Materialities, Perceptions and Ethics (Book chapter that critiques Geo-Ethics) — Harold Sjursen Harold Sjursen Philosophy of Technology & Global EthicsHarold Sjursen

Chapter 6
Materialities, Perceptions and Ethics

Harold P. Sjursen and Luiz Oosterbeek

Abstract Ethics is often the distillation of cultural and social tradition, including religious beliefs. Prominent cultural differences are frequently due to geographic and environmental influences which in turn may be reflected in ethical norms. Material- ities interplay with understandings and beliefs, since human adaptive strategies are conditioned by the first and addressed by the second, these being guided by foresight and its uncertain drivers, these, in turn, raising the need for ethical considerations. In the West since Biblical times and Greek antiquity the notion that natural resources were a gift to be consumed, used and enjoyed, has been determinative. The emer- gence of such an understanding may be traced back to water management strategies in given areas of very productive narrow riverine land amid a dominant low natural productivity in most of the territory. Generally, because of the belief that nature was self-renewing and her resources essentially inexhaustible, discussions of the human exploitation of the natural environment have been framed with little acknowledg- ment of any ethical duties toward nature. This lacuna is challenged in the twentieth century by philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Han Jonas, and it has subse- quently become a prominent discussion among environmentalist philosophers, in an age when the impact of human activity upon the earth has made the need for a global ethics compatible with the geosciences a matter of urgency. This chapter will consider the imperative of responsibility that the new found powers inherent in techno-science have put before humanity and how this duty can be honored.

Keywords Technology · Understanding · Responsibility · Ecological · Geoethics

H. P. Sjursen
New York University, New York, USA e-mail: harold.sjursen@nyu.edu

L. Oosterbeek (B)
Geosciences Centre, Instituto Politécnico de Tomar, Tomar, Portugal e-mail: loost@ipt.pt

International Council for Philosophy and Human Sciences–CIPSH, Tomar, Portugal

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 73 G. Di Capua and L. Oosterbeek (eds.), Bridges to Global Ethics,
SpringerBriefs in Geoethics,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22223-8_6

74 H. P. Sjursen and L. Oosterbeek

6.1 Introduction

We are becoming aware that the earth, home and support for life as we understand it, is not likely for much longer to sustain the patterns of climate regularity which have allowed part of humanity to flourish with relative ease amidst material comfort. Considering this reality from the singular perspective of humanity (what else can we do?), if anxiety doesn’t overcome us, we may experience a form of cognitive dissonance and interpret the growing body of evidence as indications of something entirely different; or we might turn to our creation myths and stories and await divine intervention of one sort or another, (religious or not—Schuman et al., 2018), thus expecting the end of an era, if not of the species itself (like in past millenarian approaches—Skrimshire, 2019); or, in what could be the spirit of rationality, we might invest our hope in the power of techno-science to solve the problem (as a sort of re-enacted positivism—Fawzy et al., 2020). There are numerous variations on these three paradigmatic themes, but no one of them squarely faces the question of ethical responsibility, which is a fundamental one to integrate the material and intangible dimensions of the process, allowing for behavior adaptation and cultural transformation.

In the past, tradition invoked a sense of responsibility through a call or message from the divine; our responsibility was to heed the call. In our era we are presented with no such call. The philosopher Hans Jonas has put it in these terms (Jonas, 1996):

It was once religion which told us that we are all sinners, because of original sin. It is now the ecology of our planet which pronounces us all to be sinners because of the excessive exploits of human inventiveness. It was once religion which threatened us with a last judgment at the end of days. It is now our tortured planet which predicts the arrival of such a day without any heavenly intervention. The latest revelation—from no Mount Sinai, from no Mount of the Sermon, from no Bo (tree of Buddha)—is the outcry of mute things themselves that we must heed by curbing our powers over creation, lest we perish together on a wasteland of what was creation.

Ethical responsibility is a concept that requires elaboration. Hart (1994) distin- guished 4 or 5 senses of the term as used in legal discourse; the philosopher Feinberg (1984) had a lengthier list with a greater emphasis on moral responsibility. But outside of specific interactions between individuals or groups a broader sense of ethical responsibility is difficult to define (Golding, 1986). It would most obviously fit within deontological ethics as a duty. But what kind of duty and what basis that duty would have requires further reflection. Concepts such as “the good” and “duty” have in recent times been discussed in terms of “right” (Rawls, 1971). In the 1970’s, Stone (1972), a law professor at the University of Southern California, argued for granting trees a legal voice. While this kind of approach may motivate ecological concern, it is only an attempt to extend existing legal and ethical standards beyond their normal range of application and not substantially change the notion of respon- sibility itself or clarify a broad sense of ecological responsibility. Furthermore, it raises the ethical question of how can rights be separated from duties/responsibilities (Fredman, 2008) and, through that process, be awarded to living species or other materiality that would not be able to commit to responsibilities. Such an address,

6 Materialities, Perceptions and Ethics 75 in any case, echoes a fundamental ethical flaw of the Human Rights Charter1: the

non-explicit consideration of related duties.

6.2 Materialities and Ethical Imperatives

An ethical imperative for our time is presented by the crisis for humanity dependent on the earth. By this crisis is meant the incipient breakdown of the set of natural dynamics that has controlled and sustained the balance that has permitted advanced life forms to flourish and the concomitant transition toward another yet undefined form of dynamic activity. The ethical imperative emerges from the point of view that human life has a specific kind of consciousness (Damasio, 1999), which renders it responsible in a way different than other species. These are the prerequisites for ethics of any sort: the ability to act in ways that make a difference and the reflective awareness of this ability. The ethical question can be stated roughly as follows: Since we, humanity, to some degree (and probably a very great degree), through our actions have disturbed the earth’s ecological balance in a way that will substantially change how and even if the earth can support our life and the lives of other species, does humanity have a responsibility to repair the damage?

