Crafting scholarly alliances for multispecies justice

Abstract

This commentary responds to Bram Büscher's critique of the more-than-human turn. As a more-than-human geographer, I find myself in agreement in with the broad tenor of the concerns about ontological idealism and relationality expressed in Bram's paper, and welcome its recognition of the emancipatory aims of more-than-human scholarship. However, I show that more-than-human literatures are far more diverse than Bram's characterisation of the field suggests. Many works eschew relational and agency-focused approaches to critically scrutinise the impacts of human systems on nonhuman lives. Furthermore, the concerns raised by Bram have been discussed far more extensively within more-than-human scholarship than implied. At the same time, some of these problems can be found outside of more-than-human literatures too, including in political ecology. More crucially, I argue for the need for greater precision in the usage of terms such as ‘de-centering’, ‘human exceptionalism’, and ‘more-than-life’, and for a fuller discussion of the special value attached to the category of the ‘human’. These concepts have historically combined ontological and ethico-political claims in public and scholarly life. Recognising this, and separating out ontological distinctions from the ethico-political privileging of humankind, I argue, is key for crafting scholarly alliances for multispecies justice.