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Chapter 8 Energy, Ecology, and Intensive Alliance :Bringing Earth Back to Heaven
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121 c h a p t e r 8 Energy, Ecology, and Intensive Alliance: Bringing Earth Back to Heaven Luke B. Higgins It should probably come as no surprise that a certain instrumental, techno-scientific rationality continues to dominate the discourse in which we currently engage conversations around energy consumption and its environmental effects. After all, it was modern science that defined the very concept of energy upon which much of today’s industrial civilization was built. Science defines energy as the ability to do work, expressed as a quantifiable , exchangeable unit. The utility of the scientific concept of energy derives from its capacity to abstract from particular processes and exchanges that occur throughout the natural world, reducing them to exchangeable units, or “currency.”1 The conceptual tools of science are an undeniable gift insofar as they have vastly expanded and enriched our capacity for understanding and relating to the world around us. And yet it seems equally clear that many of the civilizational habits that have led to the devastating environmental crisis we face today have their roots in a certain approach to nature pioneered and institutionalized by modern science. Identifying and constructively addressing these shortcomings in the modern scientific paradigm has proved a formidable challenge in part because of the way institutional and disciplinary boundaries have evolved in 122 Luke B. Higgins our society. As philosopher of science Bruno Latour has so discerningly pointed out, thinkers within the social sciences or the humanities—those disciplines from which the most trenchant critiques of techno-scientific rationality come—tend to be limited in their “jurisdiction” to the realm of politics, culture, and human values. Questions of nature, on the other hand, are handed over the instrumental, “fact-seeking” methods of the hard sciences. In Latour’s view, these kinds of institutional divides have perpetuated a kind of paralysis in political ecology.2 As early as the 1920s, philosopher Alfred North Whitehead offered a compelling diagnosis of the ills of the modern industrial age—ills that he understood to emerge in tandem with modern science but should not be identified with scientific conceptuality as such. For Whitehead, there is nothing in and of itself wrong with the strategic reductions of scientific abstractions ; it is these abstractions that allow us to draw novel connections between phenomena that would seem otherwise unrelated. Where modern science gets into trouble is with the error of mistaking these abstractions for some underlying reality—what he calls the “Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness .” Once these abstractions become reified such that they seem to point to some fundamental material substance at the base of the world, a particular relationship of the “thinking subject” to that “material object ” ensues—one that Whitehead aptly describes with the term bifurcation . This term describes the uniquely modern “schizophrenic” tendency to split off thinking, value-driven subjects from natural, material objects governed by facts such that a completely different conceptual apparatus is invoked to negotiate each side of this split. In this essay I argue that the fallacy of misplaced concreteness and the ensuing reality of bifurcation continues to offer one of the best diagnoses of how and why modern (and postmodern) Western civilization has found it so difficult to view itself in an interdependent partnership with the larger ecosystem. In the case of energy, these fallacies can lead to the illusion that abstract, exchangeable units of energy constitute the most real (or at least the most valuable) thing about the diverse natural processes and exchanges in which they are understood to occur. Together, the first two laws of thermodynamics and Einstein’s famous theorem E = mc2 seem to impart a sense that literally everything in the cosmos can be reduced to a substratal currency of power. Energy then becomes conceived as some underlying substance that is simply “there” in natural systems, waiting to be harnessed for human ends. In other words, the logic of bifurcation takes over—one in which humans, as active, thinking subjects, become the sole [54.198.146.224] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 08:59 GMT) Energy, Ecology, and Intensive Alliance 123 creative agents who can impart value to what is no more than objectified, mute, malleable, matter. It is true that the startling, paradigm-shifting insights of relativity theory, quantum mechanics, and other branches of contemporary physics have posed certain challenges to the particular reductions of an earlier scientific materialism focused on mass (i...