Chatter Marks EP 141 The Politics of Nature with Jonathon Keats

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When we look at Alaska as a whole, and even when
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we look at a city like Anchorage or look
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at any of the other larger cities there, I think there's a lot
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of capacity for experimentation,
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because there is more
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evident need. Alaska is
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more exposed in so many ways to the
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challenges that we all face than other places are.
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It is more obvious that those changes
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are taking place to those living there.
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And by virtue of being— by
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virtue of operating at a smaller scale,
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there are fewer complexities,
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there are fewer ways
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in which legacy systems
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prevent change, and the entanglements
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between systems prevent change.
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So all of that seems really promising. And I
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think that also in Alaska, what I find—
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and I do not mean to generalize,
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though I suppose that I am— I find
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that the people who I encounter there are resourceful,
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inventive, are accustomed to extremes
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and to having to cope with those extremes
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on their own or within their, within their own community. And those
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qualities seem like the essential qualities
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to bring to bear on the problems that
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the world as a whole is facing today.
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That was Jonathan Keats. He's an artist,
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writer, and experimental philosopher,
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and his work uses imagination to question
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some of the most basic assumptions about how the world works.
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His new book, A Field Guide to More Than Human Governance,
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looks beyond human societies for new ways of thinking about
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politics, drawing lessons from
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bacteria, fungi,
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plants, animals, and entire ecosystems.
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At the heart of the book is a simple idea: humans
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didn't invent governance. Living things have
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been organizing, cooperating, competing, and adapting to
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one another for billions of years. And Jonathan argues that
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we might have something to learn from them. He asks
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us to reconsider what intelligence looks like,
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who or what we're willing to learn from,
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and ultimately what our place is within the natural world.
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In A Field Guide to More-Than-Human Governance, Jonathan takes that idea
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and asks what it might actually mean for the way we govern
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ourselves. Bacteria become models
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for collective decision-making.
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Lichens offer lessons about cooperation and conflict.
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And other species challenge our assumptions about hierarchy,
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resilience, and even democracy.
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Jonathan calls this approach political biomimicry,
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looking to the strategies that have evolved throughout nature and
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considering how they might inspire new approaches to human
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politics. It's an imaginative way of thinking
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about some very real problems, and one
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that asks us to reconsider whether
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humans should always be the only ones setting the terms.
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So here he is, Jonathan Keats.
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Welcome to Chattermarks, a podcast of the Anchorage Museum dedicated
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to exploring Alaska and the circumpolar north through the creative
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and critical thinking of ideas past, present,
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and future. My name is
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Cody Liska, and I'll be your host.
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You describe yourself as an experimental philosopher.
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What does that mean? I've chosen experimental
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philosopher as a job
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title because I don't know what
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it means, because Every day
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when I wake up, I have to figure it out, and that
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seems like a really good way to wake up. I am
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deeply interested in everything,
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and I studied philosophy in
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school because it seemed like that was a good
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approach as far as pursuing curiosity. And yet
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I found that academia was by
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and large singularly lacking in curiosity. And in
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particular, academic philosophy seemed to be somehow
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about as far from where I had
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anticipated and had hoped as could possibly be.
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And so I have spent my life since
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then tried to figure out how to do philosophy in public
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where it seems philosophy needs to be done, doing philosophy with others,
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doing philosophy in the world as a matter of pursuing curiosity
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in everything that I do and
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engaging others in, in thought experiments
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and otherwise trying to figure out how we can
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ask big questions together. Because philosophy seems
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to me to be far too important for, for philosophers,
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at least philosophers as I've encountered them
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recently. And so as
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an experimental philosopher, having taken a title
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that no one else really seemed to want, it is a title that you find
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historically, you find back in the 18th century at
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the same time that you find natural philosopher as a job
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title, which is considered to be synonymous
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with scientist, or to have been the name given to people who
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were subsequently called scientists, but that also
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encompasses so much more. And I think that, that all that
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is more than science,
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yet still inclusive of science, all of that is what
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I consider to be my remit. And so I have taken
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a job title that I can't define as the best way in which to be
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able to pursue all that. Yeah. Yeah. I really liked what you
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just said about how philosophy is too
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important for just philosophers.
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You know, how did you come up with that?
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I spent enough time in academia
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And admittedly, enough time for me was 4 years. I escaped
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with a bachelor's degree, and yet
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it was enough time to recognize
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the great strengths that philosophy has,
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which are in method and rigor,
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and yet also to find what seemed to me at
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least to be real weaknesses, and those
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arise, I think, from professionalization,
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which of course also is part of what has given
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philosophy such rigor. But the professionalization
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that has led to a reification
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of certain questions, of certain problems
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that have become so dominant
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that they have blocked out the
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possibility of asking other questions,
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of looking more broadly at the world.
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And as a professional
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philosopher, one is expected to to
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advance an argument, and the thought
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experiment is one of these techniques for doing so. It's a rhetorical
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technique positing a counterfactual
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and using that as a way in which,
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by virtue of the fact that it leads to some
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logical inconsistency, ideally one that your
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opponent stumbles upon and finds
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him or herself mired within, that this becomes a way in
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which to make a point, to make an argument,
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to win an argument. And I don't have any arguments to win.
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I don't, I don't have a point that I ultimately
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want to make because I don't believe that I
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am capable of that, first of all. And I think that secondly,
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it is everything is always tentative,
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everything is always tenuous, everything is always in a state
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of discovery. And so I've taken the thought experiment,
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for instance, as a method
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for asking questions,
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fundamentally asking what if, which is what
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any thought experiment does, but to ask these questions not
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as a rhetorical device, not where there is some answer
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that I have already in wait that I am
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going to, to inflict upon
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my opponent the moment that my opponent falls into the trap that I've set,
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but rather where it's all about the question,
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it's all about setting up those alternative conditions
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and seeing what happens. And there can be a hypothesis there,
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there can be some idea that I have at the outset
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in terms of what I think might emerge that
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seems to me like it might be interesting, but it certainly is not
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a point that I'm making or an argument. So at
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the Anchorage Museum, I undertook one of my
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largest and most long-standing thought
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experiments, which was effectively to ask, what if the
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flow of time were calibrated by the flow of a river? Or actually, in the
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case of Alaska Rivertime, the project that I developed at
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the museum with multiple rivers, including the Matanuska and the Knik,
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and also some smaller waterways such as Campbell Creek.
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And this was a way in which to ask
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what has been asked so often and
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what remains still a great mystery,
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and more so as Saint Augustine himself
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observed when he asked the question most
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famously, which is, what is time? So this
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question of what is time is one that I
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think is timeless but also urgent,
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because to me, time and timekeeping
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and the way in which we reckon time, the way in which we
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tell time, this has been— and
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here's my hypothesis— this has set the
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initial conditions for the Anthropocene in many ways.
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That we have, by virtue of
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the fact that we have sought timekeeping systems
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that are ever more precise, that are
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ever more regular. We have attained great
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aptitude, great capacity for coordination
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at scale, for logistics. Amazon.com is
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perhaps Exhibit A here. You can order on Amazon and
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your order will be delivered on time, but the
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broader context is missing purposely.
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It's been, it's been set in the background
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where it can't interfere with the system, where the
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implications are not visible, where they're not apparent,
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where there is no feedback in the system.
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We extract at will and
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we consume what we want without
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having any way in which to recognize
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how that affects the environment in which
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those materials subsist
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and the environment that is affected by those decisions.
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So in asking this question, what if
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the flow of time were calibrated by the flow of a river, and more
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fundamentally asking what is time, or how
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might we construe time? This is a way in which to
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ask questions about systems that we take
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for granted and to,
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to set forth in an experimental
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way an alternative to the atomic clock, the clock
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that we can see has been instrumental
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to everything from the Industrial Revolution to
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colonialism, and that is running the
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capitalist system as we know it today, to posit this alternative,
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to say that in fact a clock could
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potentially be grounded
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in the world and not
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precise but in fact accurate in a different
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way, in a way that is, that it is telling the time
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of the environment, or in a sense, the planetary
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metabolism is manifesting in a
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way that is responsive to us and to which we can respond.
