Globing the Earth: The New Eco-logics of Nature

Abstract

Concerted clamors ring in the corridors of our planet: “Nature is dying, and with it, life on earth. Humans! Your end is approaching.” Are we then battling the postendist phase of nature? Is living with/in nature all about encountering the spectre of the “unborn”—those who will come after us and who in some sense now must command the unfolding of present politics and society? How are we, in the words of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, “responsible for our rose”? (Anderson 1987: vii) Are we entering a new eco-logics of nature? And how is a Green politics formed that may, in the process, globe the earth? Loren Eiseley observes: It is with the coming of man that a vast hole seems to open in nature, a vast black whirlpool spinning faster and faster, consuming flesh, stones, soils, minerals, sucking down the lightning, wrenching power from the atom, until the ancient sounds of nature are drowned in the cacophony of something which is no longer nature, something instead which is loose and knocking at the world’s heart, something demonic and no longer planned—escaped, it may be—spewed out of nature, contending in a final giant’s game against its master.(Eiseley 1960: 123-24) What happens to nature now? Is nature now what it is not? I agree with Michael Bess that nature is no longer a static, rigid taxonomy; it becomes protean, upwelling, a vital force erupting forth, proliferating, unpredictable, and metastasizing. We may actually be facing the most extraordinary frontier—the frontier of nature as an ultimately creative, responsive, and transformative power, which regards human beings simply as a trace that is overcome and left behind. (Bess 1999: 2) So what Bernard Charbonneau sees as human “freedom” (a version of natural dialecticism) is born out of seeing nature’s otherness as a self: a deconstructed self emerging from thoughts about the “death of nature,” a death that is a promise of a fresh lease on life—a postendism that transcends imponderable thresholds. Understanding nature is challenging the disciplinization of thought; the environmental crisis is a crisis of thought leading to reflexive and transversal thinking. Nature is more than what takes place without the voluntary and intentional agency of man; nature