328: If, as philosophers after Kant discern, the essence of humanity is freedom (a point Pico della Mirandola intuited three centuries prior), why on Earth ought we to be concerned about oceans? The answer, on the surface, seems easy --because they are instrumental to the conditions of our freedom. Without oceans functioning well in the biological frame within which we have evolved (they could function well, otherwise, for different kinds of life), we have limited options --less land (a rising sea), less food (depleted fisheries, mass extinction), deadly weather (hurricanes over warmer water) and so on. In countless small and many large ways, oceans *enable* our choice. But is that all? Are oceans merely instrumental. No, they are *majorly* so. And missing that shift of scale has been our undoing since the earliest record of homo sapiens. We tool living nature in the short and local term. But living nature works on the long and global. ... Interestingly, once one sees it does, there are instrumental reasons for preservationist-style policies, for letting life systems be, or for highly selective use. Then our freedom appears conserving of life, and sometimes life preserving. ... And yet, the answer does not stop there, because, as creatures of evaluation, we also recognize value. That is how we think good choices are made. And we see, interestingly, that the ocean has more than just instrumental value. Its life is a source of wonder. Freedom is not free when it precludes the things of value. And so preserving our freedom to "choose any form that we prefer" (Pico) ought also to involve preserving the things of deep value. This is a thought typical post-Kantians -the philosophers and activists of freedom- have not typically understood. Evaluation is dependent on freedom, bound up with it, but it is qualitatively different than freedom. Moreover, it -not freedom- discerns the possibilities in terms of which freedom is. Should we then say that out of freedom we ought to preserve the intrinsic values of oceans? Yes, but the questions only begin there. We now need to discern what, exactly, is the object of wonder. I believe that it is not life frozen in a non-evolving preserve. To be continued.
329. In memoriam national democracy: which a year ago next month managed to imperil future generations around the globe by not producing climate policy at Copenhagen. Shall we discuss a crime against humanity?
330. Snapshot 1 -The life in the ocean does not have rights, and I do not feel (and don't know) we have obligations *to* it, but I do know that we have responsibilities *regarding* it, and that these are grounded in part on the intrinsic value of ocean life living wild.
Snapshot 2 -Now I consider a whale, marvelous, intelligent and communicative. I *know* I have obligations to it, even if it does not have rights. Why do I know? Because it can relate to me. The presence of -minimal- relational reason opens the space of duties *to*, not just duties regarding. So relational reason introduces a categorical distinction, and focus, in the vast set of marine life.
Snapshot 3- Outside that subset, in the non-relational life of the sea, around what do my responsibilities form? Around individual lives? Around species? Around ecosystems? Or around myself and my impact on any one of these or on all of these? Responsibilities regarding individuals produces a reductio ad absurdum -I can't possibly discharge the responsibility, and so I can't have one (responsibility, recall, is a practical notion). Responsibilities regarding species are both epistemologically flawed and anti-wild. Individuals fray and expand species, and species are pragmatic markers at best. Moreover, the speciating process -not the species- is where wildness is. I agree with Holmes Rolston. And ecosystems are likewise problematic -epistemologically imprecise, or fictitious if turned into objects of precise preservation, and not the site of wildness moreover. Rather, the ecological process is (the process by which interdependent and mostly competitive living beings -most of species, some between them or at the edges- lock into working arrangements and then respond to new conditions, living beings, etc.).
So I have -it seems- responsibilities regarding the speciating process and the ecological one, two processes by which wild life is, and I have them because wild life is intrinsically valuable. All I mean is that I find reason to value it for its own sake, not for some end to which I want to it put. (What reason? Its wondrousness -I side with Aristotle.)
And this leaves one last element: me, us. My responsibilities form around these two wild processes. But they fall on me, and ours fall on us.
Snapshot 4- Do my, our responsibilities regarding the two wild oceanic processes invoke a duty? Yes, to myself. To ourselves. As agent-relative a duty as you can get. Because it is a failure of what is best in us to be wanton. We have a duty to ourselves -I have one to me- to not waste and destroy things of intrinsic value without a damn good reason. Destroying, being wanton, I fail humanity inside me, a crying shame. And so we have duties regarding oceans that center around letting ocean wilderness be and which are duties to ourselves. The object of the duty is the ocean, and the source of the duty is myself, ourselves.
331. I wonder if we can achieve a focus inside our oceans, a swirling analogy of life. I drove 55 MPH yesterday instead of the 65-70 around me. As I did, time slowed down as cars rushed by -I passed no cars on the road- and in the slow, I felt unrolled inside the good memories of life-chapters that had bad times. The deliberate staking of quality worked -my wanting a quality drive. And I felt inside my ocean, its zones of life, swirling, in eddies as rain splashed down and wicked off the window in refracted taillights.
332. I am sitting with Isaiah having pizza after a long bike ride through the secret field and the hidden station, through the mud and the wind. I am complete. No climate change, nor environmental destruction. There are two ways to go here: one, I tell myself to forget about those big things. Two, I tell myself to remember this moment so that I can understand why we should care about the big things. The first dishonors the child. The second honors him.
333. Hard-working, industrious we -and, churning underwater, the morally invisible. Here isn't malevolence, but tragedy. And if there is malevolence, it's in the streamlined few -the ordering class- who manage to divide and sharpen everyday life through the subtle incursion of economic imperatives fluttering down around a decision to maximize profit. Malevolence's face is ignorant in this epoch -ignoring what obstructs the higher profit. In this way, too, it is not actively cruel, but cruelly negligent. Hard-working, industrious we -and, churning underwater, the morally invisible.
