Reposting a friend's blogpost: Going beyond the “ecological turn” in the humanities

Hi there I invite you all to check out the following article. I had been uncertain whether to post it when I first read it, but I think it may be generative in light of our trip to Oka and may address some of the discomforts we've been having.

Going Beyond the "ecological turn" in the Humanities by Aaron Vansintjan

I've included some quoted passages below:

"It’s interesting that, at the very moment when we are once again oriented toward nature, many are also heralding its end. The term Anthropocene signifies that the world we live on is so greatly shaped by human activity that if someone were to dig a deep hole 100 million years from now, they would find a layer of earth that has “human” written all over it. The eco-modernists have run with this idea, saying that since there is no longer any non-human, it is up to us to shape the world as we please. And if nature has come to an end, then, in a way, so has the world as we know it. As Slavoj Zizek puts it, we are living in the End Times.

When writing the above paragraph I was struck by my assumption of a we. That’s just the problem with the Anthropocene: it assumes a blanket humanity, a blanket history, a blanket geological record. But as Métis anthropologist Zoe Todd notes, “over the last five hundred years, Indigenous peoples faced (and face) the end of worlds with the violent incursion of colonial ideologies and actions”. There are people who have never ‘turned their back’ to the land. For some Indigenous people, their worlds ended a long time ago, and for many, their worlds are in constant threat of ending. They have resisted colonialist assimilation for centuries—and despite the odds, continue to practice radical alternatives, different ways of engaging with the land"

.... 

"Capitalism can easily be caricatured as a poisonous, homogeneous puddle of “all that is wrong in the world”. And so people like to point to and romanticize those “outside” of capitalism as models for alternative ways of being. 

But what if, instead of assuming an “outside”, we simply limit ourselves to the boundaries? Consider this: when pondering the circumference of Britain’s coastline, Benoît Mandelbrot showed that its length is not universal: if your unit of measurement is 200km, it turns out to be 2400km in length. If your unit is 50km, its length is 3400km. The estimated length of a coastline will increase when your ruler’s length decreases. In the same way, if you look closely at the capitalist puddle’s margins, you’ll find that it’s actually almost impossible to measure its true circumference. What initially appears like a pretty straight line is full of edges; near-fractal shapes whose total length depends on the unit of measurement you choose."

....

"The continuing relevance of the “ecological turn” within the humanities signals that more difficult work lies ahead: as Todd and many others have argued, it requires acknowledging—and, more importantly, supporting—those who have never turned their back in the first place. It requires noticing the different worlds that exist today, are being snuffed out, and are constantly emerging. These different worlds are political, and in being political, they enable new life-worlds to become real. And so, rather than simply including them within a larger universal theory of capitalism, it should be possible to notice how they broaden our options."

*Aaron Vansintjan is a PhD student at Birkbeck, University of London and the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He is an editor of the website Uneven Earth and enjoys journalism, wild fermentations, decolonization and degrowth, and long bicycle rides.