Deborah Bird Rose
Australia deborah.rose@mq.edu.au
Death narratives, nurturance, and transitive crossings within species and between species open pathways into entanglements of life of earth. This paper engages with time in both sequential and synchronous modes, investigating interfaces where time, species,and nourishment become densely knotted up in ethics of gift, motion, death, life, and desire. The further aim is to consider the dynamic ripples generated by anthropogenic mass death in multispecies knots of ethical time, and to gesture toward a practice of writing as witness.
Introduction
Within the ecology of life, death is a necessary partner. Margulis and Sagan (2000) tell us that while accidental death has always been a contingent factor for life, many bacteria can survive more or less forever as copies are made again and again through cell division. In Contrast, “programmed death,” in which cells age and die as part of the life of the individual, came into the world with reproduction (156–7).The link between sex and death is apparently coded into our DNA.Species as well as individuals have life expectancies, and extinction,too, is a functional part of the evolutionary process (May et al. 1995). And while animals and plants have a more tenuous life when compared with bacteria, theirs (ours) is also a more complex one. Organisms Die, but new non-copy organisms are brought into being (Margulis and Sagan 2000, 91). Life, therefore, is an extension of itself into new generations and new species (144). And from an ecological point of view, death is a return. The body returns to bacteria, and bacteria return the body to the living earth (91). Margulis and Sagan go on to define life as it works productively with time: life is always “preserving the past, making a difference between past and present; life binds time,expanding complexity and creating new problems for itself” (86). Life In this broader context is “a network of cross-kingdom alliances” (191).My aim in this paper is to engage with James Hartley’s work on the murder of ethical time, and bring it into the biosocial context of the anthropogenic mass extinction event now in process. I will addressaenocide—the mass murder of individuals that constitutes a sustained attack on the future of the group, and thus an attack on ethical time.
I am drawing on previous work in which I have discussed “double death”: the process that is driving the great unmaking of life in this era known as the Anthropocene. The notion of double death contrasts with the ecological and evolutionary contexts in which death is immanent in and necessary to life. Double death breaks up the partnership between life and death, setting up an “amplification of death, so that the balance between life and death is overrun” (Rose 2006, 75). Similarly, contemporary man-made mass extinctions are an amplification of double death: the irreparable loss not only of the living but of the multiplicity of forms of life and of the capacity of evolutionary processes to regenerate life (Chrulew 2011, 149). The extinguishing of ethical time is yet another form of double death. Drawing on Hatley’s point that analysis of the cross-overs between the generations of humans could be expanded to consider species and wider questions of life (Hatley 2000, 63), I address the gift of life as a multispecies offering at the intersection of sequential and synchronous time. I add flesh to the relatively abstracted analysis of kinds of time and patterns that connect through examples drawn from the life worlds of Australian Flying foxes (Pteropus species) and their co-evolved myrtaceous flora. Connections between generations of living beings, and relationships among currently living beings, over the basis for an account of the life-giving and life-arming qualities of ethical time. We are then in a position to consider ecological genocide, or the multispecies “murder of ethical time” (219)
Rose, D. 2012 ‘Multispecies Knots of Ethical Time’, Environmental Philosophy, IX, 1, 127-140. (See: https://www.academia.edu/4539615/Multi-species_Knots_of_Ethical_Time)
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