The Forest After the Fire - On Responsibility in a World That Keeps Becoming
The Morning After the Fire
The forest is silent after the fire.
Trunks stand black and limbless. The soil is grey with ash and warm in places.
Sound carries strangely, because the things that used to absorb it are gone.
Anyone who has walked into such a place knows that the first feeling is not
sorrow. It is a kind of arithmetic. The mind begins, almost immediately, to
look for someone.
Who lit it. Whose line sparked in the wind. Which agency spent a century
putting out every small fire until the hillside held a hundred years of fuel.
Which permit was signed, which warning was filed and shelved, which budget was
cut. These questions are not petty. They are the machinery of a civilisation
that has learned, painfully and over a long time, to refuse the excuse that
disasters simply happen. Somebody acted. Something followed. Somebody answers.
That sequence is one of the great human achievements, and everything decent
about law rests on it.
Then come the years.
Fireweed first, in sheets of magenta where nothing should grow. Aspen suckers
from roots that never burned. A jay carries an acorn across a ridge and forgets
it. Fungal threads reach out from the edges of unburned ground into the dead
soil and begin, again, the slow commerce of minerals for sugar. Rain arrives
without instruction. Beetles arrive. Woodpeckers arrive after the beetles.
Somewhere under the ash a seed that required the heat of a fire to open its
cone has already opened.
And a second question appears, which has a strange property.
Who restored the forest?
There is no defendant. There is no hero, no engineer, no committee, no
authority that issued the order to return. The question has the grammatical
shape of the first one and none of its content. We ask it and the sentence
simply falls open at the end.
We have inherited a precise grammar for asking who broke the world. We have
almost no grammar for asking who keeps it able to return.
That asymmetry is the subject of this essay.
The Place Prepared for a God
Before the forest can say anything to us, it is worth asking why the first
question comes so easily and the second one comes so hard. The answer, I think,
lies deeper than law. It lies in a very old need.
Human beings have always searched for something beyond themselves.
Not only for protection, and not only for explanation. For something more
specific and stranger: for a place to stand outside oneself from which one’s
own existence can be witnessed. A person does not only ask what to do. A person
asks before whom they are answerable, and what guarantees that their own
judgment is more than their own wanting.
Left entirely alone with itself, the subject discovers that it cannot certify
itself. Meaning that I alone confer on my life has exactly the authority I
happen to give it this morning. So we look for an other that exceeds us, and
upon which our subjecthood can be witnessed. When one such other withdraws, the
need does not withdraw with it. The place stays open, and something comes to
occupy it.
The First Tenant: Heaven
In the older worlds, this other appeared as God, as Heaven, as Way, as cosmic
order.
Human beings were not the ultimate authors of value. They lived before
something greater than themselves, and responsibility took a vertical form:
one answered upward. Good and evil were received, not invented. This was
constraining, and it was also a relief. A person who has been given the
measure does not have to be the measure.
The Second Tenant: Reason
Modernity did not abolish transcendence. It relocated it.
As theological authority receded, another occupant arrived to take the vacant
place: reason itself, and its children, science and universal law. Human beings
stopped looking upward and began looking inward, toward a rational capacity
held to be common to all.
The relocation can be dated, and it is worth being specific, because the
abstraction hides how literal the substitution was.
In a footnote to the first preface of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant calls
his the age of criticism, to which everything must submit, and adds that
religion through its holiness and legislation through its majesty commonly seek
exemption and thereby arouse a just suspicion. The word he uses for the place
where they must appear is tribunal. Reason does not merely think. It sits, and
the world files past it to be judged. The bench is exactly where it always was.
The occupant is new.
Two generations after Kant, Auguste Comte designed a Religion of Humanity, with
a calendar, sacraments and a priesthood of scientists. Thomas Henry Huxley called
it Catholicism minus Christianity. The design is usually filed as an
eccentricity. It reads better as evidence: the man who coined the word
sociology, having removed theology from the account of history, immediately
built the furniture back.
The Quieter Tenants
Reason narrowed as it aged. The question drifted from what is true toward what is
efficient. Understanding became prediction, prediction became control, and
control became optimisation. Newer occupants took the place in turn, quieter
than gods and harder to address: the market, the index, the ranking, the
credit score, the model whose weights no one can read. They issue judgments and
they do not explain. They cannot be argued with. That is not a departure from
the old position. That is the signature of it.
Two of them are worth naming precisely, and both come from the world I work in.
