"Inscendence"

Today in Environmental Ethics we focus on land. "Land is resilient, like people." Some people.

Other people aren't so resilient, because they are what they eat. "Foods are enriched because they are impoverished."

And then there's Polyface Farm, a place and an ethos I first learned about from Michael Pollan. Animals there are treated with respect, but not ultimately with personhood. They're still destined for human plates. But at least they get to range free for most of their natural lives.

To many animal rightists, even Polyface Farm is a death camp. But to look at these animals is to see this for the sentimental conceit it is. In the same way that we can probably recognize animal suffering when we see it, animal happiness is unmistakable, too, and here I was seeing it in abundance.

For any animal, happiness seems to consist in the opportunity to express its creaturely character -- its essential pigness or wolfness or chickenness. Aristotle speaks of each creature's ''characteristic form of life.'' For domesticated species, the good life, if we can call it that, cannot be achieved apart from humans -- apart from our farms and, therefore, our meat eating. This, it seems to me, is where animal rightists betray a profound ignorance about the workings of nature. To think of domestication as a form of enslavement or even exploitation is to misconstrue the whole relationship, to project a human idea of power onto what is, in fact, an instance of mutualism between species. Domestication is an evolutionary, rather than a political, development. It is certainly not a regime humans imposed on animals some 10,000 years ago. An Animal's Place 

 "It is not the land that is broken, but our relationship to it." We've taken it for granted, failed to nourish and sustain it. Worms have done better than we have. What does it say about our bio-illiteracy, that we have a stock expression denigrating "lowly worms"?

A Berry not Wendell says we've become an extractive species because we see ourselves as "transcendent" and not at home here. He names the alternative "Inscendence," the impulse not to rise above the world (transcendence) but to climb into it, seek its core. (Robert Macfarlane made that one of his "words of the day," and it's a great one.)

Thomas Berry also said "the primary judgment of all human institutions, professions, programs and activities should [he said will, but that's aspirational] be determined by the extent to which they inhibit, ignore, or foster a mutually-enhancing human/Earth relationship.”

That seems too obvious to need saying. But so many of us still don't understand what was so clear to Thomas Berry:

“We see quite clearly that what happens

to the nonhuman happens to the human.

What happens to the outer world

happens to the inner world.

If the outer world is diminished in its grandeur

then the emotional, imaginative,

intellectual, and spiritual life of the human

is diminished or extinguished.

Without the soaring birds, the great forests,

the sounds and coloration of the insects,

the free-flowing streams, the flowering fields,

the sight of the clouds by day

and the stars at night, we become impoverished

in all that makes us human.”

That's the core of what we must understand. We must climb in.