The ethical question is seconded by the material question: “1) can humans survive if their ecosystems are disrupted to the point when fundamental materialities, as water or sources of proteins, are destroyed or become insufficient?” and “2) do humans have the capacity and resources to repair damage at the sale of ecosystems?” If self- interest (self-care) is a duty, then the answer would appear obviously to be yes. But, of course, self-interest is a very slippery concept. Is it always in our self-interest to maximize benefit? And, if so, for the long term and for our individual selves only, or for our family, tribe or nation? Or even all humankind and into the indefinite future? And if it is anything like the latter, who gets to decide what constitutes benefit, especially since actions that would produce enduring benefits to the earth and her ecosystem are more than likely to lead to a myriad of perceived hardships.

But apart from these difficulties, one may question what it would even mean for humanity to fix the earth; is it our job to maintain and repair the natural environment and perhaps even to design an improved version? Modern versions of the traditional Jewish ethical principle of וע ןוקית ל מ [tikun olam] have sometimes been extended to the realm of natural ecology (Troster, 2008), but the aspiration to design an improved version of the world or humanity is something inspired by high-tech futurists like Ray Kurzweil (2006) and represents a techno-spirituality that resides at the pinnacle techno-optimism.

As an ethical issue it falls under the techno-science/rationality paradigm. To regard it under the category of religious promise and morality, such as a literal belief in God’s promise recorded in the Bible in the book of Genesis to Noah after the flood never again to destroy the world, steps back from ethical responsibility (Sjursen, 2018).

1 https://www.un.org/en/udhrbook/pdf/udhr_booklet_en_web.pdf (accessed 21 September 2022).

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But seeing it within the techno-science paradigm, for example, as an anticipation that a technological fix will alleviate the threats of climate change, raises a host of issues concerning the possibility of ethical responsibility itself in an age dominated by technology (Jonas, 1972). We will return to this issue.

The philosopher Toby Ord’s recent book, The Precipice: Existential Risk and The Future of Humanity, places humanity of a precipice that is both situational and existential (Ord, 2020). He characterizes the current state of the world as teetering on a precipice where the likelihood is that we fall into an abyss that ends humanity. The reason for this is our own doing; the existential threats of nuclear and biological weapons follow from the progression of technological development from agriculture to our present state of hyper-urbanization. The circumstances we now find ourselves in do not constitute a predicament we can escape from, despite being the circum- stantial consequences of the game we have played, that is, it is not a problem to be solved by means of further technology. This very unsettling book, written in consul- tation with numerous specialists and experts, makes the case that we are now in a genuinely unprecedented state whereby the possibility and perhaps the likelihood that if conditions do not render all life impossible then at least they may lead to the annihilation of human life by degrading our planet to the point where it will be unsustainable. This situation would result from a combination of missteps and negligence, all the consequences of the prevailing capitalist-consumerist-nationalist ways in which humanity is now organized. This goes well beyond a predicament because it strikes directly at the heart of human existence itself. What is meant here?

Past societies did face, in several occasions, the challenge of major climatic changes. While in many cases adaptation entailed primarily migration, i.e., a response consisting of keeping the same behavior pattern while moving away from the area or region where it was no longer sustainable, on occasions it also incorporated a dimension of behavior transformation, as when modern humans adapted to harsher environmental constraints of the late glacial period (McLaughlin et al., 2021), or when they moved from an extensive economy of hunting large mammals, toward a model of economic intensification, through sedentism and domestication (Roffet- Salque et al., 2018). Also, failing to take into consideration the main material drivers of the ecosystem equilibrium led, in the past, to the collapse of countless cultures and civilizations (e.g., in Easter Island—Bahn & Flenley, 1992), while cycles of warming and cooling trends tend to trigger different responses (Oosterbeek, 2022).

6.3 Perceptions and Perspectives

Because, as Ord (2020) explains, the predicament, even to be understood, must be viewed from the perspective of humanity, a different mode of reflection is required. Ethics, the set of principles and guideposts to help us do the right thing, is most commonly addressed from the perspective of an individual, infrequently from that of a group and recently, but still infrequently, from a global point of view. Even these latter two approaches to ethics do not help because they do not change the perspective,

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but only zoom out. The perspective question is related to the predicament issue in the context of history. Ord looks at human history as an anthropologist or geologist would, that is, all told it is only a minute fraction of the entire history of the earth. In this way the question of the future viability of human life is that of adjustment and adaptation. Humans were, as they emerged from Homo erectus, at a serious disadvantage compared with other species, not particularly well suited to meet the demands of survival. But the strong cognitive abilities of humanity were put to good use—for example, the making of tools, extending to almost endless limits the innate biological capacities of the human body, or the invention of agriculture which meant that nutritional needs could be reliably met with much less effort and stress. Throughout human history it was through technological innovations on a grand scale such as this that enhanced the quality of life for humans, however generally with an accompanying degradation to the natural environment, which for long was not so severe, due to the low numbers of humans (except in extreme cases, like islands).

This long-standing game, according to Ord, has, as it were, largely played itself out, as the environmentalist Bill McKibben (2019) has recently suggested or as Holly Jean Buck (2019) expresses it: “are we at the point—let us call it “the shift”—where it is worth talking about more radical or extreme measures?” Her argument is that we are invested with the notion that nature is stable and self-renewing and consequently averse to the effort to correct the developing imbalance through geo-engineering. At some point the crisis will leave us with no other apparent choice and the pressure of crisis will compel the application of some form of geo-engineering. This is hardly an adequate ethical basis for the shift from regarding the earth as our resource to exploit to re-engineering and re-designing it to suit our perceived needs.

