Anthropocene thinking and moral hazards
King grounds his critique of the “technofix” in an analysis of the concept of the Anthropocene: a period when human activity is altering the conditions of life on a planetary scale and leaving perceptible traces in the geological record.
This development, King argues, “places humanity at the centre of the Earth story, suggesting that whatever challenges the planet faces will need to be solved by Homo sapiens, the species whose destructiveness is inseparable from its genius”.
Paired with the concept of the “death of nature”, Anthropocene thinking is a deadly precursor to the types of technological interventions that, King argues, will fundamentally change humanity’s relationship to the environment.
The problem is not only that technology can escape human control, with catastrophic consequences. Accepting a perspective that subjugates the non-human world to purely human ends has moral and ethical implications.
“The Anthropocene narrative,” King writes, “tends to encourage a view of nature as infinitely malleable – something that can and should be shaped by human hands, to human ends – and this perspective is likely to reproduce the arrogance and lack of principled reflection that placed us in this situation in the first place.”
Removing the separation between human and non-human nature actually makes it easier to exploit the natural environment, including other humans. This mindset – which King terms “ecomodernism” – “repeats the error of industrial capitalism, and even modernity itself, in treating the environment as an abstract entity that can be endlessly manipulated.”
Responsibility towards nature
In response to the ecomodernist mindset, which “effectively abolishes nature as a category distinct from humanity by making everything humans do effectively identical with it”, Brave New Wild suggests an alternative: what King terms “ecohumanism”.
He argues that nature is at once an idea and a phenomenological reality. “Human beings in short, are always part of and always apart from the natural world: nature defines us, and we define nature.”
This view may appear to be the same as that taken by proponents of the technofix. For King, however, our idea of nature actively shapes our experience of reality: “our ability to recognise ourselves as animals marks us out from all the other animals, while the suite of powers (intellectual, technological) from which that self-recognition is inseparable imposes upon us certain responsibilities – to ourselves and to parental nature.”
In the act of recognising that nature is created through human thought, we can realise that it should not be used purely for human gain. We must act with a sense of responsibility towards it.
King proposes an embodied approach to technological solutions to the problem of anthropogenic climate change. He argues that modern science must move away from a perspective of mastery over nature, towards “an attitude of care”.
The first level of interaction with nature should not be mediated through logic or distant observation. It should be phenomenological: at the level of lived experience. It should involve what King calls a “more holistic way of being”. This is based on a consideration of all aspects of what it means to be human and the implications of potential solutions for “conscious, subjective, immediate experience”.
One way to achieve this goal is by engaging with the democratic, creative and imaginative aspects of our humanity. King suggests decentralising political and technological control “as far as possible to individual human beings”. He proposes developing community through political policies such as universal basic income and “bringing energy and other utilities into public ownership”.
He also points to sources of inspiration in creative and imaginative exercises, such as reading nature writing, or other activities that help to elicit what he calls “human flourishing”. The point, for King, is to revitalise a sense of “conviviality” through a communal understanding of what it means to be human.
Radical humility
Brave New Wild advocates an ethical sense of human agency. It offers an accessible point of departure for many ideas circulating in environmental philosophy.
But while it is true that human beings are part of nature and should treat it respectfully, it is also true that “nature” is not limited to human perception or ideas. Human beings employ reason and sensory perception to make sense of the world, but the universe itself is not rational or reasonable.
Despite advances in science and technology, nature exists beyond the powers of human comprehension, in both a material and conceptual sense. As much as scientists can engineer life, they do not know how life in the universe started or how it will end.
What King does not explain is how to cultivate ecohumanism among those who view science and technology as providing ready solutions to the messy realities of our ecological existence. To foster the embodied responsibility that his interventions demand, we must first appreciate nature as a force that unsettles our claims to knowledge and mastery.
One way of doing this is through the aesthetic appreciation of the sublime. An experience that embraces wonder and destruction, the sublime offers a view of nature on its own terms. It compels us to experience nature as fundamentally incomprehensible. It directly challenges the hubris of a “technofix” approach.
In a world of high-tech maps and data-driven solutions, the sublime offers a glimpse of nature as it exists independently of us. The sense of awe might inspire a radical humility. It might move us away from trying to fix the planet, and towards caring for it as a source of infinite possibility.
This article is also published on The Conversation. illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.
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