Who is We?Who is We?

Proposing a notion of creative ecology means decolonising nature--not in the sense of reclaiming some sort of original wilderness or pure nonhuman environment (these represent fictions of a colonised world), but instead releasing the environment from its reduction to 'natural resources', as if it exists purely for human exploitation and consumption. (T.J. Demos, The Center for Creative Ecologies.Creativeecologies.com, https://creativeecologies.ucsc.edu/, (accessed October 19, 2019)) In the run-up to the Biennale di Venezia 2021, Het Nieuwe Instituut is programming a series of discussions around the themes from Who is We? The conversation between T.J. Demos and Anne van Leeuwen is the first in the series.

Traditionally ecology has been defined as "the branch of biology that deals with the relations of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings".Angus Stevenson, ed. Oxford Dictionary of English: Third Edition, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 557. But something disturbing happened to ecology. Organisms and their environment are not clearly separable any more. Plants, animals and microbes no longer merely adapt to their environment, they actively alter it. Humans have even altered their environment to the point where they have become part of Earth's geo-history, and with that the world has also changed. In the so-called Anthropocene, ecology moved out of the field of biology and took, with political urgency, the world's stage.

For a long time, many Western people thought they were the only, or the only significant, players on Earth. As conscious, rational subjects, they were the ones making history against the passive backdrop called nature. Nature was another material and objective world that could be entered for subjective exploration and exploitation - in nature areas, wildlife parks and other gated communities. It could also be consumed by watching nature documentaries, where 'cultural references' such as people, vehicles and camera teams, but also socio-economic and political situations, were systematically cut out of the picture. Here remains pure wilderness.

Reality has caught up with us. Climate change shows us as no other that nature and culture are no longer separate worlds. Where in climate change does nature end and culture begin? We are only beginning to understand how questions of social justice are entangled with climate urgencies. Paradoxically, in the Anthropocene, or age of man, mankind has turned out not to be almighty, as a new geological force might suggest, but above all interdependent. Thousands of actors have joined 'the Anthropos' on the world stage and confront it with their presence and actions. Icebergs threaten our shores, insects decide upon our agricultural production and microbiomes influence our moods. Nature is no longer something outside of us. You could even argue that nature, as such, no longer exists.

This new reality challenges our Western, modern, dual way of thinking. Nature and culture are no longer essentially disparate categories. The same goes for object and subject, fact and fiction, man and woman. Instead, all kinds of specific interwoven realities emerge in which socio-political, technological and economic developments merge in hybrid collectives. Take for example the small European eels that were released into the Markermeer in 2014. Possibly tagged by scientists and followed by satellites, they meet - among other things - dikes, sluices, boats, and even drugs dissolved in the water. Their release relates to the history of the Zuiderzee, the identity of local fishermen, specific economic interests, biodiversity reduction and Dutch and European policies. When caught and illegally trafficked to Asia, the lives of the glass eels intersect with smuggler communities, traffickers, customs and Interpol. The eels in turn alter water quality by eating carrion and affect the design of sluices, requiring the new inclusion of fish ladders, and probably many more things about which we still do not have a clue. Of course, the actions of non-humans and the interconnectedness of beings has long been recognised by many indigenous societies - from communities in North America to Japan and Arctic regions.See for instance Francesca Castagnetti, "Lost in Translation / Speaking the Language of the Land: The Quest for a New Environmental Narrative," The Ethnobotanical Assembly, July, 2019.

In Western societies, however, we have very little language, few frameworks and tools to process or describe these dynamic assemblages of seemingly disparate entities, however ecology is one of them.

"Ecology drives you crazy", Bruno Latour states in _Facing Gaia_ - It doesn't stop; every morning it begins all over again. One day, it's rising water levels; the next, it's soil erosion; by evening, it's the glaciers melting faster and faster; on the 8 pm news, between two reports on war crimes, we learn that thousands of species are about to disappear before they have even been properly identified. Every month, the measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are even worse than the unemployment statistics. [&] This is what the press calls living in the era of 'ecological crisis'."Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, (Cambridge and Medford: Polity Press, 2017), 7.

One of the most unsettling parts of this 'ecological crisis' is that we are part of it. We have not only instigated it, but we also are the crisis. When we start our car, drink our coffee, water our garden, go on holidays or flush our toilet, ecology haunts us and will haunt us for decades to come. Ecology drives us crazy because it entails what Latour calls "a profound mutation in our relation to the world."Ibid., 8. It even makes it impossible to have a relationship 'to the world', since the world is no longer outside of us. The interwoven reality of the Anthropocene challenges our self-image, our frameworks of thinking, and with that the very fundaments of society. Ecology drives us crazy because it confronts us at an unprecedented scale - What are we supposed to do when faced with an ecological crisis that does not resemble any of the crises of war and economies, the scale of which is formidable, to be sure, but to which we are in a way habituated since it is of human, all too human, origin?Bruno Latour, "Waiting for Gaia: Composing the Common World through Arts and Politics," Lecture at Institut français, London, 2011.