The challenge to such dire and pessimistic assessments calls for a new formulation of the fundamental relationship of humanity to the larger natural order. In the words of Luís Loures (Ergen & Loures, 2021):

This results in a new attitude towards the environment, which is not a utopic return to the past but, instead, the attitude of identifying the meaning of a sustainable development as a process of change, in which resource utilization, investment, technological development, and institutional changes are in a reciprocal harmony, increasing current and future potential of satisfying human needs and aspirations.

The human game, if by that we mean the constellation of customs, practices and rules that comprise the paradigms of human life on earth, has denied the multiple symbiotic relationships inherent in nature. Even if traditional, and probably prehis- toric, communities had a more life-integrated approach to landscape management, as shown in the management of the Amazon rain forest by indigenous communities for the last 5000 years (Piperno et al., 2021), we have come to define life in a manner that ignores or denies constraints on the willed prerogatives of Homo faber. Contempo- rary technology has vastly expanded the belief that human beings are able to control their fate and their environment as a result of the use of tools. This problem is a central theme in Arendt’s (1998) classic The Human Condition, where she argues that the realm of action, that is, deliberation and choice by an ever renewing and pluralistic community, was usurped (already by Plato) in favor of a politics which favored the artificing of an idealized polis.

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6.4 A Non-anthropocentric Human Perspective

In this chapter we explore the idea of a non-anthropocentric approach to geoethics, moving beyond such artificing approach. The common features shared by all living things, that is, what humanity shares with all life rather than what sets it apart is a likely point of departure. The ethical concerns for the earth’s precarious ecosystem, since it affects more than human endeavor, are better understood from a platform that represents life rather than humanity. Such an approach abandons the presupposition that humanity is the apotheosis and perfection of life and deserving of special status because of that. This does not mean, however, that we can understand things as other life forms do, nor that we need to denigrate the status of humanity. Indeed, it is just that which creates the need for human responsibility in the first place. Yet this approach raises questions for which universally agreed upon answers still evade us. The very idea of life is in this category. Hans Jonas (2001) in the Foreword to his collection of essays The Phenomenon of Life states:

“... seek to break through the anthropocentric confines of idealist and existentialist philos- ophy as well as through the materialist confines of natural science. In the mystery of the living body both poles are in fact integrated. The great contradictions which man discovers in himself —freedom and necessity, autonomy and dependence, self and world, relation and isolation, creativity and mortality— have their rudimentary traces in even the most primitive forms of life, each precariously balanced between being and not-being, and each already endowed with an internal horizon of “transcendence.””

It is this set of “rudimentary traces” that can provide a point of departure for the kind of non-anthropomorphic ethics we seek as it can offer an interpretation of ethical responsibility. It implies an understanding of life building from its materiality, beyond anthropocentric interpretations of its meaning or function, and in this sense, it also seats apart from current concepts that still perceive humans has deserving a special, even if negative, status (such as the definition of a geological era based on human presence, like the former Anthropozoic, or human action, like the current Anthro- pocene—Keulartz, 2012). This also supports Jonas’s assertion of the impotence of traditional ethical theory in the wake of radical technological transformation.

Geoethics (Peppoloni & Di Capua, 2022 and this volume) offers the possibility of a different perspective than that of contemporary techno-science on humanity’s relationship to earth, a perspective from which a mutual dependency and intimacy is perceived. Understanding earlier, pre-scientific and pre-technological, attitudes toward the earth requires historical, ethnographic and hermeneutical studies. The geoethics techno-scientific paradigm needs to include evidence from research from these approaches as well from types of physical evidence. To some extent, this is already incorporated in common practice of geological and archeological investiga- tion; the discovery of tools or utensils in an archeological find, for example, raises ethnographic questions as to how they were used. But if these questions are posed only from the standpoint of utility a modern technological bias is introduced that may occlude understanding other values, as Vere Gordon Childe (1956) suggested long ago.

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The good archaeologist who can himself detach such a flake from the core is in truth re- enacting in his own mind the thought of Mousterian man. He may not be able to express it in an equation and it is certain that he cannot formulate it precisely as the Mousterian would. The latter’s rule would probably run something like this: “To make a D-scraper collect a flint nodule (1) at full moon, (2) after fasting all day, (3) address him politely with “words of power,” (...).”

To put it simply, geoethics needs to connect with the past and modern technology may inhibit this. The integrated geoarcheological approach offers a possible model for the kind of multi-disciplinary investigation necessary to approach the ethical problems posed by the present state of the earth.

The philosopher and psychiatrist Thomas Fuchs in an interview about his book defending human being (Fuchs, 2021) offered this observation (Seralathan & Brahmee, 2021):

Classical humanism is undoubtedly anthropocentric to a high degree, and this can no longer be sustained today. Its lack of consideration of our embeddedness in the earthly environment is all too palpable today in the ecological crisis. The post-humanist criticism of anthro- pocentrism, however, overshoots the mark. To radically question or even want to overcome man because of his misconduct towards nature is absurd—humans are the only beings who can take responsibility for the world, there are no others. As I write in my introduction: Even an ecological redefinition of our relationship with the earthly environment will succeed only if our own embodiment and aliveness—as connectedness or conviviality with our natural environment—is at its centre.

The issue of how to frame the ethical question presents a genuine απoρι ́α (aporia). How would the classical moral virtues of courage, moderation, justice and piety apply to the stance of humanity toward the earth? Our actions toward the earth might exhibit moderation or a kind of justice, but they would be more for our sake than that of the earth. Questions like what does the earth desire? or what gives the earth pleasure? would be quite misplaced if not absurd. Ethics is about character development and social good, matters pertaining to humanity, individually and collectively. Are we to treat the earth as though it were a person and accord it rights and responsibilities as we do with business corporations? This line of inquiry will perhaps only lead us astray.

