Responses to “Bringing in the Work of Nature: From Natural Capital to Hybrid Labor” Alyssa Battistoni

In her abstract, Battistoni describes moving away from what is known as natural capital (ecosystem services) to a feminist approach to what she calls “hybrid labor”, through which she articulates

…an expanded idea of hybrid labor that understands the “work of nature” as a collective, distributed undertaking of humans and nonhumans acting to reproduce, regenerate, and renew a common world.

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In his essay Empire for the extensive website Feral Atlas, Ghosh opens with a statement that in Asia

“the themes of Empire and power, rivalry and violence, are, implicitly or explicitly, central to the discussion of climate change.”

This statement, he goes on to describe, is in contrast to the ways climate change principally operates in the West where, under the rubrics of economics first and technology second, the discourse focuses on consumption, logistics, and related emissions. His opening is question is: Does an economistic framing eclipse other ways of considering the state of the world?

Capital “E” Economy has been exported around the globe (some have been its low-level labor; some its monetary beneficiaries, and many have swallowed its dream-state); it’s not as simple as a monolithic capitalocene, but a particular Anglophone variety that is particularly extractive and resource-intensive. Ghosh unpacks the hidden consumption practices beyond the individual footprint, and those heavy usages belong to the assertion of power and of Empire: the Pentagon, military is perhaps the largest consumer of energy worldwide, 24/7, in peace or war.

This military carbon footprint removed from sight, and instead we find ourselves focusing on per capita usages (“expenditures”), as per a neo-liberal lens would have it: emphasize the individual, not the systemic or institutional.

Today, concealment is vital to the effective use of power. In the case of the United States, this masking has been so successful that it is easy to forget that the military is not just the largest employer and investor in the United States but also one of the driving forces behind the American economy. Out of sight, out of mind, as the adage goes—and so it is that all matters related to the national security apparatus are excluded from the carbon footprint of the average American.

Bayo Akomolafe‘s statement goes both ways. I have been reading twitter responses to DJT, in response to his claims that he has won the election; the number of good-seeming people who pray for him, find him to be a great leader who is watching over them is astounding. Instead of deriding them as idiotic (they’re not) and misinformed (they are), it seems to me the question is whether there can be, ethically and economically a just transition to genuine and sustainable inclusivity.

People would first need to believe that there is abundance, not scarcity, and that there is enough for people of all colors and credos. But is there?

I go back to Amitav Ghosh’s brilliant and devastating chapter in The Great Derangement about the false promises white industrialized nations made to their “little brother and sister” nations, that they too could have what the West has: unlimited energy, prosperity, autonomy, mobility.

…This is how we are trapped deeper into our Age of Derangement, where every family in the world is racing towards an equal level of consumption. It is Asia, then, “that has torn the mask from the phantom that lured it onto the stage of the Great Derangement, but only to recoil in horror at its own handiwork; its shock is such that it dare not even name what it has beheld—for having entered this stage, it is trapped, like everyone else. All it can say to the chorus that is waiting to receive it is ‘But you promised…and we believed you!’”

So scarcity is a prerequisite of progress, limitless growth that is harnessed by those in power, using the power of fossil fuels to make that feasible fast, to make logistics slip without friction like riptides through tide pools of cheap labor.

Bayo locates this in the “loss of the miraculous.” He defines this as:

Modernity, still traumatized by the loss of the sacred, is a theology of scarcity. It is the metaphysics of the exiled anthropomorphic god whose regime of indulgences the Enlightenment outlawed. Because modernity centralizes rationality/human experience, and instrumentalizes the nonhuman world as resource for human ends (that is, refusing to see the nonhuman world as powerful on its own terms), power and enchantment are always in short supply relative to deepening demand. One has to make a great effort to leave the homogenizing lull of suburbia for some distant, exotic location in order to feel alive, for instance. As the deadening rationality of modern civilization spreads, and as its circumference expands, the intimate magic of a relational world becomes even more contraband and expensive, reduced to a ‘high’ on a street corner.

(The miraculous is) neither an escape from, nor the postponement of, the ordinary. It is the indeterminacy or incertitude of the ordinary: the embarrassing excessiveness of a relational world that grants ‘things’ the scandalous capacity to be more than just things.

