Traces of ducks.

I miss the cold winters. This may seem frivolous, given the losses that others experience because of global warming and related ecological crises. Animals including humans need to leave their habitats because they are too hot, dry or wet, fall ill because of new diseases and pests, starve. But missing winter is part of  loss, that of the world that is supposed to hold us. Feeling at home in your life in the world is not just a matter of connection to a place and other beings. The landscape, the weather and the seasons are also part of it. Like day and night, the seasons ground my existence in time.

Traces of frozen water plants.

How we are grounded in time depends on our geographical location, which is dynamically related to our culture, writes the Japanese philosopher Tetsuro Watsuji (1961). Watsuji captures the subjective embeddedness of humans in their environment with the term ‘fūdo’. Fūdo literally means ‘Wind and Earth’ in Japanese, but Watsuji uses it to refer to ‘the climate, the weather conditions, the nature of the soil, and the geological, topographic, and scenic features of a given land’ (Johnson 2018:1134). Watsuji develops this idea of fūdo in response to Heidegger, who according to him focuses too strongly on time at the cost of our spatial existence. Time and history are, according to Watsuji, always embedded in a specific fūdo. This is expressed in the experience of humans, who are not loose subjects who accidentally roam around in a given environment, but who are always shaped by their environment. Watsuji gives the example of the cold (Johnson 2018:1138-1139). Coldness is a characteristic of a certain environment, but not a phenomenon that exists apart from us, and that we study from a distance: we experience the cold as cold.

Traces of thaw.

Watsuji connects this emphasis on locality to being with others. If we emphasize our being in time, this only gives us human existence on the level of individual consciousness (Watsuji 1961:9). According to Watsuji, ‘being-in-relation-to-others [aidagara 間柄] (...) is the essential place of standing out (ek-sistere)’ (Watsuji 1961, as cited in Johnson 2018:1138). Ek-sistere for Heidegger refers to existing in time, which is dynamic and moves towards the future, Watsuji argues. But understanding our being as Being in space too, including the spatial dimensions of time expressed in history and culture, reveals that we are fundamentally social beings. According to Watsuji, this embeddedness in a social-geographical framework is part of the kind of beings that we are, it is ontological and not just ontic. As embodied beings, human are formed by and form fūdo, which is then actualized in fūdosei.

Traces of wind.

We share this being of the land with the other animals, philosopher Ralph Acampora (2006) writes, translating fūdo as ‘climaticity’ (2006:33-34). We do so in general, just like we share our vulnerability and mortality with them, but also in given environments, where we share fūdosei. I write this at the end of August, when the hedgehogs, sparrows and others in my garden are noticing the first signs of autumn, like me. I live in a watery town, where humans, fishes, swans and ducks use the same water for swimming. The land is flat here, there is always the horizon for orientation. On hot days, I take my daily walk in the nearby nature reserve in the small patches of wood, in the shadow of the trees, like the four Highland cows who live there.

Traces of tyres, blackbirds and dogs.

I was looking for a photograph of pigeon footprints in the snow, but found this drawing instead.

At the same time, the fūdosei of other beings that we do not share with them – specific aspects of their experience or life-world, like living underwater or hibernating in the case of amphibians – shows us aspects of the world that surround us that we might overlook when we only focus on our own human experience. For humans in countries with four seasons, winter is a recurring event that they get used to when they grow up and are shaped by. But in these countries there are also beings who only experience one winter. Or none at all, like some smaller animals. And there are also the winters of the old trees, who lived with the seasons much longer than we and rely on them in other ways. While species is only one factor amongst many, and species membership should not be overexaggerated when it comes to understanding others or creating common life-worlds together, differences do provide us with a richer understanding of the possibilities of relating to the environment in which we are embedded. When it comes to finding a new attitude as humans towards the rest of the living world, which is less destructive, the outlook of nonhuman beings on common topics of interest can offer guidance.

As humans, we are in and of the world, we shape that world and are shaped by it, and this is a process in which world and self are continually changing. For Watsuji, the natural world to which we relate is not static, but its seasons used to have a solidity that we can no longer rely on. My fūdosei included coldness as part of the seasons that ground my existence. And now that this is gone, I need to find my feet again. This is only one aspect of life that is changing, that in severity of course cannot be compared to what animals (including humans) lose when they need to leave their actual homes due to the climate crisis. But it is a sort of homelessness too, in space and time. Learning to exist in a changing world shares similarities with having to find a home for yourself in the world after a personal loss, when you are also confronted with the strangeness of reality. But it is different from it too, because now nature, which consoles us by showing the cyclical nature of existence, cannot guide us.

Traces of frost.

One way of responding to this loss is by focusing on the movement of constituting new worlds with others. This will not bring back winter but it can counter violence on a smaller scale. In discussions about the climate crisis and other ecological disasters there is a tendency to speak about ‘the world’ being under threat, or in need of rescuing. But that project is too abstract and too large for individual beings and even communities. Moving from world to worlds enables us to see what can be done for and with others, and to make a change. Tending to life-worlds, and co-forming new worlds, is not a solely human project: other animals and plants are constantly in the process of creating meaning, together and in relation to humans. Kim Tallbear describes this coming together of experiences with the words of Vine Deloria Jr. as a ‘social reality, a fabric of life in which everything had the possibility of intimate knowing relationships because, ultimately everything was related’ (TallBear 2011:3). Different ways and modes of knowing do not obstruct relations, but form and inform them. 

Tending to the worlds of others for me for example takes the shape of helping the frogs, toads and salamanders in my town cross the road with a group of volunteers. I do this every spring, and assisting the amphibians has changed my fūdosei. Walking the streets in the evenings, looking for and picking up the animals taught me to read the weather differently, it affected my bodily attunement to my surroundings. The amphibians come out of hibernation around dusk when the temperature goes up and it is rainy. After a few years of looking and walking, my body learned to read in the days when the evenings will be busy and this has changed my experience of spring. Being attentive to the right conditions connected me differently to the multispecies community in which I live, and to the change from winter to spring.

Traces of care.

Language can also help us care for what disappears. I call the longing for winter winterwee in Dutch, a word that stems from heimwee, homesickness. I can capture what is gone in words and write about the frost flowers on the window of my childhood bedroom, skating on the slootjes that connect the meadows in Noord-Holland, or the stories my mother told, about cars driving over the IJsselmeer, the lake on which the town of Hoorn where I was born is located. Stories about others, such as nonhuman animals and their agency in finding new ways to live, can be the beginning of new narratives. We can all learn to read our environment better, through words, our bodies, new practices. This will not bring back winter in the Netherlands. But it might change worlds.

references

Acampora, Ralph R. Corporal compassion: Animal ethics and philosophy of body. University of Pittsburgh Pre, 2006.

Johnson, David W. "Self in Nature, Nature in the Lifeworld." Philosophy East and West 68.4 (2018): 1134-1154.

TallBear, Kim. 2011. "Why Interspecies Thinking Needs Indigenous Standpoints." Fieldsights, November 18. https://culanth.org/eldsights/why-interspecies-thinking-needs-indigenous-standpoints

Tetsuro, Watsuji, and Geoffrey Bownas. Climate and culture: A philosophical study. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1961.