03. Waning Quarter: Ecology is Everything
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Hi friends,
This week I revisited the opening chapter of Aurora Levins Morales's 2019 collection Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals while also reading Jack Manno's 2000 monograph Privileged Goods: Commoditization and Its Impact on Environment and Society. They really go well together.
Medicine Stories’ first section is entitled “The Ground on Which I Stand”, and the chapter is called “Ecology is Everything.” It begins:
We live on a planet that has been changed by the actions of human beings to the point that it may not continue to support our existence. This planet we talk about so much isn’t just a location. It’s a biosphere, a living organism of which we are part, and on which we depend [...]
The ecological crisis we find ourselves in is in fact a crisis of human relations, with each other and with the entire planet. It is a crisis created by a set of false assumptions about reality, the same assumptions that drive all systems of oppression. That greed and domination are the inherent driving forces of human existence and, therefore, that warfare, conquest, enslavement, exploitation, the looting of other people and of the entire ecosystem are natural and inevitable, and therefore must be okay.
“Ecology is Everything” has become part of my own personal Ground on Which I Stand, and I wish everybody would read it. A Canadian person named Karen at one of the XOXOs recommended Privileged Goods to me, and I wouldn't have expected the two books to particularly go together, but rereading Ecology under the influence of Manno is interesting.
Morales attributes our ecological crisis to the greed of the wealthiest minority. Manno digs deeply into the specific economic priorities that have driven this crisis. They do not contradict each other: Morales speaks poignantly of a collective failure of imagination:
It’s heartbreaking that there are so many human beings who cling to the sinking ship of infinite piracy, unable to imagine a society of reciprocity, respect, and mutual care that would meet the needs of all, including them. They would rather accelerate their looting, hoping to amass as much wealth as possible before the ship founders, even though that ship is our entire world and no amount of ownership will keep them from drowning.
while Manno talks about the long-term economic priorities that have limited our collective societal imagination: privileging things that can be owned and sold and shipped, and devaluing anything that can't be owned, transported, concretized. We are unable to imagine a society of reciprocity and mutual care because our existence has been structured around the worthlessness of care work, and a dependence on commodities to address all of our needs. In chapter 2, Manno enumerates the “privileged qualities” that differentiate “high commoditization potential” goods from ”low commoditization potential” services. His running examples are:
- the differences between air filtration devices, and measures to reduce emissions that cause air pollution
- the differences between mass-produced toys for children, and simply playing with children
The privileged qualities of commodities, then, are:
- Ability to assign and protect property rights: can it be sold to individual parties? An air filtration system can be sold; reducing air pollution benefits everyone whether they buy it or not.
- Degree of mobility and transportability: an air filter can be shipped and moved around; clean air is localized.
- Degree of universality or particularity: the ability of a good or service to serve the same function wherever it goes, vs. requiring context-dependent adaptation or customization Manno notes that (even as of his writing in 2000) it is increasingly possible to customize commodities for culturally and individually-specific variations — which, he says, increases the commoditization of those very differences.
- Product vs system: “Without the pressures of commoditization, solutions to [...] meet the needs of individuals and society would be designed to satisfy [...] the need with the least amount of time, materials, and energy cost, and social and environmental disruption... These systems would consist of products, but also need-reduction strategies, energy and material efficiency, and systems of mutual aid and cooperation. Commoditization results in society consistently privileging product development over other components of a systematic approach to problem solving.”
Okay, there are too many, and too rich, to put them all here. But one more I wanted to emphasize:
- Embodied knowledge vs. user knowledge. Here the comparison is between a CD player and a guitar: “All the knowledge the user needs to produce music is embedded in the CD player and disk when it is purchased. The user brings nothing to it by way of skill. CD players and CDs, by this criterion, have greater commodity potential than do guitars, which require considerable value added in terms of knowledge for use.” Similarly for pesticides vs. alternative pest-management strategies, which require observation and skill from the farmer. “The more the user must bring to the product in terms of attention and skill, the lower the commodity potential of the product.”
