17 Ecocentrism: Activity Seeds

1. Debate anthropocentrism: is it inevitable?

But … we are human, right? Invite students to contest, problematise, or qualify this claim if they like. (They might draw on a variety of posthumanist, critical humanist, postcolonial, and new materialist theory). If we accept that we are human (in some sense), can we ever truly transcend anthropocentrism? Might there be dangers in convincing ourselves that we have transcended that positionality? How far is it possible to know the other? How far is it possible to see the world from non-human perspectives? Do the answers to these questions change according to context (legal contexts, for example)? Use provocations like these, and make space for students to develop their own nuanced understandings of anthropocentrism and ecocentrism. Some relevant quotations from Bennett and Zylinska:

“We at first may see only a world in our own image, but what appears next is a swarm of ‘talented’ and vibrant materialities (including the seeing self). A touch of anthropomorphism, then, can catalyze a sensibility that finds a world filled not with ontologically distinct categories of beings (subjects and objects) but with variously composed materialities that form confederations. In revealing similarities across categorical divides and lighting up structural parallels between material forms in ‘nature’ and those in ‘culture,’ anthropomorphism can reveal isomorphisms” (Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, p.99).

“This (non- or post-humanist) human — one that could be written in quotation marks, placed under erasure, or, as I have done here, preceded by a qualifying adjective — entails the realization on the part of many theorists who still keep using this term that we are in (philosophical) trouble as soon as we start speaking about the human, but it also shows a certain intransigence that makes (some of) us hang on to the vestiges of the concept that has structured our thinking and philosophy for many centuries” (Joanna Zylinska, Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene, p.62).

2. More-than-Human Voices

Invite students to think about how a text represents (or does not represent) various environmental agencies. Invite students to consider how they might go about composing and/or creating work from other-than-human perspectives, with other-than-human collaborators, and/or for other-than-human audiences.

3. Explore and debate ecosystem services. Some angles …

• Policy. Why put a price on nature? E.g. within urban environments, green and blue spaces mitigate the ‘urban heat island’ effect through photosynthesis and other mechanisms. What do the Office of National Statistics mean when they value this at £244 million (ONS 2019)? They’re not really implying we could sell the cool air by the canal or the leafy shade in the park on eBay. It is a price tag without a market. The ONS are offering data that can feed, fairly easily, into the complex calculations of policymakers juggling many different priorities. Where does this price tag come from? Without supply and demand determining prices, how do students imagine that such economic valuations are made?
• Risk. Similarly, ecosystem services may also appear less absurd when placed in the context of decision theory and risk management. When the future is uncertain, how do you choose wisely? One answer is that you quantify the uncertainty as much as possible, and try to take actions that are robust across a variety of possible futures, taking into account the probability of each. When ecosystems are transformed into numeric representations, that enables the statistical manipulation of those representations.
• Value. You may say, “I value our friendship,” or, “That laptop is valuable,” or, “Kindness is an important value,” or, “The values were inputted correctly into the spreadsheet.” What is the relationship between these different senses of value? Do they illuminate what it might mean to value nature? Is “value” an anthropocentric concept — if so, what does it mean to say nature has intrinsic value? Does value imply commodification, or can something be valued without being a commodity, or a commodity without being valued?
• Carbon offsets. Ecosystem services can be marketised, e.g. in carbon credit trading mechanisms. For many educators in media, arts and humanities, this whole topic might feel like a slippery slope to a lot of dense technical detail. Sliding down that slope could be exciting. Alternatively, you could approach the topic in a looser and more speculative way, inviting students to weave creative narratively about the potential pitfalls of a carbon credit mechanism. Set up some premises — how is the mechanism supposed to work? Who are the buyers and who are the sellers? Where and how is the carbon being emitted and where and how is it being removed? How might the story unfold in different genres and modes — science fiction, horror, detective fiction, satire, farce? Focus on unexpected side-effects, and attempted solutions to problems that actually make things worse.
  • The Climate Ad Project uses the analogy of ‘murder offsets’: imagine if, whenever you wanted to murder somebody, all you had to do was pay somebody else not to murder two people? The total number of murders goes down, everybody’s happy! Who could object to such an elegant system? Of course, offsetting should only be used for residual murders. Students could be invited to critically analyse this analogy.
    

