Dany Celermajer: Multispecies justice and more-than-human entanglements (ep389)
“I use the language of entanglement rather than interdependence because entanglement implies that what’s fundamental is relationships.”
What are some of the limitations of human rights frameworks and the institutions that uphold them? What does it mean to go beyond recognizing our interdependence to seeing our deep entanglements with our more-than-human world? And how is the much more holistic framing of “multispecies justice” still reductive in terms of the forms of beings that they recognize?
In this episode, we welcome Professor Dany Celermajer, Deputy Director of the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney who leads the Multispecies Justice project. Through the experience of living through the black summer bushfires with a multispecies community, she began writing about a new crime of our age, Omnicide and subsequently Summertime.
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Artistic credits:
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by RVBY MY DEAR
Episode-inspired artwork by Sneha Ravichandran
Episode references:
Summertime: Reflections on a vanishing future, a book by Dany Celermajer
“Justice Through a Multispecies Lens”, an article by Dany Celermajer and others
The Subject of Human Rights, a book co-edited by Dany Celermajer and Alexandre Lefebvre
Amitav Ghosh’s website and information about his books
On “Hope is a discipline”, and other ideas from Mariame Kaba
If you feel inspired by this episode, please consider donating a gift of support of any amount today!
Transcript:
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Dany Celermajer: The earliest moments that solidified my current ethical orientation are actually quite a long way away, both topically and temporally. So I am the child of survivors of the Holocaust, of the Shoah. Both my parents were children in Poland. My mother was born in 1938, and my father in 1935, and their parents were the only survivors from our family. And so I was brought up with a very strong sense of the obligation of justice. And that led to spending the first part of my life working on human rights: which I thought was the most universal form of justice, one that didn't differentiate between different classes or nations or categories of humans. And that was a really driveing passion. I have memories of being five years old and saying that I wanted to be an international human rights lawyer.
And then gradually, through my life, I came to realize that there was a disconnect between the framework of human rights, which claimed to be universal, but set its outer limits at the boundary of human beings; whereas in my own life, I had a deep ethical, esthetic and moral connection to the more-than-human, particularly to other animals, but then increasingly to trees and rivers and soils and mountains. And so that disconnect really had me critically evaluate the limits of my own work and my own moral orientation. At the same time, the climate crisis and the environmental crisis were pressing upon me, and I was really coming to understand, in a very visceral way, that it just doesn't make sense to talk about good for humans without talking about the good for all other beings, in whose lives we're entangled and on whom we're dependent.
So that led me to not only think about justice for animals, or justice for environments, but really justice at the interface of all of those relationships. I came to think of my work and my ethical orientation as being justice for all Earth beings. So it was that combination of my own inner struggle, with what felt like a disparity in my explicit commitments and my implicit commitments, at the same time as what was happening in the world.
Kamea Chayne: A significant part of your work focuses on human rights, such as with the book you co-edited, The Subject of Human Rights. And in particular, you raise three questions: Who is the subject of Human Rights? Who is subjected to Human Rights? And how do human rights make subjects? I wonder if you could expand on what these questions address, particularly how human rights shape and even create the subjects they seek to protect, and also share the overall significance of these questions in helping to shape our understanding of our humanity.
Dany Celermajer: I'll focus on that third question of how subjects are shaped by human rights, because I think that's really relevant to my current work.
So there's a body of thinking primarily coming out of a French theorist called Foucalt, who argued that there's no such thing as the natural human. That the way that humans experience what it is to be human, the way that we understand ourselves at a really fundamental level is shaped by the type of discourses that we use, the type of language that we use, the institutions that we live within.
And so normally, the way that human rights are spoken about is that there's this natural human, and out of that natural human come these things called fundamental rights, and so we were flipping that on its head, and saying that actually, the language of human rights and the institutions of human rights have us come to experience ourselves in a particular way. And that's both got its positives—then people experience themselves as being the type of beings who have claims of justice, so you don't have to go begging according to a human rights framework, for a decent form of life, for education, for housing, for health, to be free from torture, that's just the type of being that you are...
But the other side of it, and this really speaks to my work now, is that…
Human rights as a framework really separates humans from all other beings. It constitutes humans as these very special type of creatures who have rights over and above the rest of the world.
That's not really something that we worked with that much in the book, it was primarily a very anthropocentric book, a book that really focused on humans, but I think that's an important way of thinking about the limits of human rights.
Kamea Chayne: To go deeper into the question of who is subjected to human rights standards or demands, you share that one of the puzzles that arise in this question is how the state occupies multiple roles. What does this look like in practice? And I wonder if its contradictions reveal that the state therefore cannot be relied on as the guarantor and protector of human rights, let alone something that is even more expansive.
