Ecosemiotics

The Joy of Fish

In a recent debate Slavoj Žižek said “We are telling ourselves stories about ourselves in order to acquire a meaningful experience of our lives. ...[but] the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, in order to account for what we are doing is, and this is what I call ideology, fundamentally a lie.” The Anthropocene is a time of ideological disruption just as much as ecological disruption. While ecological changes can be brought about through changes in ideology, ideological changes may or may not result from ecological shifts. But what will affect both of them is changes to the semiosphere, the growth of information that is available to us that we use to make sense of our world. Will these changes lead to an entrenchment of established dualisms or a reunification of nature and culture? I think it will be both at first (as we are seeing), but the latter must prevail in the final analysis or we will find ourselves in a biologically impoverished world with fewer resources. James Gleick noted "We know full well that meaning is what we really care about". Most people don’t understand what all this information means to them. This is why we need to see things from a semiotic perspective, and encourage others to do the same. The path to reunification of nature and culture may be through semiotics or a derivative field.

The climate strike and extinction rebellion are signs of the times. Signs that we are learning about our unity, that things must change, that the result of that change should be sustainability, and how that change will be accomplished. Yes, we are beginning to put that knowledge into action with some early success stories. But things are still moving too slowly to avert catastrophe. We can move much more quickly by using the right leverage points. Those points exist in all domains and at all scales from individual to global. Mapping these leverage points onto a semiotic web would allow us move faster. This semiotic web combines physio/bio/socio-semiotic aspects into a single semiosphere of relationships, resulting in consilience between the sciences and humanities, between nature and culture. Then it would be possible to 1) see how any single 'thing' relates it to any single 'goal', specifically environmental stewardship, 2) to understand instantly how 'this' means 'that' to 'whom', to encourage a more intelligent form of engagement, and 3) to see how those relationships change in the course of events. This is how semiosis operates; it is the process of deriving meaning. We need a clearer and more accurate sense of meaning to move quickly, efficiently, and effectively if we are to avert disaster. I think climate action plans and plans to avert ecological collapse need to use tools like this that draw out relational significance. Ancient wisdom like the Sanskrit phrase "Tat Tvam Asi" or "Thou art that" (Chandogya Upanishad, 900 to 600 BCE) illustrate the need for relating one thing to another. It's all about the relationships.

For example, I'd like to analyze how well the Anchorage climate action plan identifies not only the points of intervention, but also the combined synergistic effects among and between interventions, how some interventions can start a cascade effect of mitigating actions in other areas for maximal impact (leverage/tipping points), that is to say, how these ripple across society with other positive effects. In short, I want to map all these interventions onto a semiotic web and make the many relationships between them and us explicit. “Communities are talking about the important connections between transportation, affordable housing, jobs, social equity, and climate.” according to one climate action report card. Connections like these are the sort of things that can allow us to leverage enormous change, so we need to integrate all these levers into a complete picture where we understand not only the important part each plays individually, but how they work together to collectively amplify their impact, and how one thing implies and invariably leads to the next. There are potentially countless examples of how this can work. For example, better energy monitoring can inform where mitigation efforts are most profitably applied, and legal tools and community resources should be directed at such low hanging fruit. This is a connection between monitoring, infrastructure, policy, and resources. These connections extend and deepen, but they are not compulsory, they are informative and evolving. In the context of Peircean semiotics, they are 'representamen', the 'object' is good health, and the 'interpretant' is the connection we make between the two. These relationships continue through 'infinite semiosis', and understanding that helps us to make informed decisions for greatest effectiveness. It is the process of incorporating significance into a climate action plan and making that significance explicit for all members, rather than just having a laundry list of items that may only be loosely integrated together, appear incongruous, or have little relevance to members.

Here's a sliding puzzle of the famous "blue marble" photograph [see below]. Can you solve it? This requires several things: knowledge of what the solved puzzle should look like, information concerning your progress in solving the puzzle, and motivation (whether intrinsic or extrinsic) to solve the puzzle. If one of these is weak or altogether absent, the puzzle might not get solved. A climate action plan must either provide or make reference to each of these aspects. Climate policy is a semiotic web, but how can you illustrate that? You could use a network diagram or flowchart to delineate relationships and show how everything is connected to everything else (for example, the feedback that exists between monitoring, infrastructure, policy, and resources). But importantly, it must incorporate a scale invariant aspect, from individual to global (microcosm to macrocosm) that ties the meaning and significance which is most salient at the individual level to the global level (where things quickly become confusing for most of us). The 'silver cord' that runs through every scale cannot be severed, because it is what promotes coordinated, intelligent action among geographically dispersed individuals. It integrates their combined knowledge and resources for multiplicative gains in efficiency. But crucially, what makes a semiotic web different from most heuristic flow charts is this emphasis on meaning, and not just mechanism. In fact, this is ‘significance at scale’.