So now we have moved into the territory of the imagination. He and Ghosh have a few things in common, such as their disbelief in the current forms of narrative or the imagination. Ghosh offers a turn to the epic form, to be able to contain, translate, process climate change because the novel cannot do that, can’t accommodate the unlikelihood, the strange stranger that climate change is: upheavals, chronos unbound and deregulated. Bayo has a different model in mind:

• Why is power always located at a distance? what other forms of power are at our disposal?
• Power exists everywhere. He uses the models of the slaveship (Man is not just the occupant of the upper deck of the slave ship, but the slave ship and the transatlantic crossings it enacts)
• Restore the sacred, and understand how it imbues all things: adopt a more than human world / post-humanist / compost-centric world view, what Una Chaudhuri refers to as an ecospheric worldview, one that engages in the “ideas, feelings, and practices that attend to the multi-species and geo-physical contexts of human lives.”
• Move away from carceral models (some of his other work on tricarcerality looks at ways in which identity politics reassert carceral models, creating a third one (I think) that locks the opponents in a prison of right/wrong in the struggle for power itself.) See Bayo’s video Cancel Culture and the Limits of Identity Politics
• The logics of fugitivity (more below on this)

The problem of the Anthropocene is not clear, the boundaries not well delineated. It means nothing and it means everything: it exceeds the categorical concerns of survival and perpetuity, of longevity and adaptability. This lack of clarity is not a testament to the inadequacies of our measuring devices. We are not dealing with a want of methods or confidence. We are dealing with the corrosive incertitude and indeterminacy of collapse. We are dealing with the earthliness of measurement and the fragility of our sense-making approaches. This is not a simple cause-and-effect relationship – something we can resist with masculine fervour. Something we can defeat if we tried hard enough.

 …the Anthropocene means we are all fugitives. Or at least those of us gestating in modern worlds who have been touched by the material yearnings for stability and progress. We are being chased. The relentless curdling of the edges, the splashing of threatening ocean waves, the dimming of the sun by the dust in the air, and the disappearance of bees, all conspire to remove the post-Ice Age refuge we have long known as home. The ground has withdrawn her endorsement: we are no longer at ease.

So, how can we become fugitive?

• Develop fugitive epistemologies
• Re-sacralize the earth “by drawing ‘god’ closer – so intimately close, in fact, that we lose some of the categorical independence modernity burdened us with.”
• Fugitivity is the theology of incalculability and hopelessness. The fugitive rejects the promise of repair and refuses the hope of the established order. By clinging to outlawed desires, barely perceptible imaginations, alien gestures, the fugitive inhabits the moving wilds.
• Accept being marginal, do not bother with the center
• (The) story of sanctuary is a fugitive site of dismantling ‘Man’ not by critique but by ironic intimacy – the kind that knows we are not exterior to the realities we find problematic. Nothing embodies this ironic intimacy quite like eating. When we eat something, tearing it apart with our teeth, ingesting it so that the thing becomes a part of us, we are performing this ironic intimacy.
• Fugitivity requires the construction of sanctuary–someplace to rest, to be safe. It is an active process, made repeatedly, always on the run. It exists in and anticipates a continual state of instability. We are all fugitive, we just have been sold a bill of goods, that we are not, that there is some anthropocentric center to hold us in a stable format, on a background of this earth.

These notions of the loss of the sacred are echoed and described along different lines (after all, it’s not–cool/acceptable–to talk about animism or god or the sacred) in the work/play of

• Joanna Macy’s writing from a Buddhist orientation.
• Jane Bennet’s book The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, crossings, and Ethics.
• Terry Tempest Willams writing as a weaver of land, family, feminism
• Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Anna Tsing, Elaine Gan
• Hanna Landecker’s work on metabolism (good video interview here)

1. Acid rain is still a major problem in China, India. Does acid rain have global effects?
2. Now that regulations have eased on the US, is acid rain on the rise?
3. Is there any discussion of global governance around climate change and environmental degradation, pollution? Do conventions have adequate (or any) effect? What is the incentive for compliance?

A Just Transition requires solutions that ensure the well-being of workers and communities; address racial, economic and gender injustice; protect our health, environment and climate; and create meaningful, good jobs and a thriving and sustainable economy.

