We are currently living in an age in which the effects of industrialism, and more specifically, industrial agriculture, are beginning to pierce through the smog that once cloaked the devastating reality of our culture’s increasing addiction to consumption and convenience. Put another way, as the world’s population increases, factory farms and urban developments are caking up across the globe like tar in the lungs of a seasoned smoker, and the concrete jungle is relentlessly and blindly laying waste to a once fertile and robust land, sea, and air.
These effects are now so grossly apparent that in early 2000, Nobel-Prize winning scientist, Paul Crutzen coined the term Anthropocene, or the newest geological era to hit our humble planet since the Holocence epoch that marked Earth post-ice age 12,000 years ago. According to Crutzen, the Anthropocene epoch is defined by, “human dominance of biological, chemical, and geological processes on Earth,”# that have begun to inflict measurable and irreversible effects on the ecosystem for untold millennia to come. In his article, “Living in the Anthropocene: Toward a New Global Ethos,” Crutzen asserts that, “to master this huge shift, we must change the way we perceive ourselves and our role in the world.” He goes on to explain that,
“teaching students that we are living in the Anthropocene...could be of great help...This name change would stress the enormity of humanity’s responsibility as stewards of the Earth. It would highlight the immense power of our intellect and our creativity, and the opportunities they offer for shaping the future.”#
Essentially, what Crutzen is calling for is an entire restructuring of the way in which we discuss nature, and consequently, our relationship to it. To truly understand the magnitude of such a task however, we need to first understand just how entrenched our culture is in its current epistemology, and if our goal is to restructure our current discourse on nature, a good place to start would be with post-structuralist thinker, Michel Foucault’s essay, “The Discourse of Nature.”
According to Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab, “post-structuralism holds that there are many truths, that frameworks must bleed, and that structures must become unstable or decentered.”# Ultimately, post-structuralism boils down to a refutation of the fact that our lives are informed by grand narratives, falsely dictating our realities and leading us to interact with the world in ways that do not coincide with any sort of truth. Thus, Foucault opens “The Discourse of Nature” with the simple yet poignant idea that, “the theory of natural history can not be dissociated from that of language.”# That is, after thousands of years of philosophical and religious texts claiming man’s dominion over nature, we have reached a point in which to think in any way contrary to that is to be a regressive, dirty hippie.
Furthermore, the only way to discuss nature is to use the language we have imposed on it, and given our current relationship to nature, that language is unarguably one in which Earth is deemed inferior to the cunning inventiveness of man. As Foucault states, "Natural history is contemporaneous with language...[It] cannot and should not exist as a language independent of all other languages unless it is a well-constructed language--and a universally valid one."# Here we see the dire need to heed Crutzen’s advice and start at the top with a universal name change. In doing this, we are allowed the opportunity to look at Earth from a completely new point-of-view, albeit one that admits our foolish treatment of it. Nevertheless, unless we admit defeat, we are doomed to continue discussing the problem of our relationship to the planet in a way in which we subjugate and bastardize it.
Despite the fact that people are beginning to look at man’s place in nature from a more symbiotic angle, from thinkers like Crutzen to those who shop at their local farmer’s markets, it will be horrendously difficult to make any serious strides unless everybody gets on the ‘eco-’ train. As Foucault somewhat bleakly points out, "[life] is a category of classification, relative, like all the other categories, to the criteria one adopts."# Thus, until the majority of the world’s inhabitants regard everything from the soil to the stars as bearing some semblance of life, and thus some semblance of an integral relationship to the rest of the world, we will continue to run up against those individuals who want to innovate the environment into oblivion.
When taken together, Crutzen’s call for a new geological era and Foucault’s theories on our current discourse of nature provide a compelling argument for just how lost we are in the throes of the wilderness. Though there are still some scientists and politicians that want to vehemently deny global warming and man’s impact on the environment, the rest of us need to stand up and acknowledge our selfish tradition with our home. It has always struck me as kind of odd that we are always hearing of missions to the moon in which we drill the surface, searching for resources that can sustain human life. Clearly we are so entrenched in an anthropocentric world view that our notions of technological quick fixes are now being carried over to a planet that we are not even inhabiting yet. Thus, unless we fundamentally change the way in which we structure our knowledge of the natural world, we will quickly, and most likely painfully, phase ourselves out of it.
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