Repairing indifference

Rebuilding cultural relationships of love with the land again

“Love has never been a popular movement.”

— James Baldwin

Notes:

1. I use ‘the land’ and ‘the Earth’ interchangeably.

2. The ‘we’ I refer to is predominantly those of us in modernized Global North societies — which isn’t to say these things couldn’t or don’t apply to other ‘we’s’ elsewhere.

The late Barry Lopez said in an interview that the mature relationship with nature is love. He said that the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. Modern culture is not a culture founded on love for the Earth. The imperative this presents us with is that of culturally repairing indifference, learning to practice love again, and finding ways to socially re-enshrine such practices. Practicing love for the Earth is a moral necessity, and one not widely recognised or accepted for its fullest implications. This is likely because such practices would require a near total social and cultural reconfiguration to sufficiently enact. Or, even when this necessity is recognised, excuses are often made (including and especially by those well-intentioned) that effectively re-entrench in the systems of ecocide which structurally require the continuation and reproduction of mass indifference in order to successfully function.

Indifference is foundational to modern culture’s relationship with Earth. To most of us in modern societies there is no evident reason to practice love for the Earth, as we continue to inhabit, reproduce, and benefit from a social order subsidised by violence against the Earth. After all, the very basis of modern society that we derive our enjoyments, comforts, dreams, and desires from is built upon indifference to the continual annihilatory violences necessary to produce that society. Loving the Earth is so culturally alien to us that we might wonder what such a practice could give us that we don’t already have or can’t get from human society. Most of us likely even struggle to ‘hear’ the idea: modernized ears understand ‘loving nature’ as one might love any other object: a car or a favourite tea mug. Neither am I talking about mere affection for or enjoyment derived from ‘the outdoors’ or birds singing in your garden here.

We take it for granted that the land will continue to provide everything we want while it is continually depleted and destroyed. It’s imagined that we can ‘solve’ ecological breakdown while continuing to maintain the status quo of industrial violence against the Earth which underpins modernity. These ‘solutions’ commonly involve merely enclosing small pockets of life for ‘conservation’, or changing the ways in which we consume, or supplementing the industrial technologies deployed for ecocide with different industrial technologies somehow believed to be ‘green’, among a list of other false solutions and avoidance strategies. It is even imagined that we could establish revolutionary new social and economic orders which at their foundations do not alter the violent relational landscapes inherent to modern ways of knowing and being, and somehow that will have ‘fixed’ our problems. It’s not possible to compartmentalise love in this way. We can’t keep the products of modern civilization’s war against life and also practice love for the Earth. There can simply be no ‘sacrifice zones’. We can’t have our cake and eat it too. So where do we go from there?

I suspect the crisis of indifference we face is not so easily ‘fixed’. At its root it is ontological: it exists at the level of our way of being in the world and with each other. We remain indifferent because the practice of love is so far outside our understandings and experiences of reality and how we exist in the world. To put it another way, this isn’t something that can be ‘solved’ via the usual pathways for dealing with problems in modern society. It is a meta-problem created by modernity for which there are no modern solutions.

‘Fixing’ this crisis isn’t just a matter of doing a few things a bit differently, or ushering in some new technological shifts. The rot we face runs millennia deep, and has been exported globally through colonialism. We can’t just point fingers at someone else, or at something else, and hope that things will change. Although the rot is structural, cultural, social, civilizational — we each reflect and manifest those things in our ways of relating and our own selves. Culture exists in the living flesh of our bodies. It starts, stops, and changes with us. Our cultural indifference pervades our spirits as a sickness that is altering the very aliveness of the world.

Yes — those most profoundly benefiting from and reproducing the violent, hierarchical power structures of global coloniality/modernity need to be ripped from their thrones — but if this were to happen tomorrow, and we, the sick, were to replace them, we would still be left with the fundamental underlying issues that give rise to the kinds of destruction and disintegration that currently plague Earth.

