Societal perspectives from the environmental humanities

The rise of the environmental humanities challenges the dichotomy between humanity and nature. Tim Ingold advocates for a collaborative, relational approach inspired by environmental humanities and indigenous knowledge to dissolve boundaries between humans, nonhumans, and the environment.

The humanities and the natural sciences

The disciplines known collectively as the humanities are the legacy of an academic division of labour established some three centuries ago by philosophers of the European Enlightenment. Key to their philosophy was the idea of universal humanity, uniquely characterised by the gift of mind or reason. Thanks to this gift, it was supposed, humanity is raised upon a pedestal, over and above the world of nature to which all other creatures are confined. Enlightenment thinkers believed that by way of the cultivation of mind and reason, every individual human being in their lifetime, as well as humankind as a whole in its history, is destined to progress from an initial baseline in the natural world to ever greater heights of civilisation. In academia, then, the humanities would focus upon the achievements of the human mind, in multiple fields of endeavour, as it progressed towards these heights, while the natural sciences were reserved for the view from the summit, with a mission to map out the natural world as seen from the Olympian perspective it affords. The relationship between the humanities and the natural sciences was accordingly established as one of complementarity, with the physical world of nature on the one side, and the mental world of humanity, culture and civilisation on the other. Still today, this complementarity is built into our academic institutions and the ways they work.

The rise and fall of Enlightenment humanism

There is no doubt that Enlightenment humanism, and the forces of progress it unleashed, have transformed the lives of millions. It has brought education, literacy and democratic governance to more of the world’s inhabitants than ever before. People are, on average, living longer and more comfortable lives than their ancestors could ever have imagined. Commensurate with this success, what began in a handful of European nations has expanded, through trade and colonisation, to encompass the entire globe. This has come, however, at a cost – in two respects. First, in driving a wedge between humanity and nature, the very earth which had once offered nourishment and support for human life came to be seen as a repository of resources to be plundered, unloosing an unfettered extraction of materials, on an industrial scale, which has ravaged the earth and jeopardised its capacity for renewal. Much is now permanently damaged. Second, while the appeal to universal human entitlement serves the interests of those empowered to lay claim to it, for others the forcible imposition of this claim has meant dehumanisation and enslavement, along with loss of land, livelihood, and even life.  As these twin costs have inexorably risen, what began as an agenda for progressive emancipation has morphed into a vicious spiral of environmental destruction and social injustice. To break the spiral demands no less than a radical alternative to the humanist settlement.

The environmental humanities

This demand has set the stage for the recent emergence of a congeries of perspectives under the collective rubric of the ‘environmental humanities’. Their disciplinary roots are multiple, in fields ranging from philosophy, human geography, sociocultural anthropology, environmental history and sociology to studies of literary, visual and material culture, science and technology studies, art, architecture and design. They have in common a rejection of the belief in exceptional human destiny, and a desire to restore human lives both to the generative matrix of a living world encompassing creatures of all kinds, and to the habitation of an earth teeming with diverse vitalities. The result is to dissolve the opposition between humanity and nature, and with it, the established complementarity of the humanities and the natural sciences. While not intrinsically anti-science, the environmental humanities are against scientism – the doctrine that science alone opens a window to the true nature of reality. They recognise that the knowledge afforded by science is neither sovereign nor absolute, but as rooted as any other ways of knowing in the practice and experience of inhabiting a world. In emphasising this rootedness, they suggest how science might be done otherwise – that is, by admitting its subjects of study into the field of its own deliberations. And by the same token, they open scholarship in the humanities to the involvement of beings beyond the human.

