Introduction

Abstract

The theme for this issue, (In)finite Ecologies, came to life as my co-editors, Garth Sabo and Christine Bennett, and I delved into the rich diversity and circulation history of ecological thinking across the disciplines. As literature scholars, we came to this topic—and the environmental humanities more generally—through varying methodological, disciplinary, literary, and topical commitments: histories of science and medicine, speculative fiction, environmental writing and activism, modernist avant garde writing and image-making, media studies, even film theory. And we were struck by the way that these divergent paths brought us to a similar set of questions about what, exactly, ecological thinking entails across history and in our time. Is the notion of ecology still an applicable heuristic through which to understand the material reality of the 21st century? Are there instances in which ecology, so often bound to notions of infinite relationality—and thus, consequence—hits an epistemological limit? What, if any, are the finite bounds of ecological thinking, and in a time when the prefix eco- is widely and easily attached to any number of concepts, theories, practices, products? How have those bounds been defined, and how have they been exploded? In what instances does ecological thinking become finite, even as it retains a strong relationship to infinitude?Our call for papers, and the responses it generated, sought answers to these questions by activating critical theory alongside media studies and histories of science, environmental writing, and representation. We supposed that this three-pronged approach would help us answer our questions by providing a solid footing in ecological thought's historical context paired with an understanding of how the various strains of ecological thought we document here were and are circulated across media—and, thus, necessarily altered by this circulation. Prompted by Jacques Derrida's observation in his essay “Faith and Knowledge,” we called upon media studies to help us understand how “a certain vague ecologist spirit”—and at times very specific ecological practices and practitioners—might inoculate themselves against irrelevancy and compete for epistemological footholds by embracing mediatization despite the risks of dissolution, interpretation, and appropriation involved in doing so (Derrida 2002, 92). And encouraged by the wide-ranging philosophical interests of Sir Arthur George Tansley, one of the earliest practitioners and evangelists of ecological science as a form of experimental fieldwork practice, and whose dabbling in philosophy, psychology, and psychoanalysis appears to have influenced his scientific practice, we anticipated that theory and philosophy might better help us understand and describe the scope of ecological epistemology—in part, because it always has.1The articles in this special issue consistently bring ecology's discursive history into conversation with its present iterations. Michael Marder and Kristin Ferebee, for example, both impugn forms of eco-optimism by turning to texts ranging from ancient Egypt and Greece to the public exhibitions at Chernobyl currently facing threat amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Both Marder and Ferebee question the fantasy of nature's limitless ability to supersede catastrophe, anthropogenic and otherwise. Ferebee asks us to consider, for example, “why did the COVID-19 pandemic see such a marked return to the idea that human catastrophe was corrective, and that an unchanging, inexorable nature was only awaiting our absence in order to build a better world?” When we read these articles alongside each other, we can see different iterations and mediatizations of this fantasy, from the ancient past to our very present moment.Skeptical readers might contend that setting the scope of ecology within this wide-ranging historical time frame creates a problem that we ourselves then solve here, but I would counter that seeking ecological thinking among diverse sources, and across literary history, has been a key function of how ecology domesticates media. Tansley and his contemporaries, for example, sought out ecological description among a diversity of the literary and natural historical archive, and retroactively defined certain writers and observers as practicing ecologists. They also made sure to note what writing was not ecological, including the “rather trivial and . . . decidedly slovenly” papers that drew too much upon superficial natural historical observation, and that “tend[ed] to bring the subject into disrepute” (Tansley 1987, 1).2 For all of ecology's lasting impact, the field did not have an easy time establishing its work due to its seemingly leisurely appearance, a problem made manifest in the look of fieldwork as well as in prose (Tansley 1987, 1).In response, ecologists became savvy interlocutors within their contemporary media environments and deftly made use of modernity's innovations in representative and connective media3 to circulate their message: print media, visual art and especially photography and film, aviation technology, and even telephony, in the astonishing case of ocean ecologist William Beebe, who by 1935 was using telephones to describe deep-sea organisms and environments to illustrators and writers top-side from his revolutionary diving apparatus, the bathysphere.4 The American plant ecologist Henry Gleason even looked to film's theoretical relationship with time to think about the bounds of paleoecology, or how to imagine the presence of past environments in our present landscape (Kohler 2002, 240). In avidly taking up mediatization to establish the field as a legitimate discipline and recruit scientists, students, and amateur practitioners alike, ecologists opened up their field to interpretation and adoption, with historic results—including influencing the concept of media as itself a kind of ecosystem.5Embracing mediatization was one reason why ecological thought went viral. Ecology has always been wide-ranging in its scope, often looking backward for the models it might need to define a forward-looking knowledge system and turning to varied disciplines to describe its finite limits. As the one of the field's earliest advocates, Tansley took pains to encourage understanding ecology not as a discreet discipline, but rather as an