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Other Feature

the Other Press

May 21, 1992

 

David Cayley Speaks About Id

 

by Stephen So

David Cayley is a broadcaster with the
“Ideas” program on CBC radio. Hehasrecently
compiled the transcripts of a number of radio
essays, or documentaries, from over the last 5
years, under the title The Age of Ecology. In the
book, he attempts to explicate the fundamental
questions that arise for activists and thinkers
exploring issues and ideas in the age of ecology.

I spoke with David Cayley about his book,
the ideas in and behind it. He kindly gave me
moretimeonafinespring day than my questions
warranted. “He was warm and congenial, and
spoke with a sense of humour that is probably
lost in the transcription. The conversation we
had was invigorating and thought provoking,
and i hope that comes across.

 

 

The Age of Ecology

by David Cayley

published by James Lorimer & Company
paper back, 272 pages. $16.95

Stephen So. Was there a moment when you
first became aware of what you call environmental
degradation today?

David Cayley. I would say probably when
I was about 7 years old, maybe 8 years old, and
not because something happened in that year.
That was when I became aware that something
was wrong with my world, something that
made me different from my father and my
grandfather. And, in fact, what happened to
my fatherand my grandfather was moreterrible
than anything that’s happened to me.

Both of them came of age fighting wars in
Europe, but I think it was just a sense of the
change in the world. Some people associated
that with nuclear weapons. I was always alittle
nervous of that kind of talk. It becamea kind of
excuse that we were growing up in the shadow
of the bomb...and I thought well, I’m not so
sure. But there was asense ofa difference about
my world, and in calling a book The Age of
Ecology, I’m talking about that. It’s the reality
that we live. It’s the condition that we have
moved into and will stay in, and that happened
at Alamagordo, or it doesn’t matter where you
think it happened. It happened when people
finally discovered that human beings were
having an impact on the very composition of
the atmosphere.

You could put the moment anytime, but I
think it’s recognizing that a critical limit has
been reached and then broached, and from that
moment on, you're living in a fundamentally
new reality.

SS. You mention a critical limit. This is
something Ivan Illich has talked about. How
important is Ivan Illich's thinking in shaping how
you understand issues about the environment.

DC. Totally important. He’s a very close
friend and he’s also a person who I think has
presented me with the greatest challenge
intellectually that I have ever had to face. Illich
is important for me.

SS. You distinguish between the two
approaches to the “apocalyptic moment”. And you
use the words humility and hubris to
make thedistinction. They'reold words.

Why do you use them?

AMAL MK. RS
be Penccrion'tthinkyos ANVIFTOMENtalism has

can do better than those words
whicharevery old wordsthat come

B gs
worteconmamoonsre ThE Capacity to tighten

for bringing Illich to Toronto to

environment. I think Illich was a prophet.

And the other thing that he said, which
was that environmentalism, or concern with
theenvironment, or ecology, or whatever name
it goes under, has the capacity to tighten the
noose of the economy on our necks. He said
that 20 years ago, and I don’t think I even
understood it at the time. But it seems to me
nowthatthat’strue. If yousawthecontradiction
between humans and nature as absolute, you
see, that’s what I’m talking about, with the
bomb, or whatever, you see at a certain level
that this is an absolute contradiction. And you
see that a society that keeps on growing can’t
last. It has to, at some point, adjust itself to the
reality of finiteness.

SS. He talks about limitations...

DC. Yes, tothe possibility that suffering is
part of the human condition, that you cannot
solveevery problem. How everthat recognition
comes to you, whatyouseeis that environment,
orecology, then stands for theneed to factor the
unsustainability of this way of life, and to ask
what would be good political institutions, what
would be good social institutions under these
circumstances.

SS. So you come to a choice then.

DC. Yes, well that was how I saw it
through his eyes. Now, he also saw that if it
wasn’t approached at that depth, that what
would happenis daily life would become more
and more minutely economized in a way,
because every gesture [would be scrutinized]. I
mean, we probably shouldn’t be having this
coffee. You either establish limits within which
you live what he saw as being an austere
conviviality, (helikes to quotemedieval sources,
you know, sort of drunken sobriety, these kind
of paradoxes thatare very, very old), thatifyou
live esthetically or austerely, then you can also
live it up ina certain sense. You can live with
abandon, freely. But, otherwise, we come now
into a kind of hygienic form of society where
everything is a cause for concern, everything is
a source for potential alarm. And the minutest
gestures of daily life come under surveillance.
How do they affect the environment? How do
they affect our health?

This is troubling intwo ways. It’s certainly
troubling because it’s life under surveillance
and, therefore, it is not a free form of life where
wecan beconcerned about one another, where
friendship would be a very important thing /
and not me worrying about whether you're
alright, whether you're politically correct,
whether you're taking responsibility for your
own health. Whatever it is, we come to a
moment of concepts of responsibility.

So it can go in that direction, and I think
alsothat might bea prefascist condition. Idon’t
want to speak sensationally, but if you look at
what happened in Germany, that was also an
ecological society, the Nazi society. There were
organic gardens on the boundaries of Dachow.
That was the society that became obsessively
concerned about health, with the health of a
certain kind of social body, and then developed
the image of these pathogens, these pollutants.

pain vost aecnta'i {HE NOOSE Of the

spokethen about the environment,
and hesaid (I’m recalli

good idea what a commonsisinthis way of life,
because there is nocommons. But we haveseen
inourlifetimes, certainly sincethesecond World
War and the development era, let’s put it that
way, that whole countries have been
transformed from communal lands, from
commons, into state ownership. Under the
ownership of remote elites without political
roots, those commons have been decimated.
My main example is the country that I
know, which is Sarawak, East Malaysia,
northern Borneo, which was, until the 70s I
think, a society that was probably modernizing
ata pretty moderate pace. There weretransistor

 

radios and outboard motors that you would see
in the long houses and somehow, it seemed to
me anyway, and it’s a superficial judgment,
that people were taking those things in out of
choice, at least limited choice, and somehow
managing, somehow coping. And then the
government simply began to parcel out the
country in timber licenses, and they found
themselves facing utter catastrophe. They found
their forests were just cut out form underneath
them and they couldn’t live as they had lived
anymore, and that’s happened all over the
world.

