Love and Death in the Gaianthropocene (prologue to my talk at Boom Festival)

Sharing some thoughts I’ll expand upon during my talk at Boom Festival next week.

A transcript of this video:

Next week, I’ll be in Idanha-a-Nova, Portugal to attend the Boom Festival. This festival is known for its psytrance, cultural offerings, and art. I’ve often heard it described as the European version of Burning Man, though I’m not certain if that comparison is widely accepted. I’ve attended Burning Man in the States, which, in my perspective, feels like a crescendo of the American religion of individualistic expression.

The positive aspects of this individualistic archetype are visibly displayed at Burning Man. The event is infused with a lot of humor and irony. It’s a celebration of the individual, while simultaneously symbolically burning this notion of the individual, reminding us of our collective interdependence and intra-dependence. The conditions of the event require radical self-reliance, but also demand radical inclusivity and participatory collaboration.

To me, Burning Man has always been a form of social sculpture. Of course, there are aspects that could be criticized, but attending a festival isn’t about focusing on the negatives; it’s about participating. You’re there to enjoy the art and entertainment, but you also bring yourself into the experience, contributing to co-creating a joyful encounter with others. It’s a form of social sculpture in the vein of Joseph Beuys.

I imagine Boom will offer a similar experience. I’m scheduled to give a talk at the Liminal Village on the 24th of July at 4:30 in the afternoon. The topic of my talk is “Love and Death in the Gaianthropocene,” exploring our moment in history.

The term “Gaianthropocene” is one my colleague Sean Kelly coined. It could denote a new geological age, epoch, or era, depending on how transformative we imagine it to be. Many will know the term “Anthropocene,”which geologists are still debating, with various potential start points being proposed, such as post-1945 or post-1610. The idea is to identify a point where there’s evidence in the geological record of a layer of coal dust or radioactive elements or microplastics that could be detected millions of years from now. This would then mark the start of a new “scene” or age.

The Gaianthropocene could even be considered the terminal phase of the Cenozoic era, which started 66 million years ago, around the time when dinosaurs went extinct due to an asteroid or meteorite impact. The changes we’re experiencing now are, in part, caused by humans and our industrial growth economies. But it’s also the Earth itself undergoing changes.

Climate change wasn’t invented by humans, but our industrial activities have precipitated not only climate change, but a cascading series of ecological unravelings. Our extractive political economy has pushed the system over its limits. The fossil record indicates that there have been five mass extinctions in the past, caused by super-volcano eruptions, asteroid impacts, and even what appears to be an oxygen crisis when anaerobic bacteria released oxygen as a waste product and nearly poisoned themselves.

This toxic environment was created by life itself and its metabolic processes, requiring adaptation. Life adapted and was able to harvest the higher energy of the oxygen molecule to power even more complex metabolism and consciousness.

So how do we relate to this moment in human history? Yes, it’s an ending, and there is moral culpability for the damage, destruction, and death being unleashed by the accumulation-driven global capitalist economy. But there’s also something inevitable about this.

It’s not the first time life has had to adapt to changing conditions. After every mass extinction event, within a few million years, there was actually more diversity of life and a greater variety of species than there were prior to the mass extinction. Life doesn’t just survive and struggle to exist—it responds to catastrophe with creativity, complexifying and intensifying its experience, consciousness, and value.

At this phase of the Earth’s evolution, what does the human being represent? If we take seriously the fact that human beings are an expression of the earth process, we can see that we’re a species of animal. As unique as we might imagine ourselves to be, at the end of the day, we are as natural as leaves on a tree.

So, how do we understand the human event and the Anthropocene in a Gaian way? That’s what referring to this moment as the ‘Gaianthropocene’ would mean. In this historical context, I want to talk about some very human dimensions of our existence: Love and Death. We used to think what made us unique as a species was our awareness of death, and our spiritual or religious response to that awareness, that we will die. The attempt to understand where the ones we love go when they die, where we go when we die. Love would be the other, especially human factor for us to consider here.

Now of course, we know that there are other species that are, or appear to be, aware of death and that mourn the dead. Elephants, other primates, corvids, they seem to almost perform ritual responses to death and to the dead, and so we can’t draw sharp lines here between human beings and other species. But this capacity that complex animals have to become aware of death seems especially pronounced in the human being, I think we can say that. This capacity for love, similarly, is obviously present in many animal species, particularly evident in the mammals, where you get extended parental care periods to protect longer childhoods. As childhood is prolonged, this capacity for love and care and attention in a social setting for one another becomes enhanced. The human being is the most neotenous of all the animals, and of the primates: we have the most prolonged childhood.

