Our Natural Home: Should we Domesticise Earth?

Jan 12

With an abounding climate discourse that has come to the fore in the history succeeding the Industrial Revolution, it is an ironic reduction that what the earth and its inhabitants now face has only recently been registered as a climate emergency. Perhaps it is a fair oversight considering that we, as humans living in the twenty-first century, have been forced to evolve into creatures that rely so incessantly on the victuals of the media metropolis. Tagging someone in a scathing meme about Greta Thunberg being a tyrannical eco-warrior because the western culture has decided it funny, or succumbing to the reassurance of the strategically placed political promises of COP27 to distract from some four hundred private jets that landed in Egypt that day, surely sounds more gratifying than tackling a rhetoric centring on the simple fact that we are killing Earth. The home that did not get to choose us, nor we choose it. Our innate home; our natural home.

Such a simple and yet poignant reflection is certainly one that gets squandered in ecological debates whose rhetoric places humans – unsurprisingly – at its core. One need only do a quick internet search for ‘COP27’ to unveil that one of the initiative’s crucial values lies in ‘ensuring humans are at the centre of climate talks.’ The pledge is ostensibly woke, and in its subtext retains a feeling of the human home being eventually saved by an oligarchical rescue team. From an ecocritical perspective, however, the organisation’s embodiment of a contemporary humanity’s last-ditch effort to reverse the damage inflicted by hundreds of years of mass global consumption has fallen at the very first hurdle: decentring anthropocentricism. According to Durham University’s own Timothy Clark, anthropocentricism may be thought of as ‘the almost all-pervading assumption that it is only in relation to humans that anything else has value’; and in many cases, particularly in the developed areas of the western world, that assumption alone is compromised over the selfish needs or desires of the human individual. Employing a linguistic tone of this nature has become a subconscious norm in much eco-activism, and whilst one could argue that any publicity is good publicity for a global crisis defined by its need for action and urgency, its proliferation in general environmental discourse will only further the naive assumption that it is solely a human effort to recover the earthly home in order to retain its purpose to, above all else, provide for our industrial endeavours. In fact, such an approach perhaps fails to recognise Earth merely as home, working instead to implicitly vilify the planet’s reluctance to conform to modern ways of human life.

Some hope, however, could reside in the fact that the human collective has become a media-eating giant, since it means that those few works that manage to slip the anthropocentric net stand a chance at having a profound impact on a culture obsessed with newness. It may be a more convincing argument to suggest that media of this kind makes a conscious effort to go against the grain of much of the current activism, predominantly because it is able to detach itself momentarily from such murky politics. The Guardian’s 2019 changes to its environmental style guide, for example, subtly rages against the infiltration of anthropocentric vocabulary. The article (which can be accessed via the suggested reading at the end of this reflection) pledged six changes in terminology that would come into effect immediately. Perhaps the most striking for its simplicity – after their stark alteration from ‘climate change’ to ‘climate crisis’, of course – was the news outlet’s willingness to recognise something as ostensibly trivial as ‘fish stocks’ as ‘fish populations’. The mere eradication of one word transfers the discussion from one of mercenary motive to one that recognises Earth’s wildlife as an inherent part of the biosphere. Such an example speaks to the likes of John Felstiner’s seminal ecocritical work, Can Poetry Save the Earth. In ‘Images Adequate to our Predicament: Ecology, Environment and Ecopoetics’, Greg Garrard and Susanna Lidström elucidate Felstiner’s proposal of the ecopoem as the:

observation or recognition of the natural world for its own sake, rather than in relation to difficult and complex questions regarding human-environment relations, pertaining for example to issues of justice, governance, or access to resources.

Whilst I would not endorse Felstiner’s insinuation of a total ignorance towards human politics as an entirely suitable mode of protest, the crux of his theory underpins a fundamentally biocentric perspective that has formed the basis for some of the most influential works that have arisen from the current cultural moment. There must be good reason as to why Avatar: The Way of Water, for instance, is quickly rising to one of the top-grossing films at the box office of all time less than a month after its premiere in cinemas. ‘Avatar is the highest-grossing film,’ says Director, James Cameron in a recent interview for The Hollywood Reporter, ‘and it’s a movie that’s asking you to cry for a tree.’ It is an unceremonious summary, indeed, for a film franchise that has proven pioneering for its technological experimentation, and yet it is a reflection that so perfectly encompasses the script’s yearning for a radical reconsideration of the way in which humans have placed their lives in opposition the earth. ‘This is our home’ are the words that are left reverberating the cinema walls and the personal inner conscious after viewing Avatar: Way of the Water.

Considering his esteemed status in the field of literary ecocriticism, it is best to leave this reflection with the words of Timothy Clark, who claims that if we are ready to employ the biocentric values upheld in some of the examples above, we can:

affirm the intrinsic value of all natural life and displace the current preference of even the most trivial human demands over the needs of other species or integrity of place.’

The ‘integrity of place’ – that is, the integrity of Earth – is the key takeaway here. Mother Nature, after all, is dying and will die if her human and nonhuman counterparts do not restore symbiotic balance; so maybe see if you can incorporate ‘fish populations’ into your next ecological discussion…

Our Natural Home: Should we Domesticise Earth?

The epitome of what home is not: Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë