Schrader EnvironmentalCrisis

7/31/2019 Schrader EnvironmentalCrisis

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Time, Speed, and Delays in Environmental Crises

Reflections on the Time of Slime

Astrid SchraderSarah Lawrence College, [email protected]

DRAFT

For UC Berkeley Environmental Politics Colloquium

March 11, 2011

(Please do not cite or circulate beyond the colloquium)

In a keynote lecture for the 2007 annual meeting of the British Sociological

Association, Bruno Latour wonders How can we read in the newspapers that we as

humans might be responsible for 30 or 40% of species extinction, without this effecting

a change in our identity and ourrelationships? (Latour 2007) How can we

reconcile an idea of the human, Latour asks, as so big, so powerful and as dangerous

to our life support system as the impact of a major meteorite and on other hand we

are so little, so powerless, a mere scratch on the surface of the Earth? (ibid) Latour

formulates these questions in response to James Lovelocks gloomy prognosis for the

survival of humanity in the face of climate change in his bookTheRevenge of Gaia

(Lovelock 2007).

Latours questions point to an inherent contradiction in systems theories that

forget to ask how and to what extent we can know the rest of nature. From an

evolutionary perspective we are certainly part of nature, but as ostensibly the only

beings with histories, cultures, and technologies that are threatening the livelihood of

many other taxa we must surely recognize our domination of the rest nature.


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Slowing Down: Recognizing Human Domination?

In her Presidential Address at the 1997 Annual Meeting of the American

Association of the Advancement of Science, marine ecologist Jane Lubchenco (now the

head of NOAA) proposed a new social contract for science. After a detailed review of

the dramatic changes human culture has imposed on nature during the last few decades,

Lubchenco states, The current and growing extent of dominance of the planet will

require new kinds of knowledge and applicationknowledge to reduce the rate at

which we alter the Earth system (Lubchenco 1998, 495). Part of the Contract,

Lubchenco suggests, should be that scientists will exercise good judgment,

wisdom, and humility. It is difficult to know what Lubchenco meant by new

knowledge that reduces the rate at which we alter the Earth system, but she was

probably not recommending developing more technologies that would postpone

environmental decision-making into an indefinite future. Yet, immediately after her call

for scientific humility, we are told that The Contract should recognize the extent of

human domination of the planet (495).

The recognition of human domination over rest nature seems exactly where the

majority of efforts in environmental research are directed. The proliferation of maps

that measure and display the so-called human footprint as the degree of human

disturbances to wild nature is only one example among many that reinforce our

alleged power over nature (Sanderson et al. 2002).1

In spite of the acknowledgment that

1Recent efforts include the human disturbance index , which used digitized maps from Rand-McNally atlases and other sources to classify areas as human-dominated, partially disturbed, orundisturbed; according to that index, nearly three-quarters of the habitable surface of the planet isdisturbed at least in part by human use (Sanderson et al. 2002).See also (Kareiva et al. 2007) for a recent review of the domestication of nature and a proposal of howto quantify ecosystem services.


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human domination of the planet is at the heart of environmental problems, human

domination is often discursively reinforced through the maintenance of a fundamental

nature/culture distinction. The premise is, as Nigel Clark puts it, that left to itself,

nature is docile; it maintains its given forms and functions (Clark 2002, 107).

Ironically, such a premise is reinforced by dynamical system theories that picture nature

as self-making, or self-regulating that, more often than not aim at displacing

anthropocentric accounts of the environment. The cell, the body, the organism, the

ecosystem, nature, life, everything has become a (cybernetic) system nestled within a

hierarchy of larger systems. Each system is characterized in relation to the other by its

function or economic role, culminating in the global system, also called Gaia (or Earth

System, as Lubchenco called it), which no longer has an environment.

And, why is it exactly, asks Clark,that there is so much political purchase to

be had from the idea of natures undoing at the hands of culture, and so little currency

in considering the things life achieves on its own account (see Wilson, 1996)? And why

is it that after all the vexing of the nature/culture binary, we are still so much more

comfortable tracking the impact of globalization on the biophysical world than we are

with any consideration of a biological or geological contribution to the global

contours? (Clark 2002, 104). While the targets of Clarks critique view nature as

passive and immobile (exemplified in Ulrich Becks account of risk society),2 system

theoretical approaches to ecology posit nature as active and multiple: composed of

multiple hierarchically organized interacting systems. I would like to suggest that part

of the answer to Clarks question lies in insufficient attention to conceptions of time in

attempts to deconstruct the nature/culture binary. What distinguishes humans from the

2 See (Szerszynski et al. 1996) for compelling critiques of Becks Risk Society.


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rest of nature is no longer mobility versus stasis or activity versus passivity but the rate

of change that our technologies enable. At the center of the current environmental

crisis, and perhaps any perception of crisis, is the question of speed. What distinguishes

humans from the rest of nature is no longer mobility versus stasis or activity versus

passivity but the rate of change that our technologies enable.

Moving beyond the mere affirmation of the activity of nonhuman nature, in this

paper, I attempt to link an epistemological anthropocentrism that opposes historically

flexible human knowledge to its atemporal object of study to a political

anthropocentrism that presupposes our time as the unalterable movement ofHomo

Economicus. My inquiry is greatly informed by Jacques Derridas arguments that our

conception of time hinges on a fundamental distinction between human and nonhuman

animals and that this very distinction perceives scientific knowledge production as a

teleological process, progressively approaching the truth of the object as it is by itself.

In such a case, the object of knowledge is necessarily assumed to be static.

The first part of the paper draws on research with Harmful Algal Blooms

(HABs), illustrating and motivating a connection between an epistemological and a

political anthropocentrism. I argue that the scientific detection of harmful algae, which

attempts to fix nonhuman nature in an other time maps onto a particular

anthropocentric concerns with our political economies. .

In the second part, I explore how such a link might be enabled by specific

conception of time inherent to system theoretical approaches that consider nature or

life itself as a teleological process toward increasing complexity. In different

enactments of self-producing systems, natural evolution is either opposed to cultural or


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technical evolution, or the latter is naturalized as inevitable. The focus of my discussion

hence will be on the role of time in maintaining the duality between human society and

the rest of nature within a framework of systems theories that consider life - from the

cell to the planet - composed of hierarchies of self-producing organisms.

Expanding Dead Zones in the Ocean: Going Backwards

In 2006, theLA Timeslaunched a five part series titled Altered Oceans, documenting

the crisis in the seas.3 In Part I of the Pulitzer Prize winning series, A Primeval Tide

of Toxins, environmental reporter Kenneth Weiss suggests that humans are pushing

the oceans back to the dawn of evolution, [f]ish, corals and marine mammals are

dying while algae, bacteria and jellyfish are growing unchecked. For Weiss, the

alarming rate of anthropogenic nutrient pollution in the ocean is squeezing out complex

animals and plants, leaving oxygen depleted zones that are only hospitable to so-called

primitive organisms. Weiss suggests that pollution is reversing the natural arrow of

time: evolution [is] running in reverse, returning to the primeval seas of hundreds of

millions of years ago (Weiss 2006). Referring to the overpopulation of our oceans

with microscopic algae, marine ecologist and paleontologist Jeremy Jackson of the

Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California in San Diego agrees

with Weiss, and characterizes the current ecological transformation of the oceans as the

rise of slime. What assumptions about time and slime animate such pronouncements?

Converting sunlight into biomass, microscopic algae are considered primary

producers of life not only in the ocean, but of all life on earth. Due to the increased

pollution of coastal waters their productivity has gotten out of hand. In order to

3 Available at http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-oceans-series,0,7783938.special; last accessed Feb.,2011.


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reproduce algae need not only sunlight but also nutrients such as nitrogen and

phosphate. Agricultural run-off containing plant fertilizers and waste from industrial

animal farms have supplied coastal waters and estuaries with a large dose of these

nutrients. The result is an increased frequency and severity of what historically have

been called red tides.4 Descriptions of red tides appear in the Bible and in Captain

Cooks travel journals, suggesting that their seasonal occurrence is natural, rather

than a symptom of human-induced environmental change (D. M. Anderson et al. 2002).

This, however, no longer seems to hold for the expanded category of Harmful Algal

Blooms (HABs).

Algal blooms are considered harmful in two distinct but overlapping ways -

through the production of high biomass and the production of toxins. Public health

officials are most concerned with species of toxic dinoflagellates, whose toxin can

accumulate in shellfish, which upon human consumption can lead to serious illnesses.

On the other hand, when massive amounts of algae can no longer be eaten by predators,

their decomposition consumes enough oxygen to suffocate many other ocean dwellers.

According to the latest estimate, about 400 dead zones worldwide suffocate major

taxa of life in the ocean (Diaz and Rosenberg 2008). The largest and oldest dead zone

in U.S. waters has been observed in the Gulf of Mexico at the opening of the

Mississippi River. Its expansion appears to announce the collapse of the fishing

industry in that area within a few decades (Jackson et al. 2001). 5

4 Because not all algal blooms render themselves visible through color changes of the sea, marinescientists no longer speak of red tides but of Harmful Algal Blooms (or HABs).5 Depending on the model used, ecologists quarrel about whether the total breakdown of the fishingindustry is to be expected within the next few decades or whether it may take another century.


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These dead zones are, however, not dead at all. In fact they are full of life

just not the kind of life we want. We prefer big fish and pretty corrals (Jackson

2008). Jackson elaborates: A dead zone is an ecosystem, which lacks all the kinds

of animals we want, and has all the kinds of animals we dont want, and has all these

toxic microbes.6 For Jackson, the notion of slime refers not only refer to the

sliminess of some of the organisms that thrive under conditions of oxygen depletion,

but is also a figure for the excesses and overproductions of modern life, referring to

what is morally filthy or otherwise disgusting (Oxford English Dictionary, entry for

slime, online edition). The rise of slime is also disease, Jackson affirms, the excess

nutrients, the excess production that fuels the wrong kinds of microbes that kill the

organisms we want like corals and fish.7

Jacksons portrayal of the rise of slimecaptured succinctly by Weiss

subtitle of theLA Timesarticle as The Run-Off from Modern Life Is Feeding an

Explosion of Primitive Organisms propagated rapidly through the popular press.

Discover Magazinerated the rise of slime number 4 of the top 100 Environmental

News Stories of 2008.8 While the figure of slime seems to be effective in spreading

concerns about the dire conditions of our oceans, I argue, however, that the rise of

slime invokes a logic of time that works against Jacksons and many other

environmental scientists affirmation that nutrient loadings to coastal waters need to be

reduced now (Rabalais et al. 2009, emphasis added).

6 Interview with Jeremy Jackson available athttp://www.learner.org/courses/envsci/scientist/transcripts/jackson.html, accessed Feb, 2011.7Ibid.8 Available online at http://discovermagazine.com/2009/jan/004,accessed Feb., 2011
http://www.learner.org/courses/envsci/scientist/transcripts/jackson.htmlhttp://discovermagazine.com/2009/jan/004http://discovermagazine.com/2009/jan/004http://www.learner.org/courses/envsci/scientist/transcripts/jackson.html


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What kind of politics of time associates nature with a particular state of

affairs in the past? As Johannes Fabian states in Time and the Other, referring to

other cultures, as object of anthropology, the absence of the other from our Time has

been his mode of presence in our discourseas an object and victim (154). And, the

only agents of history are the ones that hold economic and technological power. Such

an evolutionary temporalization (Fabian 1983, 11) informs both the discursive and

technological re/construction of harmful algal species.

Research into harmful algal blooms faces a dilemma similar to the one we are

familiar with from debates about climate change: namely, the sorting out of human

versus natural contributions to the occurrence of red tides. According to Jackson, we

are not only encountering a period of reduced economic activity, but are witnessing a

great Anthropocene mass extinction in the oceans (Jackson 2008). As a

paleoecologist, Jackson worries that nature has become too relativistic; we need a better

understanding what wasnatural, he claims, rather than recalibrating the baseline upon

which human influences are compared to the state of nature in every generation of

ecologist (Jackson 2001, 5416). Moreover, he writes, Our concept of what is natural

today is based on personal experience at the expense of historical perspective. Thus,

natural means the way things were when we first saw them or exploited them, and

unnatural means all subsequent change (Jackson 2001, 5412). Hence, for Jackson,

the importance of paleoecology, which seeks to establish a baseline according to the

limits of scientific (or anecdotal) retrodiction into the past. But if the consequences of

HABs are an expression ofevolution running in reverse, we must be careful not to go

back too far otherwise the current state of our oceans might appear natural. What

seems problematic with such an assertion is not only the affirmation of human power


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over the rest of nature -- that is, the power to change the direction of evolution -- but

also the very assumption that evolution has a direction at all, equating simplicity (e.g.

slime) with the past and complexity (diversity and big fish) with the future.

Marine scientists make no attempt to hide the anthropocentrism in the notion of

harmful algal blooms. Harmfulness means either directly harmful to human health or

the altering of ecosystems in ways humans do not like (Cullen 2008, 1). But what

exactly is meant by this abstract category human in this case? A look at the National

Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrations(NOAAs) harmful algae website is

revealing: under the human dimension of harmful algal blooms, NOOA lists the

reduction of economic impacts of HABs as the foremost priority.9

We learn that the

annual economic loss in the U.S. due to HABs sums up to $82 million - with major

losses in the commercial fishing industry and the public health sector and noticeable

losses due to a decline in tourism and coastal monitoring expenses. According to this

and similar calculations, the economic threat of the dead zone, however, does not

match the surplus value the agricultural industry produces through the utilization of

excess nitrogen - even if the projected loss of the entire Gulf of Mexico fishing

industry, which some ecologists take for granted, would be taken into account. As one

commentator remarks, Its hard to weigh the benefit of protecting the gulfs $3 billion

fishing industry, which supports at least 40,000 jobs, against costs incurred by the $98

billion Mississippi Basin farm economy, which supports almost a million farmers

(Malakoff 1998).

Ecologists from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science use a slightly different

currency to calculate the contribution of blooming algae toward a recession in the

9http://www.cop.noaa.gov/stressors/extremeevents/hab/current/HumanDimensionsStrategyv08.aspx,

accessed Feb., 2011
http://www.cop.noaa.gov/stressors/extremeevents/hab/current/HumanDimensionsStrategyv08.aspxhttp://www.cop.noaa.gov/stressors/extremeevents/hab/current/HumanDimensionsStrategyv08.aspxhttp://www.cop.noaa.gov/stressors/extremeevents/hab/current/HumanDimensionsStrategyv08.aspx


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overall productivity of oceanic life. Diaz and Rosenberg, for example, estimate the loss

in productivity in metric tons of carbon as potential food energy due to the suffocation

of larger organismsthe secondary producers - in the dead zones (Diaz and Rosenberg

2008). Such a single currency of harmfulness - measured either in loss of US dollars or

in the loss of carbon biomass for consumption at the top of the food chain - structures

the main research agenda in harmful algae science.

Along with the algae the biomonitoring industry is blooming (Donald M.