Humanity is responsible for climate change and dwindling biodiversity, but at the same time the crisis reveals that a unified humanity does not exist. Not all people have the same impact - as the ecological footprint per nation-state poignantly shows - and regardless of their footprint, not all people feel the same responsibility, as current political polarisation reflects. Communities in different places have very different socio-ecological realities, world views, and political reactions to the ecological crisis. Without a clearly circumscribable 'we', there is clearly also no universal fix. This seemingly makes us feel even more distanced, or more helpless, when faced with the current situation.

One thing that we can do is start to get to grips with the interwoven reality of the Anthropocene. In his call for a holistic perspective, the Zimbabwean ecologist and farmer Allan Savory recognises that both human and non-human actors shape the world. After years of studying ecosystems and observing complexity, he states that "we now realize that no whole, be it a family, a business, a community, or a nation, can be managed without looking inward to the lesser wholes that combine to form it, and outward to the greater wholes of which it is a member."Jody Butterfield, Sam Bingham and Allan Savory. _Holistic Management Handbook: Regenerating your _Land and Growing your Profits. (Boulder: Savory Institute, 2019), 21. But speaking of wholes or holism can be tricky. A whole, be it in the form of 'nature' or 'the globe', can imply an all-seeing engineer or God and obscure the many different voices, interrelations, and specific dynamics that make up communities.

This is why Timothy Morton introduces the idea of 'implosive wholes.' These 'implosive wholes,' made of sets of partial objects, could provide "a special, weak holism, that isn't theistic."Timothy Morton, Humankind: Solidary with Nonhuman People. (London and New York: Verso, 2019), 103. He envisions these wholes as perforated bags filled with water in which countless other leaking bags swim. The good thing about envisioning wholes, such as individuals, institutions, societies and ecosystems, as perforated bags is that it means you can share worlds. It opens up space for collaborations and exchanges. "Our human world is shared with all kinds of tattered broken worlds. The world of spiders, the world of tigers, the world of bacteria."Ibid., 93. As 'implosive wholes,' we can start to come to terms with the interwoven reality of the Anthropocene and look for ways of sharing worlds.

"This new reality", TJ Demos explains when referring to the current socio-ecological situation, "raises all kinds of questions about the world, different modes of worlding and different kinds of just futurities."TJ Demos, "The Center for Creative Ecologies," Lecture at Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, 2019. He summarises these queries in one speculative research question with The Center for Creative Ecologies - "What comes after the end of the world?" This question is a provocation to think, in Demos' words, about the present culture of catastrophism, negativity and nihilism, but it is above all an invitation to envision futures beyond the end point of catastrophe. In the end it is all about the question - "how can we cultivate futures based upon social justice and multispecies flourishing?"Ibid.

Building future worlds is no longer only a human business, it is now also about "going about your doggy, spidery or whaley business."Timothy Morton, Humankind, 92. It concerns a process that Donna Haraway describes as 'becoming-with'. When talking about the relation between pigeons and humans, Haraway points out that "pigeons have very old histories of becoming-with human beings. These birds tie their people into knots of class, gender, race, nation, colony, postcolony and - just maybe - recuperating terra-yet-to-come." Donna Haraway, _Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. _(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 15. Haraway further explains this pigeon-human entanglement with the project PigeonBlog_, in which domestic pigeons, artist-engineers and pigeon fanciers worked together to collect data on air quality. During this project, Haraway stresses that "the pigeons were not SIM cards; they were living coproducers, and the artist-researchers and pigeons had to learn to interact and to train together with the mentoring of the men of the pigeon fancy. All the players rendered each other capable."Ibid., 22. The same might be said of tagged eels or, for that matter, communities of fruit-bearing trees. In order to be able to build futures of co-existence, we shouldn't flee into utopian schemes or try to eradicate the present or past to make way for new futures. Above all, according to Haraway, co-existence requires learning to be truly present and to consciously connect with other beings. In times of ecological crisis, this means "staying with the trouble" and nurturing unforeseen relations with other beings. It requires "making oddking; that is, we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles. We become-with each other or not at all."Ibid., _4.

