Rewilding & Reparative Ecology

This essay, the fourth and final essay in the series, will be difficult to understand if you have not read the first and second essays in the series, as this essay assumes the psychoanalytic and schizoanalytic concepts defined and developed in the earlier essays. I therefore recommend reading the earlier essays before this one.

I doubly recommend reading the first essay before this one because this last essay picks up where the first essay left off, with “the general economy of leakiness and superfluity that animates the (de-/re-)composition of Mother Earth”.

This essay concludes with a reference to the third essay in the series, but missing this reference detracts little from this essay. So you needn’t read the third essay prior to this one.

Is there any reality that is more disturbing than that of the ongoing rape and abuse of Mother Earth? 

This reality disturbs me more than genocide, more than slavery, more than the rape and abuse of women — and these realities already disturb me to no end. I imagine that I am so deeply disturbed by the rape and abuse of Mother Earth because I sense somehow that this reality conditions the rape and abuse of women which, in turn, conditions genocide and slavery. 

The reality of the ongoing rape and abuse of Mother Earth has become so violent and extreme over the past two-and-a-half centuries that no one can effectively deny it anymore. It has been noted that the sum total of the harm inflicted on Mother Earth since the Second World War, the last “hot” war to consume the entire globe, exceeds the ravages that another world consuming war would have left behind. Yet still, in spite of its obviousness, the reality of the ongoing rape and abuse of Mother Earth is still spoken of in euphemisms: so few of us speak openly and honestly of ongoing ecocide. What’s more, most of our customs and institutions still express wishful and defensive fantasies that bunglingly attempt to cover up and deny the ongoing rape and abuse of Mother Earth; this is to say, in other words, that most of our customs and institutions are engaged in forms of anthropocentrism and anthropodenial.

Anthropocentrism is the wishful fantasy of human beings who would deny the reality of the ongoing rape and abuse of Mother Earth. Anthropocentrism and its privileged customs and institutions tell us that Man’s dominion over the Earth is a matter of divine dispensation or of natural superiority. Anthropocentric customs and institutions hold that either (i) God made the Earth for Man’s pleasure or (ii) Man has conquered the Earth because Man is a conqueror by nature. Either way, Man can and should have his way with Earth because the Earth is Man’s property.

Anthropodenial is the defensive fantasy that attempts to cover up the rape and abuse of Mother Earth. Anthropodenial and its privileged customs and institutions tell us that human beings can’t have an abusive relationship with Mother Earth because there is no such thing as Mother Earth. Anthropodenial claims that the idea of Mother Earth is a primitive anthropomorphism, a superstition that human beings need to put behind them in order to meet their Sustainable Development Goals. Those who engage in anthropodenial will tell you that the Earth does not have feelings and, as such, the Earth cannot be raped and abused. The Earth can only be used or misused: that is to say, it can be used effectively and efficiently or it can be used ineffectively and inefficiently. The Sustainable Development Goals that anthropodenialists hold dear are primarily concerned with making more effective and efficient use of the Earth, choosing success over failure in order to avoid collapse. They do not aim to develop ever deeper and ever more meaningful relations with Mother Earth.

Anthropocentrism as wishful fantasy and anthropodenial as defensive fantasy are both “human, all too human” or artless anthropomorphisms: they anthropomorphize humans and de-anthropomorphize non-human so as to keep humans from meaningfully relating to non-humans. Opposed to anthropocentrism and anthropodenial, those who would acknowledge and make reparations for the rape and abuse of Mother Earth find meaning and purpose in animisms.

Animisms are “beyond human” or artful anthropomorphisms. Animisms anthropomorphize non-humans and de-anthropomorphize humans so that humans can relate to non-humans in increasingly more meaningful ways, flipping the script of anthropocentrism and anthropodenial. Animisms tell us that we have feelings for the Earth and that the Earth has feelings for us, and animisms invite us to take care not to hurt the Earth’s feelings and to make amends for having hurt the Earth’s feelings. This is to say, in other words, that animisms are sublimating fantasies that enable human beings to better acknowledge and make reparations for the harm that they can do and have done to non-human others. 

I hear both the anthropocentrists and the anthropodenialsts sneering at me, accusing me of “vain superstition and womanish pity” when I talk about the Earth’s feelings. Indeed, I hear them quoting Spinoza at me, aware of how fond I am of the 17th-century rationalist, “The rational quest of what is useful teaches us the necessity of associating ourselves with our fellow men, but not with beasts, or things, whose nature is different from our own.” 

