John Linstrom talks about the ecosphere, a way of understanding the world deriving principally from the work of ecologist and philosopher Stan Rowe. We also refer briefly to James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, crown shyness in trees, Aldo Leopold’s idea of a ‘land community’, Wendell Berry’s The Way of Ignorance and knowledge humility.
John Linstrom is a 7th year Ph.D. Candidate at the Department of English, New York University., and series editor of The Liberty Hyde Bailey Library for the Comstock Publishing Associates imprint of Cornell University Press.
The image for this episode is that of red-blue-and-green sea anemones.
TRANSCRIPT
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
ecosphere, organisms, life, humility, ecologist, called, talking, earth, people, john, question, humans, idea, properties, ecosystems, thinking, knowledge, bailey, policy, book
Saronik
So today we are talking to John Lindstrom about ecosphere. And John is one of my oldest friends here in New York, so it’s great to have you John on the show. as is our custom, I’m going to first ask you to introduce yourself and your work.
John
I’m John and famous friends with Sharonik Bosu. And I’m in my seventh year of the PhD at NYU in English and American Literature and becoming a Museum Education Fellow at the Museum of the City of New York and I study a number of American authors during the Progressive Era and think about questions of environment and land work.
Saronik
Not very recently, but recently, you have a book out, so please talk to us about the book.
John
True. So one of my authors who I’m really interested in and have been for a while, is Liberty Hyde Bailey, and a friend and I recently co-edited an anthology of Bailey’s garden writings called the Liberty Hyde Bailey gardeners companion, which I highly recommend to everyone.
Saronik
Yes, so you’re listening to the show, please go buy John’s book. And also, I mean, as a direct manifestation of the studies that he has done for the book, John has been growing beans and other sundry crops in his apartment.
John
Oh, man. Yeah, the bean babies… They were not super successful. But we’ve had much better success, surprisingly, with tomatoes, Rutgers tomatoes, which are big beefsteak guys, and we’ve growing them in our living room window. So it’s possible. We’ve got some basil and trying to grow some hot peppers, but they’re being quite shy. But yeah, Bailey’s writings really kind of inspired a lot of that activity, I think.
Saronik
Today we are talking about really, really big questions. John will tell us what the meaning of life is, if I’m understanding it correctly. John, what the heck is an ecosphere? The Ecosphere?
John
Yeah, well, so my understanding of it is that we probably say “the ecosphere” just because we don’t know any others. And I’ll, I’ll get to that. But yeah, so what the heck is the ecosphere? I guess it’s this term, and it hasn’t been widely picked up, although there’s interesting work that’s being done right now. It’s really lovely little article called “ecospheric care work” by a friend of mine, Aubrey Straightkrug was published this past year. So it’s starting to get picked up, particularly by some quirky agrarian folks out at the Land Institute in Kansas, which is where I learned about it. People like West Jackson. But the idea, as I understand it, was really developed by an ecologist named Stan Rowe, who was a Canadian ecologist in the 90s, early 2000s. Stan’s no longer living. If you have a library account, you can look up some really cool videos that he made in the 90s that are the environmental version of Cosmos by Sagan, Carl Sagan. Anyway, he’s kind of a lovely thinker. He’s an ecologist and philosopher. He’s concerned about representations of the earth and people’s place in the earth, and how we kind of go through our lives as parts of this planet, who are also responsible for anthropogenic climate change and the most recent mass extinction event of the planet. And the ecosphere is helpful in terms of understanding the earth in terms of life and what our place within life is. So one of the most clarifying moments for me is when he actually quotes this ecologist named Rapport and buddies et. al., I’m not sure who they all are, they’re talking about ecosystems and what they’re getting at, the thing here is low form, quote unquote, lower forms of life, we often think–and I’m talking like below the organismic level–we can think of as alive based on the context in which they exist, right? So DNA, or like, the organ of an animal, so like your liver, for instance, enjoying a bit of fine whiskey right now, so thinking about my liver, myy liver is alive to the extent that it’s part of the organism that is me, right? But for some, we equate life with organisms. He described this as a metaphor, where life equals organism, and so we think of it as something that organisms possess. In fact, we know that’s not really how it works, right? Like we wouldn’t be able, like an organism, anywhere outside of our planet, is not alive, unless you carry a little bubble of earth with you, right, like an astronaut in your spacesuit. So he quotes this guy, this essay by Rapport et. al., where they say–this is a 1991 essay–where they say, “Ecosystems are to be sure a Supra-organismic level of organizations, but are not super organisms, since each level in the hierarchy has both unique properties found only at that level and parallel properties with other levels. Accordingly, ecosystems are not organisms, but there are analogous properties that may or may not function in the same manner at the two levels.”
