Ecology 101 Gerry Canavan Marquette University, [email protected]
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Marquette University e-Publications@Marquette English Faculty Research and Publications English, Department of 11-1-2015 Ecology 101 Gerry Canavan Marquette University, [email protected] Published version. SFRA Review, Vol. 314 (November 2015): 16-25. Permalink. © 2015 Science Fiction Research Association. Used with permission. Feature 101 is the cash nexus; 2. It doesn’t matter where something goes as long as it re-enters the circuit of capital; Ecology 101 3. The self-regulating market knows best; 4. Nature’s bounty is a free gift to the prop- Gerry Canavan erty owner. (120) In this use of the word “ecology,” it is intended to distinctions between environmentalism as an um- suggest as a matter of scientific determination that [1]brella THERE term HAVEfor a seriesBEEN frequentof interrelated, attempts usually to draw re- no environmentalist reform of capitalism is or could form-liberal political movements and ecology as an ever be viable, and that a new economic order will - ing the web of relations and interconnections be- social system is what Foster and others call ecoso- tweenostensibly organisms neutral and field their of scientific environments. inquiry concern cialismbe required, or what for genuine Kim Stanley sustainability; Robinson this (borrowing proposed [1.1] In practice, however, such distinctions have a term from agriculture) has called permaculture tended to collapse in the face of the overawing eco- (see “Comparative Planetology”). In both cases, the logical crises with which humanity has been con- proposed alternative system is to be one that does not degrade or undermine the conditions for its own centuries. Ecological apprehension of late capitalism continuation, as both industrial and agricultural infronted the contemporary in the late twentieth- moment andis far early from twenty-first politically systems do under capitalism; as Robinson puts this neutral, and tends in a contemporary context to be proposition elsewhere: Justice becomes a survival technology. […] therather use fiercely of “ecology” anticapitalist, and “ecological” in ways thatby humanities frequently scholarsgo significantly on the leftbeyond to describe liberal reformism.their own work (Indeed, has has desperate people stripping away forests typically denoted a deliberate attempt to go beyond andReal soiljustice in much would of alleviate the world, the andpoverty it would that “mere” environmentalism, in the name of something reduce the hyper-consumption of the rich, more radical.) [1.2] “The realms of ecology and capitalism are op- resources and excessive in carbon burn. The posed to each other—not in every instance but in onlywhich possible is equally road or toeven sustainability’s more destructive neces of- their interactions as a whole,” John Bellamy Foster - writes in Ecology Against Capitalism (7). In an ear- avan, Klarr, and Vu 213). lier work, The Vulnerable Planet, Foster points to the sary carbon neutrality involves justice. (Can “four laws of ecology” as proposed by Barry Com- [1.3] For this reason, ecological knowledge is often moner in The Closing Circle in 1971, as a means of understood to logically entail anticapitalism by mak- distilling the ecological worldview into its core ele- ing visible what K. William Kapp once called capital- ments: ism’s “economy of unpaid costs” (231). “To call for capitalism to pay its way”—to demand, that is, that 1. Everything is connected to everything else. capitalism take into full account the natural world 2. Everything must go somewhere. from which it draws its resources and into which it 3. Nature knows best. dumps its by-products and refuse—is “to call for the 4. There is no such thing as a “free lunch.” abolition of capitalism” altogether (Moore 145). (118) ecology and leftist politics must ultimately come un- Foster’s proposed “four laws of capital,” in turn, sug- der[1.4] some However, revaluation, even withthis regardeasy equation both to anticapibetween- gests the extent to which ecology and capitalism talist or anti-Western political movements that are - or, indeed, fully anti-ecological in their political necessarily find themselves in inevitable and irre agenda—asonly superficially well asor recognitionopportunistically of the “ecological”— various ways solvable1. The conflict: only lasting connection between things that the property rights that undergird Western cap- 16 SFRA Review 314 Winter 2015 SFRA Review 314 Winter 2015 17 italism have sometimes led to greater conservation and types of growth within systems. and environmental protection than would have been [2.2] As Richard Grove shows in his 1995 Green Im- possible in their absence. As will be discussed below, perialism, however, it would be