Kant’s body and other natural disasters

This post is part of a series of occasional posts I am working on concerning the body and ecology.  I start somewhat circuitously by examining the re-introduction of the body into philosophy in the work of Kant.

Friedrich Nietzsche, in tones braggadocio, prefaced his intellectual autobiography, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, with the following sentence (suggestion: read it slowly and dramatically), “Seeing that before long I must confront humanity with the most difficult demand ever made of it, it seems indispensable to me to say who I am.”

Nietzsche proceeded to review the challenges he confronted us with in several chapters with titles progressively more grandiose (or jocular, depending upon your sensibility): "Why I Am So Wise", "Why I Am So Clever", "Why I Write Such Good Books" and "Why I Am a Destiny".  My objectives are more humble than Nietzsche’s.  I am interested in re-examining the relationship between the comportment of our bodies and the founding of knowledge about the natural world.  Does having a body matter at all for deepening our relationship with the rest of nature? Though my objectives are modest, nevertheless it may be mannerly to take Nietzsche’s lead and say a little more about who I am.

Once a week or so for the last three years I metamorphose into a graduate student of philosophy at the same school where I am a professor of environmental science.  Though I am a clamoring scientific cuckoo dumped into the philosophical nest, my professors have been affable, hospitably taking my fledgling efforts seriously.  They have taken me under their capacious wings, (to keep the metaphor straight I can say they have placed this outlandish egg alongside the rest of their brood beneath their downy underbellies) and they treat me as one of the clutch.  And though I have perhaps been a little more impatient than my fellow students to sweep philosophy up into rapid use, I have nonetheless taken to heart their teacherly advice to be a slower and more attentive reader.  (Could it be that scientists, in general, are less patient readers of their foundational texts than are philosophers? Surely not all biologists have read their Origin of Species line by line, though it might be harder to imagine a philosopher that has left unread The Critique of Pure Reason).  These days I am as entertained as the next man by, let us say, lengthy disquisitions on the use by Kant of the two German words translated as “object” in the English rendering (Objekt and Gegenstand).  Despite my newfound persnicketiness when it comes to texts, I remain relatively impatient to launch myself from the nest’s edge and try out my new feathers.

Introducing the Rules of the Ecological Game: The descent of a flock of hierarchy theories in Manhattan, circa 1986

TAKE HEED YE YOUTHFUL SCHOLARS: books discovered in your tender years will influence your thinking for decades to come. In 1987 while surfing the stacks of the library of CUNY Graduate School in Manhattan, I plucked off the shelves a copy of Hierarchy: Perspectives for Ecological Complexity by T. F. H. Allen and Thomas Starr (1982). Shortly after this I picked up a copy of a monograph by R.V O’Neill and his colleagues (including T.F.H. Allen) entitled A Hierarchical Concept of Ecosystems. I recall that this volume was regarded with a measure of scorn, albeit a bemused rather than a vicious scorn, by several of the ecologists who taught me at the time (primarily population and community ecologists). It was this book, placing the ecosystem into the framework of a more general systems theory, that ultimately had the longest lasting influence on me in terms of my conception of how the complexities of nature can be made tractable. 

Hierarchy theory was in the air back them. Perhaps one should say “hierarchy theories” since the observation that many of the complexities in the world can be resolved into structures comprised of parts within parts within wholes is not only a commonplace observation; it is one that has been theorized in many disciplines. Herbert Simon, a leading figure in developing this perspective, was an economist, Ilya Progogine, a chemist, Howard Pattee, a theoretical biologist, Jean Piaget a developmental psychologist. Hierarchy theory draws upon more general systems theory developed by luminaries such as Ludwig von Bertalanffy and James Grier Miller, both theoretical biologists. These early students of complex systems developed ways of thinking about commonalities between disciplines whose objects were structured as nested sets of parts within wholes (in more mathematical terms, hierarchies are a partially ordered set).

From the universe as a whole down to the atoms: distinctions between community and ecosystem ecology

Tools of the trade: ecosystem ecology

In one of the more nerve-wracking moments of my early career I was informed that the ecosystem concept was “putting food on the family table.”  I was to stick to the methods of ecosystem ecology and not to waste time with community level questions.  By this I understood that I should not indulge an interest in individual organisms nor attempt to identify these to the species level – certainly this was consuming a lot of my time. I should not, I was told, become overly interested in species diversity, another community-level phenomenon.  Though ecology is rapidly changing, nevertheless as recently as a decade and a half ago you picked your favourite flavour early – if you chose chocolate it is frowned on if you started adding dollops of vanilla.

The ecosystem, as we have discussed, is a compound constituted by all the organisms of a region interacting with the non-living environment – soil, water, and atmosphere.  In modern ecology the ecosystem concept has become the foundation for functional studies of the environment, often at the landscape scale, where ecologists study the processes contributing to the flow of energy (primarily starting with the photosynthetic “fixing” of the sun’s energy by plants) and the cycling of nutrients.  For instance, a present-day ecosystem ecologist might be interested in how the rates of leaf litter decomposition in a woodland affects the availability of nutrients in the soil, thus influencing subsequent plant growth.  This functional interpretation of the ecosystem is contrasted with the approach taken by population and community ecologists who study the interaction of individual organisms, the growth of populations and the interactions that occur between individual of multiple species coexisting in the same place at the same time. 