Saronik
Is this like an anti-Gaia hypothesis?
John
So that’s where this is going. So the idea is, we actually don’t live outside of the ecosystems in which we live. So you can describe life as actually a property of ecosystems. Similarly, you can describe ecosystems as a property of what Rowe calls the ecosphere. And that’s partly because ecosystems need the larger ecospheric context in order to live. And he even says, you know, well, you can even go further like, you need sunlight, which, you know, comes from outside of the ecosphere–It’s not like this is a self contained whole in itself. But yeah, so the quote that I was just giving is sort of recognizing not only that perhaps life can be a quality higher up than the organismal level. His issue with the Gaia hypothesis that, which is Lovelock’s idea that it is a super-organism is problematic because there are basic properties of the ecosphere that are not possessed by organisms like climate, right? The jet stream, these are emergent properties that exist only at the level of the ecosphere, that are part of life. And part of what he’s doing is he’s saying, so things that we think of as not alive, like, you know, molecules in the air that are part of planetary climate, perhaps those are part of a larger thing that actually does possess life. So it breaks down like the biotic-abiotic boundary. Yeah. And so the ecosphere is just supposed to help us understand ourselves as part of a larger living thing.
Saronik
Let me ask you my second question, which is, how do we use the ecosphere?
John
When we’re talking about how we fit in this kind of embedded context we can just use words like earth or nature, right, and Rowe says that at some point. What he’s identifying is a problem, though, in how we think about life itself. And so the goal is that ecosphere, kind of, because it’s available, right, because it’s weird sounding, it can open up space for thinking about a larger living entity. And he’ll go so far in some of his writing to talk about, you know, what’s ecospheric creativity? If we think of life at a planetary level, is creativity a property of life? Meaning the ecosphere, you could argue by its makeup created a bunch of different organisms, maybe humans aren’t the only creative force? And you see this even in like, the science of plant communication, right? Where people want to talk about how forests think–there’s that great book, how forests think–or how they communicate. And some people bristle at that because they say like, well, they don’t communicate the way humans communicate. But the argument is well known humans aren’t don’t have the only valid means of communication, right? And we can stand to humble ourselves a little bit.
Saronik
I really like this sort of capacious way of understanding creativity. I was reading this article about crown shiners, which is, you know, tall trees when the canopy over, they don’t touch each other. So that sort of light shines through and the undergrowth benefits. It’s like a way of sharing resources. What I really like is that this idea, because, you know, I was thinking of parallel ways of thinking of the world comprehensively, and when we decided that we would do this episode on ecosphere, I was also thinking about Spivak’s idea of planetarity, which is, you know, it is kind of it’s very capacious, but it’s also a cultural idea, a cultural metaphor of comprehensiveness, and I think that these two ideas could also be like, companion ideas and they work really well. But I guess, before I jump on to the next question, I want to ask you, like, you know, let’s say, how do you see–speculatively speaking–this idea of benefiting, let’s say, policy geared towards climate change?
John
What Rowe would say is that when you question a policy, especially policy that’s going to impact a large swath of what Leopold called the land community, right? Not just people, but who knows what all, the question is, how will this affect the health of the ecosphere or the flourishing of the ecosphere before you know, how will this affect the flourishing of whatever venture capitalist company is trying to make a lot of money or something. One of the really important things to me is that we kind of move past you know, Rowe’s definition and our use of this idea, and because I think he’s really situating this within the history of ecology, but I think you can look at lots of cultural traditions from around the world, both within and outside of, sort of, quote unquote Western tradition, that have a conception of embeddedness within what we could describe as an ecosphere. Like they have, like, an ecosphereism to their cosmology, or their outlook. There’re interesting cases, these really interesting legal questions now that are still very fluid about how do you sue a corporation or a government on behalf of the earth? So the ecosphere could be leveraged in the policy arena, in that way. You know, we’re trying to protect life here, because we as humans value life inherently, even if we’re being selfish. But our life is so deeply contingent on larger ecospheric life that we’re a part of, that it’s just really stupid to be doing things that are highly destructive of that life and ignoring most of it because the life of this small group of oligarchs is flourishing, or whatever.
Saronik
This is a good place to ask you my next question, which I think you’ve already begun to speak on, which is how will the ecosphere save the world?
