Michael Livermore 0:12
Welcome to the Free Range Podcast. I’m your host, Mike Livermore. This episode is sponsored by the program on Law, Communities and the Environment at the University of Virginia School of Law. With me today is Laura Candiotto, a professor of philosophy at the University of Pardubice, in the Czech Republic. She has a relatively recent paper, Loving the Earth by Loving a Place. That is fascinating set of arguments in there, I thought that it would be a fun starting place for a conversation for the podcast. So thanks so much for joining me today, Laura.
Laura Candiotto 0:44
Hi, Mike, thank you very much for having me here. I’m very happy to have this conversation with you today.
Michael Livermore 0:51
And I’m looking forward to it. So you explain to me as a way into the paper, you know, we talk sometimes we talk casually, at least in the US, we use the term love in a pretty casual way especially maybe when talking about nature. So you know, I might say that I love nature, I love the outdoors or, or that kind of thing. But in this paper, that’s not really what you’re talking about. So how do we distinguish the love that you’re describing? Loving a place in this paper from you know, that more casual usage?
Laura Candiotto 1:22
Oh, yes, this is a crucial question. Yes, because when we say, I love nature, I love going into the woods and stuff like this can just mean that I enjoy doing these activities, right liking being outside, but I try to provide a philosophical conceptualization of love also, because I think that if we take love of nature, just in this casual way, we cannot really appreciate the moral and political value that love, love of nature in particular, can have now and how much love of nature can help us in tackling some of the more pressing issues that we are facing nowadays with the climate crisis or climate disaster, we can say. So, in providing this philosophical conceptualization of love of nature, I start from the philosophical debate on the philosophy of love, and so that we have different accounts. So I start from the idea that love as care, so that it is not just you know, love a feeling of enjoyment of doing or being with someone but caring about this someone, meaning that really working for her well being, and also this goes well with the account that is called the devalue account, that means that in caring for the your, the intentional object of your love, you value this object. So, you appreciate some qualities or some specific feature of this, of this object, or we can also say that this object of love has intrinsic value, and then there is also another account, that is the fusion account of love. And this account spells out the idea that, when we love, we really wanted to be one with our beloved, so that we are looking for our fusion. And this fusion has been understood in different way, but many times it has led to the idea that love isn’t in universal, and so, it is this idea of oneness with the other. So, I started providing this map of this philosophical account of love and from there, I say that, while I take a lot from the care and your account of love, but I challenge the fusion or the universal account of love, and in doing so, I develop my inactive account of love. So, maybe this word is a bit technical, so maybe it could be useful to define it a bit. So, with inaction is a specific model of mind and cognition that assumes that there is a continuity between life and mind. And this continuity is understood in terms of processes of sense making. So when an organism, a living organism, develops a perspective on something, this is still a bit too theoretical what has to do with love. Well, in a paper I wrote with Hannah de Jager, we developed our inactive account of love, where we say that it is a process of participatory sense making when two or more living beings are in processes of existential encounters. And through these encounters, they build their perspective together. But still, I think that it is important that they say something more concrete, for defining this, this kind of love, especially when we speak about love of nature, what does it mean to have this kind of existential engagement with nature? Right? Is it possible to actively love nature? Or could we just love other specific and unique human beings? So, I don’t know, Mike, if you want to proceed?
Michael Livermore 5:45
Let’s maybe pause for a second. There’s a lot on that table already. But maybe just to again, we’re just getting our feet wet here. An initial question that, you know, that one might have with this project that you’re engaged in is, what does you know what, what is the business of philosophy here. So you know, I can kind of imagine studying love, or studying people’s relationship with the environment, the emotional relationship with the environment, say, from, from a psychological perspective as a psychological phenomenon, or we might think about this love, or the relationships with the environment as a sociological phenomenon, that we could study using the tools from that field, or we could think kind of historically how the idea of love has changed over time, or how this concept or these ideas play out in different cultural contexts, you know, kind of a historical perspective. So before we kind of dive more in-depth into your arguments, which I do want to do, of course, is just maybe to set the stage by, you know, getting your thoughts on, what is the role for philosophy here? Just as an initial question, why are we turning to the tools of philosophy in order to engage with this phenomenon?