Inspiring work enumerated in this site, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth:

• In 2013, KFTC members identified the following principles for a just transition:
  
• Improve the quality of life for people and communities affected by economic disruption, environmental damage, and inequality
• Foster inclusion, participation and collaboration
• Generate good, stable and meaningful jobs and broad, fair access to them
• Promote innovation, self-reliance and broadly held local wealth
• Protect and restore public health and environment    
• Respect the past while strengthening communities and culture
• Consider the effects of decisions on future generations

See also Empower Kentucky

Astra Taylor’s magnificent 2019 text, Out of Time, for Laphams’ climate issue talks about all the temporalities the earth operates on, and how humans manage to or willfully experience so few. We are surrounded by chemical, geophysical, and biological clocks, yet

Capitalism’s clock ticks loudest in our ear

I’d add: the time of a coal seam’s development, deep time, the time it takes for a drop of sea water to circumnavigate along the Great Ocean Conveyor Belt (1000 years).

In his essay “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” the British historian E.P. Thompson invokes Madagascar, where time was measured by “a rice cooking” (about half an hour) or “the frying of a locust” (a moment), and tells of some native communities that spoke of how a “man died in less than the time in which maize is not yet completely roasted” (less than fifteen minutes).

Fossil fuels sped up time (via work demands, travel and mobility opportunities, the ease of obtaining objects, stuff).

“The psychological results of carboniferous capitalism—the lowered morale, the expectation of getting something for nothing, the disregard for a balanced mode of production and consumption, the habituation to wreckage and debris as part of the normal human environment—all of these results were plainly mischievous.”  (Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 1934)

“Global warming is a sun mercilessly projecting a new light onto history,” writes Andreas Malm in Fossil Capital, a history of steam power. “If we wait some time longer and then demolish the fossil economy in one giant blow, it would still cast a shadow far into the future: emissions slashed to zero, the sea might continue to rise for many hundreds of years.” By burning up the past, we imperil everything to come.

We can see the danger in the environment around us. Nature’s timekeeping methods are increasingly confused; delicately evolved biological clocks erratically speed up or slow down. 

There is another danger, and that is the human capacity to keep two sets of books, in terms of temporal accounting. Neither looks too far back or to the side; each book circulates around the economy of ourselves: our life spans, our generational entitlements (or traumas), and our right-now attachment to our “rights’ to fully enact a techno-utopian present. Taylor talks about biological mismatch theory: the desynchronization of biological clocks from current climatological realities; but capitalocene humans also evince mismatches between our brains’ capacities and the task at hand, to think beyond our selves, beyond the moment, in an enduring way, one that cannot be unfelt.

(Humans) are out of sync with everything on earth and even with one another. There are 7.7 billion human beings and counting, each of us possessing a kind of inner clock, a unique expression of lived time. For Homo sapiens, time is strange not only because it is relative, as Albert Einstein and others revealed, but because it is subjective; it is not only biological, like the clocks of flowers and trees, but also psychological. Our personal experiences of time are inconsistent, mutable. In childhood a month can linger for an eternity; for someone in middle age, a season unspools at a disorienting clip.

Part of the anxiety many of us feel around climate change is the fact that no one knows what will happen next. But perhaps that’s the wrong way to think about it. The ancient Greek root chronos means chronological time, a sequential unfolding. But the ancient Greeks complemented it with kairos, which meant a propitious moment, the time for decision or action—a term that in modern Greek has coincidentally come to mean weather. Perhaps the opportune time to intervene is fleeting, like a passing thunderstorm or the peak of spring, and we risk a mismatch by striking too late.

From first breath, each of us is bound in a complex web of relationships that transcend the current moment. Thinking of time as chronological might be part of what is holding us back from finding a sustainable path. Past, present, future—climate change combines all these registers at once. Time is not an arrow, relentlessly moving forward, but something circular and strange, more akin to “a lake in which the past, present, and future exist,” to quote the Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, than a rushing river. We need a new vocabulary and new understandings—or maybe we need to revive concepts and traditions unjustly deemed relics of an outmoded, obsolete age by a dominant culture invested in their disappearance.

Taylor goes on to describe the time taken in Vancouver to save the Squamish language from extinction, and how many indigenous people believe that the equality of life we had before colonization was much better than we have now. (I hope that was in no way a typo).