January 21, 2021

Coupling

(Decoupling)

“Our relationship with nature has changed radically, irreversibly, but by no means all for the bad. Our new epoch is laced with invention. Our mistakes are legion, but our talent is immeasurable.” Diane Ackerman

Evolution is “ …an increase in the capacity to experience what is intrinsically valuable.” Alfred North Whitehead

“I recently went with my mother to visit her oldest friend, living alone since her husband died 12 years ago. She was always a rather cantankerous soul, but she honestly sounded much happier with her robot than with her husband! Not just because of the way it copes with the fetching and carrying, cleaning and cooking and so on, but because it manages all her social networks and games… It also deals with her regular health care: all her tele-med sensors are connected via her robot straight through to her doctor” Looking back from the year 2050, Alex McKay narrates in detail a world where the boundary between what is human and what is nonhuman is even fuzzier than it is today. In this speculative fiction, systems for growing artificial meat have virtually eliminated hunger and Detroit is an award-winning comeback city having iteratively tested and optimized urban farming at the scale of the city. Set in the very very near future, in a time when many of us will still be alive, Jonathan Porritt’s The World We Made is an uncanny and thought-provoking goad for ambitious, futural designing for the possibility of flourishing. Neither utopian nor dystopian, The World We Made is refreshing because it dares to imagine what would have to be true about the built environment of today and tomorrow in order for flourishing to be a future consequence. <Propositioning - >

Back in present time, great ecological and geopolitical challenges presenting fuzzy ethical dilemmas stand between now and 2050. In present-day 2015, some of the world’s most astute environmental experts drew a hopeful line in the sand by publishing the Ecomodernist Manifesto. Motivated to strategically align networks and to instigate action on the urgent and interlocking ecological and population challenges ahead, they issued a unified public call to collective action seeking to bring forth a “great Anthropocene.” This esteemed group of signatories concludes that the best way forward necessitates “decoupling” human well-being from the natural world. Acknowledging the decisive impact that humans have had upon the planet, they advocate leaning into our challenges with innovation and hope for human ingenuity. In so doing, the Eco-modernist Manifesto highlights existing polarizations within environmental discourse represented by views that lean more toward innovation and views that lean more toward preservation. <Inter-depending - Independing>

Fusing a scientistic rational modern perspective and a postmodern conscience, the Eco-modernist Manifesto asserts that because we have not only reached but in many cases exceeded critical environmental and climatic thresholds, we are past the point where dynamic states of sustainability are possible without aggressive technological interventions. From an unflinchingly realistic modern perspective, we can observe that most of planet Earth has been mapped, managed and engineered with consequences both remarkable and fearsome as the massive, collective, ongoing collective design we call modern human civilization. Only by means of geoengineering and other emerging technologies, accellerationists argue, will we maintain a livable world with a modern standard of living more equitably distributed amongst a growing world population. From the aspirational modern perspective, the millions who still suffer crushing poverty and have yet to partake of the freedoms and dignities of modernity deserve a more humane existence. They advocate continuous enhancement of our technologies to close resource loops and to lessen reliance on extraction.

Reflecting a modern perspective, the Eco-modern Manifesto takes “Nature” as an object and treats the environment as something “out there” that can be “decoupled” from human well-being. It frames the challenges of the next 30 years as necessitating decoupling or at the very least bracketing any notion of human beings as belonging to or included in the natural world. Acknowledging that what we call “wild nature” is and has long been a human contrivance, they advocate a neo-conservationist approach to setting aside parcels of “wild nature” in the form of parks and reserves. The Eco-modernist Manifesto is an “environmentalism” - a political ideology that streamlines and simplifies our relationship to the environment as one of mutual benefit and autonomy.

Although from a postmodern ecological perspective, nature — culture or nature - human binaries may be viewed as obsolete, meaningless and even counterproductive, the range of postmodern perspectives still represents a relative minority among global worldviews, as the critical mass of the population in the developing world is just moving into a modern consciousness. Noticing what geo-technological time it is, eco-modernists are strategically asserting that any truly viable forward plan for humanity will by necessity have to deeply resonate with the critical mass of emerging moderns worldwide. The Eco-modern Manifesto, grounded in demographic and psychographic global data, is geared toward positively impacting the survivability of human life in the long term through immediate and aligned efforts in the near term. Pragmatic in intent and global in frame of reference, it seeks to strategically influence and impact the behavior of the majority while bettering the circumstances of the greatest number. Its ethical circle of consideration prioritizes human well-being over the well-being of nonhuman animals, at least in the short-term. <Depolarizing - Polarizing>

The Eco-modernist Manifesto advances the stalled-out ecological discourse by seeking synergies between modern technological advancements and postmodern planetary-centric and egalitarian values. Modernity has yet to fulfill its promise to enable the kinds of equity and access that would make our world truly modern ethically and morally (Habermas). Globalization, as a manifestation of the fusion of modern and postmodern forms of consciousness is both fearsome and emancipatory. It is well known that the drastic and growing gaps in income inequality that are a feature of globalization results in social and environmental harm. How might we equitably distribute the benefits of modernity without reproducing the violence of imperialist and techno-centric forms of globalization? How can developing nations enjoy safety, hygiene and comforts appropriate to their own local culture and context, without stressing the biosphere in the manner of the developed world?