Here's an elevator pitch: Employment websites have been a booming market ever since the 'Craigslist Jobs' category, and even more today, with Indeed.com being a first stop for people job hunting. But do these companies offer prospective job hunters the details they are interested in most? I don't think they do. What people really want is a job that is meaningful to them. Yes, they need a living wage to pay their bills and live a comfortable life, but what really sets a job apart within a crowded job market is what it offers in terms of meaning/value/significance. There aren't any employment websites highlighting this 'semiotic' aspect of work. We can create one. Either we can build it from the ground up, or we can serve as an aggregator website that takes the data from existing employment websites and analyzes it according to our proprietary semiotic analysis tools, allowing us the ability to offer job hunters the information they really want.

The seed idea: One interesting question is whether freelance job sites like FlexJobs, Upwork, and Fiverr can be redesigned to display an 'ecosemiotic organizational format' that primarily features the meaning/value/significance/relationships among jobs as relevant to social problems/goals, and only takes into consideration the financial benefits package secondarily (or better still, suggests how it might be better tied to the actual value thereby determined). If this can be done, it could be a useful framework for projects with a clear goal, like the Green New Deal, where values like ecological and social health take center stage. If it doesn't already exist, a job website like this that advertises position availability using semiotic analysis would be an interesting twist on the employment matching services niche market.

Q: "Honestly I’m not sure there would be an easy way to answer that question. What one individual finds meaningful is often very different from that of another. This is the crux of all management- how do you figure out what an individual finds meaningful?"
A: "The first step in finding out what an individual finds meaningful is simply to ask them! If people want a job that is meaningful to them in the sense that it is relevant to the realization of some goal or value they hold, first we have to do the groundwork of learning more about people and what their values and goals are. Then, with this information, we can uncover the network of relationships that can help them realize their goals/values and engage in work that is meaningful to them. To be honest, current employment websites offer a few steps in that direction, but I think it is not enough. The assumption here is that meaning/value/significance in work often has a clear relationship to one's particular goals. This characterizes all work as goal-oriented, or 'teleological'. ...Here's a brief tangent about the importance of this perspective in education:

"One of my former teachers, Craig Gerlach, supported restructuring the university from an academic departmental organization, focused on individual subjects, to a more interdisciplinary approach to better address large complex research and real-world questions that extend beyond any single discipline. Outside academe, corporations and other large structures don't worry about disciplinary divisions and build nimble structures to successfully address complex problems. The same need to address real-world issues has promoted the creation of interdisciplinary institutes. If we ask the youth in our communities what kind of future they want, and help them reach their goals, I think we have to take this sort of approach as well. As Nicholas Maxwell put it: "The proper task of philosophy [and education in general] is to keep alive critical thinking about our most fundamental problem of all: how can our human world, the world as it appears to us, the world we live in and see, touch, hear and smell, the world of living things, people, consciousness, meaning and value – how can all of this exist and best flourish embedded as it is in the physical Universe? This fundamental problem straddles all the problems of both thought and life."

"The idea is basically to organize an employment website in the same way: identify a problem area and the tasks relevant to addressing it so that when a person searches for a job they can see how it relates to a particular goal. During job interviews candidates are regularly asked "Why do you want this job?" Well, they should have a very good understanding of how to answer that question. There are other possible benefits to restructuring how we view the labor market. Maybe we could identify unmet needs and possible organizational improvements, spot inefficiencies, anticipate disruption before it occurs, facilitate adaptive changes, or simply offer a descriptive analysis of existing conditions with possible recommendations."

