# Progressive Summary # Structured Notes ## Descartes and Heidegger ### Cartesian split In 1619, 23-year-old Descartes had three dreams. The first two were nightmarish, but in the third he saw a dictionary on a table, and then a book of poetry appeared in his hands. Opening it at random, he comes across the phrase: *Quod vitae sectabor iter?* What path in life shall I follow? He interprets this dream to mean that the purpose of his life is to reform all knowledge. Eighteen years later, he publishes *Discourse on Method*. In his youth, he had studied hard and become familiar with mathematics, anatomy, philosophy, law and theology. But he was disappointed to find out that there was no certain knowledge, and everything was disputed. He gave up his studies and enlisted as a soldier, only to become even more disillusioned with the world. He decided to go to Frankfurt for a third path of study - to study himself. He was held up in Ulm for the winter, and that's when he had his dreams. This was the second winter of the Thirty Year's War (1618-1648). "Descartes, like his contemporaries Galileo Galilei, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton, lived in a time marked by the collapse of medieval certainties, and sensations of vulnerability and insecurity were widespread." This collapse began in 1517, when Martin Luther sparked the Reformation. In 1543, Copernicus' book *On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres* further added to the disorientation by challenging the geocentric model of the universe, in which everything revolved around the Earth. Kepler formulated laws of planetary motion that further established the heliocentric model. Galileo made it even more convincing when he looked through his telescope in 1610, and saw moons around Jupiter. He was able to show empirically that not all celestial bodies revolved around the Earth. > To Galileo, nature could be described accurately if and only if scientists restricted their queries to quantifiable, measurable data: to numbers, movements, shapes. He rigorously excluded qualities such as taste, smell, color, touch, or even a sense of beauty or compassion from his experiments. His program was a template for reductionist science for centuries to come. Its unprecedented combination of abstract thought with experimentation later prompted Albert Einstein to call Galileo the father of modern science. Until this moment, most of humanity experienced the universe as a womb. This is what our senses told us when we looked up. There was a sense of interiority as we watched the sun rise and set, and the stars circle in the sky. In the Middle East, the night sky was described as a canopy held up by mountains. The Pueblo of North America spoke of it as a big house. In the Pacific Northwest, people spoke of the cosmos as a longhouse made of wood. Now this womb had burst. Galileo had shown that we couldn't trust our senses. We're still recovering from the birth pains 400 years later. Blaise Pascal said: "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me." Descartes was responding to this existential dread in his search for certainty. Heidegger calls Descartes the first modern philosopher, because he definitively split mind from body as a result of his radical scepticism. > This is the context for Descartes’s existential dread. The European psyche was bleeding from a fatal wound. The overturning of the geocentric model definitively proved that you could not trust your senses. Descartes’s response to this narrative disorientation was to employ radical skepticism in the search for a new sense of certainty. This is the precise moment, in the thinking of the German phenomenologist Martin Heidegger, when modern metaphysics originated. Heidegger writes: “The metaphysics of the modern age begins and has its essence . . . in the fact that it seeks the unconditionally indubitable, the certain and assured, certainty.” Heidegger identifies Descartes as the first truly modern philosopher. He was also the philosopher who definitively split mind from body in the search from that certainty. > > With that Cartesian split, a deep ontological crack began to shoot far and fast through the phenomenal world, not unlike when lake ice relieves its inert tension in a rumbling boom that reverberates through the frozen landscape, leaving behind a jagged lake surface. Here, on one side of the split, was the pure substance of his own thinking, that first moment of certainty in the history of thought. Descartes thought of it as res cogitans, or thinking stuff: creative, intelligent, self-conscious, self-willed, rational, human mind. > > On the other side of the split was res extensa, or extended stuff. Res extensa included our bodies, the domesticated animal companions with whom we shared our lives, all wild creatures, mountains, rivers, primal forests, the atmosphere, the oceans, the geological forces of the planet, the whole of the planetary presence, the rapidly extending cosmos beyond. The formulation encapsulated and formalized his contemporaries’ experience of a cosmos that was suddenly blown wide open. It emphatically acknowledged Galileo’s reductionist project, which sought to know the universe truthfully by recognizing all knowledge gained through the senses as deceptive. Never had there been a philosopher who was less ambivalent about the fact that anything other than the thinking human mind was ontologically, epistemologically, and morally irrelevant. > > The consequences were profound. Descartes had students vivisect living animals. When the animals on the vivisection table began to scream and writhe and yelp and kick in agony, Descartes urged his students to ignore the screams and to cut deeper into the bleeding flesh. You should not trust your senses: The screams of the animal on the vivisection table might sound to the ears like screams of pain, but the animal is just a machine. All nonhuman animals are machines, apparatuses that