Abstract
We all know what we’re up against. It is a way of thinking that proclaims the supremacy of human reason and its capacity to manage the affairs of the entire planet, including its human and nonhuman inhabitants, in ways that align with its own exclusive interests. Initially articulated by leading thinkers in the Europe of the eighteenth century, promising an age of Enlightenment, it has since spread around the globe on the back of a worldwide project of trade and colonisation. Although this project, propelled by advances in science, technology and medicine, has improved the lives of millions, it has come at the cost of massive environmental destruction and social injustice. For not only did the unfettered extraction of raw materials to feed industrial production and military armament lay waste to colonised lands but the peoples of these lands, routinely derogated as less than human, were also to face dispossession, slavery and even genocide. The consequence today is a global crisis, at once environmental and social, of unprecedented proportions.
We are only too aware that contemporary efforts to ameliorate the worst effects of the crisis remain largely mired in the very same orthodoxy that brought it on in the first place. Just as it was science that proclaimed the triumph of human reason over nature, and its technological applications that left behind landscapes of military and industrial ruin, so today, state actors and international bodies still look to science and technology for solutions to restore the earth system, once and for all, to human control. And just as it was the expansion of global capitalism, with its insatiable demands for raw materials, that destroyed much of what we call the natural environment, it is still supposed that if enough of nature can be ring-fenced to provide the ‘ecosystem services’, from clean air and potable water to touristic enjoyment, needed for the wellbeing of coming human generations, then states and corporations can continue to exploit the rest with impunity, for their own material advantage.
To shift a way of thinking that is so entrenched, and propped up by such powerful interests, is no mean task. Despite the plethora of voices from academia, environmental organisations, representative bodies of the world's First Nations or Indigenous Peoples, and what is increasingly known as the global South, embracing nations whose recent history has been marred by colonial oppression, the language of environmental policy and practice remains stubbornly unchanged. The question of how to divide up the planet, between territories earmarked for industrial growth and development – or increasingly today, for the infrastructure and facilities needed to support the digital economy – and territories protected for the purpose of conserving nature, remains at the top of the agenda. Big science, obsessed with the monitoring and remediation of climate change, continues to pay only lip service to ways of thinking that question its monopolistic appeal to fact and reason, while rolling its eyes with scarcely concealed contempt for the delusions of those who presume otherwise.
Why so? Why have warnings of the imperative to relearn arts of coexistence, which allowed past populations to prosper for millennia alongside nonhuman creatures of all kinds, apparently fallen on deaf ears? Why do those empowered to shape environmental policy continue to insist that a future for the world's fauna and flora can be secured only by protecting it from humanity, in reservations accessible only to scientific researchers and conservationists, to the exclusion of those whose lives and livelihoods long depended on sharing their lands with other beings in a spirit of conviviality? The contributions to this special issue agonise over these questions. They leave me increasingly convinced, however, that the problem – at least for scholars whose academic mission is to shift the dial of public consciousness – is not that the rhetoric of coexistence is too challenging for readers immured in the mainstream discourse of conservation but, quite to the contrary, that it fails to deliver the electric shock needed to jolt them from complacency.
Think of some of the phrases and injunctions so commonly bandied about; you can find examples in these articles too. ‘Humans are part of nature, not separate from it’. ‘We inhabit a more-than-human world’. ‘Everything is interconnected’. ‘To be alive is to be entangled in webs of relations with other beings’. ‘We must reject the anthropocentric worldview’. ‘Human exceptionalism is an illusion’. ‘The dualism of nature and culture is outmoded’. Every nature-lover, viewer of popular television programmes or delegate at an international sustainability conference will be familiar with expressions like these, and would doubtless nod in agreement without giving a thought to their real significance. No eyebrows would be raised. Should anyone, to the contrary, assert that humans are exceptional and entitled to grab what they can of nature for their exclusive enjoyment, they would likely be met with howls of disapproval. Some very powerful individuals, hell bent on stoking controversy, do indeed say things like this. To the environmentally minded, their posturing is outrageous. Yet it is these rabble-rousers who are taken to represent the mainstream!
Of course, the power of populism comes from giving voice to what many feel but are afraid to say, or to agendas that mega-corporations prefer to conceal behind a gloss of greenwash. We need to call it out. But it is equally important to call out the double standards inherent in a discourse of environmentalism which yokes its assertions of the connectivity of nature, and the part humans play in it, to a platform which accords pride of place to a way of knowing, born of the age of Enlightenment, which not only belongs exclusively to science but also bestrides the world. This is not just human but scientific exceptionalism. To challenge the exceptionality of science involves revisiting the questions of what is meant by nature, and indeed by human being. In a more-than-human world, what kinds of relations do humans entertain with beings of other kinds? Could even anthropocentrism and exceptionalism, after all, have a place within such a relational matrix, albeit without their usual connotations of separation and superiority? Can we bring nature and culture back?
