The Ecology of Everyday Life

"Optimism is a political act." Alex Steffen of Worldchanging.com (in The Sun, April 2010)

I've been talking and thinking for some time about what I call the ecology of everyday life. People who hear this phrase often wonder what I mean. In some ways, my ecology of everyday life chimes with what Chaia Heller advocates in her book of the same name, Ecology of Everyday Life: Rethinking the Desire for Nature (1999). Heller suggests that the environmentalist movement since the 70s has been driven not just - and perhaps not even principally - by the desire for social justice, but by the desire for a new way of living everyday life, especially with regard to our relationships with "nature". In other ways, I'm also riffing on David Abram's excellent book, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (1996), which emphasizes the role of the shaman or sorceror in articulating human communities' relationships with "nature". And in another way, as my scare quotes on "nature" suggest, I'm also thinking of a different kind of ecology, a technecology that does away with the very distinctions that the word "nature" implies, that is, the distinction between culture and nature or between humans and nature. For me, this way of thinking starts in Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" (1985) and continues throughout her work, in the work of other science studies scholars - people like Karen Barad and Bruno Latour - and in the writings of assorted science-fictional oddballs like Marshall McLuhan, Manuel Delanda, and Gwyneth Jones. The cyborg insight I'm evoking here brings together deep ecology - with its Luddite yearnings for a mythical primitive state - with deep technology, that is, with the recognition that the best widgets function with and not against the flow of a livable world. This way of thinking allies me with pro-technology greens like Bruce Sterling and Alex Steffen ((c.f. the Viridian design movement and Worldchanging.com). As the Love & Rockets song "No New Tale to Tell" puts it: "You cannot go against Nature / Because when you do / Go against Nature / It's part of Nature too." I personally prefer to abandon the very notion of nature as some enfolding all-encompassing and often feminized figure from which humans are somehow separate and turn instead to discussing relations between all the various critters and widgets that make up this incredible ensemble I've codenamed the "world". The ecology of everyday life, then, articulates for me a desire to bring ecological thinking - a way of thinking that always references vast networks of often invisible relations between different ways of being in the world - to bear on whatever and whoever we personally come into contact with in our day-to-day lives, including not only other critters - humans and other animals, plants, microbes, and all the beautiful mutants that don't fit these categories - but also other things, that is, tools, trinkets, materials and machines. What does this look like? I don't know, except that it definitely entails a heightened attention to the texture and tenor of everyday experience, an attention oriented towards feeling a sense of wonder in the complex webs that we are woven into, a sense which fuels the political act Steffen calls "optimism". This optimism is not naive, nor is it an excuse not to act. The optimism inherent, I think, in any ecology of everyday life actually calls on us to experiment with new and better ways of being in the world. This might mean really listening and getting someone's point of view - giving up resisting it - which (from personal experience) can fundamentally change a friendship, marriage, or any relationship. It might mean spending some time with the critters you see outside your window - climbing a tree, spending your work break staring into the heart of a flower or listening to insects rustling in the grass - and getting curious about how they live. Or it might mean turning that curiosity to the foods you eat and the drinks you drink, tracing both where this stuff comes from, how it's made, and where it's going when you're done with it. Turning the focus away from far off scenarios - the classic material of the environmental activist - and turning it to our everyday lives is I think the best if not the only way to turn our ecological crisis around. And the point is of course and always not to look for more and more ways that we humans are not part of the world - the classic pastime of humanist philosophies and religions in the Western world - but instead to look for all those ways that we are totally one with, totally implicated in, totally invested in this world right here and now. Amen.