Anderson and Ramsdell 2005). While environmental policy decisions are indefinitely

delayed because of the impossibility of figuring out whose nitrogen it is that is feeding

the hypoxic zone, (Malakoff 1998), monitoring technologies seem to approach real-

time. In close collaboration with the National Aeronautics Space Administration

(NASA), marine scientists develop satellite imaging technologies and robotic

underwater DNA-samplers in order to detect emerging algal blooms before they reach

the coast (Olson et al. 2003). As stated on NOAAs website A shift from light

microscopy to molecular approaches for quantifying harmful algal bloom (HAB)

species has been driven by the need to expedite sample processing while increasing

detection sensitivity and accuracy.10

The assumption that species of microorganisms

could be captured in their living presence, as they have always been, however,

effectively narrows the kind of possible responses to the nutrient pollution of coastal

waters. As soon as an early warning system is in place, fisheries can be closed in time,

seafood can be withdrawn from the market, beaches can be evacuated, aquaculture

cages can be dragged out of the toxic zones, without ever having to alter nutrient flows

into the oceans. What is becoming predictable with real time technologies is not the

10http://www.cop.noaa.gov/stressors/extremeevents/hab/current/abs_MERHAB.aspx#compHabAccessed Feb., 2011
http://www.cop.noaa.gov/stressors/extremeevents/hab/current/abs_MERHAB.aspx#compHabhttp://www.cop.noaa.gov/stressors/extremeevents/hab/current/abs_MERHAB.aspx#compHabhttp://www.cop.noaa.gov/stressors/extremeevents/hab/current/abs_MERHAB.aspx#compHabhttp://www.cop.noaa.gov/stressors/extremeevents/hab/current/abs_MERHAB.aspx#compHab


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future itself, but perhaps its anthropo-economic shape or form. These mitigation efforts

of the potentially harmful effects to human economies rely on the hope of the detection

ofa species presence that has previously been tagged harmful. Most harmful algal

species however object to such an objectification.

The most sophisticated visualization and genomic technologies fail to bring

harmful dinoflagellates into a present as such. Reducing the microorganism to either

a series of genes or to points of biomass (identifiable through their chlorophyll content),

the speedy detection technologies cannot capture their harmful performances.

Conceivably,writes a team of marine ecologists, once the ecological requirements

for each species are known, it would be easy to predict its occurrence. Unfortunately,

they continue, the real world is more complicated.Indeed, the net growth

performance of a species is affected by complex interactions with other organisms In

fact, it is becoming increasingly evident that phytoplankton life strategies and their

interactions with the surrounding environment may reach a degree of complexity

unexpected for unicellular organisms (Zingone 2000). In this account our slimy past

appears to be too complex to be brought into the present. For Donald Anderson of the

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, however, the major problem with the forecast of

a HAB event is not an unmanageable complexity that could possibly be reduced with

improved monitoring and modeling technologies, but relates to an inherent

unpredictability in the behavior of the microorganisms themselves. As Anderson

affirms, an important aspect of many HAB species is their reliance on life history

transformations for bloom initiation and decline. Many HAB species have dormant,

cyst stages in their life histories, which remain in bottom sediments when

environmental conditions are unsuitable for growth and germinate when conditions


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improve, cable of suddenly populating the water column with a large number of cells.

More important, however, than the temporal suspension of movement and growth is,

according to Anderson, the environmental regulation of cell division. Many

dinoflagellate species can switch between sexual and asexual reproduction depending

on nutrient availability and the stage of a particular bloom. And, at least for some of

these HAB species such a switching between modes of reproduction has been shown to

depend not only on current environmental conditions but also on their nutritional and

reproductive histories (see Schrader 2010). Thus, in becoming toxic or making-more-

of-themselves at an accelerated rate, the dinos change who they are. The trouble with

HAB species is that boundaries between organisms and environment are anything but

clear; they not simply adapt to environmental changes, but transform their harmful

species beings in dynamic intra-actions with their environments. Neither their

presence nor their movements can be captured as such. What Donna Haraway calls

the dance linking kin and kind (Haraway 2008, 17) becomes a spatiotemporal

entanglement of productive and reproductive processes that are irresolvable in real

time. Harmful dinoflagellates dont pre-exist our technoscientific intervention, nor are

they produced by them; their beings cannot be determined without incorporating

specific matters of concern into their scientific enactment; how we get to know them

matter to what they become. In this context, the figure of slime becomes a sign of that

which slips away from containment (Helmreich 2007); the excessive slime refuses to

be drawn into techno-scientific representability. The HAB species historicity requires

us rethink the time of slime that can no longer be ours alone.

[Im not trying to make an argument against the development of speedy

monitoring technologies (at least not as long as all funding for HAB research are


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devoted to it), but against the perceived need for physical evidence of a quantifiable

species being captured in its living presence before any policy decisions could be

made.]

For decades, marine ecologists have argued that nitrogen from agricultural run-

offs due to the overuse of fertilizers and waste from Concentrated Animal Feeding

Operations (CAFOs) are the major causes of the increased frequency of toxic algal

blooms and the expansion of the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico (D.F. Boesch and

Brinsfield 2000; Donald F. Boesch 2002; Carpenter et al. 1998; Ferber 2001). In a

recently published a consensus document, a group of harmful algae experts (Heisler et

al. 2008) cite multiple examples demonstrating both total algal biomass and HAB

occurrence decreases after reduction in nutrient input and underscore that prevention

of large blooms through nutrient control is far preferable than attempts to eradicate

HABs once they are established. The EPA, however, recommends voluntary measures

for agricultural nitrogen reduction in the Mississippi Basin. And, such a

recommendation took the EPA nearly a decade to formulate into an Action Plan.

Meanwhile, according to Jackson, the area of the hypoxic zone has doubled in the past

20 years to 20,000 km2, and the rate of increase in area is a linear function of nitrogen

loading from the Mississippi drainage (Jackson 2008, 11461). The 2008 Gulf of

Mexico Hypoxia Action Plan footnotes an earlier goal to shrink the dead zone to a size

of 5000 km2 by 2015 with the remark that this is probably no longer achievable.11 The

11The Gulf of Mexico Hypoxia Action Plan (available at) was required by The HarmfulAlgal Bloom and Hypoxia Research and Control Act of 1998 (HABHRCA, Public Law 108-456). In2001, federal and state officials finally agreed on a plan to reduce the size of the Gulf of Mexico deadzone to 5,000 km2. The 2001 Action Plan was highly contested by the agriculture industry. Claiming tolisten to all the stakeholders, it took the interagency Gulf of Mexico/Mississippi River WatershedNutrient Task Force another seven years to formulate an updated plan. The 2008 Gulf Hypoxia Action


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EPA's Science Advisory Board states that to reduce hypoxia in the Gulf, a systems

view, looking at all sources and effects, is needed (EPA Science Advisory Board

2008: ii).12

Even if it is clear that all sources and effects can never be determined,

emphasizing the complexity of the system in question has been proven an effective

strategy to postpone policy decisions indefinitely.

Anthropologist Bill Maurer argues that when both ecology and economy

become complex adaptive systems, postmodern capitalism appears as inevitable,

natural state of human economic affairs (Maurer 1995, 116). In the following I ask,

what logic of time is able to unify eco-logical/nomical systems with

historical/evolutionary narratives of progress such that nature becomes inextricably

linked to the past and capitalist re-productivities appear naturalized in turn.

Gaia in Crisis: Lovelocks Call to Weapons

James Lovelock characterizes his recent bookThe Revenge of Gaia as a wake-

up call about the impending catastrophe of global warming. From the inventor of Gaia

Theory, we learn that Gaia is extremely sick; sheGaia, the name of a goddess, is of

course female! - has a fever, and if we continue business as usual, few of the teeming

billions now living will survive (Lovelock 2007, 61). One of Lovelocks early

articulations proposes that Gaia is a complex entity involving the earths atmosphere,

biosphere, oceans and soil. The totality constitutes a feedback or cybernetic system

which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for the biota (Lovelock,

1972) (Margulis and Lovelock 1974). Lovelock continues: The period we are now in

Plan apparently incorporates changes in agriculture due to the increased demand for biofuels,reassessing previous and now seemingly too optimistic goals.12 The EPA Science Advisory Board report on Hypoxia in the Northern Gulf of Mexico is available at , accessed Feb, 2011.