Q: "I agree, but that takes time, and honestly most places think of time as money so they want to do things the easy way. The more useful way is just more time consuming in the short term, so most places will gloss over it."
A: "The motivational speaker Stephen Covey famously said "begin with the end in mind" and that's what I think we need to do, beginning first by making a choice about what sort of goal we find most meaningful, then learning about how and in what ways the work we do addresses that. A simple way to circumvent the problem of asking each person individually what they find meaningful, is to simply anticipate a broad range of the most common responses, and then expand from there. A lot of websites incorporate some form of a site map or network that begins with a general category and then further subdivides it according to narrower criteria. This can generate a visual web of relationships. That is actually pretty uncomplicated. The harder job, I think, is specifying the actual character of the relationships between and among specific jobs and goals - how and in what way they relate to one another. But that's where I think the real value lies. When we see how it all works together we get a 'systems level' understanding, along with the many benefits that brings."

Anchorage municipality, Anchorage Climate Action Plan (2019)
Žižek, Slavoj and Jordan Peterson, Debate (2019)
Naughton, John, James Gleick: 'Information poses as many challenges as opportunities' (2011)
See also: Cyber-Physical-Social Systems (2018) (an application of semiotics)

The book "Bullshit Jobs: A Theory" by anthropologist David Graeber argues that the existence of meaningless jobs is psychologically destructive and causes societal harm. Rutger Bregman, who promotes a universal basic income and a shorter workweek, says we’ve got a huge amount of bullshit jobs right now. He pointed to a paper by two Dutch economists on socially useless jobs: "In 37 countries, 27,000 employees were asked the question: Does your job contribute anything to the common good? Eight percent said no and 17 percent were in doubt. So if you add that up, around a quarter of the workforce is not sure whether they contribute anything." This is part of a contemporary 'crisis of meaning', a starvation amidst plenty.
Matthews, Dylan, Meet the folk hero of Davos (2019)
Dur, Robert and Max van Lent, Socially Useless Jobs (2018)
Stillman, Tyler et al. Alone and Without Purpose: Life Loses Meaning Following Social Exclusion (2009)

In 1981, televangelist Pat Robertson said: "And I tell you, in our world today; people are like a bunch of sheep. They’re saying, ‘What must we do? You know, what do we do with our money? What do we do with our children? What do we do with our education? What do we vote for?’ And all these—What do we do? And somehow or other God’s got to give some people with knowledge of the times to tell Israel what they ought to do. And I think we have a golden opportunity to do that, and that’s one of the things we’re trying to do on The 700 Club..." From a public health standpoint, television is a prime carrier of messages that can undermined mental health. (The reason the Icelandic Psychological Defense Act bans American televangelists.) So the question is: love one another, or love thy self? Jesus famously said "Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me." So it's useful to contrast Pat Robertson with Chester Pierce, who had a vision of an integrated society based on positive regard for one’s fellow human beings.
Heaton, Terry, Jesus, big money and the GOP (2017)
Heaton, Terry, The Worship Of Personal Responsibility (2017)
Kolhatkar, Sonali, The Gospel of Self: How Jesus Joined the GOP (2017)
Harrington, Anne, The Forgotten Tale of How Black Psychiatrists Helped Make ‘Sesame Street’ (2019)

What's needed is "a change to the definition of what a good quality of life entails—decoupling the idea of a good and meaningful life from ever-increasing material consumption," according to a new biodiversity report. "We need to address the root causes... we need to change our narratives," said Eduardo Brondizio, one of the panel's co-chairs. It's not coincidental that this report, while focusing on the biological and physical state of the planet, invariably returns to the social science concerns of meanings and narratives. And the reason for that should be obvious - they are all connected. We will never change our relationship to the natural world without understanding the inherent significance embedded within the global semiosphere. Today we only understand a small fraction of that, but what we do know we have begun to piece together well enough to usefully inform our policy decisions. That knowledge needs to spread.

Figure 2

Looking at Fig. 2 from the IPBES report (5/6/19), it could be improved by adding another column to the "drivers" on the far left side, to the left of "values and behaviors". These would be still more "indirect" drivers - the fundamental semiotic processes that give rise to our values and imbue our behaviors with the significance we attribute them with. This is where our meanings and narratives are born.These are the "root causes", and they are eminently subject to changing conditions. We can shape them.

