Nature, or Environmental Flip Flop

2024-12-10

As you may be able to tell from reading some of my older posts, I have some strong opinions about ecology. I am careful to refer to such things as "ecology" rather than "the environment" or "nature". "The environment" is too vague, for example we have "the built environment" versus "the natural environment". What is the difference between "the" environment and "our" environment. It's a scaffold which poses the existence of Nature as something both static and dead. It is not agentic, in fact it doesn't really exist, it's merely the backdrop for humanity, the "environment".

Nature is a more complex one. For a long time I would ask questions like, "why is that when ants or termites build large structures, this is considered Nature or natural, but when humans do it it's not considered Nature or natural?" The answer to my question should have been obvious: what is natural is simply defined in opposition to what is man-made. When Nature birthed Man it also birthed itself, since it previously had nothing to define itself against. But still, the Man Nature binary opposition has always puzzled me.

As we've established, Nature preceded Man, Man came from Nature. Man is also contingent on Nature. Without the products of Nature, Man could not reproduce itself. Likewise, without man, Nature could not exist, because it only exists in so far as it is opposed to Man. In simpler terms, the Man Nature distinction has always struck me as an odd line to draw in what is quite clearly one total and monistic system. Man and Nature are one system.

The Climate

The climate is changing, and it's not looking good. I am one of these people who believes that most other people are effectively climate change deniers, even if they claim to believe in it. For example, just the insistence on focusing on climate change as the primary mode of ecological catastrophe is already a form of denialism (I would put climate change as maybe number 3 on my list when it comes to ecological catastrophe, number 1 being topsoil depletion, and number 2 being resource scarcity).

Renewable energy production is another form of denialism. The idea that ecological collapse can be countered via transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy without any wider changes to society, like a drag and drop replacement. I won't go into detail here with specific numbers because I am lazy, but it seems like people somehow think that the materials and energy required to construct renewable energy infrastructure somehow "don't count". They don't seem to realise that this transition requires a massive increase in resource extraction. And when I say massive I mean massive. We're talking about trillions of tonnes of minerals here. It doesn't seem to register with them that increasing the level of resource extraction and energy production is massively ecologically destructive. Not to mention the working conditions in cobalt mines and whatever. To solve climate change we need to send more children to the mines and poison more water sources with lithium mining by-products, sorry it's the only way to go green. And this isn't just the initial start up cost that will eventually be overshadowed by the product of the new infrastructure, solar panels and wind turbines have to be regularly replaced every five to ten years. Wind turbines are made of fibreglass which is not recyclable. I could go further into so called "deep ecology" but you get my point. What's often presented as the solution to all of our ecological problems is itself an ecological problem.

Flip

Not only is it much too late to halt ecological collapse, we don't even have a hope of mitigating it. It's also not an abstract event that will take place some time in the future, collapse is already taking place and accelerating each day. The world is already over, some of us just haven't noticed yet.

The flip is the theory that global capitalism cannot continue to reproduce itself in the face of this event, and a new mode of production will emerge. I will expand on why I'm doing this later, but note that I am being careful not to take any sort of moralist position here. In fact I'm trying to focus on materialist analysis without making any "ought" statements at all. The theory goes that the set of conditions produced by ecological collapse will out-mode industrial capitalism and leave behind a mode which makes best use of the left-over infrastructure. During collapse, the existing built environment doesn't simply disappear, and the social forms that survive will be those which can best take advantage of re-coding the remains of the dead society into the early stages of the emerging society. State power, without access to modern apparatus of discipline and control, will retreat, leaving stateless zones open for capture. In a process resembling natural selection, those societies which are best adapted for state evasion, creative restructuring, and resource production will be the ones that survive. In a world like this, those will be groups making use of rhizomatic techniques like permaculture, nomadism, salvage, and low-level programming. You will degrow, whether you want to or not. Millions, perhaps billions, will die. Collapse is really defined as an environment of relative energy-scarcity.

It's tempting to say that whoever starts now, during the early stages of collapse, will put themselves at an advantage during later stages. However, the specific local conditions of later stage collapse are indeterminable, and it's nigh impossible to predict which actions will actually become power intensities and which will come to be obviously useless.

You will have no treats, and you will likely have to work hard.

Flop

The flop asks, what if the initial premise is wrong? What if capitalism actually can survive ecological catastrophe? Civilisations have collapsed before, but never in this particular way. It might seem obvious that capitalism is totally dependent on fossil fuels, and when they run out so too will capitalism. But these sorts of pseudo malthusian predictions have also been consistently proven wrong historically. There are any number of ways I can imagine civilisations continuing to be fuelled by their own rot, turning their own destruction into propulsion, in the way that companies failing powers the overall machine of capitalism. Entirely imaginary technological booms such as artificial pseudo intelligence and crypto-currency take place on a regular cycle. Billions of credits are generated and dissipated in a mysterious alternate world. Money seems to come from nowhere. We have "vibecessions". Top economists can't seem to agree on what money is, how it's created, and what it does, as was once argued about the reproductive cycle of eels. We have the material conditions of the Cruelty Squad world, and it will come to pass.

As established at the start of this post, the Man-Nature binary opposition has outdone it's usefulness, and we are now looking at this as one total system. Moral systems are human systems, whatever your meta-ethics. Relative social systems, innate to human nuero-biology, Kantian, utilitarian, handed to us by G-d. Whichever you believe, moral systems are rules for human society. Watching one David Attenborough documentary should be all it takes to prove that Nature is not bound by moral laws. "The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don't think they sing, they just screech in pain." To take a moral stance on Nature is to re-affirm the Man-Nature binary opposition with Man as the privileged position. There is in fact a moral law of the jungle, the law of physics, the law of the universe. These are thermodynamic principles of growth, and excess, combined with natural selection or autopoiesis. Anything which continues to exist must successfully reproduce itself from one moment into the next.

Invasive species do not exist. There are simply systems which reproduce themselves from one moment to the next, and systems which do not. Therefore invasive species are the conquering of space by time. "Nature" is constantly trying to kill you, and nature includes our glass and steel termite mounds. Twelve billion beetle species go extinct beneath the sun. Any pathetic faith placed in human agency crumble under the simple acknowledgement of autopoietic law. Just because Nick Land was wrong, doesn't mean he wasn't right.

Nature is in a constant state of movement, time is the key principle here. Systems reproduce themselves in time. The (r)evolution to multicellular life was on par with the domestication of humans by grain in terms of it's destructive capabilities. Wheat invented the atomic bomb. Capitalism is a vavilovian mimicry of grain agriculture. What I'm saying is, you gain brouzouf.

Con(cl/f)usion

The flip is the belief that things can only get so bad. The flop is the belief that things can always get worse. Depending on the time of day, my opinion will shift. From planning a permaculture with collapseOS on a sega master system, to "The super AI emerges from an extremely pornographic ultra hyper suck and fuck". I can't decide