Dark Ecology

humans devised modes of agriculture we glimpse in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles that now cover most of Earth and are responsible for an alarming amount of global warming emissions all by themselves, let alone the carbon-emitting industry that agricultural mode necessitated

Ecology, after all, is the thinking of beings on a number of different scales, none of which has priority over the other. When scaled up to what Douglas Kahn happily calls Earth magnitude, my conscious actions have an unconscious result that I did not intend.39

Unless we think the concept species differently, which is to say think humankind as a planetary totality without the soppy and oppressive universalism and difference erasure that usually implies, we will have ceded an entire scale—the scale of the biosphere, no less—to truly hubristic technocracy, whose “Just let us try this” rhetoric masks the fact that when you “try” something at a general enough level of a system, you are not trying but doing and changing, for good

Becoming a geophysical force on a planetary scale means that no matter what you think about it, no matter whether you are aware of it or not, there you are, being that

But humans did it with the aid of beings that they treated as prostheses: nonhumans such as engines, factories, cows, and computers—let alone viral ideas about agricultural logistics living rent-free in minds.

No one decided in 1790 to wreck the planet by emitting carbon dioxide and related gases. Moreover, what is called human is more like a clump or assemblage of things that are not strictly humans—without human DNA for instance—and things that are—things that do have human DNA.

Don’t like the word Anthropocene? Fine. Don’t like the idea that humans are a geophysical force? Not so fine

Like the racist, the speciesist fills out the gap between phenomenon and thing with a special paste: the fantasy of an easy-to-identify content.

When I mathematize a thing, there I am, mathematizing it—measuring it, for instance. Why this is so different a form of access than eating it or using it to paper my room is uncertain. The gap between the human and everything else can’t be filled in, as racism tries to do.

Every kind of access—a philosopher thinking about a stone, a scientist smashing a particle, a farmer watering a tree—is profoundly limited and incomplete