Ecology is the study of relations between organisms and environments and, like ‘economy’, derives from the Greek for house. Ecology considers the planet as a house and explores its building blocks, from the smallest microbe to the largest cryosphere, and the interrelationships between the parts and the whole. Ecology is inherently political because it encompasses multiple scales, focuses on interactions, and describes human relations with each other and the rest of nature; how something over here affects something over there, across communities and ecosystems; and whether living beings behave in cooperative, competitive, or predatory ways. What or who causes an icecap to melt or hunts a species to extinction is at once an ecological and a political question, as more and more climate reportage makes clear.
Long before climate occupied the news, ecological ideas influenced structures of the political economy and vice versa. In the mid-19th century, the anarchist and geographer Pyotr Kropotkin found examples of mutual aid in evolutionary aspects of the natural world which resonated with his own anarchist communism. An ecological understanding of interdependencies between the human and more-than-human worlds remains central to how climate breakdown might be faced. Karl Marx, meanwhile, was studying ecology as he theorised capital, drawing from Charles Darwin’s research on natural selection to understand economic competition, and on Justus von Liebig’s soil science to develop a critique of intensive industrialism. Marx suggested that industrial agriculture was driving a “metabolic rift” between humanity and the rest of nature, simultaneously exhausting “the soil and the worker”. His work thus anticipated contemporary readings of climate breakdown in terms of capitalism.
Rachel Carson’s influential 1962 book, Silent Spring, demonstrates the catastrophic extent to which industry has damaged ecosystems during what has subsequently become known as the Anthropocene age, an era dominated and shaped by humans. Carson’s integrated approach to humanmade industry and more-than-human ecosystems also characterises the work of the anthropologist Gregory Bateson. In his 1972 essay collection, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Bateson combined approaches to anthropology, psychiatry, evolution, cybernetics, and epistemology to propose a new way of understanding interactions between human behaviour and the more-than-human world. Bateson argued that the fundamental unit of evolution was not the organism, but an organism plus its environment.
Although more recent, the term ‘extractivism’ is useful for describing the exploitative mechanisms that Marx, Carson, and Bateson identified in modern industry. Today, extractivism encompasses many kinds of industries, from open-pit mining to data harvesting, seeing the world as a set of resources to be extricated from their original state and converted into something for human use and consumption. The effects of this extractivist mindset, which reduces the lively ecology of the natural world to inert commodities, are inextricably linked to climate breakdown. Anthropologists including Marisol de la Cadena and Anna Tsing have traced extractivism and its accompanying climate devastations to colonial plantation systems and identified their current continuation in powerful global agribusinesses. Numerous contemporary geographers, cultural theorists, and philosophers of science including Kathryn Yusoff, Isabel Stengers, and Donna Haraway have proposed older origins for the Anthropocene, citing earlier forms of capitalism, including plantation economies, as grounds for later industrialisation and climate damage.
This expansion has significant implications for spatial practices. First in suggesting that people exist in relation to the wider ecosystems they inhabit, and then by implication understanding buildings and the wider built environment not as autonomous objects but as part of a complex set of human and more-than-human relationships. In this way spatial relations, social relations, and ecological relations are all interlinked.
Annotated Bibliography
Gregory Bateson. Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972).
In this essay collection, the anthropologist Gregory Bateson combines approaches to anthropology, psychiatry, evolution, cybernetics, and epistemology to propose a radically holistic understanding of life which emphasises interactions between human behaviour and the more-than-human world. Arguing that the fundamental unit of evolution is not the organism, but the organism plus its environment, Bateson’s work had widespread implications for numerous disciplines, from architecture to philosophy, in suggesting that people exist in symbiotic relation to the wider ecosystems they inhabit.
Barnabas Calder. Architecture: From Prehistory to Climate Emergency (London: Pelican, 2021).
This is a history of architecture written for the present and future. Calder uses a global array of buildings to illustrate humans’ dependencies on different sources of energy at different times. He argues that architecture is shaped by its creators’ access to energy— be that fire, farming, or fossil fuels. From the Parthenon to a Victorian terraced house, form follows energy, often at the cost of social and environmental care. Today, around 40% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions come from the building and construction sector. In addressing energy consumption, Calder invites an essential re-reading of the canons, damages, and potentials of architecture in the context of climate breakdown.
Donna Haraway. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
Staying with the trouble of biodiversity loss and climate breakdown, the feminist philosopher of science Donna Haraway argues for the importance of caring for other living beings in an approach she describes as “making kin” in unexpected collaborations and combinations. Drawing on a broad range of examples for how humans are entangled with animal, biological and technical systems, Haraway makes a case for abandoning categories of separation between humans, species, and orders, in favour of an expanded ontology of complex and considerate interaction.
Isabelle Stengers. In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. Translated by Andrew Goffey (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015).
Addressing current senses of political impasse and climate emergency, the philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers critiques contemporary elites of bureaucratic governance for maintaining a status quo of socioeconomic inequality that threatens to push the planet and its populations into barbaric unrest and upheaval. Against such catastrophic governance, Stengers proposes an array of tactical interventions including scientific knowledge-sharing, aimed at facing environmental and socio-technical issues as political questions and opportunities for radical change.
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).
What manages to live in the ruins of our capitalist present? Answering this question takes the American anthropologist Anna Tsing across the world in pursuit of an unlikely protagonist: an edible mushroom called matsutake. A weed, a delicacy, and an ecological salve, matsutake’s multiple functions help Tsing tell a multifaceted tale of commodity chains, traditional cultures, and the more-than-human worlds of forests and fungi. Matsutake, she argues, lives within and despite capitalist extractivism, exemplifying the vital possibility of collaborative and multispecies survival.