For multispecies liberatory futures: Three principles toward “progress” in anti-anthropocentric environmental geography

Abstract

This review draws on the work of critical animal geographers to elicit the notion of environmental anthropocentrism through critiques of progress as human development that adversely incorporates or displaces animal bodies in the service of (green) capitalism and sustainability. It reflects on how ideas of “progress” in environmental geography become reshaped through a critical animal geographic approach that politicizes animal–nature relations in all their diversity, and centers the experiences of animals as individuals and species in development-induced ecological crises. To this end, it advances three principles for an anti-anthropocentric analytic of progress as multispecies liberatory futures: animating humans toward a shared (but not universal) animality; differentiating species for nonhierarchy beyond capitalism; and instituting anti-anthropocentrism in addressing difficult ethics and incommensurability in liberatory futures.

I Introduction

How do (other) animals perceive, relate to, and perhaps, even conceptualize the environment in which they are embedded? In what ways do animals’ notions of the environment cohere, vary, or exist at odds with humanistic cultural-political ideas, and technological mediations of the environment, and species’ place(s) in them? How do animals’ perception of, and relations with, Homo sapiens shape or alter their association and fellowship with their environment—and what might animals make of humans’ place in the environment? How can we imagine animals’ environmental politics, when adversely incorporated as instruments of human development, “a key hallmark of the modern idea of progress” (Srinivasan 2022: 1), or displaced as impediments to it?

Such questions are rarely raised in environmental geographies or its subfields such as global environmental change, leading to a lacuna in intersectional “hybridizing” research on animals’ affect, agency, and experiences in environmental studies (Hovorka 2018). As Hovorka (2018: 457) writes, “Existing scholarship is anthropocentric with animals subsumed into ‘environment’ and positioned as drivers of environmental change (e.g., livestock industry) or as exposure units (e.g., animal-based livelihoods or biodiversity threatened by hazards).” Anthropocentrism as the devaluation of “the animal,” and their differentiation from the “fully and quintessentially human” (Calarco 2016: 54), scaffolds colonial-capitalism (Wadiwel 2022), enduring into the present in anthropocentric-capitalist formulations of “human development” (Srinivasan 2022). Anthropocentric-capitalism involves extractions of capital-labor from the animal body, making anti-animality a condition of human development (cf. Bledsoe and Willie Wright 2019). The questions raised at the outset of this review, however, must be posed in an anti-anthropocentric formulation of environmental geography—one that critiques anthropocentric beliefs, practices, and ways of knowing that uphold human supremacy (Gillespie 2021a: 11).

In lieu of human development then, this review proposes multispecies liberatory futures as a conceptual, ontological, and empirical blueprint for future modes of progress that includes but is by no means limited to H. sapiens’ interests. The environment is a key space to theorize anti-anthropocentric liberatory politics, as the “environment and nature are understood to create the conditions for social justice” (Schlosberg 2013: 37). The environment is a “notoriously ambiguous” concept in humanist politics, complicated through intersectional issues of racial (and caste), class, and gender justice (Holifield 2001: 79). It can, however, also not be presumed from species perspectives. Critical animal geographers have demonstrated how almost all species lifeforms—mammalian (including human), avian, reptilian, insect, aquatic, viral and bacterial, among many others—are variously ordered and exploited as “privileged” commodities and sites of resource extraction, “marginal” or superfluous/disposable (Collard and Dempsey 2013; Gillespie 2021b), and displaceable entities (cf. Yiftachel 2020), through the ascription of capitalist, political, and racial value to some, and devaluation of others. These classifications determine how animal bodies are the environment and are displaced from the environment. In both cases, it is animals’ “designation as inferior … upon which capitalist value relies” (Collard and Dempsey 2017: 83).

This review reflects on how ideas of “progress” in environmental geography become reshaped, and with what stakes for animal others, when animals’ affect, agency, and experiences, as individuals and collectives, are centered in the identification of ecological crises, and in global environmental policy and praxis. It considers that species are core to the definition of what are, and what are not considered environmental issues, through a progressive approach in environmental geographic thought that is oriented around the political subjectivities of animals, or their capacity to “stake claims and be recognized” (Krause and Schramm 2011: 1). The idea is to motivate a conversation around anthropocentrism in environmental geography, and “make space for the possibility,” as Probyn-Rapsey (2018: 48, 51) urges that animals might be “amongst the most vocal and active critics of anthropocentrism.” It calls for vigilance in environmental action and policy, so that multispecies approaches to the environment are simultaneously bespoke and localized, attentive to the wellbeing of individuals, and even the vilified and persecuted among nonhuman species, and institutionalized in being anti-anthropocentric.

