The Unconstructable Earth: An Ecology of Separation

The Unconstructable Earth

Series editors

Bruce Clarke and Henry Sussman

Editorial Board

Victoria N. Alexander, Dactyl Foundation for the Arts and Humanities

Erich Hörl, Leuphana University of Lüneburg

John H. Johnston, Emory University

Hans-Georg Moeller, University of Macau

John Protevi, Louisiana State University

Samuel Weber, Northwestern University

The Unconstructable Earth

An Ecology of Separation

Frédéric Neyrat

Translated by Drew S. Burk

Fordham University Press: New York    2019

Copyright © 2019 Fordham University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

This work received the French Voices Award for excellence in publication and translation. French Voices is a program created and funded by the French Embassy in the United States and FACE (French American Cultural Exchange). French Voices logo designed by Serge Bloch.

This book was originally published in French as Frédéric Neyrat, La part inconstructible de la terre: Critique du géo-constructivisme, Copyright © Éditions du Seuil, 2016.

Cet ouvrage a bénéficié du soutien des Programmes d’aide à la publication de l’Institut Français.

This work, published as part of a program of aid for publication, received support from the Institut Français.

Fordham University Press gratefully acknowledges financial assistance and support provided for the publication of this book by the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

An advance excerpt from Chapter 13 of this book appears in diacritics 45, no. 3 (2017).

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Printed in the United States of America

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for my friends who continue to go on living

Contents

Introduction: Reconstructing the Earth?

Part I. The Mirror of the Anthropocene: Geoengineering, Terraforming, and Earth Stewardship

The Copenhagen Chiasm

1. The Screen of Geoengineering

2. The Mirror of the Anthropocene

3. Terraforming: Reconstructing the Earth, Recreating Life

4. The Logic of Geopower: Power, Management, and Earth Stewardship

Part II. The Future of Eco-constructivism: From Resilience to Accelerationism

Turbulence, Resilience, Distance

5. An Ecology of Resilience: The Political Economy of Turbulence

6. The Extraplanetary Environment of the Ecomodernists

7. The Political Ecology of Bruno Latour: No Environments, No Limits, No Monsters (Not Even Fear)

8. Anaturalism and Its Ghosts

9. The Technological Fervor of Eco-constructivism

Part III. An Ecology of Separation: Natured, Naturing, Denaturing

Object, Subject, Traject

10. Naturing Nature and Natured Nature

11. The Real Nature of an Ecology of Separation

12. Denaturing Nature

13. The Unconstructable Earth

Conclusion: What Is to Be Unmade?

Notes

Index

Introduction

Reconstructing the Earth?

The combined circumstances that we live on Earth and are able to see the stars—that the conditions necessary for life do not exclude those necessary for vision, or vice versa—is a remarkably improbable one.

—Hans Blumenberg, The Genesis of the Copernican World

You did not wish to see the face of the Unknown; you will see its mask.

—Victor Hugo, Préface de mes œuvres et post-scriptum de ma vie

A New Grand Narrative

Humanity’s conquest of outer space is over? No. We have simply discovered a new planet: Earth. An Earth we would supposedly be able to reconstruct and pilot thanks to the exploits of an absolute engineering process. Geo-constructivism will be the name bestowed upon this voracious discourse that considers the Earth as the consenting prey of an integral conquest. Aggregating a diverse number of philosophical, economic, and scientific lines of inquiry, geo-constructivism asserts itself at the intersection of several discourses: the discourses of engineers and architects who would like to transform the Earth into a pilotable machine; biologists who would rather spend their time resurrecting already extinct species rather than protecting those that are still alive; political strategists offering solutions for global governance; the advent of new markets by businessmen who view climate change as a new industry for economic speculation; geographers enthralled by the power of humanity within the age of the Anthropocene; sociologists and anthropologists proclaiming that there is no common world and so it is up to us to build one; essayists promoting nuclear energy for all; prophets declaring the death of nature or the birth of the transhuman; philosophers inviting us to accelerate our technological control over existing society; paradoxical ecologists simultaneously lauding the merits of fracking and dreaming of the disappearance of any form of ecology containing a political dimension. How did such a discourse emerge? How can we begin to explain its ever-increasing influence and irresistible hegemony? Who are its principal spokespersons? And what does its future have in store?

