What Does it Mean to Be an Ecologist Today?
What are the responsibilities of being an ecologist in a time in which man thinks himself master of all Nature?
Take a moment to think about the last meal you ate. Where did the ingredients come from? What about the idea for the dish itself? In the modern age — this phase of the Anthropocene — we have become ever more enmeshed in a globalized economy. More often than not, our food comes from a grocery store, and we are blind to the vast distances our food travels – from the soils and watersheds our food first emerged from to the vast interwoven transportation networks and cultural heritage which led to your meal. Humankind has a long history of creatively engaging with the natural world, creating meals from the world around us – but now, in this overwhelmingly myopic age, we are increasingly alienated from the incalculable number of lives that enable our own. Ecology is the reawakening of our desire to know our impact, and today more than ever, to be an ecologist is to see the global interconnectivity upon which our life depends.
In this essay, we will explore a question I have been struggling with since I started this blog: What are the responsibilities of being an ecologist in the Anthropocene
This question extends far beyond ‘ecologists’; it touches all of us. We are all ecological beings, and more than any other species, we have come to build our environment to meet our desires. While some individuals try to bend human and more-than-human nature to their will, we all suffer the consequences. In an ecological community, we are entangled within a web of deep interdependence. Can ecological understanding help us learn what it means to care for the world? Can it teach us to behave responsibly? How can we learn to live our lives as a blessing: for all humanity, for all life, now and forever?
This essay is a longer than my recent posts. I hope you are able to take your time and read through it at your own pace. Feel free to approach it nonlinearly; wander! Read the last section before the first, or skip through to different sections as you ponder these questions.
To help with this, I have broken this essay into sections.
Table of Contents
Questions at the Heart of Ecology
If ecology is our collective pursuit to understand our home, then becoming an ecologist today inevitably leads us to come face to face with the sheer destruction implicit in our modern way of life. In becoming an ecologist, it is nearly unavoidable to encounter the tremendous pain inflicted daily on the Earth. It is a strange time indeed to want to study, learn, teach, and practice ecology, and yet, this work is paramount.
Once one sees this harm and feels this pain, there is no turning back. More than any other time in the history of Life on Earth, one species — our own — has come to dominate the very processes which shape and maintain our living planet. In this modern day, no matter one's culture or background, becoming ecologically aware requires that we learn to see the global scale of our impact – not just on those around us, nor just on the environment, but on the whole of our extensive community; our place in the biosphere: a network of relationships upon which our life wholly depends.
And now, as we barrel full steam through the interwoven crises of modernity – with our seemingly limitless appetite for urban sprawl, rural expansion, and industrial production leading to habitat fragmentation, ecological devastation, and climate change (not to mention the slew of social pathologies which stem out of our desire to dissociate ourselves from the rest of our living community) – I am supposed to teach students about trophic pyramids and symbiotic relationships?
To struggle with the accepted content and scope of ecology — and yearn to expand its logic into all of our living, rural, urban, and industrial systems — seems to be the fundamental urge of ecologists coming into their own in this peculiar age. Whether “nature” is merely a place we appreciate when we are in designated “natural areas” and “national parks” or if it is something we find all around us, budding ecologists are forced to reckon with the strained relationship we seem to have with the rest of the natural world.
And so, we are left to wonder: what is our place here? Do we have any hope in reversing the destruction wrought on the Earth by humans who don’t comprehend — or worse, don’t care — about the global scale of the ecological crises of our time? How can we ensure our life has a positive legacy, and that we leave the Earth better off than if we had never been here at all?
And critically: What does it mean to be an ecologist — let alone a responsible one — in this midst of global systems which have pushed the Earth into crisis?
In a time where we seem to have forgotten the millennia of ecological learning passed down to us from our ancestors, where most have become addicted to the otherworldly religions (of both supernatural divinity and totalizing economics), and where we seem to be ever more alienated from any semblance of genuine community, what does it even mean to be an ecologist? And furthermore, in the Anthropocene — this latest (contested) geological epoch in which the human quest for domination over land and water has become widespread, and has come to endanger all life on Earth — what does it even mean to bring ethics back into ecology?
How can I embrace my obligations as a Jewish ecologist – for whom ethical responsibility, ecology, and the momentous task of this moment can never be truly separated from one another?
Each of these questions are loaded, packed with philosophical and ecological implications. Only by grappling with the meaning of the these concepts — ethical responsibility, an ecologist, and Anthropocene — can we really comprehend the depth and importance of this question.