In what follows, I shall review these questions. The foregoing articles contain many clues as to how they might be answered, but I shall not refer to them separately here. Instead, I shall try to set out the steps we need to take if we are to transition from the science of conservation to an ethos of coexistence.
II
Let us begin with the concept of nature. For many today, the concept undoubtedly bespeaks of a world that we humans, in the fulfilment of what we see as our personal and historical destiny, are as determined to leave behind as our own childhood. Yearning for what we have lost, we may dream of going back to nature and commend its restorative powers. But it affords us but a temporary respite, for rest and recuperation, before we once more take to the high road, with its promise of a better life in a world to come. It is not that we follow where other creatures go, as the hunter, for example, follows the trail or the gatherer the rhizome. On the contrary, we pride ourselves on having pivoted to set our course in the opposite direction. Accelerating down the fast lane of progress, we bear witness to nature not as the world around us but as a world ever closing up behind, reflected as it were in the rear-view mirror of our advance.
But if we humans see a world of nature only because, among living beings, we are unique in having overtaken it – if, that is, we alone can view this world retrospectively, in its reflection – then what can it possibly mean to assert that we too belong to nature, as much as any other creature, or that we are destined to play our part in it? Would we not have to go through the looking glass in order to do so? As our present and future selves, yes. Nevertheless, framed within the mirror image is the memory, from times past, not just of the world we have left behind but of what we once were before we, or rather our ancestors, had taken leave of it. This, the human part in nature, is a memory we carry with us, transmitted across the generations as an inheritance. It is not however a part we can actively play in the fulfilment of our present lives. Indeed, so long as progress in life means turning our backs on nature and leaving it behind, there can be no possibility of coexistence.
Yet it is this rearward perspective that turns the world closing behind us into an object for science. True, scientists must turn to face the earth to extract their data, yet having done so, they promptly pivot to project themselves and their findings towards a speculative future. Science and nature thus go their separate ways, the former advancing as fast as the latter recedes. In its determination to pin down the objects of its inquiry, science is blind to the flying, crawling, wriggling and burrowing of living beings as they ride the crests and probe the furrows of the lifeworld, fashioning themselves and one another as they go. Far from proceeding hand in hand and in the same direction with the creatures that absorb its interest and attention, science sees only specimens, each a token of its type, not so much a living thing as the embodiment of a received design, pre-encoded in the materials of heredity. In the eyes of science, then, living nature – including even humankind in its generic, ‘anatomically modern’ form – appears as an immense back catalogue of designs for life, commonly known as biodiversity.
What if it were otherwise? Anthropologists never tire of pointing out that nothing corresponding to ‘our’ concept of nature can be found in the conceptual vocabularies of non-western or non-modern peoples. The modern concept, they rightly observe, is a precipitate of the idea of progress so effectively promulgated by the philosophy of Enlightenment. Yet the word itself is of much older provenance. Derived from the Latin nascere, ‘to be born’, it referred originally to a power, at large in the cosmos, to give birth to new life. In this sense, the idea of nature is not at all strange to non-Western ways of thinking. On the contrary, it has counterparts in many Indigenous cosmologies, nominally committed to an ontology of animism, which embrace the idea of a world that, far from having already settled in its objective forms, is perpetually coming into being around and about us, thanks to the vitality of the materials and energy that course through it. This is the world of nature's naturing, of its continuous birth or natality.
The natural world, in this sense, might be better compared to a chorus than to a catalogue. In the catalogue, every item is objectively pre-specified, regardless of how it might be deployed in the theatre of interaction with others. But the chorus is not so much a collection of ready-designed items as a gathering of resonant voices, each of which issues forth, moment-by-moment, in ongoing response to every other. Thinking of the natural world as a chorus rather than a catalogue gives an entirely different twist to the idea of participation. It is no longer a matter of inclusion. We would not say that humans are part of nature because, after all, they do have a place in the catalogue as individuals of the species Homo sapiens. The irony is that on looking ourselves up in the catalogue, all we find is our own reflection, albeit in an archaic, stripped-down version. To participate in the chorus, by contrast, is continuously to find our own voice in answering to those around us, even as these others find their voices in our listening to them.
Is this what it means to inhabit a more-than-human world – to join the chorus? It goes without saying that the world is home to more than only human beings. Yet it is equally home to more than every other kind of creature. And the chorus is more than all of them put together. This is not in the sense that the whole is greater than its parts. For the chorus is not an assembly of interconnected elements but a gathering of corresponding movements, a life of many lives, each of which, in its continuation, is ever more than itself. Just as in the chorus, every voice exists in its sounding, so in the living world, every species exists in the generative movement of its self-formation: humans in their humaning, animals in the animaling and plants in their planting. Species, in short, are not nouns but verbs. This is to hark back to an older use of the term, to signify not an entry in the catalogue of living things but the very unfolding, before our eyes, of a way of being alive, of nature's revealing her hand in the unceasing work of creation.