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So, so time becomes, or timekeeping
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becomes a mechanism for attaining a sort
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of homeostasis, and for it becomes a feedback mechanism.
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And this is something that I, I see
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wherever I look in the world except in modern
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human society. This is effectively the system that is
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found when we consider the coordination
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between, between plants and pollinators,
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for instance. This is all about coordination
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of different beings existing
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in time together and finding a common time through
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their observation of each other and through their response to each other.
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So the hypothesis is that
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time might be this other thing other
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than what physicists talk about, or that timekeeping
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might do this thing that is not done
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by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and that there might
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actually be meaning in this and value in this,
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and that it might do some good in the world, but also
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that it is inevitably going to only back us into
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deeper questions if we, if we try this
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out, and if we start to find
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that in fact this does make
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sense as a system, this, this does the work that
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timekeeping is meant to do, and it does satisfy at some level what
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we're talking about when we talk about time. It only enlarges
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the possibility space for considering time
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and its meaning. And that multi-dimensional approach,
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or that multi-dimensional consequence of having
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an alternative timekeeping system— in the case of Alaska,
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where we have a clock, alaskarivertime.org is
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a clock that you can to this day, and we started
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back in 2020, to this day you can go
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there, like it was actually 2019, you can go there and you can see
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what the time is on this clock.
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So it's an open-ended question in the form of a proposition
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that is something that could be experienced in, in the world, that can be
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experienced on the rivers, but also that can be experienced in aggregate
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through this clock that is keeping time where the ratio
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of the current flow rate of the river to the average annual flow rate
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historically becomes the basis for how quickly the clock
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advances, whether it's faster or slower as
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the discharge of the rivers, as the flow rate of the rivers changes.
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So do you think the future of democracies
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will become less hierarchical and more ecological?
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I don't see how democracy
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can persist in an
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environment that is even more hostile to
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life, including human life, than it is now.
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And I don't see how we
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can possibly live or expect
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to live in a world that is going
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to become more ecologically
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viable than the one in which we live unless
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we make extreme changes in
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terms of how we act, in terms of
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what we do, and in
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terms of how we understand
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the world around us.
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I wonder if you think humans
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have confused progress with
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acceleration. You know, we tend to think
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bigger is always better— more growth, more development, more expansion—
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but nature often seems to value balance
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instead. Do you think we've mistaken
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growth for progress?
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I don't know that progress is
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a concept found anywhere
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other than in human
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civilization and in a particular time
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and place, in the present,
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primarily in the Global North.
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I don't think that there is a concept
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to be found when observing ecology that
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is equivalent. One could think
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about climax communities. We could— one could think about the way in which
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after fire you have
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grasses that are followed by larger
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plants and ultimately large trees.
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And the attendant fauna. But those trees burn,
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and if you simply scale out from
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looking at that sequence in
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the time that it takes to get from grass to
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old growth to
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the cycles of the
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system that is described when we speak about
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a climax community, we find that it is not a
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matter of progress. It is a matter of contingency
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and a matter of cyclicality.
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That is to say that there is a
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seeking, I believe, within any living system,
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seeking fitness
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within the conditions
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surrounding that system, to the extent that one can speak of
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an inside and an outside, and even that seems rather suspect.
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That is not a matter of acceleration
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or growth or progress. It is a matter
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of how ultimately
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how to coordinate, or it
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is a, it's a relationship.
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And it's a relationship like any,
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including human relationships, it's a relationship that is constantly
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in flux. So I
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think that another, another case in which we might look
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to nature and say, that's progress,
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would be to look at the phylogenetic
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tree, to look at evolution. But that doesn't
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seem like progress either when considered. First of all,
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there are the so-called living fossils, that is
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to say, creatures like the horseshoe crab or the,
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the comb jelly, the sponge. These are
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creatures that have been around for a very long time. And they're still here.
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And they have changed very little. And there's
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no point in going to them and saying, you know,
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you're kind of a little bit behind now.
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You gotta grow up. You need to progress.
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So, that success story,
24:12.425 --> 24:15.412
so to speak, the fact that they persist,
24:15.916 --> 24:19.635
speaks against progress as a construct,
24:19.797 --> 24:23.893
and the idea of acceleration being
24:24.310 --> 24:27.309
one that is universal in the world,
24:27.854 --> 24:31.992
but so too does the phenomenon of extinction.
24:32.569 --> 24:36.402
And while I certainly don't want to be an
24:36.578 --> 24:39.112
advocate of extinction here,
24:39.865 --> 24:43.666
in a world that has all too many species that
24:44.166 --> 24:48.750
are all too precariously at the edge of
24:49.350 --> 24:52.838
being extinguished. And we have politicians who are looking for any
24:52.935 --> 24:56.227
excuse they can find to take away the habitat
24:56.727 --> 25:00.091
and otherwise to doom
25:00.188 --> 25:05.502
those species. I don't want to give any credence
25:06.002 --> 25:09.729
to that position. But extinction is
25:10.790 --> 25:14.149
as natural as any other phenomenon in general.
25:15.049 --> 25:18.622
Extinction is part of a larger
25:18.686 --> 25:22.033
process that we find that is this process
25:22.163 --> 25:25.602
that we think of, that we refer to as evolution.
25:26.665 --> 25:30.438
And that is not one
25:30.695 --> 25:34.671
that is in the old
25:34.736 --> 25:38.194
view of a tree of life, where you are
25:38.694 --> 25:41.838
a great chain of being, going back to Aristotle,
25:42.079 --> 25:45.508
that is not one where the new replaces
25:45.620 --> 25:49.625
the old, or where there's a hierarchy where the
25:50.891 --> 25:54.016
animals are superior to the plants, where humans are
25:54.516 --> 25:58.791
at the top. It is one where all these life forms are all coexisting
25:59.399 --> 26:03.533
until circumstances change, whether those are circumstances
26:03.806 --> 26:06.850
from within that system or whether it's an asteroid strike.
26:07.331 --> 26:11.415
But the conditions change, and then you have some
26:11.915 --> 26:15.662
life that is no longer present and other life that comes into being.
26:15.774 --> 26:21.332
And so it's this constant
26:24.128 --> 26:27.888
of inconstancy, I guess,
26:28.065 --> 26:31.644
that I'm describing, which is to say that
26:31.709 --> 26:35.536
it is not balanced. I don't believe.
26:36.654 --> 26:39.471
It is, at some level,
26:40.135 --> 26:44.595
homeostatic, meaning that there is a way
26:45.095 --> 26:48.802
in which when this system starts to
26:50.155 --> 26:52.271
go to one extreme,
26:53.063 --> 26:57.428
factors will moderate
26:57.928 --> 27:01.379
that extreme. And if it were not the case, then there wouldn't be life
27:01.879 --> 27:05.520
on Earth, we would end up in, in, in a place that did—
27:05.633 --> 27:09.960
that was not habitable. But even
27:10.651 --> 27:13.499
big events like the Great Oxygenation Event,
27:14.014 --> 27:19.101
the moment where you have bacteria
27:21.017 --> 27:25.350
able to perform photosynthesis, and you
27:25.850 --> 27:28.957
have oxygen that is this toxin at the,
27:29.572 --> 27:33.145
at the level that it starts to enter the atmosphere—
27:33.982 --> 27:37.313
this is a while back, but it's salient here— yeah,
27:37.394 --> 27:41.410
you then have animals that are able to— that,
27:41.491 --> 27:45.277
that, that evolve to be able to exploit
27:45.294 --> 27:49.080
that waste product, that toxin. And so
27:49.258 --> 27:52.641
I think that there is, at least
27:53.141 --> 27:56.704
so far here on Earth, not a balance at
27:57.204 --> 28:01.369
any moment not a tendency toward
28:01.547 --> 28:07.948
greater balance over time, but rather a constant
28:09.987 --> 28:13.656
introduction of some counterforce,
28:14.269 --> 28:19.143
some, some factor that is in
28:20.547 --> 28:24.512
response to other factors that as a whole the system
28:24.737 --> 28:29.312
is able to persist. And that is definitely not progress, at least by any definition
28:29.380 --> 28:32.705
definition that I can come up with, and it certainly doesn't seem like a,
28:33.572 --> 28:37.010
like a corporate model I can imagine any company
28:37.107 --> 28:38.729
here in San Francisco taking up.