Humankind and the Anthropocene
Over the past decade, scientists — ranging from chemists and geologists to nuclear physicists and ecologists — have debated the degree to which humanity has ushered in a new geologic epoch: the Anthropocene. While these debates have spanned scientific disciplines and cosmological narratives, it is undeniable that humankind has, in the span of a mere moment of geological time, become a prominent driver of the Earth system. We have come to shape water systems, to transform our climate, and to mold other species into tools for human domination of soils, pastures, and societies.
However, when it comes to the creation of a new geologic epoch (which, like previous geological epochs, is supposed to coincide with a globally synchronous measurement that can indicate the start of this age), geologists seem unable to agree on when this age truly began. Before the Anthropocene — the age of humanity — was even a glimmer in a geologist’s eye, it was established that we live in the Holocene. The Holocene began approximately 11,700 years ago, as the glacial oscillations of the Pleistocene (beginning 2.58 million years ago) gave way to the mild and comfortable climate in which human civilization (including independent instances of plant and animal domestication occurring across continents) first began. Like all geological epochs, the dawn of the Holocene can be identified in sediments across the world, with carbon-14 isotope signatures allowing the global synchronization of our dating of this last instance of the glacial climatic regime.
Earlier this year, an authoritative scientific panel of geologists decided that the Anthropocene is not a discernable geological epoch. Apparently, we remain in the Holocene. The group responsible for this decision — the Anthropocene Working Group — has been meeting for over 15 years, and for most of this time, worked to assess whether radioactive isotopes, evidence of the post-WWII nuclear tests, could be used as a standardized indicator for the dawn of the Anthropocene. The official start of the “age of humanity” was supposed to be 1952 – coinciding with “the great acceleration”, in which rapid expansion of industrial agriculture, fossil fuel use, and human population growth led to a slew of new ecological challenges. While these transitions have culminated in the vast ecological crises of our day, it would be dishonest to pretend that the processes which led here began in the mid-1950s.
The debate surrounding the Anthropocene stemmed from this key insight: agricultural “land-use change” has been impacting the global climate for far longer than 72 years. In looking at the ice core record (which allows researchers to accurately measure the CO2 levels dating back hundreds, thousands, and hundreds of thousands of years back in time), we can see that human activities have long impacted the biosphere and the global climate.
The “Great Dying” of the Americas was largely spurned on by Spanish/Portuguese colonization after 1492. These colonists brought foreign pathogens, warfare, and violence upon the land, causing the widespread genocide of indigenous peoples. Large areas of forest and grassland — which had been previously kept in a cultivated or semi-cultivated state by their indigenous caretakers — began to grow back: storing large quantities of carbon in the process. This led to a measurable CO2 minima, occurring globally in the year 1610.
Further back, we can see the global impact of Asian rice farming, which began slowly around 9,000 years ago and took off in earnest around 4,200 years ago. Researchers have shown that as rice paddies expanded, with forests and grasslands being converted into seasonally flooded agricultural fields, a massive surge of methane (CH4, a potent greenhouse gas) and CO2 led to global climatic changes – which remain visible in the ice core record.
All this is to say, the niche constructing activities of our species has long had global significance in shaping the both the ecosystems and climate systems in which we live. And given that the vast majority of geologic eras span millions of years, the geologists on the Anthropocene Working Group were not convinced that we needed a new geologic epoch to delineate the age of human influence on the Earth.
Relative to previous epochs, the Anthropocene and the Holocene are relatively short. Very short in geological terms. And while we might imagine that the end of the ice ages caused the dawn of this new era (holo- quite literally means “new”), without the cumulative niche construction of humanity over the past 12 thousand years, experts predict that the global climate would soon be returning to its ice age climate. The Holocene cannot be separated from the age of humanity — and thus, perhaps we best understand the past 12 thousand years as part of the broader story of the age of humans — the dawn of the Anthropocene.
Throughout the Holocene (and well before, going back 40,000 years or more), people have been a key driver in ecosystems across the world. From the Siberian tundra to the Amazonian rainforest, people have played a key role in wiping out large herbivores, distributing useful plant species, and shaping ecosystems through fire. Perhaps then, we ought to recognize the Holocene as being composed of early stages of the Anthropocene.