II Moving beyond environmental anthropocentrism

Anthropocentrism is a pervasive and presumed notion of H. sapiens exceptionalism that is embedded at every scale of human institutional, cultural, and knowledge systems. Probyn-Rapsey (2018: 47) defines anthropocentrism as “a form of human centredness that places humans not only at the center of everything but also makes ‘us’ the most important measure of all things.”

Anthropocentrism also stratifies among humans across race, gender, and caste (Kim 2015). Caste, for instance, is an anthropocentric construct that not only “stratifies human beings and their humanness,” producing environmental injustice (Ranganathan 2022: 261) but also nonhuman beings and their animalness. In the Hindu imagination, other animals too are born into caste, and specific species and human groups are paired to mutually elevate or debase each other (e.g., cows and Brahmins, or dogs and pariahs) (Narayanan 2023).

Anthropocentrism acquires salience as environmental anthropocentrism, rooted in the assumption that there exists a fundamental animal–nature relationship that is oriented to human benefit, increasingly and intensively shaped by technology, that is, different from human–nature relations. Environmental anthropocentrism cannot be reduced to acts of intentional human discrimination against animals; it is differentiated by human and nonhuman geographies, histories, sociologies and ecologies of race and caste, and mediated by animal difference. Consequently, Indigenous knowledge systems (see de Vos 2023), and rural and pastoralist economies may be less anthropocentric, in their deployment of multispecies kinship rituals prior to animal sacrifice (Govindrajan 2018) for instance, to differentiate their production from the violence of industrial farming. As Creek-Cherokee scholar Craig Womack (2013: 12) writes, “prayers and ceremonies do something for us, not the deer … there is no way to escape the fundamental inequity of the relationship.” Environmental anthropocentrism predates capitalism, though it is intensified by capitalism.

Anthropocentrism, however, is not a common analytic in debating, or even identifying the institutional and structural harms of environmental injustices in the pursuit of progress as human development. The notion of inequality between humans and other species—particularly human supremacy—is rarely considered in the context of environmental degradation, even as it arises from H. sapiens activity. Other animals’ perspectives, politics (Meijer 2019), feelings/emotions (King 2018), and their lived experiences of human development (Srinivasan 2022), are overwhelmingly ejected in most articulations of environmental issues. Human privilege too then, can be seen as contingent on “the existence of the opposite experience—the environmental injustices experienced by socially marginalized groups” (Sasser 2014: 1241)—especially animal others.

There are, however, signs that critical new work in environmental geography is mindful to “avoid a post-political future and remain open to politics of liberation and justice” (Johnson et al. 2014: 441, emphasis added). Environmental geographers recognize that communities’ identity and sense of place are critical to identifying “the diverse array of climate risks to places and cultures’, cultivating resilience, and giving them ‘some locus of control over their destinies’” (Adger et al. 2011: 20). A core framework for development geography, likewise, lies in its growing capacity for recognition of “diverse actors across time and space,” and their knowledge and socio-ecological connections (Radcliffe 2005: 293). So too, a politicized multispecies approach (Gillespie 2019) to “progress” in environmental geography—as distinct from ideas of entanglements that continue to privilege human superiority (cf. Kirksey and Helmreich 2010)—can radically enrich potentials for multiple forms of livable planetary futures.

Building on this critical work, and taking inspiration from feminist, postcolonial and decolonial critical animal geographic work, the review proposes three intertwined principles that are oriented toward progress as multispecies liberatory futures. These are: animating the human toward ideas of a shared (but not universal) animality; differentiating species for nonhierarchy beyond capitalism; and anti-anthropocentrism in addressing difficult ethics and incommensurability in liberatory futures. This is not to negate or deny the significance of intrahumanist politics in environmental geographic thought and praxis. Rather, this review recognizes the oppressions of intrahumanism as part of, rather than separate from, the larger exploitations of environmental anthropocentrism, resolvable only through the dissolution of human supremacy, as well as an end to the ordering and exploitations of multispecies lifeforms.