28:42.714 --> 28:46.929
One of my favorite ideas in the book is that animals aren't
28:47.429 --> 28:50.619
metaphors. They're already solving political
28:50.667 --> 28:55.266
problems. What is something like a
28:55.929 --> 29:00.089
slime mold, understand about cooperation that
29:00.849 --> 29:04.164
Congress doesn't? I would say that the
29:06.414 --> 29:10.031
president probably is more the
29:10.531 --> 29:13.462
problem than Congress historically,
29:13.656 --> 29:17.038
though Congress seems recently here in the
29:17.538 --> 29:21.149
U.S. to have all but abdicated power to the president.
29:22.159 --> 29:27.076
But what I see when I look to slime molds that
29:27.254 --> 29:31.347
I don't see when I look to our political system as
29:31.444 --> 29:34.552
a whole is I see
29:35.086 --> 29:38.874
a flatness,
29:40.440 --> 29:44.210
literally, figuratively. They are— they're not
29:44.710 --> 29:48.185
2-dimensional, but they lie flat. On the
29:48.685 --> 29:52.428
ground as they move across the forest floor. And they
29:52.962 --> 29:57.179
move in ways that are based
29:57.388 --> 30:00.592
on the totality of their body,
30:02.315 --> 30:05.395
their body comprising many in one.
30:05.524 --> 30:09.400
They are a superorganism comprising many nuclei,
30:10.795 --> 30:12.991
all within a single cell.
30:14.008 --> 30:16.737
They move, they forage,
30:18.206 --> 30:22.538
the decisions they make all emerge from
30:24.188 --> 30:27.650
every, every part contributing
30:28.083 --> 30:32.068
to the behavior of
30:32.085 --> 30:35.700
the whole. And this is not only the
30:36.200 --> 30:41.207
case for slime molds, it's found in in many superorganisms,
30:42.127 --> 30:43.870
in many living systems,
30:44.952 --> 30:48.583
bacteria perhaps being one of the
30:49.083 --> 30:53.655
most advanced,
30:54.122 --> 30:57.585
even though bacteria are even more than some
30:58.085 --> 31:03.623
of the animals mentioned earlier, such as horseshoe
31:03.639 --> 31:06.970
crabs. Being quote-unquote primitive.
31:07.404 --> 31:12.596
Their, their system of quorum sensing is
31:13.014 --> 31:16.975
a remarkably resilient system,
31:17.056 --> 31:20.759
a remarkably well-adapted system
31:21.275 --> 31:24.663
to making decisions in
31:25.163 --> 31:28.890
a changing environment where no individual
31:29.164 --> 31:33.098
has access to the totality of,
31:34.001 --> 31:37.552
of information about that
31:38.052 --> 31:40.847
environment, which of course is always the case for any being.
31:41.673 --> 31:46.681
And it's based on the, the sensing
31:46.794 --> 31:51.177
by every individual cell of the immediate
31:51.242 --> 31:55.282
environment and signaling to those surrounding
31:55.346 --> 31:59.873
that cell with chemicals that effectively
32:00.130 --> 32:04.180
are encouraging a certain response on
32:04.680 --> 32:08.310
the basis of what has been detected in the environment, but also
32:08.342 --> 32:11.769
with a receptiveness to those chemicals from others. So,
32:12.460 --> 32:17.200
so a consensus is reached. There's a phenomenon
32:17.527 --> 32:20.208
where, as a result of quorum sensing,
32:21.802 --> 32:25.290
a phase change takes place. And the phase change does not take
32:25.339 --> 32:29.141
place because there is one leader who
32:29.496 --> 32:33.662
mandates it, but because the entirety of
32:33.856 --> 32:38.016
the bacterial colony is
32:38.516 --> 32:42.285
constantly sensing and processing and
32:42.640 --> 32:46.237
constantly sharing what is sensed
32:46.496 --> 32:50.082
and what is processed in a way that leads to
32:52.587 --> 32:56.758
optimal behavior or adaptively
32:56.968 --> 33:00.430
appropriate behavior in an environment where
33:00.930 --> 33:03.316
that environment is changing unpredictably.
33:05.253 --> 33:08.916
So I think that the, the superorganism
33:10.401 --> 33:15.231
remains a really compelling model, and within
33:16.216 --> 33:19.874
human society There is an
33:19.971 --> 33:25.434
increasing capacity for communication in
33:25.450 --> 33:30.156
ways that could potentially be leveraged
33:30.543 --> 33:34.702
to achieve a certain kind of quorum sensing.
34:53.250 --> 34:57.403
One of the main arguments in the book is that
34:57.483 --> 35:00.930
our political systems weren't designed to include
35:01.430 --> 35:04.949
the rest of the natural world. How much of our environmental
35:04.965 --> 35:08.536
crisis stems from that exclusion?
35:11.018 --> 35:16.384
To the degree that we decide
35:17.926 --> 35:22.301
what happens in the world without
35:22.752 --> 35:26.599
input from others who
35:26.631 --> 35:29.979
are affected, those who happen not to be human.
35:33.150 --> 35:34.188
That is,
35:37.304 --> 35:41.883
well, it's ultimately
35:41.932 --> 35:46.954
an issue that is addressable
35:47.552 --> 35:51.992
in ethical terms and also in
35:53.240 --> 35:55.638
pragmatic or practical terms.
35:56.993 --> 36:00.169
So ethically speaking,
36:01.829 --> 36:05.199
there is the question of the
36:05.699 --> 36:09.062
degree to which we believe in
36:09.175 --> 36:12.781
collective self-determination. We profess
36:12.895 --> 36:16.110
to do so. That is one of the underlying
36:16.143 --> 36:18.541
justifications for democracy.
36:19.773 --> 36:23.443
And yet we run into a contradiction,
36:24.357 --> 36:28.381
or we run into an inconsistency, when we consider
36:28.829 --> 36:32.420
how much of life on Earth is affected by our actions but has
36:32.533 --> 36:36.717
no say, has no ability to influence our
36:37.005 --> 36:40.404
policies, and therefore to influence the world that
36:40.904 --> 36:46.591
affects them. So that is one aspect
36:46.944 --> 36:51.102
of this that is relevant as
36:51.198 --> 36:55.116
a matter of what we care about, what we consider democracy to
36:55.132 --> 36:59.210
be, and also how democracy
36:59.547 --> 37:03.626
as we know it and how ethics as practiced
37:03.642 --> 37:08.090
by us affect our behavior.
37:09.053 --> 37:11.172
So in other words,
37:13.439 --> 37:16.539
the acceptance of what
37:17.039 --> 37:20.805
might be argued to be an ethical slippage in
37:21.306 --> 37:26.237
the autocratic rule
37:26.722 --> 37:29.851
over all other life on Earth is
37:29.964 --> 37:33.878
potentially an entry
37:33.991 --> 37:37.164
point into much more
37:37.301 --> 37:40.463
that is ethically questionable,
37:40.994 --> 37:44.228
much more that is going to
37:46.466 --> 37:50.306
allow us, even lead us, to treat
37:50.484 --> 37:54.501
other life as lesser. So there's that.
37:55.260 --> 38:00.611
But then there is— and I guess that does get into practicalities,
38:01.189 --> 38:05.061
which is to say that democracy could be
38:05.110 --> 38:08.528
seen as a computational system
38:08.867 --> 38:13.301
where all of us are in the world sensing
38:14.207 --> 38:17.468
what we encounter and making sense of
38:17.517 --> 38:21.206
it, where there's a distribution of
38:22.992 --> 38:27.219
our ability to sense
38:27.492 --> 38:31.720
and also a distribution of our way
38:32.110 --> 38:36.195
of reasoning. Where each of us is
38:36.389 --> 38:40.321
going to contribute something
38:40.920 --> 38:44.252
different that might potentially amount to more
38:44.947 --> 38:48.811
if aggregated appropriately.