incorrect to say that the ecological history of human civilization does not ecology only emerges as a concern this late in histo- necessarily yield simplistic or unidirectional politi- ry. In fact, many of the intellectual developments we cal conclusions. now associate with ecology actually have their ori- [1.5] From this perspective, however, we can cer- gins in European imperialism, as Europeans in set- tainly say that all ecology is in some sense political - ecology, in terms of its application to real-world situ- ations and cultural institutions; in practice ecology environstler colonies in the in thename tropics of creating frequently viable attempted and sustain sci- necessarily implies some evaluation of human social ableentific colonies. management Grove of notes and interventionthat much environmen within their- relations as either ecologically salutary / sustainable talist rhetoric has its origins in these kinds of colo- / rational / desirable or else destructive / irrational nized spaces, a noteworthy and unacknowledged / unsustainable / undesirable. But neither the right nor the left should be understood to have some total also traces the importance of the spatial topoi of the or undisputed claim on the political implications of gardencase of andthe “periphery”of the island influencingto early ecological the “center.” thought, He ecological thought. as well as the devastation that the imperialists often [1.6] In what follows I will primarily be discussing brought with them to these island through improper management and invasive species, which ultimately cultural, and literary-aesthetic implications. I hope came to premediate a fully global devastation that is thisecology piece as will a scientific serve as phenomenona useful companion with political, to simi- lar “101” pieces that have run in this space, perhaps around the corner. But Grove also destabilizes the most directly Eric C. Otto’s “Environmentalism 101” familiaryet to come postcolonial but seems narrative to us, today, of villainsto be always and justvic- (also available in the eBook SF 101: A Guide to Teach- tims by noting that the imperialists were sometimes ing and Studying Science Fiction.) While some over- more ecologically “rational” than native groups, and lap is unavoidable, I have endeavored to focus here that the legal absolutism of the imperial state often less on political movements and more on ecological unsettlingly allowed for conservationist policies in science’s use within humanities discourses as a cog- the colonial sphere that were possible neither under troubled) interconnections between organisms (es- under the entrenched free markets of Europe. peciallynitive standpoint human beings) that highlights and their the environments, (at times quite es- the[2.3] precolonial David Mazel’s status tour-de-force quo of the Global chapter South “Ameri nor- pecially as that standpoint manifests within contem- can Literary Environmentalism as Domestic Orien- porary SF. talism” in The Ecocriticism Reader (1996) similarly [2] The term “ecology” was coined (as Ökologie) by - Ernst Haeckel in 1866, drawing together the Greek sire for ecology as a neutral ground from the ideo- roots for “house” and “study”—the etymological ori- logicaldemonstrates construction the difficulty of terms of likedisentangling “wilderness” the that de gins thus again suggests the tension between “ecol- are always embedded in political and historical as- ogy” as a pure science and “ecology” as a theory of sumptions about property rights, utilitarianism, best practices for domestic management, whether white settlement, gender, and the state. Just as Mazel - notes that environmentalism is always both resis- tance to power and the exercise of it, so too we have thethat deliberate management intervention reflects ofthe human unconscious, actors (which, auto already seen it is with ecology, which is always both again,matic consequencesare to be evaluated of evolved as either animal adaptive behaviors or mal or- a tallying of mankind’s crimes against the environ- adaptive for the various organisms involved). ment as well as, precisely through that tallying, the [2.1] Now another strong internal tension within blueprint for continued human domination over the the idea of ecology becomes visible as well: ecology planet. is at one and the same time the principle of mastery [2.4] As David Harvey has warned the Left in such that allows agents in an ecological system to control works as The Enigma of Capital (2011) and else- that system and the principle of hard limit that con- where, anticapitalists neglect the “blueprint” com- strains mastery and makes impossible certain levels ponent of ecology’s relationship with capitalism to 16 SFRA Review 314 Winter 2015 SFRA Review 314 Winter 2015 17 their peril, as capitalist innovation