The journal impact factor was built in the early nineteen sixties as an
in-house device for deciding which journals a citation index ought to cover.
Its inventor warned in print, decades ago, that using a journal’s average
citation rate as a stand-in for the impact of a particular paper is expedient
and dangerous. The warning was published, and it is well known, and careers are
counted in the number anyway. An instrument made for a shelving decision
became, within a generation, a measure of a life’s work.
The second is a family of cases rather than a single one. An institution is
ranked by a weighting it did not choose, cannot inspect in full and may not
appeal, and it begins to rearrange itself around that weighting. Departments
close. Hiring shifts. When the ranker revises the formula, the institution
revises itself again. No order was ever issued and no reason was ever given.
Something judges, and cannot be argued with, and that is the old position
occupied once more, by a tenant with no face and no obligation to explain
itself.
None of this is a story of decline, and it would be cheap to tell it as one.
The place exists because we are finite. No one can verify everything alone; no
community can act only on what it has fully established; and a shared authority
is how limited beings coordinate at all. Peer review, courts, air traffic
control, clinical guidelines: none of them claims to possess the truth. Each
claims something more modest and more useful, that on present information this
is the best common ground for acting together. That is practical wisdom, and it
is how history continues.
So the question worth asking is not whether the place can be emptied. It is
what kind of thing occupies it, and whether the constraint it carries stays
open to revision by those who live under it.
With that question in hand, we can go back among the trees.
The Forest Has No King
The forest has no king.
No central intelligence assigns roles. No chief engineer holds the design. A
tree does not know the forest. A fungus does not know the network it maintains.
A bird does not know the future of the seed caught in its feathers. There is no
office in which the whole is represented.
And yet the whole exists, and it does something that none of its members can do.
Walk in and try to point at what makes it a forest. You can point at a trunk,
at a root, at a fungal thread the width of a hair, at rain. You cannot point at
the relation. It has no location and no surface. And nothing you can point at
would exist as what it is without it. The tree is not first a tree and later a
participant. Soil, water, fungi, weather, neighbours: these are the conditions
through which it becomes a tree at all.
This is the intuition I have been circling for years under the name
generative relational being. Being is not first given and then placed in
relation. Very often, being emerges through relation.
There is a human case just as ordinary and just as strange. Nobody teaches a
child a language. Parents teach words, a few hundred of them, and correct
almost nothing else. Grandparents repeat things. Other children supply the rest
in the course of playing. Out of thousands of small responses, no one of which
contains the grammar, a speaker appears who can say sentences that have never
been said. Nobody holds the design here either. What the child receives is
something other than instruction. It is a world that answers.
One caution belongs here, before the image gets away from us. A forest is not a
harmony. Trees shade each other out and mean it. Roots poison competitors.
Fungi trade on terms that favour themselves. Parasites do well. What holds
among all this is weaker and stranger than cooperation, and more interesting:
relations that continue to make further relations possible. Not peace. Not
balance. Continued possibility.
That is a thin thing to build an ethics on. I would rather have a thin true
thing than a thick false one.
A Single Spark, a Thousand Trees
Return to the beginning of the fire.
A spark is almost nothing. It has no power and no intention, and it does not
know what it is about to change. Yet under certain conditions this nearly
nothing becomes a force that rewrites a landscape.
The power was never in the spark. Dry leaves offer fuel. Wind offers movement.
A slope offers direction. A century of suppressed small fires offers a
continuous ladder from the ground to the crown.
That century has a policy behind it, and the policy has a number. After the Big
Burn of 1910 took some three million acres in two days, the young United States
Forest Service settled into a doctrine of total suppression, and by 1935 it
carried a clock: every reported fire to be controlled by ten o’clock the
following morning. It worked, which was the difficulty. Each small fire
prevented is fuel kept, and the kept fuel accumulated across decades into
exactly that ladder. The fire that finally came was not the fire the policy had
spent a century fighting. The fire emerges from the
encounter between a small disturbance and a field prepared to carry it. Drop
the same spark on wet ground in a forest that burns lightly every fifteen years
and nothing at all happens.
The Small Does Not Stay Small
The mind holds a quiet assumption about causes: that large effects require
large causes, that a small act has small consequences, and therefore that
responsibility should scale with size.
Living systems often decline to behave this way. Near a threshold, feedback
takes over from proportion. A small difference is amplified, crosses a critical
point, and the whole settles into another state. One match matters immensely on
one hillside and not at all on another, and the difference lies in the hillside.
