<b>The modern idea of separating the real from the mere subjective, facts from values, nature from culture hides, according to Bruno Latour, an opposite truth: that man and nature are getting more and more entangled. In relation to the environmental debate Latour argues that this entanglement must be the starting point for future action – a retreat to the nostalgic idea of untouched nature will not truly encounter the problem. The following is an excerpt from Latour’s contribution to the unpublished book of essays, “Postenvironmentalism”, where Latour comments on the book “Break Through – From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility” by T. Nordhaus and M. Shellenger</b>. Canadian Pharmacy Pills Store Online cialis

Life inherently values. Individual life forms a centre for that valuing since each individual organism is driven, by the push for unfolding of its nucleic acid - OK. That breaks down right there - how can an acid push to unfold?

The division between life and non-life is smeared at its beginnings (only particular kinds of chemical reactions occur in living things, and even this is indistinct as a definition). The division between nature and human is, as Timothy Morton rightly points out, no division at all but a device cultures have developed to enable our own survival. As Dan Dennett has held, the boundaries between cell insides and cell outsides, at the simplest level, are, however permeable, nevertheless instances of an important creation - us and them, I and it, in and out. We aggress precisely because we identify against, not with. Can we escape this metaphor, though? 

Dennett thinks not: thinks that the one depressing truth we have to face is our xenophobia towards other members of our own species and, by extension, our phobia towards what is 'not I', or 'not us' (or, as the Sloanes used to say, 'non-U').

We want to be egalitarians and value all that, rationally, we know, has value, equally, for itself, by its own lights. But we can't, can we, because we're stuck with the gut feeling that something's us and something isn't and I, for one, can't quite untangle what would be required to let that go.

There is one way, of course: a kind of mental trick, or reversal, the old cliche that what we see is what we're looking with. Knowledge helps too: Frank Ryan's Virolution shows just how much of our ancestral DNA is virally derived; Matthew Hall shows how autonomy and intelligence are words which can be meaningfully applied to all manner of plants; and Charles Cockell shows how microbes make up a large proportion of our mass, to say nothing of the dependency we have on them for the development and functioning of 'our' organs. There's also the metaphor of symbiosis: don't we do better humming along as part of an orchestral symphony than strumming out our own, human, tune, tone deaf to the rest? 

I don't know. I wish. I wish respect could become a way of relating to the world, to one another and to ourselves, that we could shift to a biocentric view. But I wonder at the loss it would demand: lose oneself and gain the world? Or just lose? 

In his article Don't Just Do Something, Sit There! Global Warming and Ideology Timothy Morton questions the dicothomy between nature and nurture. He says that this divide is not possible to make, and neither can we divide between human and animal. 

“When you think about ecology, your world becomes much larger and therefore more groundless. Yet it also becomes much more intimate. We've got others—rather, they have us—literally under our skin.” (Timothy Morton)

We share 98% DNA with chimps and 35% with daffodils. We have arms and legs like lobsters and cells, just like the amoebae. Darwin actually proved that distinguishing one species from another is strictly impossible. Humans as well as animals are ecological coexistences; strange strangers, as Morton calls them.

“I can't in good faith use the word animal anymore, and “nonhumans” won't work either—we are strange strangers too.” (Timothy Morton)

Where does this melting together of human and animal; of nature and nurture leaves us in the question of climate change? How can we talk about human-made or nature-caused catastrophes? How can we say, that we humans have to save nature? Does this free us from our responsibility? Or does it force us to take another approach in the questions about climate change?

“The more we know about strange strangers, the stranger they become. Are they alive? What is life? Are they intelligent? What is intelligence? Are they people? Are we people?” (Timothy Morton)

For other articles about the merging of nature and nurture see "It's Development, Stupid!" or: How to Modernize Modernization by Bruno Latour and Learning to accept re-created climates by Mike Hulme. And for the theme of humans and animals see From animal to information by Ranine Randerson.

 

“We are no longer a minor species living in diverse ecosystems. We are now a dominant species that has homogenised ecosystems. […] Today we behave as if we are exceptional from natural systems and operate by controlling and excluding nature. For example, where does your poop go, when you use a flying or flushing toilet? Yes, the human system of disposal means it disappeared from having a direct presence in your life. It may have moved away from your area of habitation, but it hasn’t really disappeared, no matter how much you wish it to be so. It has merely moved to another place on earth. Your poop is still present in the world, and its presence has effects in the world that you created. Yet we persist in pretending that the poop really is no longer our concern. We don’t think about its cumulative effect until it bursts through into what we consider the human system, with direct and detrimental consequences to our lives.”

Tse-Hui Teh gives us, in her article RE: URGENT – You in the Water-Cycle, a fascinating insight into the water-cycle, which we in the industrialized world most often take for given, but which we none the less are a main ingredient of. Because we are the only species that has managed to find ways to transport more water than we can carry, we have manipulated the water-cycle in a non-sustainable way, leading way to much fresh, drinkable water out into the salty ocean. This doesn’t only makes us run low on drinking water in some places of the world, but the water further more crosses all kind of borders on its way, transporting and washing away as well natural minerals and human pollution and shutters and destroys our fragile eco-system.

