Guest blog by Bastien Vassort
I’ve been thinking about how I relate to the world recently, and what impact that has on my activism. Questions like that are a daily practice, but this internship has provided me with the opportunity to really consider the practical side of the question – how do I want the future to be, and how do I play my part to make it happen? Specifically: How do I want future societies to relate to the living world around them, and how do I make that vision a reality in practice? I’ll try to answer this question in the next 2 blog posts: in this one, I’ll explore what it means to bring change, and in the next one I’ll talk about an inspiring example.
So, how to bring change? The way I’ve been told to bring about societal change is through building a solution tailored to the problem:
Climate change is an issue? No problem! We can develop technology to recapture carbon!
I have a problem with eating too much sugar? I’ll develop a set of rules for myself to stop eating sugar!
I’m having sleep issues? I can make an appointment with the doctor to get medication to help me sleep.
See what I mean? All of these solutions are tailored to a surface analysis of the issue, a treatment of the symptoms. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that. If I’m not sleeping well, having something that can alleviate my problem immediately is a good thing. However, recently, I’ve been discovering a different way to view “problems”. What if I were to look at the deeper causes, instead of ways to deal with symptoms alone? Maybe I can ask myself why I feel the need to eat so much sugar. Maybe I can investigate why I’m sleeping poorly, and then maybe find out that it’s because I feel stressed as I go to bed, and that makes me very tense during sleep – maybe by questioning, I’ll find out some uncomfortable truths that make me realize I need to change the way I live my life, and how I relate to things.
Biophilia raises similarly tricky questions about our society. Are we taking the right approach to addressing the polycrisis? What if the polycrisis we’re facing cannot be solved through “problem oriented” solutions?
In The Nutmeg’s Curse, Amitav Ghosh argues exactly this: by drawing on the history of the Banda islands, the only place nutmeg is indigenous, he explains the current polycrisis as a result of the stories we tell ourselves about the world. He argues that it was a materialist, mechanistic view of the world that allowed Western bourgeoisie to view the living world as dead, inert, and empty. In a paradoxical mix of cause and effect, this ontology was the first step to the development of technologies and organisations tailored to subjugate nature – a path that both caused and made possible the “foundational violences of slavery, genocides of Indigenous peoples, and the centuries of ecocides and onslaughts on the environment that shaped – and are now undoing – the world” (from Prof. Anne McClintock’s essay “Monster: A Fugue in Fire and Ice”).
These questions came to my mind last week, while interviewing a member of Biophilia. While we were talking, we brought up playfulness as a core tenet of the organization. We understood playfulness as a nurturing relationship with other beings. We see playfulness as a way to bring Robin Wall Kimerer’s insight that “All flourishing is mutual” to life. We see playfulness as a way to live with the polycrisis: by changing our relationship to the world around us, seeing living beings as companions in a journey towards more joy, we can shift that mechanistic ontology, and transition away from harmful ways of living, but also learn to live with more resilience in the present.
However, there are obstacles. During the interview, we talked about how many groups working towards change nowadays are subject to constant evaluation. This is not bad per se – making sure that something is working as intended seems reasonable, when a third party is allocating resources to Biophilia. The issue to me is that kind of evaluation rests upon a very narrow view of progress: that of progress only through innovation, which is defined here by techno-utopian visions.
Innovation today is shackled by a focus on technological solutions that address symptoms – through this, we remain stuck, unable to let human creativity run its course through exploration of possibility. What if we allowed innovation to work through slowness, through collaboration with other beings, through de-escalating the intensity of life? In setting objectives to fulfil, delineating places we want to get to, we confine ourselves to the sole possibility of their accomplishment – anything else is failure. It is a story of control. To me, Biophilia represents a return to a humble attitude – one that values seeding change slowly at local scales instead of at high-speed and magnitude, and learning from the living world instead of relying on techno-heroism rooted in ideas of domination.
In her wonderful article “Beyond destruction: innovation as an offering for repair, renewal and reparations”, Lauren Parater urges shifting away from a paradigm of innovation as problem solving towards one where innovation can become a way to explore dreams for the future. Today, we view innovation as something fundamentally good, a value equally desirable as fraternity or freedom. As a result, the institutions with enough resources to make experimentations like this possible often look to measure innovation in an effort to “prove” their ventures are worthwhile (a necessity in today’s capitalistic world). The problem arises when we acknowledge the very limited view of definition. If innovation can only take the form of a magic pill that immediately “solves” the the challenge initially defined, we limit the possible solutions. In a project like Biophilia, where we try to approach climate change as something to live with, looking for immediate solutions seems pointless. How can one measure a change in relationship?
To foment true change, I would argue that we must break out of the paradigm of success/failure, and allow our creative endeavours the freedom to explore radically different ways of relating without being routinely questioned to see if the problem has been solved yet.
In the next article, I will talk about an initiative that does just that: Mustarinda, who describes itself as “… work[ing] for ecological reconstruction by combining contemporary art, boundary crossing research, practical experiments, education and community work. ”