We’re malleable and capable of learning for a long time, ultimately for our entire lives if we, once the childhood period ends and our bodies have matured, can continue to keep our minds youthful through acts of our own will and self-cultivation. We can stay children our entire lives, and I think keeping your mind youthful even in old age is why learning and education need to become understood as a lifelong process. It’s not something you do until you get a degree at a certain stage to get yourself a job. No, you’re always learning. You’re always learning how to be human, you’re always learning how to relate to death and to love. And then we’re also aware of birth, of course. These mysteries, birth and death, are sort of what encompass us on either end of our lives, and the only way we seem capable of getting close to these mysteries is through love.

Obviously, birth comes from sex and sex requires love. There are different kinds of love: there’s eros, there’s friendship, there’s romance, there’s agape, divine unconditional love. Somehow love is the bridge through which we pass from birth to death. A question I want to ask, I don’t know that I can answer it, but ask at least, is whether there might not be a love bridge between death and a new birth. I think there’s a really important conversation to be had right now in the Gaianthropocene about the ethics of reincarnation.

If we do want an ecological ethic, it’s going to need to overcome this kind of shallow anthropocentrism and individualism and allow us to feel as though all of the creatures that compose this planet are our kin. We are all related. My individual birth and death make me a link in a chain, really a network of chains. Life is often thought of abstractly as though we exist in a lineage, but as you go back a few generations, you end up being related to a lot of people. These numbers grow exponentially and there comes a point where the lineage is way more like a rhizome, and there are transversal connections from different nodal points in this network.

If we are going to have a serious conversation about reincarnation, it’s not going to be in terms of my separate identity migrating from one body to the next across the millennia. It’s going to be a sense of karmic interconnection. Karma is always shared, right? It’s always interactive, intra-active even. It’s a recognition of our inseparability, and the way that every action has a reaction in one sense, but that the action is not just reactive, it’s free to varying degrees.

This is the whole human dilemma, right? We recognize love as a bridge between birth and death, and we contemplate this notion of a love bridge between death and a new birth. Many religious traditions have contemplated this “under-bridge,” if you will. I think part of finding the moral courage to respond to our moment as a species, when collapse is not only inevitable as a prediction or projection, but actively transpiring around us, is to have a sense of identity that goes beyond just the partial forms of love that we might feel embodied as we are now, between birth and death.

This experience of being embodied between birth and death is where the action is, but there’s also action on the other side. It’s only this complete cycle of birth, death, and rebirth that gives us a sense of our ecological interdependence. So, when we think about the end times that we’re going through right now, it’s not just a sense of dread. We should do everything we can to lessen the suffering and lift people’s spirits in a time of great anxiety, uncertainty, and suffering. But we can also view this end time and death itself as a transition, an initiation to something new, a change of state, as the crossing of a threshold.

Nobody knows what happens when we die, unless you’ve had a near-death experience. But, just considering the ideas I’ve shared as a thought experiment might lead you to a sense of greater resolve about how we can meet this moment as concerned Earthlings or Gaians, if you choose to so identify. Death is not an accident, right? Mass extinction is not an artificial imposition that human beings invented and are imposing on the biosphere; it’s happened before. That doesn’t remove moral culpability here or release us from any responsibility as a species for what we’re doing to the Earth. Nonetheless, extinction is part of evolution, death is part of life. It’s not an accidental part of life; it is essential to life. Really, life is a life-death-rebirth cycle, always has been, always will be.

Death is not an end, really. It’s a process, it’s a phase transition. It’s possible that the entire cosmos as we know it, as a physical system, might die one day. The Earth itself will die, the Earth will be swallowed by the Sun. So, whatever value and meaning and purpose we might achieve here as human beings, as living organisms, it’s not going to be subject to the ravages of time. We must be tapping into something vertically, as it were, perpendicular to the horizontal course of history, which connects us directly to a source, to ultimacy, by which we might judge the value and the meaning and the purpose of our existence here and now on this planet at this moment in history.

Rather than fearing the end or just having this anxious reaction to a projected future, it’s a process that we’re always already undergoing. Our purpose here is to become more conscious of that process so that we can begin to cooperate with it, to become co-creative of history rather than having history happen to us. Whenever we talk about history, we’re drawing artificial lines between one age and the next. How we draw these lines, which we can’t avoid doing, is simultaneously a religious, a scientific, and a political act. Evolving consciousness in this moment of history means recognizing how drawing these types of lines is also an artistic act.

We’re trying to learn to make history together as social sculptors, as artists, rather than being made by it. How can we make history together rather than being made by it, and how can we, while making history and becoming artists, also become responsible for the natural history we’re inheriting? There’s human history, which is a subset of geohistory, which was already going on when we emerged. We must become responsible for that geohistory, become grateful and gracious inheritors of it. We are it, we carry forward its achievements in pursuit of this sense of eternal value that we never finally reach and realize, but that we’re nonetheless compelled to strive to attain.