2.1 Toward a shared (but not universal) animality: Human as animal and human vulnerability as progress

As a fundamental tenet of anti-anthropocentric progress, this review proposes a critical environmental politics of a shared animality between humans and other species, based on progressive ideas of multispecies liberation, justice, and equality. Critical race scholars have warned of the risks and falsity of a universal humanism that erases and assimilates difference (Pulido 2015, 2017), so what does it mean to speak of a shared animality against obvious physiological, genetic, and environmental differences between and within species? In its very essence, a shared—but not universal—animality between humans and other animals would simply mean an end to denial of humans as animals, and to reflect on what it means to properly occupy our place in the environment as species (Srinivasan 2022). Becoming fully human requires us, indeed, to choose to become animals that disrupt, rather than reinforce, “anthropocentric humanism” (Dave 2014: 448) and allow “a different mode of relating to [other] animals and our own animality” (Hudson 2011: 1675). Conversely and simultaneously, this reframing of humans as nature would involve locating the vast spectrum of nonhuman animal life into the social dimensions of development rather than being subsumed exclusively into nature (or as natural resources) (Narayanan 2016).

Multispecies liberatory futures call for H. sapiens to live in balanced and proportionate, even equal, relations of vulnerability with nonhuman and marginalized human others; indeed, vulnerable human living is at the heart of a radical reconceptualization of the human as animal. Currently, human vulnerability and thereon, insulation from a spectrum of perceived and real risks of “earthly living” (Srinivasan 2022: 13) mobilizes progress as human development. The environment itself is remade as a risk in development, necessitating human separation from it, by “managing” or controlling it, and “by becoming ‘more-than-animal’” (Srinivasan 2022, original emphasis). Simultaneously, vulnerability becomes essential to anthropocentric-capitalist development as an exceptional condition of (elite) human life, where the vulnerability of other animals (and marginalized people) becomes possible to disregard, to continue its unimpeded pursuit. Arguing that “vulnerability is universal to the human condition and unique to every single person,” Eriksen (2022: 1280, 1279, emphasis added) describes it as “co-suffering, linking lived experiences with a shared humanity.” Vulnerability, however, is a shared feature of the animal condition (Deckha 2015)—and indeed, of an even more expansive articulation of life including plants and whole ecosystems—and specific to every species, and individuals within those species.

What does it mean to be human and inhabit a shared animality when animals are constantly vulnerable to us, and against an almost visceral human refusal in turn, to be vulnerable to nonhuman natures? How can vulnerability, currently hinging on the anthropocentrism of the constructed human–animal binary, and often, inhumanity based on, and even sanctioned by this duality, be overturned to secure empathy for our collective human–nonhuman animal condition? How can co-suffering between humans and other animals be articulated for farmed and other bred animals who have been subordinated to human control “through generations of training, habituation, body modification, reproductive controls, and enclosure” (Wadiwel 2018: 528)? And what of species with whom it may be impossible to co-suffer due to vast physiological, psychological, and other differences?

To be vulnerable as a praxis of shared animality involves ceding rights and ownership of other animal bodies, and a refusal to see animals as killable, a “social status” (Srinivasan 2022: 10) that renders them displaceable and exploitable. The onus of perilous living, writes Srinivasan (2022), ought to be taken by the privileged cohorts of humanity who are most safeguarded from the risks of planetary living. Vulnerable human living would require rethinking animal bodies as “food” for human, and human-mediated animal consumption of carnivorous species like domesticated cats and wild captured reptiles who live—and are often incarcerated—as “pets” in human habitats. It would mean an end to nonhuman animal experimentation to prolong H. sapiens lives.

It would involve rethinking human housing and habitats in ways that allow living more intimately with weather, land, and ecologies as a condition of earthly living, rather than a complete sealing off from these realities. The global construction sector (composing the brick, cement and sandmining industries), largely located in colonised/”developed” lands of displaced human and nonhuman others, is among the most environmentally extractive industries, and is acutely exploitative of marginalized human and animal labor (ILO et al. 2017). Shared animality rests on human empathy for the almost entirely unappreciated scale of global chronic animal hunger as a direct result of human development (and consequently, climate change), and taking urgent responsibility for it as a moral imperative. These are but a few of the ways other animals are made vulnerable by humans.

