Are We Really Only Here Temporarily?

This article originally appeared in C for Conscious Magazine

Much has been said about the state of nature. From it’s brutal, untamed order as expounded in Hobbes’ social contract to nature’s submission under the Enlightenment’s anthropocentrism, all the way to today’s Anthropocene. Over time, our relationship with the nature around us has gone from one of supremacy to submission, but in the insignificant amount of time we have been on this planet, what have we learnt from this natural world that both petrifies and soothes? 

Our relation with the natural world, despite our very existence being dependent on its resources, has always been conflictual. In fact, it is only in the latter part of the 21st century that we have seriously begun questioning the tenets of our beliefs regarding the environment, its preservation, and the newfound interest in the symbiotic exchange between humanity’s unrelenting state of progress and the safeguarding of its natural resources. One of the first proponents of a symbiotic theory, providing evidence for nature’s cooperative and unselfish nature came from Lynn Margulis, an evolutionary biologist who was initially ridiculed by the scientific community for her contributions to the endosymbiotic and Gaia hypotheses. The Gaia theory, popularised by James Lovelock, proposed that nature, its ecosystems and all its complexity, not merely operated as one evolving system, but also self-regulated itself. In Margulis’ theory, eukaryotic cells evolved via the symbiotic relationship with prokaryotic bacteria, meaning that it was through cooperation between species that evolution was spurred - not via competition, as commonly thought. Thus, what Margulis proved at the micro-level, her Gaia theory with Lovelock proved at the macro-scale.  Life as we know it, essentially, is interconnected in ways we previously thought impossible when looking through the lens of anthropocentrism. Once we began unravelling the carefully spun web of human supremacy over its environment, we initiated the process of re-evaluation. A re-evaluation defined by our re-positioning within the schema of existence. 

As our role within this world is re-scaled and re-evaluated, we begin to deconstruct the pillars of our supremacy. To be in this world, is no longer to be above it, in dominance, but rather to be with it. Heidegger, famously called this being, a being-in-the-world, which he defined as Dasein - a being that isn’t merely a thing, but a thing thrown within the complexities of an already-existing world. By repositioning the human amidst the other, this phenomenological approach allowed us to see ourselves as intermingled and already imbued in this social and natural order. Being-in-the-world does away with the anthropocentric language popular within the Western tradition: through it, the dichotomy of the subject and object dissolves. Through it, we begin to see the interconnectedness of our being, realising that our consciousness is always a consciousness of something, not a thing isolated within itself. With this novel appreciation of our sense of liminality, we can now see, not with our eyes, but rather with our mind, that our bodies don’t end with the confines of its biggest organ, but rather propels itself into a multitude of different systems. We now know humans contain roughly the same amount of bacterial cells as human cells. Does that make us any less human? Or does that simply make us more entwined with the species, environments and systems we inhabit? According to contemporary philosopher Timothy Morton, technology notwithstanding, we are already inherently ‘cyborgic’ for we are made up of non-human components ranging from the mitochondria in our cells to the composition of our very DNA containing genetic material from viruses. Essentially, we are already made of the environment in which we are positioned -  this means that through our acts of ecological violence, we don’t just hurt the environment, but our very selves. 

The idea of an environment so badly damaged by the acts of humanity that its own system of self-regulation is compromised, is inherent in Morton’s exposition of the Anthropocene. The Holocene, the geological epoch defined by the rapid growth and impact of the human species, from its hunter-gatherer beginnings to the transition to industrial urbanisation, has now ended. The epoch we have now entered, that of the Anthropocene, is defined by the impact humans have had on our planet’s geology, ecosystems and species. What Morton makes painstakingly evident is that the Anthropocene isn’t merely defined by our species’ destruction of the world, but also by our coming to terms with the irremediable fact that we now know we are the destroyers of our planet. We are now not only condemned to living on a planet whose resources and ecosystems are rapidly changing, but we are now experiencing, first hand, how every small action we perform, be it taking a flight to go on holiday, or kick-starting our car engines every morning to go to work, causes the further deterioration of our condition. This newfound awareness, that we ourselves aren’t merely the commanders of our own bodies but the unwitting drifters amongst the shifting ecosystems around us, is the tragicomical story of the 21st century: the realisation that it was only through the destruction of our planet that we came to realise just how entangled we were to it. 

It is true, we are here only temporarily, but unfortunately, within that small speck of time in which we are given life, and despite our being human only figuring for a fraction of the Earth’s existence, we imparted on this planet a disease more virulent than that of any infectious microorganism. It may be true that we are more microbial than ‘human’ but ironically it is the human in us which has caused our planet this great illness. Sadly, this means we are not just here temporarily. Within the interconnectedness of Gaia, our actions have repercussions beyond our finite existence; and so we live on, diseased, in the haunting forms of climate change, mass extinction and rising sea levels.