Laura Candiotto 7:08
Yes, so in this paper, I do at least three things, I would say. The first one is that really, I’m working with language. So I’m trying to refining the way we speak about our engagement with nature. And so also when we speak about our love of nature, and try to see really what we mean with this, and also try to work with new words, and new concepts that can try to change our ways of interacting with nature. So if we can use a kind of language that is more, that has to do more with engagement, instead of taking nature as for example, the object just an object, and I’m a spectator of this beautiful landscape, but nature is more like my interactive partner, and I can’t find new words to express this i we can say that working with language, we can also transform our perception and our practice in nature. So, the first level is language, the second one that has to do with more practice-oriented kind of philosophy. So a kind of philosophy that is very much situated, contextualized, that has a bottom-up approach, and that wants to tackle some pressing issues of our days. And the third point is a conceptual work. So they did that in order to work with language and also tackling these practical issues. Philosophy can offer a consistent conceptual framework for thinking about them. And so, when you do this conceptual work, you of course, also engage with some objections. So you discuss other perspective, and you show why your perspective is better than others, and you offer examples and so on. So, but I will say that in this paper, I have, I have this understanding of philosophy as a practice, as something that we do, and our we write, also our paper and what we aim for, what we want to try to tackle and change through our discourse, our transformation of our discourse about global nature in this case.
Michael Livermore 9:45
So then, good so that’s a very interesting bit of background and that’s very helpful for framing so the idea is both it sounds like to understand how we’re using these ideas or these words or if there are concepts that are kind of floating around, that are linked up to these words, and in some sense, kind of help to provide clarity about what we’re talking about, or to, you know, just kind of, it’s housekeeping in some sense, to clarify how we’re approaching the world. But also it’s not. It’s not only a descriptive project, it sounds like there’s also embedded here is an ethical project where you have some commitments, or, you know, at least for purposes of this project, you’re adopting some commitments say that, you know, our relationships to nature are out of whack, or we’re, we have a climate crisis, and there are kind of complex social, political, economic and moral reasons behind that. And so part of the goal with the project is not simply to state a more cleaned up version of our current relationships to nature, but also to articulate a vision of what our relationship to nature could be that would, that you know, at least arguably think would kind of put us in a better position to realize our own kind of moral and ethical goals visa vie our relationship to the environment.
Laura Candiotto 11:17
Yeah, indeed, yes, there is this idea that philosophy as this ethical aim, or can this ethical aim, but again, this ethical purpose is not framing within universalistic account like providing some principles or rules of action, but more it is an engaged with ethics that is grounded in a process of transformation of the moral agent. So, and this has to do also with an ancient conceptualization of philosophy, because if we take for example, the work by Pierre hudl, French scholar will say that philosophy in the Greek time was it will see spiritual a spiritual exercise of transformation of our perception and action in the world actually say more the perception of the world. But then, if we read this, also, along with some pragmatist tools, we can say also that to change how we live our our daily life, so of course, we can take philosophy in this way as a transformative experience, and this transformation as to do with an unethical transformation of self betterment.
Michael Livermore 12:43
Right, okay, good. So and so I think that’s also placing kind of your methodology a little bit within the world of philosophy, as well as this kind of situational list or, you know, kind of, as you said, bottom up approach, which is different from, you know, other approaches that are gonna start with principles, and then reason about situations from principles and you want to, how hardcore are you, by the way within the situation? Because, you know, there are different versions of this, you know, are you someone that thinks that, like, there, there are no principles, that it’s not just a matter of figuring out what the principles are? Cuz, you know, one concern that I’ve, that I’ve seen articulated, if you take a very hardcore version of the situation, analyst perspective, is that it almost makes it impossible to do the work, of, of philosophizing of thinking about, you know, because it’s just the situation, and there are no general principles that we can abstract, it just seems almost to do away with the whole project of, of reasoning.
Laura Candiotto 13:47
Yeah, I agree. And I think that the title of my paper says a lot about this, because I say a lot in the earth by loving a place. So my aim is starting from specific context, to get to the universal so I’m not denying the universal dimension, but I start from, from the bottom to get there. So we can say that it is a relation of account and not a relativist account in this regard.
Michael Livermore 14:20
So, so great, that’s all super helpful, again, that helps to situate as it were, your thinking within this, you know, kind of broader, you know, broader debates about how we go about the process of doing moral reasoning. And so just to return to the, to the arguments that you were, you’re introducing right at the top of the conversation, and we can maybe just start to unpack them a little bit. See, one of the kind of basic, foundational bits of perspective that you offer in the paper are these three different accounts of love, which maybe we can think of is interacting with each other and maybe they’re not totally distinct, but they you know, again, kind of illuminate what’s going on? There’s the care perspective, the value perspective. And then the fusion model. And the Fusion Model, there’s this notion of oneness is, again, as you note, you’re rejecting or you’re raising concerns with the Fusion Model visa vie love of nature. I guess just one question quickly is, do you also reject the fusion model in terms in terms of love visa vie human relations is kind of inadequate? Or are you kind of put that to the side? Or how do you feel about that?