38:49.232 --> 38:53.812
That is, that's the promise of democracy as
38:53.908 --> 38:57.704
a practical tool for
38:58.204 --> 39:01.857
making the best decision in a complex environment,
39:02.582 --> 39:07.460
making use of the best system
39:07.493 --> 39:11.481
we have for doing so, which is to say, our own
39:12.257 --> 39:14.602
bodies and minds. So,
39:16.300 --> 39:20.261
so both of those, both the ethical and the practical,
39:21.011 --> 39:25.247
come into play when we start to consider what
39:25.376 --> 39:28.819
democracy is and what democracy does,
39:29.563 --> 39:33.135
and what democracy as currently practiced,
39:33.216 --> 39:36.127
what it isn't, and what it doesn't do.
39:37.001 --> 39:40.673
And I think that we
39:41.466 --> 39:44.737
need to bring
39:45.076 --> 39:48.683
others into our decision-making processes
39:49.505 --> 39:52.670
for our own sake, and for theirs,
39:53.670 --> 39:57.123
for both of these reasons. I don't think we
39:57.623 --> 40:01.495
need to say that one of these reasons is more important than the other.
40:01.817 --> 40:05.217
I might have my preferences, you might have yours, but I think
40:05.265 --> 40:09.438
that both of these reasons argue for inclusion
40:09.551 --> 40:15.672
of others and potentially explain
40:17.918 --> 40:21.678
or the lack of enfranchisement of non-human
40:21.774 --> 40:24.988
beings explains, to some extent at
40:25.488 --> 40:28.924
least, why we are in this mess, why we're in the world
40:29.424 --> 40:31.190
that we find ourselves in today.
40:32.620 --> 40:36.460
How we go about it is one of the grand challenges,
40:36.878 --> 40:41.120
and my book is
40:42.598 --> 40:48.653
partly written as
40:50.279 --> 40:55.306
a proposition that
40:55.790 --> 41:00.660
shows, I hope, a thought process and
41:00.838 --> 41:04.034
that leaves traces of that
41:04.164 --> 41:08.458
thought process in order not to insist
41:08.610 --> 41:13.002
too strongly on that proposition but to
41:13.018 --> 41:17.267
leave all those dimensions
41:17.525 --> 41:19.964
that were, in my mind,
41:20.995 --> 41:25.861
dimensions of the problem, dimensions of
41:26.361 --> 41:32.108
the world, to leave those all free for others to reconstruct
41:32.706 --> 41:36.828
in other ways. So, there's the
41:37.328 --> 41:41.284
most obvious gambit, is we could
41:41.784 --> 41:45.758
simply enfranchise other species by,
41:48.479 --> 41:52.398
by having them vote. And I've explored this
41:52.674 --> 41:56.051
at length, both in writing and
41:56.211 --> 41:59.716
also as a thought experiment
42:00.873 --> 42:03.603
in several different places,
42:03.959 --> 42:07.047
beginning in Adelaide, Australia,
42:07.566 --> 42:10.794
at a gallery run by
42:11.821 --> 42:14.856
the University of South Australia, a gallery called MOD,
42:15.209 --> 42:19.609
and then subsequently here in the
42:19.625 --> 42:23.446
US at the Institute for Contemporary
42:23.478 --> 42:27.332
Art in San Jose, where in
42:27.832 --> 42:31.346
both cases I was seeking to
42:31.846 --> 42:35.647
create the conditions Oh, and also in a third instance in
42:35.759 --> 42:39.577
Germany at the Festival der Zukunft, the Festival of the Future in
42:39.689 --> 42:42.625
Munich, Germany. So in all of these cases,
42:43.539 --> 42:46.876
trying to build a system that would
42:47.550 --> 42:52.090
enfranchise plants. So that
42:52.186 --> 42:55.539
what if, what if plants could vote? Yeah. And to
42:55.571 --> 42:59.292
enfranchise them, of course, as a
43:00.388 --> 43:04.068
political proposition that would have legal standing,
43:04.807 --> 43:08.101
this would require a constitutional amendment or the equivalent,
43:08.181 --> 43:11.400
which I was not at the time able to enact,
43:11.803 --> 43:15.443
and I can't do so now. So instead, what I did was to
43:15.926 --> 43:20.215
think about something that could be done that
43:20.344 --> 43:24.105
would allow us to observe what might
43:24.799 --> 43:28.337
obtain were we to enfranchise non-human beings,
43:28.369 --> 43:31.000
which is to say that I created a polling agency.
43:31.581 --> 43:35.340
And the polling agency took as its basis
43:37.065 --> 43:40.468
question that is supposedly at
43:40.968 --> 43:43.503
the back of our minds when we go to the polls, the old cliché,
43:44.021 --> 43:46.108
are you better off now than you were 4 years ago?
43:48.725 --> 43:52.410
So, so to me, a cliché only becomes a cliché because it is
43:52.864 --> 43:56.423
true at some level. And so I took that seriously
43:56.763 --> 44:00.388
and considered how what
44:00.502 --> 44:04.013
we're asking more
44:04.142 --> 44:08.395
fundamentally than asking whether
44:08.411 --> 44:12.889
you prefer this candidate or that, or whether you prefer this
44:12.970 --> 44:16.138
policy to be overturned or this new policy
44:16.638 --> 44:19.757
to be enacted, is we're asking, are you, are you getting
44:20.257 --> 44:24.160
more stressed or less as a result of the political
44:24.660 --> 44:28.403
conditions you find yourself in today compared
44:28.436 --> 44:31.953
to what they were 4 years ago. So,
44:32.550 --> 44:35.891
so that's what I'm attempting to bring
44:36.084 --> 44:39.312
into a very different umwelt,
44:39.570 --> 44:42.688
that of plants, where there is in common
44:43.225 --> 44:46.997
the stress response and
44:47.029 --> 44:50.352
the measurability of it. So we could measure stress response in humans
44:50.528 --> 44:54.204
directly by measuring cortisol level and change in cortisol,
44:54.621 --> 44:57.991
the stress hormone. We could look to plants with an equivalent with,
44:58.007 --> 45:01.634
with ethylene. We can also look indirectly when we look at humans,
45:01.683 --> 45:05.197
for instance, we can look at behavioral patterns,
45:06.032 --> 45:09.547
we can look at physiology. And in the case of plants,
45:09.563 --> 45:14.233
we can do something equivalent, we can look at canopy cover, we can
45:14.733 --> 45:17.325
look at whether plant— a plant is putting more energy into roots or shoots.
45:17.886 --> 45:21.268
This is a good measure of whether the plant
45:21.349 --> 45:25.068
is becoming more or less stressed. So that was the principle.
45:25.500 --> 45:29.219
And the idea was to open up this agency over a period
45:29.719 --> 45:33.435
of time, in the case of Adelaide, for an entire year, where people
45:33.451 --> 45:37.170
were able to come in and try to interpret what they saw
45:37.555 --> 45:40.649
in the plants in terms of change in stress level with changes in the political
45:40.665 --> 45:44.015
system, and to try to map this where it was not just environmental
45:44.593 --> 45:48.045
legislation, but it was everything. It was sort of like, what is the total package?
45:48.286 --> 45:52.203
Because I believe that environmental
45:53.167 --> 45:56.667
problems or environmental issues, as we talk about them in society
45:57.167 --> 46:01.178
today, it seems like it's a small subset of what really constitute environmental issues,
46:01.210 --> 46:04.389
because everything is ultimately environmental. It's all of the environment.
