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Tech for the Anthropocene: Cultivating Earth Creatureliness
Climate Change
September, 2023
Author: Timothy Beal is a Distinguished University Professor, Florence Harkness Professor of Religion, and Director of h.lab at Case Western Reserve University. His work at h.lab helps empower scholars and students in the humanities to experiment with and critically reflect on new and emerging computational tools and methods.
When I published When Time Is Short: Finding Our Way in the Anthropocene last year, my editor was a little uneasy about including “Anthropocene” in the subtitle. Coined in 2000 as the name for our new geological era, in which human activity has become the primary force of change in our biosphere, the word was still mostly circulating among climate scientists, ecologists, and environmental activists.
A year later, after a summer of record-breaking heat waves, catastrophic wildfires, and devastating weather events, “Anthropocene” has definitely made it into the cultural mainstream; indeed, it’s an excellent candidate for Word of the Year.
The Anthropocene and Human Exceptionalism
The word “Anthropocene” itself can get in the way of understanding its deeper meaning. On its surface it seems to reinforce anthropocentrism, the industrialized West’s default worldview that places humans at the center of planetary change. More significantly, it generalizes blame for our environmental emergency on all humankind, when in fact the primary responsibility lies with modern industrial capitalist practices of extraction. In doing so, Bayo Akomolafe reminds us, the term potentially erases the “legacies of extermination and the ghastly bodies of those that have subsidized the project of modernity.” In other words, it gives those responsible a pass.
It should come as no surprise, then, that the Anthropocene is also being deployed by corporations and governments to frame the climate crisis as a win-win opportunity for both natural ecosystems and human economies: “we can beat this, and come out even stronger!”
As important as this recent commitment to climate solutions may be, it is also an expression of our continuing faith in human exceptionalism, the belief that humankind is exceptional to the rest of creation and excepted from the subsistential realities that they must live and die by. This faith tells us that we can science and engineer ourselves out of anything. In the industrialized West, this is our grand narrative, our Big Story, which we have been telling ourselves, and exporting around the world, about who we are and our place in creation.
What Comes After Human Exceptionalism?
But the deeper meaning of the Anthropocene does not reinforce this Big Story; on the contrary, it interrupts it, knocks the wind out of it. The Anthropocene is an announcement, on a planetary scale, of the end of the anthropos, that is, of the modern Western Big Story of godlike human exceptionalism, mastery, and progress. The Anthropocene exposes that story as a prime example of what Ernest Becker called an “immortality project,” a denial of human finitude, in this case fueled by a delusional faith in infinite growth through extraction.
Whether or not it’s too late to avoid all-out climate collapse, we need to find meaningful ways forward in the wake of the end of the Big Story – and perhaps, even, the end of grand narratives broadly speaking. If that’s the case, then what’s next?
We don’t know yet. But to find out, I believe we must cultivate a sense of what I call earth creatureliness, an ecological understanding of what it means to be human that is rooted in interdependence and inseparability: the inseparability of human and nonhuman beings in a more-than-human world; the inseparability of life and death; the inseparability of environmental justice and social justice; and the inseparability of spirituality and impermanence, divinity and earthiness. Earth creatureliness begins not with delusions of godlike transcendence but with a call to subscendence, to grounding ourselves in the precarious wonder of human spiritual striving within the larger ecological web of subsistence and interdependence. Earth creatureliness is the antidote to human exceptionalism.
I am leading an initiative funded by the Henry Luce Foundation called “Finite Futures: Imagining Alternative Ways Forward in the Anthropocene.” We are a small community of religionists, technologists, students, and artists exploring relationships between religion, technology, and ecology in order to imagine possibilities for a just and thriving future on the horizon of ecological catastrophe and potential collapse. This is not another “before it’s too late” project; this is a “what if it’s already too late?” project. Maybe it isn’t. But what if it is? How then shall we live?
A central task for us is to interrogate the role of technology in light of a finite human future. How might new and emerging technologies help break through human exceptionalism, interrupt our faith in infinite growth through extraction, and cultivate earth creatureliness?
Technology and Earth Creatureliness
To be sure, technology has often contributed to the denial of our earth creatureliness. It allows us to refuse or ignore our fundamental inseparability from the more-than-human world. It promises a world without limits on knowledge, pleasure, power, and even life, as individuals and as a species, fueling our delusional aspirations to transcend our biological wetware and go on forever.
