Inhabiting earth
(the earth inhabits us)
Keynote, Felwine Sarr
Souza, January 2023
Social, economic and environmental unbinding is one of the major challenges of the contemporary world. An instrumental relationship with ” nature “, inherited from the mechanistic cosmology of Western modernity, has led us to overexploit the resources of the biotope and endanger the conditions for the reproduction of life on earth. This fact, predominant in one part of the world, has its roots in a representation of the centrality of our humanity in the order of living things, in a cosmology of separation and in the transformation of the rest of living things into objects subject to our exclusive purposes.
We all know what’s at stake. Sustaining life, not irretrievably compromising the conditions under which the earth is habitable. Repairing the link with the living whole (of which we are an emanation and a component), which our technically driven civilisation has severely damaged.
For a long time we have been busy building the human community. It has been a long struggle to make life sustainable, to pass it on, to overcome the hostility of our ecologies ; to survive in it, to harvest resources from it, to protect ourselves from our predators, freezing winters and sweltering summers to migrate when we exhausted the sustenance of an ecological niche.
From this old memory, we have retained an uneasy relationship to survival and the means of subsistence. When technology allowed, we set about dominating our world, the land around us from which we came, sometimes (often) even the humans who lived there and whom we had equated with “nature “.
Our religious texts made animals, plants, non-humans and all living things into beings /things in the exclusive service of our self-fulfilment. We placed ourselves on a pedestal: the measure of all things, the Alpha and Omega of the cosmos, the awakened conscience of the universe, the only beings capable of language, interiority and sensitivity. We gave ourselves the mission of being vicars and ordinators. Our arts, our letters, the discourses that structure our imaginations and indicate the place we have granted ourselves within the universe, intoned this song.
We built cities and constructed the world. Then came the crisis. The daughter of our hubris. Economic, ecological, social, environmental, spiritual. A climate that’s out of kilter, a planet that’s inexorably warming up, a world economy and lifestyles that are accelerating the entropy of living things. A civilisation that is decivilising and endangering the sustainability of life and the conditions for its reproduction.
In a previous reflection, in an essay on relational politics, I wondered how to inhabit the world by establishing better quality relationships within it. With the idea that real progress lies in a civilisation’s ability to produce quality relationships between its various components. The mistake was perhaps to think of these issues solely in terms of the space of the world, which is our creation; we built it with its cities, its objects and its artefacts.
The civilisational crisis we are experiencing, which is forcing us to rethink our relationship with life, death and the earth, is a crisis in the way we inhabit our primary ecological home, which is the earth.
First of all, as Pierre Madelin and Val Plumwood assert it’s about getting out of the denial of belonging to the earth that leads us to wish to eradicate nature’s otherness by subjecting it to our will. Geneviève Azam invites us to consider ” that living things and species, those that exist outside human ingenuity (…) are a gift that we inherit “. A gift that commits us. To receive this gift,” says Pierre Madelin, “is to assume the physical and sensitive reality of the world. To recognise the otherness of natural things, their given character, he points out, for the individual is to recognise the other-than-human foundations of his being, and only in this way can he inhabit the earth without destroying it.
To recognize, then, the other-than-human foundations of our being in the world, their necessity, and to draw all the implications from them.
Aldo Leopold reminds us that our vocation is not to master and dominate the living world, but to recognise that ” we are fellow travellers with other species in the odyssey of evolution. We are full members of the biotic community”. The challenge, then, is to put into perspective an excessive anthropocentrism on the one hand, and an ecocentrism that would tend to deny the uniqueness of humans on the other. It is certainly impossible to avoid any instrumental relationship with nature, but it is possible to admit the irreducible, unavailable part of the earth as well as its agentivity.
The point here for us, better than thinking about how to inhabit the world, is to think about how to once again inhabit the earth and make community with its inhabitants (the all-living).
This inhabiting the earth faces an ontological challenge that we will now examine.