John
Yes, how will it save itself. I think part of the challenge of climate change is coming to grips with the fact that we’ve been doing it wrong for–some people say since the Industrial Revolution, some people say since the advent of agriculture–in terms of the way that we lift calories from the earth to sustain ourselves in increasingly cheap ways, fossil fuels being the cheapest form of burning calories, but also one that has some of the most waste and most deleterious effects to life on Earth. So, what I find really fun about what Rowe does the ecosphere is that he plays with the word, he talks about ecospherism, or thinking ecospherically; so what what would it mean to think ecospherically. And he talks about art, too, artistic production, the ecospheric artist is sort of observing the creativity that surrounds them in the ecosphere and is trying to make it special. I think something that he says at one point, which like Rowe not a literary scholar, he’s not an art critic, you know, he’s an ecologist, but I kind of love that idea of like, making special because, I mean, you know, it seems like we really need a worldview transition in order to move ourselves into thinking creatively about how to get out of our dependence on fossil fuels. And there’s actually a really great article that was just published earlier this year by a group of scientists that calls for what they call “knowledge humility”
Saronik
Oh, that’s a lovely phrase, I really like it.
John
Yeah, i’ts a group of climate scientists asking for knowledge humility, another, you know–Wendell Berry wrote a book called The Way of ignorance which is sort of provocatively calling for something similar where when you think about our intelligence as being a very small part of a much larger intelligence, which is sort of something that most of the great world religions do themselves, but you know, we’re living in an increasingly secular society so maybe the ecosphere is a way to think about this. Our intelligence is a small part within a much larger intelligence that it’s like, ecospheric creativity and a knowledge and information. Maybe that can help us practice knowledge humility as we move forward with our solutions to climate change so that we don’t fall into the trap of sort of technocratic fantasy that all we need to do is shoot a bunch of mirrors into outerspace to deflect sunlight and could not possibly be anything that would go wrong with that, or the idea that we can keep consuming fossil energy at the rate that we currently are. We can keep consuming energy at the rate we currently are just by switching to renewables or something. The same group of scientists is saying that seems like a very optimistic perspective, given the data. So by practicing a little knowledge humility, we might have to force ourselves to say we, we can’t do all of this. We have to do less and we have to somehow scale back consumption at the same time that we recognize there are people on this earth who don’t have access to adequate resources to just live on this earth, right? So it’s tricky as soon as you start talking about austerity, it’s like, well, but there are enough resources for people not to be hungry and starving and in poverty. So how do you address those crises at the same time that you sort of try as a society to practice some restraint? I don’t know. It’s like a huge fucking challenge.
Saronik
It’s also like, like the one word has been hovering in the offing in this episode, and we haven’t mentioned it yet is anthropocene. I was thinking about this, and I also coordinate this other reading on the postcolonial anthropocene, and we were talking about this today. It’s a Galilean decentering, right? It’s, you move the human away from the center. At least, you cannot move the human away from the center in, in actuality, but you do it in thought so that your biases, your intentions, your intentions, your intentions of thought possibly change and that’s why I really like the term knowledge humility, and I’m gonna look this up. Just everything that John mentioned will be linked in our show notes. But I really like this phrase knowledge humility, because it is a kind of decentering and it is kind of something that we do not tend to do often in academia, which is to say that knowledge itself is a way of admitting the lack of knowledge.
John
Yes. Well, what you were just saying made me think the Enlightenment was really good for decentering the the idea that we were special and in the center of the universe, but at the same time, it kind of created a new sense of special, like a recentering of the human in terms of being supreme intelligence, you know? Which is, you know, I’ve never thought about it that way before but the way you just kind of brought those things together.
Saronik
I mean, decenters the human, but then everything that became visible in that process of decentering became the object of our study. And by that we, you know, gained and, really, I mean, European continental philosophy.
John
Something about the ecosphere does feel a little medieval to me, you know, like, it’s almost reclaiming something of this sense of mystery. That’s what knowledge humility kind of does that in my mind, you know, it’s not saying that we can’t know things and it’s not saying science won’t reveal truths, if I can use that word. But it is reinforcing another, we’re talking about policy, there’s this concept called the precautionary principle, which also works really well. I mean, it’s talked about in environmental study circles sometimes. I think it fits really well with the idea of the ecosphere because the whole idea is that in policy if you operate by the precautionary principle, you never do the maximum that you think you can get away with, right. It’s maximum, quote, unquote, sustainable extraction. It’s about let’s take the precautions of extracting less than that, right? Whatever we think is sustainable, let’s shoot lower than that, actually, you know, keep it in the ground.
Saronik
Yes, I think we end on that both generative and cautionary note. I want to thank you so much, John, for coming on our show and talking to us about ecosphere. Thank you so much for listening.