Laura Candiotto 15:29
Yes, I refuse it also, regarding the relationship. Actually, I started from that, in this paper that I already mentioned, at the love in between, we were challenging the fusion account about a romantic relationship. And by writing this paper, I started to say, Oh, well, but it could we also think in terms of romantic relationship away to non human beings, could we think about this about a loving relation with a dog or a tree or a place, and what does it mean, and when you go to love of nature, and especially if you read some, something that is not immediately philosophical, like novels, or poems, this fusion account is quite omnipresent, right? And also in a fascinating way. And also, there are some romantic paintings that are so beautiful, really expressing this immersion into nature as this, this feeling of being one with nature. So I don’t want to deny that we may feel in this way. But my point is that for my ethical concerns, this is not the best way, because there are many problems related to eat. So we can train ourselves in different forms of love that focus on difference instead, instead of oneness.
Michael Livermore 16:58
It’s really, really interesting. So again, just to maybe just recapitulate, we just said, it’s not to say that such experiences can’t be had. Who knows? Maybe they can, you know, people attest to them in some ways, right? And you know, that then there’s an interesting question, like, Should we call that love is that love properly understood? I like that. Right. So that’s, that’s kind of interesting. That goes to the kind of conceptual clarity point. But I think part of what the argument here is, and maybe we can just delve into this, because I think it’s really interesting, sorry, we’re not moving through the whole paper, we’re taking each step really slow. But to what you just said is that, you know, that doesn’t provide a good ethical basis for you know, our relationships with nature. So let’s, let’s unpack that a little bit. Because I can imagine a counterargument might come back and say, What are you talking about, like that feeling of oneness with nature and the dissolution of the boundary between self and other is like the most profound experience that you could have these of you the natural world, and it’s a wonderful foundation for, for an environmental ethic, it immediately leads us to be less selfish, to you know, to engage in politics to be committed to the preservation and integrity of the system and that that is really good because you do need emotions. I think you’re as loud as you are philosopher emotions, and I don’t think it would be too much to speculate that you would say that emotions are an important part of politics and political engagement, they would say, that is a really excellent it’s in fact, in fact, the best foundation for a most powerful and motivating foundation for an environmental politics. So so that’s just to offer the counterargument so I’m curious what your response is to that.
Laura Candiotto 18:52
And yeah, that we miss a lot if we start from oneness and what we miss is the rich biodiversity and the otherness and mystery that is implied by difference, but not only the mystery, really recognizing and acknowledging the uniqueness of the other and this uniqueness is also in terms of radical difference. So the problem is that okay, we can value someone only if he is or she or it is like me, not at all we need to value he, she or it exactly because it is or she is totally different from me. And so this really has to do with making space for the value of difference the ethical value of difference and this has to do with nature. When we think of natural light, not just like, you know, this environment that is surrounding this landscape, but as the biodiversity, or full of different living beings, and, and so also if we have this perspective that is grounded on difference, we can also acknowledge many tensions and, and problems. So again, I do not just care about a beautiful landscape and also this was one of the Multics that we can find in many times, you know, so the value of a landscape is very often described in terms of, of the beauty of this place. The point is also, and especially now, caring and valuing a place, especially because it is a mess, and there are a lot of problems. It is a polluted river, and it is also our fault. Mostly it is our fault, if it is a polluted river, right? So an ethics of difference, I strongly believe that providing better tools for really engaging for the well-being of a place is better than just focusing on sameness or oneness. Yeah.
Michael Livermore 21:13
Yeah. Great. Well, that’s very, that’s really, that’s a really interesting perspective. And I like really love that notion that on the one hand, you can, you can love a place where you can have a certain Let’s put aside the word love for him, you can have a certain kind of feeling that you get when you see wondrous landscaping, you’re on a mountaintop, and there’s a beautiful feast, or something like that. And that’s you can have that emotional experience. And then there’s another emotional experience that you have when you see a polluted, polluted river. And that can create different kinds of feelings, but, but maybe, you know, thinking of that as love as one of them. There’s a Pete Seeger. So Pete Seeger is an American folk singer, who is an important figure in kind of history of us folk music, he was actually doing his thing back in, like the depression and the aftermath of that. And then through the 60s in the 70s, he says, kind of very active in the civil rights movement. And he was also an important figure in that early environmental movement in the US. And he has a song about the Hudson River, which, of course, is the river port in New York City. It’s called sailing up my dirty river. But still, I still I love her, and I keep the dream that some day show. So run clean. That’s kind of the idea. So it’s like, I think that that’s kind of quick, because I’ve always found that quite poignant. And I think it relates exactly to that point that you can, that feeling of tenderness that you can have for a, what we might call it degraded resource.