The why of economic growth, production and consumption, needs to be addressed, and there are certainly a lot of quick fixes we can make, with substantial impacts. As for the deeper root causes, money is definitely a motivator, likely because it is the tool for still more basic economic/political/human drives for power (and the prestige that comes with it). But the notion we have of power (popularly conceived) is fundamentally inaccurate, and that is a big problem. Real power must recognize that it relies upon the web of relationships that are capable of sustaining it, and within which we exist - the fortunes of others are the true barometer by which we must measure our own success. The sort of power that is destroying Earth does not know this, it is really just the pursuit of "temporary power" that will be gone, likely long before we are. So what compels us to produce ever more things, consume ever more things? A false understanding of power with a narrow, restrictive focus on particular agents (usually one or a handful of people/investors/politicians), over a very brief timeframe (quarterly reports/election cycle/etc.), with no real appreciation of the importance of relationships. This is the reason environmental consciousness has been fighting the “nominalist turn of mind”, per Wendy Wheeler (Expecting the Earth, p50). Unfortunately our laws have fully incorporated this distorted view of power, as they themselves were a product of nominalism, and they exert influence over other policies and the larger social milieu. We need to ‘reinstate’ the correct definition. Once our needs are met it is most appropriate to reinvest surplus value into the semiotic web of relationships (semiosphere) in which we are embedded (society/biosphere), for example the “basic needs guarantee” Peter Corning advocates. This is not a purely altruistic safety net for others, in reality it is just as much our own safety net. Artificially circumscribing the spread of wealth within a narrow circle of agents is like tying a ligature around your limb; only a fool would harm their own body.

IPBES set up a causal chain (Fig. 2). The assumption is that our values and behaviors influence sociocultural and economic systems, which in turn lead to impacts on terrestrial/freshwater/marine ecosystems. In this chain, because the sociocultural and economic drivers are "closer" to the ecosystems, they appear to be bigger, while drivers that are causally more "distant" will always appear smaller. But I'd add that there's also a lot of feedback going on here too (see figure 9 from the same report). So it gets hard to say if anything is really a bigger/smaller driver. But the common denominator that all drivers share, whether values, behaviors, or sociocultural and economic systems, is that these are all semiotic processes.

Currently, there is no real money to be made by cleaning the environment, and businesses still seek to externalize costs whenever and wherever possible. The roots of contemporary capitalist economies within nominalism, which has grown and nurtured it to become what it is today, are striking. Given an unregulated free market in the hands of nacissistic robber barons (who themselves retain the tribal psychology of their stone age ancestors) is it any wonder things would go awry? Especially given the prevalence of new technologies to extend their exploitive ambitions further than even their own wildest dreams could have imagined? No! And so, they give in to the sweet sugar rush, the instant gratification version of power where they profit, but the future be damned. Wouldn't we all love to, at least if our mental maturation were held at the level of a three year old? But the tempering influences of cultural evolution and other mitigating factors ensure that the majority of us understand the responsibilities of being a good citizen on planet Earth.

And that is exactly what we need - to mitigate the excesses of an economic system gone awry. To understand that the sort of power a child would seek, the instant gratification, comes with a sugar crash. Every time, without fail. Our biological evolution set up the conditions where some members of society, left unchecked and entrusted with too much, could ruin the entire planet for the rest of us. It's now up to cultural evolutionary processes to find the way to prevent that from happening. 
Shankman, Sabrina, Georgina Gustin, and John Cushman, Humanity Faces a Biodiversity Crisis. Climate Change Makes It Worse. (05/06/2019)

“Indeed, it is the entire argument of this book that liberalism’s overemphasis upon individualism, and upon a certain idea of human reason and knowledge, is mistaken. Not only is our understanding of human behavior and reasoning incomplete when we fail to take account of the role of the body, emotion and tacit knowledge, but it is also incomplete, as suggested above, when we view people primarily simply as individuals. It is the whole creature (mind-body-environment) and the whole system (minds-bodies-cultural-social-and-natural-environments) which must be taken into account by anyone interested in human flourishing and creative living." That's Wendy Wheeler, in her book "The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics, and the Evolution of Culture" (p33). This amazing writer and thinker sheds a good deal of light upon our contemporary global problems. For example, in a recent interview Bill McKibben brought up the "ideological conviction" that has continually blocked appropriate action to mitigate the pollution contributing to climate change and other environmental problems. This is exactly the point:

Sean Illing: "You just said the engineers are doing their jobs and developing the sorts of green technologies we need to respond to this problem, so what’s preventing us from dramatically ramping them up?"
Bill McKibben: "The short answer is the fossil fuel industry. This is what’s keeping us from making any serious effort to do anything about this. This has always been the biggest roadblock, and behind it is an ideological conviction, shared by the top tier of our power structure for the last several decades, that laissez-faire capitalism is the answer to all our problems and that the market will always self-correct every imbalance they create."
Illing, Sean, Bill McKibben has been sounding the climate alarm for decades. Here’s his best advice. (2019)