Geo-constructivism is not some definitively unified theory. As with any discourse with a hegemonic vocation, geo-constructivism contains contradictions, vanishing points, and ambiguities. In order to untangle this internal heterogeneity, the present book begins by proposing an empirical philosophical inquiry into the concept of the Anthropocene in its relation to recent solar engineering projects (the invention of a chemical shield to protect the Earth from solar radiation), synthetic biology (the advent of organisms with new or improved traits), and finally Earth stewardship. Next, we will decipher the form of ecological thought compatible with these projects, before then proposing to conclude our inquiry with an alternative conception of nature and our relation to the Earth. This progressive passage from the empirical to the speculative will allow us to analyze, under different aspects, the fundamental fantasy at the heart of geo-constructivism: claiming that the Earth, and everything contained on it—ecosystems and organisms—humans and nonhumans, can and must be reconstructed and entirely remade.

If the Earth can indeed be reconstructed, this is only possible because of the geo-constructivists’ view that nature—as an independent entity and force—has been overtaken by the techno-industrial power of humanity; if the Earth must be reconstructed, this is because it would be the only solution to solving ongoing environmental problems. The project for a general reconstruction of the world would be a project of general ecological interest.¹ Mark Lynas provides a perfect summary of this doctrine in his book The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans. Lynas writes, Nature no longer runs the Earth. We do. It’s our choice what happens from here.² The thesis of our present work is that, as fantastical as the doctrine of geo-constructivism may sound, it is in the midst of ushering in a new grand narrative, the new myth of our current age: not a mere fiction without any true repercussions but a discourse capable of legitimizing real economic decisions, social practices, lifestyles, laws, institutions, and the guiding orientations for civilization. What does the geo-constructivist grand narrative have to tell us? What promise does it have in store for us? The narrative unabashedly declares: Yes, it’s clear, the world is in the grips of ecological disasters, but we mustn’t forget that these disasters were caused by humanity and not by some sort of obscure fate; far from extracting a sense of guilt from this current situation, we must on the contrary, extract a profit from this telluric power. If we have damaged the Earth, it’s because we had the power at our disposal to do so. We have made the Earth poorly? Then we must repair it, reprogram it—reconstruct it!

Technology of a World without Nature

Geo-constructivism’s exploit: the capability of recycling the project of scientific modernity consisting of becoming masters and possessors of nature (Descartes), while simultaneously solving the environmental disasters intrinsically associated with this same conquest. In order to return to the concepts proposed by Ulrich Beck, geo-constructivism is presented as a reflexive discourse that, having analyzed and overcome the errors of the first modernity (founded on the idea of progress), would have learned how to take into consideration the criticism of the ecologists as well as the risks generated by industrial technologies.³ However, the dream of an absolutely modern society has instead turned into an utter nightmare.⁴ In stark contrast to Beck’s hopes, geo-constructivism’s reflexivity was not born out of a true environmental critique of modernity but rather reinforced modernity’s original project without improving on it, without purging it of its original flaw—its anthropocentric drive toward conquest, whether in the form of technology (the control of a nature out of joint with its power) or culture (the human all too human decision, relative to the contingent split between the artificial and the natural)—namely, geo-constructivism’s inability to open itself up to a consideration of the entire universe. In this sense, the geo-constructivists are hypermodern, more modern than Bacon or Descartes. Indeed:

1. The geo-constructivists explicitly integrate techno-industrial hazards. As Günther Anders already exclaimed in 1966, we don’t realize we are mere sorcerer-apprentices producing destruction;⁵ from now on, this knowledge has been integrated as simply one tiny element of a supposedly superior knowledge: as if by magic, the sorcerers will have progressed from the stage of apprentices to that of masters.

2. The geo-constructivists are not striving to conjure these dangers by way of the self-limitations of industrial and technological power but rather by way of an increase in anthropogenic modification. The geo-constructivist knows he is playing with possibles and that his intervention will provoke unexpected outcomes; he is the sorcerer-apprentice wielding a magic wand with the hand of a master, but this merely confirms his appetite for transformation. To paraphrase Hölderlin, geo-constructivist belief can be summarized thusly: Whereas one can detect a danger looming within the industry of nanoparticles, the fields of genetically modified crops and foods, nuclear energy, synthetic biology, and the artificial modification of the climate, one can also detect a saving grace.⁶ In this sense, the fundamental promise of geo-constructivism is not progress (like it was for the Saint-Simonians in the nineteenth century) but the mere survival of humanity: From now on, progress is a secondary benefit of a planetary lifesaving program.