A single sentence becomes a conflict. A single exclusion becomes a culture. One
unrepaired institutional gap becomes a systemic collapse. A small withdrawal of
trust ends a marriage that survived worse.
The Debt of the Spark, the Debt of the Forest
This opens a difficulty rather than resolving one.
The first question stays necessary. Who acted. Whoever drops the spark cannot
be excused by the dryness of the leaves; a world where amplification cancels
authorship is a world where nobody ever did anything. The condition of the
field is not a defence.
But a second question becomes unavoidable, and it has no defendant either:
What conditions allowed the spark to become a fire?
There is responsibility for the event, which asks who acted. And there is
responsibility for the field, which asks who shaped the conditions under which
acts acquire their force. An organisation, a legal order, a professional
culture, a family: each is a field of amplification. Each decides, long before
any particular act, which differences vanish and which differences become
world-changing.
Seeds Are Small Too
Then the symmetry, which is the part I find most difficult to write honestly.
The same relational world that amplifies destruction amplifies renewal. A spark
becomes a fire. A seed becomes a forest. One root bridges two severed
communities of fungi. One act of attention restores a person’s sense of being
addressable at all.
The sentimental version of this is false, and worth naming so that it can be
refused. Amplification is indifferent to what it amplifies. It carries cruelty
with exactly the fidelity it carries care, and a field can be arranged so that
kindness disappears without trace while a rumour crosses the whole
organisation by lunchtime. The indifference is the honest part. It is also why
the condition of the field is a moral question and not only a technical one.
And one more complication, which the forest supplies and which spoils any clean
opposition. In some forests, fire belongs to the grammar. Lodgepole pine
seals a portion of its cones with resin that yields at around fifty degrees, so
a stand is reseeded by the same event that removes it. Certain seeds wait for
smoke.
Destruction and generation are not always opposites in the forest’s own terms.
This must not be turned into a licence. A low fire every fifteen years and a
crown fire after a century of suppression are different events, and the
difference is not moral subtlety. It is scale, frequency, and the state of the
field. Anyone who moves from the first observation to the conclusion that
destruction is secretly creative has stopped looking at forests and started
using them.
The God Who Did Not Descend
After the fire we expect a familiar story.
A disaster occurs. The world falls silent. Something greater than the world
must arrive to restore what was lost. This may be humanity’s oldest hope: that
beyond our limited existence there is a power able to give back what we cannot
recover ourselves.
The forest tells a different story.
No god descended from the sky.
No external hand reached into the ashes.
No supreme subject commanded the return of life.
And yet the forest was not abandoned.
Something continued. Beneath the burned surface, invisible relations remained.
Seeds waited in the soil. Fungi went on with their silent exchanges at the
unburned edges. Roots held fragments of connection. Rain carried possibilities
that had not yet appeared. A bird crossed a ridge with something stuck to it.
The forest did not return because something outside the forest repaired it. The
forest returned because the relations within it still held the capacity to
generate.
Perhaps this is another way of meeting the sacred.
The sacred may not always take the form of a being above the world, governing
it from outside. Perhaps it can also appear within the relations through which
a world continues to create itself. It appeared between root and soil, between
seed and rain, between decay and renewal, among countless beings responding to
one another with no comprehension of the whole.
The forest was not rescued by a savior.
It was regenerated by relations.
From Above to Between
Humanity’s long search for something beyond itself expressed a genuine
recognition, and I do not want to talk anyone out of it. Individual beings are
never sufficient sources of meaning. That is simply true.
What the forest disturbs is a narrower assumption: that whatever exceeds an
individual must be a larger individual.
A tree exceeds itself through the forest. A person exceeds themselves through
the relations that made them a person. A generation exceeds itself through
futures it will not see. The more-than is not always above us.
Sometimes it is between us.
Three questions can be laid beside one another here, and each has carried its
own form of the more-than-us. Who created the world. How does the world work.
How does the world continue becoming. The first was answered by a creator
standing outside. The second by law standing above. The third has no occupant
yet, and this essay is a suggestion about where to look: at the conditions,
held among beings, under which becoming continues at all.
A Name to Be Given Up
I have been using the phrase relational divinity, and I want to be
careful about it, because it is the most dangerous phrase in this essay.
It is a word for pointing, and it must be surrendered once it has pointed. Go
looking for the relation and you find soil, thread, seed, rain, a bird, and no
relation. You cannot be shown one. A relation is not a thing, not a node, not a
link, not a network. It is the constraint within which becoming unfolds, and it
has no address.