Significance at scale (Image: Greg Dunn)

David Loy: "Most if not all of these disorders are connected to a questionable mechanistic worldview that freely exploits the natural world because it attributes no inherent value to nature, or to us for that matter, since humans too are nothing more than complex machines, according to the predominant materialistic understanding." That's the legacy of nominalistic Cartesian dualism, the separation of nature and culture. Carl Jung wrote: "My interests drew me in different directions. On the one hand I was powerfully attracted by science, with its truths based on facts; on the other hand I was fascinated by everything to do with comparative religion. [...] In science I missed the factor of meaning; and in religion, that of empiricism." (Memories, Dreams, Reflections 1963) In the eliminative materialistic world we live in today, where our secular world treats nature as a machine and culture as an illusion. Now, knowing this, it's not a spiritual crisis we are experiencing per se, it is an ontological crisis, a crisis stemming from a dualistic view of the world that severs us from the matter of nature, that ignores the importance of the relationship between nature and culture. ...Instead of an ecodharma, we need ecosemiotics, because semiotics can heal this rift.

Loy's conception of ecodharma is interesting though, because he recognizes the contours of what reuniting nature and culture would look like, "combining 'inner and outer', since a sense of a separate self is the basic problem, engagement with the world is part of the solution". That's a start, however ecosemiotics goes much further. I fully agree with his conclusion, paraphrasing, "If spirituality cannot or does not want to do this, then spirituality is not what the world needs right now." Indeed, I don't think spirituality, as it exists today is capable of this. The better forms inevitably become the precursors of philosophy, but there is no guarantee there either, as nominalist philosophies are just as problematic. There's a great line from Charles Morris in "Signs, language, and behavior" (1946): “An education which gave due place to semiotics would destroy at its foundations the cleavage and opposition of science and the humanities". That's what the world needs right now, and I think semiotics is far better equiped to carry it out.

Q: Doesn't environmental economics place a value on nature by measuring the economic worth of ecosystem services?
A: Beginning with definitions, 'economic value' is the measure of the benefit provided by a good or service to an economic agent. So, is this conception of value suffient to solve environmental problems? If the only agents capable of valuing goods and services are humans, then no, environmental economics will not be enough. There are many nonhuman 'agents' that ascribe value to goods and services, as Almo Farina describes in his paper "A Biosemiotic Perspective of the Resource Criterion: Toward a General Theory of Resources". (2012) As the paper title points out, semiotic relationships hold the key to understanding value. Now, if environmental economics accounted for the well-being of other species (as they understand it from within their particular umwelten), then Farina's biosemiotic theory of resources and environmental economics would be functionally synonymous. But critically, such an expanded environmental economics would need to make reference to exactly how these nonhuman agents ascribe value, otherwise incorporating that value into economic calculations would be a futile effort. And the notion of value may need revision, replace with 'significance' perhaps? What we end up with looks a lot less like economics and a lot more like semiotics. In the end, I think semiotics is a firmer foundation for social systems anyway, as it can account for and address a host of other contemporary problems (misinformation, for example) that economics alone is ill suited for. ...But there you have it. Nature has value/meaning/significance apart from what humans give it.
Loy, David, Can Buddhism Meet the Climate Crisis? (2019)

Lacan conceives sublimation as one of the defining characteristics of the human condition. To Jung it was an "alchymical transformation for which fire and prima materia are needed... a great mystery." For Freud, it is what makes higher psychical activities possible, whether scientific, or artistic. I agree. In semiotic terms it is a transposition of signs, a semiotic process of substitution and reinterpretation.

Quoting David Roberts, when we see "something that took centuries to develop, something that can never entirely be recreated, disappear in the comparative blink of an eye", like the Notre Dame Cathedral, which erupted into flames 16 April 2019, the common reaction is a sense of tragic loss. But take note: "that, in slow motion, is going to be the dominant feeling of the 21st century. Only instead of buildings: glaciers, forests, species." We need to learn to, as it were, sublimate those emotions of loss upon seeing the cathedral in flames and afix them to objects of still greater value, the species and ecosystems we evolved in connection with on Earth, with whom our relationship is much stronger. On Saturday, the last known female Yangtze giant softshell turtle died in China. There are three left now, one is a male, and the sex of the other two is unknown. Is this not a cathedral of more grand proportions than any created by the human hand? What will we do if we learn that through our negligence this cathedral, and many others like it, is lost as well?