can be reduced entirely to their constituent parts, and that can be known entirely through mechanical explanations. Whatever signs of agency, creativity, or conscious decision other animals portray become mere functions of the machine. > Practically in parallel, Galileo and Descartes formalized a withdrawal from the world of the senses in response to the narrative disruptions of their age. To Galileo, this meant that science ought to align itself exclusively with the sober language of mathematics and leave aside the bewildering murmurings of the body. Descartes went even further, proclaiming that the thinking mind would henceforth withdraw categorically and completely from the body, and from all things related to the world of sensory phenomena. The thinking mind would take refuge inside the one thing that had not yet been contested: itself. The clean separation of mind from all else provided a barricade against the encroaching meaninglessness of a vastly expanded space.  > > The Cartesian split was a desperate attempt to preserve some kind of inside. Sealing the mind off created an impregnable safe haven. This would have been a great relief in those riotous, disorderly times, now that the universe was no longer perceived as a great inside but rather an even greater outside. The fact that the Cartesian split went right through the human body was only consistent. Descartes meant business: If the body had been deceiving the mind all along, it had to be kept at a safe distance. The distrust had to be formalized and institutionalized. The Cartesian split also created a positive vision that charged this new philosophy with a certain mythical power, making it desirable to pursue, an ideal to strive for. With the rational mind, humans could eventually elevate themselves above the muddled realm of the sensuous, up to a plane of no more uncertainty. The fact that humans alone were now left with an interior dimension also implied that humans were not only separate, but superior to the entire rest of Earth’s creatures, its landmasses, its oceans. Rising above the confusion was a seductive response. It offered firmness, reassurance, and relief. ### Hospicing Modernity > With the benefit (or agony) of hindsight, it is easy now to condemn Descartes for amputating mind from body so clinically and systematically, and for giving powerful philosophical sanction to animal abuse. We will see how the Carte sian story is still in full bloom today, how it provides an ideological blueprint for the systematic, structural, and industrial-scale abuse of salmon and other animals. We will see the frightening continuity between his philosophical project and modern husbandry practices, and the way it still expresses itself in the structures of our technological lifeworld, in the way we speak about the more-than-human world, and in our political visions. > > But this book does not stop with this critique. The intention is to move through the Cartesian story, to look beyond the ongoing objectification of the living creature now manifest in the salmon industry, and to point toward po tent, promising, and constructive ways forward in the encounter between us and salmon. For that, it is important that we embrace the Cartesian project fully and complexly from within its experiential horizon, rather than simply cast it off as collateral damage onto the landfill of the history of thought. > Earth, a wanderer through an infinite universe! What could it mean, being human here atop the crust of this wanderer, in plain view of infinite space? Beside the terror and the fear and the uncertainty, there is the joy, the ecstasy, the novelty, that sense of seeing existence more truly for what it is. We cannot help but acknowledge that Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Descartes were midwives to a true leap in our understanding of the true nature of Being. They boosted a rupture between before and after that was abrupt and irreversible. And of course, they celebrated the empirical method, for it was the final stepping-stone before that audacious leap into a formerly unknown void. The human mind possessed a terrifying and beautiful power, and it expressed its own potential more insistently and urgently at just that moment. Wasn’t there something truly awe-inspiring about the realization that the power of reason could transcend the body? It might be at least understandable that the so-called “view from nowhere” became plausible at precisely that historical moment. Doesn’t it make sense that Galileo, Descartes, and their contemporaries fell for the belief that the human mind is an all-seeing eye, able to wander freely and without hindrance into infinite space, unbound by tradition, by the body, or indeed by a supernatural God? > > This, too, resonates in the formula cogito, ergo sum. It is not just the full blown denial of the body, and not just the full-blown denial of the sentience and intelligence of other animals. It is also a celebration of the empirical method, a salutation to the clarity and depth of understanding that the thinking mind allows. To overcome the Cartesian split, we must endure such complexity and internal conflict. ### Heidegger completes the revolution > The change that Copernicus inaugurated, and that Kepler and Galileo reinforced, was that of decentering the geocentric model of ancient astronomy. It is quite possible that Descartes stopped short of metabolizing the full ontological, epistemological, and ethical implications of this decentering. Although an outrageously different idea was taking shape, Descartes carried a certain residue of the old monocentric story into his philosophy. Even in a vastly decentered universe, he insisted that there remained a single, central access to truth—the human mind. > What if the Copernican Revolution still hasn’t been completed? What if it will only be completed when we have successfully overhauled the old ideology that humans are at the center