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If we acknowledge the myriad presences around us not as objects but as subjects in their own right -- as open-ended beings with their own inherent spontaneity and active agency -- ... then we straightaway begin to feel ourselves as members of a community of living subjects, and to wonder about the quality of our relations with the other beings in our neighborhood.
My notes on Descartes chapter and pp. 81-82:
Wild Ethics is essentially trying to replace the Cartesian view that has been central to Western thought since Descartes with the views of Spinoza (a Dutch philosopher and contemporary of Descartes) [Ethics, 1677]. Sadly for our planet and climate and many species, Descartes won the day, despite no scientific argument to recommend his view over Spinoza's.
p98 The discursive style of trees is so unlike that of us two-legged apes ... that it is exceedingly difficult to hear them speak at all. A sandstone cliff is slower still ... But sandstone cliffs perform rap songs in comparison to the Gregorian Chant of continental plates. ... When they do speak, suddenly, in voices we apprehend corporeally--when their inert tension is released as earthquake or as tsunami, or when the molten interior of the Earth erupts as volcano --- they speak with voices so commanding, so powerful, that we struggle to apprehend them with human speech.
p99 The irreversible loss of biodiversity we are witnessing today appears to be directly connected to one creature's stark insistence on the singular importance of its own, rational attunement to the world. But how can a truly modern people think that rational thought, cut off from its source, will not eventually wither alongside all those others who are now withering or who have already slipped away?
p111. when the remarkable freedom of our capacity for abstract thought is not coupled with a sense of our ethical obligation to the land, and with a sense of wonder for all those other beings going about their lives, thought can quickly become hugely destructive.
p112. When we act as we do in the modern mode, as if we humans alone have consciousness, or as if we alone have language, then in fact we are not being fully human.
p115. Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14, 6th man to walk on the Moon: "Suddenly, from behind the rim of the Moon, in long, slow-motion moments of immense majesty, there emerges a sparkling blue and white jewel, a light, delicate sky-blue sphere laced with slowly swirling veils of white, rising gradually like a small pearl in a thick sea of black mystery. It takes more than a moment to fully realize this is Earth ... home."
see Space quotes
p154. If the project of modernity is based on the double notion that humans are somehow of central concern and that the rational intellect rules supreme over the body, then modern cultures are likely to always have ecological crises, because such a tradition of thought disregards anything other than the human. If instead we accept that we ... are within ... a more-than-human world, where sentience lives at large within the land, the air, and the oceans ... we encourage a culture of steady and careful listening.
p196. Power need not be a hierarchical concept; it can be a relational one. Everyone in the Klallam community had a different power ... Everyone could do something that differed from what anyone else could do. ... everyone held a piece of what constituted the community in its entirety.
p197. For the past 400 years, our philosophical tradition has been deeply informed by Descartes's "I think therefore I am." [the West and the Klallam both recognized the uniqueness of human thought, but] the ways each interpreted the observation were astonishingly asymmetrical. In [the modern West]'s interpretation, it went "I think, therefore I am separate and superior". In [the Klallam]'s interpretation, it went "I think, therefore I am pitiful." -- [(p196-7 collage/paraphrase:) We can't fly like the birds, inhabit the deep seas, or live as long as a tree. Other animals are better able to stalk prey, some have keener eyes or noses or ears.] All we can do is sit here and think about things, and it causes us to be able to cause problems within ourselves.
...The Klallam couple their observation of humans' power to think with the humbling insight that this power, like others left unchecked, can become a source of corruption. [their] interpretation of ... the power to think-- is not that it elevates them above [the] world. It is, rather, that it demands of them extra care to not become too alienated.
p200-201. [Campbell and Butler studied Olympic Peninsula over the last 7,400 years.] Throughout this vast stretch of time, humans lived sustainably in these lands [Olympic Peninsula] [without overfishing] ... for the mind-boggling span of more than seven millennia ... despite the fact that the region supported extremely high human population densities, and cultures had the technology to greatly reduce salmon populations.