The point is not that commodities are inherently bad, or that people who buy or sell them are all greed-mad pirates, or that people should learn to play instruments if they want to hear mosic. The point is that the values of commoditization have become the predominating and structuring principles of our lives — give me convenience or give me death — and this is deeply connected with the devaluing of care work like teaching, child care, elder care, housework etc. etc. etc., at the same time that these values are directly responsible for the climate crisis. Meanwhile, none of the world's top industries would be profitable if they paid for the ‘natural capital’ they use
As it happens, Aurora Levins Morales is turning 70 this month. For the third time I will encourage you to read Ecology is Everything and the rest of Medicine Stories. If you don't know Aurora Levins Morales, her bio begins by identifying her as “a cuir Ashkenazi Boricua writer of poetry, essays, and fiction” and her October 2023 poem Summons begins:
Last night I dreamed
ten thousand grandmothers
from the twelve hundred corners of the earth
walked out into the gap
one breath deep
between the bullet and the flesh
between the bomb and the family.They told me we cannot wait for governments.
There are no peacekeepers boarding planes.
There are no leaders who dare to say
every life is precious, so it will have to be us...
For her birthday, Aurora's friends and supporters are trying to get her Patreon donations to a level that will meet her living expenses:
Like many artist-elders of color, Aurora has no salary, institutional support, health benefits, or retirement to lean on. And, as a disabled and chronically ill elder she has urgent medical expenses. Aurora has contributed decades of unpaid work to social justice movements and we, her community, are her social security. https://www.patreon.com/auroralevinsmorales
Since I have been belt-tightening in my unemployment, I have had to pause my own Patreon support of Aurora, but I have been a supporter there for years. Aurora's essays articulate things that I never realized I have always believed, and they make concrete many kinds of interconnection/interdependence that I really thought were just metaphorical. My own birthday is this month, too, and last year I was actually thinking about asking people to Patreonize Aurora as a birthday present for me. It doesn't have to be Patreon: other ways to support Aurora include direct donation, librarying or buying her books — including preordering her next book Rimonim: Ritual Poetry of Jewish Liberation.
Other readings
Finding creativity in adverse circumstances
I listened to Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder. It's a wild fairytale-vibe story about a frustrated artist-turned-stay-at-home-mother who becomes a dog and her life gets a lot better. I heard of it pretty randomly but now I know that Amy Adams is making a movie adaptation of it, which explains the long waitlist for it at the library. A while back I described a different book to somebody as “like a non-horny Murakami” and Nightbitch has some Murakami-ish shades of ”weird stuff happens, but everything is fine, and the protagonist’s partner is mysteriously steadfast in support.”
More against common sense
In the past year I also heard the Nightbitch audiobook's reader, Cassandra Campbell, reading Lisa Feldman Barrett's How Emotions Are Made. Barrett's research on the neuroscience of emotion sweeps away a whole bunch of the popular commonsense understanding of how the brain works, and replaces it with something much more generative:
The theory of constructed emotion dispenses with fingerprints not only in the body but also in the brain. It avoids questions that imply a neural fingerprint exists, like “Where are the neurons that trigger fear?” The word “where” has a built-in assumption that a particular set of neurons activates every time you and everyone else on the planet feel afraid. In the theory of constructed emotion, a category of emotion such as sadness, fear, or anger has no distinct brain location, and each instance of emotion is a whole-brain state to be studied and understood. Therefore we ask how, not where, emotions are made.
Of note
- You've heard of the Trolley problem: the philosophical thought-experiment about the right action to take if a runaway train is on track to hit five people, but you could switch it to a track where it will hit only one person. Apparently rail workers have known the “solution” all along: you throw the switch in the middle, after the front wheels have passed the junction point, and the train safely derails.
As a response to a Gedankenexperiment, I appreciate how this flags many other important things there are to gedanken about:
- the embodied expertise of workers who actually engage in the labor process we're asking people to guess about
- rejecting the technological inevitability that commodity mindset inculcates
- plus, the sheer joy of rejecting any strictly dualistic proposition
Nightshade is a software utility that "poisons" pictures to make them useless for generative image models:
so that models training on them without consent will [...] learn unpredictable behaviors that deviate from expected norms, e.g. a prompt that asks for an image of a cow flying in space might instead get an image of a handbag floating in space.
...It does not rely on the kindness of model trainers, but instead associates a small incremental price on each piece of data scraped and trained without authorization. Nightshade's goal is not to break models, but to increase the cost of training on unlicensed data, such that licensing images from their creators becomes a viable alternative.
It is developed by the same UChicago team that is developing Glaze, which does a similar trick of changing the visual style of pictures, so that people can see the "real" style, but software sees something different.
That's all for today. I feel like I'm starting to get the hang of this!
Next quarter moon: February 16th, 7:00AM Pacific.
Love,
Orión