Laura Candiotto 22:44
Yes, totally. I totally agree. Yeah.
Michael Livermore 22:47
So okay, so if we’re, if we’re moving away from this fusion model towards, you know, care, or value or something else, you’ve put, you know, there are some other ideas that you have in the paper, and that you’ve put on the table in our conversation, too. So, one idea that’s in the, in the papers, you say that, you know, nature or nature in general, I think but a situated a place, right, that’s where it kind of plays comes into the picture, right? Where we’re talking about, you know, where you live and your environment, your immediate environment, as a partner in a participatory process of making meaning, okay, so. So there’s a bunch of different ideas that are kind of simultaneous in there. So there’s, there’s meaning-making, there’s what it means for, you know, for a place to be a partner. And then I guess that’s related to the notion of like participation, joint participation in meaning-making. So I wonder if you’re using two, the sense making, meaning making, those are both ideas that are in the paper? Is there a difference between those things? Are we talking about the same thing? And maybe also, just what do we mean when we were- What do you mean when you’re talking about the process of sense-making or meaning making and you know, if those two things are different from each other, yeah.
Laura Candiotto 24:06
So, basically, I mean, that there is not, I and you that are already constituted, so that they are just two objects two substances that are already made, are there and at some point they need the what I am and what you are emerges from our interaction and this is the case also with a place so we can speak in terms of niche creation. So the process in which an environment started to became my place in replying to my needs, and I can also reply to the needs of this place. So that there are interactions in between and this interaction are conceptualized as a process of making, sense of creating meaning, so our field of significance and why meaning because in this process of niche creation, I’m trying to reply to my existential needs, we can think about them in terms of survival. So, a place can reply to my needs of having food, if I make a garden, but also relational needs. So, if I go in a place, because there is a nice community there, so, I started to share some practices with the other people that are living there and so on. So the point here is not really understanding a place as something that is already there, but something that in a process and interactive- through an interactive process, something that can become my place, but also in this process, I am going to change and that’s why I use this concept of becoming native at the ground of my conceptualization. So I can say that, in my work, there are two prominent inspirational figures on the background. One is the French philosopher Luce Irigaray, who developed this view of love as something that is free from this idea of possession of an object. So it is not an object already constituted that I can get because I desire it. So this is one and the second one is freer Matthews, with philosopher from Australia will develop view on been in nature as dialogical encounter. So I understand that this dialogue from within a place as a process of participatory sense-making,
Michael Livermore 27:05
Right. Okay, great. So there’s there’s, again, a bunch of interesting things happening here simultaneously. So one is, again, this notion of sense-making, a participatory sense-making so I think some folks might think of a sense-making or meaning-making as having a semantic element to it, right. So like, you know, just a conceptual kind of element to it, but what it sounds like, what you’re talking about is maybe something different, again, you can welcome correction. So then, the idea being that what’s happening is this kind of recursive process, where a person, a human being is there, their sense of self-identity and how they understand the world in both the perhaps a semantic sense, but also, you know, in an emotional sense, or just how sensors embedded in their daily practices, right,
Laura Candiotto 27:59
I would say more fundamentally, as a non on top poetic process,
Michael Livermore 28:06
which I will admit I’m not, it’s not one that I use very often in my day to day life. So, what is that what are we talking about there?
Laura Candiotto 28:16
Self-creation. So, if we start from this idea, that the world is not made of already made substances or objects or building blocks, we can see how what we call objects are things or living beings, emerge out of process of interaction, and the process of interaction and focus in here is interaction between at least one living being and other beings, that are inhabiting a place and so, it is at the beginning and an embodied process and well then in the inactive literature, there is a very interesting and important book on how also language, I mean also verbal communication can emerge from from from the body. So I’m not just speaking about you know, sensory-motor relationship, but the point here is really taking sensemaking as an embodied practice of living beings that inhabit a place. So, it is not just conceptual or we can say that the conceptual dimension emerges out of embodied interaction. So this is the starting point of the inactive approach of cognition.