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is close to a crisis point for Gaia (Lovelock 2007, 43). This crisis point marks the

failure of Gaias self-regulation mechanisms; negative feedbacks that used to assure

Gaias equilibrium (or homeostasis) turn into positive feedbacks or runaway effects.

This, Lovelock maintains, is already happening to Gaias temperature control system.

All systems known to affect climate are now in positive feedback, he claims, such

that any addition of heat from any source will be amplified (34). Gaia herself will not

die, Lovelock assures his readers, but the odds of survival ofour civilization are slim.

The evidence coming in from the watchers of the world, Lovelock proclaims, brings

news of an imminent shift in our climate towards one that can easily be described as

Hell: so hot, so deadly that only a handful of the teeming billions now alive will

survive (147).13 According to him, the apocalypse appears certain; the only open

question is when it will arrive.

For science studies scholar Eileen Crist, The Revenge of Gaia is only one of the

most extreme examples of apocalyptic thinking that she finds deeply ingrained in

current discourses of global climate change (Crist 2007).14 Such a vision of the end,

which implies a particular orientation towards the future as certain but yet unspecified

time, cannot be reduced to a particular religious conviction of one of the promoters of

Gaia theory, but appears to be a direct consequence of the teleology inherent in

cybernetic systems theory. According to Crist, systemic thinking contributes to the

13

The watchers of the world are no longer a few scientific outsiders who cannot make up their mindswhich side of the same coin they prefer: romantic holism or ultimate control. Rather, as Gaia theorists donot cease to point out, Gaia theory has made it into mainstream science and has found internationalapproval under the guise of Earth System Science. In 2001, the Amsterdam Declaration on GlobalChange put forward by the heads of four international global change research programs and signed bynumerous scientists, states as fact: the Earth System behaves as a single, self-regulating systemcomprised of physical, chemical, biological and human components (Lenton 2004; see also Lovelock2007, 25).14 Susan Harding makes a similar point about Al Gores deeply religious environmentalism in AnInconvenient Truth (Harding 2006).


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framing of global warming as theproblem of our time, diverting all attention to an

Earth-shattering calamity at some unspecified future time at the expense of

environmental problems humans and other species are already facing now.

Moreover, Crist observes that the framing of climate change as imminent

planetary emergency encourages the restriction of proposed solutions to the

technical realm (Crist 2007, 33). She cites a 2006 Wiredarticle titled Rebooting the

Ecosystem, which assures us that luckily, a growing number of scientists are thinking

moreaggressively, developing incredibly ambitious technical fixes to cool theplanet

(Crist 2007, 49). So much for the scientific humility Lubchenco calls for.

Lovelock goes even further and suggests that climate change has to be fought

like a war. At the early stages of the climate war, he writes, we have to make sure

our defenses against climate change are in place before the attack begins (Lovelock

2007, 13). Given his rhetoric of war, it is hardly surprising that Lovelock supports large

scale geo-engineering projects as perhaps the only effective means to protect us from

the powerful enemy (Lovelock 2007, 13).

But who or what are the two opposing forces at war? In times of peace, Gaia is

a living all-encompassing superorganism, a species of one (Barlow and Volk 1992),

in which humans are certainly meant to be included -- at least ordinary humans who,

unlike astronauts or systems modelers, do not have the privilege of viewing Gaia from

outer space. However, it is not only difficult to imagine how this species of one

evolves without companion, as population biologists have pointed out, but also how it

could get so terribly disturbedout of balance as it is - without external influences. As

Lovelock implies and Barry Commoner makes clear, Gaia must be thought of as


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divided into two worlds: the natural ecosphere, the thin skin of air, water, and soil and

the plants and animals that live in it, and the man-made technosphere (Commoner

quoted in Luke 1995, 61). Only under this condition is it possible to think of a climate

war. As humans in the technosphere disrupt the ecosphere, the ecosphere responds

with equally or more disruptive secondary effects in the technosphere (Luke 1995,

61).

Ironically, then, the powerful enemy is supposed to be fought with the same

kind of weapons - human technologies - that supposedly turned the negative feedback

controls of self-regulating Gaia into positive feedbacks at the first place. In this view,

the human is simultaneously an invasive species from which nature has to be protected

and the savior of the environment, enabling a protection from himself through a

further acceleration of external technological interventions. Jacques Derrida calls this

logic autoimmunity, whereby a living being, in quasi-suicidalfashion, itself works

to destroy its own protection, to immunize itselfagainstits own immunity

(Borradori et al. 2003, 94). What is put at risk by this terrifying autoimmunitary logic

is nothing less than the existence of the world, of the worldwide itself (98-99). In other

words, while it threatens to destroy the world itself, this kind of autoimmunity calls into

question the very existence of the world as a self, thatis Gaia as a species of one.

While I think Crist is right to draw attention to environmental changes that are

already affecting human and nonhuman populations now, the counter-narrative she

proposes shares many of tenets of the global emergency view of the Gaia theorists she

critiques. Crist writes, The most pernicious dimension of this representation [climate

change as apocalypse] is that of occluding the reality we are (and have been) immersed


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in here and nownamely, the simplification-cum-homogenization of life on Earth

(Crist 2007, 48).

Her affirmation of a simplification of ecosystems as the real problem of the

current environmental crisis is in danger of complicity with the kind of systemic

thinking that views the future as (uncertain yet predictable) telos, whose logical

necessity, as Crist asserts, quoting Horkheimer and Adorno, remains tied to

domination, as both its reflection and its tool (Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of

Enlightenment, p. 37 quoted in Crist 2007, 54).

To think of the human-induced spread of weedy species, as Crist calls the

surviving generalists, in terms of a simplification of life supports the teleological logic

of an evolutionary reversal, assuming that nature left to itself, demonstrates an

evolutionary tendency of complexity increasing with time (Schneider and Sagan

2005, 7).

A fetishization of complexity as uninterrogated ethical good makes it

impossible to ask who or what constitutes that we that prefers the big fish and pretty

corals. Or formulated the other way around, such a view takes for granted that what

we prefer coincides with what is commercially interesting. This association is,

however, precisely what Crist (and Jackson, as noted before) tries to avoid when she

writes, The real problemthe industrial-consumer complex that is overhauling the

world in an orgy of exploitation, overproduction, and wasteis treated with kid gloves,

taken as given, and regarded as beyond the reaches of effective challenge (Crist 2007,

55) In order to understand better why attention to the diminishing biodiversity as

progressive simplification is not a persuasive counter-narrative to an apocalyptic view


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of climate change, we have to dig a little deeper into systems theories and consider the

view of life in a second-order incarnation of cybernetic systems.

Life as Self-producing Ecosystem

Biologist Lynn Margulis, who initially collaborated with Lovelock and co-

authored the Gaia hypothesis of the 1970s, seems now to have a rather different view of

Gaia than her British colleague. Marguliss theory of ecological evolution highlights

the active role of all organisms in nature in maintaining their livelihood. Her aim is to

de-center the human not only as the pinnacle of evolution but also as steward or

controller of nature. In their co-authored books What is Life? andAcquiring Genomes ,

Margulis and science writer Dorian Sagan provide us with a wealth of examples of how

the smallest organisms -- from bacteria, protists, fungi, and termites to squids -- self-

maintain their living conditions by actively constructing their environments. We learn,

for example, of the invention ofgenetic engineering by bacteria, of fungis agriculture,

and of the architectonical skills of termites -- skills that make human technologies seem

primitive. Margulis and Sagan directly contradict Lovelocks contention, shared by

many environmentalists, that technology began with the human invention of fire and

everything bad that is happening to our planet now followed from that. Humans, we

are told, are special, Margulis and Sagan write somewhat cynically, We have, at least

in Western culture, a tradition of seeing ourselves as being in position of moral

stewardship over the rest of the life. Even in the absence of God, we imagine ourselves

to possess a unique capacity to destroy the planet (via nuclear weaponry) or to swiftly

change atmosphere and climate (Margulis and Sagan 1995, 221).


