A Lively Earth - Afterword
Systems tip. This occurs where an equilibrium is dephased. In actuality there are only metastabilities - punctuated thresholds of more-than equilibrium. What appears to be a stable state is only stability from the vantage point of its separation from the wider ecology. All is in flux.
A self-organizing criticality occurs when the equilibrium thresholds. The punctuation of the equilibrium - always itself in a state of excess, far-from itself - catalyses a new state.
All systems are potentially self-tipping. What keeps us in the belief of their stability is the commitment to separability. When “nature” is meted out in distances, when the earth’s processes are cast apart from the human’s self-centering (usually in the name of culture), an arm’s length separability is habituated.
Criticalities are tended by the ecologies they call forth. In an over-settled earth, however, the balances are skewed, the pressure of the degradation too instable for what are increasingly fragile systems. Rewilding does its work here, focusing on “keystone” species — bears, beavers, wolves — to rebuild complex ecosystems and regain the metastability of non-separable existence.
Edouard Glissant writes of difference without separability (1997). This ethos, activated through a commitment to the opacity of a poetics of relation, refutes simple taxonomies and easy cause-effect solutions. Texturing complexity, it practices the refusal to reduce life to the common — to the common denominator, or to common sense. Ecologies in complexity rewild difference.
When an ecology is foregrounded over a species, a differential field is tended. The texture of a tipping point is tended not to keep it stable - tipping points will tip - but to nurture how it tips. Human intervention in the name of rewilding does its best work when it learns to attune to the tip. In Andrew Goodman’s words: “At its best rewilding resists the urge to control nature, focussing on restoring dynamics: a ‘systems ecology’ emphasizing flow rather than equilibrium” (XX).
Dynamics of self-organization are naturing forces. They activate the differential complexity of worlds. Goodman’s project intervenes here, at the transversality of the environmental, conceptual and creative planes where acts of potentiation “produce novelty that feeds the creativity of the earth” (XX).
Beavers are considered a keystone species. In areas of the UK, they have been reintroduced, and the creation of habitat — the building of ditches and hollows in the banks, their felling of trees and clearing of areas for other forms of wildlife, and the reduction of soil loss through erosion — have been celebrated.
In northern Québec where the 3Ecologies Project is situated, where we work the land and regenerate the forest through a project of “giving land back to itself,” it would be a challenge to convince people of the good of the beaver. Although it is against the law to cull them, they are routinely killed, their habitats destroyed. They are considered a pest that destroys culverts, deroutes fish (destroying their spawning habitat in the process), a scourge on the lumber industry and a terrorist for road maintenance.
The beavers are a system that is far from equilibrium. They keep the environment in a mobility that threatens the human: they decide, in their coordinated family efforts, how the water will flow or pool. They remake the territory.
Forests are continually in flux. Trees fall, new plants grow, and with them new mosses and lichens and fungi. Human and animal trails are altered, the rhythm of the walk made uneasy by the shifting terrain. A stable bi-pedalism is often no longer the best option, bum-on-trunk the only move forward and across.
Systems in a far from equilibrium state are in a continuous process of incipient transformation. Many of these are not woven into human experience: the human enters what is considered an impasse chainsaw-ready. But those systems that are not solved by human expediency, those that resist the tampering, the distantism of separability, continue to produce nonlinear effects. The more-than equilibrium catalyzes further shifts. As Goodman writes, these are not structures but “ongoing processes themselves” (XX).
In Quebec, the “scourge” of the beaver is recognized to be, to a large degree at least, a result of the road systems. Roads, it is said, segregated the beavers, forcing them to work within a more reduced territory. Another way of putting this is that private property got in the way of the beaver. Vast expanses of undivided land are less troubled by the shifting geographies of the forest’s most ardent engineer. But when humans begin to want to make their own lines, securing them against encroachment, a human-beaver war becomes inevitable.
Propertied existence depends on a belief that what is valuable about land is the marketability of its limit. To be propertied is to be in the value-added of a border. By nature, beavers are de-boundarying animals. Despite being the leaders of the blockade, their large condos redirecting the waterways, and their dams pooling areas that are often treed, leaving what seems like a devastated swamp of ghost trees when they move on, beavers are not property-makers. They are movers in and of the field, their short-term lived environments incipient redirections of an already-mobile landscape.