Which kind of view on nature do we perform by using water as was it a magic stream? How can we provide people with a better understanding about the ecosystem of the earth? How can we develop a water-cycle that are more true to our nature and in which we share the water with all other organisms?

“The climate crisis introduces us to the fact that our immediate surroundings are being mediated by complex visualisations, interfaces, statistics and carbon quotas – thus an imaginary computer interface lurks in the blue sky, even deep in the country with no computers in sight!” (Søren Pold)

Climate is being measured and monitored all the time through pervasive computing and satellite systems. We don’t see the interface for climate measurements, but being a part of our climate, we as well get observed and interface/interlace with these ubiquitous technology systems. How does this situation change our perception of our being in the world, our nature and our climate? In his article, Imaginary Interfaces in the Blue Sky Søren Pold describes this situation through a number of climate art works. We have to make interfaces for the climate problem in which the viewers are given the opportunity to understand and influence it.
 

Read also Gabrielle Gramelsbergers article, The Strange World of Climate Models.

“Predicting the future is one of mankind’s oldest dreams.” (Gramelsberger)

Whether the predictions happens through a crystal or through extremely complicated, mathematical computer programs, it seems to be a prediction we have to go easy on and be critical towards.

“Although climate scenarios rely upon the use of numerical models […] and these models have become superstars of a kind, with an increasingly trendsetting influence on our life style, one should ask: What kind of view of the world do these models create?” (Gramelsberger)

When we talk about, and deal with the change of climate, politically as well as and socially, it is never the actual climate, but rather models of climate, we base our action and decision on. In her article, The Strange World of Climate Models, philosopher of computer simulations, Gabriele Gramelsberger explains how these models work, and she questions the simplicity of these averaged simulations lacking the complex mechanisms taking place between the atmosphere and the ‘anthroposphere’.

Can we really use these models as basis for serious action against climate change? Or does their lack of complexity and scale make the nature look more like a fish soup than it portrays the actual nature we live in – the nature that are exist of immeasurable processes and which follows its own unpredictable ways?
 

“The injunction to act now is based on preserving a Nature that never existed: this has real effects that may result in more powerful catastrophe as we tilt at non-existent windmills. I'm not saying let's not look after animals because they're not really natural. I'm trying to find a reason to look after all beings precisely because they're not natural.” (Timothy)

In his article, Don't Just Do Something, Sit There! Global Warming and Ideology, Timothy Morton turns our perceptions of what nature, environment and being human are up side down and suggests the concepts of the ‘strange stranger’ and ‘dark ecology’ in which we can’t separate humans from other species, nature from culture, or ecology from action. Everything is coexistence, interconnected, and intersubjective, which blows the foundation on which our capitalistic and liberal society is build.

Because the old perception of nature as something outside of us is being shuttered by climate change -– because nature an ecology are much more complex and much more intimate dimensions, we cant just ‘do something’ but we have to ‘sit there’ and think about what we want to do first. “Dark ecology is a paradoxical aesthetic that slips from our conceptual grasp. This openness serves as startup software for politics: it doesn't tell you what to do, but it opens your mind so you can think clearly about what to do.” (Timothy).

In the case of Timothy’s article I will avoid opening up further questions. Instead I will promise you, that the text will leave you with plenty of question, which I hope you will share and discuss here at the blog, in order to reach a more complex understand of the problematics concerning climate change and what we can actually do about it.

“Ecological thinking should not stop forging ahead, thinking unthinkable things and demanding the impossible. It must hold open the possibility of a future radically different from the reality we appear to be stuck in.” (Timothy)
 

“Why are we so frightened of a change in the climate?  Why do we want our climates to stay the same, to offer us the same old weather we have grown up with?  We welcome change and novelty in many other areas of our human experience: new technologies to captivate us, new places to visit, new people to love.” (Mike Hulme).

Hulme writes that the climate has been made the symbol of the pure natural, the innocent and fragile–- Eden, something we have to save and protect. But how can we keep on holding on to a myth like that, when everything around us seems to be mutated by humans? In his article Learning to Accept Re-created Climates Hulme argues that climate is not what we would call a pure, natural nature but it is an artificial nature – a hybrid nature co-created by humans.

We cannot talk about a natural nature, but we have to accept our new (if we can call this new, but that is another question) role of co-creaters of nature. “Should we fear this new role?  Should we indeed be frightened of a change in climate?  I think not.  Or at least we need to learn to think not.  We need to ‘Rethink’ climate change.” (Hulme).
 

Read the article Learning to Accept Re-Created Climates and share your opinnion of wether we should fear climate change or not!