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For Margulis, Gaia is not the living feedback system of Lovelocks first-order

cybernetics; rather Gaia is symbiosis seen from space (Margulis 1986, 189). Such an

assertion does not provide any relief from the paradoxical position the human assumes

as located simultaneously within and outside of Gaia as observer, but for now the focus

is on symbiosis. Symbiosis is a close association of organisms of different kinds

making a living together, an association that can be mutually beneficial, exploitative (as

in parasitism) or neutral. The point is that multiple organisms co-habit within and

outside of bounded individuals. InAcquiring Genomes,Margulis and Sagan argue that

the completely self-contained individual is a myth that needs to be replaced by a

more flexible description (Margulis and Sagan 2003, 19). They view organisms less as

autonomous individuals than as ecosystems: that is, as communities of bodies

exchanging matter, energy and information with each other (23). The anthropocentric

view that posits the human as pinnacle of evolution appears to be replaced with a bio-

or ecocentric view. While Margulis and Sagan hold that individuality as well as

competition are political terms inappropriate for biology,

15

they regard the

maintenance of a (composite) self as a unity as the very foundation of life.

For Margulis, Gaia is no longer a homeostatic system that tends towards a stable

equilibrium as Lovelock supposes, but a homeorrhetic system. The word

homeorrhetic is a composition of the Greek words homosmeaning same and rhysis

meaning flow (editors note in Serres 1983). Homeorhesis [sic] is the process

version of homeostasis (Gilbert 2000, 731), the term was coined by Waddington in

15 This assertion is awkward, given thatAcquiring Genomes is full of metaphors borrowed from politicaleconomy. People are walking assemblages of microorganisms, a sort of loose committee (19). Not onlydoes evolution proceed through corporate mergers (72), it is also marked by an increasing division oflabor (48).


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referring to the stability of developmental trajectories (Keller 2002, 190). In this view,

Gaias self is no longer static; rather the process of self-regulation is what is

preserved. Margulis writes, Gaian regulation, like the physiology of an embryo, is

more homeorrhetic than homeostatic in that the internally-organized system regulates

around moving, rather than fixed-from-the-outside, setpoints (Margulis 1990, 866).

Margulis articulates her homeorrhetic version of a self-regulating ecosphere

around the concept of autopoiesis, which she adopts from the Chilean cognitive

biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela.16

Autopoiesis literally means

self-making. Autopoiesis relies on a recursive or circular logic. An autopoietic

system generates the components that produce its own organization (Hayles 1999).

According to Maturana and Varela, the internal organization of a system defines the

systems class identity. Any interaction between the autopoeitic unit and an

environment is controlled such that the organization of the system is conserved.

Maturana and Varela refer to the identity preserving interactions as organizational

closure. The internal (currently actualized) configuration of the system determines or

16 For some commentators such a move from a stable equilibrium to a dynamic equilibrium or from first-order cybernetic to a second-order cybernetic system makes a tremendous difference in terms of itsethical and political purchase. Cary Wolfe, for example, reads Maturana and Varelas autopoeitic theoryas relativistic. He then can claim that the charges brought forward against the totalitarian implications offirst-order systems theory as appropriable for technocratic management of society and nature (CarolynMerchant quoted in Wolfe 1995) or global environmental surveillance (Luke 1995) do not apply tosecond-order cybernetics. But then he points to the political danger of considering all points of view asequally valid, as if this were not a form of totalitarianism. My reading is more aligned with Katherine

Hayles, who sees Maturana and Varela as wiggling between relativism and realism, never being able toresolve the paradox entailed in their notion of reflexivity. In other words, the (political) problem resideswithin their epistemology rather being merely a political consequence of a possible appropriation.Adding a degree of freedom (or two as Terrence Deacon does for example (Deacon 2003)) makes atheory of self-referentiality more interesting and certainly more complex, but does little to address thebasic dilemma of circularity turning into dialectical contradictions only apparently resolved on the nextlevel in a hierarchy of emergences. (How many epis do we want to add to the phenomenon before werealize, as Susan Oyama did, that the entire structure needs an overhaul rather just some fine-tuning(Oyama 2003)? As discussed in detail in (Schrader 2010), Barads notion of an intra-actively producedphenomenon provides an alternative to the hierarchical structure of systems theory (Barad 2007).


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selects the kind of interaction with an environment. While the environment plays a

cameo role in this scenario - it functions merely as a trigger for structural changes - the

organism actively selects environmental patterns to which it will respond with

structural changes such that its identity is maintained (Maturana and Varela 1998,

169).17

Maturana and Varela conceive of living systems in terms of the processes that

realized them, and not in terms of the relationship with an environment (Maturana and

Varela 1998, 12).

For Margulis, the autopoeitic story of active self-maintenance is particularly

attractive to counter the gene-centered Neo-Darwinian account of evolution (which

combines Mendels genetics with Darwins account of gradual evolution via natural

selection), which she finds reductionist, zoocentric, repressive and simply wrong

(Margulis 1990). Nobody has ever shown, she maintains, that random mutation in gene

frequencies accumulate and that this would lead to speciation. As an alternative,

Margulis proposes symbiosis to be the driving force of evolution. According to her

theory, new species originate through the acquisition of genomes from formerly

independent microorganisms or bacteria that the larger organisms incorporate without

digesting. It is now well-established that mitochondria within the eukaryote cell

originated from bacteria. However, whether all speciation events can be attributed to

symbiogenesis remains highly controversial. The main point here, however, is that

according to Margulis, life does not adapt to a passive physicochemical environment

17In Cary Wolfes reading of Maturana and Varela the interplay between organizational closure andstructural openness implies openness from closure (Wolfe cited in Haraway 2008, 317). In my reading,there is a clear hierarchy between organization and structure. Structural openness is only possible in sofar as it does not affect the fundamental organization of the organism, that is, its autopoiesis. ForMaturana and Varela, interactions with an environment are clearly secondary to self-maintainingprocesses, which is central to the very idea of autopoiesis. Autopoiesis happens within the horizon of apresent.


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as most neodarwinians assume; instead life actively produces and modifies its

surroundings (Margulis 1990, 866).

Marguliss second attack against Neo-Darwinism concerns the presumed

activity of selfish genes. In Richard Dawkinss famous view, any ecological

interactions are subordinated to the genes desire to be reproduced in the next

generation. The urge to replicate would trigger competition for resources (Eldredge

2003, 24). Against this, Margulis and Sagan hold that genes cannot be selfish: they are

not autopoietic units, since they do not have membranes that would distinguish them

from their environment. All autopoeitic entities are surrounded by membranes that are

semipermeable in that, like gate-keepers, or custom officials, they permit passage of

only certain chemicals (Margulis 1986, 11). Thus genes are not alive. For Margulis

and Sagan, the minimal autopoietic unit is the cell and its first representatives are

bacteria. Life began with bacteria.

For bacteria to count as living organisms, life must not be defined by genetic

identities, since bacteria freely exchange genes with each other (this is called lateral

gene transfer). For that reason bacteria do not have a species, according to Margulis

and Sagan, but are certainly alive. The argument sounds persuasive. What they

presuppose, however, is that inheritance is necessarily and exclusively genetic. The

fluidity of bacteria is defined against the stability of genetic reproduction. Their

decentering of the gene is limited to rendering reproduction secondary for the definition

of life, while holding on to a fundamental separation of productive, metabolic processes

and reproductive, genetic processes. A series of problems will follow from that.


