Symbiosis, Livelihood, and Bioregion
摘要
Symbiosis, livelihood, and bioregion are ways of living and being with nature in the Anthropobscene and countering sublimation with desublimation in the Symbiocene, the hoped-for epoch superseding the Anthropobscene. A bioregion is a geomorphological and biological region, the watershed, the valley, the plain, the wetland, the aquifer, etc. where or on which humans live and work, and which sustains human and more-than-human life. This relationship is situated on a continuum between the mutually beneficial and ‘normal’ biological and psychological desire for, and pleasures of, symbiosis and mutuality at one end, and the parasitical, psychotic, and failed drive for mastery at the other. Raymond Williams’s concept of livelihood implies both our work and our physical surrounds, their environmental supports and effects. Symbiosis is both a biological and a psychological term, what could be called bio-symbiosis and psycho-symbiosis. After drawing on Lynn Margulis’s work on bio-symbiosis, Margaret Mahler’s work on psycho-symbiosis, Jessica Benjamin’s work on bonding, Michel Serres’s work on parasitism and the natural contract, and Raymond Williams’s late ecocultural work on livelihood and socialist ecology to make these cases, this chapter and the book then concludes by advocating for psychopolitical symbiosis and mutuality with the living earth in the Symbiocene.