3    Tuning

Let’s think about the delivery mode of ecological advice—drive less, shop locally, save energy, all the usual “shoulds” that we hear again and again. Either we are being preached to as individuals, being made to feel bad and encouraged to change our habits, so that maybe we will feel better, because we think others think of us differently—or we are being lectured at, made to feel powerless, because the thought of revolution or other big kinds of political change are very inspiring, but also bring up thoughts of how they might be resisted or constrained: the powers that be are too great, revolutions are always co-opted … Maybe they’re just impossible on any scale that would matter. Sometimes I think, “Really? I have to assemble a huge group of humans and start a revolution right now, then I can relate to polar bears?”

But awareness of the sensuous existence of other lifeforms doesn’t have to involve big ideas or actions. How about just visiting your local garden center to smell the plants?

Why this constant and very particular orientation to the future—what needs “to be done” in order to start being ecological? It’s a sort of gravity well that ecological thought about ethics and politics can get stuck in. You think future and you think radically different from the present. You think I need to change my mindset, now, then I can really start making a difference. You are thinking along the lines of agricultural religion, which is designed mostly to keep agricultural hierarchies in place. You are trying to get the right attitude toward some transcendent principle; in other words, you are operating within the language of good and evil, guilt and redemption. Agricultural religion (Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, and so on) is implicitly hierarchical: there’s a top tier and a bottom one, and the very word hierarchy means the rule of the priests. By framing ecological action this way, you have been sucked into a gravity well, and it’s not an especially ecological space down there. In many ways, it’s not helping at all. For instance, there’s really no reason to feel individual guilt: your individual actions are statistically meaningless.

We don’t have to frame an ecological future as being radically different, at least not in quite that way. Now some of you may be tempted to close this book because you’ve already pegged me as a quietist who doesn’t want to address the elephants in the room such as neoliberal capitalism. You’d be quite wrong. I’m talking about exactly how to address the elephants, considering that all forms of elephant address so far haven’t worked out so well for planet Earth (and all the creatures, including humans, who live on it). There’s nothing wrong with being a little bit hesitant and thoughtful and reflective. But anti-intellectualism is the favorite hobby of … the intellectual. At the end of ecology conferences, you so often hear someone saying, “But what are we going to do?” And this has to do with guilt about sitting on chairs for a few days thinking and talking (and perhaps also with the sheer physical frustration of sitting on chairs for a few days).

I want to take an entirely different approach. I want to persuade you that you are already being ecological, and that expressing that in social space might not involve something radically, religiously different. Don’t think this means that nothing changes, that you are just the same when you know about being ecological. It’s rather hard to describe what happens, but something does happen. It’s like someone slit your being with a very sharp and therefore imperceptible scalpel. You started bleeding everywhere. It’s something like that.

A couple of years ago, I was being interviewed for a magazine. The interviewer was asking a lot of devil’s advocate type questions, so many in fact that I started to think that they weren’t devil’s advocate questions at all. I started to think that he seriously didn’t like the idea of acting ecologically. I wondered how I was going to convince him. Then I wondered whether convincing mode was the best way of addressing his stance. As I’ve just described, this mode might have some bugs in it, bugs from religious discourses that were originally set up in part to justify a massive firewall between humans and nonhumans (cattle over here, frogs over there, cats charmingly—or suspiciously, perhaps—in the boundary space between here and there). And ecological action is very evidently about not having such a firewall.

Then something occurred to me.

“Do you have a cat?” I asked.

“Yes,” he replied, perhaps somewhat taken aback by the oblique and simple question.

“Do you like to stroke her or him?”

“Oh, yes of course.”

“Well, so you’re already relating to a nonhuman being for no particular reason. You’re already being ecological.”

The journalist didn’t like it. Conventional wisdom says that being ecological is a special, different mode of being, akin to becoming a monk or a nun. And the theory of action that fuels this special being also has a religious patina to it, in an antiquated way. Let’s consider a different approach altogether.

It’s going to take us a little while to get the hang of the “no particular reason” part of the above statement. And it’s going to take a while to determine exactly what “relating to” means. Both have to do with a concept that I’m going to call tuning. I think we are already being ecological—we just aren’t consciously aware of it. And those of us who say they’re being ecological might be saying it in a mode that doesn’t have anything in particular to do with coexisting nonviolently with nonhuman beings, which is roughly what I take ecological ethics and politics to mean. This nonviolence doesn’t have to be as extreme as Jainism, perhaps. And perhaps it can’t pretend to be perfect or pure. It’s fraught with ambiguities, because sharks can eat you and viruses can kill you and it would be a good idea to protect our human selves from viruses and sharks. Furthermore, we can’t determine in advance how wide the net of our concern should be, because we don’t know everything about all lifeforms, and we don’t know how they are all interrelated—and our actions cause further interrelations, tangling us even more. Nonviolence in this respect is uneasy and shifting.