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Thus, rather than denouncing the oppositional hierarchy between genealogy and

ecology, Margulis and Sagan reverse the order of things. Life is not defined by

reproduction, but by autopoiesis. Without autopoietic behavior, organic beings are

not alive (Margulis and Sagan 1995, 17). Self-maintenance must precede

reproduction. For a population to evolve, its members must reproduce. Yet before

any organic being can reproduce, it must first self-maintain (Margulis and Sagan 1995,

19).

Too focused on countering and dismissing the gene-centered view of the Neo-

Darwinian synthesis, Margulis and Sagan miss out on the great opportunity their theory

of symbiogenesis provides to deconstruct from within biology the liberal humanist

notion of individuality. Instead of highlighting that any self is always already

inhabited by multiple past and present others, as her theory of symbiosis suggests, we

learn that self-maintenance is the first and only goal of life.

In place of competitive individualism, Margulis and Sagan affirm a functional

teleology. They argue that Darwin threw the baby out with the bathwater when, in

getting rid of divine purpose, he denied life any kind of purpose (Margulis and Sagan

1995, 224). For Margulis and Sagan, the purpose and the very foundation of life is self-

maintenance, the maintenance of the functional integrity of a bounded self, which can

be internally multiple, but is nevertheless clearly distinguishable from its environment.

Instead of giving up the humanist notion of self-interest, choice, and purpose, Margulis

and Sagan grant them to microorganisms too. All living beings may share our own

feeling of free will (Margulis and Sagan 1995, 217). As Rich Doyle asserts, the theory

of autopoiesis is placed firmly within an Aristotelian tradition that saw organisms as


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wholes mobilized by their purpose or telos, but with a difference: the purpose of an

organism is autonomy itself (Doyle 2003, 37).

Autopoiesis and Time

While Margulis and Sagan seek to connect the purposefulness of autopoeitic

systems to their account of evolution, such a move sits somewhat uneasily with

Maturana and Varelas account of autopoiesis. According to Katherine Hayles, the

circular self-reflective structure of autopoiesis prevents it from an articulation with an

evolutionary line. In Marguliss account, evolution is not gradual, nor does it proceed

in a linear fashion, but in genomic jumps. The problem remains, however, that for

autopoietic systems there is only the present and the ongoing processes in which it

engages (Hayles 1995, 76). Past, future and time exist only for the observer

(Maturana and Varela quoted in Hayles 1999, 139). The observer is itself constituted as

an autopoeitic system through the act of observation. It is however, a special system

that recursively generates representations of its interactions with the system it observes.

The interactions with the representations of the interaction then constitute the human

subject as observer (Hayles 1999, 144). While this still seems to be circular,

temporality hinges on the fact that the domain of interaction is always larger than that

of representation (ibid.). Time is constituted through the failure of exact

representation. Without the capability of an observing system observing itself

observing there would be no time.

Representation hinges on the existence of what Maturana and Varela call a

linguistic domain, which in turn presupposes the existence of a social structure, in

which symbolic communication among members of a social unity becomes possible


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(Maturana and Varela 1998, 193). Neither a social structure nor the ability to

communicate is confined to the realm of human beings, but the emergence of a society

presupposes, in Maturana and Varelas view, a nervous system with a specific

plasticity. There arent any societies of microbes. The formation of society requires

what they call a third order structural coupling between autopoeitic units (as distinct

from a second-order-structural coupling that is responsible for the formation

multicelluar organisms). Social life becomes possible when interactions between

organisms become recurrent in the course of their ontogeny (Wolfe 2003, 37). In

addition to recurrence, ontogenetic variations are necessary for the emergence and

maintenance of a social system, which is constituted as interactions between different

organisms of the same class identity. Individual ontogenies become part of co-

ontogenies of organisms that each preserve their organization, giv[ing] rise to a new

phenomenological domain (Maturana and Varela 1998, 180). The formation of a

society is thus an emergent phenomenon that allows bidirectional communication

across the systems boundary, constituted through the relations between individual

autopoeitic units.

Cary Wolfe is right to affirm that autopoeitic systems are not grounded in a

dichotomy between human and nonhuman (Wolfe 1995). A new fundamental

distinction, however, is introduced that classifies organisms according to their possible

modes of inheritance based on their ability to communicate with each other, which in

turn hinges on the plasticity of their nervous system.18 Only when there is

(bidirectional) communication between the inside of the system and an outside, can

18 This second order distinction between the different modes of inheritance can be seen as a consequenceof the hierarchical distinction between system and environment, that is, the privilege of self-maintenanceover interactions with an environment.


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there be time and representation.19

As long as the environment is reduced to a mere

trigger for structural changes, genealogical changes are impossible to conceive of.

We Have Never Been Individuals

Developmental biologist Scott Gilbert points out that environmentally

dependent development is precluded in Marguliss account of autopoiesis. Gilbert

asserts: Lynn Margulis has championed symbiosis in evolution, yet she sees

symbioses between autopoietic (self-developing) entities. He continues: But if

developmental symbioses represent the rule and not merely the exceptional case, then

the entire notion ofautopoiesis must be abandoned. We are not adults entering into

symbiotic relationships with other adults or microbes. Rather, the processes that made

us adults are already the interactions between us and our microbes (Gilbert 2002, 213).

The possibility of interactions between us and our microbes (or between

microbes and their prey) during development, which Gilbert calls interspecies

epigenesis (Gilbert quoted in Haraway 2008, 32), is precluded by the hierarchical

structure of systems theory. According to the theory of autopoiesis, any inheritable

transmission of traits must come from inside the organism, that is, its genome, unless

recurrent interactions between organisms lead to the transcendence of the biological

world through the formation of a social world. Interactions between organisms in the

course of ontogeny cannot possibly affect the being of either one of the organisms.

19There is of course a certain kind of communication between system and environment in any case, ifone would call a systems selective responses to environmental triggers a communication. But thiskind of communication is rather single-sided; it can be hardly viewed as interaction. Interactions becomepossible only between autopoietic entities and only when these are recurrent can one speak ofcommunication in the sense we usually understand this term.


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The oppositional hierarchy between self-maintenance and reproduction

demands that if memory is not internal to the organism, it must be located in a distinct

phenomenological domain. Only language, culture, or society20

could feedback onto the

ontogeny of an organism, but only after they have been isolated from the interacting

bodies that constituted them. The presumption of an operational closure or internal

teleology in Marguliss terms, precludes, the embryonic co-construction of the

physical bodies. And this, Gilbert asserts, has many more implications because it

means that we were never individuals (Gilbert quoted in Haraway 2008, 32).

Gilberts critique must not be constrained to symbiotic interactions during

development, but holds for any environmental interactions that affect the being or

mode of inheritance of an organism, whether this is defined by a particular metabolism

or the mode of reproduction. Due to the oppositional hierarchy between ecology and

genealogical changes, autopoiesis cannot account for development at all other than in

terms of structural changes that leave the systems organization or its class identity

intact. If the purpose of life is to maintain a systems metabolism, any modification of

it must be associated with death; and any modification of the mode of reproduction or

life history processes must be associated with either evolution or extinction of the

species. The assumption is, as biologist Franois Jacob succinctly summarizes, [t]he

[genetic] program cannot receive lessons from experience (Jacob cited in Beardsworth

1996). But how can there be a program without experience? What or who comes first?

Susan Oyama reminds us of the undecidability between a first time and a recurrence in

20 Language, culture, or society must not be understood as exclusively belonging to the realms ofhumans; the division is drawn differently in this second-order systems theory. However, inviting somenonhumans into these human categories based on their cognitive abilities does not make a difference thatmatters. Maturana and Varelas theory of autopoiesis fixes the terms of comparison between species inrelation to the human. I see the move here from first-order to second-order systems theory as a movefrom fixing selves to fixing relations.


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development. She writes, transmission, whether of genes or culture is supposed to

produce developmental regularity, but , it actually presupposes such regularity.

