What is a Hyperobject?
Published 4/15/23 in Sierra Sun
Burning questions: What is a hyperobject? | SierraSun.com
If you’re anything like me, you grew up somewhere in the United States over the last few decades with a set of givens nestled inside your brain like cozy birds: That ours is the greatest country in history and the answer to the millennia-old question of how humans should best govern themselves; that God created the earth and put man (and, peripherally, woman) in charge of it; that if you save up and go to college you’ll have a long, successful career; that human progress is inevitable and without significant cost.
And –most importantly—that there is no reason to question any of those givens.
Well, what if some –or even all—of those cozy nested givens were mistaken?
What if the way we all grew up thinking about ourselves and the world turned out to be only a tiny sliver of reality, and a misguided one at that? What if, rather than masters of our domain, it turned out that we humans were just a small part of an enormous network of systems that is beyond our ability to truly understand?
Timothy Morton is an English professor at Rice University and a philosopher who coined a delightful and mind-bending term called “hyperobjects.” Morton’s definition, as referenced in his 2013 book Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, describes them as “things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans.” They are things too vast for us to really get our heads around, and likewise too vast to touch or see in their entirety… but they are fully integrated into our existence, as we are into theirs.
The evolution of our awareness of the world and its workings is easily seen throughout our relatively short history, and the way our explanations of things have changed over millennia. Of course we used to think that god(s) lived in the sky; that is where we find the sun, the moon, thunder and lightning, rain and snow… But now we understand (somewhat, at least) the physical properties that create those life-giving --and sometimes life-threatening-- phenomena, and we don’t feel we need to appease the god of thunder with a sacrifice when a storm comes. We just get a weather alert on our iPhones and slip indoors to ride it out with a Netflix show and some snacks.
And speaking of weather, Morton had this to say in Hyperobjects: “You are walking out of the supermarket. As you approach your car, a stranger calls out, ‘Hey! Funny weather today!’ With a due sense of caution –is she a global warming denier or not?—you reply yes. There is a slight hesitation. Is it because she is thinking of saying something about global warming? In any case, the hesitation induced you to think of it. Congratulations: you are living proof that you have entered the time of hyperobjects. Why? You can no longer have a routine conversation about the weather with a stranger.” (p. 99)
The term inspired prolific filmmaker Adam McKay to create a production company named after it (Hyperobject Industries), and the first film produced by the company was the wildly successful 2021 disaster comedy Don’t Look Up, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence. In a 2021 interview with Laura Hudson for Wired Magazine (At the End of the World, It’s Hyperobjects All the Way Down | WIRED) on how Morton’s “hyperobjects” inspired the name of his production company, McKay said, “’You can feel your brain changing ever so slightly because you never even considered that possibility. That’s Timothy. Every page of their writing has that feeling.’”
Hudson expands on the concept further: “The word hyperobjects offers a useful shorthand for why threats like global warming are so difficult to understand or accept: They threaten our survival in ways that defy traditional modes of thinking about reality… Hyperobjects speak to the immense, structural forces all around us, and even inside us, that we cannot see with our eyes but strive to comprehend through data or computer modeling.”
The concept of the hyperobject not only points to the confounding “super wicked problem” of climate change (a future Burning Questions column may explore this fascinating conundrum), but to the expanded thinking that the grasp of the concept requires.
While the concept of hyperobjects is disorienting and even unsettling, it can also be powerfully freeing and exciting. It can open one’s mind up to the possibility of a world –or worlds—yet to be explored and understood… and, strangely, it also opens up the possibility of a mutual intimacy with everything and everyone around us. It is a humbling, and exciting, prospect to contemplate.
What is the Gaia Hypothesis?
Published 5/3/23 in Sierra Sun
Burning questions: What is the Gaia hypothesis? (Opinion) | SierraSun.com
Rupert, our family’s favorite backyard Aspen, was standing listlessly in the melting snow the other day, enduring my conversation with the cat, who was stalking some poor small creature along the concrete pad next to the house (where --finally--there is no more snow), when something about his movement in the warm spring breeze stopped my chattering for a moment. I leaned in closer to his slender branches and listened. But he was still and quiet and said nothing… at least nothing I could understand.
But that’s the problem right there: a human leaning into a tree, waiting for spoken English to emerge. Trees communicate, but not in any of our human languages. Why do we expect, always, to be met where we are, whether by other people or by other creatures that we may not understand? Like Rupert, for instance.
Which brings me to the second of two innovative thinkers featured in this column so far (Timothy Morton and his hyperobjects being the first): the late British chemist James Lovelock, who produced the Gaia Hypothesis in the 1970s, and expanded on it over the ensuing decades. A 2022 Economist article about Mr. Lovelock shortly after he died at age 103 described the hypothesis as capturing “the imaginations of the scientifically minded and mystically inclined alike with its proposal that life on Earth behaves like a mega-organism…. Researchers now know that bacteria on land and the oceans alter the chemistry of the atmosphere and the soil, regulating global temperatures. Algae produce airborne, cloud-seeding chemicals. Forests generate atmospheric rivers, and their own rain.” (Farewell to James Lovelock | The Economist)
Lovelock’s hypothesis was –and remains—controversial; in a 2013 article in New Scientist, Michael Bond wrote, “Gaia may have been rooted in genuine science, and its originator a well-regarded chemist, but when the public lapped it up with the enthusiasm they had shown for mysticism or faith healing, many scientists pulled up the drawbridge.” (Exploring our love/hate relationship with Gaia | New Scientist)
As with Morton’s hyperobjects, much of the argument supporting the Gaia Hypothesis is over my head and much of it is controversial, but I am fascinated by the groundbreaking –and at the same time, strangely intuitive—worldview that both concepts present. And there is similarity between the two; I suspect a Venn diagram would reveal quite a fair amount of overlap. Both concern themselves with entities, or systems of entities, that are vast in scope, beyond humans’ conventional realm of understanding, and at the same time powerfully interconnected with human life.
In a 2022 article about Lovelock after his death, Australian scientist Tim Flannery wrote about Lovelock’s first book, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979) in The Conversation, (Inspiration, mentor and a truly great man: Tim Flannery farewells scientist James Lovelock, who has returned to Gaia at 103 (theconversation.com)) “Portrayed as a sort of hippy, flower-power view of the world, the book is in fact a rigorous, numbers-heavy analysis of Earth function at the highest level.”
Lovelock, like Morton, was an intellectual of far-reaching and eclectic accomplishments and interests; both an inventor with an accumulated 40 patents during his career, and a well-respected chemist whose work informed his creation of the Gaia hypothesis. In the same article in The Conversation, Flannery mentioned an interview at Exeter University on Lovelock’s 100th birthday when a young man said, “’You are famous for thinking outside the box… How do you do it?’” Lovelock sat “for a moment or two before replying: ‘What box?’”
The concept of Gaia –an integrated view of the Earth and all the creatures on it—is foreign to the way most of us were raised to view our planet, and ourselves. But we are seeing, more with each passing day it seems, how interconnected we are: Global supply chains, our food systems’ reliance on honeybees, the increasingly complicated chemical interplay of heat and moisture in our weather… the list goes on. I think we could benefit from exploring different ways of understanding ourselves and the world. Innovative thinkers like Morton, Lovelock, and others may well be onto something important… possibly transformative.
Rupert knows this, I think. He’s just waiting for us to learn his language, so he can tell us.