Cancer with a conscience

The human species may well be like a cancer unto the Earth. But that's not anything to necessarily cry about - we have the capacity to put ourselves into remission, for example

by Michael Nenonen <mnenonen@republic-news.org>

The biggest obstacle to developing an ecological consciousness is the emotional cost this consciousness carries. As we begin to comprehend the dangers facing our species, we usually become frightened; this fear quickly escalates to despair. Then, as we start acknowledging the suffering we're inflicting upon the other sentient beings with whom we share our world, we're threatened by overwhelming guilt.

Once this stage is reached, it's only a matter of time before we begin wondering just how deeply our ecocidal tendencies descend. Even a cursory glance at the historical record reveals that for ten thousand years wherever humans have walked, extinction has followed, and that every expansion of human power has inevitably multiplied the harm humanity has inflicted upon our biosphere.

This has culminated in industrial society, which, in both in its capitalist and socialist forms, has granted humankind previously undreamed of power while simultaneously unleashing an ecological nightmare. As these thoughts take hold, we're troubled by a pervasive sense of self-loathing, a loathing that transcends our personal lives to poison our vision of humanity itself. This potent mixture of despair, guilt, and shame is the very stuff of existential horror. Is it any wonder that most of us anesthetize ourselves to environmental concerns?

When presented with this scenario, we're tempted to say that it's too bleak, that although our situation is indeed perilous, there's no reason to assume that the danger is rooted in a fatal flaw in the human species. Many take comfort in the Gaia theory—typically in its most crassly popularized form. If the planet is an organism, so the reasoning goes, and if human beings are as much a part of that organism as the forests and the fields, then isn't it possible that our activities are in harmony with the organism's deeper rhythms, and that even our excesses may serve some greater evolutionary good? These objections overlook life's darkest mystery, that deregulated, unlimited, and fatal growth we call cancer.

Warren M Hern, in his essay “Why Are There So Many of Us? Description and Diagnosis of a Planetary Ecopathological Process” ( Population and Environment: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies Volume 12, Number 1, Fall 1990) suggests that human societies have, for at least several thousand years, had the same relationship to the planet that cancerous tissue has to the human body.

According to Hern, cancerous tissue has four distinct features. First, it exhibits rapid, uncontrolled growth. Second, it invades and destroys adjacent healthy tissue. Third, it metastasizes tissue in areas of the body far removed from the original cancerous tissue. Finally, it's "dedifferentiated:" healthy cells in the heart are structured quite differently than healthy cells in the bowel, but cancer cells tend to resemble each other regardless of where they appear. There are many parallels between these traits and the human experience.

In recent millennia, humanity has undergone rapid population growth. Two thousand years ago the world's population stood at approximately 250,000,000 people. It took 1,650 years for that number to double, but it doubled again two hundred years after that, and then again in less than a hundred years. By the early 1930s, the planet's human population was approximately two billion. Now, seven decades later, there are over 6.4 billion people on the planet. This acceleration suggests that human population growth is, relative to other large animals, largely unrestrained.

Like cancer cells, human communities invade and destroy their surrounding ecosystems. Consider, for example, the impact the growth of Greater Vancouver has had upon its environment. Modern cities, which may have tens of millions of people living in them, absorb vast amounts of resources and energy from their environment, only to return them in a degraded, ecologically useless form. The more our cities consume, the more they grow, transforming once-vibrant ecosystems into urban sprawl. In the same way that cancer cells metastasize distant tissue, human communities have spread across the globe through colonization and urbanization. In reference to our cities, Hern writes, “A visitor from space might see, not individual human beings, but lesions on the Earth's landscape, some with interconnecting links. The lesions now glow in the dark."

Just as cancer cells are dedifferentiated, so have our communities become homogeneously organized. Several thousand years ago our communities were extremely varied. Architectural styles, economic and political structures, languages, and cultures were radically different from one location to the next. Now, our cities are nearly identical, our economic and political structures are increasingly integrated into the global capitalist market, innumerable languages have become extinct, and consumer culture is rapidly becoming the universal norm.

In the same way that cancerous tissue grows despite the starvation of its host, humanity has compromised the delicate relationships underlying our planet's ecosystems. Besides causing the planet's sixth mass extinction, we're destabilizing the climate, destroying our forests, saturating both land and water with toxic waste, and fouling the air.