This is something I have been thinking about for many years now, and after reading an article by Lewis and Maslin from 2015 “Defining the Anthropocene”, I was inspired to propose a new timeline for the Anthropocene. Below I’ve included a figure and some key insights from an essay I wrote while a university student – “Redefining the Anthropocene.
This diagram does not aim to suggest that these dates are fixed and apply globally, but rather aims to show how humans have gradually constructed modern anthropogenic biomes (anthromes). While divisions between the Early, Middle and Late Anthropocene are tied to both atmospheric and pedogenic (soil) evidence, Anthropocene processes occur heterogeneously across landscapes and continents, and stages need to be defined independently at regional scales. These dates are based on evidence from the Amazon. Names are just for fun. Margin of errors are based on spatial variability and uncertainty. Style is based on graphics in Lewis and Maslin (2015).
By recentering the discussion of the “Anthropocene” on the construction of the human place on the Earth (referred to by some scientists as the “Anthroposphere”, a parallel sphere to — and constructed by humans in relation with — the hydrosphere, atmosphere, biosphere, and lithosphere), we can stitch together a broader story of our species’ engagement and apparent dominion here on Earth over the past several millennia.
In the proposed chronology above, I refer to the latest stages in the Anthropocene as the “Apocalyptic” and the “Economic” stages. The intention here is not to argue that the genocidal colonialism or mercantile empires that spread over the world during these periods were phenomena previously unseen on the Earth. Rather, my intention is to highlight how these processes fundamentally frame the modern way we perceive the relationship between humanity and nature. Whereas indigenous peoples across the world have long lived in loving attunement with their place in the broader living community, colonization has actively imposed a culture of human power over nature — spread by means of the exploitation of both human and non-human life and the exportation of the illusion that the human soul is destined for otherworldly immortality. Only in the “Late Anthropocene” — a time etched into reality by private corporations, colonial empires, emerging nation-states — has land become privatized and our vital relations to community and place been disrupted by sword, gunpowder, and assimilatory regimes.
From this perspective, the modern phase of the “Late Anthropocene” is defined by three key processes:
1) Biological and cultural diversity loss following the redistribution of organisms and the transformation of social ecological systems.
2) The expansion of linked urban and rural landscapes.
3) The homogenization of culture through colonial domination and the assertion of cultural hegemony (ie. assimilation)
Each of these processes began in earnest following the expansion of colonial empires during the 16th century, and while they have changed in scale and scope over the last 500 years, we must recognize the continuity of these processes into the present day; without this perspective, it may be impossible to truly reckon with the current state of the global human-centered affairs, or to move us towards a more sustainable and harmonious future. Despite the increasingly rapid changes beginning in the last 200 years, we remain in a world defined by colonial nation-states and a colonial mentality regarding human dominion over the natural world.
Nature in the Anthropocene
Perhaps the best place to see the contradictory narratives around our relationship with nature lies within “wilderness areas” – landscapes that have been set aside for “preservation”, where “man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” Wilderness areas, alongside their earlier iterations, the national parks, were American inventions, designed to ensure people will always have the opportunity to commune with rugged nature. Yet, people have lived in relation to these lands for millenia.
This moment in the Anthropocene is marred by the fantasy that we can shape every landscape to our liking without endangering the complex living systems which enable our way of life to persist.
The Mariposa Grove Cabin in Yosemite National Park, where the first “guardian” of this “park”, Galen Clark lived.
I recently had the pleasure of visiting Yosemite National Park – the first “natural” landscape to become state-controlled, protected, and “conserved” for the sake of non-human life. And yet, millions of people from all over the world visit these ecosystems every year – taking inspiration, joy, awe, and wonder from the marvelous trees, mountains, waterfalls and rivers which build this place. Though while the trails and roads allow people to visit, people must work to maintain this ecosystem. Be it through controlled burns (as indigenous people have done for millenia), invasive species removal (as we now must do if we hope to conserve localized plant communities everywhere), or policing of visitors, a tremendous amount of work must be done to ensure this landscape continues to appear “natural.”
The world famous “Tunnel View” of Yosemite National Park, where people can view the splendor of this landscape from the comfort of their personal vehicle.