46:04.437 --> 46:07.857
So that's really what we were— what I was trying to achieve with
46:08.357 --> 46:11.984
this polling agency was to experiment and see, to see
46:12.048 --> 46:15.872
what might happen. And, and it was inconclusive, which is,
46:17.253 --> 46:21.751
which is not surprising, given that
46:22.892 --> 46:25.349
it was a highly complex problem,
46:26.008 --> 46:30.409
and a relatively simple experiment to
46:30.683 --> 46:33.783
attempt to, to address that question.
46:34.297 --> 46:37.911
What if the question was being addressed, I believe,
46:38.714 --> 46:42.680
at the level of observing the trees, but also observing people
46:42.808 --> 46:46.549
in terms of how they responded to the proposition of
46:46.581 --> 46:50.290
trees voting. In other words, what is the capacity politically to
46:50.790 --> 46:54.063
bring about this sort of change, in addition to what would be the consequences
46:54.272 --> 46:58.270
of the change in terms of the decisions
46:58.286 --> 47:01.754
that would be made? So the plants were
47:02.254 --> 47:05.750
providing input. The input would likely have
47:06.171 --> 47:09.636
changed certain conditions as a result
47:09.895 --> 47:13.440
of having changed certain policies.
47:14.266 --> 47:18.459
There would have been change. It was, as I said, an approximation.
47:20.043 --> 47:24.060
But all of this was not
47:24.560 --> 47:27.483
only simplistic in terms of how I set up the polling agency,
47:28.078 --> 47:31.936
but also simplistic in terms of the underlying
47:32.277 --> 47:36.239
premise. The premise that we should
47:36.993 --> 47:41.390
take our political system and simply add
47:41.631 --> 47:45.145
on a mechanism by which
47:45.562 --> 47:49.478
plants can go to the polls and potentially equalize
47:49.574 --> 47:52.944
things such that for humans we're measuring cortisol level
47:53.444 --> 47:57.630
rather than having people check off boxes, and we're doing something equivalent
47:58.130 --> 48:01.839
in terms of measuring ethylene in forests. So that,
48:02.767 --> 48:03.483
that is,
48:05.989 --> 48:09.864
that is a way in which to, to make other species
48:11.989 --> 48:15.517
conform to our system, where— That's really interesting.
48:15.970 --> 48:19.415
There are decisions underlying our decisions that
48:19.447 --> 48:22.504
we have made that we are insisting upon, even if we're
48:22.552 --> 48:25.510
letting them into the decision-making process in the moment.
48:25.591 --> 48:28.458
I think that we need to go deeper than that,
48:28.766 --> 48:30.506
ultimately, in order for this to be meaningful.
48:34.859 --> 48:38.342
You know, we often talk about climate change as
48:38.554 --> 48:41.403
a problem we'll solve with better technology.
48:42.670 --> 48:46.604
But your book makes me wonder if the real problem is how
48:46.620 --> 48:49.794
we've imagined our relationship with the rest
48:50.294 --> 48:53.706
of the natural world and If we change
48:53.803 --> 48:58.595
that relationship, would the technologies we develop start
48:59.095 --> 49:03.664
to look different too? We are a technologically
49:03.761 --> 49:08.442
oriented species. I think that that is evident
49:08.945 --> 49:13.230
when we observe our
49:13.730 --> 49:18.986
cities, when we observe our homes
49:19.259 --> 49:23.152
when we look to our history, even going
49:23.362 --> 49:26.304
back to Paleolithic times.
49:27.285 --> 49:31.929
And other species also
49:31.945 --> 49:35.550
have their technologies, but certainly
49:36.954 --> 49:38.342
not nearly to this degree.
49:39.520 --> 49:43.280
And seemingly not
49:43.474 --> 49:46.582
with as much reliance as we
49:47.082 --> 49:50.928
have on ours. So when
49:51.122 --> 49:55.278
we address the question, when we address the problem of climate change,
49:56.510 --> 50:00.948
we quite instinctually go
50:01.044 --> 50:04.681
for technological solutions, a tech
50:04.747 --> 50:07.794
fix. Essentially, we,
50:09.065 --> 50:12.462
we got ourselves into all this trouble with
50:12.478 --> 50:15.588
technologies that we created previously.
50:16.341 --> 50:19.852
Look at the internal combustion engine or the steam engine. Can we—
50:20.352 --> 50:24.501
can come up with a long list here very easily. Yeah. So it's
50:25.001 --> 50:28.236
only a matter of other technologies being
50:28.364 --> 50:32.580
deployed, potentially through some sort of geoengineering
50:32.708 --> 50:36.588
scheme, that we are going to address the problems
50:36.604 --> 50:40.150
that we have created. Since other
50:40.650 --> 50:44.855
species have not gone
50:45.112 --> 50:49.608
in for technology, which I'm going to speak
50:50.108 --> 50:53.927
of here as an externalizing of
50:54.425 --> 50:58.439
functionality and a development
50:58.519 --> 51:02.598
of that external functionality in a way that is
51:03.688 --> 51:06.686
subject to its own evolutionary forces.
51:07.359 --> 51:11.078
That's just a working definition
51:11.270 --> 51:15.261
that is certainly wrong, but maybe is useful
51:15.277 --> 51:19.268
for the moment. If we, if we take that as a definition and
51:19.300 --> 51:23.131
we consider non-human species, we certainly find primates
51:23.631 --> 51:26.321
using sticks and so on and so forth. We don't find anything like this.
51:26.994 --> 51:30.632
We find that other species, in terms of how
51:31.467 --> 51:35.821
they address the
51:36.321 --> 51:37.845
problems that they encounter,
51:39.821 --> 51:43.721
and they certainly encounter plenty of problems. The world is not
51:43.819 --> 51:47.248
stable and never has been. That they do
51:47.329 --> 51:52.294
so through their
51:52.505 --> 51:58.617
extended selves,
51:59.380 --> 52:03.490
that is to say, as a collective,
52:04.497 --> 52:09.079
they are able to act, and as
52:09.257 --> 52:12.476
a collective in time through evolution,
52:12.752 --> 52:15.285
they are able to act, and as a,
52:17.925 --> 52:22.141
as a part of a larger system, those relationships
52:22.472 --> 52:26.752
they are able to act. So altogether,
52:27.926 --> 52:30.083
the ability to,
52:32.775 --> 52:36.208
to act collectively in space,
52:37.740 --> 52:42.014
to act in evolutionary time
52:43.111 --> 52:47.660
in ways that change within
52:49.797 --> 52:53.825
the capacity of the creature in relation to the world, and the capacity to
52:54.756 --> 52:58.110
form relationships with others, symbiosis,
52:58.286 --> 53:02.330
roughly speaking. These seem to be the practices that
53:02.555 --> 53:05.476
we're finding when we look outside of ourselves,
53:05.604 --> 53:08.188
and they seem to work extraordinarily well.
53:09.375 --> 53:12.151
We can look back at life on Earth,
53:13.130 --> 53:16.773
and we can look back at the extremes that life
53:16.821 --> 53:20.068
has lived through, And we find that
53:20.568 --> 53:24.415
they are far more extreme than the most extreme
53:24.512 --> 53:28.152
projections for climate
53:28.652 --> 53:31.969
change, as extreme as those might be. And I don't want to diminish
53:32.469 --> 53:36.760
them here. But we're looking at glaciation, we're looking at really major
53:37.260 --> 53:40.463
change. So, so all of this
53:40.576 --> 53:45.450
to me would speak to the possibility of
53:47.669 --> 53:51.039
emulating non-human others
53:52.530 --> 53:56.388
in terms of how we cope with
53:56.421 --> 53:59.729
the adversity in the world today,
54:02.340 --> 54:05.449
the diminishing habitability of the world right now,
54:07.101 --> 54:11.009
and that that might be more
54:11.379 --> 54:14.645
viable than developing technologies
54:14.822 --> 54:20.859
to stand on top of technologies in terms of
54:22.104 --> 54:25.415
finding our way toward a
54:27.329 --> 54:30.787
homeostasis in this world that
54:31.431 --> 54:35.848
is also crucially one
54:36.203 --> 54:40.207
that is involving non-human others.