6.5 Ethics Beyond Experiment

Why is it that humanistic studies generally have been ineffective at expressing the realities of climate change in broad existential terms? The novelist Ghosh (2016) has argued in a non-fiction treatise, we live in an era of derangement, that is, of widespread insanity and confusion. In his view phenomena like climate change are traditionally ignored, one reason being simply the limits of human imagination. Historically, whenever societies had to face major climate induces changes, like late hunters in face of the melting glaciers, or Greenland Vikings facing the arrival of Little Ice Age, the major difficulty has been to be able to move from the perceived scale of

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meteorology to the long-term scale of climate. Maintain a farming economy while the soils got frozen, or thinking meteorology and climate are the same, are expressions of such difficulty, while overcoming it is beyond the scale of experiment, as it requires a degree of abstraction based on probabilistic, science. We could readily agree that the scientific representations of climate change lack existential qualities that may make it seem possible to refute them simply by taking a walk on winter morning. But Ghosh indicts the literary arts for this failure as well. In The Great Derangement he explores how the modern novel has been an imaginative failure in the face of global warming. His argument suggests a more general failure, that of the human imagination to deal with the uncanny in any way other than shying away from it. How do we learn to think such phenomena? Hannah Arendt speaks of unlearning and thinking without banisters as a necessity in our times (Arendt, 2018). This is the task for the humanities in the face of modern technology. Ghosh’s main point, however, is that even in the face of daily evidence of the serious degradation of the earth’s environment our larger imaginative faculty does not adequately represent this. A question that underlies the ethical consideration is how can the human imagination assimilate scientific data. This is not a matter of mere scientific literacy, but one of limits of the human brain to assimilate and process all the relevant data, even in the case of scientists.

This ethical question, of whether and if what kind ethical responsibility humanity has to repair the damage done to the earth, at once becomes a kind of engineering problem. What would this repair entail? Does it mean to restore the status quo ante? Would that even be possible? And if it were, back to when? With this the engineering question reverts to a more purely ethical question. If we could turn back the clock, to what point would that be? To a time when the inhabitants of wealthy nations lived in the comforts produce by industry while most of the underdeveloped world sustained the relative stability of the climate and the abundance of natural resources while their own inhabitants lived lives of far less material comfort? What ethical principle could justify this approach?

In a nutshell, this global debate was performed on occasion of a discussion on the conservation of Lascaux prehistoric cave paintings (Coye, 2011). The cave of Lascaux having been discovered in 1940; it immediately attracted the visit of thou- sands of people, willing to see the unexpected and very impressive paintings from the Paleolithic. This, however, triggered a degradation of the cave’s ecosystem, threat- ening the preservation of the paintings, and this led to the decision, by the French Minister of Culture André Malraux, of its closure to the public, in 1963, allowing for a relative ecological stability, while a monitoring system was installed. The later corrosion of such device led to its replacement by the turn of the century, and this replacement disturbed once again the ecosystem of the cave, which suffered from a sequence of moisture, fungi and lichen destructive expansion. By 2009, a debate brought together experts from all over the world to discuss on the strategies to face the threat to the paintings: try to retrieve the past ecological balance? Find a new equilibrium? Accept the final degradation of the paintings allowing for their visit? Further restrict visits and preserve the new equilibrium while creating replicas of the cave for the public?

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The divide between those (predominantly from earth sciences) that pledged for retrieving past environment and those (predominantly from life sciences and human- ities) that considered such an approach impossible and even naïve, as portrayed in the volume edited by Noël Coye, in a sense mimic the current debates on our global responsibilities and possibilities, namely when the discussion is structured around the alternatives of preserving some access to visitors and experts (despite the nega- tive impact on conservation) or further restricting access to all visitors (despite the negative impact on accessibility), even if the final decision that was taken, to produce replicas and further restrict visits to the original cave even to experts, would hardly be acceptable for addressing our global challenges.

Why should a multifaceted ethical question like this take the form of an impera- tive? On what basis can a duty or obligation to the earth be asserted? Apart from an acknowledgment of a duty to others which recognizes their (or our mutual) depen- dency for survival upon largess of the earth, in what way are any of us obligated to the earth? What is our duty and to whom or what are we so obliged? To talk about a duty to the earth is something in traditional Western ethics rarely considered. If it is a duty to humanity, then the ethical issue is exacerbated because, especially now given the power of technology, we are often dealing with people we will never meet, the inhabitants of the earth in the indefinite future.

As humans, what are we entitled to from our natural environment? Many would say clean air and pure water. What about biodiversity, temperate climate? And what to say about cultural diversity, itself rooted in diverse ecological contexts, including cultural heritage, as evidenced in the case of the cave of Lascaux? The process of life is one of consuming—how much of that is our right?

These kinds of issues, resistant as they are to our most frequent norms of evaluation and analysis, have largely emerged in an age dominated by technology and are what prompted Hans Jonas to call for a new ethics for a technological age (Jonas, 1979). The points he made in support of this proposal might be summarized as follows:

(1) Technology has advanced from tool to machine to automatic device—this leads to the situation where some technology may be beyond human control.
(2) Technological processes are often not well understood and produce unantici- pated consequences—emergent technologies manifest a high degree of human ignorance due to complexity.
(3) Technology produces results disproportionate to human action—this raises the issue of overwhelming power, as we can destroy the world with the simple push of a button.
(4) Technology may alter the environment permanently—that is, our actions may be irreversible.
(5) Results of technology may only present themselves in the distant future— because potentially damaging consequences affect the unknown and indefinite future, they lie beyond normal motivations for our concern.
The two main aspects of his thesis are that the nature of human action has

changed such that we now possess extraordinary power, entirely disproportionate to our natural stature, capable of destruction beyond the limits of our imagination.