Let us be very clear right from the outset: This book is not a general denunciation of technology in the name of some kind of return to a pure form of nature. Our perspective consists in analyzing the manner in which the conception of nature—which is at the heart of the geo-constructivist program—and its hypermodern horizon, is intimately correlated to the technological possibility it is striving to actualize. This correlation could be stated in the following way: The geo-constructivist program consists of privileging technologies that consider nature as nonexistent. The geo-constructivists embrace statements such as the conditions for human life were not natural and never have been or the idea that humans must live within the framework of the natural environmental limits set by our planet denies the reality of our entire history. The cold and inevitable conclusion drawn by Erle Ellis, a geography professor at the University of Maryland, is harsh, and perfectly geo-constructivist: The environment will be what we make of it.⁷ From now on, nature is posited as a nonbeing and incapable of disturbing the anthropogenic modification of environments in any way whatsoever. The main thesis of geo-constructivism is therefore not naturalist, that is, as Philippe Descola claims in his anthropological work—founded on a dualism of humans and nonhumans—but rather anaturalist: without nature, ignorant of it.⁸ Geo-constructivism’s anaturalist optic does not tend toward separating two worlds (into the world of humans and the world of nature) but completely erases and denies the existence of one of these worlds. And yet, a denial is not a separation, which recognizes an inherent difference between the two terms. A denial is a refusal to recognize the existence of one of these terms for the benefit of the lone identity of the other term. For the promoters of anaturalism, the only world that exists—the only world that must exist—is technology: You will read a number of writings about the end of nature, but anyone who would proclaim the end of technology would immediately be locked up in a psychiatric hospital.

We could, of course, follow in the footsteps of Paul Feyerabend and choose to revert our gaze all the way back to Parmenides for a philosophical origin of the denaturalization of nature: For Parmenides, nature as abstract, homogenous, and distant from any kind of experience would seem to already expel anything that would firmly bind it to the world of the living.⁹ Nevertheless, nature remains a model for the paradigm of antiquity, as this well-known statement by Aristotle attests to: Art (techné) on the one hand completes to a certain degree what nature is incapable of effectuating, and on the other hand, it imitates it.¹⁰ However, by substituting God for nature, the monotheisms will cleverly devalue the latter, removing its power and thereby preparing the terrain for the new science of the seventeenth century: Nature becomes an inanimate and mathematizable material, upon which a human fashioning is applied that always tends toward extending the limits of the possible and transforming the impossible into the possible. From then on, anaturalism assures its hold over the Earth. With the arrival of a geo-constructivist hypermodernity, it is precisely the idea of nature itself that disappears within the aftermath of the substitution of nature by artificial entities whose objective is to integrate, digest, and reprogram all natural alterity. Nature becomes biodiversity, preservation of social services (the water supply, pollination, etc.), resources—merchandise.¹¹ From then on, anaturalism clearly appears as the condition for the ontological possibility of technologies whose goal is to replace nature. The goal of these technologies of substitution is not simply to conquer nature but to remake it, by substituting its own technological power for nature.

We will insist on using this verb: to reconstruct [refaire] can also mean to modify (such as when one refers to genetically modified organisms—GMOs); to find a substitute (as in the case of an artificial uterus);¹² or if we consider the idea that the human form of life and its human body are obsolete and must therefore be replaced by transhumans or posthumans. To modify, substitute, and replace are all at work within the manner in which geo-constructivism envisions remaking the Earth. In order to understand the way in which geo-constructivism has translated, for its own sake, the passion of remaking and thus prolonging the conquest of the modern, let’s read what Lewis Mumford already proclaimed in 1966:

Our age is passing from the primeval state of man marked by his invention of tools and weapons for the purpose of achieving mastery over the forces of nature, to a radically different condition, in which he will have not only conquered nature, but detached himself as far as possible [my emphasis] from the organic habitat. With this new megatechnics, the dominant minority will create a uniform, all-enveloping, super-planetary structure designed for automatic operation.¹³

Here, we can slowly begin to see a strange topology unfolding: It’s as if the geo-constructivists view themselves as residing off-planet, outside the Earth, without any kind of vital relation with the ecosphere, detached and separated as far away as possible from the Earth object to be reformatted. It’s from this seemingly extraplanetary position that the geo-constructivists reflect on how to produce a super-planetary structure for the happy select few who would supposedly be capable of controlling it. Remaking the Earth would thus actively allow for the realization of Teilhard de Chardin’s fantasy that he prophesized as our unavoidable fate: the passage from the biosphere to the noosphere, planetized humanity, that is to say, to the sphere of the human mind that, thanks to its technological globalization, would supposedly be capable of materially and spiritually detaching itself from an organic form of life judged to be outmoded at an evolutionary scale.¹⁴

