Contingency, Relocation, and Control: Dwelling and Acting in a Porous World

The world is porous. Our bodies: skin, breath, mouth, senses, inguinal—in a perpetual inflow and outflow that ceases only in death. This permeability and exchange are essential to life. A body, to persist as a bounded entity, must do so in such reciprocal relations to its surroundings. The nation: people, goods, species, dust, water, air, disease—perpetually move across borders. Concepts blur into one another: race, gender, species, emotion, color. Yet we can pick out archetypes and exemplars. Difference is meaningful at the extremes. Bodies cannot live without some checks and controls on what enters and exits. A radiated body whose cells disintegrate in indistinguishable liquidity is doomed. Taste, smell, consent, immune system, gag reflex, equip us with mechanisms of distinction to protect ourselves by controlling our ingestion and inhalation of distasteful or toxic substances, or counteract those already absorbed.
 
Boundaries and borders are often helpful or essential, until they aren’t. Racism, transgender exclusion, and other discriminatory isms can so result from border construction and unwarranted imposition. Nationalism can be a blessing or a horror depending on its historical context and degree of imposition. Anticolonial independence movements and genocidal Naziism each partake in forms of nationalism. Just as we have reached an apex of potential global interconnectedness through rapid transportation, information flows, and shared threats and collaborative opportunities arising from climate change, biodiversity loss, global epidemics, artificial intelligence, nuclear proliferation, and the continued relevance of a shared realization of our presence on a “pale blue dot” in the empty depths of space, xenophobic nationalism is ascendent globally. Demagogues twist the truth, scapegoat the vulnerable, and exploit information for their own corrupt ends.
 
Climate change is exacerbating conflict and migration in altering weather patterns, shifting the timing and distribution of rain, amplifying drought and storms, and drowning coasts. Greenhouse gases disproportionately emitted from one region alter the global climate, imposing costs on others far less historically culpable. These challenges in turn spur migration, leading to increased nationalism and demagoguery.
 
Conservation biology reveals the limitations of severe boundaries around protected areas. Parks, wildlife refuges, and wilderness are typically far too small to maintain species populations, particularly of large and migratory animals. Corridors and interconnected ecosystems, across public and private lands, are thus critical. Likewise, hardened national borders hewn by walls or oblivious to the life cycle and migration patterns of birds and insects may be a death sentence to some species. Climate change exacerbates these constraints as wild creatures move in response to warming and changing weather, while others become stranded or are simply unable to migrate fast enough.
 
On the other hand, parks and wilderness are, in most cases, a boon resulting in far greater conservation outcomes than in their absence. These areas’ stricter rules regarding development, transportation, hunting, and extraction are critical. Likewise, national and protected area boundaries help to impede the movement of invasive species, which can have profound and destructive consequences for ecosystems and economies. Yet, novel ecosystems proliferate.
 
Invasive species and climate change each invite or require assisted migration or heavy-handed mitigation efforts like herbicide use, trapping, and extermination. Simultaneously, ecology presents a radical challenge to the practical limits of our control, while an ethic of restraint, respecting evolutionary and nonhuman autonomy, presents a moral challenge to such interventions.
 
A common theme shared by many of the world’s wisdom traditions is the virtue of accepting necessity, recognizing the limits of one’s power and control. These traditions, ranging from Stoicism, Taoism, or Abrahamic faiths, appeal to some independent order, whether God, Tao, or Nature, that exceeds our own wills. Yet there is a modern strain of thought that offers the promise of overcoming or transcending nature through remaking or controlling it, from Enlightenment through today, from Bacon to Kurzweil, Musk, and ecomodernism.
 
This belief, this temptation, remains powerful, despite the increasing recognition, particularly since the post-war period, of the deep and inseparable dependence—functionally and ontologically—of humans and nonhuman nature, often rendered in the strong claim that “humans are a part of nature”. This acknowledgement includes, for instance, the recognition that political history is inseparable from natural history.
 
The issue shared by conservation, nationalism and immigration, is control, specifically of borders and of constituents contained within them. In an era of tremendous and accelerating change, borders and control demand deep reflection. What are they? Why are they? How are they related? When does a natural or constructed border become harmfully sclerotic?
 
 Wildness is one way of theorizing contingency and that which exceeds human control (whether by choice or necessity). Wildness includes among other things an element of autonomy. A border is an instrument of control, of flows of exits and entries. In the context of the nation state and protected areas, each presumes the primacy of the sovereignty of the state, as opposed to that of the human person or wild animal.