Michael Livermore 30:01
Okay, I think I think I’m getting at it. So the idea of distinction that you’re drawing is, you know, that we build our ways of understanding the world through, as you say, an embodied process, an interactive process with our environment. And that’s, that’s pretty foundational to how you think about a lot of things I take. And so as opposed to say, you know, I’m not sure anybody else who holds this view but something like that all that humans are doing when we make meaning is, you know, kind of being disembodied, you know, agents, that I’m not even an agent to disembodied, you just entities that read meaning that kind of pre-exists in the world that have, you know, concepts that are kind of out there. And we’re just a process of extracting them. Like it through a refining process or something like that. It’s rather what’s going on is, again, it’s this engaged process of sense-making. So I guess the- so now, now that we have that, if that’s built into our structure of how we understand the way that we come to understand the world, right, is this embodied, engaged process, it seems kind of natural in some way for there to be a role for your, your physical place, because it sounds as though it doesn’t even make sense for us to come to an understanding of anything outside of this active, engaged recursive process through which we come to understand the world. So if that’s true, I guess what I’m trying to distinguish is, is kind of everybody in the world who’s just, it didn’t adhere to like, the nature of how of sensemaking basically, as we’re defining it, isn’t automatically a lover of nature, just because they have to be in some sense because they’re, in order to come to any sense making they’re engaged with a place and because that’s where they’re embedded and that’s how they come to understand anything are built to build a notion of the world. And so, is it just like automatic that someone has this participatory meaning-making process or what distinguishes the love of nature from just how we come to understand the world,
Laura Candiotto 32:28
I would say that it is not automatic, unfortunately, maybe, but also this is good, that is not automatic, because it has to do with the development of certain beauties, attitudes, and it is the strangest practice or at least I wanted to stress this dimension. So, there are other colleagues that really working on this continuity between life and mind and also continuity between life and emotion can say that, a living being is just by being a living being is a lover, I don’t see that, I feel that love is something that should be nourished. So, we can say that maybe we have a basic attachment to our place right but this could be also very narcissistic or egotistical, also, when I was defining this relationship, when I say this is my place, that this my place can be very much self-centered. And this is not love, because love also need to take perspective that is other oriented. So, I will say that while love it is not against of course, this embodied perspective on sensemaking we can say that can come from there Right? In certain cases more naturally than others, but a practice is needed, a practice of cultivation of certain varieties of care and towards the place and in my paper, I try to start these list these beauties, but my, my main goal in this paper is providing the framework for understanding them. So I speak in terms of inactive listening. So when you start to listen to a place in a certain way, or in a certain manner,
Michael Livermore 34:38
Yes, great. Okay, good. And so just to give me one final thing, then, you know, we can kind of move on to that point about listening and the virtue stuff, which is super interesting, but just to get just on this connection between, you know, the, almost like an epistemic set of views about how we come to build a sense of the world, and this relationship to loving nature and the right ideas that it’s not automatic, right, it’s a practice that we need to cultivate them, you know, has ethical dimensions to it, tell me if this sounds right to you, on your view, that a love of nature in the way that you describe right, which is really a love of place, and you know, that you have a particular relationship with is a arises naturally from a correct understanding of how we do sensemaking. But that, you know, people often are mistaken about that, and they can be you know, and that can lead to kind of egotism or this notion of separateness or whatever, but if you really understand how you make sense of the world, that would then naturally lead you to this kind of relationship and attitudes that would be part of a practice of that you would cultivate, that involves loving nature.
Laura Candiotto 36:07
Yes, this is a good way for understanding it. I didn’t phrase it in this way my paper, but I think that it could be a good way for forgetting there also, because it can really point to my work on language right. So, how we can revise or transform our language in order to start to perceive our relationship with a place in a different way, in a better way. And in order to do it, we need to have the correct understanding. And so, if we keep going with this dualistic assumption, that nature is in a way, just a resource that we can use and it is just out there forever, just for us or nature is just weak objects that we need to protect. So, here, I’m just using the two extremes that they are both sharing the idea that nature is just an object out there, we are keep working with this dualistic account that does not that underestimate the value of this fundamental relationship of inhabiting a place as what constitutes our self and the place. So, what they say that beginning this fundamental process of sense-making or we can also call it this fundamental process of interdependent autonomy, of self that creates themselves in relationship and while So, understanding Yes, and I will take this epistemic dimension that you rightly stress also in an effective way, right, because I say that while there is a discontinuity between life and cognition and life and emotions, so, I’m not going to talk a lot about emotions here today with you, but we can also try to get an account of understanding that is more effective, right, that way of really appreciating the things for what it is, and in there there is our account of love, the one that I developed with Hannah Deagar in the love in between paper, where we say that love is this desire to know more about the other ourselves and the world together. So here you see we are taking the affective dimension here spell it out in terms of desire this this motivational this affected motivation towards what to know it better the other so what does it means knowing better they’re understanding it properly. So and in this paper, I say that listening is the fundamental practice that we need to undertake in order to have this correct understanding.