Within an ecological web, when one node on the web is affected so are the others, but not indiscriminately so. Some nodes are more intimately bound to the fortunes of others. What is a minor inconvenience to one may be a welcome opportunity to another, or alternatively, a devastating blow. It’s not enough to know the web exists, one must understand the relationships it describes, that even extend to abiotic processes. A semiotic web also connects everything, but moreso, and the relationships are still more intricate. It sheds light not only on physical processes, but those things we imbue with meaning as well.

The degree to which we are bound to portions of the semiotic web helps explain emotional reactions to threatened or actual loss. Conversely, where there’s a lack of meaningful engagement in semiotic processes we can expect feelings of detachment and ambivalence. This is particularly a problem for many political processes (where it can lead to neglect and exploitation), but more generally this can shed light on our crisis of meaning in the Anthropocene. The importance of identifying and engaging in meaningful relationships is well known for improved health, but extending that truism and placing it on deeper foundations is the purview of semiotics.

Q: "I'm curious as to why you believe that meaning is important. I find that the search for meaning leads people into all sorts of futile labyrinths. I call those people significance junkies. Because there's really no meaning except what we make for ourselves. And people who are chasing ultimate meaning are bound to be disappointed. How do you see the relationship of semiotics to chasing the elusive (because it's non-existent) goal of ultimate human meaning?"

A: "It is helpful to differentiate between possible uses of the word 'meaning'. One usage is often encountered in the phrase "What is the meaning of life?" and its variants. Søren Kierkegaard proposed that each individual — not society or religion — is solely responsible for giving meaning to life. Jean-Paul Sartre also argued that we create our own values and determine a meaning for our life. There is no meaning in the world beyond what meaning we give it, we make decisions based on 'subjective meaning'. This is the existential definition.

"Semiotics associates meaning with 'explanatory power', our ability to relate one thing to another. Take for example the sort of meaning we talk about when we say, "where there is smoke there is fire". Here the perception of smoke signifies something to a person: there is a fire at approximately the same location. The squiggles on a screen we call letters we interpret to mean a word, which in turn represent an idea. And so on. All these significations contain meaning for us. In this sense of 'meaning' we are simply describing the processes by which we navigate our daily lives.

"I think you already recognize this when you say "there is no meaning except what we make for ourselves". That is exactly why semiotics studies the meaning that we make, not 'ultimate meaning' per se, except insofar as the processes of meaning-making are in some sense reflective of other physical principles. So to answer your question about the relationship of semiotics to chasing the elusive goal of ultimate human meaning, semiotics is as much a scientific discipline as any other, so what it is really after isn't meaning, but explanatory power. In this regard I'd suggest it is chasing the same elusive goal as physics, a "theory of everything" as John Barrow puts it in his book on that subject. It seeks to answer the question of why and how we make meaning in the first place, less so what that meaning we make consists in, except insofar as it sheds light upon other issues. The implications of the meanings we do make for ourselves, as I don't need to explain to you, are extremely consequential, which is why the study of semiotics (and its derivative fields) is profoundly important. Some people say that because of an existential/nihilistic point of view, there is no sense in addressing climate change. That's defeatist. Ignoring or recognizing the relative and relational aspects of life is a choice we can make."

Q: "For a correct worldview?"

A: "Yes, in the broadest sense, we need to know more about how factually accurate semiotic relationships are formed and maintained, like the relationship between humans and the Earth, which is in rather poor shape right now. It's an existential issue. We need to "wake up" to a universe of sign activity, as described by Hans Bakker, where semiotic objects "are part of an interpretive process involving signs which relate to signs, ad infinitum."

"A dystopia is a misdiagnosis or mistreatment, as often as it is the result of malign forces at work. We need a deeper understanding of the fundamental nature of truth, error, and how we can be led to either. We need to see life as belonging to a shared universe of sign activity in which cells, organisms and species all over the planet interact in ways that we still hardly understand, and in which we can anticipate events, even those in future centuries. For improved health and relationships, we need to meaningful engage in these semiotic processes. Arguably we already have much of this. But the filling in of details and application still remains."