The ontological challenge and the question of meaning
As for our ontological challenge, it has to do with the desire of (some) humans to extricate themselves from the natural conditions of human life. The temptation to create and recreate ourselves, and to transcend the limits of our biological condition, is becoming increasingly pressing in the most technologically advanced part of the world. In short, a desire to mutate the species, towards a hybrid humanity, a biologic-technical assembly as the support and place from which we experience life from now on: a Human-Machine as the embodied form of an augmented humanity. Technology is thus transformed from a tool for mediating between matter and spirit into an eschatology. This accompanying the project of artificialising life, as well as the desire to extricate itself from its natural (biological) conditions and operate an ontological mutation.
This project of a technological eschatology (human-augmented, transhumanism) draws potential new meanings of what it is to be human and alive. The old dreams of immortality and human omnipotence, as well as the dream of escaping from our vulnerable condition, are echoed here. By integrating prostheses into their bodies and tissues, this augmented human would free themselves from the constraints of the limits of the body and the brain. The possibilities of extending the body, of decorporation, with the broadening of the body’s faculties of perception, will mean that the body is no longer the sole seat of consciousness. The virtual thus becomes one of the possible supports of existence and its unfolding. For the proponents of the mutation of the human species, it is a question of deconditioning the human condition, by increasing and broadening our faculties of action, perception and knowledge.
This new configuration offers significant possibilities to restorative and regenerative medicine and is considered by proponents of transhumanism as a qualitative evolutionary leap.
A new way of being alive would now involve challenging our umbilical link with the rest of living things, by producing negentropy with the artificial.
Hannah Arendt, in distinguishing between work and the work, is already analysing this human propensity to produce something that exceeds the need to feed oneself and maintain the vital process (through work). Work is the activity that corresponds to the non-natural nature of human existence, and that enables us to produce an artificial world of objects in which humans live. This world is destined to outlive us and outlast each individual life. To make the world (and/or the earth) habitable, we would be obliged in some way to artificialise it and denaturalise its conditions. Is this process of artificialising the conditions of life a matter of necessity, or is it the expression of an existential and identity crisis that we are going through? Should we preserve the living world as it has given itself to us, or accelerate its mutations and thus pave the way for a new post-modern human condition? More than who we are, the question arises of who we want to become as a species.
The enterprise of modifying living things, of genetically altering their organisms, including attempts on the human genome, come under this desire to decondition the human condition. However, this desire to extricate ourselves from the natural (biological) conditions of human life comes up against an impossibility. We are extremely dependent on our biotope for our survival. The project to artificialise the conditions of life is currently unable to provide us with the resources necessary for our life on earth.
Today, our consumption exceeds available resources by 70% and we need 1.7 planets to cover our needs. Since the 1970s, the ecological footprint has exceeded the planet’s biocapacity for the current year every year.
In a reflection on how to live a good life in a bad life, Judith Butler points out that we cannot consider human bodies without evoking the environments, the machines, the complex systems of social interdependence on which they rest and the whole of which form the conditions of possibility for their existence and survival. Satisfying the requirements that enable the body to survive is a prerequisite for life, but to be liveable, life must be much more than survival. It is a question of going beyond the question of the survival of bodies and its fundamental requirements and looking at the capacity to lead a good life. This concern is in line with those of Amartya Sen and Martha Nusbaum in their thinking on capabilities and the possibility of leading a life that one has chosen and whose meaning and scale of values one has determined.
So thinking about a livable life is not simply a matter of positing an ideal of a good life, but of drawing the consequences from the fact that our existence depends on support systems that are both human and non-human. We live within social organisations of life and biopolitical regimes that dispose of our lives. We cannot subsist without biological worlds and these social forms of life (human-nonhuman assemblages).
The complex relations that constitute bodily life must lead us to move beyond thinking about the human ideal to attending to the complex set of relations without which we do not exist (Donna Haraway). My own life (my social life) is more extensive, because it is articulated to those of other living beings. To lead a good life is also to think of our anthropology and ontologies as relational.
