We are the dingoes.

 Sometime in the past ten years, I came to think on whether our civilization - liberal in politics and economics - has rested on an unspoken assumption of ecology. Global warming brought me this idea. Reading The Dingo’s Fate (NOEMA) touches on some of my own thinking - and adds a few things.

The following touches on my thoughts that we, as a species, have benefitted from a stable environment whose stability is a falseness based on our limited historical memory:

As Drury wrote, referencing the thought of Aristotle: “If one starts with false premises, dialogue and logic will not necessarily lead one to the right conclusions.” Disturbance and disruption, viewed through the lens of an essentially fixed, inflexible natural world, are scarcely distinguishable from “damage.” If the cause of such disruption is a native species, it must be overpopulated and therefore eligible for “control.” If the cause is a foreign arrival, its impact is the clinching proof of its malignancy. 

So, philosophy, metaphysics, shares a responsibility for our thinking of an immutable nature. Our human-centric thinking had us once the center of the universe; now, it has us as the center of earthly life. Politics and economics have not factored in the needs and costs of an environment in chaos - chaos being antagonistic to human life, not an arbitrary anarchy inherent in the natural world.

Drury responded to the great variance and mutability of nature, and the lack of workable definitions in his day, by rejecting the fundamental meaningfulness of “ecological communities” as a concept: Communities, he concluded, are merely interpretive frames we impose upon the clutter of the natural world as aids for communication and understanding....

Human-centric thinking divorced from understanding our place in the natural world underlies denial of climate change. We can change our ways, or we can all die. I have little hope my species can do what is needed to save its current form of civilization. Collective action will not go to reform, but towards the protection of its members against Others in ever more militant, restrictive means. Lebensraum will rise again as a political concept in a reality where the land becomes less and less able to provide life. The danger is not in othering people until they become the victims of a superior military power. It is in seeing the danger emanates from how all of us affect the world around us.

Nativeness in human societies is a topic and a quandary of its own, yet the conceptual overlap is inescapable. Belonging, home and fittedness to place — these are not concepts we can eschew altogether without throwing the world, and our understanding of it, into jeopardy. Clearly, the association of the giant panda with China and the kiwi with New Zealand is not merely a matter of arbitrary perceptions. Yet neither can we fence out all the dingos and their likes, nor insist upon criteria for nature more static than the natural world itself. 

Ecological systems, and the associations that constitute them, are real and crucial. It is only that we cannot, in our shifting, changing world, be rigid to the point of blindness, lest we lose our grasp on the very things we are trying to preserve.

 

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