Is Conservation Contrary to Nature?

The blog that you are about to read might confound or upset your own personal beliefs. But before you decide that I am an anarchist who wishes to see wanton and random destruction I want you to read the full blog, attempt to understand it on my terms and give me a fair hearing. You will then have the task of taking on board what I've said and bringing it into critical interaction with the beliefs you already have. This, as I understand it, is something like how our belief systems progress anyway. And so I ask for a hearing.

My blog today starts from one of my own beliefs. This belief is that conservation, not just ecological conservation but pretty much all forms of conservation, are contrary to nature. What do I mean by saying this? I mean that the nature of the universe, the way it works, the way things are ordered, the way this universe progresses, is not based on the conservation of individual specific things. The universe, for example, does not have as one of its guiding principles that you or I must be saved. It does not think that lions or elephants or rhinos or whales or planet Earth or our sun or our galaxy should exist forever. Indeed, it doesn't think that anything should. It just is. Conservation is not a part of its make up. The universe is a big engine of change.

So what is a part of its make up? From observation it seems that constant, radical, permanent change is a part of its make up. The universe, left to its own devices, is merely the living history of forms of energy if you break it down to basics. These forms of energy interact with one another to produce the things we see, hear, and experience. More importantly, they interact to produce things that we will never see, hear, experience or even imagine. Existence, in this sense, is just energy doing what energy does. There are no over-arching rules for it and nothing is mandated to exist or not exist because the universe is impassive and uninterested in what is - or is not. Its just random, chaotic energy. Out of this random chaos came us - quite inexplicably to my mind but that's another discussion. We human beings are not impassive or uninterested. Indeed, we need to be concerned and interested in order to survive. And so from this universe of chaotic energy we interested beings were produced.

I have observed the interest in ecological conservation as a phenomenon with my own growing interest for many years. Its one debate which can get some human beings very hot under the collar. When I hear people saying that we need to "save the planet" I often ask myself "What for?" For me its never really good enough to assume the rightness of an agenda merely because it seems to be either moral or, in some sense, on the side of good. I know both morality and goodness as interested ideas which are in no sense neutral but always serving some interest. You might think that the interests of saving the planet are very good ones but I would always seek to undermine the foundations of a belief to ask what presuppositions it stands on. Our beliefs always have these groundings and they are often very revealing and easily toppled. Such are human belief systems.

Of course, conservation is about more than wanting to save the planet or some species upon it (whether that is a rare kind of insect, a cuddly mammal or even us). I had a think and I reasoned that you could connect capitalists (who want to preserve their economic status in society as well as the value of capital), theists (who want a god to be the guarantor of everything that is as it is right now), Greens (who want to preserve the planet and species of life as we have them now) and Transhumanists (who want human beings to outlive our current surroundings and even our planet) all as types of people interested in conservation broadly understood. You may be able to think of others. Conservation is, of course, most commonly associated with the Greens but, as we can see, the drive to conserve things is actually apparent wherever people want things to stay roughly as they are right now (or in an idealized, utopian form of right now). My point, as I've said above, is quite simple: this is contrary to the way things are, contrary to nature, against the organizing principles of an indifferent universe.

You may argue that this is to misunderstand the way things are and that's a fair point to challenge me on. You may say that I am right and the universe doesn't care what stays or goes. It will just keep rolling on until the energy all dissipates in the eventual heat death of the universe in some trillions of years. In that context you may say that what is is then up to those species who can make something of it and that if the universe allows us to make and manufacture things a certain way, guided by our principles, then we should. I don't actually find this position all that wrong. My concern here, I suppose, is with those who reason that there is some form of rightness or naturalness or in-built goodness with this drive to conserve. To me it is entirely manufactured and interested as a phenomenon. It is the activity of self-interested and self-important beings. To want to save the whale because you have an impulse to save whales is one thing. To say that we have a responsibility to save whales is to use rhetoric in the service of an agenda. The universe doesn't care if whales live or die. It follows that there is no imperative for me to care either - although I may choose to and may give reasons for so doing. But these reasons will always be interested and (merely) rhetorical.