Most of us cannot imagine (and it seems don’t want to at this juncture) that there even can be other ways of organising society, though the past and present abound with examples. The story of ‘progress’ tells us the present is innately better or more ‘advanced’ than the past, so it is commonly imagined that whatever follows, whatever solution-making is conducted now, must build in a linear ‘progressive’ way on top of what exists currently without any fundamental changes to the way of being underpinning modern/colonial civilization. But this civilization is unravelling at an increasing pace under the weight of its inherent contradictions, and we have no idea when large-scale catastrophes like COVID-19 will strike. Climate ‘tipping points’ and forecasts and so on are consistently proving to be unreliable, with significant changes sometimes coming decades ahead of predictions. It seems the Earth is too large, complex, and interconnected to be able to quantify and accurately predict in this way. The only thing we can take for granted that business-as-usual is ‘progressing’ towards is the destruction of life on Earth as we know it. We’re already amidst the sixth ever mass extinction in Earth’s 4.5 billion year lifespan. Modernity and its industrial civilization mark a regression in our capacity to be fully alive as human animals. Rebuilding relationships of love with the land has the potential to give us the most vital thing we need at this grievous time: an out.

To modernized ears the ‘idea’ of ‘loving nature’ might even sound immature. The drudgery of modern, capitalist life is unendingly exhausting. Keeping the head down while dealing with that drudgery is the realm of serious, adult matters: so we’re led to believe. And yet, loving the land is the only way out. Maintaining our one-way extractive relationship with nature is what’s immature. What I’m suggesting is a starting point, not a prescription: how to love is the complex, ever-changing, and context-specific process that we in modern societies are moving in the opposite direction of. A more ‘serious’ leftist might say that loving the land is a depoliticised or even un-politicisable notion. “You can’t organise around that”, they might say. But nothing is more political than our cultural crisis of indifference that is precipitating catastrophic social and ecological breakdowns. We better start considering how we can and should organise around it, because nothing is more gravely serious. Without the moral grounding of uncompromising love for the land our political imaginaries will remain confined by modernity’s horizons and we will enact solutions to the mounting crises that are no solutions at all.

A question we need to ask ourselves when decision-, process-, or solution-making is “does this harm the land in any way?” Some harm is inevitable. We harm just by existing and being in the world. But manipulating the entire biosphere and bending it to meet our immature, selfish, and short-sighted ends is on a different plane to that. For example, if posed with the question of whether wind energy is a viable solution to ecological breakdown, the answer should be quite simple when passed through this ‘filtering’ question. A solution that continues, or even expands, our violent cultural relationship with Earth is no solution at all. And, that deficit-based question isn’t enough, we need to be asking: “how do we best love the land at this grievous time, in this specific place?”

Only it will not be possible to effectively reinstate practices of love for the Earth within the ways society is currently organised while the state — as the foremost institution of ecocide and colonial violence — continues to exist, dominate life, and enjoy legitimacy and assumptions of benevolence in society at large. More on that topic to come.

---

I write this essay as someone who has at times been unloving and indifferent, who has at times acted selfishly, and who is learning how to practice love. I thought I knew what love was, but I didn’t, and had little idea how to practice it. It’s entirely possible to get stuck theorising about things, even grasping things on an intellectual level, but having no idea how to practice them, take responsibility for them, and connect with one’s power to act. That’s always a danger in writing or reading an essay like this. Within modernity, we constantly reduce being to knowing.

I don’t have this figured out. I don’t have the answers. What I sense is that we need to offer ourselves in service before the Earth at this perilous time with total humility, and grace, and listen for what guidance we might receive. The mess we’re in is deeper than any one of us can really fathom. Nobody has the answers because nobody has faced a cataclysm like this before — but the land is ancient and has faced many cataclysmic events. We need to relinquish the long-standing illusion that we can control the fate of all Earthly life to our own ends, be those exploitative or imagined as egalitarian. We need to de-elevate ourselves from the deified position we’ve put ourselves in and learn again to recognise the gods in the woods, on the wind, and under the waves. This begins with love.

Check out my self-paced online course ‘Decolonization in Ireland’