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This implies a qualitative change in relation to past human extractive strategies, as those were framed within a space–time scale that allowed for regeneration, even if this could be occasionally challenged, namely after the industrial revolution. The current technological impact operates in a new time scale, beyond the possibility of human perception and of ecosystem resilience, which sets a new framework for human reflection and action. This technologically mediated power, in addition to surpassing our imaginative faculties, is in a sense not controlled by us because its consequences are unpredictable. We are able to initiate processes that we do not fully understand, that are powerful beyond our natural means, and which may yield consequences unanticipated and unperceived by us.

6.6 Understanding the Past and Technology

These are the questions that motivate geoethics. The motivation is strengthened by the belief, supported by the ever-increasing power of techno-science, that the earth is truly under our dominion, that we can control and manage it to suit our needs and preferences, even when scientists demonstrate this is not the case. Let us review some of the issues that need resolution.

Most recent discussions concerning the ethics of geo-engineering solutions to the hardship and destruction to the natural environment by anthropogenic climate change have focused on cost, benefit and risk analysis and whether on those grounds geo-engineering solutions are justified ethically (Mittiga, 2019). This approach is not discussed here, although the notion that a radical intervention designed to alter the natural operations of the globe requires, we believe, greater justification than the results of cost, benefit and risk analysis.

A major driver of historical and anthropological assessment of the past concerns the understanding of human being/environment adaptive processes as representing a growing mastering of environmental resources (i.e., raw materials) through by tech- nology, specific techniques combined with logistics. The progress of civilization was measured by such means which, in the face of the unintended consequences of envi- ronmental degradation must be viewed in a different light. This kind of assessment is conducted under set of operative intellectual categories, namely the presuppositions of science concerning the natural environment. But this may limit our understanding in a way as suggested by Heidegger and others. Although science as we understand the term descended from the ancient Greeks, technology existed prior to the advent of this mode of understanding (Lloyd, 1970), yet at this stage technology as human craftsmanship did not was not mediated by the theoretical constructs of philosophy or science.

Despite the awareness of scholars of the explanatory limitations of this approach (in terms of the understanding of motivation related to choices, namely given the lack of sufficiently accurate information on intangible cultural and psychological drivers), such an assessment allows one to approach contextual constraints of human behavior and offers examples of sustainable management of the environment in the past, even

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if edaphology, biome or demographic variables are very different from present ones. There is a consensus among scholars that first written narratives (religious or not) are written later versions of earlier oral, mostly sang, tales, include behavior prescriptions that bridge with current notions of moral and ethics. But we know very little about the mindset of these early societies. The very idea of nature may not have been operative, let alone thought about in anything like scientific terms, in ancient Mesopotamian culture, yet they did develop a way of understanding and relating to their natural environment (Rochberg, 2016). Such traditions at least suggest the possibility of an alternative mode, one not wedded to the current prevailing mechanistic model, for understanding our own relationship to our natural environment.

However, the approach of humanity to its past, based alone on the material evidence through a logic of resources management is, in fact, in line with an under- standing of the industrial societies of their contexts as being resources alone. In this sense, the assessment of the past, necessarily reduced to the tangible dimension due to the absence of other evidence, tends to lead to a societal approach to the present also along those lines (the notion of progress being embedded in it). This triggers, today, different types of reaction, that may be clustered around two extreme posi- tions: the negation of the interest of history and archeology, replacing them with a literary non-scientific revision of the past, in order to demonstrate past adaptive sustainable behavior patterns (from the imagination about past societies “will” to the speculations around the “Paleolithic diet,” which find no hard evidence from archeological research); the negation of the relevance of non-material dimensions for the understanding of past societies (and, as a result, of contemporary societies, explained through the notions of competition, survival of the fittest).

This division, in attitudes toward nature and the role of human activity, generated two disparate camps, one a limited techno-scientific view and the other a nostalgic understanding derived from literary accounts produced by a truncated imagination.

The assessment of the past entails, hence, wider ethical implications, concerning the legitimacy of given approaches, their validity across time and beyond specific contexts. Also, technology and logistics being core drivers of the academic study of the past (and of ethology studies involving other species too), bringing in ethical concerns that build form those axes may prove to be useful to embrace a more diverse understanding of human behavior without falling into negationism and anti-science. Yet, without abandoning the fruit of these inherited practices, geoethics needs to assimilate some of the insights offered by traditional perspectives.

One might see geoethics as it is being proposed here in light of the overview provided already in the 1930s by Lewis Mumford in his call-to-action for the humanity to consider its options in the face of the threat to its very survival by ecolog- ical catastrophe or industrialized warfare (Mumford, 1934). At about the same time Heidegger was formulating a critique of technology which became more specifically a negative critique of cyber-technology. His analysis was derived from his reading of the meaning of technology in classical Greek philosophy. His argument when put together with the notion of Gaia suggests an interesting approach to a kind of geoethics that is less influenced by techno-science and which steps back from a

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purely “resources and use for humans” perspective. Let us consider some of the key aspects of this perspective.