There is therefore an urgent need to rethink the ethical and philosophical foundations, as well as the imaginaries, of our relationship with living things. We need to understand and acknowledge the fact that our condition (as living humans) is consubstantially linked to that of living things and the interactions we have with them. To do this, we need to put ourselves back at the heart of living things and move away from a logic of devastation. We need to cooperate with existing communities by establishing mutual relationships with them, based on reciprocity, care and repair. Caring for and repairing the living is necessary for us because through this gesture we self-repair and self-preserve.
Bottom line, it’s not about inhabiting the earth, or even inhabiting the earth better. This formulation still attests to a relationship of exteriority, but of recognising that the earth inhabits us, that we are the earth, we are its children and fruit, just as mushrooms are.
It’s about collectively freeing ourselves from the myth of our self-sufficiency as well as the fantasy of our capacity for self-creation. It’s about freeing ourselves from the desire to get out of the relationship of debt and dependence that life imposes on us. The arts and myths have widely explored the limits of this delusion of power and desire for absolute autonomy.
For a new ecology of links
Meeting the challenges posed by our technoscientific civilisation, (unbinding, climate disruption, ongoing ecocide, risk of futuricide) requires us to reinvent the cosmologies and cosmovisions that underpin and structure our relationship with living things, our place within this order, the relationships we have with its various modalities. This leads us to envisage ontologies of connection and cosmologies that produce forms of life that preserve the balance of the living, the quality of social cooperation and that of the connections that enrich it.
In Africa, Latin America, the Amazon, Oceania and pre-modern Europe, human groups are heirs to cosmologies and cosmovisions that established relationships between humans and non-humans based on the unity of the living. These cosmologies establish a continuum between the existent and make no clear distinction between humans, plants and animals. Moreover, reflexive consciousness, intentionality, sociality and emotional life are not unique to humans. Collectives of existing animals, plants and humans share the attributes of mortality, social life, reciprocity and knowledge. Interactions with communities of living beings are certainly conceived under the sign of utility and necessity, but also under the sign of affinity, cooperation and interdependence. Because of the metamorphosis capacity of living things, the boundaries between existing collectives are porous, as are their ontological categorisations. In Ewe/Yanomami cosmology, for example, animality and its discontinuities emerge from an original humanity that has condensed the attributes of both orders. Also, humans do not come from an earlier animality of which they would constitute the summit (Bruce Albert, Davi Kopenawa).
This is the opposite of modern, Western naturalistic evolutionism. Humans humbly constitute only one of the many existing peoples who inhabit the vast world of the earth-forest and form each other’s cosmopolitan and interlocutory landscape. In these cosmovisions, there is no denial of co-humanity. The hierarchies of living things postulated by Western mechanistic cosmology are overturned, implying other relationalities. These cosmologies also postulate a link of continuity between individual and social bodies and ecosystems, which implies that damage to the environment affects social links and vice versa. The issues of social, political and environmental ties therefore need to be considered together. These cosmologies are important imaginary, symbolic and political resources for thinking about a new relational ontology.
Souza: A link factory
We came here to Grand Souza a few years ago, following Marème Malong’s invitation to experiment on this territory and make practical, the reflections we were conducting at the Ateliers de la pensée in Dakar on the Planetary condition and the politics of living. Séverine Kodjo-Grandvaux put together a multidisciplinary team of researchers and artists, and we set about mapping the Souza territory first and foremost. The aim was first and foremost to learn about the area. I can even say that it is a counter-cartography. Its aim was not to grid the territory, to grasp its topography in order to control it better ; but to listen to it, to learn from it, before claiming to experiment with a new relationship to the economy, ecology, knowledge and the territory.
.Also, we were interested in its geohistory, the successive population movements that made it up, its imaginaries, its modes of economic production, its children’s games, its pallinotheque and anthotèque, its therapeutic and culinary heritage, its birdsong, its rumour and its sky that rumbles during the rainy season.
We thus learnt that Grand Souza, located 40 km from Douala in the commune of Bonaléa, is inhabited by around 70,000 souls. Women make up 52% of the population and men 48%. Historically, the commune was populated by the Banko, Bassa and Bamiléké peoples. In recent years, it has had to accommodate English-speaking populations from the North-West and South-West regions of the country. Agricultural activities are important here, but they are not the only ones. Over time, the expansion of Douala, Cameroon’s economic capital, has spawned new agro-industry-related activities (palm oil production, flour mills, etc.).
