“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris
1 comment:
On first listening, I think I get the answer to the question (How do we know we are thinking at earth magnitude?) I posted about a month ago when you first mentioned the Earth Magnitude thing (I suddenly have Floyd's "Astronomy Dominé" stuck in my head). My initial concern about this concept was that it might just be an upgraded version of "think globally, act locally", which I criticized back in the '90s (to the horror of my fellow Ecological Agriculture students) on the grounds that we are not global beings, but local ones: therefore the idea that we can somehow think on the level of the "globe" is itself a dangerously anthropocentric delusion of the "we are the world" variety. My altered version of the slogan was "think LOCALLY, act locally", meaning "see what you can do with what you've got, and leave everybody else's resources alone" (my peers really hated that). I'm still not entirely convinced this isn't a good idea, by the way. My own apprehension of Dark Ecology still contains some localism, since I'm interested in doing things as well as thinking them, and even if I CAN think at earth magnitude, all effects of any actions I take begin where I am (even if someone can read this comment in Houston, Massachusetts or Iceland).
But I think that what you're saying now is different from "think like a globe" (something I could only do if I was one). Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you're saying that "thought at earth magnitude"--not only the concept of it, but the actual apprehension indeed--always includes the bias of the thinker, anthropoid or otherwise. This would be nice, because it takes forgiving ourselves for our perceptual limitations practically for granted. Yes?
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