Free Will Is Overrated

We have, incidentally, made some ethical and political progress in the last couple of pages, though you may not have noticed. One thing that we just got clear is that it’s possible to combine traditional environmental ethics and politics with animal rights ethics and politics. Though they seem like they might be naturally akin, some people regard joining up these two discourses as an impossible task, like squaring the circle. Environmentalism and ecological science is often about populations rather than individuals, and populations are considered very differently from individuals—in ways, animal rights critics might argue, that are insensitive to specific nonhuman beings: how they can be managed and controlled, for example. Animal rights talk, on the other hand, is frequently concerned with specific individual lifeforms—how they suffer, how they should be treated—even if there are many of them. But the seeming difference in focus between these two types of thinking may not be as distinct as it seems, and it has to do with something we’ve been exploring, namely our trouble with thinking wholes and parts. Let’s consider the sharp distinction between what is considered to be an environment (or ecosystem) and a lifeform (individual animal).

We think, for example, that ecosystems (and populations of lifeforms, for that matter) are wholes with parts that relate to them mechanically, in the sense that they are replaceable. If there’s something wrong with your engine, you replace a component and it’s fixed. Science is ethically neutral but you can imagine using ecological science to justify a certain kind of unpleasant ethics. A lifeform goes extinct? Never mind, the whole will generate a new component to take its place. You can imagine that this doesn’t work very well for the animal rights crowd.

But we are also going to need to have a little conversation about rights. If the choice is between mechanical wholes and separate individuals defined according to the normal manuals for defining such things, I don’t want anything to do with either. They might actually be two halves of a torn whole, as one philosopher, Theodor Adorno, liked to put this sort of thing. The trouble is that rights and citizenship and subjecthood (and languages related to those concepts) have to do with possessing things. Individual rights are based on property rights, so that being in possession of yourself is one criterion for having them, for example. But if everything has rights, nothing can be property, so nothing can have rights. It’s as simple as that. Scaled up to Earth magnitude, rights language doesn’t work at all. The other problem is that to grant someone rights, you traditionally have to show that the someone is indeed a someone, in other words, that such a being has a self-concept. So the poor chimpanzee, to take an example from American law, has to wait around until enough humans are kind enough to condescend to grant it a self-concept. So far, such an approach has not been working out so well for the chimpanzee—or most other nonhuman creatures either.

This is why what Ecuador did in response to the oil corporation Chevron was so fascinating. Thirty thousand Ecuadorians living in the Amazon rainforest brought a $27 billion lawsuit against Chevron for drilling the Lago Agrio oil field, saturating the topsoil with viscous oil. From 2007 to 2008, Ecuador rewrote its constitution to allow for the “rights of nature.”¹ This means that the nonhuman world has the right to exist and regenerate. If you think this is dangerously anthropomorphic, then too bad. The problem is that there is no other way for us as humans to include nonhumans within rights language than to bring them under the human umbrella under which we are sheltering. The difficulty is, many of the tools we have for making correct decisions are contaminated in advance with anthropocentric chemicals, as we will see in the following paragraphs.

The division between act and behave, which is based on a medieval Neoplatonic Christian doctrine of soul and body, structures how we distinguish between ourselves (the ones we allow to act) and nonhumans (the ones we only believe to be behaving, like puppets or androids). But are we Neoplatonic Christian souls? Isn’t being a person a little bit about being paranoid that you might not be a person? Can you get rid of the ambiguity without tearing something?

There is an additional issue. We observe some emotions in nonhumans such as elephants, but we are less willing to let elephants feel emotions that seem less “useful” to us. We can let elephants be hungry when they look hungry, but we have trouble allowing that they are happy when they look happy.² That, for some reason, would be anthropomorphic, and many environmentalist thinkers are concerned not to be, although I’ve argued that it’s impossible, since even if you intend not to be, there you are, a human, relating in whatever human way you are relating to whatever other lifeform. It’s interesting that we think that sheer survival (hence hunger) is more “real” than some kind of quality of existing (such as being happy). It says a lot about us that just surviving, being hungry, are supposedly “real,” aka nothing to do with being human in particular—what does that say about us and what does it in fact do to us ourselves, let alone the elephants? Ecological catastrophe has been wrought in the name of this survival, sheer existing without heed to any quality of existing. Objectively, in terms of how we have acted it out, this default utilitarianism has been very harmful to us, let alone other lifeforms. That says it all, doesn’t it? It’s like that language about the bottom line. We may feel bad about workers suffering, but profits must be maintained, corporations must go on existing for the sake of existing. These two types of thought—about survival and bottom lines—are synonymous.