The Anthropocene

We now know that life on earth is facing an unprecedented crisis, from a mixture of habitat destruction, the deposition of toxic residues, and both oceanic and atmospheric overheating. We know, too, that responsibility for the crisis lies largely with large-scale applications of science and technology, driven by the insatiable demands of global capitalism coupled with state-sponsored militarism. But while scientific research has led the way in raising the alarm, it lacks the conceptual and imaginative resources to heal the divisions – between humanity and nature and between colonisers and colonised – that have created the current impasse. Instead, it proposes a science of ‘biodiversity’ and an economics of ‘ecosystem services’ that serve only to reproduce a logic in which the living world appears already ordered and enumerated in the sight of a universal humanity, and in which environments exist to provide for human needs at lower cost than proposed technological alternatives – all of which would involve projects of geoengineering on such a massive scale as to compound an already unfolding disaster. Arguably, indeed, the planet has already transitioned to a new epoch, recently dubbed the ‘Anthropocene’, characterised by the decisive geomorphological consequences of human activities. Although the strictly scientific applicability of the term remains controversial, it is situated within a well-worn narrative of how humanity has mastered the earth only to unleash forces of a magnitude beyond its control.

Variable experience and multiple histories

It is in fashioning the concepts that make it possible to imagine human-environment relations otherwise that the disciplines of the environmental humanities come into their own. For scholars in these disciplines, the idea of the Anthropocene serves not so much to designate a geological epoch as to offer a rallying point for debates around the theme of how to live, in habitats facing imminent if not current ruination. These debates share two striking features. The first is an acknowledgement of the variability of human experience, which precludes any telling of the story of humanity as one single, all-embracing narrative, with a universal ‘we’ as its subject. As many critics have pointed out, responsibility for environmental destruction is borne disproportionately by the most powerful, while it is the powerless who have to endure the consequences. The second is the recognition that human histories are not only multiple but inextricably intertwined with the histories of the manifold beings of other kinds with which they have coexisted, and with the histories of the lands and waters they have inhabited. Arguably, this has always been so, but it has taken the current crisis in human relations with the earth and its biota to force it on our attention. Scholars in the environmental humanities have resorted to such terms as ‘biosociality’ and ‘geosociality’ to refer to such intertwining of human, biotic and earth histories.

Posthumanism

Another designation that has risen to prominence, as an umbrella term for attempts to go beyond the polarisation of nature and humanity, is ‘posthumanism’. Far from signalling a future without humans, posthumanism marks a radical break with the particular construction of the human bequeathed by philosophers of the Enlightenment. In this latter construction, essential humanity – or what came to be known as ‘human nature’ – is split in two, between a component that remains founded in the natural world, in which the human is but one species among many, and a component that transcends this world, thanks to which humans can see themselves and other beings for what they truly are. The project of normal science is itself mired in this duplicity, between human being and being human, the one taken as an object of inquiry, the other providing the platform from which such inquiry draws its authority. It is spun out in a host of familiar dichotomies, between instinct and intelligence, nature and culture, the material and the ideational, and so on. Philosophies of posthumanism aim to dismantle these dichotomies, replacing them with the figure of the human as a way of being – or better, of becoming – indivisibly body and soul, and placed from the start at the heart of a world of relations and processes unfolding around it, and to which it contributes in and through its activity.

Anthropocentrism versus coexistence

In pitching their philosophies in opposition to Enlightenment humanism, posthumanists are particularly critical of what they see as the anthropocentrism built into the idea that the common destiny of humanity lies in the transcendence, domination and control of nature. They call for a more balanced or ‘symmetrical’ approach, which would allow the participation of nonhumans with humans on a level playing field. Much of the inspiration for this approach comes from studies among the world’s so-called ‘indigenous peoples’, for whom relations with the earth and its nonhuman inhabitants, as much as with fellow humans, are founded in practices of care and compassion. For many indigenous peoples, these relations are understood in the idiom of kinship. This implies nothing about genealogical connection. It is rather about the ways in which the nurturance provided by environmental beings of manifold kinds makes human existence possible, and about the responsibilities that fall on humans to reciprocate in kind. Crucially, it is to understand environmental care in terms of coexistence rather than conservation. For conservationists, nature exists as a heritage to be preserved for the benefit of coming human generations. The perspective is still anthropocentric in subordinating a nonhuman past to a human future. Coexistence, by contrast, means finding a modus vivendi by which human and other beings can carry on their lives together, each along its own way yet in continuous response to the others.