Michael Livermore 39:19
Right, so then so one of the things this is another interesting really interesting we have in the paper that you know, there’s a relationship between loving, listening, and I think learning those were the things that I kind of came up with. And in listening I took to be understood kind of metaphorically. You mean like attending to not necessarily like using your ears right but yeah, right. And so that so this is really interesting this to me that struck me as a rising very naturally from the thread of your arguments that we’re thinking about being situated, respecting difference right as kind of differences important foundation for love rather than this notion of unity or oneness. And then, you know, if you really, you know, do love something, then you want to learn about it. And that involves a practice of attention. That- one of the things that I think is another very closely related and moving in the paper that I think is maybe more controversial. And again, I want I’d be very curious to hear your thoughts on it and explore is this notion that not only does it make sense for us to listen to or attend to our place, but our place listens to us to this mutual relationship. Yeah, my father used to say, when we were kids, don’t love anything that can’t love you back. And he kind of meant that with respect to like stuff like don’t become overly materialistic. He was actually I’m not sure he followed that advice. But that was the idea. Don’t care too much about objects in your world. So the question that is related to this is, Can nature love us back? And kind of some and you work with some of these? You don’t say it exactly that way. But you talk about you raise this question, like the notion of having community with a tree, and you and you ask, you know, is that just a solipsistic fantasy? And your answer is no. But you know, when I saw that, I was like, well, you know, it’s a worthwhile question, right? And we just imagining this stuff, or we just project again, like, rather than listening, and really coming to understand the thing for what it is, we’re like, projecting, or anthropomorphizing or whatever. And so, so again, yeah, this is quite interesting. So one of the things you say in the paper, is, if I treat a river with love, it will listen to me by being healthy. And so. So that struck me as a pretty concrete notion of what it means to what how you’re using that term, listen in this kind of mutualistic way, visa vie visa vie, you know, nonhuman systems. And so, so what, so what is it? And what sense is that listening, I guess, that’s, I guess what I mean, so like, it’s the river is going to respond to my behavior, right? So and to not just my behavior, but the behavior of people around me, right. So if to take the Hudson River, for example, you know, the Hudson River listened to New York City and New York City policies by being very polluted for a long time. And then once we started to, and not just New York City, but the state of New York. And there’s a long history of different pollutants going into the Hudson River from various sources from sewage, industrial pollutants and the like. And then we started to clean up the environment and have a different attitude. And we acted differently, we started to treat our sewage before dumping it into the river, we started to reduce and banned some of the industrial compounds that had been causing a lot of pollution in the Hudson River, and we even started to clean it up. We started to, you know, do all things, build parks along the riverside and, and whatnot. And then the river has had made an amazing recovery. It’s much less polluted, and it’s a much safer place. So but that strikes me as a lot different than listening, at least as I normally think of the term listening. It’s kind of responding for sure. It’s, it’s changing. There’s a mutualistic. There’s a relationship between what I do, there’s feedbacks between what humans do and what is going on with the river. So I guess the question is, what’s the value? What’s the meaning of using the term listening in that context? And is that? What do we get out of using that word to describe what’s going on in that situation?