Eduardo Kohn, author of "How Trees Think" describes how our ways of knowing, including language, are only the entry point, the beginning, and we must go a step farther. According to Kohn, what we share with nonhuman living creatures is not just our physical bodies, but also the fact that we all live with and through signs. Because we are not the only ones who think, human language is just one kind of sign system. This means that understanding the relationship between human forms of representation and these other forms used by nonhuman living creatures is key. Kohn’s work with the Runa in Ecuador taught him that forests and the many beings that live in them –animals, plants, and perhaps even spirits– also think. “Finding ways to allow the thoughts of the forest to think themselves through us changes our understanding and can open our thinking to that which lies beyond the human context.” He believes it can “provide ethical guidance in these times of human-driven planetary ecological crisis, a crisis that can be characterized as an affliction of this larger ecology of mind.” But it’s not just the forest, it’s the tundra, the desert, the oceans, the planet.

Meghalaya, India (Photo: Amos Chapple)

Eduardo Kohn: “The question for me politically is, how are we going to create an ethical practice in the Anthropocene, this time of ours in which futures, of human and nonhuman kinds, are increasingly entangled, and interdependent in their mutual uncertainty? This is where I’m headed. And in the book I begin to think about this political problem. But how does that articulate with what’s happening on the ground in terms of environmental politics? Who might be doing something like this? I don’t know. It’s very abstract right now, but that’s where the political part of this would go.”
Alex Golub: “What are your future projects?”
Eduardo Kohn: “Well, thinking about an ethical practice in the Anthropocene through the logic of thinking forests is one. I plan to work with Amazonians but also with environmentalists, lawyers and biologists in Ecuador, and I don’t know where that will go. We all share this problem of how to live in the Anthropocene, how to reorient our lives with respect to this. But I don’t know what that means on the ground.”

For people who aren’t super familiar with Peirce, he has a “continuist” framework, so he thinks that everything in the universe is related to everything else. He’s worked out all sorts of ways to move across boundaries. (See also Kohn’s presentation.) In addressing the ecological crisis, and as climate action planning becomes an implicit part of local governance, I really think incorporating (or at the very minimum making reference to) this perspective that Kohn is describing is important. I hope that it somehow finds expression here in Fairbanks too as we embark on that process. While I believe that Kohn is on very solid ground, both in approach and theory, finding a precedent in how to apply these ideas to something like a CAP is challenging. I have half a mind to reach out to him and simply ask. Many have engaged in parallel lines of research, though Kohn's synthesis and original thought adds to the discussion in ways I have not yet seen others do.
Source: Golub, Alex, Eduardo Kohn on How Forests Think (2014)

Bruno Latour (French philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist) wrote an interesting review of How Forests Think: "I read How Forests Think as part of a vast movement to equip anthropologists, and more importantly, ethnographers, with the intellectual tools necessary to handle a new historical situation: the others are no longer outside; nonhumans have to be brought back in the description in a more active capacity... This is to me the most interesting aspect of the book: whereas “beyond human” could imply that you begin with the subject and immerse it into the world of things (this is after all what naturalist descriptions most often do), the book (and I take it also as a work of art) manages to describe situations where neither the human, nor its subjectivity, nor its linguistic capacities are central. ...What a relief! An anthropology that learns how to escape anthropocentrism without, for that, being in any way reductionist, antihumanist, or deterministic, that’s quite a wonder. Such is the immensely refreshing move for which we should be grateful to the Runa’s ways of life transformed, through Kohn’s aesthetics, into an alternative philosophical anthropology.

"In my experience, the half-life of descriptive theory is about five years! I am afraid that’s what will happen to this influx of semiosis into ethnography. ...the test is still to come: how could an ethnographer, or, for that matter, a Runa scholar, equipped with such a philosophical anthropology find ways to make his or her ontological claims understood in negotiating what a forest is made of, when faced with forestry engineers, loggers, tourists, NGOs, or state administrators? That’s where the so-called ontological turn finds its moment of truth. Not on the epistemological scene but being thrown in the world, designating who is friend and who is enemy. That’s where Kohn is leading us, and that’s where I yearn to join him." ...When Nainoa Thompson says “We’re going to put the language of the Earth on the agenda" and Angakkorsuaq repeatedly draws the connection between the spiritual and the physical, you know they have always understood what semioticians talk about. I'm glad that people like Kohn are bringing this consilience to light.
Simon, Clea Putting ‘the language of the Earth on the agenda’ (2019)
Kohn, Eduardo Ecopolitics (2016)
Latour, Bruno, On selves, forms, and forces (2014)