interdisciplinary “point of view” that necessarily brought together the data and methods from across life sciences, and later social sciences, to understand the interactions ecologists observed in nature—or what Tansley called “the study of plants and animals as they live in their natural homes, and this implies all they are and do when they are ‘at home’” (1987, 6). There is more to be said about this definition, which was itself embattled and often lost within the circulation of ecology as a concept, which, as Tansley writes in this essay, was “now appearing in print more and more frequently, even in some newspapers” (1).6 But I want to mark here that in recuperating this definition—in resisting efforts to dissolve it—Tansley devotes an entire subsection of this paper to describing a coordinated, interdisciplinary ecology. Bemoaning the specialization of biology into botany and zoology, Tansley calls for these scientists to work together so that a “unified picture of the whole might be built up” (10). In other publications, Tansley makes a strong case for extending this network to include pedology, meteorology, entomology, forestry, and other sciences rooted in biology, and he advocates teaching ecology not as a separate discipline, but as a means of uniting our understanding to better describe nature and our relationship with it.7 His definition of and advocacy for ecology were at the outset a form of cooperative interdisciplinarity that embraced and acknowledged the limits and potentials of its conversant scientific disciplines.In this issue, contributors worked in this cooperative, interdisciplinary vein, bringing science and critical theory together to construct a more inclusive picture of ecological thinking, on the one hand, and to make a case for critical theory as a powerful interlocutor in scientific epistemology, on the other. Derek Woods and Romy Opperman make superb cases for bringing theories of technics and prosthesis and Black feminist theory's unique understanding of hauntology, respectively, to bear on ecological thinking. They do so at two different levels of scale: at the level of term and concept, in Woods's case, and at the level of methodological and political commitments, in Opperman's. As much as these are innovative experiments in interdisciplinary thought, rooted in the often radical texts of critical theory and speculative fiction, they also resonate with Tansley's vision for ecological thought as a collaborative endeavor—and his own forays into philosophy and theory as tools that put cooperation and relation at the forefront of knowledge work, ecological and otherwise.8Relation is of course the key concept of ecological thinking, and it is also the most embattled. What forms of relation does ecological thought underwrite? This issue's contributors take on this question through several different avenues. Bringing media and film theory to bear on early ecological filmmaking, I suggest in my essay that ecological eroticism might at times sever human and nonhuman relationships to respect species’ sovereignty. Derek Woods, too, questions an ecological thought that, following Donna Haraway, postulates relation all the way down, such that there is no discreet boundary among organisms and environments. In posing finite limits to ecological relationality, we also delve into the descriptive practices that posit relation in infinite terms. Contributors document forms of ecological description that truncate and addend attachments among bodies, both affective and physical, and posit frameworks for understanding human–nonhuman relationships in finite terms.In Tansley's moment and for much of the century following, the ecosystem concept—Tansley's most famous theoretical contribution to the field—bore the brunt of this philosophical debate. As Frank Golley has noted in his History of the Ecosystem Concept, this viral notion is perhaps the most highly circulated output of the science because of its ability to bring diverse modes of modern analysis (systems thinking, information theory, computing, to name a few) together to explain nature as a fully integrated mechanism (Golley 1993, 2). Tansley's initial theory, however, first articulated in his wonderfully titled “The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts” (and rehearsed in “What Is Ecology?”), worked hard to define and describe the limits of ecosystemic relation. Although it has come to be associated with forms of holism, mechanism, and biopolitcal control, Tansley conceptualized the ecosystem concept as a means of making visible the dynamism of nature as it changes and evolves (Golley 1993, 205). I quote Tansley's definition from “What Is Ecology?” here; I hope readers note the winding descriptive pathway to his final definition of the ecosystem concept, his conditional word choice, and contingent phrasing throughout: Practically all plant communities have animals associated with them in different ways, ranging from species of birds and mammals which live in forest, or on grassland or heath, to minute invertebrates which are closely tied to the plants (often to particular species of plant) by the exigencies of their lives. Sometimes there are small local communities of small vertebrates, such as rabbits or voles, in our own woodlands or grasslands, or of various invertebrates, within the general plant community; and these may be very highly integrated in themselves—ants’ nests in a conifer (or other) wood are a good example. Many species of the larger animals, mostly birds and mammals, which are highly mobile, commonly range, however, through many plant communities, and are not tied to, or in any way dependent upon, particular ones. But when you have scattered individual animals, or communities of animals, which are so tied, the entire complex of natural plant and animal life (so long as it is not interfered with by man), together with the physical factors of climate and soil which permit its existence, forms, when mature, an integrated and balanced “system” which may be called an ecosystem, and can sometimes maintain itself, apparently indefinitely, so long as the conditions which determine it continue. // Such is the subject matter of ecology, and it will be realised at once that is both extremely wide and extremely complex. (Tansley 1987, 9)The punctuation of this paragraph interrupts the definition of ecosystem at