The disdain that anthropocentrists and the anthropodenialsts have for the animisms of primitive peoples is but an expression their refusal to admit the reality of ongoing rape and abuse of Mother Earth. Anthropocentrists and anthropodenialists would find it difficult to live with themselves if they made an earnest effort to imagine how Mother Earth feels and to express the feelings they imagine. Anthropocentrists and anthropodenialsts cannot claim that it is impossible to imagine how Mother Earth feels because primitive peoples have proven again and again that this is possible to imagine how Mother Earth feels in ways that are meaningful. Instead, anthropocentrists and anthropodenialsts argue that imagining Mother Earth’s feelings is an irrational activity, a waste of time, and they claim that primitive peoples are irrational peoples with too much time on their hands. “Be smart,” say the anthropocentrists and anthropodenialsts, “Do not waste our time and yours, for we have important things to do.”

To their chagrin, I and others like me continue to persist in our idiocy and we insist upon wasting everyone’s time with sentimental stories about Mother Earth. This is because we believe that making reparations for the rape and abuse of Mother Earth must involve (re-)creating primitive animisms anew. Indeed, my fellow travelers and I, in our endeavors to (re-)create primitive animisms anew, are what you might call neo-primitives. 

Switching from the psychoanalytic register to the schizoanalytic register, we neo-primitives find that modern human societies are defined by increasingly streamlined designs, by proliferations of pipelines dedicated to conveying  human wants and needs hither and thither apart from the wants and needs non-humans. These streamlined designs are breaking fluent connections between human and non-human wants and needs, and anthropocentrism and anthropodenial are, above all else, expressions of the fact that fluent connections between human and non-human wants and needs have been broken. In endeavoring to (re-)create primitive animisms anew, we neo-primitives aim to deconstruct the streamlined designs of “advanced” patriarchal capitalism and to (re-)construct leaky designs in their place, enabling human and non-human wants and needs to become confluent again. As we neo-primitives see it, the animisms of ur-primitive peoples were expressions of their societies’ leaky designs and the confluences of human and non-human wants and needs that their societies enabled. We neo-primitives aim to (re-)create primitive animisms anew by (re-)creating the potentials that yielded primitive animisms: by (re-)creating human societies with leaky designs so as to (re-)generate confluences humans and non-human wants and needs.

The eco-modernism of liberal globalism is the foil of neo-primitivism. Eco-modernism is the extreme form of anthropodenial that is the logical endpoint of our Green New Deals and Sustainable Development Goals. Eco-modernism aims to decouple the global economy from the ecology of the biosphere and, in so doing, it would sever whatever fluent connections still remain between the wants and needs of humans and non-humans. Eco-modernism would take streamlined designs to new heights, plugging up every fault and fissure to be found in existing pipelines and creating new seamless pipelines that would ensure that human wants and needs do not leak out into and pollute non-human environments. Indeed, this is what the eco-modernist calls environmental conservation.

Instead of working to conserve environments, neo-primitives work to rewild the world. Rewilding is not a matter of removing humans from nature and letting nature do its thing. Humans, so long as they exist, are inextricable from nature, and nature cannot become wild again without human beings also becoming wild again—unless, of course, the human species becomes extinct. Rewilding, insofar as it is a human practice, is about (re)creating confluences of human and non-human wants and needs. 

The eco-modernist snarls and snaps, “Luddites! Neo-primitives are the enemies of progress, science, and technology!” I implore you not to take them seriously. Neo-primitives are in no way the enemies of science and technology, unless science and technology are definitively characterized by seamless and streamlined designs. If there are sciences and technologies that can be characterized by seamful and leaky designs—and I assure you there are—then there are neo-primitive sciences and technologies. Rewilding, as the neo-primitive understands and practices it, is only about eschewing the seamless and streamlined and embracing the seamful and leaky. In light of this, the neo-primitive finds that making the world wild again is not the impossible feat that “advanced” capitalist man makes it out to be. The mistake is to think that rewilding is about sustaining nature as it is or returning nature to what it was. When undertaken by neo-primitives, however, rewilding is about making nature differ wildly again, it is about (re-)creating potentials for things to wildly differ. Indeed, going even further, we neo-primitives find life’s meaning and purpose in asking and answering the following question,

“How can we defer to what wildly differs?”

I will stop here, leaving this question and many others unanswered. These unanswered questions are to remain unanswered in theory because they ought to be answered in practice. Indeed, henceforth, I hope I might refrain from theorizing apart from the theorizing that is needed to relay me from one practice to another: from the practice of rewilding natural landscapes to the practice of revaluing cultural landscapes and vice versa. What I have not made clear in the words that I have written above, I hope I might make clear in deeds performed in light of these words, in deeds that deliver on the promise of what I have written.