Something is judged to have been transmitted when it reappears (195). Oyamas

comment hints at the Derridean structure of iterability, that is, that any assumption of a

unit presumes it repeatability as its very definition.

At the heart of the problem is the positing of a spatially bounded individual,

whether static or dynamic, defined either by essence or process, that prevents thinking

matter and energy transfer together with informational exchanges across generations.

This is a direct consequence of the claims that identity formation must precede

reproduction, which remains an internal genetic affair. The inability to articulate

genealogical and ecological phenomena together is not only a failure to account for

well-known, empirically established behaviors, but has ethical and political

implications. The superiority of the human and a nature/culture division are

reintroduced through different modes of inheritance.

As discussed above, in many dinoflagellate species that contribute to harmful

algal blooms, modifications of modes of reproductions due to altered environmental

circumstances are the rule rather than the exception. In addition, many heterotrophic

(those that live on the organic compounds of other critters) dino species complement

their metabolism through the temporary acquisition of photosynthesizers. In Margulis

and Sagans account, such a temporal change in survival strategy is inconceivable. The

assumption of an internal teleology suggests that what they call corporate mergers are

irreversible, and environment-dependent opportunistic cooperations are ruled out.


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Life history transformations can only be explained when both context- and

history-dependencies are taken into account. In order to account for symbiosis or any

other environmental contributions to development, we do not only have to give up

the notion of autopoiesis, but also the very idea of interactions implying preexisting

entities at a particular moment in time. Interspecies epigenesis is better understood as

intra-activity in Barads sense, in which the agencies do not pre-exist their activities.

As philosopher of science, Joe Rouse points out, the study of mutual interacting

systems in which both systems are modified tacitly presupposes a standpoint outside

the interaction themselves, from which both modifications are equivalent (Rouse 2002,

272). In other words, tracking the changing meanings of interacting systems in time,

presupposes a general framework of already unified human time (external to particular

happenings), making such an outside view possible.

The Thermodynamic Economy of Life

While for Maturana and Varela, time exists only for an observer, as a

consequence of self-reflexive observation (see Hayles 1999, 139), Margulis and Sagan

postulate an immanent being of time as underlying all living processes. They

circumvent the problem Maturana and Varelas articulation of autopoiesis has with

evolutionary changes in supplementing autopoiesis with the second law of

thermodynamics.21 In order to map the internal teleology that manifests itself as a

future-directedness present in all living beings (Margulis and Sagan 1995, 17)

onto an evolutionary arrow of time, Margulis and Sagan help themselves to one of

21 Such a move is possible only because, unlike Maturana and Varela, Margulis and Sagan do notattempt to develop a coherent epistemology and thus leave the vexing question of observation aside.


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the most contested laws of physics.22

Paradoxically, in this view, the being of time is

simultaneously atemporal and directed toward a future that unifies complexity,

diversity and productivity.

In their bookAcquiring Genomes, they summarize their view as follows:

Not only the development of ecosystems but the entire direction of evolution is informed by thethermodynamic mandate, the law of nature to reduce ambient gradients. In ecosystems,evolution, and economies we note an increase in complexity in, for example, the total number ofspecies spread over a larger volume, increasing differentiation of division of labor, moredeveloped and complex computer networks, and increasing functional integration of materialand energy flows such as gas, electricity, water and sewage in urban development (Margulis andSagan 2003, 48).

Margulis and Sagan thus effectively collapse ecological and evolutionary changes -

production and reproduction - into an economic unity and map the efficiency of

ecological productivity onto an evolutionary direction of time.

In an attempt to provide a counter-narrative to the Neo-Darwinist imagination

that subordinates productive activities to the reproduction of selfish genes, in which the

urge to replicate would trigger competition for resources (see Eldredge 2003, 24),

Margulis and Sagan provide the global economy with an alternative biological

foundation. Their economy is driven less by competition than by the freedom to choose

corporate partners such that the most efficient energy-converters prevail. All life-

sustaining intra-actions are reduced to the thermodynamic economy of matter and

energy exchange. Instead of treating ecological interactions as if they are all about

perpetuating genetic information into the next generation, as Richard Dawkins proposes

22 The second law of thermodynamics posits an irreversible increase in entropy (the loss of energy foruseful work) for closed systems near a thermodynamical equilibrium. While physicists andphilosophers still debate if and under what conditions the second law is applicable to living open systemsfar from equilibrium, the Nobel-prize-winning work of Ilya Prigogine suggests that the local constructionof so-called dissipative structures increases the rate of entropy production in their environment.


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(Eldredge 1992, 6), Margulis and Sagan treat genealogical relations as if they are all

about the maximizing of the efficiency of economic interactions.

The purpose of life and the driver of evolution lies in the construction of

mechanisms or structures for ever more efficient gradient reduction in order to more

effectively accomplish the natural goal of entropy production (Schneider and Sagan

2005, xv). Over time organisms and ecosystems become progressively more

differentiated. With increasing complexity of its internal organization a system

becomes more efficient in erasing differences in its environment. Thus, life no longer

just thrives to maintain itself, but evolves towards greater efficiency in gradient

reduction of its environment. Self-maintaining life becomes a conquest of the most

efficient energy exchanges. The survival of the fittest becomes the survival of the

fastest entropy (or waste) producer. As a result of more efficient gradient reduction,

complexification becomes an end in itself and an ethical good.

From this it follows directly that the evolution of life seems to accelerate

(Margulis and Sagan 2003, 43). Lifes peculiarities and human technologies, Margulis

and Sagan assert, do seem to expand at an accelerating rate of change as we come

from the past and toward the present (ibid.). Just like the movement of capital in

economic globalization, life needed to get faster or more mobile, and so it did, and the

manner in which it did so logically followed from what went before (Maurer 2001,

470).

In other words, through a collapse of production and reproduction, it appears as

if Time [itself] accomplished or brought about things in the course of evolution

(Fabian 1983, 15), as if the means of production [were] already produced (see


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Helmreich 2007, 294). Given these assumptions, an assessment of harmfulness in algae

blooms in terms of loss of productive biocapital seems to follow naturally. The very

possibility to ask to whom the ecological transformations of our oceans matter is

effaced when the means of comparison between past and future states of the ocean are

presupposed.

But if that view were correct, if life, technology, and capital were all so well

adjusted in their natural movements, we wouldnt be talking about an environmental

crisis. Not everybody, it seems, can keep up with presumed global rates of

acceleration. As Crist remarks, the greater the speed of environmental change, the

more the adaptive ability of organisms is challenged. Anthropogenic climate change is

unfolding faster than episodes of the pastfar faster than many species can or will be

able to handle (Crist 2007, 44).

For Derrida the question would be how to prevent the ontologizing of such a

disadjustment into an injustice; in other words, how to respond without re-constructing

an ontological difference between human culture and its natural others. If Margulis is

correct that microorganisms have technologies, how did human technology become so

much faster to begin with?

The Speed of Human Time

Philosopher and new media theorist Bernard Stiegler links the increasing speed

of human technologies to a general acceleration of global changes. With Stiegler, the

apocalyptic view of the environmental crisis can becomes associated with an

acceleration of human time that is fundamentally distinct from the

genetically/informationally programmed rhythms of the rest of nature. In Technics and


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Time, Stiegler rethink technics as time in the face of the acceleration of technology that

threatens our culture (see also Bennington 2000; Stiegler 1998).

According to Stiegler (and Derrida), for there to be time there must be

diffrance (a differing/deferral) betweenphysis and tekhn. Diffrance is the

articulation of the living with the non-living (Derrida 1982). This also means that there

must be memory before any division between nature and culture, humanity and

animality. While for Derrida diffrance is quasi-transcendental -- neither in nor beyond

history, but its condition of possibility -- Stiegler tries to locate diffrance as a

particular stage of life within evolutionary history. Hence for Stiegler, there is a

rupture betweenphysis and tekhn within history. Following paleontologist Leroi-

Gourhans description of the process of humanization, Stiegler associates this rupture

with the emergence of the human, who is marked by the co-evolution of brain and tool.