So relational divinity is not a new tenant for the empty throne. If the phrase
hardens into a name for something, then the essay has committed precisely the
error it came to describe: it will have found the vacant place unbearable and
moved a successor in. The word is a ladder. Once you are up, push it away.
One further refusal belongs here, and it is not decorative. I am not claiming
that transcendence-between is superior to transcendence-above because it
generates more. That sentence would make generativity into a currency, and once
generativity is a currency there is an exchange rate, and once there is an
exchange rate someone will be spent. There is no such rate in this essay. What
is being offered is a description of where the more-than-us may be found, and
descriptions do not come with entitlements attached.
The Forest Promises Nothing
Here the essay has to turn on itself, because the image has begun to serve me
too well.
The forest says nothing. It offers no lesson, holds no position, and has no
view about responsibility. Every meaning in the preceding pages was placed
there by a reader who arrived with questions already formed. The reading is
mine, and so is the responsibility for it. Nature is the oldest surface onto
which human beings have projected the order they wished to find, and it has
authorised almost everything at one time or another.
So three refusals, before the essay can be trusted with anything.
The first: sometimes the forest does not come back. In the sagebrush country of
the American west, cheatgrass arrives after a burn, an annual that cures to
tinder by early summer and shortens the interval between fires from something
like a human lifetime to three or five years. Sagebrush cannot mature that
fast. What follows is an annual grassland that burns and returns as annual
grassland, and stays. In the mountains the mechanism is different and the
outcome rhymes: burn twice within a few years, put the nearest surviving seed
source two valleys away, add the hotter and drier summers that now follow a
fire, and the conifers simply fail to establish. Regeneration is a possibility and not a promise. Any
essay that ends in guaranteed return has stopped describing forests and started
consoling.
The second: an account of how life returns says nothing about whether its
return matters. This is the point at which I have to be most careful, because
the vocabulary of generation is seductive enough to hide the gap. A description
of a mechanism carries no value with it. Structure does not arrive with worth
attached. Knowing in detail how a system maintains its capacity to keep
changing tells you exactly nothing about whether that capacity deserves
protection, or whose.
The third follows from the second, and it is the reason the first two had to be
said. The most dangerous sentence available to any philosophy of generativity
is that whatever keeps a system generating is thereby good. It is dangerous
because it is often factually true. Destroy a part of a coupled system and the
remaining parts frequently do unfold more freely. Expel the member and the
group’s coordination cost really does fall. The history of that sentence is
written in clearances, purges, and the removal of whatever was said to obstruct
the whole. It is the self-justifying form of nearly every atrocity, and a
philosophy that treats flourishing as an aim cannot refute it, because in that
philosophy’s own language the sentence is correct.
So a line has to be held, and it is a narrow one.
What may be called an obstacle is a condition. A blocked channel. A rule. A
cost. A scarcity of attention. An absent path.
Never a being.
The moment a person is placed in the category of obstruction, the category
begins to manufacture its own evidence, because it can only be true if he does
not flourish. That is the mechanism, and it is available to majorities acting
in perfect sincerity after long collective reflection. Sincerity is no
protection. What offers some protection is narrower and more procedural: the
one who bears the cost of a designation holds the standing to contest it, and
that standing does not depend on the goodwill of anyone else.
Nothing in the forest supplies this. It has to be held by us, against the
image, in the full knowledge that the image will not object.
The Fire Has a Date, the Forest Has None
The opening of this essay asked a question it did not answer. Why does one of
those two questions come so easily, and the other so hard.
I think the answer is a matter of tempo.
A fire is an event. It has a date, an hour, a point of origin, a photograph. It
can be drawn on a map with an arrow. It fits inside a sentence that has a
subject and a verb, and that sentence can be read aloud in a courtroom.
A returning forest is a rate. Nothing happens on any particular afternoon.
There is no moment at which the forest has returned, no threshold anybody
crosses, no ceremony and no announcement. What exists is a slope: a little more
moss this decade than last, seedlings that were saplings by the time anyone
looked again.
Moral attention is built for events, and it is built that way for a good
reason, because events are where the exits are. The cost is that we hold
instruments of very unequal quality on the two sides. On the side of
destruction, precision. On the side of return, almost nothing.
Underneath the tempo lies something harder. Nobody watches a forest come back.