So in order to build new worlds of co-existence we need a new kind of sensitivity for 'developing with each other.' This might be grown by experiencing, observing and describing contemporary interrelations between humans and non-humans. Our ecological reality requires a new kind of listening - a listening with all the senses to the specific, and often incredible, meetings that beings have with one another. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing listens to such meetings through a method integrating natural history and ethnography. In _The_ Mushroom at the End of the World, she narrates how matsutake mushrooms interact with specific communities, economics, politics and natural histories. Human and non-human actors and actions interweave, alter each other and write history together. In these stories matsutake mushrooms and pine forests are just as much world builders as Hmong mushroom collectors, Japanese wholesalers and Finnish nature guides. Tsing shows that stories can be pivotal in coming to grips with the current ecological reality. Listening and storytelling can have as much value as scientific research, or, as Tsing puts it :

"To listen to and tell a rush of stories is a method. And why not make the strong claim and call it a science, an addition to knowledge? Its research object is contaminated diversity; its unit of analysis is the indeterminate encounter. To learn anything we must revitalize arts of noticing and include ethnography and natural history."Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, _The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. _(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015), 37.

In Tsing's research, natural history suddenly becomes truly historical. Her ecological descriptions are not abstract, but grounded in reality. Through her method of listening and storytelling, history can be rewritten with just as much concern for "environmental matters" as "socio-political and economic frameworks of injustice." TJ Demos, "Ecology-as-Intrasectionality," Bully Pulpit, _Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art _5, no. 1 (Spring 2019), 1. Such histories allow for the emergence of intertwined futures in which humans and non-humans 'become-with' each other.

To return to Demos' question, "how can we cultivate futures based upon social justice and multispecies flourishing?" In order to answer that question we need to let go of the idea that there are neatly circumscribed entities or wholes with clear boundaries such as individuals, nation states and institutions. Instead we need more permeable notions that befit a reality of migratory movements and interspecies transactions. More fluid perspectives are needed "because meadows and gorillas and humans and clouds and biosphere are just the things that you can't categorize as totally solidly themselves - meadows are made up of all kinds of things like grass and birds that aren't meadows, lifeforms are made up of all kind of things that aren't alive."Timothy Morton, Humankind, 116. Recently this has included all kinds of things that were previously considered 'human,' such as microplastics and fertilisers.

This also means that thinking in terms of 'multispecies', or a collection of species, bears the risk of falling short of ecology. To see the world as a collection of neatly circumscribed species, as Linnaeus once did and many natural history museums still do, simply does not hold anymore. Darwin already noted the difficulties with categorisation during his decade-long research on barnacles. After looking at the umpteenth barnacle under his microscope, he lamented, "I must express my deliberate conviction that it is hopeless to find in any species, which has a wide range, and of which numerous specimens from different districts are presented for examination, any one part or organ [&] absolutely invariable in form or structure."Charles Robert Darwin, A monograph on the sub-class Cirripedia, with figures of all the species. The Balanidæ, (or sessile cirripedes); the Verrucidæ, etc. etc. etc. (London: The Ray Society, 1854), 155. Instead of trying to somehow pin down essential features, it is time to look for specific relations in communities and what they set in motion. In other words, the interesting question is no longer 'what is a species of barnacle?' but 'what does a specific community of barnacles do?' and 'how do they 'become-with' other beings and things?' In the Anthropocene, a search for 'the European eel' will provide little insight, but studying a specific eel-plant-human-animal-microbe community might actually teach us how to become more of this earth.

Living in the ecological reality of the Anthropocene requires renouncing false universalisms and embracing diversity and complexity. It means accepting that the world is moved in specific ways by hybrid communities and that we are part of that interconnected world. As implosive wholes, we are caught up in all kinds of peculiar entanglements. This can be confrontational, as when uncomfortable feelings suddenly arise after having booked a flight and reading about flooded Venice. Nonetheless, we need to find ways of 'staying with the trouble' without drowning in guilt, denialism or fear. "This has to be our point of departure - not with the goal of finding a cure, just so we can learn to survive without getting carried away by denial, or hubris, or depression, or hope for a reasonable solution, or retreat into the desert."Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia, 13. As earth-bound people, we are going to have to get used to ecology and find ways to institutionalise it. In other words, we are going to need many more 'Centers for Creative Ecologies'.

For Demos, introducing the notion of creative ecology means "releasing the environment from its reduction to 'natural resources'." But cultivating just ecological futures requires more: it means 'releasing the environment from being an environment.' Because ecology affects us on the inside. In our lungs when we breathe, through our microbes when we eat and in our behaviour when the climate crisis hits us. Ecology fundamentally enforces a new concept of the self as a relational being, a complex 'perforated bag of water' that can, and necessarily does, share worlds. What is left is inter-being. "There is no cure for the condition of belonging to the world. But, by taking care, we can cure ourselves of believing that we do not belong to it."Ibid., 13.

And that is the beauty of our new ecological world. We belong to it, and that makes life so much more interesting and worthwhile.

Text: Anne van Leeuwen