In acknowledging animality as the broadest basis for identification with the “other,” we can recognise the vulnerability of those who don’t look like us, or those we regard as pests, “trash” (Nagy and Johnson II 2013), or “unlucky” (Narayanan and Bindumadhav 2019). It is through the experience of empathetically shared connections that we might see “becoming and being animal [as] an achievement” (Srinivasan 2022: 13, original emphasis), a critical parameter of progress at the intersection of critical animal and environmental geographies. The celebration of difference between H. sapiens and other species, and among species, as significant beyond capitalism, is then a second precept of multispecies liberatory futures.

2.2 Animal difference and nonhierarchy beyond capitalism

How can we productively work with animal difference in ways that do not automatically result in their hierarchisation, exploitation and capitalisation? As Kari Weil (2018: 112) writes, attending “to differences among species (and among individuals) is necessary for understanding what can help them flourish and what they need for their livelihood and for their distinct ways of being in the world.” Nonetheless, he continues, difference “implies hierarchy—whether in terms of a difference between humans and nonhumans or in terms of the differences within each of those categories—differences between species as between genders, breeds, colors, anatomies, and so on” (Weil 2018: 112). Perceived difference and nondifference, and the mechanics of othering and “saming” are both deployed to exploit for capitalism (Weil 2018). Attending to difference offers opportunities to discern new ways of exploiting the novel body, such as edible insect farming in the United Kingdom. At the same time, the apparent lack of difference or sameness between individual insects (such as mealworms) makes the species less (or not) worthy of care for many insect farmers (Bear 2021). As Weil (2018: 122) writes, “Difference, then, is the very site of the ethical.”

So too, the capacity of hens to ovulate, a similarity shared with humans who ovulate, is differentiated from humans where chickens have been bred to make them hyper-ovulate, or lay almost daily for egg capitalism, making chickens’ capacity to ovulate an inherently life-threatening gynaecological condition (Narayanan 2024, Rosenfeld 2021). Notably, chickens are differentiated from reptilian species (like crocodiles) or insects (like ants) whose ova too are consumed by humans but who are “too wild” or difficult to breed-for-purpose; chickens, however, are among those formerly sovereign, wild species, most subjugated to the violence of domestication for their flesh and eggs. Critical animal geographers’ scrutiny of the animal body (Gillespie 2014) unveils how technology, in this case, genetic science for breeding, produces the “denatured” body (Pitts 2005: 229), essential to capitalism. In this way, resource exhaustion (of species such as the woolly mammoth driven to extinction, or sharks, at risk of extinction due to human consumption), extends to resource intensification in the farmed animal body (Pellizzoni 2021).

Neutralizing the significance of difference (and nondifference) to capitalism and giving difference and sameness meanings outside of capitalism becomes then, a core tenet of multispecies liberatory futures. Animal geographers have shown how attending to, and indeed, differentiating individual beings from “‘animals’, ‘species’ and ‘herds’” (Bear 2011: 297) may undo the abstractions required to sustain capitalism. These modes of being, via an “interspecies ethic” of “being in difference,” where differentiation—and sameness—is rendered irrelevant to hierarchy (Dave 2022: 656) are already embodied in geographies of animal liberation such as farmed animal sanctuaries (Abrell 2021, Donaldson and Kymlicka 2015).

Feminist animal geographers have examined how halting the bred capacity of hens to hyper-ovulate and enabling their seasonal infertility—a phenomenon rendered remarkable for hens—makes a difference to their capacity to flourish as hens. An intimate focus on the lives of Sultam, Rani, and Ruby, three hens liberated from egg farms shows how the use of the Suprelorin contraception in chickens in sanctuaries and microsanctuaries (such as vegan rescue homes) allows them to experience periods of nonovulation like their wild ancestors (Narayanan 2024). Attending to the needs of the individual allows insight into unknown facets of suffering of the species that are inherent in breeding and farming animals. As Bear writes (2011: 303), “Engaging the individual is, then, part of a wider ethical and political project to move animals from the shadows.” While Suprelorin is intertwined with medical/veterinary capitalism, available only to hens in the care of “elite” rescuers, it allows a glimpse into what it means for hens to flourish as “nonsocialised nature” (Pellizzoni 2021: 86), that is, specifically nonsocialized to commodification. In being implanted, chickens remain socialized to human interventions, albeit in ways that better enable their flourishing. Chickens’ liberation itself requires the cessation of their selective breeding, and the rehabilitation of those already bred into existence.