I guess part of my understanding of a
commons as someone living in Toronto and
very much shaped within the climate of
environmentalism, as we’ ve called it here, was
that in 88 in Toronto, there was
the so-called Citizen’s Summit,
which wasanalternativesummit
totheG7, Group of Seven. There
I met all kinds of people, or
people who talked about other
people anyway, for whom the
term environment just simply
had nomeaning. If you’reliving
in Sarawak and the forest goes,
and youcan’tlivethereanymore,
youdon’thavea problem in your

and hes im religion economy on our necks etek Suse, yoo

environmental degradation was a
result of a corruption in man’s self
image.
And that there would be two possible
responses to this. One would be toaddress it at
that level, as an unworthy way of living in
creation. The second would be to let it goto the
pointat whichit becamea managerial problem,
and then begin to manage it, which would
involve the creation of a whole new sector of
social services, environmental services. Now
we have seen a massive expansion of
environmental services in the 20 odd years
sincehespoke. We’reseeing majorinternational
institutions like the World Bank, which has
certainly been a author of 40 years of
development and destruction, reappearing as
the white knight that is going to save the

 

I think that’s a way of thinking that might be
possible forthis society if things get bad enough
and people get panicky enough. Sothosearea
couple of reasons to be concerned about an
approach like that. I never answered your
question. This is typical.

SS. Well, it was about humility and hubris.
Why choose the old words?

DC. I guess I did answerit . Imeanthey’re
good words. And I think the Greek myths in
many wayssimply represent the way intelligent

ple saw that things are in the world. And
they’re still like that. Always will be.

SS. What do you mean by the commons?
What is the commons?

DC. Well I don’t think we have any very

haveacatastrophein your world.
Imean, your world is gone. Your
world is utterly gone.

An environment is only an externality, as
economics calls it. It’s as if, this is a rather tragic
view of the situation, that by the time people
canspeak ofanenvironment, they are obviously
too far gone to do anything, because an
environment already implies something
external to you which you necessarily manage
and which has meaning only in relation to you.
That’s really what environment means. It’s a
purely relational term. It has no content. You
don’t go for a walk in the environment.

SS. There's nothing to hold in your hand.

DC. That’s right. It’s not an exhaustively
beautiful world. It’s an environment. It’s a
nothing.

SS. Has the term environment become one of

our modern day certainties?

DC. Yes, Ithinkithas. Absolutely. People
are sure there is an environment. You know,
certainties isa term that Illich gives a particular
twist to as meaning ...

SS. Common sense...

DC. Yes, what you and I in conversation
won't question. What will betaken for granted.
So a radio interviewer will say to me, “Mr.
Cayley, what do you think the condition of the
global environment is?” And he'll take his
questionasthesensible one. And he'll probably
beoffended if Isay, wellthat’sabsolute nonsense
as you've just said. Why don’t you please ask
me an intelligent
question, or a
sensible question or
something? How
could I possibly
answer that?
There’s no such
thing in the first
place. It’sa figment
@ of yourimagination
to think there’s a
sg lowbad
environment.

Maybe scientists
can talk like that.
They can’ttalk very
accurately like that,
because we've just
been through a big
ozone loop that
scared the pants off
everybody, and
then it turned out
to be nothing. The
© }equipment was
'] acting up that day.
= |. mean, it’s pretty

tough to count
molecules in the
ozonelayer. You're
j not going to get it
right every time.
I'm digressing, but
you see this as a
problem of being
delivered into the
hands of the
scientificmanagement, that you becomesubject
to that kind of thing. So certainties are things
that you take for granted and become concepts
that areina way below your horizon. Youdon’t
see them anymore but they shape your world.

And it’s interesting now to go around and
do interviews and so on. Very often it seems as
if you can’t easily raise those questions. I mean
I can raise them with you clearly and you are
obviously interested in questioning thosethings
yourself so it’s not universally true, but there
does seem to be a kind of talk going around
which takes global responsibility and such kind
of concepts for real. And not only that, but
might think of a descent from them as slightly
treasonous because this is the turn-around
decade, and we've got to turn it around, and
we've only got so many more years, and let’s
get on side and let’s get out there and do
something. There’s that kind of mood, whichis
not a good climate in which to raise what seem
to be a philosopher’s quibbles.

SS. It strikes me that a person like Hazel
Henderson isan ecocrat, aterm you use in the book,
and that ecocrats impose a certain hegemony on the
discourse about ecology. A question, like you say, is
posed about the global environment, and it's loaded
with these key words. So how do you address people
then, talk to people in a way in which you can be
understood?

DC. I don’t know the answer to that. I
don’t. It’s only become clear to me in the last
couple of years that there seems to be a kind of
parting of the ways here. I certainly grew up
inside of a kind of a whole earth consciousness,
if you want, and took it for good. And I think
there were parts of it that were good, and I
would want to be very, very discriminating.
Certainly faced with the work of someone like
Hazel Henderson, I think parts of Hazel’s work
are just terrific. And she’s made me aware of
many, many things going onin the world which
Ithinkare very, very good. For example, one of
thethingsthat] particularly havebecomeaware
of through heris the idea of alternative moneys,
decentralizing. There’s much that’s valuablein
Hazel Henderson’s thought. But she wants to
think under imagesand rubrics that I now want
to question. And maybe sometime she'll want

 

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