So what am I arguing against? I'm arguing against those who want to find or impose imperatives. I'm arguing against those who think that something put us here to "save the world". I'm arguing against those who see us as over and above nature as opposed to merely an interested and self-interested and self-important part of it, a species and individuals with a will to survive. I'm arguing against those who see us as anything other than a rather pathetic bug-like species on a nothing ball of rock in a nowhere solar system in an anonymous galaxy floating in a space so big you cannot begin to quantify it. I'm arguing against those who regard life as nothing to do with power and its operations and how those dynamics play out in human societies. Human beings are very conscious of their station in life and will seek to preserve or increase it. This, amongst other things, is why there are differing sides of the Green conservation argument. People have empires to protect. But seen from that angle life just becomes a power struggle between forms of energy marshalled to power differing agendas. We, instead of being the savior of our world, the universe and everything, are merely just more energy acting in the vastness of space until we dissipate.

So yes when I hear the slogans of Greens I chuckle. I wonder what we are saving and why. I smile at the naivety, if that's what it is, that just assumes this is the right thing to do. I wonder at the hubris that thinks we and our planet in some sense deserve to live. I wonder how these people have factored in the assumptions of our eventual destruction. I wonder how they explain away the fact that well over 90% of things that ever lived on Earth are gone forever without any human action whatsoever. Because that's what things just do - have their time and then cease to exist. I wonder where they reason the meaning they ascribe to things fits in. For nothing exists in a vacuum. (Feel free to ponder on the vacuum of space here and how that affects my last sentence.) The reasons we give for things, the beliefs we hold, are supported by other things and it is they, when articulated, that support our actions and drives. Life is wonderful and random. But it is not permanent. And, as far as I can see, it was never meant to be nor can it be. The drive to conserve is an interested human drive, just one contingent outworking of the energy that drives a form of life. This doesn't mean we shouldn't care or should ravage and destroy. Its just a context for something humans want to do for their own, personal reasons. It is, in the end, just one more example of the universe doing its thing, its the energy that exists exhausting itself until there's no more left. 

Its an example of the kind "Anything the universe allows is allowed".


Now you may feel free to think about this and decide who is right or wrong and, just as importantly, why.

There is Little Point in Being Good

Let me get straight to the point: there is little point in being good. It can be observed that the person who spends their life working for various forms of social justice, helping others or being a generally all round good egg lives the same life (and receives the same death) as the habitual criminal, the parasite and the fool. It may be that the second type of person actually lives a ​better ​life than the first. Indeed, this has been observed many times before. I, personally, as one example, am aware of this very thought in the biblical book of Ecclesiastes. It’s just one reason given there for why life is “futile” or absurd. The book makes no attempt to say that this idea isn’t true. It even ends by saying, in so many words, “but obey god and keep his commandments anyway”. I wonder, then, if you accept the premise and the conclusion that I take from it? There is little point in being good.

Examine yourself honestly and you will see that each one of us, every day, commits some act, positive or of omission, that is in some sense immoral, self-serving or unprincipled. We rationalize it and explain it away as small or inconsequential but each one acts as a chip in a pane of glass. That pane of glass is us, our character. It matters not how small the chips are. If left for long enough such chips will shatter and destroy the whole pane of glass much as they do in a car’s windscreen. Who of us can stand up and say we are flawless panes of glass? Surely, we all know that we are at least many times chipped?

And so such thoughts lead me to think about morality as a whole. Such a problem was morality for some (I mean here Nietzsche) that for them nothing less than a complete “revaluation of all values” was required. This is far-reaching stuff. Our societies are meant to operate on moral lines but does anyone actually believe this ludicrous notion? We could all, I am sure, roll off lists of immoralities committed daily from the trivial to the criminal to the horrific. There seems a somewhat disingenuous relationship with morality on offer within human societies and cultures. It’s never pure and thus always (often considerably) flawed. Humanity as the flawed species could very much be our defining characteristic.