First of all, in our desire to experiment with a living and well-being economy there, we had to recognise the otherness of the territory and learn from it. To start from its primary ecology. Here, as elsewhere on the African continent, there is no divorce from the earth, no denial of our co-humanity with the living world. In everyday practices and in the memory of societies, inexhaustible archives enable us to re-articulate a more harmonious relationship with our ecology. The richness of these relationships to the world and these primal ecologies is brilliantly restored in the works of Gaston Paul Effa, (Le Dieu perdu dans l’herbe) of Sami Tchak (les fables du moineau), De Werewere Linking, De Wangari Maathai, in the painting and poems of Hervé Yamguen…
This is how Souza has become for us a place of learning, reflection, experimentation ; an active, working utopia and a factory of nurturing links. An (organic) agricultural farm set up by Marème and Alain Malong; a writing workshop run by Hemley Boum; a cartography workshop run by Parfait Akana, SKG, Muhammad Ba and Cheikh Ba, who provide rigorous supervision of the doctoral students (Astrid, Noëlla, Titti Pierre); a convivial refuge irrigated by the energy of William Mpah Dooh, Mohamed Cissé, Jeanne Tine, Chef Christian, Marème and Alain ; as well as all those who work to make this place a haven of peace (for the mind and soul) ; not forgetting the mango trees in the courtyard and the weaver-musicians who nest there.
It is in this Fabrick of links that during this week we will question our relationship to territories, ecology, the earth, the all-living, the economy, the greater community, well-being, imaginations. That we will share experiences, that we will mix sensitive reason and quest for intelligibility that we will build by trial and error, but in a certain joy, that of doing and thinking in community and in connection.
It seems to me that the most urgent relationship to re-articulate with our ecology concerns the economic gesture. The modern economy is mainly extractive and accelerates the entropy of living things. It is an economy whose metabolism has a negative impact on the biosphere, but which is also experiencing a crisis of purpose (the majority of humans on this planet are unable to satisfy their needs with dignity in this economy). We need to rethink its axiological foundations and its practices.
The urgent need is to promote an economy whose action is negentropic and whose rhythms of production match the rhythms of regeneration of the biotope. An economy of the living, relational, re-embedded in socio-cultures and whose metabolism positively affects social, environmental and relational orders. A non-anthropocentric economy, which is no longer content merely to attempt to meet the needs of human communities, but which develops a symbiotic relationship (i.e. of mutual growth) between natural ecosystems and human activity.
Such economic practices already exist in several parts of the world and are different from those promoted by the dominant economy (agroecology, circuit-court, degrowth, territorial economy, …) ; but they do not form a system. The idea, however, is not to replace one sprawling model with another ; but to allow for a plurality of relationships to the economy, a plurality of economicities. To a low frequency, homogenising culture, substitute a high frequency culture within which plural economicities cohabit and exchange.
To conclude,
The question of the durability of life is as important as that of the purposes we assign to it. Being alive also means constructing meaning. What would we have done with vitality increased and preserved? To what end? Rather than a teleology, we need to build teleonomies[1] that embed the adventure of living beings in chosen meanings. What might these mean? Life is never exhausted by the categories we apply to it, or the fatalities to which we assign it. It is and remains an inexhaustible source of possibilities. The long history of living things tells this story, and it can be seen as an infinite source of potential. We only experience one particular mode of life, the fabric of which is more diversified. Remaining alive by enriching it with meaning. But life is neither inexhaustible nor self-sufficient. Approach it with the ethics of the traveller who stops off in a caravanserai and that of the host who makes the dwelling more habitable than he found it.
To carry vitality to its fullest, to sow the seeds of life, to share life, to make it grow, to disseminate it, to nourish it, to burn out and disappear, to leave the scene having always given more than you have received.
[1] Teleonomy, a concept derived from biology, is about the construction of meaning by societies. Purpose is not given a priori as in teleology.