Mr. Grumpy's Sixth and Penultimate Integral Ecology Report

...and so the horrible, protracted brown note of Adornian negativity that is Mr. Grumpy's sad contribution to integral ecology draws to a sickening close. I really truly didn't think it was going to be like this. But I'm afraid I leave this week with reasons why I was a little reluctant to open my copy of Integral Ecology in the first place.

Why am I being so fierce? A little context here: this is the Anthropocene, a geological period marked by the depositing of a thin layer of radioactive materials in Earth's crust in 1945. In this period, humans are fully responsible for what goes down in the biosphere. Not only because humans now exert a direct causal influence on life and sub-life systems such as DNA, but because humans now have the understanding to see how implicated they are, simply because they do understand.

Nothing but the freshest, sharpest, most heavy duty thinking will do as we enter this age. What we very much can't do any more is reproduce the contemporary pervasive attitude of cynical indifference. It's especially egregious to disguise this cynicism as New Age love speak. If the highest form of mystical oneness with Nature is the smooth indifference of a Hallmark card, we are in big, big, big trouble.

The attitude for sale in Integral Ecology is woefully out of date. Despite the authors' assertions, it's a form of postmodernism. This could be done well, and it has been, by David Byrne and Laurie Anderson for instance. There's more usable, more potent ecological awareness in Big Science than there is here.

This book, by contrast, is postmodern pastiche pure and simple, selected from the spirituality section of the bookstore. It just isn't going to work as ecosophical tools we can use, because it's a symptom of the shopaholic consumerism that is very much one big reason why the Polar ice is now melting. We just don't have time for another remix of nature and culture, with or without the AQAL grids and the other charts and lattices and diagrams that make everything so beautifully mapped out.

But just what is being mapped? If all we have at the end is a map of philosophical fast food, then what we have is a map that resembles the food tray on a plane, with the special holes for the salad and the bread.

It's not a matter of picking and mixing from the best of “Nature” ideas and “Culture” ideas. Let me just level with you for a moment. Here is my very, very condensed version of Ecology without Nature for those of you who don't have the time:

The concepts Nature and culture are fucked. Fuck them. It's over. To Mr. Grumpy's ears, messing around with the variously capitalized concepts of Nature, nature, NATURE, culture, premodern, postmodern, indigenous, and whatever sounds like: “Well, if you think about it, a Chicken McNugget is really a small yellow hamburger, and a hamburger is really a large, flat, brown Chicken McNugget. So we can pack them both together in this bun, add the special sauce of suchness, and tuck in.”

The only response that matches this with appropriate vigor is a bloodcurdling scream, but unfortunately we must use words that spell out what we mean, with any luck to put one more stake through the quaking heart of the cynical beast.