of Being? And what would it take to bring the Copernican Revolution to its completion? What would it take to fully decenter the narratives of who we are as storytelling animals here inside this Earth, and to recognize and appreciate the many other storylines whose strands are woven into the delicate web of Earth’s biosphere, the short-lived and the ancient, the feeble and the grand? Good account of Heidegger's critique of Descartes. For the first time, I feel I'm beginning to understand Heidegger. Felt the influence of Heidegger when reading Andreas Weber. The idea that each being has a project - the project to keep existing, to stave off Nothingness. Heidegger's move to point out that all thought always begins with being-in-the-world is the perfect counter to Descartes' attempt to remove ourselves from the world. Giving ourselves the freedom to choose our story is like Donella Meadows' strongest leverage point. Paradigm and story are interchangeable. > If the intention here is to empower ourselves to navigate cultural narratives with a mature power of judgment, then it becomes important to gain a clearer understanding of what there is to choose between. It is a fundamental concern. As Neil Evernden has pointed out, our freedom lies not primordially in our actions within a story, but rather in the choosing of our story. ## A Story of Interbeing in 5 Acts ### Act 1: Wolves and Moose Isle Royale is the largest of a 450-island archipelago in upper Lake Superior on the US-Canadian border. The moose and wolves on this island are locked into an exclusive predator-prey relationship with little migration in and out, and this dynamic has been studied since 1958. In November 2009, three wildlife biologists from Michigan Technological University published a paper that showed how decaying moose carcasses produced hotspots of diversity around the island. They located the sites of 3600 moose kills over a 50-year period, and measured nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium levels in the soil. They studied microbes and fungi and large-leaf aster (a common food of the moose). Soils in these places contained 1 to 600 percent more minerals than neighbouring soils. They also had an average 38 percent increase in bacterial and fungal acids, which is a sign that bacteria and fungi found these sites more favourable to eat, grow and multiply. The plants they studied showed a 25 to 47 percent increase in nitrogen levels, which would attract more moose, whose feces and urine would contribute to plants, fungi and bacteria prospering. ### Act 2: Forests, Snow and Albedo Northern boreal forests account for almost 1/3 of all land-bound carbon. Moose are the dominant herbivore of these forests, and wolves are their top predators. If it weren't for the wolves, the moose population would grow and eat more of the young trees, inhibiting the growth of the forest. This leads to warmer and drier soils, which increases the risk of forest fires. Boreal forests with intact moose-wolf populations can absorb an additional 42 to 95 percent of Canada's carbon emissions. Climate researcher Richard A. Betts has suggested that there is another feedback loop that might offset all of this carbon absorption. Spruce trees and other evergreens have evolved supple branches that can shake off heavy snow without breaking. Seen from above, boreal forests are darker, and so absorb more heat from sunlight, which increases regional temperatures, leading to less snow, leading to higher temperatures, etc. ### Act 3: Whales Sunlight only reaches the upper layer of the ocean called the euphotic ("good light") zone. This zone is home to phytoplankton (*phyton* "plant" and *planktos* "drifters"), which are a community of microscopic photosynthesizing organisms. They consist of 5000 species who drink sunlight, absorb carbon dioxide and produce organic compounds. They are the primary food producer of the oceans, and account for half of the oxygen present in the atmosphere. Besides sunlight and carbon dioxide, they need minerals such as nitrate, phosphate and iron. But gravity pulls these nutrients below the euphotic layer. The feces of fish and zooplankton (the complementary community of animal drifters) also sinks, depriving the phytoplankton of precious nutrients. Great whales hunt for food near the ocean bottom, but they must return to the surface to breathe, whereupon they poop huge clouds of liquid feces that floan on the ocean surface. These are rich in nitrogen and iron. More whales means more plankton means more anything in the ocean. [Roman. 2010. *The Whale Pump: Marine Mammals Enhance Primary Productivity in a Coastal Basin*](zotero://select/items/1_5NQSJCCM) More plankton also means that there is more carbon that is stored in their bodies, which then sinks to the bottom of the ocean when they die. At their peak, whales may have helped remove tens of millions of tons of carbon from the atmosphere every year. ### Act 4: Algae, Birds and Clouds Some phytoplankton emit a chemical, dimethylsulfide, when they are under attack. Birds such as albatrosses, petrels, shearwaters and fulmars can smell this chemical and will be drawn to feed on the smaller animals that are attacking the plants. The seabirds also poop and give more food to the plants. When dimethylsulfide evaporates into the air, it oxidizes to form a sulfate aerosol. These tiny particles help clouds form above the ocean surface, thus increasing the planet's surface albedo and cooling it. ### Act 5: Glimpses of Gaia "... every act in our story invalidates the ideology of separation; each draws us deeper into a felt kinship with the more-than-human world. This Earth can no longer be thought of as a dead object composed of discrete entities, a big lump of rock that can be conceptualized in hierarchical terms with one thinking ape outside and on top of everything and everyone else. That story has exhausted its credibility. The world is a network of inseparable