Our global economy, upon which our entire social structure stands, depends upon unlimited growth. The forces sustaining that economy are overwhelmingly powerful and driven by short-term self-interest to the exclusion of longer-term collective needs, factors that mitigate against any hope of ecological sustainability. Ecological collapse may well spur ever-more intense extraction and decimation of the few resources still scattered about the wasteland. Given that our species has found a way to survive in some of the world's harshest environments, it's altogether possible that we'll survive in sufficient numbers to continue plundering the Earth even as it becomes thoroughly uninhabitable for the majority of species living upon it.

If we grant all of this, then how can we possibly develop an ecological consciousness? Wouldn't the emotional burden be too great for anyone to handle? If we are like cancer cells, then where can we find hope or even self-respect?

As unfamiliar as these questions sound, they aren't really new. Humanity has always wrestled with its capacity for malignancy. The problem takes up a significant share of our species' cultural heritage. To expand upon Hern's metaphor, we could argue that underlying every system of ethics, regardless of whether that system is expressed through mythology, philosophy, or poetry, is a single question: how can we go into remission?

This question has normally been asked in regard to our often-consumptive relationships with one another, but in the most advanced ethical systems it's been expanded to include our relationships with animals.

Ibn abd as-Salam completed the first statement of animal rights in the thirteenth century, the same century that witnessed the ministry of Europe's most well-known animal advocate, Saint Francis of Assisi. Long before that, Buddhists were preaching compassion for all “sentient beings.” For thousands of years, many tribal cultures have encouraged their people to develop a deep respect for the animals they share their environment with. Ethical thought may begin by addressing relationships among human beings, but it ends by encompassing all life.

These examples lead me to believe that if any degree of remission is possible, it's to be found in our capacity for empathy—the ability to not only put ourselves in another's shoes, but to also care about another's feet. At its most sophisticated, empathy transcends conceptual knowledge and brings us into the realm of pure presence, the comprehension that the being standing before us cannot be reduced to the thoughts we have about it, or the perceptions we have of it, but is in fact an irreducible reality. At that moment, when we viscerally experience the limitations of our own minds in the presence of the real, deliberation gives way to an intellectual humility and existential wonder.

Along these lines, the philosopher Martin Buber argued that there are two basic word-units in any human language: I-It and I-Thou. We cannot say "I" without implicitly referring to the "other," which may be human or non-human. If we only know the other through our conceptual categories, then the other is reduced to a set of concepts for our manipulation, an “It,” and the sense of the real vanishes.

People who are objectified in this way are invariably exploited; the same fate befalls a living world reduced to a pile of “natural resources.” As the reality of the other disappears, the “I” diminishes too. We follow the world into our fantasies, becoming lost and insubstantial in the narcissistic mirror-maze of our thoughts. When, however, empathy allows us to make that leap beyond thought into realization of the other's presence, then the other becomes a “Thou.” In this awakening, we grasp our own inscrutable reality, our self-concepts lose their rigidity, greed and anger subside, and we live, for a time, in openhearted awareness. By cultivating empathy, we cultivate our ability to live in I-Thou consciousness.

Throughout our species' history we've turned to empathy to curb not only our social excesses, but also our environmental excesses. Tribal cultures often treated animals and natural forces as though they had human personalities, a strategy Western academics refer to as "anthropomorphizing." The spirits and gods of the natural world are anthropomorphizations of that world. For all its many flaws, anthropomorphizing allows us to cultivate empathy for non-human life forms and natural processes, allowing the emergence of an ecological I-Thou consciousness.

I believe that this consciousness is essential if we're ever to go into remission. We'll never protect the wild until we love the wild, and we'll never love the wild as long as our capacity for love, for empathy, remains impoverished. Consider a father who rushes into a burning building to save his daughter: does he waste time bemoaning his failure to fireproof his home, or calculating his chances of success? He enters the fire simply because he loves his child. Though the effort may fail, it gives his daughter a fighting chance, and it simultaneously ennobles the father. In these moments, the father is in a state of I-Thou consciousness. The more often we perceive the natural world the way this father perceives his child, the more likely collective remission will become, and the less we'll be bothered by despair, guilt, and self-loathing.

Regardless of our efforts, the cancer of our condition may well kill us, and much more besides. However terrible this knowledge is, it can't stop us from developing empathy and from entering, however sporadically, I-Thou consciousness. As long as these possibilities remain open to us, we don't have to succumb to horror. Beyond this, we have the chance to live in the most elevated of our faculties, and therefore in the full flower of our being. The emotional cost of ecological consciousness is high; but isn't the cost of ecological unconsciousness, of I-It consciousness, infinitely higher? If we are a cancer, then isn't it better to be a cancer committed to its own remission? To be a cancer with a conscience?

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