"Humanity and the Environment"
Position Paper
Presented to the Faculty of
Daniel R. Aguinaldo National High School- Senior High School
Sto. Niño Matina, Davao City
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements in Introduction to Philosophy
of the Human Person
Submitted to:
Sir. Francis Demol
Submitted by:
Tobey Hersano Porta
12 Aquarius
NOVEMBER 2023
l. INTRODUCTION
The constant danger of climate change and the decline of our environment is a
big problem for our planet and, as a result, for us humans. Throughout history,
humans and nature have been closely connected, but many see nature as existing
mainly to serve human needs. Even though people from religious, ethical, and social
backgrounds stress the importance of taking care of the environment, it's crucial to
deal with climate change and protect nature to ensure our survival as a species.
Different sets of beliefs like deep ecology, taking care of our environment, ethical
considerations about the environment, and climate justice have brought in different
viewpoints to help deal with the problems caused by climate change and
environmental damage. These beliefs emphasize the basic idea of looking after the
environment, whether it's seen as a natural right of nature, a present from a divine
power, or a duty towards making sure climate justice is served. The fact that we
humans depend on nature for survival really highlights the strong, basic instinct to
make sure our species continues to exist.
As we look at the different connections between the people and the environment,
I want to invite you to join me in a journey to solve the current problems and imagine
a future where we all treat the environment better. Let's leave behind harmful
practices and work towards a new era where everyone, humans and the
environment is included, are treated fairly. it's not just about being kind to the
environment; it's about making sure our planet stays healthy for the future.
ll. BODY
Before I turn to some of the keywords of environmental geography today
volatility, emergence, performance, inventiveness let me make a few passing
remarks about the distance and direction that the study of society-environment
relations has travelled since writers like Neil Smith (1984) sharply questioned the
idea that nature named a realm external to society.
The first point has been widely rehearsed: that, while the ‘first wave’ of post
dualist approaches led the way in unpacking the nature-society divide, they often did
so by collapsing the former into the latter, and thus merely raised the error to another
level. This was equally true of those influenced by the cultural turn in geography,
which drew inspiration from writers as diverse as Baudrillard, Derrida and Foucault to
explore how human and non-human nature was constituted as meaningful.
The latter work often set out to provide a strong counterpoint to a metaphysics
of presence, which, in its assumption about the self-evident quality of things avoided
responsibility for the ways that the natural world was made present in various
representational practices. However, despite the careful empirical research evident
in much of this work, and it's clear emphasis on the provisional and power-laden
nature of environmental discourse (for an excellent recent example of this work, see
Kosek, 2006), non-human nature was often rendered a passive or inert realm merely
the receptacle for human strivings and thus added very little of its own to the story.
lnsights are particularly significant. On the one hand, Bingham’s work has
consistently emphasised the practice of assembling. Whether the topic is avian
influenza or the relation between genetically modified crops, bees and butterflies,
Bingham is at great pains to show that the world consists of specific assemblages of
humans and nonhumans ‘that are constituted through particular practices of
articulating with others’ (Bingham, 2006: 487). Within the terms of what is best
described as a practical or ‘performative’ ontology, assemblages have no pregiven
form, but emerge as the result of what people and things do (Szerszynski et al.,
2003).
A second insight extends the first. Far from a world defined in terms of lack,
Bingham gives us a world characterised by plenitude: it is always being ‘added to’.
As I will discuss later, it is this ‘addition’ for Bingham that demands an ethical
response. Notably, Bingham’s emphasis on practice leads directly into the vexed
question of agency, for what is presupposed in his work is that all entities have a
greater or lesser capacity to cause effects. For many years, geographers have
struggled with this question, uncertain how one can attribute agency to non-human
entities.
Certainly, the increased emphasis on the meaning of nature has faced
considerable criticism in recent times. According to Pels et al. (2002) pointed out, the
cultural turn, characterised by intellectual movements like structuralism,
poststructuralism, semiotics, phenomenology, symbolic interactionism, and
hermeneutics, tended to promote the idea that material entities primarily exist as
carriers of meaning, gaining their social significance through processes of linguistic
coding and discursive interpretation.
The problem with this perspective is that it constrains, solidifies, and makes
inactive what should be the most vibrant. While the question of what should be
vibrant is worth exploring, it's crucial to recognize that within the discipline, there are
diverse views regarding the vitality of life.