The Modern American (colonial) imagination is chock full of fantasies regarding what the many places we live in ought to look like. Whether in LA or Yosemite, people play a major role in constructing, maintaining, and reimagining what the purpose of a place is and how it should function. Should we continue to imagine that we are separate, and that our “ownership” of the land ensures that we have the right to mine, plow, and “develop” the landscapes we call home, we may forget that our belonging here is conditioned by our ability to live harmoniously with the other beings who make this place habitable. We cannot conserve a landscape without recognizing how it fits into the broader world. Should we desire to protect the millenia old trees of Yosemite, we need to act now to prevent the continued warming of our climate. Should we desire to ensure we continue to have adequate quantities of drinking water, we need to realize that everything is connected – and that we cannot dissociate ourselves from our relationships to the rest of the living world.
To be an Ecologist
Being an ecologist in this day and age involves being aware of this broader context. It means taking the time to struggle with the nuances and complexities that have brought us into this present moment, and working to comprehend the various ways that the processes which drive forth the many-faced ecological crisis of today are not brand new: they are but continuations of the ways our ancestors learned to relate to the world, and they draw from both our ethical desire for coexistence and our anthropocentric desire for human wellbeing over ecosystemic health.
Ecology is the study of the home – the oikos. But “oikos” does not mean “home” in a purely physical environmental sense, nor in a decoupled manner. Rather, “oikos” forms the root for both ecology and economy – it is the home in which we work to actively maintain our place.
To be an ecologist is to recognize that our home is the home of others — other people, other cultures, other species — and that alone, we cannot thrive. Rather, being an ecologist — or perhaps just an ecologically-concerned citizen of our planet — is to be aware that our “belonging” to a place, community, or institution is contingent upon our ability to align our own wellbeing with the wellbeing of our neighbors, our fellow citizens, our biosphere. To belong is to find ourselves rooted in a place – and to understand that our impact here does not merely affect ourselves and our kin, but also every other living being: known and unknowable, appreciated and forgotten; those we rely on and those we detest.
But what does it look like to fully incorporate ethics into one’s ecological perspective? In grappling with the infamous Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics — an integrative philosophical tract that stretches from metaphysics and theology to psychology, ethics, and politics — I came to a new understanding of what it means to do ecology.
From Spinoza’s perspective, all work — including that of ecology — is both physical and mental. But it is only through thinking ecologically that we can learn to do ecology. Ecological thinking arises from one’s understanding of an ecosystem, and interweaves with every way we affect that ecosystem. To do ecology, one must first extend their mind into the whole of an ecosystem — that is to say, one must struggle to understand the drives, needs, and broader niche of each organism and process which shapes the ecosystem. Once we understand the many parts, we must then grasp how each fits together to support the whole. With this cohesive mental image, and knowledge of how this ecosystem has come to be, we can imagine how it might change over time – and how we might work to ensure its continued well being.
Thus, to be an ecologist is to work to understand our place in the world, and G-d’s idea of the ecosystem – we must understand ourselves and strive to take a view from eternity. Only then can we understand how we might sustainably work for the good of life: from ecosystem to ecosystem, breath to breath, and mind to mind.
Being an ecologist in this age of human power over the Earth is to recognize that our relationship with land, air, water and soil is politically contested. We must work to negotiate our path forward together in honest dialogue – striving to understand the various needs of other people, other communities, other species, and the sustainability of all life as one: from now and for all time.
The Chihuahuan Desert ecosystem in which I completed my Master’s research has long been home to various indigenous groups. Yet, the research station was established in 1912 by the USDA in order to help ranchers — who had been overstocking this landscape with cattle for several decades — help ensure longterm sustainability of this “rangeland”. This landscape cannot be understood unless we truly reckon with the long history of ecological change, cultural upheaval, colonial power relations.
We must work to build a deep awareness of the various ways we engage with, disrupt and/or perpetuate systems of oppression, domination, and destruction; and to recognize the systems, narratives, and ideological assumptions from which our modern ecological crisis blooms. Only then can we see real solutions to change our ways and work for the good of all life.
Responsibility in Modern Jewish Philosophy
Let us now return to the question at the heart of the essay: what are the responsibilities of being an ecologist today?
As a student of ecology, I recognize that you cannot learn to be an ecologist solely from the classroom. To recognize the parallels between the broader ecological community and our human ones, we must make contact with the wider living world. We must struggle to understand the many other beings who share our world — our home — and we must work to understand how we might live together in peace and harmony. But what are the ethical demands of being an ecologist?
To unpack this question, I will draw on two 20th century Jewish philosophers: Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas. I will then weave their ideas into my own experience as a practicing ecologist in the city of LA.
