Earthlings by Adrian Parr (commencement)

Commencement

WHETHER WE ARE LOOKING AT the creative life force that science dissects, isolates, documents, and demonstrates; the wonderful and miraculous that myth and literature illuminate; or the transitory relay of life, death, and decay that philosophy ponders and property law captures, it is in the endlessly rich return of the living and nonliving, of abundance and emptiness, and in the undoing of reason and selfishness, that planet earth’s disobedience occurs. The earth’s defiant insubordination in the face of human will, pontification, and domination has confounded, surprised, and inspired amateurs, practitioners, and the proficient alike; it is indifferent to what you or I think, feel, conjecture, or calculate. Yet despite the autonomy of the earth as a self-regulating living system, one group of organisms has managed to dramatically transform this wondrous and enchanting living system in just a little over two hundred years—a relatively short blip of time in the earth’s 4.5 billion–year history. The culprit earthling in question? Humans.

The combined activities of many humans stretched across different generations, nations, and creeds have combined to form a singular material force that has come to shape all manner of life on earth. Since the industrial revolution, the pooled efforts of human

labor, leadership, ingenuity, and misguided resourcefulness have consolidated into what many call “global capitalism,” “finance capitalism,” or “neoliberalism.” Without entering into a laborious examination of definitional nuances, the nomenclature simply highlights the manner in which the global economic system that human beings have collectively created, and the subsequent weakening of democratic politics and social inequities that this system has produced, is changing the natural cycles of the earth and placing its entire life support system under stress.1 When we speak of humans fundamentally changing and compromising earth’s lifegiving system, we are referring to the ways in which this collective and cumulative human economic, social, and political system works to capture earth’s primal growth and reproductive systems and redirect them into an unyielding structure of violence and precariousness waged against trillions of unnamed, unspecified, and unheard beings.

Whether we are speaking of the ongoing slashing and burning of the world’s forests; demolition of marine ecologies; erasure of animal habitats; smothering of the earth’s organic surface with concrete, chemicals, and trash; pumping greenhouse gases and a horde of other pollutants into the sky; or radically altering the climate system, Homo sapiens, the species to which all humans belong, are basically running riot throughout the world’s oceans, wilderness zones, ecosystems, and atmosphere. At the rate we are going, the complexity of life on earth will be severely diminished. In the absence of radically changing how human communities live and the priorities used to direct the organization of human societies the world over, which mediate our relationship with other-than-human species, human beings will be responsible for eventually creating an earth that is no longer conducive to sustaining a vast majority of current life on earth—including that of humans themselves. Under these circumstances, the existential question defining the twenty-first century is not whether life on earth will persist but rather in what form it will it exist.

That said, no matter how much human beings change all manner of life on earth, it is inaccurate to emphasize anthropocentric forces of change over ecocentric ones. Indeed, it would be an anthropocentric exaggeration to underestimate earth’s autonomy in this way. The earth is like a single living organism; its life force is spurred on by the interaction of living and nonliving elements that collectively optimize and sustain the conditions for a complex and enriching abundance of life. This life system is unique to the earth, and it persists regardless of how much Homo sapiens alter the way it functions. Life on earth will continue, and even recuperate, in spite of the ecological damage humans have and continue to inflict upon it. Humanity, however, through complete fault of its own, may no longer exist to delight in the bounce back.

It is up to us, as a species, to individually and mutually invoke our ethical sensibilities and to extend our imaginative capacities to rediscover our common place alongside the many species, organisms, cells, and molecules that make up the biomes in which we collectively survive and thrive. This is a call to activate transpeciesist, transgenerational, and transnational thinking, understanding, and practices. A call to a transenvironmentalist undertaking that recognizes and supports the mutual imbrication of the earth’s life-giving systems in human production, policies, politics, and values. It is nothing short of an invitation to resuscitate our humanity and reinvent how we put it to work. 2

Scouting out other worlds within the routine of familiarity not only swells the senses but also affectionately unveils the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) we share with all manner of life, from the plants populating the surface of the planet to the birds and bees taking to the skies in the breeze. The many threads, lineages, and traces that tie you to me, us to the millions of microscopic life forms making up over half of the human body, through to the underwater invertebrates that share the same evolutionary tree as us, are the many filaments vivaciously forming complex layers of extinction, diversification, evolution, and regeneration, spawning

common ancestries and distant cousins traveling back millions of years in time and propelling these forward for hopefully millions more. The breaks, bonds, attachments, additions, and extensions moving from the nanometer to the micro and macro scales make up the rhizomatic threads of life engaging living and nonliving alike. They constitute the many materialities, forces, energies, and chemical reactions of earthly activity that together generate a kaleidoscopic array of earthlings.