[What stopped the Indians from overfishing?] a spiritual and taboo system emphasizing respect, propitiation, fear, and balance limited salmon harvesting...
p204. The Klallam understood that the question to ask of technology is this: how do we learn to use it in such a way that it does not diminish ourselves or the land we inhabit in the long run? ... Moral responsibility follows from power, and power without responsibility begets exploitation.
p211. The Stockholm Resilience Centre [2009] ... identified nine so-called "planetary boundaries". Together the nine make up a safe planetary operating space within which humans could thrive indefinitely without upsetting the relatively stable conditions of the Holocene epoch ... inside which humans have lived for the past ten thousand years. ... pushing even one [of the 9] beyond a critical threshold would be enough to seriously upset the Holocene stable state. ... 3 of those factors have already been pushed beyond a critical threshold: climate change, biodiversity loss, and the nitrogen cycle. ... An entirely new Earth epoch is upon us.
one species among the multitudes has become a destructive geological force ... setting the Gaian story on a course likely to be very, very different from anything this planet has seen before.
p212. [Earth's] actions play out at scales and at orders of complexity vastly beyond [human's] capacity to contain, to manage, to control, often even to imagine.
At no time in the last 650,000 years has the oceans' basic chemistry changed more rapidly than now. ... by weight, the oceans absorb 22 Million VW Bugs of CO2 every single day. .. [which] lowers the surface ocean pH [acidification]. ... the scientific community underestimated both the magnitude and the rate ... it takes millions of years for the corals to come back.
p214. the major cause of worry is not so much the amount of CO2 added to the oceans, but the rate... the creatures do not have the time to adapt.
p215. we must go back about 55 million years to get a perspective on the present ... acidifying oceans. ... The last time this happened, 55 million years ago, it took the oceans over 100,000 years to recover.
p219. The notion that the rational intellect can predict, contain, and manage technology's every impact on the biosphere .... we have not yet absorbed, collectively, the mind's categorical entanglement with the biosphere ... We have not yet recognized that ignorance will inevitably increase proportional to technology's accumulated leverage on the fabric of life... This is the curious paradox of modern technology...
p220. the chemical balance in the oceans began to shift precisely at the time when combustion engines were first used on a mass scale. ... the massive disruptions to food webs now underway took everyone by surprise ... it took roughly 200 years between the creation of the engines and when the researchers first became aware of the problem. Weather reason will now be able to contain the forces it has unleashed is not certain.
we are discovering how tremendously little we actually know about ocean acidification. [overview of research showing how the effect on calcifying ocean life is unknown] ...
No one really has a clear understanding of what is being unleashed, not even those who have made it a career to study this. This wicked dilemma is a direct consequence of the epistemological optimism ["I think, therefore I am superior"] that has been inherent in the modern story since its beginning. The decisions we make now will be felt over hundreds of thousands of years.
p247. Given the forces already unleashed and the damage already suffered, a radically more inclusive narrative perspective offers the best alternative to the egocentric hubristic and short-sided story of modernity
p254. My words, not a quotation. Harding's Deep Time Walk: each step is 1 million years. Walking the Earth's time line is a 4.5km walk. About half way, multicellular organism appear. Near the end of the hike: species of wise apes first appeared 20 centimeters before the end, and Descartes and the ensuing human changes to our biosphere (e.g. ocean acidification) appear 0.4 millimeters before the end of the walk.
p266. [The Elwha Dam (built in 1910) was removed in 2011-2012, to restore the salmon that sustained the Klallam for over 7,000 years.] Already birds, bugs, and mammals are feasting on salmon eggs and carcasses ... Bears, cougars, minks, and bobcats have quickly learned to scavenge again on salmon carcasses...
scientist at the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center... speaks of the Elwha dam removals in awe: "It is so mind blowing to me, the numbers of fish, and seeing the birds respond immediately to the salmon being there. It makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up."
p267. The act of restoring the Elwha to health is a concrete political act of healing a landscape, but it is also an important symbolic gesture, precisely an act of restorying.... it symbolizes a striving to create a more complex, reciprocal, integrated, and beautiful relationship between earthlings and their particular Earth region. It is part of the larger effort to dismantle the old story of separation [the Cartesian split].
.. the Elwha strives to make itself heard ... at long last, the human collective is learning to listen again.
In the return of wholeness to the landscape ... is the return of wholeness to the people. Not only for the tribe, but also for the rest of us. [Lynda Mapes]
p272. The provincial story of human exceptionalism does not withstand sustained critical attention... the inherent inconsistencies are already causing it to implode. Change is inevitable. ... Part of the work entrusted to this generation must be to hasten this changeover.
p273. ... unweaving the story of human exceptionalism has begun ... We see the old story's worn fabric, and find we are deeply embedded within a far larger story. That larger story is awe inspiring, terrific, and very beautiful.
p274. Salmon ... have been accepting the responsibility to return from the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans for at least 6 million years. ... 15,000 times the time that has passed since some thinking apes first thought it wise to treat the Earth, and all her processes, as a machine. ... it would seem to be far more parsimonious and precise to think of salmon not as objects, not as commodities, but as elders.