    Arguments in favour of ecosystem services	Sample critical responses
    Advocates may find the criticisms a bit mystifying. They may agree that nature has intrinsic value, yet think of ecosystem services as the most practical means of recognising that value. If decision-makers don’t have numbers to work with (however approximate those numbers are), well … they might just leave nature out of their calculations altogether! So if you really care for the spirit of the forest, wouldn’t you want to shield it with — not just passion and poetry, but also — a business case? Ecosystem services doesn’t claim to be the perfect framework, but isn’t it better than nothing?	Is placing a value on some nature necessarily ‘better than nothing’? What if it perpetuates a worldview and an economic system that devastates the environment in the long term? Furthermore, the word ‘value’ can also be interestingly equivocal: a vegan environmentalist and the owner of a commercial fishery may both ‘value’ the fish living in a river, but they probably do so in different ways (the fish might think so). You also needn’t accept that environmental valuations are the only ‘practical’ way to approach the complexities of ecological stewardship: for example, more can be done to strengthen participatory, democratic decision-making.
    Advocates of ecosystem services may also offer arguments based on equity and justice. Consider a country in the Global South with extensive forests. The entire world benefits from the existence of these forests. Within an ecosystem services framework, the value of these forests can be quantified, and wealthy countries in the Global North can contribute fairly to their conservation (rather than free-riding). This is roughly the idea behind the REDD+ mechanism, for example, and behind carbon offsetting more generally. It aims to unlock climate finance for the Global South.	Are considerations of justice really best served by these kinds of transactional relationship? Who has had the most power to shape the terms of the transaction? Consider how fiercely Global North countries (including former colonial powers) have resisted climate reparations proposals from the Global South. Further, letting wealthy actors buy credits to harm biodiversity, or to emit carbon, widens their strategic options, and might exacerbate inequality. Even if these problems can be addressed, some may still object on principle to commodifying the ‘right’ to moral wrongdoing: e.g. the Climate Ad Project’s use of the analogy of ‘murder offsets’.
    Ecosystem services may occasionally be defended on epistemological grounds. Advocates may point to the complexity of climate change (and other ecological crises), and the challenge of coordinating a response to it. They may argue that ecosystem services are vital for creating effective markets, capable of integrating a wide variety of preferences and local knowledges, so that we can coordinate our action in the face of such complexity. (Within political economy, this kind of argument has roots in the earlier socialist calculation debate, and the Efficient Markets Hypothesis). See also the point about risk (above).	Here, critics may point to many examples where such approaches have failed in the past. Some things may lend themselves to being marketised, but nature doesn’t really seem to be one of them: there are huge challenges around transparency, certification, accountability, and additionality of such “services.” For example, Lisa Song investigated a number of offset schemes and concluded: “In case after case, I found that carbon credits hadn’t offset the amount of pollution they were supposed to, or they had brought gains that were quickly reversed or that couldn’t be accurately measured to begin with. Ultimately, the polluters got a guilt-free pass to keep emitting CO₂” (Song 2019).

4. Guardians, trustees, delegates, interpreters, proxies.

What are the different ways that one person can stand in for another, or for an animal, or a species, or an ecosystem, or some other entity? For example, you could explore the zoöps model from Het Nieuwe Instituut. A ‘zoöp’ is an organisation whose governance includes representation of the voices and interests of non-human life. “The Speaker for the Living acts as a representative of the other-than-human life in the spatial and operational sphere of our organisation. To the best of their abilities, the Speaker will help to translate the interests of other-than-human life to what we do and should not do.”

5. Animal Trials

Use Late Medieval animal trials as a starting point for wider discussions about anthropocentrism and ecocentrism.

Useful resources:

• Evans, E.P. 1906. The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals
• Cohen, Esther. 1986. ‘Law, Folklore and Animal Lore’
• Vatomsky, Sonya. 2017. ‘When Societies Put Animals on Trial’
• Minou, Arjomand. 2018. Staged: Show Trials, Political Theater, and the Aesthetics of Judgment. New York: Columbia University Press.
• Leeson, Peter T. 2013. ‘Vermin Trials’. The Journal of Law and Economics 56 (3): 811–36.

