Although we would like to think our world is "globalised" and "flat," I believe the world we inhabit is highly specialised and centralised. This specialisation is at some level (obviously from a neoconservative economic standpoint) semi-defensible given assumptions of "economies of scale," but arguments cannot hold water from a moral and ethical perspective.Wendell Berry likes to call this phenomenon "reductionism."

We have defined these boundaries for two reasons...

• It is impossible for us to know all of the variables of a given system or problem, and so in order for us to stand any chance of coming up with an elegant solution or number, we need to reduce the number of variables; we need to define limited boundaries so that we can still capture the basic dynamics of interactions between various parts of a system, without overburdening our computers and calculating gadgets.
• We seem to think that we can know how complex systems work, and that given enough time and resources, the outcomes of such endeavours are believable. 

The latter point can be defended, but only within the context of an individual discipline or sub-discipline. When we try to optimise a system or try to maximise some outcome of a system, we can continuously tinker with the variables we choose to work with. However, what we fail to recognise sometimes is that just because a system is optimised for one particular situation, it isn't necessarily optimised for another situation or system. The output of our narrowly defined system will always have an impact on the variables that were left outside of its boundaries. A great example of this is trash. Trash is the result of an "optimum" solution to a very narrowly and myopically defined system, and that system is our pleasure and convenience. The variables that can play a role in our pleasure and convenience are time, money and place. The boundaries of the system are defined as such, and we consciously or subconsciously defend the definition of those boundaries when we accept the formation of trash. If I am in a rush to grab a bite to eat, the optimum solution is for me to microwave a microwave meal that came in a box with a plastic bowl and thin plastic cover, or to run to Jimmy John's and buy a sandwich wrapped in wax paper, along with a drink in a wax/paper cup with a plastic lid and straw. However, this is not the optimum solution for the Earth that provided the resources to produce the plastics, papers and boxes. The outputs of our pleasure and convenience are too much for nature to handle.

We cannot continually overlook the impacts of our actions on nature by defining the boundaries of our systems for our "ease" and "convenience."