If our analysis is correct, it follows that the contemporary thought regarding ecology, and the anthropological approach accompanying it, must refrain from endlessly questioning itself about the dualisms of nature/technology or nature/culture, those great divides attributed to the modernists of the West as well as the means for going beyond these divisions thanks to hybridizations, more transformations or more interactions. It’s not a question of loosening the vice grip of dualism (Catherine Larrère and Raphaël Larrère) but of contesting this category.¹⁵ To speak of dualism is to incite the belief that there is something called two [il y a du deux] when what is at stake is the disappearance of one of these terms named within the supposed divide. To believe in something called the two when there isn’t such a thing—to believe that there is that which is wild and that which is artificial when the former is disappearing under a deluge of concrete¹⁶—is to play the game of the One, that is to say, the game of domination. In the end, this is not simply a question for ethics or philosophy but, above all, for politics: Is it possible for someone to forgo participating within the extension of an empire of a world without nature, to remain outside this enterprise that is attempting an intellectual and material eradication of all alterity from the human experience? Instead of attempting to transcend the so-called dualisms and Great divides (between nature and culture, humans and nonhumans, etc.), is it possible to look for what stands behind the Great denial (of alterity)? As Eduardo Viveiros de Castro notes, because the Europeans thought that America was a world without humans, the Indians became humans without a world: Their world was destroyed by the Moderns.¹⁷ But with the arrival of geo-constructivist hypermodernity, this great denial of alterity has become a planetary religion and the constructivist approach of a worldless humanity can end up being applied to everyone.¹⁸ From this point on, escaping from the great denial of alterity becomes a major concern for contemporary political ecology.

Reformatting the Earth: Piloting a Management Machine

In order to better understand the nature-technology apparatus associated with the geo-constructivist program, the first part of our book will begin by taking an interest in one of its most emblematic projects—geoengineering, and more specifically climate engineering—in other words, the attempt to control the climate by way of the mediation of its technological optimization. A hyper-Cartesian apparatus of mastery and possession consisting of remaking terrestrial nature, climate engineering is the mirror in which the Anthropocene would like to see its own reflection—an era wherein they tell us (and repeat it until they’re blue in the face) that the human species has become a force to be reckoned with—oh how wonderful! We’ve become a major geological force. We will also study the links connecting the dominant discourse of the Anthropocene with geoengineering. For it’s not by chance if, in 2002, the co-inventor of the term Anthropocene, Paul Crutzen, mentions in an article the possibility of geoengineering projects on a large scale with the end goal of artificially optimizing the climate—an article where he also has no reservations referencing Teilhard de Chardin.¹⁹ This is the same Paul Crutzen who proposed, in a rather bombastic article from 2006, to send tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere in order to create a chemical shield that would purportedly be capable of protecting us from the sun and that would consequently recool the planet.²⁰

One mustn’t be fooled into believing this is a case of mere science fiction masquerading as science fact that would only garner interest from a few fringe scientists or fans of Hollywood films. In order to be convinced of this, all one has to do is review the increase in funding for such projects and the interest that President Obama and an influential newspaper such as the Wall Street Journal have in questions concerning geoengineering. We should also consider the increasing number of conferences, academic articles, and books for the general public devoted to the question of geoengineering.²¹ Even the IPCC, in one of the last paragraphs from its 2013 Summary for Policymakers, finally mentions the concept of geoengineering.²² Certain members of well-known ecological associations, such as WWF, no longer deny the possibility of geoengineering.²³ This possibility no doubt explains why certain think tanks that once simply chose to deny climate change now appear to have finally come to accept it. Are we witnessing the arrival of a new market ripe for conquest?²⁴ A new frontier for capitalism? Of course, the risks and potential dangers of such projects are often evoked as well; in line with the American Academy of Sciences, we often prefer to speak of climate interventions rather than geoengineering (a term that is too often associated with trying to control climate, a task deemed beyond our grasp).²⁵ But in no way do these potential risks prevent more and more ongoing studies and research regarding the national and international rules and regulations that would—eventually—be the guiding framework for this geo-technology.²⁶ As a technological object that is also juridical, economical, social, and environmental, the climate bubble is the so-called plan B that many would like to see turn into plan A in order to fight climate change. A plan B whose dangers are well known to its promoters, but such is the new doctrine of the geo-constructivists: not some utopia of a constant progress but the pragmatism of a lifesaving expedition of the Earth that will require taking risks.