It is not, then, because human beings have their own entry in the catalogue that they are kin to other-than-human kinds. For science, every entry has its place within an all-inclusive taxonomy which can be mapped, one-to-one, onto the tree of evolutionary phylogeny. On this tree, of which the human lineage is but a recent offshoot, finding kinship connections means tracing lines of descent back to a common ancestor. The shorter the lines, the closer the kinship. In these terms, chimpanzees and gorillas are closer to humans than cats and dogs, even though most of us are a great deal more familiar with the latter than the former. But kinship in the multi-species chorus has nothing to do with genealogical relatedness. It is rather about the formation of relationships. We become kin with creatures of both our own and other kinds in the affective relations of our going along together, alternately following and being followed, carrying and being carried, begetting and being begotten. Every being, then, is formed not as a node in a network of genealogical connections but as a knot in the tangle of correspondent lives.
This recognition of human kinship with all the other forms of life with which we share our world surely puts paid, once and for all, to the delusions of anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism. Or does it? I continue with some reflections on this question.
III
Let us start with the scientists, who have long been adamant in stressing the continuity between humankind and other forms of life. The human species, they observe, has evolved like any other. It may be unique, but so is every species of nature, each in its own way. Whether there exists a specifically human nature, which sets our kind definitively apart, remains a topic or controversy. For many scientists, the implied essentialism is incompatible with the Darwinian paradigm within which they profess to work. Others argue that the idea of human nature is so deeply ingrained in the minds of those condescendingly known as ‘folk’ or ‘laypersons’ that it would be better retained, if only to disabuse them of unwarranted assumptions of ascendancy. Yet the elephant in the room of these debates, invisible to the scientists themselves, is the exceptionalist premise behind their own claim to deliver a superior account of how the world works. Humans in general may not be set apart from the melee of nature but scientists are, else they would be unable to see nature, or the human part in it, for what it is.
While not all humans are scientists, all scientists are human. Is science, then, despite its protestations to the contrary, incorrigibly anthropocentric? Certainly not, if we interpret the term literally, to mean putting our human selves at the centre of things. The scientific gambit, indeed, is precisely the opposite: to remove ourselves as far as possible from the world of which we speak, to repudiate any affective contact with it, and to view it objectively, as if from the outside. To do science is thus to turn our backs on kinship, to face the other way. Yet for many critics, it is precisely in the denial of kinship that the fault of anthropocentrism lies. It is taken to mean an attitude which, far from placing humans at the centre, lifts them to the top of a pyramid with the world at their feet. Yet not only is anthropocentrism, taken in this sense, a misnomer for what is, in fact, a decentring of the human, but it also has the perverse consequence of positing, as its alternative, an ecocentrism that leaves humans with no part at all to play in future planetary flourishing.
Exhortations to reinstate humans at the core of the lifeworld, in the name of overcoming anthropocentrism, are indicative of the contradictions to which the ambivalence of the term has given rise. They nevertheless suggest how it might be used, in a sense both more literal and more benign, to recover the kinship we have lost in setting our course in a direction contrary to nature. For it is surely only from an emplaced centre that humans can exercise their proper responsibilities towards beings of other kinds, in the discharge of the debt they owe to these others for their own existence. The question, then, is whether there is anything exceptional about these responsibilities. Everything, indeed, points to the conclusion that there is. This is not to make any assertion of superiority. To be placed at the centre is not to be above other beings but beholden to them, while acknowledging that they are not necessarily beholden to you. Nature, as every seasoned inhabitant knows, can be capricious, even vengeful, and coexistence fraught with risk. In the recognition of that risk lies a certain humility.
What is exceptional, I believe, is a consciousness which – far from taking possession of the world, as philosophers of the Enlightenment believed – is possessed by it. Let me return to the idea of nature as a chorus of voices. The tree has a voice in the rustling of its leaves, the thunder in its clap and roar, and the glacier in its crack and the gurgle, but only because we lend our ears to them. Thus, while every creature has its voice, the chorus is one that we alone can hear. It is by way of our listening, in short, that nature hears itself. It is thanks to their possession by the voices of nature, I suggest, that humans bear a burden of responsibility that other creatures do not. It is a responsibility founded in unconditional love, borne of a reverence for nature in its original sense of the power to bring forth new life. And there can be no better word for this than culture, again in its original sense – from the Latin colere, ‘to cultivate’ – of nurturing this new life, so that it may grow and flourish.
Let us not, in conclusion, be too hasty in excluding nature and culture from the conversation. At fault are not the terms themselves but the specific inflections bestowed upon them by modernity. Restored to life, they tell of the natality of the world, and of how important it is for us humans to take care of it. If we do not, then nothing else will.