For Stiegler, the emergence of the human coincides with an exteriorization of

memory as technology. The human did not invent technology but is constituted as

technology. Before the emergence of human and technology, memory would have been

located entirely within the living being as genetic program. The relationship between

an organism and its environment would be genetically fixed. (This is not very different

from Maturana and Varelas postulate of operational closure for a living system, even

though they would not want to associate this closure with a genetic program.) As a

result of the exteriorization of memory an archive is born that defines the human

species particular relation to time (see Wills 2006, 241). The human being is

essentially prosthetic (Stiegler 1998, 179). In this way, Stiegler can claim that the

human is constituted by technology and that technics is time. Now time itself has a


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history and can be associated with a speed, the speed of technology. Stiegler then

rethinks speed in terms of technological transformations. The point of Stieglers move,

as I read it, is to be able to structurally distinguish between different kinds of

technologies associated with different cultural historical periods, as for example

between analog and digital technologies. In Stieglers account, the possibility of a

periodization of different kinds of technologies comes at the price of a renewed

fundamental distinction between the human and its animal other.

Stiegler hence builds his analysis of the acceleration of time associated with

technological domination and globalization on the distinction of fundamentally

different modes of inheritance associated with humanity and animality. According to

him, [h]umans die but their histories remain -- this is the big difference between

mankind and other life forms (Stiegler 2003). Stiegler is here not thinking of the

individual memories we have of our deceased grandparents, but of the memories we

make available to future generations through books, films, databases, and other archival

technologies. In addition to technologies specifically designed as archives, which

Stiegler calls mnemotechnical systems, any technical object functions as memory

device, such as a piece of pottery or a tool, enabling future generations to

inherit/remember experiences they never lived (Stiegler 2003). Such a mode of

inheritance transcends the presumed genetic programming of other animals. So far, this

is not very different from the kind of epigenetic memory Maturana and Varela associate

with the plasticity of the nervous system as condition for the emergence of society. For

Stiegler, however, this kind of memory is explicitly linked to technics as an

exteriorization of human evolution, which he calls epiphilogenesis. He describes

epiphilogenesis as sedimentation of succession of epigeneses or alternatively an


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Stiegler presumes that the speed of technology is correlated to the precision of

technology, the enhanced precision is achieved through an enhanced manipulation of

the object to be recorded. For Stiegler the promise of real-time technologies lies in

their calculability as force against shortsighted economic calculations. Like the Gaia

theorists, for Stiegler the hope of technology lies in more and better control of

technological calculations.

If , however, as it seems in HAB research, the speed of technoscience and the

speed of policy decisions are inversely proportional, such that the faster the former the

slower the latter proceeds, the very idea of an acceleration of time seems to prevent

environmental decision making. Such a disproportionality might be just an effect of the

very illusion ofreal-time that built on the assumption that there once was a nature all

by itself. Promising ever greater exactness and control, real-time technologies seek

their own disappearance as technology through the erasure of time. In fact, real-time

technology is an oxymoron.

As Derrida points out, it makes no sense tofetishize the concept of

acceleration: there isnt a single acceleration. The danger of assuming an objective

speed which is continuous and which gets progressively faster is the erasure of

differences of rhythm, heterogeneous accelerations that also manifest themselves

within technological developments (Derrida 2002, 249-50).

Conclusion: Is There Hope in The Rise of The Slime?

As noted above, major research efforts into HAB research focus on monitoring

and control. According to Lovelocks story, Gaia is a system in need of global

management. In Lovelocks narrative, Gaia resembles less a sick organism than what


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Timothy Luke calls an ensemble of eco-knowledge and geo-power ( Luke 1995).

While suggesting urgency and emergency, Lovelocks apocalyptic narrative

strategically promotes delays: oriented towards the future catastrophe, it diverts from

any engagements with environmental problems humans and nonhumans are facing

now. The options we are facing in this scenario are either risking the world or giving-up

on the idea that there is a self, a world itself. As Marilyn Strathern remarks, Nature as

ground for the meaning of cultural practices can no longer be taken for granted if

Nature itself is regarded as having to be protected and promoted (Strathern 1992, 177).

In more fluid accounts of systems theories, I have discussed two opposing

movements in terms of their modes of inheritance. In Margulis and Sagans account,

human technologies and their accelerations are naturalized through the collapse of

evolutionary (internal temporal changes) and economic (external spatial changes)

interactions. Theres no fundamental distinction between human and other animals, but

their relationship is fixed in terms of increasing complexity. The question of an

environmental problem cannot even arise, since everything moves in synch as

determined by the second law of thermodynamics. The rise of the slime cant possibly

be bad news, since a) the slime always already had all the power it deserves and b)

everything moves only in accordance to Gaias internal organization that maintains

itself. As Derrida would say, once one has named a telos, theres no distinction between

opinion or belief and knowledge: that is, there is no more space for an environmental

critique (Derrida 1984).

Maturana and Varela and Stiegler maintain the opposition between internal

genetic memory and an external technical or cultural memory. In one case the

externalization of memory is associated with cognitive ability, in the other with


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technology, and in both cases with the beginning of time (as subjective illusion in the

former and as objective reality in the latter case). Natural evolution, if that term would

even make sense in their accounts, is timeless. Thus, no matter how fast the speed of

technology, it is always out of sync with nature by its very definition. If that is a mark

of a crisis then we are living in a permanent one.

What could be the meaning of the rise of the slime with which this pager

began? For Lovelock it might be a warning that a sustainable fishery is an illusion. For

Margulis and Sagan, it might be an affirmation of bacterial power, and their more

advanced genetic engineering technologies. My hope is that the rise of slime may

become an opportunity to reconfigure the time of slime that is, now - and ask anew

to whom the ecological transformations of our oceans matter.

My point is not a specific answer, but the very possibility to pose the question

that has been effaced by assumptions about the unalterable movement of the global

economy of our time. Any preconception of our time that fixes the relationship

between nature and culture, whether in terms of complexity, cognitive ability, or speed,

effaces the possibility to ask who are the we that get to eat the big fish? As Donna

Haraway remarks, there will be no nature without justice (Haraway 2004, 86), which

also means, as Jean Luc Nancy asserts, Our time means precisely, first of all, a

certain suspension of time, of time conceived as always flowing. A pure flow of time

could not be ours (Nancy 1990, 155).

For Margulis and Sagan, the most significant difference between humans and

other animals is self-deception; we are the only beings accomplished enough to fully

fool ourselves, they write (Margulis and Sagan 1995, 221). I do not think they mean


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by this that we are the only ones capable of reflexivity or the making of metalinguistic

distinctions, e.g. to pretend pretense, as Lacan proposes, or the only beings who can

observe themselves observing. Rather they imply that we keep fooling ourselves by

assuming that we are or could be in control of the rest of nature. Would it be possible to

build responsible environmental science around the insight that humans are in fact not

in control? This would require giving up not only the idea that humans create

technologies, but also that human nature could be circumscribed by a privileged

relationship to technology. Technology would not only be an intervention into the

rhythms of the relationship between humans and the rest of nature, but would become

an apparatus in the Baradian sense, reconfiguring the dynamics and topologies of

human/nature relations in every intra-action. In Derridas terms, it would require us to

re-think the relation between knowing and acting .. . between the invention that finds

what was already there and the one that produces new mechanisms and new spaces

(Derrida 1984, 23). Perhaps that is what Lubchenco meant by producing knowledge

that reduces the rate of change. It might require remembering with Derrida that an

originary technicity inhabits all life and matter, rendering all boundary construction --

scientific or otherwise -- an impossible ethical and political act. Scientific responsibility

is that impossible possibility.


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