It would be convenient to say that your parents’ generation sees death everywhere, while the following generation sees “life” everywhere, but the term does not carry the same meaning in the two camps. Those who consider themselves the only beings endowed with consciousness amid inert things regard as living beings only themselves, their cats, their dogs, their geraniums, and perhaps even the park where they go for a walk after throwing Gregor into the trash at the end of the story. But foryou, who have undergone the metamorphosis, “living” applies not only to the termites but also to the termite mound, in the sense that without termites that heap of mud would not be structured in that way, rising like a mountain in the middle of a landscape (and the same can be said of the aforementioned mountain and the aforementioned landscape…). Conversely, let us not forget that termites would not survive a single instant outside the termite mound, which is to their survival what the city is to urban dwellers. I need a term that indicates how, on Earth, “everything is living,” if by living one means both the frenzied body of the termites and the rigid body of the termite mound; the crowds pressing onto the Charles Bridge and the Charles Bridge itself; the fox and the fox fur; the beaver and the dam it builds; bacteria and plants and the oxygen they emit. Bioclastic? Biogenic? In any case, artificial—in the somewhat unusual sense in which invention and freedom are always inseparable, a source of continual surprise.
Bruno Latour, Where Am I?, 2021Termites do not survive without a termite mound, and humans?
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- Extractivism identifies a political economy premised on the withdrawal of value without corresponding deposit: resources are removed from the Earth, profits from labor, and commodifiable data from plants, bodies, and information systems. Returned to their place is waste, toxicity, disease, exhausti …
What if we invent an ecosystemic economy
If the termite also means the termite mound, the beaver the dam, and humans their habitats, infrastructures and the resources that sustain them, then what happens to the very idea of an “economy” built on the assumption that there are separate beings exchanging things with one another? Perhaps economy needs to be understood not as the management of scarce resources, but as a system of mutual care.
An ecosystemic economy would need to turn the conventional economic question inside out. Instead of asking, What can we extract from the world? it would ask, What do we need to give to the world for life to continue—including our own? Let us just keep in mind that there is no such thing as an external “resource”: every resource is also a relation, a habitat, a condition of survival. To destroy it is therefore not simply to consume nature; it is to consume the very system that makes the consumer possible.
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