What beavers do is complicate how humans understand the environment’s limits. Humans see certain waterways as fishing pools, and certain forests as hunting grounds. Of course this is not true of all humans — these are colonial tendencies. All propertying of existence is a colonial, settler form.
The beaver’s work is an invitation to much that cannot be perceived on the surface, and settlers tend to be surface-focused in their colonizing, propertying tendencies. When, as it often happens in Quebec’s north, the roads are no longer passable because of a beaver dam, it is only the inconvenience for cars that is registered, not the fact that beavers create deep pools and channels that don’t freeze, protecting the landscape from drought; that these pools are homes to many species of fish and amphibians, and provide wetlands for moose; that in the wetlands, the animals find food, shelter and protection; that through the pooling of water, tree canopies are opened up, creating warm environments for insects and food for birds; and that over the dams, walking paths can be erected for those same animals and those non bi-pedaling humans.
A Lively Earth writes into the dissensus of overlapping modes of existence. It suggests that “rewilding can think, aesthetically, with the desire of an ecology in the process of (re)inventing itself, as a collective, field or group expression, without homogenizing the desires for ongoing self-actualization of its components” (XX). In Goodman’s creative engagement, this is not reducible to human action. Rewilding is a logic for a poetics of relation that touches on “new collective expressions as a speculative aspect of ecological immanence — an ecology’s own subjective feeling of the potential, desires or tendencies of the field from which it emerges” (XX). A Lively Earth is about the matter, and the mattering of the “differential qualities or intensities of their intertwining,” toward the “surplus-value of life” (XX).
Brian Massumi defines surplus-value of life as a “life-value” (25). “A qualitative life value is something that is lived for its own sake, something that is a value in and of itself, in the unexchangeable ‘currency’ of experience” (25). A life-value is incommensurable, singular: “it has the value of the qualitative character of its own occurrence” (25).
Surplus-value of life is life’s relational share, that difference without separability that cannot be meted out, or marketed. It is the ecological texture of what exceeds its surface appearance, “an irreducibly relational effect that comes to more than the sum of its contributory parts” (26). It is the intensification of process.
Intensification of process is artful. It carries an aesthetic yield that exceeds any form the object can take, unsettling the separation art can seek to master. Artfulness too rewilds, as Goodman beautifully demonstrates. Here, where art connects to the dynamism of systems in flux, its rewilding shifts the conditions of a world, in the aesthetics of the earth, to think with Glissant once more.
A Lively Earth is a tract on love. With the force of the impersonal — that vectoring quality that connects to the potentializing force of existence beyond the limits of personal identity — A Lively Earth moves like the beaver, creating loose landscapes that rewild thought.
Colonization lives in trepidation of loose landscapes. The dissensual ambiguity of what never quite finds its final form is a threat to its propertying logic. As is the love it germinates.
The love Goodman finishes on is a recasting of responsibility away from the individual-centred moralizing form it can take toward the quality of a surplus-value of life. What might it mean to connect to the incipient potential of an aesthetic yield? Where might bum-on-logs take us?
Charles Sanders Peirce’s cosmological love, or Alfred North Whitehead’s concept of peace, perhaps come closest to the impersonality of that aesthetic yield through which difference without separability worlds. Whitehead’s peace transcends self-interest. It has the cosmological quality of what Gilles Deleuze calls “a life” — the force of life-living beyond any one account of life. Whitehead struggles with the nomenclature — peace is a laden concept. He flirts with the impersonal as the force of vectoring that carries the more-than of life’s surplus.
There is no account of this world that can promise it will find a healthy metastability. The planet is too far gone, its far-from-equilibrium processes incapable of adequately protecting it from overheating, or from the vast degredation of animal and insect life. Love, in Goodman’s account, is not the promise of a world successfully rewilded. Love is the promise of an ecosophical commitment to the undirected, the non-distantist, the inseparable. It is a plea for uncolonizing incompossibilities toward a future we cannot govern.