Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –
The anguish and pain that humans and nonhumans are enduring because of climate breakdown, the loss of bio-diversity, the pollution of rives, lakes and sea along with other human created harms could at root be attributed to believing that humans exist outside the orbit of what is conventionally thought of as the natural world.
This belief, which is an illusion as it is simply not true, can in part be attributed to religious doctrines which hold that of all the billions of species that have ever existed and might exist in the future, humankind is the only one that has a destiny outside of nature. This belief holds within it the idea that the Earth, with its neural-like connected life forms, is on a moral par with the merchandise we habitually discard.
The designation of the Earth as a thing rather than a being and the hubris of thinking that our species is exceptional, has in no small way led us at to treat the Earth as we see fit. We behave like the overseers of a factory deciding what resources to utilize and when. That these resources before they were extracted from their home place might have had qualities, relationships and self-interest does not concern us.
This misconception of our place in the natural order explains our individual and collective response to the collapse of the natural world. The response of governments and corporations to the ecological breakdowns is to employ what are thought to be technological remedies such as the replacement of petrol and diesel vehicles with electric ones, replacing the generation of electricity with solar, wind and nuclear and the use of so-called artificial intelligence to improve efficiencies.
The wellspring of these proffered solutions to our self-made ecological catastrophe is not to conserve what is left of the living Earth and enable the millions living in dire poverty to live better lives but to enable consumerism and the exploitative enterprises and structures it supports to continue unabated. Kate Crawford points this out in her very readable book Altas of Al (2021).
What is not open to discussion by those whose hands are on the steer of the global economy is the option of making a swift but orderly transition to a way of life that is not based on treating our biosphere as a thing and sustaining an economic political system that has been designed to enable the transnational corporations and finance companies to make extraordinarily large amounts of money. An alternative that is within our cultural frame of reference is communitarianism.
The nub of what communitarianism is can be found in the ancient texts. In the New Testament for instance, Acts 4. 32-36, reads: “No one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. … There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as had need.”
This practice of caring for each other is a lived experience in every Irish townland as witnessed in the aftermath of Storm Éowyn when neighbour helped neighbour to clear local roads of fallen trees, provided flasks of hot water to those who had no electricity and called on the vulnerable. The mobilisation of community resources to address needs was an integral part of rural life in Ireland until recent years. I recall in the mid-1990’s seeing farmers in County Fermanagh help each other bring in the harvest. This practice involved families working together officially began on Lughnasa, 1 August, and ended on Gleaning Sunday or Domhnach Deascan, the 15 August.
Implicit in the willingness to help each other is the predilection to see ourselves in the other, which is empathy. In this epoch of willfully destroying the Earth’s life support systems there is a need not only to help and cooperate but to see ourselves in nonhuman life-forms. We need to treat the biosphere, which means the waterways, flora, fauna, fungi and air in our neighbourhood, the places we walk through and where children play, as we want to be treated ourselves. In other words, we need to apply the Golden Rule of ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ to all life forms. That our society’s default mode is to behave otherwise does not nullify the ethical validity and survival value of the golden rule.
As the practice of working together as a community has a long pedigree so is the idea that Homo Sapiens are an integral part of nature. The evidence for the latter is recorded in Irish name places many of which refer to natural features and myths that suggest a reverence for the land. To give an example, one translation to English of the Irish name for the 33-mile long Sillees River, which originates in Lough Achork and flows through south-west Fermanagh, is ‘Stream of the Fairies’. In times gone by the idea of fairies articulated the view of nonhuman nature as a sentient being which although at times difficult to understand deserved to be treated with respect.
The idea of ecosystems, geological features and nonhuman life-forms having the status of persons is not only a part of Irish mythology but one increasingly embraced by governments. An example is in late January the New Zealand government conferred legal personhood on Taranaki Maunga, a prominent mountain, granting it all the rights, powers, duties, responsibilities and liabilities of a person. In 2017 India granted the river Ganga and its largest tributary the Yamura the status of a person. Can we expect the Northern Ireland Assembly and the government in Dublin to grant personhood to rivers, hills, woods and even whole bioregions sometime in the near future?
We don’t need to wait for our institutions to become more enlightened in order to treat nonhuman nature with respect which I am sure our descendants will be glad we did.