54:41.292 --> 54:44.699
The technologies that we are building, except to the extent that
54:44.747 --> 54:48.529
we want to exploit them, we want to
54:48.546 --> 54:52.328
use bacteria, for instance, for fuel cells or something of the sort,
54:54.078 --> 54:57.954
aside from that, we're really not being at all inclusive
54:58.454 --> 55:03.842
here in terms of how we are going about the the
55:04.117 --> 55:07.416
efforts that we're taking to address the grand challenge of climate change.
55:07.545 --> 55:12.804
So perhaps if we recognize not
55:13.029 --> 55:15.940
so much the evolutionary potential,
55:15.988 --> 55:21.578
because that seems rather slow and precarious,
55:22.094 --> 55:25.241
to say the least, to say that it will all sort itself out if we
55:25.741 --> 55:29.324
just give ourselves a few, a few million years.
55:29.977 --> 55:36.075
I think that just at the level of that
55:36.140 --> 55:40.115
connection and how that connection makes
55:40.615 --> 55:46.586
possible different behaviors that are
55:47.086 --> 55:50.452
appropriate given the environmental conditions,
55:51.050 --> 55:55.811
that that seems more sensible
55:55.827 --> 55:59.573
to me. Than the tech fix that seems
55:59.702 --> 56:03.070
so far only to have led to a greater
56:03.570 --> 56:05.536
need for even larger tech fixes.
56:09.892 --> 56:13.857
Do you think a place like Alaska, where people
56:14.357 --> 56:17.490
still live so closely with the natural world,
56:18.936 --> 56:22.626
could it be an opportunity to rethink governance before
56:22.674 --> 56:23.048
other places?
56:26.924 --> 56:30.504
One of the institutions with which I'm affiliated is
56:31.099 --> 56:33.924
Earth Law Center, where I'm principal philosopher.
56:34.294 --> 56:38.051
And Earth Law Center is an NGO working on
56:38.147 --> 56:41.567
ecocentric law and governance. And one
56:41.760 --> 56:46.304
of the organization's core
56:46.433 --> 56:49.725
beliefs is that the
56:50.225 --> 56:55.316
places in which to bring about change
56:55.429 --> 56:59.445
that will ultimately have the potential
57:00.195 --> 57:04.543
to change the world as a whole are
57:05.707 --> 57:10.302
not the big cities,
57:12.266 --> 57:16.405
and that they are also not
57:16.534 --> 57:19.128
the historic centers of power.
57:20.642 --> 57:23.913
And I wouldn't want to say
57:24.010 --> 57:27.119
that Alaska lacks
57:28.327 --> 57:32.064
cities of scale. Anchorage is
57:32.096 --> 57:36.260
a city that has scale and that has significance
57:36.760 --> 57:40.181
and that has power. But I would say that when
57:40.213 --> 57:43.633
we look at Alaska as a whole, And even when we look
57:44.133 --> 57:47.891
at a city like Anchorage, or look
57:48.391 --> 57:52.506
at any of the other larger cities there, I think there's a lot of capacity
57:53.168 --> 57:58.235
for experimentation because
57:58.510 --> 58:01.850
there is more
58:02.689 --> 58:06.869
evident need. Alaska is
58:08.015 --> 58:11.788
more exposed in so many ways to
58:12.865 --> 58:16.513
the challenges that we all face than other places are.
58:17.365 --> 58:20.872
It is more obvious that those changes are
58:21.372 --> 58:23.015
taking place to those living there.
58:24.630 --> 58:29.192
And by virtue of being— by
58:29.692 --> 58:31.636
virtue of operating at a smaller scale,
58:32.655 --> 58:36.598
there are fewer complexities There are fewer,
58:38.355 --> 58:42.144
fewer ways in which legacy
58:42.644 --> 58:48.108
systems prevent change, and the entanglements
58:48.478 --> 58:50.421
between systems prevent change.
58:52.044 --> 58:54.169
So all of that seems really promising.
58:55.152 --> 58:58.796
And I think that also in Alaska,
58:59.360 --> 59:03.268
what I find, and I do not
59:03.768 --> 59:07.935
mean to generalize, though I suppose that I am. I find
59:08.128 --> 59:12.348
that the people who I encounter there are
59:14.168 --> 59:17.138
resourceful, inventive,
59:18.226 --> 59:22.400
are accustomed to extremes and to
59:23.489 --> 59:26.714
having to cope with those extremes on their
59:26.973 --> 59:31.167
own or within their own community. And those
59:31.279 --> 59:34.516
qualities seem like the essential
59:34.645 --> 59:38.558
qualities to bring to bear on the problems that
59:38.928 --> 59:41.372
the world as a whole is facing today.
59:44.860 --> 59:49.146
You know, something I kept thinking while reading the book was
59:49.502 --> 59:53.724
how much some of these ideas reminded
59:53.772 --> 59:57.663
me of Indigenous ways of thinking about our relationship
59:58.163 --> 01:00:02.421
with nature. Was that something that influenced
01:00:02.921 --> 01:00:04.082
you as you were writing?
01:00:06.600 --> 01:00:10.731
I've been in dialogue with Indigenous people
01:00:11.231 --> 01:00:14.252
from around the world for a long time,
01:00:15.500 --> 01:00:18.755
here in the U.S., including Alaska,
01:00:19.695 --> 01:00:23.486
also in places such as
01:00:23.922 --> 01:00:27.653
Nagaland in the far northeast of India.
01:00:29.720 --> 01:00:33.351
And the conversations have
01:00:34.032 --> 01:00:36.318
been important to me.
01:00:40.243 --> 01:00:46.770
I would say that in
01:00:47.594 --> 01:00:50.149
most instances,
01:00:53.127 --> 01:00:56.558
what we have discussed has felt familiar to me rather than
01:00:57.058 --> 01:01:01.963
exotic. What I mean by that is that
01:01:04.784 --> 01:01:07.629
what we have spoken about,
01:01:08.586 --> 01:01:12.461
and relationality is certainly
01:01:13.190 --> 01:01:16.402
one of the central tenets,
01:01:18.056 --> 01:01:22.010
that this seems completely
01:01:23.175 --> 01:01:27.689
natural to me. And the
01:01:28.189 --> 01:01:31.844
conversation, like any good conversation, has deepened
01:01:31.908 --> 01:01:35.511
my consideration of relationality,
01:01:36.189 --> 01:01:40.303
deepened my ability to
01:01:40.415 --> 01:01:44.006
articulate ideas that I have
01:01:44.343 --> 01:01:47.998
and enrich those ideas with the ideas of,
01:01:48.671 --> 01:01:52.246
of other people and with the ideas
01:01:52.262 --> 01:01:55.965
that they carry through their heritage. None of it
01:01:56.222 --> 01:01:59.829
seems like it comes from elsewhere,
01:02:00.454 --> 01:02:04.785
except when I think of the
01:02:05.832 --> 01:02:10.229
world in which I live, my everyday circumstances,
01:02:11.227 --> 01:02:17.190
and how those feel extraordinarily
01:02:18.354 --> 01:02:25.071
strange and foreign. So the—
01:02:26.408 --> 01:02:29.278
there is no one Indigenous way of thinking, of course.