But is technology necessarily or inherently antithetical to or in conflict with earth creatureliness? Might technology also be a resource for breaking through our denial of our mortal precarity, for letting go of our human exceptionalism and embracing new ways of imagining what it means to be human in a more-than-human world?
Like many, I often feel a profound disconnect between my “techy” self and my “earth creaturely” self. The two can seem incommensurable to and incompatible with one another.
At the same time, I’ve come to believe that experimenting with technologies can create deeper ecological connections between humans and the more-than-human world. (It’s important to remember that the more-than-human world includes machines as well as animals, plants, and other things. What are computers made of if not earthly materials?)
Moving in this direction , I believe, requires us to go beyond familiar problem-solving modes to imagine alternative futures. Problem-solving is essential to addressing our current state, but it tends to proceed in a linear fashion from problem to solution to the next problem and so on, keeping us locked in the paradigm of we-can-fix-everything anthropocentrism. Gathering to imagine alternative futures does not home in on one or two solutions, but rather opens up new horizons of possibility in the face of a crisis that we may not be able to solve for. We need to develop what adrienne maree brown describes as a kind of science-fictional imagination. “Science fiction,” she writes, “is simply a way to practice the future together. I suspect that is what many of you are up to, practicing futures together, practicing justice together, living into new stories. It is our right and responsibility to create a new world.”
The Power of Play
Such imaginative, science-fictional work at the nexus of humanity, technology, and ecology must be interdisciplinary and experimental. We need to bring together, on the one hand, people from the arts and humanities who want to explore and play with new and emerging technologies to test their limits, experiment and ask big questions and, on the other hand, researchers and designers from STEM fields who are hungry for more open-ended forms of inquiry and theoretical perspectives from the arts and humanities.
With that in mind, and in the spirit of the science-fictional imagination, I suggest we take our initial design cue for cultivating technological earth creatureliness from the late science-fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Rant about ‘Technology’.” “Technology,” she wrote, “is the active human interface with the material world … I don’t know how to build and power a refrigerator, or program a computer, but I don’t know how to make a fishhook or a pair of shoes, either. I could learn. We all can learn. That’s the neat thing about technologies. They’re what we can learn to do” (italics added). In other words, we are all technologists.
This understanding of technology should be inspiring and empowering for all of us, from data scientists and AI engineers to philosophers and poets, as we reflect on the call to develop ecological technologies of earth creatureliness. First, it makes clear that technology does not necessarily alienate us from other humans or from the more-than-human world. On the contrary, it is first and foremost our means of connecting with that world through our embodied senses. As “active human interface with the material world,” technology connects us with our environment. It is, to borrow from Michael Hemenway’s theory of interface, a dynamic “space of meeting” that creates and is created by “the entangled ‘interaction’” of different entities. Within this entanglement of relationships, moreover, technology itself comes alive; it has agency in the network of interconnections and interdependencies that emerges, opening space for new possibilities. In this sense, James Bridle suggests, technology actually “exemplifies and performs the most central characteristics of ecology: complexity, interrelatedness, interdependence, distribution of control and agency, even a closeness to the earth and the sky; on, under and out of which we fashion our tools.” Technology need not be antithetical to ecology; indeed, it has the potential to play a powerful role in developing a deeper embodied experience of our ecological earth creatureliness.
The second inspiration I take from LeGuin may seem like a throw away. It’s not. Resisting the tendency to see technologies, especially computational ones, as the exclusive domain of technical experts, LeGuin insists that the “neat thing” about them is “They’re what we can learn to do.” As someone who has lived out my professional life on the humanities side of the university, I can attest to how intimidating, even paralyzing, new and emerging technologies can seem. But as someone who recently began experimenting with the programming language of Python and doing work in NLP and machine learning in the context of an interdisciplinary community of generous, open-minded fellow colleagues, I can also attest to the transformative power of such new learning.
Core to this work is creating low-hurdle spaces where those of us who may be intimidated by such technologies are invited to try, to play, to experiment, and to be comfortable with mistakes and failures along the way. When such spaces are created and shared by artists, humanities, STEM scholars, designers and developers, all seeking ways for technology, as “active human interface with the material world,” to cultivate a deeper sense of earth creatureliness, surprising new possibilities may emerge.