Heideger’s later (post Zein und Zeit) perspective (Heidegger & Stambaugh, 1996), when combined with aspects of Santiago theory and the Gaia worldview (Dicks, 2011), suggests an ethical program. Heidegger’s position rests upon his under- standing of πoι ́ησις (poiesis) which in classical Greek thought means the activity by which something that did not exist is brought into being. It is close to τšχνη (tekhne), making or doing, and πρα ̃ ξις (praxis) which refers to the activity or prac- tice of rendering an idea or skill as action. Poiesis aims at a product whereas for praxis the end is action. Poieisis in Aristotle’s account is what artists and poets do, thus changing the characterization of the work of art from imitation as Plato maintained to something new brought forth. It is the concept of bringing forth that Heidegger concentrates on. In the Greek view tekhne covered both handicraft and artistic production such as poetry. But, according to Heidegger’s understanding, the process of bringing forth (poiesis) has two senses: in the first what is brought forth is brought forth by something else as when the poet brings forth the poem; in the second sense poiesis is physis (nature), i.e., the bringing forth that occurs in nature, like the bringing forth of a plant (Heidegger, 1977).

Heidegger argues that techno-science understood by him as dominated by cyber- netics, conceals or hides the fullness of Being and thus prevents philosophy (us) from thinking Being and thereby leads us to apprehend Being merely in terms of resource or standing reserve (Bestand).

The idea of autopoiesis is an important concept in biological theory, referring self-organizing/self-generating systems, e.g., single-cell animals like the amoeba, or more generally cellular life forms. It has been argued that autopoiesis is the defining principle of life itself. This idea comes from the work of Maturana and Varela (1980), who coined the term. Most controversially was their claim that this organizing activity (on the cellular level) was the equivalent of cognition.

The applicability of Santiago Theory, as the work of Maturana and Varela is known, is taken to establish a new paradigm in biology by the physicist turned biologist Fritjof Capra who emphasizes a systems approach as a corrective for the mechanistic approach (Capra & Luisi, 2014). According to Capra, nature generally has been understood by modern science in what he calls the Newtonian mechanistic worldview in which the cosmos is seen as a kind of machine, an approach concordant with (although not demanded by) today’s techno-science.

Technology has been an important issue since Greek philosophy distinguished and divided episteme from technics, associating the latter with the rhetoric of sophistry. This traditional distinction and its pejorative association have influenced the devel- opment of European civilization and helped to shape the discourse of art, religion, politics, science and much else. The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century and the subsequent debates surrounding Darwin’s evolutionary biology expressed aspects of the tension between technics as mechanics versus the science of beings that possessed the qualities of agency, self-organization and purpose. These debates revived the disputes around Descartes’ dualism in which the human body was a mechanical device with no agency of its own.

6 Materialities, Perceptions and Ethics 85

6.7 Understanding Symbiotic Relations

The mechanistic view of animal life, consistent with Cartesian dualism, applied to human bodies but not to the human mind–body aggregate. However problematic this dualistic conception of being human was (how could utterly unlike substances—res cogitans and res extensa—manage to interact?), it served the emerging new science well. Human agency somehow derived from cognition understood as a process absent from creatures and life forms save the human being whose rationality was now appended to animality. Darwin whose evolutionary biology of random selection would fit a mechanistic interpretation himself had a less than mechanistic under- standing of animal behavior and choice. About animals he opined: “the exertion of choice, the influence of love and jealousy, and the appreciation of the beautiful in sound, colour or form” was often determinative (Darwin, 1981).

Capra mentions early Greek hylozoism with an appreciation that suggests that he thinks that the replacement of that worldview by the radical separation of living from non-living matter, necessary for the mechanistic theory, later contributed to the rise of that theory and the doctrine of non-teleological explanation for change and action in the domain of the material. He argues that a systems or network approach, on the contrary, permits a non-mechanistic understanding of the human body and other levels of life (notably the molecular). The problem of the apparent agency of living things, in this approach together with the concept of autopoiesis, is thereby solved (Capra & Luisi, 2014).

The meaning of autopoiesis for a theory of life is summarized by Bitbol and Luisi (2004) as follows:

The theory of autopoiesis, as developed by Maturana and Varela, ... captures the essence of cellular life by recognizing that life is a cyclic process that produces the components that in turn self-organize in the process itself, and all within a boundary of its own making. The authors thus arrived at the definition of an autopoietic unit, as a system that is capable of self- maintenance owing to a process of components self-generation from within. This generalizes the definition of life. Systems involving RNA-DNA coding (as in actual cells) are no longer the only possible living entities. The important notion is that the activity leading to life is a process from within, i.e. dictated by the internal system’s organization. This ‘activity from within’ permeates all other concepts associated to autopoiesis, like the notion of autonomy, or biological evolution, or the rules of internal closure.

When the autopoietic interpretation is supplemented by the Gaia hypothesis a new basis for geoethics is presented.

The Gaia Hypothesis proposed by James Lovelock (1995) suggests that living organisms on the planet interact with their surrounding inorganic environment to form a synergetic and self-regulating system that created, and now maintains, the climate and biochemical conditions that make life on earth possible. Gaia bases this postulate on the fact that the biosphere, and the evolution or organisms, affects the stability of global temperature, salinity of seawater and other environmental variables. For instance, even though the luminosity of the sun, the earth’s heat source, has increased about 30% since life began almost four billion years ago, the living system has reacted as a whole to maintain temperatures at a level suitable for life.

86 H. P. Sjursen and L. Oosterbeek

Cloud formation over the open ocean is almost entirely a function of oceanic algae that emit sulfur molecules as waste metabolites which become condensation nuclei for rain. Clouds, in turn, help regulate surface temperatures.

Lovelock compared the atmospheres of Mars and earth and noted that the earth’s high levels of oxygen and nitrogen were abnormal and thermodynamically in dise- quilibrium. The 21% oxygen content of the atmosphere is an obvious consequence of living organisms, and the levels of other gases, NH3 and CH4, are higher than would be expected for an oxygen-rich atmosphere. Biological activity also explains why the atmosphere is not mainly CO2 and why the oceans are not more saline. Gaia postulates that conditions on earth are so unusual that they could only result from the activity of the biosphere (Reichle, 2020).

