The "non-human world"

I was reading an interview with Timothy Morton called 'ecology without nature' and the issue of our anthropocentric, human world came up. The example was raised of a forest fire campaign which stated "In a wildfire we don't only lose a forest", the image beside was a picture of a burnt doll. The interviewer argued that, we are so unable to sympathise with something that is external to ourselves that we have to "conjure images of dead children". Morton reasoned with this and said that it is okay to visualise with self-interest if it allows people to identify with the non-human world.

I was just so astounded that I had never realised how much of a self-centred society we actually are, how we can't even reason with something so terrible because it didn't directly harm humanity, even though in reality it did. Maybe the reason that I'd never realised was because my life was in fact completely anthropocentric, and thats so shockingly worrying, that I was so ignorant that my life and everything in it completely orbited me and my self-interest.

Morton goes on to discuss the temporality window that self-interest is continued within. How it is so difficult to comprehend things that will happen outside of our lifespan. Everything you ever do will be amplified significantly years on, at the same time, none of it will hold any value. Its a paradox, every decision you ever make will matter, but at the same time, they really won't. The very fact that the meaning of our actions diminishing in the future somehow allows them to only benefit ourselves within our lifetime is incredibly selfish. It supports the egocentric mindset that once you're dead, everything you have ever done whilst living ceases to exist.

In the interview Morton says that "the concept of Nature is a sort of anthopocentrically scaled concept, designed for humans". The concept of nature separates the human world from the non-human world. Everything outside of our human world is nature and therefore is somewhere else. In this human world, every aspect of our environment is impacted by our actions. The polluted city air, the architecturally planned out landscape garden, These are not truly natural. The idea of the human world deludes to this natural non-human world being elsewhere.

This is just incredibly problematic because we all know that just as nature, we have evolved. We are not two separate entities but instead feed one another. We can't think of humanity and nature as separate because this only feeds the anthropocentric human world. This other place is really the same place, the same world, but it is not the human world.

Reflecting upon the illusion of a human world and a natural world, I really don't want my sculptures to give the impression of being the other. In that, they are not a vision for a technically modified future plant but rather an artistic revisualisation. This is why I initially developed onward from the photographs containing both the sculptures and nature, because one element had to become the other. But looking back there was no true problem with the composition, because there was no other to combat. They were two states of the same thing, one more artistically evolved than the other, but not in replacement.

referenced from http://lab.cccb.org/en/tim-morton-ecology-without-nature/