almost every turn of phrase with new agents of environmental mischief (humans), apathy (highly mobile animal populations), and actors (climate and soil), disrupting the definition of ecosystemic equilibrium here with varied agents of contingency and closure.9 In “Use and Abuse” (Tansley 1935), the consistency of an ecosystem's relationality is even more fragile, and the concept's use is described as practically metaphorical, rather than as an observable phenomena in its own right.10 My point here is that this tension between stasis and change, between continued and truncated relationships, and especially about how humans interact with our planet is inherent to the field's writing about itself. For Golley, the concept has been an influential tool for dissolving disciplinary and institutional boundaries that are always already linguistic: “It is not clear to me where ecology ends and the study of the ethics of nature begins” (205). Golley goes on to state, “These divisions become less and less useful. Clearly, the ecosystem, for some at least, has provided a basis for moving beyond strictly scientific questions to deeper questions of how humans should live with each other and the environment. In that sense, the ecosystem concept continues to grow and develop as it serves a larger purpose” (205).In this issue, Heather Houser and Claire Colebrook take up the extension of ecology to the problems of human society in richly speculative terms. Noting ecological science's historical relationship to scarcity thinking, Houser asks us to imagine an ecology based in abundance. Ecology has often been taken up by political ideologies seeking to control the lives of black and brown people, which based its reasoning for doing so in notions of limited resources, as Peder Anker and Janet Beihl (1985) have recounted.11 “What Is Ecology?” is no exception, as Tansley makes the case for an ecological point of view for solving famine in India under British rule.12 Houser asserts the political power of imagining an ecology of abundance, turning to Ross Gay's poetry as a theoretical and descriptive model for this reorientation. Claire Colebrook reviews theoretical and scientific efforts to theorize the human without limit—unbound by planet, biology, and philosophy alike—and instead constructs “a counter-genealogy, within the Western tradition, of texts and images that do not simply affirm the infinite but also explore the ethical and imaginative demands that the concept of the infinite imposes on finite existence.” Colebrook turns to Octavia Butler's fiction as a speculative model that imposes human finitude within myths and dreams of a boundless, self-surpassing humanity. Together with Romy Opperman, Colebrook and Houser find common ground in turning to authors whose cultures and identities have been historically oppressed and/or excluded from ecological thinking to expand the bounds of who can and should contribute to its development. Placed next to each other in the issue, however, these articles reveal a tension, running along the lines of (in)finitude, between how humans have drawn on ecology as a specific and diffuse concept to imagine our being.Tansley, who defines his ideal scientific subjectivity not in any work of ecology, but instead in his synthesis of psychoanalysis, The New Psychology and Its Relation to Life (1929), would, I think, appreciate these speculative, inclusive models for what human life and thought entail. In the section of The New Psychology titled “Dreams, Mind-Wandering and the Libido,” Tansley argues that strict rationalism is “a great deal rarer than most people imagine” and notes that quality scientific work, and also “all artistic creation,” is about pursuing the branching pathways toward which intuition directs our footsteps (152). “In original or quasi-original thinking,” Tansley states, “the exploration of side lines is often exceedingly useful or even essential to progress, but that is rather a different case, for there is often no sharply defined ‘main track’ to which our purpose is confined” (149). These flashes of inspiration are instead “arrived at by allowing the mind to wander freely around the points of the problem to be solved,” which must then be “related to all the relevant knowledge available to consciousness” (152). Provoked by the branching pathways of cognition that our dream world generates, scientific knowledge work first and foremost for Tansley partakes of a dérive through the fields of the mind.In focusing on Tansley's life and work (in an extremely truncated form) to describe the project of this special issue, I hope to show our readers that the questions of this issue are both new and old, haunting the language, stories, myths, experiments, ethics, and terms that have found their way into environmental humanities through their attachment to ecology. In many ways, like Gleason's imagined paleolithic ecosystems, the past landscape of ecological thinking remains deeply embedded in the soil, vegetation, and bodies of contemporary ecological thought—and there is no one textual or philosophical lineage at play in this scene. And while we map the contours of this past life, we are faced with new conditions that interfere with the stability of this picture. We also need new voices to understand them. We celebrate the diversity of source material, story, methodological approach, and questioning that our authors brought to bear in this issue. And we regret that this issue doesn't include the perspectives of BIPOC scholars and scientists, whose contributions to ecological thinking have been rich, many, and varied, and that women's contributions to the field live too often in footnotes. Some important contributions in these areas were lost as our authors lived and worked in the pandemic, taking care of families, students, and selves in unprecedented times; we applaud their caretaking efforts while we all lived and worked exclusively at home. Most of all, we mourn the loss of health and life that the pandemic brought to our world during the organization of this project. As I read and reviewed essays, I couldn't help but imagine how many necessary dreams for our future have been lost in this time to the finitude of our fragile existence, and our limited means of care.I take comfort in printing a few of these dreams here.Katie Greulich, Ph.D.Guest EditorAnn Arbor, MichiganJune 2022