The relationship between living organisms and their inorganic environment is symbiotic, with benefit flowing in both directions, and not one of mere dependency. For instance, the archeological interpretation of the domestication of living species in the dawn of farming, occurring independently in different regions of the planet in the Holocene, became an adaptive possibility because, even before, late hunter- gatherers had for long engaged in a process of specialization that allowed not only to better understand their reproductive and habitat strategies, but also to curate these. The process of selection of species, benefiting some to the expense of others, also became expression of a symbiotic relation between humans and animals or plants, as Eric Higgs demonstrated long ago (Higgs & Jarman, 1969). More recently, studies on the management of the Amazon rain forest by indigenous communities for the last 5000 years are another example of such symbiotic relation (Posey et al., 2006).

Within such an understanding, the living/non-living environment is a whole, systemically ordered, where humanity is an integral part. Moreover, from this perspective the living-non-living dichotomy has less significance. Yet, although Lovelock (1995) describes Gaia in affectionate terms, at times comparing human emotions and feelings to something inherent in earth, from the human perspective it has not always looked that way. From the human point of view, and hence from the viewpoint of traditional ethics, humans stood in a unique and privileged relation to the earth or non-human nature. The characterization of earth as our home, while it supports an ethic of care, does little to challenge this structure. For this reason, the Gaia hypothesis offers the possibility of a corrective to an ethics proscribed by classical metaphysical categories, whether Aristotelian or Cartesian.

6.8 Understanding of Life

We will now return to Heidegger whose position, on this issue, like those of Hans Jonas and Toby Ord, expresses an existential sense of crisis. There is also a sense in which theories about the so-called post-human era suggest a similar anxiety. Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory presents an account of technology—machines and

6 Materialities, Perceptions and Ethics 87

systems—that function in a collaborative fashion in a distributed network. His assess- ment of the relation of humanity to technology (Latour, 1987) stands in contrast to that of Heidegger.

Heidegger’s understanding of truth and the concealing/revealing of it by tech- nology can help guide our understanding of nature. In his 1927 book Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) indicted the Western tradition from Plato onward for having misconstrued the basic issue of what it means for something to be, i.e., how some- thing is present to an attentive human mind absent any scientific or philosophical analysis or interpretation. For Heidegger, forgetting of Being as he puts it has led us into the crises which characterize modernity. In his later work he argues that the prevailing scientific/technological approach, problem-solving rather than thinking, presents nature as raw material and blinds us to its and our true nature. Heidegger does not propose that we reject technology, but that we recognize its danger. Rather, it is to stand in a free relation to technology, one that implies that the discourse of Being is not obfuscated by the metaphysical categories adopted by cybernetic science.

Does this understanding of life and the earth as a symbiotic and interdependent part of the life system bring us any closer to a new ethics for an age of technology as Hans Jonas put it? Such an ethics cannot eschew technology altogether but by the same token it must not yield to the interpretive power latent in technology use. Aristotle (2011) did not think, in contrast to Plato, that one needed to possess theoretical knowledge in order to know what goodness is. For him it was more of a habituated attitude, one that we might compare in this case to the attitude James Lovelock attributes to his father.

He had not formal religious beliefs and did not attend church or chapel. I think his moral system came from that unstructured mixture of Christianity and magic which is common enough among country people, and in which May Day as well as Easter Day is an occasion for ritual and rejoicing. He felt instinctively his kinship with all living things, and I remember how greatly it distressed him to see a tree cut down.

But while this attitude is surely conducive to personal virtue, the particular problem that high-tech solutions present is a kind of ignorance of outcomes beyond the immediate that is not overcome by an appreciation of nature or the desire to protect the earth. Wildlife conservation is a beautiful ideal that may not grasp the dynamic character of the natural environment considered holistically. It seems that a knowledge of aspects of techno-science is a fundamental necessity for recognizing what one is doing as a powerful agent of environmental change. A new ethics for the technological future—now upon us—must use technology to reveal and disclose the being in which we dwell.

There is another sense in which the problem of what prerequisite knowledge ethics requires is clearly recognized by Aristotle. The pursuit of the good may lead to disagreement as to what is the highest good. This kind of conflict is often evident in disputes about the natural environment: agriculture or mining versus pristine wilder- ness, for example. The expectation that land can be returned to its natural state after it has been fully mined represents both an inadequate understanding of ecosystems and an abundance of faith in the power of technology. The adjudication of this kind

88 H. P. Sjursen and L. Oosterbeek

of conflict requires not only knowledge of what is actually possible, but also evaluate differing preferences and notions of what is good and beautiful.

In a highly tentative way, we shall suggest that the work of earth scientists can contribute to the development of a kind of geoethics that embraces the affirmation of life as a source of value and contributes to our knowledge of the earth’s ecological systems through the reflective use of modern technology.

To try to illustrate how such an approach could expand geoethics to include, in addition to material records and the investigative power of geosciences and geo- engineering, literary reflections, historical records and hermeneutical analytics as part of a comprehensive effort to address the crisis of the earth. We could suggest, for example, that a study of the meaning bestowed upon rivers in ancient societies, particularly in China, would exhibit this kind of integrative attitude. It has been pointed out frequently that the history of China can be told through its persistent efforts to live with its rivers, especially the Yellow River and the Yangtze. These rivers and their profound impact on nearly all aspects of life in ancient China were understood first through the lens of mythology and then by Daoist philosophical inter- pretations. Because of this in ancient China the laws of nature are seen as embedded in moral precepts. To state this in contemporary language, it would be as though earth science was an aspect of ecological ethics—not the reverse which is our usual perspective. To explain this, before looking more specifically at the example of the two great rivers, a precise of Chinese cosmological theory is needed.

