Earlier I wrote a post about the possible difficulties for the regeneration of the bush.
I’m now interested in the continuing idea that the bush will regenerate without problems, without any human help. This idea seems quite common, but often hides a disregard for what is currently present, or for creatural suffering.
For example, one person wrote:
The bush will always recover. It always does.
Now that appears to be a non-problematic statement, even if it might be false, but it is problematic for a number of reasons we can observe in what I’ll call ‘denier’ literature. It implies no change, but when pressed it appears lack of change is not what is meant. The sentence comes from a disregard for any kind of change in ‘nature’. It becomes transhuman, or post-human, in the sense that humans are rendered irrelevant spectators; they are just another unimportant species which could cheerfully go extinct. Humans do not matter, and have no effect on anything, and it is merely a conceit to say they do. However, it can appear that support for human irrelevance is accompanied by an apparent horror of change in economics or power relations.
My response to this was much as I wrote in the previous post:
If the fire was too hot in some places, then it could destroy seeds, so the bush won’t regenerate. It could have killed the insects so there is no pollination, and it could have killed the birds so there is no seed distribution, animals will not dig up the soil… We shall have to see. It is, in any case, unlikely the rainforests will regenerate quickly.
The response was:
This has never been seen in the history of earth. Although it could be possible. The earth always regenerates. If not exactly as before but as new species emerge. Never doubt the amazing ability of nature to re-emerge. Otherwise mamals like us would still be scurrying in fear in our burrow.
There is an initial comforting suggestion that nature will go on and recover (as such failure is apparently unseen “in the history of the earth”), but in the end the suggestion implies that the person is really arguing that humans cannot kill life on earth. The latter point is probably true, but it is not even vaguely the same as the former. “Recover” usually means return to something like what it was previously, not become something completely different, even apparently dead or wiped out.
By talking of evolution (and conflating it with progress), and life in general, the suggestion avoids creatural suffering; effectively creatures are just being wiped by natural forces, and there is nothing to worry about or be concerned about. Some other creatures may be impelled to progress and crawl out of their burrow. Being sad at animals and humans being burnt to death, or ecologies being destroyed, is clearly silly, from this transcendent point of view.
So the person recognises the reality that Earth does not always regenerate in ways that are happy for humans or other creatures, or in ways which are similar to what was before. We can add, that this has happened many times in the history of humanity, and civilisations have seemed to collapse as a result of the changes. Failure to recover has been seen many times, even in the short span of human history. So they are contradicting themselves, apparently in order to be comforting, distant and uninvolved.
Failure to recover, can be how deserts form; humans change the environment, say through intensive agriculture, and an unintended consequence is that the land does not regenerate, and people can no longer live there. Perhaps that is helped by wider climatic and ecological changes which are being ignored, I don’t know. However, deserts have been supposedly expanding for quite some time now, and are likely to expand in Australia. One possible sign of this is that after the fires there have been massive dust storms as top soil has blown away.
Evolution is, in current human terms, more or less irrelevant. New species can take tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of years, or longer, to emerge, although colonising species can move in and produce long term change to previous ecologies pretty immediately. Evolutionary frameworks, when used in a certain way, appear to be yet another mode of distancing oneself from what is going on.
To repeat: in human time-frames, destruction is quite possible, and neither the flora nor the fauna may recover. The change could come with an extinction of species, that might otherwise not have occurred for considerable amounts of time
The arguers response to this, is to assume that wanting the world to be safe for humans (and as many other creatures as possible) is human arrogance. We can destroy what we will and it does not matter because everything changes, and hey no individual species is of any import.
Nature does not aim to please our arrogant species. It will regenerate in ways that best suit the new environment. Simple. We may find it tragic, but that is purely subjective. The very notion that we somehow know what is best for nature is dangerous at least.
If this is the case, which is probably correct, then saying the flora and fauna will recover is misleading, because it may not.
It is much more accurate to say, the old ecology could possibly be destroyed, and a new ecology may eventuate. This may be bad for a whole heap of plants and creatures, and good for some others. Change happens. There is no straightforward recovery. But this is not what is being said on the surface – and it is odd that it is not being said, because it is not difficult to say, and this silence implies some other rhetoric is in play.
While the idea that whatever happens after human induced destruction is ok, may be extremely dangerous, it could be comforting to the destroyers. Perhaps this is a quietist response to the recognition that humans (including ourselves) are destroying the world?
So, it may not be surprising, when it turns out the person does deny human induced fires, and posits that the bushfires are a purely natural process (which they are of course).
However, this position obscures the role of humans in the fires, and the politics of that role. Not only climate change or accident was responsible. Humans lit some fires. The government cut back on fire fighting services, refused to listen to advice that the coming season could be bad, especially given the drought, made no preparations etc. So the fires were partly human induced, even if we posit that there was no human induced climate change.
This is a post-humanism which acts to excuse human actions, by making everything equally ‘natural’ and humans irrelevant, while pretending that
- All is well, and normality is not threatened,
- They have a modest non-interfering model that represents humans as not the dominant species, as opposed to those who would try and direct the actions of nature.
When you push, it appears that they think that altering our destructive tendencies in economic and political behaviour is bad. For them, going along with our economy is natural and apparently not directing the actions of nature. Perhaps the economy is considered more ‘natural’ and immoveable than the Earth itself? Planning mitigation or amelioration, or the politics which might lead to such actions is defined as conceit. We are not to try and disrupt corporate power.
Doing nothing to oppose the routine pollution, and destruction, of ecologies by business and governments is accepting a plan to interfere with natural processes, and to prefer profit for some over survival for all. And perhaps that is the intention.
First: say everything will recover. The earth always regenerates
Second: if pressed, admit ecologies will change and creatures and plants will become extinct.
Third: suggest that any actions or thinking taken to prevent this extinction and harmful change, are conceit and we should quieten down and accept our insignificance, and accept the flow.
Fourth: do not worry about the ecological consequences of corporate and government action, because it does not matter in the long run. Humans are irrelevant after all, and we could have no effect either way. Let it, and the social power relations, continue. Let us submit to fate, or rise above the earth, rather than become political or active.
Tags: climate change, Disinformation
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