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Title: There is no “Natural Balance”
Author: APS
Date: February 2020
Language: en
Topics: social ecology, Philippines, Bandilang Itim, ecology
Source: http://libcom.org/blog/there-no-natural-balance-01032020

APS

There is no “Natural Balance”

On social media, I usually see people moan over how we’re “Destroying

Nature”, and that “Mother Nature is dying.” No, my sweet summer child.

Mother Nature ain’t dying. Mother Nature is just grabbing the slippers

she’s gon’ use to spank our collective asses with. Natural processes

that lead to life are going to remain well after we are gone. We just

won’t be in it.

What we’re really calling “Mother Nature” is the specific set of

material conditions found in nature that is conducive to life as we know

it. And more importantly, to human life as we know it. Studies in

catastrophe theory and chaos theory have all discussed at length how

this works.

What we’re here to talk about though, is how this “enduring myth” of a

“Balance of Nature” reveals about how the Filipino thinks about the

world around them.

Essentialism is the view that for every entity or object, there lies

certain attributes or substances that are critical for what it does.

That there are things that make things what they are. This has been

explored in Plato’s Theory of Forms, that everything is an imperfect

embodiment of a perfect, abstract Form. Following this logic, certain

characteristics make “Nature” what it is. “Men” and “Women” would also

have not only defining, but essential characteristics. Not having

certain characteristics disqualifies something from being something.

I hope you can see how this kind of thinking is problematic.

Not only does this kind of thinking removes an entity, in this case,

Nature, out of its historical context, but it also ignores the variety

and breadth of human experience tied to the entity. A semi-essential

view of nature was found in the Animism of the natives of the

pre-colonial Philippines. It was a living and present force in their

lives, something that could be bargained and negotiated with. Offerings

could be made to placate their anger, while feasts were held to thank

them for a bountiful harvest. Recognizing the role that the environment,

and “Nature”, in general, plays in their lives.

Although this isn’t to say that the natives were this “in-tune with

nature” collective of hippies that they’re sometimes made out to be.

Muro-Ami is the practice of using rocks to destroy corals in order to

catch them in dragnets. This not only leads to overfishing, but also

depletes the ocean biome’s ability to replenish fish populations.

But it gets worse with the eventual arrival of the Spanish conquistadors

and the wide-scale feudalization of the islands. The old gods were

demonized and “Nature” just became God’s gift to mankind. Which the

colonized laborers were obliged to hand over to their conquerors. The

theocratic ideology of the Church caused a greater split between the

inhabitants of the archipelago and their environment, with the building

of the oldest cities.

With the arrival of the American “Benevolent Assimilators”, almost all

sectors experience some form of industrialization. The relationship of

Society and Nature was then made into a purely economic one. It is here

that Alienation from Nature is made complete.

Observe how at each stage, Nature was assigned a different “Essence” and

contextualizes society’s relationship with it. We are not saying that

all of these changes happened overnight, and that these are complete,

sweeping changes, either. Reality is a lot more messy than that. What

does though, is unconsciously make us ignore nature’s role in the

context of our material conditions. It’s just somewhere you get all that

wood from. It downplays the fact that we affect it as much as it affects

us. As living creatures, we need to realize our interdependence with

nature. And this indifference to the role that large-scale human

activity, of which large corporate and military entities are the most at

fault for, has resulted in the crisis we are seeing today with global

warming.

We must learn that Nature is not a great, monolithic entity. Nature is

an inconceivably large and interconnected network of systems, of which

animal life, and specifically human life, is merely just a part of. The

contradiction between Nature and the needs of human social production,

is something that Marx calls The Metabolic Rift, and we can see how that

is creating a global crisis and pushing us head-first into what is

likely going to be a 6^(th) extinction event the world has ever seen.

We must learn how to resolve this dialectical contradiction, or pay the

price in countless lives.