We will show that the representation of the Earth preferred by the geo-constructivists is that of an image of a hollowed-out box one can reformat at will. The dynamisms of terrestrial nature are only recognized as existing when it is necessary to legitimize a reformatting project: One considers a dynamic as a biospheric process that one prepares for remodeling, skillfully managing according to the economic imperatives of the moment. In other words, natural dynamics become the arguments for turning the Earth into a computer. Inside his own kind of fantasy space, the geo-constructivist sees himself as some kind of rogue off-planet agent, with demiurgic powers for reshaping the Earth from the outside. And in this regard, the geo-constructivist embodies the dream of Richard Buckminster Fuller—the famous architect-designer and American inventor active from the 1950s through the 1970s—known for baptizing the Earth as a spaceship. "I’ve often heard the question, ‘I wonder what it would be like to be on board a spaceship’ and the answer is very simple. What does it feel like? We are all astronauts."²⁷ And yet, this metaphor created a double meaning: It’s not simply that the inhabitants of Earth are viewed as extraterrestrials but that the Earth is no longer viewed as the cradle of humanity and is instead envisioned as a kind of exoplanet that we must terraform. A concept plucked right out of science fiction literature, the idea of terraforming first of all signifies the process of deliberately modifying another planet in order to render it similar to Earth and, as a consequence, making it inhabitable for human beings. But from now on, it’s the Earth itself that we would like to terraform at our own convenience: The Anthropocene inherited its imaginary from the era of space exploration and the era’s ambitions for extrasolar colonization.²⁸ In fact, it’s as if everything was set up for the end of the Space Age to coincide with the promotion of the Age of Man. Of course, today we’re talking about plan C, which would consist of creating a living spaceship capable of extracting humanity from a dying planet and shepherding it to a new, more welcoming one.²⁹ But this is not the imaginary of some sort of virile colonization project but rather, and this is the moment to put it out there, an imaginary of revival—of the 1950s, a speculation concerning the various alternative days to come. The eventual colonization of the Moon or Mars having been abandoned once and for all, or at the very least put on long-term hold, it’s now the Earth itself that has become the object of a technological colonization project. From now on, the frontier of capitalism is no longer some kind of dreamed-of beyond whose first attempts were initiated by Sputnik and the Apollo missions. Capitalism’s new frontier has now been left in the hands of the geo-constructivists and their bio-constructivist allies: Commodify the atmosphere and securitize the planet (green finance), artificialize and manage the planetary climate (synthetic biology), such are the fronts put forth regarding the shifting of the frontier toward the body of the Earth.

After having deciphered the imaginary foundation of the project and the geo-constructivist apparatuses, it will then be possible to understand the precise function of the concepts of piloting or Earth stewardship. A notion proliferating within environmental and scientific literature, Earth stewardship situates science as the discipline that must facilitate the guided management of socioecological changes in view of the well-being of humans and their inherent resilience. Distinct in its appearance as a kind of geo-constructivist voluntarism, the concept of management (of biodiversity, of environments, etc.) leaves one to believe humans would do nothing more than simply steer or manage various dynamisms without truly being capable of controlling them. By way of their seemingly soft appearance, being cooperative and bearers of a morality of respect, the concepts of management and stewardship have the unfortunate tendency of making us forget about the technologies that make them possible: Indeed, what else would this stewardship be that would be applied to environments modified by climate engineering, environments that have their sights set on human well-being if not the self-service of the age of humans? Furthermore, the concept of management was first applied to a machine: the piloting of a machine that we could call the management machine—in other words, the social, economic, political, and technical megamachine underlying all stewardship and governance of the ecosphere. From now on, we can define the Anthropocene as a grand narrative seeking legitimization for the installation of a global, pilotable, management machine: Its politics propped up by the powers of engineers, and its fantasy being the possibility of an integral project of terraforming.

The Theoretical Foundations of Eco-constructivism

This will lead us to understand why certain think tanks and businesses in the United States simultaneously refuse to recognize the anthropic origins of climate change and yet at the same time are also calling for the geoengineering of the climate. It’s true, geoengineering is presented as a means for aiding the continual tempered burning of fossil fuels and, therefore, as a means to help maintain the same kind of development, society, and domination organized and hoped for by the militants of the geo-constructivist program.³⁰ But how is it that a large number of supposed ecologists have married themselves to these ideas? The second part of the present book will attempt to demonstrate the following thesis: Ecological and environmental thinking today is dominated by an eco-constructivist current that is less and less apt at contesting geoengineering and the anaturalist position and is more and more opposed to any truly antiestablishment political ecology. To say that this eco-constructivism, elaborated within the humanities and social sciences as well as scientific ecology, is becoming more and more compatible with the geo-constructivist project in no way implies that ecological or environmental thinking has always been eco-constructivist, nor does it mean that any kind of ecological thinking or any environmental philosophy is from now on constructivist. We want to simply show to what extent eco-constructivism has begun to shake