To think meaningfully and productively of the differences among animals outside of capitalism, such as say, a Mahi-mahi fish and a tick and a snow leopard and a dingo, requires thinking differently of the human (Weil 2018: 117). For instance, parasites can help us think differently about human socialities, identities, and our shared ecological contexts (Weil 2018). In allowing hens to experience infertility, chickens and humans who ovulate as per untampered individual and species-specific patterns, share a measure of sameness of bodily being and vulnerability, rather than being differentiated for similar features and capacity. Where animals have been purpose-bred and objectified as consumable resources, Guy Scotton (2017) argues that humans have an obligation to be interested in knowing these animals and understanding the fullness of their individual and collective lives, by socializing and forming friendships with those rehabilitated in sanctuaries. So too, knowing individuals, like Angelica, an octopus bred in captivity, leads not only to a better understanding of nonmammalian lifeforms not routinely encountered by humans, but also disrupts the invisibilization that sustains their exploitation (Bear 2011). A mindful human indifference to animal difference—but also, attention, particularly to individuals, can serve as a basis for “progress” as multispecies liberatory futures.

2.3 An anti-anthropocentric approach to complexities and incommensurability in liberatory futures

Species matter in laying bare depoliticized discourses of human or green development projects that are speculative, oriented toward profit. This review takes inspiration from the postcolonial critics of “development without the poor” approaches, which regard the subaltern (rural or migrant) populations “to be removed from what it considers to be dynamic and progressive spaces and populations,” even as it relies on their labor and resources (Ballard 2012: 569). “Suffering in body, mind and heart” is a core experience of development that indeed, causes impoverishment (Bray et al. 2020: 4). This suffering, ranging from physical distress due to hunger and homelessness, to the emotional terrors of being separated from one's children, and being disregarded to such an extent that the poor do not even feel human (Bray et al. 2020)—or in other words, feel affirmed as a member of their species—are not experiences that are salient to H. sapiens life.

This review calls for anti-anthropocentrism as a baseline principle in the addressing the difficult ethics and incommensurability that can arise in framing liberatory futures in multispecies orientations. It rejects “development without the animals,” that is, development that disregards the nonhuman animal body as a political subject, and the suffering inherent in deanimalisation or the elision of species-specific needs and vulnerabilities (Narayanan 2023) to justify their commodification, use as ecological fixes, or displacement from earthly living. Deanimalisation is akin to dehumanization, in making the fundamental experience of desubjectification (Hudson 2011) of any species-being—not only human being—profoundly violent. Debovinisation or deporcinisation (Narayanan 2023, 2021) for instance, sustains the farming of cows or pigs by erasing their vulnerabilities as morally relevant even as it exploits and capitalizes those vulnerabilities. Animals too can be regarded as intergenerational sufferers of what Pain (2021) calls geotrauma, an impact of the spatial forms of human development, in this case, in both farming and nonfarming sites.

Anti-anthropocentrism in multispecies liberatory futures would mean conceptualizing urgency and crisis (Leyshon 2021) from species standpoints, to restore animals’ wildness (Collard 2014), or autonomous states of being without enforced human contact (Collard, Dempsey and Sundberg 2015). Urgency can be articulated as reparation in undoing the crises of domestication and displacement for human development (and correspondingly, poverty alleviation). An urgent priority to address the crisis of domestication would be the immediate termination of the breeding and exploitation of animals as capital-commodities (food, laboratory, affective/”pet,” entertainment, “ecological fixes,” among others). While nonhuman animals themselves tread lightly on the planet (Srinivasan 2022), purpose-bred animals have ecological hoofprints (Weis 2013)—and pawprints, clawprints, and finprints—that significantly contribute to bringing planetary ecosystems to collapse.