Angles:

• Invented trials: Although many animal trials did take place, many were inventions. Engage students in assessing the credibility and legitimate uses of sources about animal trials.
• Historicising jurisprudence: How did the legal system reflect assumptions and circumstances which may now seem very distant to many of us?
• Humour: Why do these trials seem funny? What might the absurdity conceal and/or reveal?
• Corporate personhood: Can animal trials illuminate corporate personhood and vice-versa?
• Theatre: Jean-Baptiste Racine’s The Litigants (1668), Citron the dog is put on trial for having stolen a capon from the kitchen. Aristophanes’s The Wasps (422 BCE) features a bowl, a pestle, a cheese-grater, a brazier and a pot as witnesses in a dispute. There is a rich literature on theatre and the law, including the performativity of legal processes. See e.g. Arjomand, Minou. 2018. Staged: Show Trials, Political Theater, and the Aesthetics of Judgment. New York: Columbia University Press.

6. The Anthropocene and the Planetary Boundaries Model

The term Anthropocene was coined to describe the current period in planetary history, when human activity has been significantly impacting earth systems. Similar to the Planetary Boundaries model (see earlier in this toolkit), Anthropocene attempts to create a compelling and scientifically legitimate way of describing our past activities, and our obligation to change course. To generalise a bit: the Planetary Boundaries model is built around a set of measurable (or potentially measurable) phenomena. There has been plenty of controversy about just what to measure and how. The term Anthropocene is looser: it is widely used within nature writing and the environmental humanities, but hasn’t gained much traction in stratigraphical and geological science. There are different proposals about when the Anthropocene began (about 70 years ago, about 250, about 12,000).

Students might be invited to compare the two terms, especially as they relate to the construction of scientific knowledge. Jill S. Shneiderman’s chapter ‘The Anthropocene Controversy’ in Anthropocene Feminism (2017) is a good introduction to the history of the term Anthropocene, which began to be widely used after 2000. Shneiderman is a sympathetic critic of the term. Partly inspired by Londa Schiebinger’s work on how mammals came to be called mammals (rather than, say, “Pilosa,” “the hairy ones”), Shneiderman examines the term Anthropocene through feminist and postcolonial lenses. What are the implications of proposing Anthropos, the human, as a monolithic actor? Does this sideline the differences between different humans, including “intersecting systems of oppression” (187)?

And/or students might be introduced to alternative framings, such as Capitalocene, the Plantationocene. Simply picking ‘the best’ name might not be terribly interesting, but what could be very interesting is investigating the distinctive presuppositions and power of each one. Shneiderman writes: “If one accepts the idea that there is convincing geological evidence for a new epoch (as I do), then there is clearly a need to name that epoch. […] the history of science shows that it is healthy for science to endure questioning about nomenclature from within and outside of the scientific community. So it is a good sign that scholars from varied disciplines have taken interest in and continue to challenge and propose alternative names or this new epoch.”

The Anthropocene is also (of course) anthropocentric: Shneiderman contrasts the Copernican revolution and Darwin’s theory of natural selection which, like climate change, were scientific revelations with wide and deep implications beyond scientific enquiry — but which decentred the human. What -cene might we want to nurture? In Staying with the Trouble (2016) Donna Haraway suggests Chthulucene, a vision based on making kin across many species: “The chthonic powers of Terra infuse its tissues everywhere, despite the civilizing efforts of the agents of sky gods to astralize them and set up chief Singletons and their tame committees of multiples or subgods, the One and the Many. Making a small change in the biologist’s taxonomic spelling, from thulhu to chthulu, with renamed Pimoa chthulu I propose a name for an elsewhere and an elsewhen that was, still is, and might yet be: the Chthulucene. I remember that tentacle comes from the Latin tentaculum, meaning ‘feeler,’ and tentare, meaning ‘to feel’ and ‘to try’; and I know that my leggy spider has many-armed allies. Myriad tentacles will be needed to tell the story of the Chthulucene” (31).