Dany Celermajer: That's absolutely correct. You've identified a really foundational tension in the way that human rights system works, and the logic of the human rights system. So on the one hand, human rights claims to be universal, so above the state, so it's supposed to regulate state.
So if we think about the emergence of the modern human rights system after World War Two, one of the stories that's often told about why we have this modern human rights system, through the United Nations, is that: if we take Germany as a primary example, there was no higher law saying that—when the German government, when the Nazi government, passed laws that discriminated against Jews and sanctioned their killing—that law is wrong. Within what we call the Westphalian system or the system of nation-states, the highest law is the law of the state. And what that means [is] that if states pass laws that are gravely immoral, that treat certain citizens or certain human subjects in ways that are violent, that really undermine their dignity or their capacity to live decent lives, then under that system, there's no higher law that says, actually you can't pass that type of law [as a state].
And so the human rights framework, as this international framework, was developed as a higher form of law that could regulate state law. So that's the ideal. But then if we look at the practice... We have this body called the United Nations, if we take the most international organization—and people often think that the United Nations is a type of global government, but it's not, the United Nations is literally what the nation what the name says, a united body of nations—nations remain sovereign. Where sovereign means they have ultimate power. So when a nation-state signs on to a human rights treaty, say the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, it says: we, the state, are going to implement the principles that are set out in that treaty within our own jurisdiction, within our own area of authority. But it's the state that has to do that regulation. There are bodies within the United Nations that report on how well the state is doing, and that can tell the state that it's not doing very well, for example, if it's not fully implementing its treaty commitments, but the United Nations isn't a higher form of government, it can't force the state to do anything.
So even though the state is agreeing to these higher norms, it's the state that has to implement those higher norms. That's the first contradiction. But then the second contradiction is it's often the state itself that is violating those norms. The state is both the enforcer of human rights and the addressee of human rights.
It's the body that violates human rights, and that ought to be regulated by human rights standards. And so often what states do, is they'll set up a body which is responsible for ensuring that the state abides by its own human rights standards. Those often take the form of what's called national human rights institutions. And those national human rights institutions will look at state practice and say, this is in conformity with your human rights obligations, or this isn't in conformity with your human rights obligations. And if the latter is the case, then it might recommend what the state needs to do to get into line. But that's the state regulating itself.
And so if we take the example of Australia, the country where I live, there have been a lot of controversies in recent years where our Human Rights Commission, our national human rights institution, put out reports saying that the state was violating human rights with respect to its treatment of asylum seekers and refugees, and this is something that a number of international bodies have found [too], but the Australian Human Rights Commission was very vocal about this. And the government of the time, the national government, really didn't like that it was being criticized in that way, and so [they] really came down on the national human rights institution and said that they were getting out of line and that they didn't really understand the complexities. So even though you've got this principle of a higher law that states need to abide by, when push comes to shove, it's the state regulating itself.
Kamea Chayne: There's so much to this. I've shared similar critiques of the United Nations, in regards to the climate conferences. And when we understand climate justice and sustainability to necessarily require a dismantling of existing power structures and exploitative power dynamics, then we might see the grave limitations of those changes being able to stem from these types of meetings consisting of, or led by, the highest representatives of those nation-state institutions. So it speaks to our need to not really rely on these global climate conferences as the site of where the global transformations we need are going to take place.
Dany Celermajer: The analogy is very accurate, that we live within an institutional structure that is completely inadequate to deal with the type of problems that we're currently facing. And global heating is the most pressing and obvious answer. It is self-evidently a global issue. The climate does not stop at the boundaries of nation-states, very obviously. And in fact, what the nation-states that are the gravest emitters are doing, are having the worst impacts on some of the states that are emitting or have been emitting the least greenhouse gases. If we think about something like the relationship between emissions from the United States and the impacts on island states in the Pacific who are now going underwater because of sea level rise.
So we have a global problem and we're trying to solve that problem through an institutional structure which is still fundamentally based on the absolute power of nation-states and those negotiations trying to find a way where nation-states can agree, given that the impacts of global heating and the causes of global heating are truly global, and yet they're still, as we say, repeatedly, consistently, acting on what they define as self-interest—of course, that self is very narrowly understood. It's not only excluding people who live elsewhere, but it is excluding future generations. It's excluding all of the people within those nation-states who are going to be on the frontline or already are on the frontline of the impacts of climate change.
Kamea Chayne: Right. And of course, the climate crisis is tied to, and a part of the human rights conversation, as it is a part of the multispecies justice conversation, so it is helpful to like constantly expand our lenses that we use to try to understand these issues.