Conservation and development

This distinction between conservation and coexistence has important implications for thinking about sustainability and its achievement. For conservationists, making room for other species means apportioning the planetary surface between areas designated for technologically driven, industrial development, and areas set aside for the preservation of natural heritage. The latter, commonly known as ‘parks’, are intended as havens for wildlife, free from human disturbance save for the oversight of researchers and managers appointed to monitor and protect species diversity. Making space for both development and conservation on a globe of finite extent tends to pit one against the other, and the effort to find a resolution dominates the agenda of much current environmental policymaking, driven by the goal of sustainability. This rarely turns out well, however, for inhabitants of the areas affected, for whom neither conservation nor development offers any assurance of continuity, in the sense of being able to carry on their own lives alongside beings of other kinds, in relations of conviviality. In many cases, indeed, the forcible imposition of policies of conservation, deemed disrespectful of the ways of other-than-human beings, has caused these relations to break down. The achievement of sustainability, then, is not about creating separate spaces of sanctuary for nonhuman life, but about sharing our lives with those of other creatures, in what scholarship in the environmental humanities calls a ‘more-than-human’ or ‘multispecies’ world.

A multispecies world

This is to adduce the concept of species, however, in a sense quite unlike that of the familiar concept of biological taxonomy. In the science of biodiversity and its conservation, every species is like an entry in an immense catalogue, each populated by a stock of individuals whose identity is unalterably given from the start, by virtue of genetic inheritance from an ancestral population. In a multispecies world of coexisting beings, by contrast, the species is a form of life. Species-life, as opposed to species-inheritance, is performed. The creature is more verb than noun, less a living thing than a way of being alive. In a multispecies world, these so-called ‘creaturely ways’ – including the lifeways of humans – go along in concert, weaving a composition comparable to a symphonic work made up of multiple melodic lines. But unlike the symphony, fully composed and notated in advance of its performance, this world with all its inhabitants creates itself as it unfolds, evincing ‘nature’ in its original sense as a power of natality, of perpetually giving birth to new life, natura naturans. This, too, bears on the meaning of ‘extinction’. As research in the emerging field of extinction studies has shown, lifeways are not extinguished in a one-off, datable event, like the demise of the last remaining individual of a type, but unravel over a period of time, often many generations.

A meaningful environment

It also bears, of course, on the meaning of ‘environment’. Mainstream science still tends to equate the environment with nature, understood not as the ongoing renewal of a lifeworld, but as a territory already laid out, with its divisions in place, ripe for exploration and discovery. This is natura naturata. Humans alone, according to this view, assign meaning and value to a natural environment that is otherwise reduced to its material facticity. Scholarship in the environmental humanities rejects this appeal to human exceptionalism, and with it the corollary, that other-than-human creatures inhabit worlds which, for them, are without meaning. Starting from the premise that, to the contrary, living beings of all kinds inhabit meaningful worlds, the challenge is to identify the sources of meaning, and to consider to what extent they might be open to human beings as well. Several approaches are available to address this challenge. One approach, from semiotics, argues that every creature inhabits a world of signs, an Umwelt, the meanings of which are conferred by way of its own capacities of perception and action. Another, from ecological psychology, sees meaning as already present in the environment, in what it affords for a creature in its form of life. Ecophenomenologists, for their part, hold that perception is founded in an awareness, at once pre-objective and pre-conscious, of bodily immersion in an environment.

