Appraising Asymmetries: Considerations on the Changing Relation between Human Existence and Planetary Nature—Guest Editors’ Introduction (original) (raw)

2019, Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics

Against this general backdrop, the idea for the present special issue on the theme "Nature strikes back! Thinking the Asymmetry of the Human Relationship to Planet Earth" arose. For ourselves, it followed rather naturally from our collective efforts to engage in a philosophical questioning of technology in light of the Anthropocene. In the course of organising several conference-sessions and publishing a special issue on this topic in the journal Techné: Research in Philosophy of Technology (see Lemmens et al. 2017), we increasingly felt that a more elaborate engagement between philosophy of technology, environmental philosophy, and environmental ethics was in order. Of course, the concept of the Anthropocene evidently involves a conjunction of technology and nature, given how it is generally understood as the earthly epoch in which, as Jan Zalasiewicz and his colleagues put it, "natural and human forces [are] intertwined, so that the fate of the one determines the fate of the other" (Zalasiewicz et al. 2010: 2231). Although the meaning and implications of this intertwinement were (and remain) central, we hitherto predominantly addressed them from the perspective of philosophy of technology. As such, despite not truly attempting, in the words of Horace, to "drive nature out with a pitchfork", she kept coming back nonetheless. This recurrence of nature accordingly prompted the dissemination of a call for papers on the theme of "nature strikes back", which we consider to be one of the core experiences that informs contemporary environmental thought. Think of global warming, reduced biodiversity, the sixth mass extinction, increasingly frequent extreme weather events, draughts, floods, crop failure, declining permafrost, rapidly changing precipitation-patterns, etcetera ad nauseam-and it becomes clear how these are increasingly experienced as symptoms of some kind of natural retaliation, a sentiment that we also find expressed in James Lovelock's "revenge of Gaia" (2006), Amitav Ghosh's "The Great Derangement" (2016) or Isabelle Stengers' "intrusion of Gaia" (2015: 137). Importantly, the Anthropocene renders it impossible to interpret such 'striking back' in all too modernist terms of two radically opposing factions, as if human subjects and their technological accoutrements are now 'struck back' by a nature that is essentially different from them. Rather, in light of the osmosis between technology and nature witnessed in the Anthropocene (cf. Cera 2017), coming to terms with nature striking back cannot get around the Anthropocenic adagio that "nature is us" (Crutzen and Schwägerl 2011). It was for this reason that the call for contributions included the task of "thinking the asymmetry of the human relationship to planet earth". On the one hand, as the phrase "nature is us" concisely captures, this relationship has evidently become symmetric. This is to say that since what Earth System Scientists refer to as "The Great Acceleration", industrialized humanity has become a force to be reckoned with on a planetary scale, a geo-force exerting a domineering influence on the dynamics of the Earth system in which it partakes. Defined as "the suite of interacting physical, chemical and biological global-scale cycles (…) that provide the life-support system for life at the surface of the planet", the Earth System thereby expressly "includes humans, our societies, and our activities; thus, humans are not an outside force perturbing an otherwise natural system but rather an integral and interacting part of the Earth System itself" (Steffen et al. 2007: 615).