01:02:30.780 --> 01:02:35.908
There are many recurring
01:02:36.326 --> 01:02:40.305
themes that I find when speaking with
01:02:40.370 --> 01:02:44.862
Indigenous people in New Zealand and
01:02:44.975 --> 01:02:48.920
Indigenous people in Nagaland. Very different
01:02:49.420 --> 01:02:52.914
places, but certainly there are a lot
01:02:53.043 --> 01:02:57.432
of ideas that emerge
01:02:57.610 --> 01:03:01.802
in both places. And I think that these ideas
01:03:03.437 --> 01:03:06.528
are present within all of
01:03:07.028 --> 01:03:10.376
us as a matter of all of us at some
01:03:10.893 --> 01:03:14.563
time having been indigenous to somewhere,
01:03:15.097 --> 01:03:19.431
and as a matter of all of us living in a more-than-human
01:03:19.626 --> 01:03:24.579
world, as a matter of all of us having within
01:03:24.627 --> 01:03:29.456
our lives all these other creatures,
01:03:30.466 --> 01:03:34.509
all these, all these qualities
01:03:34.785 --> 01:03:37.269
that are to be found in,
01:03:38.276 --> 01:03:43.338
in our environment, and simply being
01:03:43.451 --> 01:03:47.623
there in that environment and being attentive
01:03:47.720 --> 01:03:51.307
to those other creatures I think that that is,
01:03:51.920 --> 01:03:56.465
that that leads to convergence
01:03:57.222 --> 01:04:01.104
in thinking, even of people who might
01:04:01.185 --> 01:04:04.084
not have had a discussion about it.
01:04:04.954 --> 01:04:08.854
And that is what I think I find when
01:04:08.902 --> 01:04:13.947
I have conversations with people who are
01:04:13.995 --> 01:04:17.959
Indigenous, and who have lived
01:04:20.028 --> 01:04:24.057
in places that are their tribal lands,
01:04:25.208 --> 01:04:29.424
when I have conversations with them, I think that that's what is called
01:04:29.924 --> 01:04:33.594
up within me and where the conversation
01:04:33.707 --> 01:04:35.732
naturally happens with them.
01:04:36.841 --> 01:04:40.169
I should say also
01:04:40.545 --> 01:04:44.252
that I've spent far more
01:04:44.365 --> 01:04:49.293
time living in big cities and
01:04:49.553 --> 01:04:53.885
living apart from the creatures
01:04:54.079 --> 01:04:57.912
and the conditions that I'm talking about than many of
01:04:58.024 --> 01:05:01.476
these colleagues and friends. And so they are
01:05:01.976 --> 01:05:05.900
going to be able to guide me in many ways
01:05:06.859 --> 01:05:10.621
simply because I don't have a lot of the experiences that they
01:05:11.121 --> 01:05:14.808
do. However, on that
01:05:15.308 --> 01:05:18.611
fundamental level of what we're talking about,
01:05:19.808 --> 01:05:22.931
it doesn't take a moment to get there.
01:05:24.014 --> 01:05:27.669
It simply is the conversation that,
01:05:28.542 --> 01:05:30.910
that seems inevitable. Mm-hmm.
01:05:33.036 --> 01:05:36.386
You said that you've spent most of your life in
01:05:36.435 --> 01:05:39.753
cities and not so much in the
01:05:40.253 --> 01:05:43.926
natural world. I wonder, have you thought about
01:05:44.487 --> 01:05:48.859
if all these ideas, these questions
01:05:49.474 --> 01:05:53.650
about our current form of governance, if we
01:05:54.150 --> 01:05:58.047
transitioned it to more of an ecological direction where we're
01:05:58.547 --> 01:06:03.107
in tune with the natural world, Have you thought about how
01:06:03.220 --> 01:06:06.633
you would take to that? Would you find it kind of a culture
01:06:07.133 --> 01:06:10.094
shock since a lot of your life you've,
01:06:10.902 --> 01:06:15.345
you know, been around buildings and concrete and
01:06:15.361 --> 01:06:17.687
grocery stores and things like that?
01:06:19.233 --> 01:06:21.390
I don't see cities as unnatural.
01:06:23.322 --> 01:06:26.864
I see cities as a part of nature,
01:06:26.945 --> 01:06:31.635
just as we are. I see cities in
01:06:32.393 --> 01:06:36.551
many cases as instances
01:06:36.664 --> 01:06:40.724
in which certain aspects
01:06:41.985 --> 01:06:47.233
of our nature have been amplified
01:06:47.995 --> 01:06:54.189
and accelerated to such an extent that the cities become
01:06:54.613 --> 01:06:58.979
alienating, and they work against
01:06:59.591 --> 01:07:03.151
the premise of the city as a
01:07:03.200 --> 01:07:06.335
place that is home,
01:07:06.672 --> 01:07:10.852
as habitat. I don't
01:07:11.771 --> 01:07:15.988
see a future that
01:07:16.199 --> 01:07:20.121
is back to nature in
01:07:20.154 --> 01:07:23.912
that hippie sort of way where
01:07:24.187 --> 01:07:28.126
we are eliminating cities. I see
01:07:28.610 --> 01:07:33.067
instead ways in which we
01:07:33.439 --> 01:07:37.455
more tightly weave these
01:07:37.567 --> 01:07:40.863
different habitats into a
01:07:40.943 --> 01:07:44.785
tapestry where that includes the
01:07:46.362 --> 01:07:49.597
the den in which a bear lives, where that
01:07:50.097 --> 01:07:52.719
includes the ocean,
01:07:53.624 --> 01:07:58.431
the ocean floor where you find these extraordinary
01:07:58.543 --> 01:08:02.314
bacteria and archaea, that includes all of these,
01:08:04.455 --> 01:08:06.946
all these places where different creatures live.
01:08:08.580 --> 01:08:14.687
I see this as being something that needs to be more needs
01:08:15.187 --> 01:08:18.500
to be brought into sync in
01:08:18.597 --> 01:08:22.474
ways that potentially my efforts to reconsider
01:08:22.974 --> 01:08:26.888
how we tell time, maybe that those bring time
01:08:28.692 --> 01:08:31.785
into sync where the synchronization is not
01:08:31.833 --> 01:08:35.193
homogenizing. So I insist always on
01:08:35.694 --> 01:08:38.863
chronodiversity as a dimension of biodiversity, I insist
01:08:38.944 --> 01:08:43.040
always on the differences needing to be
01:08:43.200 --> 01:08:46.140
in a condition where they can coexist.
01:08:46.654 --> 01:08:49.690
I think that the city needs to coexist with all of
01:08:50.190 --> 01:08:54.412
these other environments much more than it currently is, and that
01:08:54.926 --> 01:08:58.669
necessitates changes to the city. That does not mean
01:08:58.845 --> 01:09:03.102
that I will move out of the city. I don't
01:09:03.602 --> 01:09:08.714
think that that is necessary, nor do I think that it is necessary that cities
01:09:08.942 --> 01:09:12.322
are eliminated. I would say,
01:09:12.596 --> 01:09:16.945
however, that the world
01:09:17.445 --> 01:09:22.314
that I imagine, that I try to conjure in
01:09:22.362 --> 01:09:25.767
this book most recently, but through much of my work
01:09:26.057 --> 01:09:30.155
as an experimental philosopher, work that happens within the
01:09:30.655 --> 01:09:34.772
art world, such as the work at the Anchorage Museum, I would say that
01:09:36.354 --> 01:09:39.971
the transition from the world
01:09:40.149 --> 01:09:43.932
that is familiar to us, that is familiar to me, to one
01:09:44.109 --> 01:09:47.714
that is operating on,
01:09:51.047 --> 01:09:55.377
on fluvial or arboreal time, for instance, or where
01:09:55.831 --> 01:09:59.412
we have successfully considered
01:09:59.989 --> 01:10:04.237
how other species make
01:10:04.737 --> 01:10:09.959
decisions and how we have come to some sort of decision-making
01:10:10.023 --> 01:10:13.501
process, some system that all
01:10:13.629 --> 01:10:17.043
life can participate in that is not setting
01:10:17.075 --> 01:10:20.425
the initial conditions based on how we think decisions should be
01:10:20.925 --> 01:10:24.544
made, but that is a system by consensus
01:10:24.689 --> 01:10:28.348
for making decisions by consensus. I think that that is
01:10:28.605 --> 01:10:31.722
a world that I would find challenging.
01:10:32.478 --> 01:10:36.478
I want to be totally honest. I don't think that
01:10:36.559 --> 01:10:40.110
I am at all prepared for the world that I
01:10:40.610 --> 01:10:44.817
conjure. I don't think that anyone
01:10:45.573 --> 01:10:49.075
who is honest about
01:10:49.252 --> 01:10:52.980
this and who is willing to
01:10:53.752 --> 01:10:58.799
let the imagination free is really prepared
01:10:59.056 --> 01:11:01.517
for what the imagination is able to conjure.
