The summer of 2023 was the hottest on record the world over. By September, the United States of America had clocked its highest number of billion-dollar natural disasters while Europe sweltered in extreme heat. Closer home, a cloudburst triggered a glacial lake overflow that wrecked Sikkim. This year, hardly a month went by without a ‘natural’ disaster making it to the headlines, prompting us to ask what has gone wrong.
The roots of our incomprehension can be unravelled if we take a hard look at the questions we ask. At the heart of our perplexed queries is an assumption labelling ‘nature’ as something to be tamed. This is another way of saying that nature does not have independent agency; humans are the only independent agents with the power to shape their destiny.
This idea about human agency and exceptionalism can be traced to religious texts and the works of major thinkers. The Book of Genesis exhorts, “fill the earth and subdue it.” In the eighth century, another symbolic signpost of this belief lay in the visual imagery of Saint Boniface felling the Oak of Jupiter revered by pagans. We find this belief in human exceptionalism in the works of major Enlightenment thinkers like René Descartes and John Locke: Descartes’ cogito, ergo sum being an example.
The problem with these views is twofold. First, they have bred speciesist imperialism and, second, they are being increasingly contradicted by facts and experience. Absence of agency in non-humans has been used as a justification for largescale colonising of ecologies, right from the time of the Columbian exchange on to the relentless neocolonial hunger for taming rivers and stripping forests. This denial of agency has been attributed to the absence of a mind, lack of brain complexity or mobility, and the absence of life in other species.
But it is becoming increasingly clear that this denial of agency is hard to defend. Today, we are beginning to discover the impact of the human microbiome on our health and moods while the remains of dead zooplankton and algae still power our fossil-fuelled cars. A host of deadly zoonotic pathogens remind us that we remain connected with other beings — animate and inanimate. A better future of justice and equity must thus acknowledge and negotiate these entanglements with non-humans.
With every new disaster in the Anthropocene, our connections with non-humans and their agentive action become clearer. Such agency increasingly reveals itself through the violence of ‘nature’. If we follow the ideas of Bruno Latour and Gregers Andersen, the Sikkim flash flood or the European heat wave manifests as a “quasi-object” — a complex of the natural (non-human) and the social (human) — which being infected by our ravenous thirst for energy expresses a violent, almost punitive, agency. But the all-pervading signs of non-human agency are hard to miss even without disasters. Think of a life-giving stream, the work of diligent pollinators, the magic of mycelium or the algorithms that affect our decisions. We shape our lives around these non-humans and, collectively, we share and shape our common future.
Any project of sustainability that ignores these more-than-human connections is destined to fail. To mitigate planetary crises and build a better multispecies future, it will be necessary to end speciesist imperialism and acknowledge the role of non-human actors as we negotiate our complex connections and dependencies within a collective space of what Latour called the “parliament of things”.
Exhortations like Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (the world is one family) or Pope Francis’ encyclical and its rejoinder, Laudate Deum, can be persuasive instruments for the psychological groundwork necessary for a transition to such a future. Indigenous peoples’ worldviews that reject any significant separation between the human and the non-human sphere can also be a good salve to cleanse our progress-tainted belief in human exclusivity.
When humans begin to accept ‘nature’ as a valued kin and start recognising non-human agency, we would make some headway towards a better tomorrow.
Rajat Chaudhuri is a writer and climate activist