The person standing in the ash and the person standing under the second canopy
are not the same person, and often not the same generation. Whoever keeps the
conditions of return intact does so for a state they will never see confirmed,
on behalf of beneficiaries who will not know their name, with no visible
evidence along the way that the keeping is working at all. This is why care for
conditions is such a weak motive and blame is such a strong one. Blame arrives
complete, today, with a face attached. Maintenance offers no such satisfaction,
and it never will.
And people do it anyway, constantly, which is the part worth noticing. Someone
plants a walnut at sixty, having done the arithmetic. Someone keeps a variety
of bean alive by growing it out every third year and handing seed to whoever
asks, so that a plant no company sells is still in the world. Someone feeds a
starter every morning that was alive before they were born. Someone puts a
bench where the path turns, for people they will not meet. None of this is
heroic, and none of it can be seen from outside, and it is the ordinary human
form of caring for a rate instead of an event.
Then the refusal that has to accompany all of this, or the section turns into a
consolation.
The second forest grows out of the death of the first. Standing dead trunks
shelter the seedlings. Fallen ones become nurseries. Ash fertilises a season or
two. Every part of this is true, and none of it settles anything. The tree that
died is not compensated by what grew on it. A harm is not redeemed by the fact
that something eventually came of it, and look what grew out of it is
among the oldest cruelties available to anyone who was not the one who burned.
Regeneration is a fact about a system. It is no verdict on the loss.
A Harm Without an Author
With those refusals in place, the second question of the opening can be taken
up seriously.
Attribution is not the enemy here. It is a defence, and mostly a defence of the
weak. Whoever acted answers. This is what closes the exits that power
habitually uses: it was the market, it was the culture, it was the system, it
was everyone and therefore no one. Keep it.
But some harms are not events. They are processes that reproduce themselves.
Exclusion in an organisation rarely begins in a decision anyone would sign. It
lives in a hiring habit, an evaluation form, a set of informal invitations, and
a silence in a meeting that nobody afterwards remembers. Each element is
defensible on its own, and the harm is in the arrangement. Ask which act caused
it and every candidate is too small. The pattern is not hiding behind an actor.
It is distributed across a field, and it renews itself each quarter without
anyone intending it to.
The same distribution runs the other way, and it deserves the same attention,
because it is easier to see once you know to look. A place where a newcomer is
taken care of rarely has a rule that says so. It lives in whoever notices that
someone is eating alone, in the habit of explaining the thing nobody wrote
down, in a senior person asking a question they already know the answer to so
that a junior one can answer it. No single act contains the welcome. It sits in
the arrangement, it renews itself quarter by quarter, and it can be taken apart
by nothing more dramatic than a few people deciding they are too busy.
There is a darker version. Look closely at the person standing at the sharp end
of such a pattern, the one everyone can name, and something uncomfortable
appears: the role would be filled by someone else within a month if he stopped.
He is also performing for an absent audience, closer to the front of the stage
than the rest. Attribution reaches him and finds a man obeying a script.
That observation must never become an excuse, and this is the sentence that has
to be said clearly: responsibility does not vanish when psychology stops
explaining it. It relocates. It moves from the interior of a person toward
positions, capacities, and the maintenance of the script. Punish the actor and
leave the role written, and the next person will step into it. Everyone who
keeps the script legible carries something.
This is where the relational view becomes usable, and also where it can
collapse into vapour. If everything is connected, is everyone responsible for
everything?
No. Connection confers nothing by itself.
Responsibility gathers where four things gather. Whether you occupy a position
that shapes the field. Whether you could have acted otherwise with the means
actually available to you. Whether the degradation was foreseeable from where
you stood. Whether your conduct helped reproduce the pattern. A child walking
through the woods and a company holding the logging concession are both in
relation to the forest, and they do not stand in the same place.
What emerges is not one responsibility but two, held together and doing
different work. Answerability looks backward and names. Participation looks
forward and maintains. Answerability alone leaves the field untouched, so the
pattern regenerates around the punished actor. Participation alone is worse in
its own way: a diffuse ethic of care with nobody accountable for anything, and
power finds that arrangement extremely comfortable.
Keep both. The tension between them is not a flaw in the account. It is the
shape of the problem.
Law in the Shadow of the Forest
Law is a map, and I want to say clearly that the map is indispensable. The
argument here is not that law is mistaken about anything. It is that a map is
not a forest, and that some of what a forest does cannot be drawn.
Law is superb with boundaries and events. A line was crossed. A duty was owed.
