Human Ecology

I have long had an idea that humanity does not understand its own ecology. It started this way: what if all of the economic and political and sociological ideas of industrial civilization were based on a mistaken idea of our environment, that, perhaps, we were living on credit from the natural world? Our changing climate puts my question to the test. We may have been living in a physical world that allowed us to behave as we have, to exploit the natural world as we have, to impose our own conceits upon reality. 

Reading the interview Amitav Ghosh on the Lies of History and How the Natural World Fights Back made me think it was time to put out my questions, especially this passage:

BE: Of course the Enlightenment understanding of history is based on that exclusion of the nonhuman—of everything that counts as “nature”—which is one reason I was so taken by your application of the science-fiction term “terraforming” to historical colonialism, specifically to the environmental interventions imposed by settlers striving to remake landscapes on a European model. This, you argue, should be understood as a form of warfare, one that, “lies at the heart of the planetary crisis.”

AG: That the word “terraforming” comes from science fiction, and is defined in reference to other planets, says something very important. Because, of course, the transformation of colonized landscapes (which is exactly what is implied by “terraforming”) is one of the most important aspects of settler-colonialism.

That mission was explicitly embraced by English colonists, as far back as the 17th century: they literally wanted to remake New England in the image of England. This entailed a complete transformation of the environment, part of which was achieved by explicit human interventions like the damming of rivers and cutting down of forests. But much of it was also accomplished through the deployment of non-human agents and entities, like livestock and pathogens, which were said to belong to a separate domain, “Nature.” The colonists knew perfectly well that they were actively transforming what they called “Nature,” yet they clung to the conceit that this was a domain that followed its own laws, impervious to human intervention. This allowed them to disavow responsibility for the ecological transformations that were being effected by their livestock, or by diseases. The idea of Nature served the colonists, in effect, as a tool for the “management of conscience” (to borrow a phrase from Priya Satia). Of course Native Americans weren’t fooled, but for the colonists the idea of Nature as an entirely separate domain was very important.

This is why, I think, the concept of terraforming was not articulated until the mid-20th century, and then only in relation to other planets, even though the actual processes had existed for centuries, right here on Earth. The concept had to be actively repressed to preserve the efficacy of the idea of “Nature” as a tool for management of conscience. That repression has served its purpose very well. It is no accident that climate denialism is strongest in the settler-colonial countries of the Anglosphere. The denialists are disavowing their responsibility for the world-wide environmental changes of today in much the same way that their ancestors did. 

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