relationships, complex, nonlinear, nonhierarchical, and often unexpected." Neil Evernden, The Natural Alien: "An individual is not a thing at all, but a sequence of ways of relating: a panorama of views of the world." > The old urge to withdraw from the world remains powerful. Descartes tried very hard to withdraw. The salmon industry continues to reenact the old drama, fueled by the epistemological optimism that characterized Cartesian thought. It might almost seem as if the industry is on the winning side of history: It has the benefit of habit, of economic power, of political muscle, of technological leverage. It creates a false sense of infinite abundance, not to mention entitlement and success. This adds up to a story so commanding, so big, that it almost seems like the real world. Sadly, it all adds up to tragedy, too. Gaia hasn’t evolved to fit that story’s confines. Earth hasn’t evolved to host storytelling animals who forever try to run from it, to deny physical reality, to live outside life’s many beautifully and delicately spun cycles of participation. Relationships are the primary reality. That is the baseline that the old story cannot erode, try as it might. Abundance for our own kind is within reach, but only when we forsake the compulsion to step outside the living world. True abundance is within reach only inside this Earth. > > Our spiraling fireside story not only challenges the atomistic interpretation of salmon in feedlot practices. It also adds substance to our earlier contention that this phenomenology of story must resist the objectification of salmon and the partitioning of humans, and the way in which both these acts of separation have been pursued in the Cartesian tradition. If we can no longer uphold a sharp ontological distinction between self and other; if it becomes more prudent to speak of relational selves; if minds participate in, and are nourished by, the larger web of relations to the same degree as bodies are; if both minds and bodies are not discrete entities but aspects, angles, or local perturbations of one emergent, stratified, differentiated, strangely animate planet—then can we not assume, with the words of the American educator David Orr, that “it is not possible to unravel the creation without undermining human intelligence as well”? Can we not say that the discovery of the primacy of relationships di rectly challenges those who suggest that human well-being will not be affected by the disappearance of salmon (or wolves, or whales, or any other fellow crea ture)? If it is true that we, like salmon, are fully embedded in the living matrix of this small planet, entirely therein and entirely thereof, then can we not say that we are only healthy to the degree that salmon are healthy? Perhaps we are human only to the degree that we give salmon the opportunity to be salmon. > Who is she, again? She is the gravel bed where she hatched from her tiny, transparent egg. She is the long succession of moons that wax and wane throughout the Arctic winters. She is the April storms and the August heat, the spring floods and the September rains. She is the whales who fertilize the drifting plants who will be prey to the crustaceans and fish she hunts. She is the algae who excrete the oxygen that fires her flesh. She is the clouds above the surface that help keep Earth cool in the face of an ever-growing sun. She is Earth’s expanses of liquid water, she is its surface temperature, she is its drifting continents. She and I are both Earth, thinking and sensing and feeling itself inside each of us. # Rough Notes # Quotes > For if philosophy rises from wonder (as the ancient Greeks were first to suggest), and if salmon have been nudging humans toward experiencing wonder for millennia—prompting our forebears to structure their thought in accordance with these strangely metamorphic fish—then to turn toward salmon in expectation of being drawn once more into wonder is to turn to the cradle of philosophy itself. > Man’s freedom lies primarily in the choosing of his ‘story,’ rather than his actions within that story. > - Neil Evernden > The predominant ethical stance of modernity remains anthropocentrism, which stands directly in the tradition of Descartes’s monocentric thought. Modernity’s humanism is humanity-as-separation. The  premise of human exceptionalism has never been sufficiently renounced in that tradition. > Heidegger began his ontological tour de force with an epistemological localization: that we are already in the world whenever  we venture to speak about that world. Being human should be  thought of as being-in-the-world! The phrase might feel bulky and  awkward to the tongue, but it is an excellent move. Heidegger  breaks with Descartes’s withdrawal from the tactile, sensuous  world. He questions the idea that the human mind is the only true  inside left. If we are already in the world when we speak about it,  then “the world” must be an inside. Being human, we are “thrown  into” the world. And being thrown, being entirely within and entirely thereof, our primary access to clarity and truth would not be to step outside. It would rather be to ask how precisely it is that  we are in this world. What are the qualities of that interiority?  What are its textures, its patterns, its rhythms? With Heidegger,  this world becomes once again the context and horizon of our  existence, and being human must mean being in relation to this  Earth. By designating being human as being-in-the-world, Heidegger paved the way for radically rethinking the question of being  human: from within this atmosphere, within this windswept, rainsoaked planet as it journeys around its star. > The Cartesian split is not, first and  foremost, a split between humans and other-than-human beings.  