In the Song dynasty neo-Confucian rendering of classical Chinese cosmology— which in a sense offers a grand synthesis of classical Confucian, Daoist and Buddhist worldviews in the context of Zhou dynasty cosmology—the distinction between nature and humanity is not operative; there is an interpenetration of (human) mind and cosmos such that each is responsive to the other. The Western metaphysical categories of self and other are dissolved. The self, heart/mind, is responsive to the natural order as which is its extension. Nothing like the Cartesian dualism is present. The ethics of the self is coextensive with the natural order from which it is inseparable (Sjursen, 2015).

The Yellow and the Yangtse Rivers in China have done much to shape Chinese civi- lization and simultaneously inform the Chinese imagination (Ball, 2017). Although the rivers were and are vital to agriculture, transportation and much else that char- acterizes material Chinese culture, they were understood in terms completely other than as “standing reserve.” Despite early innovations by the Chinese in hydraulic engineering and water management, the quasi-spiritual regard for the rivers was not lost (Needam, 1971). The vitality and life of the rivers was understood as revealing life and vitality itself. This recognition of connectedness certainly makes possible a form of ecological consciousness in which an ethics of the earth is coupled with a reverence for life and where technology does not distort the intimacy of humanity’s participation in nature. The traditional Chinese skepticism toward technology, despite its impressive advancements, seems to have yielded an attitude toward nature, and particularly rivers as living waters, that has inspired cross-cultural understanding and cooperation (He, 2000).

6 Materialities, Perceptions and Ethics 89

The Daoist sage Zhuangzi both recognized the utility of technology and then how it can impinge upon human relations to nature as illustrated in a story from Chapter 12 which tells of an encounter between Kongzi’s disciple Zigong and an old man watering his vegetables. Zigong is traveling in the country when he encounters the old man laboriously hauling water. Being sympathetic, Zigong stops to tell the old man about a machine, the well sweep, that can raise enough water for a hundred fields in the time it takes him to water one. As he listens, the old man begins to grimace, his face reddens, and finally he tells Zigong that he knows all about this machine and would be ashamed to use it. The old man is not unlearned. He mentions a master, who taught him that ingenious machines (ji xie 機械) require ingenious minds (ji xin 機心); that ingenious minds cannot be pure and simple (chun bai 純白); that they are restless and no restless mind (shen sheng bu ding 神生不定) moves with dao. That said, he pronounces a curse on scholars and another on Zigong and returns to his work (Zhuangzi, 2003).

The story can be read in Heideggerian terms: not as an outright rejection of technology, nor even of technology used to access the earth’s resources, but as a questioning of how the Being of humanity and that of nature dwell together.

6.9 Conclusion

The theme of this chapter has been “Materialities, Perceptions and Ethics.” The three terms are linked through the complex relationships between human beings and the earth. Materiality refers to biology and geo-physics; perceptions include belief systems and worldviews; ethics broadly includes actions and behaviors that aim to preserve or promote the good, however that may be understood.

Our argument regarding materialities is that bio- and earth sciences have been hampered by or biased in favor of the canonical mechanistic world view favored by modern physics. The limitations of this view have been discussed by Fritjof Capra who thinks the phenomenon of life is more accurately portrayed when the earth is understood as a network of systems, abandoning the machine analogy (Capra & Luisi, 2014). This view both addresses the problem of agency without the invoca- tion of supernatural intervention and permits for a mutually symbiotic relationship between organisms and their supportive environment. Capra’s views line up in many respects with the Gaia hypothesis which we have suggested is in the tradition of hylozoistic theories from early Greek physics as well as from other similar tradi- tions (Chinese has been mentioned; there are many relevant discussions in the Indian Vedanta literature) as well as contemporary theories and investigations of the problem of consciousness. We have stopped short of endorsing notions of cosmic conscious- ness (such as those advanced by Richard Bucke (2010) who argued for the reality of cosmic consciousness as “a higher form of consciousness than that possessed by the ordinary man [... one whose ...] prime characteristic ... is, as its name implies, a consciousness of the cosmos, that is, of the life and order of the universe.”) Our task

90 H. P. Sjursen and L. Oosterbeek

has not been to solve the problem of consciousness as understood by either philos- ophy of neuroscience, but only to suggest that thinking about the earth and human nature in the categories supplied by Descartes and early modern science makes the task of developing non-anthropocentric ethics that includes a duty to care for the earth beyond reach.

In response to the challenge of Jonas (1972) for a new ethics for an age of tech- nology that can support what he calls the imperative of responsibility, we argue that this requires a non-anthropocentric understanding of life and a non-cybernetic view of nature. Since ethical obligations and principles persist only in cultural settings, anthropology, archeology, esthetics and the study of literature and religions and other disciplines from the humanities and social sciences must investigate collaboratively to identify an approach that honors a pluralistic set of values. While geoethics alone is unlikely to answer Jonas’s challenge, because it rests upon in a non-reductionist approach to science (earth sciences including biology, geology and archeology) which itself involves humanistic disciplines including anthropology, history, as well as esthetics (landscape architecture in part concerns itself with this), a geoethics that recognizes in the Heideggerian sense the dangers represented by technological society is the best the place to start.

Acknowledgements LuizOosterbeekwouldliketothankthePortugueseFoundationforScience and Technology for its support to research leading to this chapter, through the Geosciences Centre (R&D unit 00073) and the Polytechnic Institute of Tomar.

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