For example, Marxist political economists, who have made significant
contributions to understanding the social production of nature, have shifted away
from depicting non-human nature as passive or inert matter. In their work, there is a
determined effort to understand how non-human nature resists assimilation into
specific political-economic and spatial structures. Scott Prudham highlights how the
unique biological characteristics of coastal forests in Oregon posed challenges to
capital and, in turn, influenced the region's technologies, work practices, politics, and
labor relations. Karen Bakker (2004) explores water as an entity that resists
commodification, and others, George Henderson (1999), Gavin Bridge (2000), Becky
Mansfield (2003), and Bakker and Bridge (2006) have made similar arguments,
acknowledging the agency of non-human elements in social and political life,
especially within the realm of political economy.
However, even as the liveliness of non-human life gains recognition, it is
simultaneously constrained. In these accounts, it is no longer the case that economic
forces are seen as directly producing nature, as capital or a specific mode of
production continually encounters physical barriers that necessitate transformation,
reshaping the economy itself. Despite their efforts to reintegrate the non-human as a
constitutive element of social and economic life, many of these studies still closely
adhere to a modernist ontology of distinct domains. In this case, it is no longer nature
or society that is pre-given as ontological categories, but the economy.
This work emphasises a dialectical relationship between economic forces and
physical nature, but the economy is often viewed as an already constituted structural
unity that later interacts with a resistant non-human nature. Some have attempted to
move beyond this perspective. For example, Paul Robbins' work on suburban lawns
revisits Althusser's concept of interpellation to suggest that non-humans might 'hail'
humans. Perkins seeks to attribute a more constitutive role to non-human nature by
expanding the category of labor to include the biological processes of plants and
pathogens, which he terms 'non-social labor. He argues that the urban forest,
specifically elm trees, contributes to the formation of a consumption fund through
their growth, while the fungus causing Dutch Elm Disease (DED) decomposes this
fund. In simple terms, in warm climates, elm trees reduce the social labor required
for workers to reproduce themselves, as they no longer need to purchase 'shade'
commodities like awnings or umbrellas.
This suggests that biological processes don't merely resist but may reshape
the landscape of capitalism, including the compulsion to sell one's labor as a
commodity. In other words, the liveliness of non-human nature may be inherent in
the economy from the beginning. Therefore, it may not be sufficient to say that the
economy is 'embedded' in nature, similar to how economic geographers have
suggested that the economy is embedded in social relationships.
The term embedded implies the existence of something prior to and separate
from the relationships in which it is supposedly embedded. It conveys a sense of
quantity rather than quality when we think of something as embedded. This
perspective maintains that non-humans and social relationships do not help
constitute the economy but merely introduce changes into something that exists
separately from them. The idea that the economy is 'made up' of these everyday,
mundane things from the outset remains challenging to broach.
In recent years, a different approach to understanding the liveliness of
non-human nature has emerged among geographers who adhere to philosophies of
immanence, suggesting a single ontological plane for all existence. This view rejects
the notion of essential essences for things and argues that this ontological plane
cannot be reduced to mechanistic interactions or universal law-like processes, as
seen in reductionist approaches.
Instead, it emphasises emergence as a property of the whole that is not
reducible to its constituent parts. Life is considered thoroughly inventive, and the
boundary between organic life and inorganic matter is no longer as distinct as
previously believed, especially when considering entities like viruses and emergent
properties of information systems.
In this world, the concept of relationality is not sufficient. Geographers following
this philosophy assert that matter is alive with creative potential, and everything is
part of a dynamic and evolving process. Some geographers have embraced these
non-essentialist and non-mechanistic ontologies and incorporated them into their
work. They focus on the constitutive force of things in social and political life, going
beyond merely acknowledging the resistance of non-human nature. This approach
places non-humans and technological objects at the forefront of the stories we tell,
recognizing them as integral components of the collectivities that shape human life.
This perspective values the practice of assembling and emphasises that
assemblages are not pre-given but emerge from what people and things do, often
reflecting practical or performative ontologies. It moves beyond a world defined by
lack, instead highlighting the constant addition of elements, which demands ethical
responses.
Within this framework, agency is reimagined. It shifts away from traditional
humanist notions and moves toward Deleuze and Guattari's concept of agencement,
which connects the capacity to act with the coming together of various elements.
This offers a more holistic understanding of agency, recognizing that all entities,
whether human or non-human, possess the capacity to cause effects.
This attention to agencement has been a hallmark of some geographers' work,
highlighting the material constitution of nature-culture assemblages and the ethical
implications. It also underscores the role of non-humans in influencing how
biodiversity conservation unfolds, as well as how conservation practices can be
affected by the non-human charisma of species. This perspective acknowledges the
partiality of our ideas of biodiversity and how species qualify for conservation.
Importantly, presence is not a static concept but is co-produced through the practices
of conservationists and the performances of organisms, leading to a more dynamic
and relational understanding of nature. Ethology, or the science of evolution,
amounts to a rejection of the notion that living organisms simply perform to an
internal script, checked only by external conditions. Rather the emphasis is on
understanding life forms as enfoldings of complex topologies of living and non-living
matters.