In order to ethically distribute the liberating benefits of modernity, in order to achieve a truly equitable and just world for all, the eco-modernists argue that we can only go forward. That’s why integral pundit Jeffrey Salzman says that paradoxically “the cure for development is more development.” Eco-modernists stress that in the short term at any rate, decoupling is the next step for humans on planet Earth. But, is it really ever time to decouple from whatever we mean by “Nature”? The eco-modern decoupling strategy involves hard-core eco-efficiencies, full-on embrace of alternative energies and aggressive mitigation of human impacts by bracketing human embeddedness in and as “Nature” in order to protect the ecosystem from accelerating impacts of human activity. <Naturing - Artificing>

Perhaps “decoupling” is a reaction to the ontological blurring of categories between life and artifice. It would seem to attempt to draw bright lines between human and everything else. In Sustainability by Design, John Ehrenfeld approaches the redesign of culture from the standpoint of science, engineering and philosophy. Technology, like any instrumental power, offers great benefit and great risk. Our modern dualist thinking lulls us into thinking that we can hold the world at arms length and analyze it when in fact we are “Nature” and we are “Technics.” Says Ehrenfeld, “Technologies distance us from the results of our actions. Shifting the burden and creating the illusion that technology will eliminate the need to take responsibility.”

Amidst the blurring our fundamental ontological categories, we may thrill or recoil at the thought of a techno centric or post-human future. “In the ways that matter, we cannot but go forward.” (Dilnot) Taking this both /and paradox into our hearts and being in relationship with what’s unfolding - the tension, the grief, and the conflict, is the work of our times. There are no easy answers to be found in reflexive condemnation of modernity or capitalism nor in valorization of postmodernity. The artful, messy humanization of the Technium (ourselves by any other name) awaits us. Even if we could go backwards in a return to an imagined Eden, this would in no way contribute to the alleviation of suffering of the many. Another perspective is that we are so embedded in the logics of capitalism that we cannot bring about radical change from within because of the degree to which we are inducted into and enabling of the current regime. Revolutionary change would necessarily come from alternative platforms.

Whether from within, from outside, or a combination of both, will we find ways to use the vertically integrated logics of globalization to consciously undo and mitigate its effects? Will we be able to gain widespread support and participation in something better? What will be the long term influence of this new mytho-poetic story of decoupling? Will decoupling postpone facing the abject and alien destabilizing dimensions of what is ahead of us? Will this 21st century conservation impulse lead to planetary flourishing or or merely press pause until human consciousness evolves its circle of care to encompass all life? The Ecomodernist Manifesto favors human autonomy over communion in and as “Nature”. And what of re-coupling - the long-awaited project of reinserting humanity into the body of nature? Emphasizing coupling- the communion poll of the autonomy — communion polarity, would require more surrender, more engagement, more existential confrontation with what we are. Living in crisis times, it’s easy to fall prey to a dismal view. Yet pessimism, however warranted it may seem, presents its own danger, because it reduces the field of possibilities from which we imagine our futures. Our success in collectively designing a thriving planetary future will depend on our ability to “become human by design” (Fry) and to bring ethics to the techno-sphere (Wilber) by means of artifacture - with hope, wisdom and humility.

Reading this, I hope you will have a felt experience of the moment-to-moment choice points of encouplement in and as artifice. The artifacts of design blur the boundaries between “Nature” and “Artifice” and “Us”. Entangled with technics, design is always cybernetically co-evolving with/as us. No longer meaningful as an ontological category, technology is a third-person manifestation of collective consciousness, and a primary domain wherein consciousness comes to recognize itself. We cannot speak of the agency or morality of technology per se, but only of the situated and instantiated ethics enacted in context as enslaving or liberating, enframing or reframing. Evolving as artifice necessitates ongoing grappling with consciousness, power, interdependency and surrender.

Previous post Configuring (Deploying) “Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” Herbert A. Simon Next post Crisising (Opportuniting) “We are the catastrophe.” Keith Witt Although our eponymous Anthropocene era represents a mere blink of an eye in