It is a split right through the human. Descartes applied his scalpel  not only to the soft, warm bellies of the vivisected animals. He  also applied another sort of scalpel to his students: They, too, left  the vivisection lessons sliced open, partitioned, wounded. Their  psyche had been cleanly amputated from their sensing, feeling,  intuiting bodies. > The narrative of separation as enacted by the salmon feedlot  industry needs to actively counteract empathy with other-thanhuman living beings. Empathy is a spontaneous experience that  forcefully shatters any notions of being fully separate. This is our  pressure point. If the artificial separation between “us” and  “them” requires us to actively unlearn empathy with other animals, then to mend the rift, we must practice the reverse strategy:  to actively create the conditions for empathy to make itself felt  again. > A quarter to 90 percent of all the nitrogen in the hair  and bones of grizzly bears of the Columbia River basin is of marine origin. Salmon account for more than 90 percent of the nitrogen of Alaskan brown bears.¹¹  The nitrogen and the phosphorus brought upstream by  salmon can penetrate the riparian soil up to 70 meters from a  stream, and in Southeast Alaska, traces of such marine-derived  nitrogen have been found in trees and shrubs growing up to half a  kilometer away. > Trees that grow alongside  salmon streams can grow up to three times as fast as those that grow beyond the reach of salmon. The Sitka spruce in Alaska, for  example, will take only one hundred years instead of three hundred before becoming a tree big enough to create a pool when it  falls into the stream.¹² Such pools will then become the graveled  birthplace of new salmon. The salmon not only feed the entire  riparian community. They also create, in death, the habitat that  their kin will need to thrive, many salmon generations in the future.  > > Cycles within cycles, like raindrops on a turbulent river. > The ecological thinking that emerged in the  1970s suggests that we think of Being not as an assortment of  “entities,” but as polycentric, richly layered, nonhierarchical, intricately structured, and ultimately unified processes, in which each  thing is implicated by all others, and none can exist outside the  fluid context of all others. In the embodied thick of living communities, it is implausible to conceptualize discrete units. Atomism  is an untenable position. > Gaia theory suggests that the planetary community as  a whole enables the continued flourishing of life on this particular  planet within this particular solar system, here in this rotating arm  of the Milky Way galaxy. The various kingdoms of life are deeply  integrated with the so-called abiotic aspects of the Earth—the  hydrosphere, the lithosphere, and the atmosphere—through complex feedback relationships. The result of these cycles of participation is larger than the sum of its parts. > In mid-century, the ecologist Aldo  Leopold called “land” the “foundation of energy flowing through a  circuit,”¹⁶ a circuit composed of living creatures and the soils and  waters and air in which they dwell. Not long after, Paul Shepard  wrote that Nature “is best describable in terms of events which  constitute a field pattern.” > In the 1970s, the American biophysicist Harold Morowitz expanded on this emerging field theory,  using it to directly challenge classical atomistic metaphysics: “The  reality of individuals is problematic because they do not exist per  se but only as local perturbations in this universal energy flow.”¹⁸  Within this emergent ecological understanding, energy flows  through the biological system as creatures come into being and  die away, lending their bodies to support the lives of others. In  this context, sharply delineated, atomistic divisions make no  sense. > In the final footnote of The Spell of the Sensuous lies a skeleton key,  carefully placed there by Abram to help unlock the book in its  entirety:¹⁶ “In contrast to a long-standing tendency of Western social science,” he writes, the book does not attempt “to provide a  rational explanation of animistic beliefs and practices. On the contrary; it [presents] an animistic or participatory account of  rationality.” Animism, or the notion that everything speaks, is a  “wider and more inclusive term”¹ than rationality, preceding it,  underlying it. Reciprocal and participatory modes of experience  “still underlie, and support, all our literate and technological  modes of reflection. When reflection’s rootedness in such bodily, participatory modes of experience is entirely unacknowledged or unconscious, reflective reason becomes dysfunctional, unintentionally destroying the corporeal, sensuous world that sustains us.” > > Abram uses the words animistic and participatory interchangeably. Both share the understanding that anything can engage our mindful bodies in a fully reciprocal exchange, a broken  tree stump no less than a mountain meadow of heather, a nightingale no less than a wood stack, an overcast sky no less  than a moonless night saturated in starlight. Anything can summon our gaze, claim our attention, keep our senses captive, draw  us near, repulse us, dull us down, invigorate us, distract us,  sharpen our attention. Anything is fully and entirely animated. Perception is not a unidirectional and static gaze by a “subject” onto  mute and passive “objects.” It is in no way bound by a monocentric theory of knowledge. It is a fully participatory exchange between a complexly layered multiplicity of animate powers, each  unique in its expressive style and pace, each partaking deeply and  fully of a common mystery, illuminating some local region of that  mystery. > We two-leggeds of the modern narrative tradition do not easily acknowledge that in nourishing the ground with our presence, with our stories, that same ground will feed our intelligence in return. We do not acknowledge this reciprocity, and we do not acknowledge our roots for what they are; we dismiss them easily as sentimental by-products. > Our lives inscribe themselves into the land through which we have wandered, and