Provisional Ecology

IF MACFARLANE’S EXPERIENCE of the iceberg reveals something of the earth’s inhuman manifestations (and Jefferies’s “designerless things”), he also recognizes the importance of context in affording the sometimes troubling, sometimes exhilarating patterns of our earthly relations. Macfarlane is especially well attuned to the ways we (mis)interpret the phenomenology of nature’s appearances due to our limited positionality, our egocentric concerns, and our cultural biases. He also constantly reminds us that life is not all about us.

In Underland, Macfarlane (2019) describes a perilous winter climb over the mountain ridge running down the center of the Norwegian island of Moskenes in the Lofoten archipelago. His long trek uphill, to visit the sea cave walls at Kollhellaran and the red dancing figures painted there some twenty-five hundred years ago, had become threatening, with the constant “rumble of small avalanches” (260). He experiences “a strong sense of the terrain’s disinterest, which I might at other times experience as exhilaration but here, now, can feel only as menace” (260–61). Suddenly he falls up to his armpits into a fissure in the snow, “legs dangling in a void,” only extricating himself with intense difficulty, “as if getting out of quicksand” (261)—eventually hauling himself up, he manages to climb “onto the saddle of the pass with a whoop” (263).

I lie on my back, a gaffed fish, breathing heavily, and there above me, showing through the mist, is a sea eagle. Low and circling, and the queasy fear in my throat is forgotten and my heart leaps to be overflown by that remarkable bird in that remarkable place. Then I think, it’s just sizing me up as lunch—and I laugh out loud at my stupidity and the land’s indifference. (263)

Granite and ice, cliff and crevasse, once again exemplify Macfarlane’s remark about the indifference he often experienced in the mountains, their lack of concern whether he lived or died and how this indifference may even provide a sense of exhilaration, especially when danger has passed and the climb is accomplished. The appearance of the sea eagle initially seems a wondrous recognition of his struggle and survival at this pivotal moment. He is elated but then, almost immediately, brought down to earth through the realization that, from the eagle’s perspective, his success just brings about a rather disappointing end: the loss of a potential meal.

Would it make sense to try to describe this event without recourse to a language of purpose? It could, perhaps, be done, but it would be both an uphill struggle and a thankless task. We are certainly forced to recognize that this is a landscape that dwarfs and is impervious to Macfarlane’s own purposes. What purposes are gathered together here conflict, though both relate to survival in what might seem, at least to a human being, but perhaps not to an eagle, a hostile environment where Macfarlane is left feeling like a fish forcefully dragged out of water. Both human and eagle are concerned with the other, but not in any ethical sense. How weird it is that the mundane purposes of one constituent give rise to a momentary elation in another, that indifference might seem to be everywhere, but actually there is no sense that either the eagle or Macfarlane were in any way indifferent to the presence of each other. Isn’t it also strange that being suddenly and unexpectedly reconciled to this can generate laughter born through puncturing the presumptions and pretentions of any ego- and/or anthropocentrism? Isn’t there, at least provisionally, a sign of hope here? Might such events even appear mundanely providential, in the sense of serving to open us to the possibility of joy even in a place of harsh realities, a place seemingly void of care, but inhabited by beings that are only presently there because of previous patternings of care?

Such events can be inceptual. Are we here afforded an opportunity for imagining the world as ecologically provisional, the earth as providing, both indifferently and caringly, for the more than just human? Perhaps it will not even seem so weird to repurpose John Ray’s (1691, 127–28) statement that the earth sometimes “takes pleasure in that all . . . Creatures enjoy themselves, that have life and sense, and are capable of enjoyment” and that it is no longer plausible to think that “all the things in the world were so made for Man.”

With climate change, the exceptionalist ground of the progressive imaginary has begun to tremble; a different kind of earth-quake is coming. There is a sense that we are coming to the end (whether conclusive or inconclusive) of this particularly destructive and colonizing imaginary. The very “success” (let us rather say the globalized enactment and enframing) of the progressive imaginary ironically ensures that it loses its purpose, its obviousness, and its sense of direction. The accelerated consequences of the technological reduction of everything to standing reserve and its commodification are precisely what now undermine the possibility of thinking of anything as either a fixed or final end. Events, everywhere, every day, open up a realization that the progressive imaginary entirely fails to offer any final purposes, any ground on which to stand, or any comforting destination; it just produces increasing quantities of consumer products with short shelf lives, rapidly passing fads and fashions, debts, profits and discarded theories, mountains of personal data to be mined and processed, and so on. Capitalism and technology have, in effect, produced a totalizing and failing parody of nature, where we are economically, digitally, and chemically (de)composed by what we consume, where computer algorithms now decide the expendability of lives. We have to face it: “The end itself has disappeared” (Baudrillard 2007, 70).

What, though, if anything are we to make of events coming together and being conjoined to afford the possibility of such moments of realization? Perhaps nothing. But then again, perhaps this is a question not of us “making” anything but rather of trying to conserve (because preservation is never an option) something of others’ threatened existences, of us coming to care.

Is this opportunity providential? Will it save us? Who could tell? Who cares? With theological providence, we always had to find the message elsewhere, to interpret God’s intent, and we never dispelled final ends or ceased to interpret everything in terms of benefits to individual human beings or a larger human collectivity. The value of every earthly affordance was in the intent behind it, in the presumed relationship between God and humanity. Nature, the earth, was just the intermediary. With ecological provision, it is very different. There is rarely a message in terms of there being a specific intention or an intended recipient, and even where there are intentions or purposes, there is so much scope for misinterpreting them, as the sea eagle reveals (at least to the ecologically minded like Macfarlane). Some messages are received by us and interpreted in one way, some by another being and interpreted quite differently. Any event might provide a plethora of materio-semiotic affordances for innumerable and incredibly diverse fellow Terrans, and the “messages” are not always good! Some of these messages might take the form of an iceberg or an eagle, some of an argument.

Things might be experienced or interpreted as providential after the event, but nontheological providence would really just mean an acceptance that the event was inceptual, that it provisionally changed the patterning of the earth in some significant way. We no longer have to think of such events as providential opportunities sent by external forces to change our lives, or as moments of enlightenment, but they might, nonetheless, be provisional, affording openings into the evolution of provisional ecological imaginaries, generating care that would otherwise be absent. Such epochal events also allow us to recognize that even here, in the so-called Anthropocene, the earth may have been overwritten, but it has not ceased to exist and to (de)compose wor(l)ds.

Does the earth care? At issue here is the earth and speaking of the earth, and what the earth means beyond signification. The earth does not care as a whole qua a totality or unitary entity, but then we need to stop thinking of earth in this way. Rather, as an inescapable involvement, an anarchic gathering of differently changing patterns, innumerable ways of creating and holding things together, composing, decomposing, recomposing, as that which lets something originate from itself, care certainly is among the earth’s worldly provisions. When we are afforded the possibility of letting the earth world differently (provisionally and inoperatively), care wells up as the spring after heavy rain, mysterious in its source but incontrovertible. We will never be the sole or privileged vessel or end of the earth’s care. Wanting, we sometimes find care, or care sometimes finds us wanting. Care appears; it cannot be made, shaped, or completed, and certainly not manufactured. It does not have a final purpose; rather, we are sometimes called, ecologically, by events beyond our control to provisionally become caring in our earthly inclusion and our worldly exposure to others.

Outside the window, the snow begins to fall again.