Is your climax a super-organism? The complexity of nature. Or, on being made of little parts

Vegetation Climax, Western Ghats 2009

ECOLOGICAL PAPERS WRITTEN IN THE 1930S are the Burgess Shale of the discipline. As in that middle-Cambrian fossil bed of primordial forms, everything is already there and often piled pretty closely together. Arthur Tansley’s 1935 paper “The use and abuse of vegetation concepts and terms” appeared in the journal Ecology and re-reading it three-quarters of a century later opens a window on the debates in the early years of discipline. Tansley’s proximate concern is to chastise the younger South African ecologist John Phillips, whose views on vegetation development had chagrined him. In the background is the powerful figure of Frederic Clements, the senior American ecologist and archdeacon of the concepts of “succession” and the “complex organism”, whose views Phillips was advocating and justifying. These days Tansley’s paper is primarily remembered for introducing the term “ecosystem”; however, other debates swirl around it, including questions concerning the degree to which we might regard the largest entities of nature as “super-organisms”.  (For an account of this paper go here) Is the plant community correctly seen as a large independent organism that grows, matures, and reproduces in the way an individual plant or animal does? Debates about this matter – a storm in arcane scientific teacup – prefigure more contemporary debates about Gaia: can the planet itself be regarded as a single super-organism? 

What was eating at Sir Arthur G. Tansley? On the occasion of 76th anniversary of the ecosystem concept

Remembering the late Frank Golley who wrote about it.

This month is the 76th anniversary of the naming of the ecosystem concept. The paper in which the term first appeared is entitled, appropriately enough, “The use and abuse of vegetation concepts and terms”, (the ecosystem being offered, naturally enough, as a useful one) and appeared in Ecology, the flagship journal of the Ecological Society of America, in July 1935 . In it, the British ecologist Sir Arthur George Tansley takes a scythe to the conceptual crop that the infant discipline of ecology had produced since the early years of the 20th Century. He separated the terminological wheat from the chaff. The task was not, of course, simply to determine which were the more delicious ecological terms; ecologists have always loved their terminology: climax communities, subclimaxes, proclimax, seres, plagioseres, prisere, succession and so forth; little of it is euphonious. Rather, he determined the utility of terminology based upon his perception of the “naturalness” of the units of nature they entail. Terms are abused when they promote analogies which do not produce fruitful empirical research programs. Terms are also abused, as Tansley hinted, when they smuggle in a set of metaphysical assumptions (e.g. “an imagined future whole” to be realized in an ideal human society); assumptions Tansley believed had no business in the dispassionate contemplation of nature. Especially when ecology was struggling to assume a position among the other natural sciences it seemed not the time for the discipline to divert on philosophical tangents .

Life on a pillar: environmental thought and the odor of sanctity (Excerpt from 3QD)

Excerpt: See full piece here

If asceticism was simply a matter of self-mortification then we could claim that we have never lived in more ascetic times. We diet to shed those dozens and dozens of unsightly pounds; some voluntarily submit to a surgical ablating of the flesh for the purposes of fabricating the perfect nose; our star athletes allegedly undergo a period of sexual continence before the big game; some of you may even gallop on scorching days for distances in excess of twenty-six miles, for no better reason than to replicate the achievement of the first person to die from that feat. And in general terms the definition of the ascetic as a person who practices “rigorous self-discipline, severe abstinence, austerity”, might tempt us to smuggle the more excessive of these modern deprivations under the definitional bar. However, the OED qualifies the definition by pointing out that asceticism aims are achieved “by seclusion or by abstinence from creature comforts”. Furthermore, the term derives etymologically from the Greek asketikos, meaning monk or hermit and more generally the root term is ascesis – the practice of self discipline, or exercise. If, in the final analysis, the contemporary mortifications listed above seem to fall short of being ascetic, why might we, in contrast, regard environmentalism as fundamentally so?

To use the life of Simeon Stylites as a point of comparison with environmental thought and practice may be a challenging place to start to make a case that environmentalism is foundationally ascetic. Certainly there are more temperate ascetics, ones who like St Antony of Egypt (231-356 AD) traveled to the wilds there to meditatively dally, but after decades alone returned to society, at least in the sense of taking many disciples under his care. In other words, there are ascetics whose practice might be more appropriately compared to Thoreau’s sojourn at Walden Pond. Perhaps one might compare tree-stylites like John Muir perched in a storm-tossed Douglas Fir or Julia Butterfly Hill residing in her California Redwood to the ascetic sadhus of India, who, practicing what is called urdhamukhi, dangle out of trees. In the case of Hill, she lasted two years; as for the Muir and the sadhus, the latter who dangle upside-down, their tree dwelling lasted a matter of hours. And so on; one might look for a milder ascetic counterpart for Robinson Jeffers dyspepsia concerning his fellows, preferring you’ll recall, to “sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk”; one for Ed Abbey’s hilarious but curmudgeonly defense of inaccessibility for Arches National Monument in Desert Solitaire; one for Paul Ehrlich’s discomfort in an ancient Indian taxi (“People visiting, arguing and screaming…. defecating and urinating”) prompting his writing of The Population Bomb; counterparts even for the simple-living needed for ecological footprint reduction, for the belt-tightening required by sustainability, and for the meat-eschewing dicta of environmental vegetarianism. In all of these examples there is a whiff of asceticism but none requires the foot ulcerating commitment of standing on a pillar for decades. So why Simeon?