the land takes us in, becoming porous to us, the way it becomes porous to the fumbling explorations of tree roots, and it stays around as the locus of our memory, as the earthen and wooden and aqueous atmosphere of our mindful flesh. > The ratiocentric bias is suspicious of the ways in which, even within the human, different angles of the world flow together, different ways of knowing that color our notion of reality. Whether it is the senses, intuition, feeling, or thinking, each adds a particular hue or radiance to our experience of the real, contributing its local erudition, its capacity for enriching our sentience, overlapping with the others to form a stratified, complex, and synesthetic illumination of the real. # Quotes I have found support  for Abram’s contention that animism, or  the notion that everything speaks, is a  “wider and more inclusive term”⁶⁰ than  rationality, coming before it, grounding it  palpably in the soil, and the air, and the  seas. Like Descartes, Galileo, and other  thoughtful chroniclers of the late-medieval  collective psyche, we try to comprehend the  scope of all that is unraveling before our  eyes, now that the Holocene stable state  appears to be fading. Like them, we strug-  The work of re-allying mind with body,  as well as the work of mobilizing earth-  bound, incarnate, embodied science for the  task of restorying the human-Earth rela-  tionship are complementary efforts. Each  can help us widen our sense of relatedness  w Like  Abram’s writing, Nelson’s writing bears  witness to the fluid and reciprocal process  of perception itself, which is the activity  that constantly negotiates between our pri-  vate sense of interiority and the larger in-  teriorities that surround u Where the Cartesian tradition took our  experience of subjectivity as testimony to  our existential alienation from the world,  and as sanction for the sweet reverie of  world dominion, we now know that this  very experience of subjectivity actually em-  If Gaia actively maintains a difference be-  tween inside and outside; if the biosphere  possesses degrees of entanglement, in-  wardness, and subjectivity; if, further,  Earth’s degrees of entanglement, inward-  ness, and subjectivity appear to have been Latour observes a strange and rather beautiful reverse symmetry between Galileo and Lovelock. Lovelock’s discovery of a self-composing biosphere is of such profound consequence that “very soon, in the history of science as well as in the popular imaginati Arthur Miller, the playwright, once said that “an era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.”³ The modern ideal of mind’s escape from the sensuous world is such an illusion, and the story of escape is becoming exhausted In the story of separation, a disembodied mind escapes into permanent exile, attempting to dominate all that it perceives as Other. The impulse for escape originated in a time of narrative ambiguity, when both tradition and the senses appeared to have bee Through the universalizing narrative of separation, and through modern megatechnology, the local cosmos now at stake is the living planet itself. It is within this finite local cosmos that our generation strives to absorb the forces of destruction unleash The salmon feedlot industry signifies a failure of the imagination, a failure of wisdom, a failure of story A gift-giving tool is conceived to facilitate a circle of participation, in full membership with both the human community and the morethan-human world. Here we see an example of a technological imagination that can truly call itself “ecological.”When a to A gift economy produces neither “waste” nor other “externalities.” It is charged with strong incentives to reintegrate every aspect of an interaction back into (food) cycles. When anyone can buy salmon anywhere, anytime, there is no longer any reason to celebrate the gift. The salmon’s overexposure makes them invisible. Eating becomes less meaningful. The encounter with the Other becomes pale, boring, unengaging. Audrey Lorde’s striking observation remains valid: Poetry is not a luxury. Poetry remains an indispensable and irreplaceable epistemic path to insight. If salmon are to thrive, and if the storytelling ape is to thrive alongside the fish, then, it seems, t Salmon are not reducible to the question “to eat or not to eat.” Their agency cannot be recognized in its full complexity if we leave the underlying premise of their commodification unquestioned. Their Being cannot be fully encountered within a metaphysic And because salmon feed not only humans but so many others, they also spawn far more opportunities for reason to be nourished and enriched: Every spruce, rosehip, lady bug, green woodpecker, ant nation, or wolf pack brings more integration, more diversity The gift metaphor itself is a fine illustration. It was likely through observing the return of the salmon year after year that the metaphor of the gift found its way into the structure of human reason in the first place, and from there, into human social Salmon are gift-givers par excellence. They gift the land with their remarkable annual inflow of nutrients, a tale told so eloquently by ecologists. They also make more subtle gifts, gifts that are more difficult to recognize through the quantitative, rat As metaphor and economic model, “the gift” has already proven to be immensely practical, able to spawn flourishing and sustainable human-salmon economies. Prior to the arrival of modernizers at the Pacific Rim, it was the economic model throughout the reg The industry is right about one important point. We do not want to starve. We want abundance and good food. We want to flourish as human beings. The industry is just rather misguided in its claims as to what it might take to get there. What might it take Once we discard the historic linear connotations of “indigeneity,” we can ask: What will it take for contemporary people living right now in each of