In other words, they are assemblages, affecting and affected by their fields of
becoming…. It suggests that conservation is not a matter of sheltering, or rendering
the present eternal. Sheltering can in this sense be a form of smothering, and, in
being insensitive to difference, is a form of incuriosity and therefore cruelty.
Similarly, fixing the coordinates of other species amounts to another kind of
insensitivity, and is potentially as destructive as not noticing. (Hinchliffe, 2008).
Because it gives us a world filled with contingency, and calls attention to that which
is permanently suspended between being and non-being, vitalism names a particular
ethos or discipline of thought that attends to the limits of knowledge (Greco,
2005;see also Stengers, 1997). At the same time, it reminds us that our politics of
nature must invariably be a kind of active experimentation, since ‘we do not know in
advance which way a line is going to turn’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002: 134; see also
Braun, 2006b). Geography – as earth-writing – does not stand outside this
experimentation, but participates in it. Yet it also teaches us that dreams of mastery,
or reductionist accounts of such things as nanotechnology, which presume that we
can build things ‘atom by atom’ without any surprises, are the height of hubris, and
harbour the possibility of catastrophe, for, as Kearnes (2006) puts it, ‘in the
application of force and control we can also see the radical possibility for creativity
and escape’. For a number of geographers it is precisely the conjunction of radical
uncertainty in complex systems and the capacity of bodies for effect that must inform
environmental ethics. Greenhough and Roe 2006, for instance, argue that
recognizing both is essential if embodied citizens of all kinds (humans and
non-humans) are to become politically enabled and capable of forming alliances in
order to intervene meaningfully in biotechnological futures. In a similar fashion,
Bingham (2006) takes the affectual qualities of things to form the basis for an ethics
of friendship, derived from Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy. biotechnology is
his concern then it is essential to recognize that this adding to happens in a world
that is already full of vitality, and thus can never be innocent. Life is never simply
a-life, but a being-with. From this follow a series of difficult questions, for, as
Bingham (2006) explains:
The reason why figures like Latour’s parliament of things (1993; 2004b) or
Derrida’s democracy to come (1997) are so challenging (if taken seriously) is that
they recognize the necessity of supplementing in practice the ethical imperative of
unconditional hospitality to the stranger or the new arrival with the political
responsibility of questioning, assessing, and ultimately perhaps only admitting
certain of those candidates. Even as we establish how many are we, that is to say,
we must also whether through a set of procedures or an endless troubling of this
aporia always be asking “can we live together?”’ (Bingham, 2006: 495) The language
is here is not unlike the cosmopolitics proposed by Isabelle Stengers, or the ideas
informing the work of Steve Hinchliffe, Sarah Whatmore, Gail Davies, and a host of
others who have sought to add ethical-political weight to geography’s new
materialisms.
What then do we make of this new or renewed emphasis on the inventiveness
of life? And how might it inform the world of planning, policy and politics? This
remains to be worked out, but we may foreclose too quickly on what vitalism has to
offer if we summarily dismiss it as little more than an unthinking celebration of
emergence.
Vitalism may offer a valuable ethical and practical orientation to the world, one
which takes precaution as its central principle, even as it recognizes the ontological
instability of matter. For if we live in a world in which ‘intersection, transfer,
emergence and paradox are central to life (Thrift, 2004), then we face the equally
terrifying and hopeful situation in which ‘anything is possible.
lll. CONCLUSION
In summary, environmental geography has come a long way in understanding
the relationships between society and the environment. Earlier approaches blurred
the lines between nature and society but often didn't give non-human nature its due
importance.
Recent insights, inspired by thinkers like Bingham, have reshaped our
perspective. Bingham's focus on how humans and non-humans come together
through actions and practices highlights a dynamic world where things keep
evolving. This perspective also redefines what we mean by agency, going beyond
traditional human-centred ideas.
Some critics argue that too much focus on the meaning of nature can limit our
understanding of the environment. However, others, influenced by Marxism,
recognize that non-human elements play an active role in shaping our lives.
Another approach, called philosophy of immanence, suggests that everything
exists on a single ontological plane. It rejects the idea that everything has a fixed
essence and emphasises that properties emerge from the whole, not just from
individual parts. This view appreciates the creative side of life and blurs the line
between living and non-living things.
This way of thinking has been embraced by geographers, who focus on the
important role of things in our social and political lives. They also highlight the ethical
and political aspects of understanding our world in this new light.
In simple terms, these ideas encourage us to be cautious and recognize the
unpredictable nature of things. They provide an ethical and practical way to
understand the world, which can have an impact on planning, policy, and politics. In
this view, the world is full of possibilities
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