Laura Candiotto 43:35
Well, this is an amazing question. And I think that I needed to write another paper to reply to it, and I think a lot for properly provide an answer. But yes, you really got to my, to my point, when you stress, the ethical value of really acknowledging our behaviors as not just an impact on the objects of our behavior, but the the object replies to us, but you say, Oh, well, but maybe we can understand this in terms of feedbacks or, you know, consequences of our actions is the place really listening to me? So of course, here the point is really try to understand listening, not just, you know, listening through the ears, but not only metaphorical, and this has been also, this objection has been addressed also by some of my commentators because this paper has been published it along with some kind of peer commentaries. From from colleagues and some really asked this question. So, I don’t want needed to take to say oh well, but listening here is just metaphorical right, for me is important keeping listening for stress in the embodied dimension right. And, the embodied dimension really means that by being there and living with the place within the place in a certain way treating it badly or in the best possible way, the plays can reply to me in a different way. And so, here when I say listening in an embodied perspective, I want also to say not just to the ears, but also through touch through smelling, of course, here I’m enlarging the spectrum of listening also to other senses, to the other senses, but this is important because it means more like really been open to the place from our embodied living experience. And so, this can bring us to perceive this dimension of shared aliveness that in my paper is the way through which this dialogical encounter can take place, I will say that if I would write another paper about this, I can consider the option of not necessarily needing conceptual framework that uses words that have to do with language and communication right, because I started to think about listening, because my research question was how can I communicate with another being that is radically different from me, and we do not share a common language right. So, this was my research question, the right and that’s why I have all these words, that has to do with language and communication and also because one of my main interlocutors in this paper is free and Matthews, who speaks in terms of dialogue, right, but it will be very interesting to to to enlarge, maybe I have to consider this to enlarge this a bit, the risk is missing the something that is unique of us, humans as the living beings, that we are linguistic bodies, right. And this is the title of that book that he was referring before about this conceptualization of meaning, verbal communication and language from an inactive point of view by the power of Safari and, and the Jaeger so, I don’t want neither to reduce human beings just to simply bodies without language perspective and, and concept. So, the point of keeping this linguistic framework could be important, but Well, I agree that more work maybe is necessary here. But while I say more about this, in my answer to the objections, that has been addressed to the paper, where I try to explain why listening as a concept can be useful beyond the ethical implication, that is in that these are evident because focusing on on on listening and focusing on our mutual relationship, we can really see how much we can do in embracing inactive ethics towards loving a place.
Michael Livermore 49:10
Maybe we can wait if we have time we can return to this physic there’s still lots of interesting stuff to explore in this in this domain of of kind of a mutuality or dialogic or communication with with nature or with a place but I wanted to touch on a couple of other questions. And then again, if we have a few minutes, we can maybe return to some of this because all really interesting stuff. But the other big question I had bigger picture question maybe is, you know, do you see this kind of relationship to a specific place as like essential for living a good life? Is it really like kind of a, like a core part of a complete human existence? And one of the reasons I was just thinking about this is, you know, some people move around a lot They don’t necessarily build a really close, you know, deep connection to any, to any particular place. In fact, you’ve moved over the years, right? And so, so what do we think of academics or others and you know, people in different kinds of jobs or people who have had been forced from their homelands because of political circumstances or war or economic concerns or whatever, you know, that so that it’s, it disrupts the various economic, political, social or personal or psychological factors that, you know, just make it difficult for someone to build this deep connection to a place that you’re describing. So, so I guess, yeah, so, the question is, is that really like making it difficult for them to lead you to complete ethical lives? And I guess a related question is, is it essential for engagement with environmental politics in a deep and sustained way to have the type of love of nature and wealth of place and to be able to build that over time that you describe?
Laura Candiotto 51:05
Oh, yes. So, I wanted to say two things at this regard. First, that loving a place should not be a privilege. And as we know, unfortunately, many people have been banished by their place for different reasons, political reasons, wars, migrations, economical crisis, etc. And so, we could say that there is a kind of structural violence and that if we say that, while loving a place is crucial activity in order to have a better life in order to develop your listening skills, learning to love, etc. So, this is terrible. And so, we could also say that in certain situation, we academics, that are forced it not to if we choose to that or force it to moving around for having a job, we are under the impression of a very poisonous, poisonous violence in a way we can reply in this way, but I want also to say that focusing on loving a place so, this situated account of the love of nature does not mean that you don’t have you don’t travel anymore. So that you just leave it in your place because this also would be extremely problematic, because you could start to develop a very narrow mind, not appreciate in different places, etc, etc. So, the point would be to allow yourself enough time to start loving also new places, and maybe you can do it, if you had the chance, at least for a while of spending a good amount of time in a place and also building certain relationships also with other environmental activist etc. And then when you started to travel around, so, you can try to do the same in these different places, even if you are going to live there just for a year or two. So, I would reply with these two hours worth and also I would like to add these things that now we are going also to inhabit beautiful places and also these are important for in terms of building relationships for doing something good for the environment, right. So, we can also think about a network of people who have this kind of relationship with their places that although they had to leave, they can keep nursing the relationship to that place to this grassroots movements for example, and also create connections with people who are working in the same or similar or even different manner in a different country, etc. So, I think that in a way, I wanted to stress that there is a dimension of structural violence in this constant need of moving or when in the academic jobs or also for other reasons as they said at the beginning, but also that it is possible to love place also if you do not commit to this specific place for all your entire life. And this is also important because allows the person to do not just been bounded to that specific place that this could be also very problematic, because can became a former too strong attachment, but starting to love different places. So how this love of a place can extend and expand towards other places that are recognized in their uniqueness. So you started to care for them as well. And this also can help in this process of moving towards the love of the earth, and not just the love of my tiny little garden. Right. So thinking in this way, we can also see the bright side of moving around that you have the opportunity of loving new places, and so loving more places. The point is that from this plurality, you don’t miss the individual and the specificity of of the places, right, but you can keep the differences, just extending the number.