Earth’s regions to articulate their kind of indigeneity, resonant with their epistemological horizon, resp It is also implausible to conceptualize indigeneity as a linear progression toward a coveted state of “highest perfection.” Indigeneity is, at best, an imperfect competence. The modern tradition cultivates its epistemological optimism on the grounds that Indigeneity can be thought of as an increasingly competent and complex animistic participation between people and the land they inhabit. It is a collective competence, and a process with no shortcuts, an adaptive skill that requires a certain continuity o Indigeneity involves the open-ended cultural work of striving to integrate the storytelling animal into the shifting depth of the living terrain. Rather than a remnant of the past, rather than a certain “developmental stage” in our ongoing creative adapta If indigeneity can be understood as a creative adaptation, a fitting-in-place through the prolonged habit of attentiveness, then the loss of America’s megafauna could be partly due to the fact that the newly arrived had not yet sufficiently crafted cultur So here are at last some signs of epistemological sophistication: To weave such an understanding expansively into one’s cultural web. To code the necessity of living in place and the psychological difficulty of maintaining that awareness into functional s Indigeneity is the difficult and never fully finished skill of living in place. The problem of living in place cannot be solved by holding reason in exile and by assigning to reason the sole responsibility of composing an ever-more-perfect understanding o If human speech is fully continuous with the eloquence of the air, water, and mountains, if our voices are but a certain style of Earth speech, and if our human thought is fed by the nourishment of wind, water, soil, salmon—if, that is, we not only speak full-fledged imperial conquest, mapping the land according to the new historic imagination. Potlatch culture spans from the subtropical coastal regions in the south, all the way into the far Arctic regions of the continent. Incidentally, this is the precise geographical range of the salmon. Biologist Jim Livatowitch observes that this might not This could explain all life, all thought. I have read so many books. Tao of Physics, when I was a teenager. They come from nothing, and go back to nothing. And perhaps that which the salmon and Changing Woman signify and embody cannot be spoken of any more directly than through allegory or story. There might not be an image or phrase or thought that would be able to stand fac-to-face with this enigma, and to From a historical perspective, the notion of creation implies a singularity in time, an event effected and completed in historical time. From a place-based perspective, that which we commonly call creation is rather experienced as an ongoing creativity, o And what if what is commonly spoken of as “time” is actually the land’s voices, its music? A music that is fully of the Earth body. Time might simply be the structured quality of the land singing itself into being. and complex dynamism of the sensuous terrain, the land’s storied unfolding, with what the new humans call history.²⁰ They live The Klallam return to the land that particularly human nourishment that is memory, held in story. The exchange between the Klallam and the living land is reciprocal, the conversation dialectic. Dwelling, to them, means becoming participants in an embedded From within the narrow temporal   .horizon of the dominant narrative, it becomes arduous to attune to other voices in the land. Think of the longevity of a redwood forest, or the birth of mountains, or the primordial dance of continental drift. Inside an It is up to us to resist this burgeoning eclipse of amnesia. If the project of modernity is based in the double notion that humans are somehow of central concern and that the rational intellect rules supreme over the body, then modern cultures are likely of a larger school of fish and joins a smaller group. She zigzags up and down the water column to If all things are in motion and each thing influences all else from within the shared, carnal field of experience in which we all participate, then our questioning must try to articulate as many loops of participation as possible Mind no longer appears to be an exclusive or private substance, but a kaleidoscope of ways in which the selfcomposed Earth has learned, through eons of evolution, to organize itself. Mind is an Earth quality. Mind is Earth that, over the course of 4,500 m For her, to be touched by water must be a kind of hearing, with the whole of her body. Hearing, with any sensuous receptor organ, is a way of interpreting pressure changes. that plant unfolds into the open from within itself. Nature, in this primordial Greek sense, is  a process of autopoiesis or “self-poetry.”²⁵ It is a dynamic and ongoing emergence of Being,  experienced as having that self-birthing quality we are now redi With Gaia theory, the pre-Copernican and pre-Galilean experience of living inside a wombish world once more makes sense. But this time, the primordial embodied experience is fully resonant with the latest discoveries in contemporary science. Gaia, or Eart Latour calls Lovelock’s Gaia “probably the most secular entity ever produced by Western  science.”