In this book, “earthling” denotes biotic systems metabolizing, moving, growing, reproducing, generating waste, and responding to stimulation, as well as the many interactions they have with  abiotic solids, liquids, and gases. Put simply, it is the nonbinary principle of sharing common to the thriving vitality of earthling-being that provides our point of departure into a transenvironmentalist journey across time, through the air, into oceanic waves, to ultimately submerge our “selves” in encounters with other-than-human endeavors. Transenvironmentalism is a process of implication whereby the hierarchical organization of human/nonhuman is unraveled to awaken an ecocentrically situated understanding of life that makes us “part of that nature we seek to understand,” as Karen Barad has so poignantly stated. 3 It also invokes myriad effects that are harnessed to migrate across and through different bodies and generational perspectives, destabilizing the artificial property lines of nation states and the many economic and social boundaries human beings have established and wielded along the way.

Earthlings share functions. They share characteristics and genetic material. They share ancestry extending back 4 billion years to the last universal common ancestor of all cells, a singlecelled bacterium that has gone on to proliferate into the many earthlings that today constitute the complexity and variation endemic to earthling lives.4 Regardless of whether you support a two- or three- domain model for life on earth, the eukaryotes, archaea, and bacteria making up all manner of life do not coexist

independently of each other; they share a context: planet earth.5 It is amidst this state of sharing that a community of earthlings appears.

Earthlings share a planet, and not any old planet. They share a water-saturated planet, the only planet in the solar system that is home to trillions of living beings. It is this singular capacity, or drive, of earthling sharing that lays the foundations for the flourishing for all life on earth. Homo sapiens are just one group of earthlings amongst trillions of others.

We humans share histories, ecological networks, and potentialities with an entire gamut of living entities and systems. And together this mishmash of earthly existence is both remarkable and irrelevant, for the earth and universe are indifferent to earthling action, migration, alteration, agitation, or termination. The distinction between the living and lifeless is not one that changes the order of the universe or the movement of the earth. The earth will rotate on its axis each day, orbiting the sun in an elliptical pattern every 365 days, spiraling slightly away from the sun with each year that passes, regardless of whether or not humans populate the planet. Human beings are not the center of the world’s forests, oceans, prairies, mountains, rivers, lakes, and skies. The earth is not the center of the solar system, nor is the planetary system in which the earth and seven other planets orbit the sun the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The Milky Way, in turn, is just one galaxy amidst billions of others in the universe.

Thinking and imagining across scales in space and time situates us and our earthling neighbors in a much larger context. The journey can be expansive and hypnotic, even as it is sometimes unsettling. Earthlings takes us on a vicarious and sacred voyage through the unfamiliarity latent in familiarity, bringing us up close with those hostile and beautiful moments composing life on earth. Consisting of a series of portraits, the stories at the center of Earthlings explore and play with the sensorial range and affective reach of plants, vertebrates, and invertebrates as these interact

with landforms, settlements, climatic conditions, and oceanic systems. Alternating between fiction, myth, science, anthropology, and philosophical reflection, Earthlings is testament to how the innumerable and nameless lives making up the trillion other-thanhuman species on earth illuminate and magnify our humanity. The labyrinthine machinations of viruses, flora, fauna, animalia, wind, waves, and organismic genetic material mingle and connect in weird and wonderful ways. Ultimately, Earthlings is a saga about providence, prosperity, tenacity, exceptionalism, and injury.

Art and literature invite us to come alive. Medicine and science try to keep us alive. The law tells us how to live. Politics questions how we live. Religion hopes to give us something to live for. Philosophy pursues how living and nothingness work, tempting us to explore what we love most about life. This book is a little of all of these, and hopefully something more.

“A powerful new lens through which to examine our glorious and battered planet.”

—BILL MCKIBBEN, AUTHOR OF THE FLAG, THE CROSS, AND THE STATION WAGON: A GRAYING AMERICAN LOOKS BACK AT HIS SUBURBAN BOYHOOD AND WONDERS WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED

“In a narrative style that combines analytical rigor with lyrical empathy and proximity to her subject matter, Adrian Parr designs a stunning pattern of interaction across entities, elements, ethnicities, generations, and species. Poetic and speculative, engaged and concerned, but polemical and investigative, this book is an ode to the transformative force of the imagination. Parr challenges anthropocentrism while appealing to what is best in humans, namely our shared concern for the future of our—and several trillion other—planetary species.”

—ROSI BRAIDOTTI, DISTINGUISHED UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR, UTRECHT UNIVERSITY, THE NETHERLANDS

“This highly original book on the impending climate catastrophe in the age of the Anthropocene is nothing short of a new bio-ecological philosophy for life. It confronts head-on the need for a new ethics for cohabitation with other life forms on this planet. In doing so, Parr asks profound questions about what it means to be human in the twentyfirst century.”

—BRAD EVANS, AUTHOR OF ECCE HUMANITAS: BEHOLDING THE PAIN OF HUMANITY

ADRIAN PARR is the dean of the College of Design at the University of Oregon and a senior fellow of the Design Futures Council. She has served for nearly a decade as a UNESCO water chair. Her previous Columbia University Press books are The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics (2012) and Birth of a New Earth: The Radical Politics of Environmentalism (2017).

Printed in the U.S.A.

Cover design: Adrian Parr

Cover photographs: CreativeCommons.org

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS | NEW YORK

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