In his talk "Opening the Doors of Creativity" (1990) Terence McKenna said "Nature is not mute; it is man who is deaf". This is a response to Sartre's "Nature is mute" statement. In "The Evolutionary Mind", McKenna wrote "The legacy of existentialism and the philosophies constellated around it is the belief that there is no attractor, no appetition for completion". McKenna was an ethnobotanist and advocate for the responsible use of naturally occurring psychedelic plants, something that has recently gained greater attention through Michael Pollan's recent writing and expanded clinical tests of psychedelics for therapeutic use. It is also worth noting that Eduardo Kohn gave a speech titled “Psychedelic science, biosemiosis, and the afflictions of an ecology of mind: toward a planetary sylvan ethics” at the 2018 Biosemiotics Gathering. That talk focused on the traditional use of the psychedelic ayahuasca to manifest not only the mind of the person who ingests it but also the greater “ecology of mind” of the forest.
Lin, Tao, Terence McKenna's Memes (2014)

Terence McKenna was fond of saying that "the world is made of words" (recall Peirce's "all this universe is perfused with signs"). He once said that everything in nature has stories to tell; not just scientific information to impart, but something akin to plot-line narration, if one is equipped to "read" it. ...Now if you were to try to describe semiotics to another person for the first time, saying that it is the study of how nature constructs meaningful relationships among things which then combine to form stories that we can read might be a good way to begin.
Vigorito, Tony, The Syntax of Sorcery: An Interview with Tom Robbins (2012)

"The universe produces ever-more novel forms of connectedness, ever-more exotic juxtapositions of disparate elements where mind and nature interpenetrate. Nature is not mute; it is man who is deaf. We must open our ears, open our eyes, and reconnect with the living world. One of the most disempowering things is to brush out our footprints into the past and deny our irrational roots. But if society is to somehow take hold of itself at this penultimate moment, as we literally waver on the brink of planetary extinction, then we have to follow the thread back through time. If the artists cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found. Like it or not, we are the custodians of the destiny of this planet. Our decisions affect every life form on the planet and we are in the absurd position of being able to do anything. What we are doing is fouling our own nest and pushing ourselves toward planetary toxification and extinction. And yet, we are still communicating with each other with the extremely precise medium of small-mouth noises mediated by ignorance and hate. This doesn’t seem like the way to do business. Language is the battleground in this post-history pre-apocalypse phase of things, but what we cannot say, we cannot communicate. Any culture that prosecutes its goals through a limiting of language [semiosis] is a plot against the expansion of consciousness. A coherent vision has yet to announce itself. We do not have centuries of gently unfolding time ahead of us in which to gently tease apart the threads of the human endeavor and create a bright new world. That’s not our circumstance. There is a fire in the madhouse, and we are going to have to catalyze our ability to get a hold on the situation."
McKenna, Terence, Opening the Doors of Creativity (highly condensed and edited)

Terrence Deacon, "Incomplete Nature" (2011)

At it's core semiotics is about 'probabilistic thinking' and how we, as motivated beings, can accurately discern the possible scenarios for flourishing and avoid degenerative dynamics. It is the process of forming relationships, making interpretations, and guessing about possible futures laden with existential significance to beings such as ourselves. So what do we do with this 'semiotic awareness'? My guess is that we will develop 'enabling constraints' to help us reach those few possible future scenarios in which we can flourish for centuries to come. On a geological timescale, only very recently have we humans managed to liberate ourselves from natural constraints that, heretofore, have prevented us from destroying the environment in which we evolved. And in that process, without such externally limiting factors in place, we haven't gained the self-control needed to preserve our home. Hence the path to address the ecological crisis caused by unconstrained pollution seems clear.

"If the universe were exclusively deterministic, there would be no possibilities, because every event would be determined by prior events. In a probabilistic universe, the question becomes how everything possible doesn’t occur. Everything possible doesn’t occur because of constraints, defined as reductions of possible paths making some paths more probable than others. Constraints channel wide possibility into narrower probability. We know this from personal experience. To focus our efforts, we reduce distractions. To do anything deliberately, we de-liberate ourselves, reducing our freedom to do alternative things."
Sherman, Jeremy. "Neither Ghost nor Machine" (2017)

*This is really a continuation from my earlier post, The Semiosphere, and will be expanded further. The current discussion is on the subject of "semiosis and engagement or detachment".