01:11:03.082 --> 01:11:05.648
I'm not concerned about that.
01:11:07.278 --> 01:11:11.105
I think that it will be— that it would be
01:11:12.533 --> 01:11:17.028
a really exciting transition
01:11:19.041 --> 01:11:22.390
that I would learn from, that would enrich me,
01:11:23.323 --> 01:11:26.109
where I would grow. But I don't think it would be easy.
01:11:26.820 --> 01:11:30.589
I don't think that I would— I
01:11:30.637 --> 01:11:33.665
don't think that that is a world in
01:11:33.697 --> 01:11:38.749
which I am even able
01:11:39.026 --> 01:11:42.699
to practice today.
01:11:43.784 --> 01:11:48.110
The act of living in
01:11:48.126 --> 01:11:51.807
those conditions in a way that would prepare
01:11:51.920 --> 01:11:55.770
me adequately for it. So I have to let
01:11:55.818 --> 01:11:59.297
my imagination carry me where, where it
01:11:59.797 --> 01:12:03.746
needs to go, and to do
01:12:04.246 --> 01:12:08.162
so in a way that is considering consequences
01:12:08.502 --> 01:12:11.709
and that is in alignment with my
01:12:12.209 --> 01:12:15.253
values. I need to do that work every day,
01:12:16.284 --> 01:12:21.029
and I also need to
01:12:21.109 --> 01:12:26.011
recognize that much of it is implausible,
01:12:26.766 --> 01:12:30.194
some of it impossible, and that
01:12:31.306 --> 01:12:34.987
the part
01:12:35.487 --> 01:12:38.747
of it that might, by some
01:12:39.679 --> 01:12:43.937
strange set of circumstances, come to pass is not
01:12:44.437 --> 01:12:46.476
going to be as I expected.
01:12:50.590 --> 01:12:54.077
Thinking about the future, say 50 years from
01:12:54.577 --> 01:12:58.385
now, which of your ideas do you hope becomes
01:12:58.642 --> 01:13:02.069
so obvious that people forget it was
01:13:02.281 --> 01:13:06.122
ever different or controversial. I don't think
01:13:06.622 --> 01:13:10.867
that I have any original ideas. I think that I am
01:13:12.033 --> 01:13:15.591
able to look out
01:13:16.091 --> 01:13:19.485
into the world in ways that
01:13:19.711 --> 01:13:24.369
are not so totally conditioned by my
01:13:25.135 --> 01:13:28.493
immediate surroundings and upbringing. That I
01:13:28.768 --> 01:13:32.263
am oblivious to what
01:13:32.344 --> 01:13:36.117
is there and what has been there that is
01:13:36.798 --> 01:13:41.303
potentially better than
01:13:42.373 --> 01:13:45.977
what we find as
01:13:46.089 --> 01:13:49.595
the default truth or the default conditions.
01:13:50.612 --> 01:13:53.880
So I think
01:13:53.929 --> 01:13:59.357
that more than anything else, if there is a
01:13:59.857 --> 01:14:03.464
legacy, or if there is an impact,
01:14:03.946 --> 01:14:08.429
or even if there isn't, if there is a world
01:14:08.929 --> 01:14:12.383
that, with complete ignorance of anything that I've
01:14:12.883 --> 01:14:16.676
done or said, that becomes what
01:14:16.692 --> 01:14:20.232
I would have wished. What I would
01:14:20.345 --> 01:14:24.345
wish most would be for
01:14:25.042 --> 01:14:26.223
that world to,
01:14:28.992 --> 01:14:32.837
to move beyond
01:14:34.185 --> 01:14:37.611
the certainties that we
01:14:38.111 --> 01:14:42.438
have today, to be a world of
01:14:43.279 --> 01:14:46.809
not knowing, actively not knowing.
01:14:48.208 --> 01:14:51.670
And of being in
01:14:52.431 --> 01:14:57.006
a constant state of observing
01:14:57.425 --> 01:15:02.130
and acting on those observations without
01:15:03.145 --> 01:15:06.806
confirmation bias or without
01:15:06.952 --> 01:15:10.822
the tendency to reinforce
01:15:12.617 --> 01:15:16.072
a system or its underlying assumptions to such an extent
01:15:16.572 --> 01:15:19.516
that it becomes self-fulfilling.
01:15:20.210 --> 01:15:23.119
It becomes, it becomes a trap.
01:15:24.072 --> 01:15:27.274
I would like to find a way to,
01:15:28.424 --> 01:15:33.395
or at least would like to see a world that is free
01:15:33.930 --> 01:15:37.991
of those tendencies toward
01:15:38.491 --> 01:15:42.812
reification and those tendencies toward unfounded
01:15:42.845 --> 01:15:46.393
certainty. That seem to be so much
01:15:46.652 --> 01:15:51.868
of the human habit, so much of our world
01:15:52.077 --> 01:15:55.788
and our actions within the world today.
01:15:55.949 --> 01:16:01.202
And I think that this is something
01:16:01.315 --> 01:16:05.706
that we find when we look to
01:16:06.881 --> 01:16:10.677
non-human beings, also when we look to Indigenous communities,
01:16:12.180 --> 01:16:15.053
And certainly we find traces of it everywhere.
01:16:15.666 --> 01:16:19.750
But I think that this active
01:16:19.799 --> 01:16:19.912
seeking,
01:16:23.318 --> 01:16:27.395
as opposed to this insistent
01:16:27.846 --> 01:16:31.810
knowing, that, that is what we most
01:16:32.123 --> 01:16:35.839
desperately need and what I would most hope to find
01:16:35.953 --> 01:16:38.249
were I to find myself 50 years in the future.
01:16:44.140 --> 01:16:47.383
Well, Jonathan, those are all the questions I have
01:16:47.400 --> 01:16:51.260
for you. I want to thank you for your time,
01:16:52.320 --> 01:16:54.257
for your imaginative ideas,
01:16:55.564 --> 01:16:58.842
and for a philosophy that I
01:16:58.890 --> 01:17:02.550
think reminds us that some
01:17:03.050 --> 01:17:06.578
of the best answers to our biggest questions may have
01:17:06.595 --> 01:17:08.818
been around long before we were here.
01:17:10.535 --> 01:17:15.316
I've really enjoyed this, and I deeply appreciate your
01:17:15.445 --> 01:17:18.660
reading of my words and your interpretation
01:17:18.908 --> 01:17:22.768
of my ideas in ways that I feel through this
01:17:23.268 --> 01:17:27.099
conversation. I think that the ideas have been enhanced. So thank you for that.
01:17:28.185 --> 01:17:31.469
Yeah, I mean, There's a lot to think about.
01:17:31.935 --> 01:17:35.740
You know, I found myself in this conversation, you know,
01:17:35.788 --> 01:17:39.834
just trying to wrap my mind around so
01:17:40.334 --> 01:17:44.362
much of the stuff you're talking about. Well, I find myself wrapping my mind—
01:17:44.940 --> 01:17:47.638
I find myself trying to wrap my mind around it too. I,
01:17:48.955 --> 01:17:55.284
I see these conversations as an opportunity to let
01:17:55.381 --> 01:17:56.256
go of any,
01:17:59.429 --> 01:18:03.557
anything I would insist
01:18:04.057 --> 01:18:07.972
on otherwise and to see what
01:18:08.702 --> 01:18:09.725
ideas emerge.
01:18:24.444 --> 01:18:28.949
For more information about the Anchorage Museum, visit anchoremuseum.org.
01:18:31.955 --> 01:18:35.106
This podcast was produced by me, Cody Liska, for the Anchorage
01:18:35.606 --> 01:18:38.402
Museum, with additional help from Julie Decker.
01:18:41.750 --> 01:18:44.305
Chattermarks music is produced by Keys Open Doors.