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Achieving “Ecological Intelligence” sounds like a power-up in a joystick arcade game. I guess, in a way, it can be seen as a power-up of sorts, but not for the player, for our planet.  I feel like if we understood the rules of the game more, things would play out better, but the world doesn’t come with an instruction manual, or a rule book. 

Our current way of living is destroying the world. Our society thrives on the exploitation of others as well as the exploitation of the environment. We have surpassed several of the limits placed on pollution and CO2 levels. There are countless species nearing extinction because of our exploitative ways. However, even faced with these facts, we rarely make changes in our lifestyle. We either don’t want to be inconvenienced or don’t have the means to afford to change the way we live. Bruno Latour has hailed the enlightenment as the turning point in the way the western world thought about the earth. The viewpoint changed from the acceptance of the earth as a being to the viewing of the earth as a combination of non-living “stuff”.

Essential Empathy

In The Sixth Extinction, Kolbert stated the situation of environment and human in a more objective, or even pessimism way, which led me thinking that nature and environment are meant to be mutually exclusive, doubting that if there is ever a solution we could find to balance the relationship and avoid us from the self-destruction path. However, as the concept of ecological intelligence came up, it reminded me of a novel way to reflect on the relationship between human and nature. Ecological Intelligence means reading and embracing the world, thinking of the effects in a broader ecology, including the natural and cultural one. It’s important for us to read the world in an equal way, with our experiences instead of language and without superiority and deanimation.

In Bruno Latour’s “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene”, he introduces the idea of subjectivity and objectivity. “It is impossible to read such a statement as an “objective fact” contemplated coldly from a distant place, as was supposed to be the case, in earlier times, when dealing with ‘information’ coming from the ‘natural sciences.’ There is no distant place anymore. And along with distance, objectivity is gone as well.”(2) Latour says. According to him, objectivity means distance. Only in a distant place, people are able to see the “facts”. However, Latour is being too over generalized. Sometimes good objectivity involves closeness, and objectivity is still needed for the world.

     As humans, we’ve developed a cultural tradition that evolved through a body of words. The system of cultural tradition is described as a language. Although, based on geographical area, the language in which people communicate may differ. However, most ideas and concepts that were birthed in the United States can be founded in places as far as China and India, which is known to be the act of Westernization. Due to Western style influences, people have been taught to think and communicate in a language that was based on previous leaders who were ignorant to the importance of nature and its limits. Thus constraining any further progress for a more efficient environment. 

When speaking of intelligence, there is no singular category. Intelligence, in it of itself, is not defined by a finite application. It is not an object to be held but a capacity to be attained. The ability to reason, relate, learn and understand is what dictates intelligence. To apply this idea of intelligence to the world around us, we would be reforming the way we think about the world around us. Thinking of the world as something to be reasoned, related, learned and understood would be to give the world an agency and complexity not yet fully realized by man before. This gift of agency by man is a revelation of understanding that is key to a new kind intelligence that is all too necessary for our environment, an ecological intelligence.

Mad at ILLC: Reading Nussbaum's Good Kings Bad Kings through Margaret Price

Margaret Price’s Mad at School looks into the ways academic spaces fail to include or support “neuroatypicality.” She looks not only into the traditionally assumed aspects of academia – writing papers, doing assignments, going to class – but also at spaces integral to success in academia but outside of that: “kairotic spaces.” She defines “kairotic space” as “less formal, often unnoticed, areas of academe where knowledge is produced and power is exchanged” (60) and describes it as characterized by things like a “real-time unfolding of events” and “impromptu communication that is required or encouraged” (61).

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