Martin Buber describes the ethical obligation that arises within us when we encounter the “Thouness” of the other. Whereas many of our relationships are transactional — seeing the other as an “it”, a means to an end — the I-Thou relationship is transformative: it brings the whole of our being into relation with the whole being of the other. We learn to see the other as an end in and of themself. Ecologists must recognize that we share this home, and that our long term wellbeing depends on our ability to attune our needs with those of others – other living beings, other ecosystems, other cultures, and others’ stories.
Levinas builds on this, noting that when we encounter the face of the Other — an experience broad enough to describe our encounter with other people, other species, or with the whole of Nature/G-d — we find ourselves with the obligation to respond. This is what Levinas calls responsibility: the ability to respond. When we come to truly appreciate the sheer vastness of the unknowability of other’s understandings, perspectives, and goals, we open ourselves up to the possibility of coexistence and a form of communal life in which the community is truly more than the sum of its parts.
It is from here that Levinas argues that “Thou shalt not kill” arises in the human mind. And it is from here that genuine love becomes possible. When we recognize that the world is greater than ourselves — and that we are a part of a much greater whole — we become obligated to find new ways for humanity to cultivate harmony within the more-than-human world.
As a student reflecting on many years in studying plant community ecology, I have found a deep sense of belonging in the beautifully diverse, resilient, and highly multifunctional plant communities found across my home here in California. After studying the long history of Spanish, Mexican, and American colonialism here on these landscapes — stretching from the early efforts to “missionize” indigenous peoples, agriculturalize coastal grasslands, and pastoralize the vast landscapes beyond colonial control — I have come to understand how much has already been lost. Furthermore, in studying the transformation of local and regional watersheds — from the compaction and sealing of our soils by concrete to canal building and the rapid expansion of Los Angeles’ water system — I have come to realize just how important it is to restore ecological functionality and diversity to these landscapes.
And now, I strive to participate wherever I can to support plant, animal, and soil life. Both in removing invasive plants and working to restore watersheds, but also working to educate others on the complexities of living here – I aspire to help bring about a more ecologically productive, sustainable, and resilient way of living, here and everywhere.
So then, what is the responsibility of being an ecologist in the Anthropocene? It is to take on the obligation to struggle with Nature and our relationship to it all, and to recognize that the wellbeing of all life — for a near infinite number of generations to come — depends on the choices that we make today. Thus, we are obligated to study the complexities of shared home, and to struggle with the competing interests of various species, cultures, institutions and corporations to ensure that future generations will have a home here on the Earth.
Moving Forward
We are a species which thrives when we learn to construct a way of living that honors our relationships with others in the world. When we appreciate our limits and recognize that there is much in life that is beyond our capacity to control or comprehend, we open ourselves up to the possibility of ethics: a tremendous responsibility arises in us when we recognize the infinite unknowability of each living beings’ rich inner life. But we do not need to be able to control or comprehend something fully in order to care. Through ecological knowledge and science — our collective heritage, bound up within the intercultural communal endeavor to understand and holistically engage with our place in Nature — we may come to actually appreciate the responsibility intrinsic in our relationships with the world.
While most ‘ecologists’, like myself, have come to this way of knowing and engaging with the world within powerful academic institutions in the Global North, we must work to understand our place in this work – our relationship to the global economy, to the various systems of human social and physical power, to the complex structures of domination, and communities in which scientific knowledge and ideological bias constantly intermingle. And further, we must build relationships across cultural divides, weave together old and new narratives to decolonize our ways of thinking and relating to the Earth. Only in this struggle — rooted in multicultural community and genuine love — can we work to reimagine the way we live, and build genuinely sustainable ways of caring and coexisting with the many others with whom we share this world.
Together, we can build loving relationships with our neighbors, with all of nature, and (re)construct ways of living in community with the wider world that ensure the many peoples and species who live here can continue to thrive.
Thank you for reading Jewish Ecology. This blog aims to build a participatory dialogue in which important ideas at the intersection of Judaism and ecology can help us root ourselves in the World. This blog is not just for Jews; I aim for these articles to be accessible and impactful for anyone that is interested in building up an understanding of the role that spirituality, philosophy, and/or ethics play in bringing about a more peaceful, ecological, and sustainable future for all People and the World.
intelligent ideas, beautifully expressed.... What does "kya" stand for in your diagram?