Introduction

This book presents philosophical contributions to integral ecology—an emerging approach to ecology that crosses the disciplinary boundaries of the humanities and sciences (natural and social) with the aim of responding to the increasingly complex and perplexing ecological problems pervading the planet. "A book", according to Gilles Deleuze, "is not worth much on its own", but "can respond to a desire only in a political way, outside the book". Like any book, this book of integral ecological philosophy finds its real value in its response to what happens outside its pages, in the connections the book makes with other people, with other problems and questions. This book is an invitation to make those connections—to experiment to make something happen to respond to your desires. Can the book respond to a desire for a comprehensive understanding of ecological problems? Can it respond to a desire for a more peaceful and just tomorrow for humans and for all the beings composing our planetary home, our oikos? The answer is simple. Experiment.

This book allies itself with the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) and some of his colleagues and successors, particularly those who, like Deleuze, consider the task of philosophy to be an experimental effort to forge new connections, to create something and become different. Deleuze and his writing partner Félix Guattari express this sense of philosophy when they say, "Philosophy is the discipline that involves creating concepts". A similar definition of the task of philosophy comes from Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), a friend and colleague of Deleuze and another close ally of mine throughout this book. Derrida is well known for his writings on deconstruction, and although deconstruction might sound as if it would yield a destructive approach to philosophy, it is also (and perhaps primarily) creative. It works in a way that opens new possibilities: "Deconstruction is inventive or it is nothing at all; [...] it opens up a passageway, it marches ahead and marks a trail [...]. Its process involves an affirmation".

For thinkers like Deleuze and Derrida, philosophy is not just about talking or debating. Neither is it primarily a matter of thinking or reflecting. It is creative, inventive, or it is nothing at all. A philosopher's task is to facilitate the emergence of new events, new realities. Along these lines, the contemporary philosopher Graham Harman mentions that the "creation of concepts" proposed by Deleuze and Guattari is not just a creation of thoughts or images in human consciousness. Concepts are "independent forces traversing and apportioning reality", such that philosophy is not simply a creation of intellectual ideas but is also a creation of independent forces, which is to say, a "creation of objects" or integral units.

Philosophers create concepts, and these concepts are not simply representations in human minds. They are events, objects, occasions. One can participate in them by following clues and decoding signs that express strange, unknown, and mysterious things. Along these lines, Deleuze says that a philosophy book should be like a detective novel or science fiction book, which is not to say that philosophical writing should be fiction as opposed to fact, but that it should "intervene" in and "resolve local situations" (problems not unlike the murders, thefts, time travel, aliens, and artificial intelligences of detective and sci-fi situations). A concept is a specific event resolving specific problems, ranging from small-scale problems (e.g., a jewel heist or an intelligent robot) to large-scale problems (e.g., alien invasions and intergalactic politics) in the entangled temporalities (e.g., time travels) of presents, pasts, and futures.

Making things happen, concepts adapt and change along with the problems in which they intervene. "They are alive, like invisible creatures", like organisms changing with the dynamics of the events, problems, and other concepts that make up its environmental conditions. Concepts can be thought of as "centers of vibrations, each in itself and every one in relation to all the others", and even when they do not cohere or correspond, they still "resonate" with one another (like Aristotle's concepts resonating with Plato's even when they disagree), and they have a "nondiscursive resonance" that vibrates in practises, actions, and bodies. To get a sense of how a concept does something, it might help to imagine a concept as a lens, bearing in mind that a concept is not merely a tool but is more of nascent practise. A philosopher does things with concepts in much the same way that, through the lenses of eyeglasses, a detective might see something that should be looked at by a molecular biologist with the more powerful lens of a microscope, which might then provide evidence that calls for someone's arrest or liberation, or perhaps the evidence leads to the discovery that alien intelligences have been interacting with Earth for millennia.

A concept shifts and transforms as it tracks problems, and in doing so, it opens possibilities for engaging specific situations and for creating new situations. This is exactly what is set to work in the practise of deconstruction. As John Caputo says in commenting on a question that came up in conversation with Derrida, "to 'deconstruct' does not mean—how often do we have to say this?—to flatten out or destroy but to loosen up, to open something up so that it is flexible, internally amendable, and revisable". In short, philosophy can provide ways of participating in the local contexts of problems—here and now—whilst also calling for something else, something new, another context, summoning new possibilities.

A crucial question is whether philosophy can summon new possibilities not just for human existence but also for the nonhuman denizens of Earth. In contrast to much of the history of philosophy, which has been too focused on human existence, too anthropocentric and humanistic, Deleuze and Guattari (abbreviated henceforth as D&G) conceive of their philosophy in terms of a philosophy of Earth (i.e., geophilosophy) in which nature and human culture are not diametrically opposed. The entanglement of nature and culture was precisely what interested them about the philosophy of nature. In 1988, Deleuze said that he and Guattari hoped to "produce a sort of philosophy of Nature, now that any distinction between nature and artifice is becoming blurred". A few years later, D&G...