The modern idea of separating the real from the mere subjective, facts from values, nature from culture hides, according to Bruno Latour, an opposite truth: that man and nature are getting more and more entangled. In relation to the environmental debate, Latour argues that this entanglement must be the starting point for future action – a retreat to the nostalgic idea of untouched nature will not truly encounter the problem. In Latour’s attempt to localize and describe what this entanglement of future action might possibly be and contain, he makes a division between environmentalists and post-environmentalists:

"Environmentalists say: “From now on we should limit ourselves,” postenvironmentalists exclaim: “From now on, we should stop flagellating ourselves and take up explicitly and seriously what we have been doing all along at an ever increasing scale, namely, intervening, acting, wanting, caring.” (Latour)

Read Latour’s article “It´s development, stupid!” or: How to Modernize Modernization and explore and discuss his view on nature, which he suggests as the only possible starting point for us in order to truly encounter the problems of climate change.
 

Charter tourism is still in its prime, but along with the rising environmental awareness worldwide, a new and supposedly ‘better’ genre of tourism is emerging—ecotourism embraces the principles of sustainable development concerning the economic, social and environmental impacts of tourism. It all sounds very good, but in this essay anthropologist, Veronica Davidov questions this new genre of tourism in order to see how it produces an idealized and simplified perception of nature; the singular ‘lost’ nature rooted in the Western ecotopic values and beliefs that ‘natives’ must have access to forms of knowledge that the industrialized ‘we’ have lost.

Does this assemblage create a simple green primitivism, a new exoticism, or can ecotourism really help us understand and maintain our nature?

Read the rest of the article here and decide for yourself.
 

“If we are serious about our need to rethink human relations with nature […] a good starting place might be to step outside and take a good long look at our suffering sky, a now largely man-made layer dense with emissions” (Hamblyn)

The clouds have long functioned as symbols of many things from a calm and romantic summer day to a forecast of weather, and who doesn’t enjoy lying in the grass finding figures in the clouds?

But the clouds might not be as innocent as they seem to be. In his article Antropogenic Skies, Richard Hamblyn explains how clouds recently changed due to human intervention and global warming, and how cloud formations not only tells us about the weather – but they also reveal climate changes and affect the climate as a whole.

What role will the clouds get to play in the future of climate change? The research area is still very new, and whether the amount of clouds will increase or decrease due to the rising temperatures of the oceans is not clear. The scientists still argue about if the new man-made skies and changing formations and extent of clouds will have a heating or a cooling effect on the climate of the Earth. What should we think when we look up at the sky and see a cloud looking like a big hand? 

“Why are we so frightened of a change in the climate?  Why do we want our climates to stay the same, to offer us the same old weather we have grown up with?  We welcome change and novelty in many other areas of our human experience: new technologies to captivate us, new places to visit, new people to love.” (Hulme)

In his article Learning to Accept Re-created Climates Mike Hulme argues, that the main reason we fear climate change is because climate has been made the symbol of the pure and natural, the innocent and fragile–- Eden, something we have to save and protect. The climate is the only thing left that we can call pure nature, untouched by humans, and we want it to stay that way! If we accept that even nature is co-created by humans, Eden and the wilderness of nature is forever lost. “We are concerned about anthropogenic climate change because our climate has come to symbolise the last stronghold of Nature, the final frontier resisting our encroachment.” (Hulme)

Is this really the reason we fear climate change? Do we really feel for the polar bear, or has the polar bear just become the symbol of climate change and is most of all poor, because it has to carry on its shoulder the entire weight of human nostalgia towards the lost nature, as Hulme describes it?

Hulme says that we have to stop being frightened by this idea of a not totally natural climate, because it keeps us paralyzed, instead “[we] need to ‘Rethink’ climate change. [… ] we must embrace the idea of novelty – in our climates as much as in other forms of cultural innovation and change.” (Hulme). We have to look at climate change from new perspectives to come up with ways to mitigate the problems.

Should we really accept these changes? Should we embrace them? And will this help us solve or mitigate the problems that arise from the changes?
 

Welcome to the debate forum for rethinking and discussing what we traditionally have been referred to as ‘nature’. It is my hope to establish and moderate a discussion that - from different perspectives such as philosophy, natural science, engineering, sociology, etc. - examines how we can talk about and understand the nature that surrounds us and which is the very protagonist of the antropogenic caused climate change. The debate forum is in its initial phase but more content will soon be added.

The discussion about climate change is often driven by the idea of nature as something outside of us, something clean and innocent, something we destroyed, and something we long for and should aim at getting back to. But WE are nature!
Can we talk about a nature outside of us, when clouds, oceans, soil, and animal species seem to be changed and affected of our presence on Earth? 

Why is it important for us to make this distinction between humans and nature? How can we talk about nature when it is not something outside of us? And is it possible to make our way through climate crisis that doesn’t build upon the romantic idea of the untouched Eden of nature?

When discussing the climate, we often talk about simulated representations of climate, rather than about climate in it self. How is it possible to look at climate and climate change directly? How should the politicians at COP15 think about and articulate nature, the climate, and global warming when negotiating and making decisions?

These questions and many more you will be able to read about and debate here on this blog.