The environmental approach could be described as taking care of the whole at the expense of individuals, while the animal rights approach could be described as taking care of individuals at the expense of the whole. We seem to be at an impasse. But notice a feature of the two approaches. The “take care of the whole at the expense of the individuals” and the “take care of the individuals at the expense of the whole” approaches do share something. They are trying to give you a good reason to care about nonhumans. But what if having a good reason to care was precisely a large part of the problem? Getting a bit more granular, animal rights and environmentalism give reasons that are reductionist. Reductionism doesn’t necessarily mean that large things are made of small things that are more real than large things. Sometimes we can reduce small things to large things. The environmentalist approach defines wholes as more real than (and so more important than) their parts, or they describe parts as more real than (and so more important than) wholes.

We can start to break through this difficult impasse by noting that what is called environment is just lifeforms and their extended genomic expressions: think of spider’s webs and beaver’s dams. When you think this way, you are already thinking about wholes and parts in a different way.

And when you think of things like that, there’s really no difference between thinking about what is called an ecosystem and what is called a single lifeform. Problem solved.

Thinking about wholes and parts in this way is a key component of good old-fashioned art appreciation theory. A work of art is a whole, and this whole contains many parts—the materials out of which it’s made being just one of them. We could include the interpretive horizons of the art’s consumers, for example, and the contexts in which the art materials were assembled—a highly explosive concept, as we saw earlier. In this way it’s obvious that there are so many more parts than there is whole. In an age of ecological awareness there is no one scale to rule them all. This means that art and art appreciation won’t stay still, in the way that a lot of art theory (for instance in Kant) wants. And in the absence of a single authoritative (anthropocentric) standard of taste with which to judge art, how we regard it is also about how wholes are always less than the sums of their parts. A work of art is like a transparent bag full of eyes, and each eye is also a transparent bag full of eyes. There is something inherently weird, even disgusting, about beauty itself, and this weirdness gets mixed back in when we consider things in an ecological way. This is because beauty just happens, without our ego cooking it up. The experience of beauty itself is an entity that isn’t “me.” This means that the experience has an intrinsic weirdness to it. This is why other people’s taste might come across as bizarre or kitschy.

The truth is the choice to be able to care or not care is always an illusion anyway. You are always in care space, always in truthiness (as in the previous chapter). If you say “I don’t care about this issue,” it means that you care about this issue enough to say that. Often, in the real world, saying you don’t care much about someone or something means you might be hiding that you care very much indeed.

Consider the phenomenon of “single source recycling” where you don’t have to sort stuff into plastics, cardboard, organic waste, and so on: your bin cares about the recycling, so you don’t have to. Some environmentalists have objected to it, visiting houses in my hometown of Houston, Texas, for example, and persuading people to sign petitions. But why? Why the search for hypocrisies in the new process? Because it eliminates the idea of free will, and the performance of “look at me I’m doing good.” The idea that we’re outside the world looking in, deciding from a menu which choice to make, is precisely the dangerous illusion.

When you play a game such as cricket or baseball, the ball arrives at your bat within a few milliseconds. That’s faster than your brain. You can practice and practice so that you can hit that ball when it arrives. That sounds elementary. But if you think about the fact that the ball is still faster than your brain, what on Earth is happening? Whatever is happening is a direct refutation of the Neoplatonic Christian idea we are still retweeting, that we have a mind-like or soul-like thing that is somehow inside us like a gas in a bottle, totally different from that bottle in some way, and that it is a sort of puppet master pulling the strings. You think you are about to hit that ball, but you have already hit it. Free will, as I keep saying, is overrated.

But it’s even more strange and interesting. Consider an actual scenario. The fastest cup-stacker on Earth (a young boy) competed with David Eagleman, a neuroscientist, on his show, The Brain, which ran on PBS in America in 2015. They are wired up to brain scanners. The neuroscientist’s brain is working overtime and he loses. The boy’s brain is hardly working at all.³ It’s as if he is a zombie. He isn’t intending to stack the cups and there isn’t a puppet master inside his head pulling the strings. Something else is happening. His ability to stack the cups is all in his “body.” Is the brain more like some kind of starter, which gets things going, then sits back? Well, we’ve just refuted that—the feeling of having made a decision might arrive slightly after you’ve made it, whatever it is. So the brain isn’t even that, some kind of prime mover of a mechanism that keeps going once you’ve pressed a button. It looks as if what we’re observing is neither mechanical (the latter option) nor orchestral (the former one). Some boss doesn’t start the machine, and some conductor doesn’t need to “intend” everything all the time—as any concert musician will tell you (my father, for example), the conductor is never actually driving the music like that anyway.

Both these models have to do with a myth. The myth is that for something to exist, it must be constantly present: the metaphysics of