Displacement of animals and the extirpation of their environments/habitats for human occupation and use, is likewise an elemental crisis of anthropocentric modes of progress. “Displaceability,” writes Yiftachel (2020: 4, original emphasis), “refers to the state of being susceptible to involuntary distancing from … rights and resources,” and is “an expulsion from life and living” (De Genova and Roy 2019: 355). The “condition of displaceability” (Yiftachel 2020) can be regarded as an environmental issue for species and a core experience of the oppressions of environmental anthropocentrism. Expulsion can be normative, of species considered not natural enough, like rats or pigeons (Srinivasan 2019). It can be unnoticed, like the extinction of Hawaiian snail species (Van Dooren 2022) or have commodifiable potential where the sociopolitical afterlives of the Kenyan rhinos generate capitalist value (Bersaglio and Margulies 2022). Conservation discourses that justify harms to displaced “feral” species to protect biodiversity are “expressions of human exceptionalism” (Wallach et al. 2020: 1097). The complexity in considering the wellbeing of native species without harming the introduced monkeys or mynas who have proliferated due to colonization and human development, requires (elite) humans to own accountability as the paradigmatic invasive species.

Animal liberation is impossible without engaging with poverty as a multispecies crisis, a direct effect of anthropocentric-capitalist human development. There are gaps in our understanding of the spatial politics of environmental anthropocentrism in the Global South, where complex issues of human development and animal vulnerability intersect. Animals in enforced labor in the “abject economies” of South Asian brick kilns epitomize “abject capital” (cf. Giles 2016) as means of survival for humans in bonded labor (ILO et al. 2017). Multispecies environmental geographies become simultaneously racialized and anthropomorphized. To contend with notions of human supremacy in contexts of deep human vulnerability—albeit to elite humans—however, presents ethical discomfort that is easier to ignore in policy and public debate.

This review proposes that critical animal geographers engage with environmental geographers to ask: What types of animal politics is specified and practiced by those living in destitution, and at the frontiers of environmental degradation? What are the political ontologies of people who are not asked to stay with the trouble—for instance, of bearing the direct burdens of conservation, particularly of predatory species, through their physical proximity to, and displacement from protected sites (Barbora 2017)—but are forced to endure it? What of subaltern human populations for whom small-scale chicken farming has been rendered a livelihood means (cf. Hovorka 2012) by racist-capitalist development that has excluded them from other means of advancement? Equally it is pertinent to explore, what do environmental and development geographies lose by displacing other animals as subjects of poverty?

It is productive for multispecies liberatory futures to consider what we might learn from other animals—a crow, a cow, a snail, a cicada, or a bat—about flourishing. In 2020, despite its unprecedented challenges, COVID-19 made the notion of “frugal abundance” (Rahnema 2019) more than a romantic one; it brought to life the possibilities of wealth in the richness of time, and simplicity in a noncapitalist world. Other animals may proffer the exemplar potential for such “convivial poverty” as a liberating experience from the violence of capitalism, based on the joys of “more being,” rather than the obsession of “more having” (Rahnema 2019: 190).

III Conclusion: Anti-anthropocentric environmental action for multispecies liberatory futures

Critical animal geographers can generate a shift in environmental geographic politics for the animals by positing anti-anthropocentric modalities in radical imaginaries, where we apply our humanity to cede, rather than garner control over nonhuman others, and the environment. This conceptual reorientation demands action. Policy, hitherto, has been rendered a definitive instrument of action in cementing elite/capitalist human control. Environmental racism has been entrenched via policy, to allow the perpetuation of racial injustice and inequities in the interests of capitalism (Holifield 2001). So too in anthropocentric environmental policy, the bodies of animal others, like racialized others (Sasser 2014), are used to articulate “‘problems’ as well as strategic solutions”; to this end, the abstraction of individuals in favor of collectives is vital.

In its final analysis, this review considers that multispecies liberatory action—of which policy forms a part—must be articulated via collaboration between critical environmental and animal geographers, and animal liberation activists, including from provincial, subaltern, and remote areas. Through dialogue, critical scholars and animal activists can become mutually better attuned to the politics of difference and nondifference in site-specific locales, and their interconnections with global capitalism. Anti-anthropocentric environmental action and policies must take the lives of individual animals as seriously as their species collectives. The articulation of environmental anthropocentrism must specify the racial, casteist, and gendered factors that shape it so that its particularities are not unintentionally institutionalized or ignored in action oriented toward multispecies liberatory futures. Bringing critical environmental and animal geographies in conversation with animal liberation activists may grant the possibility that other animals are the real alchemists of radically progressive environmental geographic politics.