But what is morality anyway and why, so we are told, is it so good to be good? Morality is more than the behaviour patterns or social codes we witness in animals. Morality is not an autonomic response like breathing or having a heart that beats without thinking about it. We, although we are definitely still animal, are the only animal that gives, and can give, reasons for things. Morality is making choices for principled reasons and acting upon those reasons. We do this because we can do this, because we developed in ways that made this possible. And, thus, I can’t help thinking that there is something about morality and a moral way of thinking that is intended, somehow, to grease our evolutionary wheels. But is an evolutionary impetus itself moral? I would say not.

What is clear to me is that morality can only ever be a social thing. Just as there can be no private language so can there also never be a private morality. Morality is, as Nietzsche called it, a thing of the herd, a matter of nodes in the context of a network. It is not a matter negotiated individually - even though individuals can make choices to ignore, change or influence it. Morality applies to everyone or it applies to no one and begins to break down. A morality is stronger the more people accept it and increasingly useless the less people do. If it is true that this moral impulse is an evolutionary one, and that that impulse is thus itself contingent upon our evolution which is not itself at all moral, then where does this lead us?

For some it leads us into human exceptionalism, the idea that we are, somehow, in ways not always well explained, over and above the rest of the life that has come to be on our planet. But it is not clear to me why an increasing brain function and the ability to instrumentalize and put to use the things around us, that which Stanley Kubrick in his seminal film ​2001: A Space Odyssey​ indicated by the apes learning to use bones as weapons, means that we are now, somehow, set in some kind of (usually benevolent) opposition to the rest of our environment. This is the mentality which claims that we are now (presumably self-appointed) guardians of our planet as opposed to merely contingent forms of life gaining our perilous and almost certainly temporary existence from it.

I wonder, though, what grounds human exceptionalists really have for claiming their exceptionalism for our species? I wonder too, if the animals could talk, if they would want a species around that pollutes, rapes, pillages and generally devours the rest of this world’s resources as we do. Rather than the guardians are we not actually the destroyers? Rather than the saviours are we not merely, at the very best, those seeking to try and save ourselves from the immorality of our past and present? Humans seem very exceptional in every bad way you can think of. Do other species murder, rape, kill and make war? Do other species do down their own for merely financial gain? It may be that analogues can be found for these in more animalistic terms but surely ours are the most “exceptional”? It seems to me that we are just like animals but ones with more brain power and so with more capacity to actualise and instantiate our animalistic urges in cleverer ways. And this is, in fact, exactly what we are.

So whilst it may be said that human beings have developed an evolutionary taste for the moral it cannot be said that they are themselves the best example of morality. All those chipped panes of glass can be seen as a large glass tower, the edifice of a shattered humanity’s morality. But, as yet, neither have we answered the question “Why is it good to be good?” In specifics, of course, there is the kick that one gets from a good deed done and seeing the gratefulness of the recipient of the deed. But, if we are being honest, we can also say we have got a kick from doing bad too. Does anyone not know what it feels like to “get one over” on someone or to profit at another’s expense? We may have a need to be moral but we have an inability to follow through on it consistently and, as I began by showing, the actual pay off for us in terms of our own lives is dubious at best anyway.

So what do we have left? A world of actions and consequences, the world our mothers forced us into with their painful contractions. We should have taken a warning from such an entry that the world was going to be a messy, painful place. A place of actions and consequences. In the end, that’s all there is, and that’s what you have to negotiate on your way to the death we all alike face. Actions and consequences. You may want to try and codify how to do that and respond overtly to your evolutionary moral impulse but it won’t really matter for you will be very humanistically flawed in your consistency regarding it anyway. You will, just like the rest of us, take ad-hoc decisions with little discernible consistency at all. You may call yourself moral but, in the end, is morality anymore than rhetoric anyway, just one more tale about how to be a good human?

Actions and consequences.


This is another article from my recent project "Mind Games". You can download the music and articles I wrote for this HERE!