A harm was caused, and here is who pays. This machinery is precise because it
is narrow, and its narrowness is a virtue: it is what makes the outcome
contestable and the reasoning reviewable.
Conditions are harder to draw. How trust forms. How a meaning comes to be
shared. How a place remains able to recover from damage. These are not
mysteries in principle, and they resist the form of a rule, because a rule
needs an addressee and a moment.
And here is the dependence that deserves more attention than it gets: law lives
on conditions it cannot itself produce. A judgment binds because a community
treats it as binding. A rule works because officials apply it on days they
dislike it, and because witnesses come forward when it would be easier not to,
and because the losing party goes home. Strip those away and the text is
unchanged and the law is gone. The map is drawn on ground it did not make.
Some of this is already being worked out where the pressure is greatest.
Environmental law knows about duties of restoration, which are obligations of
maintenance and something more than prohibitions. American contaminated-site
law goes further and fixes liability on the position of owner or operator
without asking who was at fault, reaching back to conduct that was lawful when
it happened. The doctrine is widely disliked, and it is instructive. It is what
a legal system does when it meets a harm whose author has dissolved and decides
to attach the duty to the position that remains. Governance of automated
systems keeps arriving at the same place from another direction, since nobody
caused this output and the question that remains is who arranged the conditions
under which such outputs appear, and who may contest the arrangement.
What I would suggest is modest and procedural. Attach duties to position. Keep
the paths of revision open to whoever bears the cost. Let the maintenance of
conditions be capable of grounding an obligation, alongside the prohibition of
acts.
One danger belongs here, and this essay is the thing that supplies it. If
responsibility reaches the conditions under which harm becomes possible, then
somebody will propose to secure those conditions in advance, and preventive
power has never once declined such an invitation. An authority entitled to act
before anything has happened, on the ground that it is maintaining the
conditions of a common life, is the most expansive authority anyone has yet
thought of. A promise of restraint is worth nothing against it. The only
safeguard available is the procedural one already named: those whose conditions
are being maintained hold the standing to contest the maintenance, and whoever
maintains owes them an account of it. Care for conditions without that standing
is ordinary control with a better vocabulary.
And then a limit, which loops back to where the essay began. Law must not be
asked to hold all of this. A legal order that undertook to guarantee trust,
meaning, care, and recognition would simply be the newest occupant of the empty
place: the last supreme subject, standing above the relations it claims to
protect, unarguable and unreviewable. Better a map that knows its edges, and a
society that knows the ground is not drawn.
The Second Forest
Go back one more time, twenty years on, when nobody who watched it burn is
thinking about it any more.
What stands there is not the forest that burned. The pioneers came first and
some of them will hold the site for a century. The old composition may never
reassemble; certain trees will not return in any human lifetime; the dead
trunks that made the recovery possible are still lying across the ground and
will be there long after they have stopped being remembered as damage. This is
a continuation. It is not a restoration.
Communities are like this after harm. There is no route back to the morning
before. What is available is a different arrangement that can keep going, built
partly out of what the damage left behind. Repair and regeneration are
different words, and the second is the honest one.
So perhaps the question shifts.
Not only who owns the past.
Also who takes part in making the future.
The forest asks nothing. It has no question and no answer, and on the morning
after the fire it is simply silent. We are the ones who ask, and that is not a
weakness in the position. It is the position. What we can still answer, in an
organisation, in a household, in a legal order, in a burned valley, is which
relations we are keeping alive, and for whom, and whether those who bear the
cost of our answer are still able to argue with it.
No god came to save the forest.
And something like the divine appeared among the roots.
Companions in Thought
This essay does not argue with anyone, and it is not alone. Hans Jonas asked
what responsibility becomes when its object is a future that cannot answer
back. Hannah Arendt distinguished guilt, which is personal, from a
responsibility that attaches to belonging. Iris Marion Young proposed that
structural injustice implicates participants without making each of them
culpable, which is the sober version of much of what is said here. Aldo Leopold
wrote about obligation to a land community and about how quickly such writing
turns into sentiment. C. S. Holling gave resilience its meaning as the
capacity to absorb disturbance and reorganise, which is the ecology behind the
whole essay. Per Bak’s work on systems held near a critical point is the source
of the spark. Suzanne Simard’s work on mycorrhizal networks supplies the image
of the underground exchange, and the strongest versions of those claims remain
contested, which is worth saying because the image is so appealing. Emmanuel
Levinas is the reason the word witnessed appears where it does. None of
them is responsible for what has been done with them here.