I started this blog with a view to giving expression to a discomfort I feel in the relationship(s) between humans and their environment; perhaps more specifically, the relationship the humans belonging to the culture and society to which I belong have with their environment. I am not sure whether it is possible to be precise about that discomfort, not least because (I have always found) feelings and emotions to be inconsistent, imprecise and transient. Scientists (and I claim to belong to that profession) are not supposed to like such things. It’s not as though they can be usefully applied or relied on. Further, there is a normative imperative to ‘objectivity’, though perhaps a little old-fashioned: a cold statement of facts, evidence and theory that supposedly exist irrespective of who discovers them or communicates them. This leads to over-use of the passive voice. Well, I wanted a space where I could write publicly about the ‘irrational’ reactions I’ve had to the facts, evidence and theory to which I have been exposed. The kind of material you can’t put in a paper to a journal.

The best metaphor for the discomfort I feel is an experience I had many years ago spending 24 hours with a tube running through my nose, down my oesophagus and into my stomach, connected at the other end to a data monitor keeping an eye on the pH of my stomach acid. It was bearable – sometimes you could even forget it was there – but it wasn’t comfortable. It was the intrusion of a machine into my daily routine, an ever-present augmentation of my physicality that was there to watch over me. The discomfort of the ecocyborg manifesto is like that, but without knowing or being able to see that the monitor or tube is there.

Putting emotions to one side, as I reflect on this discomfort, I have also found myself often to be in two minds (sometimes more…): are these really things to feel uncomfortable about? How should things be otherwise such that I might feel better about our relationship with the environment? And would that really be ‘better’? In sharing these thoughts, therefore, I share a conflicting mess, a confused bundle of half-thoughts and distracted imagery, a flickering screen channelling a noise-polluted signal. It is, for others who have read the works of A. A. Milne, the thoughts that occur in the gaps between life’s bumps as I am dragged downstairs, held by one ankle.

A manifesto is usually associated with a series of promises made by a political party, with a view to persuading the electorate that said party should be put in government. Manifestos thus, in some sense, outline the policies of their authors. The ecocyborg manifesto is, however, not mine; it is instead an observation, a manifesto I ascribe to my social, ecological and physical environment. Insofar as this environment is inanimate, such ascription could be open to the same criticisms as are levelled at Dennett’s Intentional Stance, or to non-animal agents in Actor Network Theory, or indeed, to any religion interpreting environmental outcomes in terms of the whims of fickle deities. I don’t particularly care: this is a mirror I hold up to the environment – if it is capable of decision-making, let it react as it sees fit. For now, the mirror is more important to me than the reaction. Sometimes, emotions and feelings beget insight.