²⁰ If secular implies “involving no outside cause or spiritual basis” and therefore  “fully of this world,”²¹ then the metaphor of a self-composed planetary The ratiocentric bias is suspicious of the ways in which, even within the human, dif-  ferent angles of the world flow together, different ways of knowing that color our notion of  reality. Whether it is the senses, intuition, feeling, or thinking, each a Our lives inscribe themselves into the land through which we have  wandered, and the land takes us in, becoming porous to us, the way it becomes porous to  the fumbling explorations of tree roots, and it stays around as the locus of our memory, as  the ea We two-leggeds of the modern narrative tradition do not easily acknowledge that in  nourishing the ground with our presence, with our stories, that same ground will feed our  intelligence in return. We do not acknowledge this reciprocity, and we do not ac In the final footnote of The Spell of the Sensuous lies a skeleton key, carefully placed there by Abram to help unlock the book in its entirety:¹⁶ “In contrast to a longstanding tendency of Western social science,” he writes, the book does not attempt “to If Cartesian epistemology appears so ordinary as to become invisible, then we must strive for a subtle shift of perception, so that what appears ordinary (and thus intangible, obscure) might instead reveal itself in a different fashion: as odd, idiosyncra To define the creature away from her web of relations, and the web of relations away from the creature, is to open the way to exploiting this creature, to diminishing her, violating her, abusing her, denying her. We are who we are in relation to others. S The ecological thinking that emerged in the 1970s suggests that we think of Being not as an assortment of “entities,” but as polycentric, richly layered, nonhierarchical, intricately structured, and ultimately unified processes, in which each thing is imp The Sitka spruce in Alaska, for example, will take only one hundred years instead of three hundred before becoming a tree big enough to create a pool when it falls into the stream.¹² Such pools will then become the graveled birthplace of new salmon. The s Trees that grow alongside salmon streams can grow up to three times as fast as those that grow beyond the reach of A quarter to 90 percent of all the nitrogen in the hair and bones of grizzly bears of the Columbia River basin is of marine origin. Salmon account for more than 90 percent of the nitrogen of Alaskan brown bears Narratives have a certain inherent inertia. They need not necessarily be in sync with philosophical or scientific breakthroughs. It is possible to think of the salmon industry as one such anachronism: It enacts a cosmology that is quickly falling out of t Enriching one another through the sharing of our existences becomes a communal discipline. Catherine Keller The narrative of separation as enacted by the salmon feedlot industry needs to actively counteract empathy with otherthan-human living beings. Empathy is a spontaneous experience that forcefully shatters any notions of being fully separate. This is our pr How can we speak a language that is receptive to the salmon’s other-than-human eloquence? How can we pierce through the perceptual wall of feedlot cosmology?   .That perceptual wall appears so unassailable and solid because it is reinforced several times The Cartesian split is not, first and foremost, a split between humans and other-than-human beings. It is a split right through the human. Descartes applied his scalpel not only to the soft, warm bellies of the vivisected animals. He also applied another To exploit another creature, one must actively and artificially create a sharp rift between “us” and “them.” One must create an Other which is no longer subject to “our” normal ethical concerns. Descartes was first to recognize a crucial aspect of this Ot Domestication might become a relationship of domination, but it need not necessarily be so. What is commonly seen as one-way exploitation might just as well be a relationship of mutual benefit and coinhabitation, a relationship closer to symbiosis than to My working definition of domestication would be as follows: “To domesticate is to gather in or around the nearness of people, and to make the close relationshipmore or less permanent.” The definition allows us to ask: Is domestication a relationship that The Royal Society of Canada expresses a similar concern: “Substantial equivalence does not function as a scientific basis for the application of a safety standard, but rather as a decision procedure for facilitating the passage of new products, GE [geneti Having been modified, they are not identical with other Atlantic salmon. Vandana Shiva, the Right   .Livelihood Award laureate, has come up with a name for this type of paradoxical assertion: “[when they want to patent these products], they say these are Though we have life, it is beyond us. We do not know how we have it, or why. We do not know what is going to happen to it, or to us. It is not predictable; though we can destroy it, we cannot make it. It cannot, except by reduction and the grave risk of d If the intention here is to empower ourselves to navigate cultural narratives with a mature power of judgment, then it becomes important to gain a clearer understanding of what there is to choose between. It is a fundamental concern. As Neil Evernden has Man’s freedom lies primarily in the choosing of his ‘story,’ rather than his actions within that story. Neil Evernden Being in narrative, we cannot easily read human exceptionalism as just that—a story that has certain historical foundations and belongs to a certain historical and geographical context. We might not be determined to remain inside the scripted horizon of t Heidegger’s unique angle was to suggest that the history of philosophy can be read as one of accumulating layers, or strata, of metaphysical interpretation. These philosophical strata each offer their own view of what it means to be human here on Earth, i The total equivalent of all of Norway’s fish farm feces is the annual sewage of 11.9 million people, or, in other words, roughly the entire population of Tokyo. . . . A growing number of farmed salmon is now struggling with deformities—a result of inbreed The political theorist Michael S. Northcott from the University of Edinburgh writes: “The modern world is often described as humanist, but its announcement by scientists and philosophers required ‘the simultaneous birth’ of non-humanity’—things, or object