Michael Livermore 56:06
So we can, we should love a place but we don’t have to be monogamous.
Laura Candiotto 56:10
Yes, we can speak it this way. Yeah, indeed.
Michael Livermore 56:14
You know, be a little bit promiscuous, and how, how we love how we love places. So you bet you mentioned this, but I think I wanted to highlight because I thought was a really interesting argument, the paper or kind of consequences thereof, and the paper is how you build up these, you know, fair to say emotional connections that people have to places or this particular relation as they have with their, with their with, with specific places, into something that looks like an environmental movement, that is actually able to accomplish broad political change, because of course, if, as you just noted, if we’re all just focused on our own, protecting our own little gardens, you know, that’s, that’s not really doesn’t at first blush seem like a good foundation for political action. But as you argue in the paper, and as you noted, if you’re, you know, your love of your specific place, also creates the opportunity to understand the bonds that others have with their places, and to build in a kind of a networked fashion. You know, everyone’s starting with their situated kind of experience in relationship with a place or places, you know, that creates a sense of common understanding. And that then can be, you know, serve as a against kind of a foundation for a broader collective movement. So that that definitely strikes me as really interesting. I mean, one of the, I wonder, we’ll kind of get into the end of our time, but, you know, there’s an old kind of old expression, you know, think globally, act locally. And it sounds like you would just, would you reverse that and say, think locally and globally or, you know, love locally, you know, do you engage in politics globally? Like, what are your kind of culminating thoughts on how, you know, given that so many of the challenges, environmental challenges that we face now are truly global in scope, climate change, plastics, pollution, you know, problems with the oceans, you know, there’s just a really vast number that really, this generations and the subsequent generations environmental tasks are really global, you know, how do we you know, what is the relationship between the global and the local in your framework?
Laura Candiotto 58:37
Wow, I really like how you phrase it, I can also maybe rephrase it again and say by loving locally, you can act globally. So, I really like this, you know, that the final point is not just love your place, right. So, you start from from from there, and it but it is not just as a mean, if you want for a better and bigger and it is just because you it is what you can do, actually, right? Because you can work from where you are, and I’m saying this because I I noticed that some of the environmental despair or anxiety or grief arise exactly from the idea that the problems are too big and too far and too global. And so I cannot do anything to change it. And so what I wanted also to show with this, this paper is that we can do something and it is in our power. And what we can do is loving our place, but not stopping there. But by correctly understanding our place listening to it, and so loving it, we can act for the earth in a participatory manner. So here really for this movement that starts from the local and goes to the global, the concept and practice of participation is really crucial, because it’s really speaks in terms of community building, or network or relationship, right. And so we can also say that to us, you can start to build your relationships in, in the place you inhabit. And you started to extend this a bit more and started to create notes with other people who are doing the same in in their place. So but this is not something that happened automatically. Again, I don’t think I don’t believe automatism, that very much. I am a response to the list. So I think that we need to, to do things because we care. And so we put effort. And so there are three new strains practices, and if you want also legal actions that would require time. So you know, criticism to my view could be oh, well, but this is very interesting and nice, blah, blah, blah, but we need an answer right now. We don’t have time anymore. So maybe it’s better to just go for some universal regulation or real rules, because we don’t have time for this movement. Well, I don’t reply to this objection, in this paper, on the opposite, I try to show the benefits that can arise from my proposal.
Michael Livermore 1:02:22
Great, okay. Well, you know, it’s a really fascinating set of ideas. And I think this link between the, you know, this notion of our connections to our place, and where we live, and, you know, these emotional connections that we have, and the scale of global problems that we face on many environmental issues is a fascinating one. You really have offered a super interesting perspective on this set of questions. And so I appreciate the work you’ve put into thinking about all this stuff, and the chance to chat with you today about it.
Laura Candiotto 1:03:02
Thank you, Mike. Really, thank you very much, because you as always made me think a lot so I have already some new ideas that I want to develop and also some objections to reply. And well there is work to be done,
Michael Livermore 1:03:18
Right, great. Well, that’s always the good end for a conversation is your work.
Laura Candiotto 1:03:23
Yes, thank you, Mike.
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