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As good ancestors we are all entangled

Refer to MMM, Issue 42, Feb-March 2024

An illustration from page 27 of the book The Good Ancestor: How to think long term is a short-term world, by Roman Krznaric. Penguin Random House, 2020, notes How Humans Grew Long Brains in a two-million year story.  In the last issue of MMM we published the illustration of The Tug of War of Time – Six drivers of short term thinking versus Six ways to think long term.
How to start being a better ancestor, today.

  1. If you can’t re-use it, don’t use it. …
  2. Work on our trauma. …
  3. Treat our elders with respect. …
  4. And our youngers. …
  5. Speak of love, not war.
  6. Be a custodian of the earth. …
  7. And a steward of the future.

……………………………………………………………………..

Entangled, each informs the other
What is it about the current human mode of thinking that places us in an arch of dominance and superiority above all other beings?

This is an account of relocating from an urban to a rural setting.  Danielle Celermajer in Shifting the Story (Mindful Puzzles, Issue 27, 2022) writes:

… we secured the eventual acquisition of the ‘title’ to ‘property, and with it, exclusive rights to ownership and occupation. Six years later, the absurdity and the aridity of this story leaves me (almost) lost for words. I’d like to try to find them here, so I can convey some intimation of what the myriad beings who comprise this rainforest have taught me about the entangled vivacity of their, and now our, world and about how they put me back in my place.

The ‘place’, in all  its complex diversity – river, soil, escarpments, open pasture, dank groves of rainforest, underground creeks – all are reduced to  flatness and singularity of ‘land’  Their history and becoming, the way they form and nourish each other,  communications through which they created and continue to create our experience, shift our minds, touch our bodies, all are cast in the dark shadow of the dynamic human protagonists. To the extent these others appear at all, it is fused  a single static object we humans exchange once we decide its value in comparison with their fungible commodities.

Meanwhile, everyone else who already lived here, or came here for nourishment, shelter, pleasure, or relationship – the trees, the microbes, the grasses, the animals and birds, the fishes and river creatures, the fungi, the insects – all are relegated to the categories we have established for them: flora or fauna; native or invasive; wild or domesticated. That they are in ongoing complex, world-making relationships with each other, with the earth and river and weather,and with us, that they are informing each others ways of being, that we are breathing each other, that their growth and decline shapes how we feel and know, all this is omitted from the official story. Later Danielle notes: There is an inadequacy of the official human made up story, that needs to be comprehensively revised.

This shift in how we might act in relationship with beings other than humans is the essence of the idea I have come to call multispecies justice. That the actions we take, and the ways we organise our worlds are only legitimate and rightful if they take into consideration the ‘interests’ of all beings, not only human beings.

Understood philosophically, it suggests that rather than the earth comprising distinct individuals of different types and different values, all of us emerge and persist in entangled networks.

Understood experientially, multispecies justice offers the possibility of unshackling ourselves from an official story that is not only proving deadly, but leaves our lives impoverished.  Imagine finding ourselves not before an array of goods we might buy, use up, or exchange, but amongst others with whom we might learn to live, indeed live better in these times of peril.

Danielle Celermajer is an author and Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney, Deputy Director of the Sydney Environment Institute and convenor of the Multispecies Justice Collective. Her books include: Sins of the Nation and the Ritual of Apology and the Prevention of Torture: An Ecological Approach.

MMM Issue 42, February – March 2024