The ontological turn

Notwithstanding their differences, these approaches share a common starting point, namely that the living being and its environment, far from being posited as independent entities which are then contrived to interact, are bound into one indivisible field of relations whose unfolding amounts to a process of life. Every relation is a line of movement and growth, and every organism a knot in which these lines are tightly bundled together, with loose ends reaching out to others to bind with. This relational meshwork has been compared to the plant rhizome or fungal mycelium. It gives us a picture of the living world in stark contrast to the hierarchically ordered tree-diagrams of biological taxonomy. The contrast is ontological, in that it comes down to assumptions about how beings establish their presence in the world. Normal science, in positing a reality ‘out there’, given independently and in advance of human attempts to come to terms with it, rests on an ontology of naturalism. However, following what has been called the ‘ontological turn’, scholarship in the environmental humanities emphasises that naturalism is but one of several ways of rendering the world intelligible to our perception. It assumes a reality populated by entities that have already precipitated out from the relations and processes of their formation. Another way, however, is to enter into these very processes, in their unfolding. This is to assume an ontology of vitalism.

New materialism

Though vehemently opposed by science, vitalism has made something of a comeback in the environmental humanities. It is key to the movement known as ‘new materialism’, which has been making waves in recent scholarship. The term has in fact become something of a catch-all for a variety of approaches that are not always in agreement. What they share, however, is a commitment to taking materials seriously. Earlier studies of material culture had tended to focus on the forms and functions of objects, and on their uses in socially and environmentally situated contexts, at the expense of the materials of which they were made, and how they are transformed in processes of production. New materialism puts this in reverse, by showing that that there is more to materials than passive objects of nature, awaiting the imposition of human form and meaning. They are rather actively charged with their own forces and inclinations. Whatever the forms in which they are currently cast, they are always on the way to becoming something else. Practitioners who work with materials know them not for what they are but by what they do, discerning in them a vitality with which they are compelled, in productive activity, to collaborate. An ecology of materials is played out in these collaborations, in the ways in which lives and materials are bound in webs of ongoing historical transformation.

A new science?

There are echoes of vitalism in many indigenous cosmogonies, classically known as ‘animist’. Once understood as the most primitive form of religiosity, underpinned by the belief that everything has its own spirit, animism is now recognised as a sophisticated ontology in its own right, founded in the perception of a world undergoing continuous formation by way of the circulations of vital force that course through it. Could such an ontology provide the foundation for a new science? If the project of Enlightenment humanism has indeed run aground, to be replaced by a new era of posthumanism, then we cannot continue with science-as-we-know-it. We are bound to ask: what comes after? This question drives much current work in the field of science and technology studies. Research in this field has shown how scientific knowledge has always grown from the crucible of collaborative engagements in which humans and the things and materials with which they work all play an active part. A new science could begin by acknowledging and even celebrating this collaboration, rather than seeking to deny it by way of methodological protocols designed to immunise practitioners from what are perceived as distortions, arising from their affective involvement with the things they study. Instead of seeking either to dominate the world or to escape from it, this would be to stay with it, and to find a way forward in relations of conviviality.

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Selected readings:

Cohen, Jeffrey and Stephanie Foote, eds. 2021. The Cambridge Companion to Environmental Humanities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Heise, Ursula, Jon Christensen and Michelle Niemann, eds. 2017. The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities. London: Routledge.

Hubbell, J. Andrew and John C. Ryan, eds. 2022. Introduction to the Environmental Humanities. London: Routledge.

O’Connor, Seb, and Anna Perdibon, eds. 2021. Environmental Humanities Toolkit for Policymakers: Thinking Differently Amidst Climatic and Ecological Crises. Consortium of Environmental Philosophers (CEP). https://thinkingintheworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/EnvironmentalHumanitiesToolkit_FINAL-3.pdf

Key works:

Abrams, David, 1997. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. New York: Vintage Books.

Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Bateson, Gregory, 1973. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. London: Fontana.

Bennet, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Cohen, Jeffrey J. and Lowell Duckert, eds. 2015.  Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Cronon, William. 1996. Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. New York: W. W. Norton.

Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture (translated by Janet Lloyd). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Escobar, Arturo. 2017. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Ingold, Tim. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2015. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions.

Kirksey, Eben, ed. 2014. The Multispecies Salon. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Latour, Bruno. 2004. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Tsing, Anna. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Van Dooren, Thom. 2014. Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction. New York: Columbia University Press.