A more big-picture though likely overly simplistic question that comes to mind for me when I think about human rights is whether the framework and concept is even necessary altogether only because our political systems have systemically deprived certain groups of people of shelter, food, clean water—through displacement, through pollution, through land and resource privatization, through colonization, forced cultural assimilation, habitat destruction and conversion, and on and on.
So like justice is only necessary because there's been injustice. And in a similar vein, is human rights only necessary because of systemic violence and oppression? Maybe the underlying question here is how we got here—and I'm sitting with the delicate nuance of not trying to suggest a more pure and perfect past, and yet still pointing to the very real, aggravating and increasing number of struggles people are facing just to meet their own basic needs of survival. How would you unravel some of these threads?
Dany Celermajer: Today I have quite an ambivalent relationship with human rights. So without a doubt, the intrahuman injustices, the intrahuman violations, not only the immediate ones, but as you said, the macro-patterns of colonialism, imperialism, rabid neoliberalism, capitalism in all forms, but [especially] in the type of bloated form that we've seen really intensify over the last 50 years, have left many peoples, many populations, many groups systematically deprived of the basic conditions of a decent life. And I think it's critically important to understand that those patterns of colonialism and imperialism are not something that belong in the past, but continue, and we see that, as you say, in land grabs, in dispossession, in the ongoing failure to recognize the land claims and the cultural claims of Indigenous and other colonized peoples. So on that score, absolutely. I think human rights as a framework has really important work to do, and on certain dimensions speaks to those violations.
At the same time, insofar as I said earlier, that human rights remain a completely anthropocentric conversation or framework, I think it can occlude or erase, make it difficult for us to understand, the way in which the suffering and the injustice that human beings face is largely inseparable from the violence that's committed against the Earth and against other species. And so ultimately…
I think we need a framework of justice that doesn't reiterate or reinforce human exceptionalism—which is largely at the root of the climate crisis and the environmental crisis and colonialism—but that actually recognizes the entanglement of humans in the more-than-human worlds.
And if we think about something like colonialism, both historical colonialism and ongoing colonialism, the systematic violence against Indigenous peoples, and the raping and the exploitation and extractive relationships with lands, and with other species, really are [unintelligible], right? If we think about something like the colonization of the Americas, it was about simultaneously about the destruction of peoples and forms of life, and the desire or the institutional imperative to form extractive relationships with their country, so that resources could be produced that would then produce more wealth in the European center. So I think we need a framework that allows us to not only recognize those entanglements, but to address them hand-in-hand.
At the same time, having said all that, I think there are some really interesting developments going on in the human rights world that could start to do that work. So the UN recently, the United Nations General Assembly, adopted the principle of human right to a healthy environment, which gets us some of the way. But there was a recent case in Queensland—which is a state in Australia—Queensland has a Human Rights Act and a group of mainly Indigenous young people took a case arguing that a proposed coal mine, a very large coal mine, that if it went ahead it would violate a number of their fundamental human rights, like their right to life and importantly their right to culture, which is protected under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and they won that case. And so there was an argument that the coal mine, which is obviously going to be a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions and contribute to global heating and all of the climate disasters that flow from that, is simultaneously a source of violation of human rights.
And I find that case really interesting because what it has us do is say that human rights are embedded in how the environment is traded. And so I think not only pragmatically is that useful, [but] it may [also] be a way of starting to recast how we understand human rights. I'm a great fan of the expression, we have to rebuild the ship at sea. We have to work with the institutions and the laws that are available to us, we're not going to wake up tomorrow and suddenly have a brand new perfect legal system, or legal framework, or institutional framework. We very much need to work with transforming the institutions that are available to us, seeing how far we can stretch them, and if indeed we can transform them so that human rights institutions are no longer so anthropocentric and no longer form that conception of the human as being separate from the modern human.
Kamea Chayne: So if we broadened how we even defined the human altogether to something that is much more interdependent with our broader communities of life and so forth, then that could also help to shift the existing human rights frameworks [towards becoming] one essentially with multispecies justice—expanding how we define human so that the human essentially becomes these webs of beings.
I would love to talk more about land—how our current economic systems view land and what a more expansive lens might invite. In your book Summertime, which shares your experience living through black summer bushfires in Australia with your multispecies community, you raise such critical questions about the valuation of land.
As you share: "Within the world of the real estate market land is worth as much as people are willing to pay for it; its value is an entirely comparative and competitive artefact." What do you mean by the valuation of land being entirely comparative and competitive artefact and what else might you add in terms of how these reductive forms of value may be or are completely divorced from the multispecies communities alive and present in these spaces?
Dany Celermajer: I'm really glad that you pulled out that section of Summertime, because as you began to ask the question, I was thinking, I'm really going to answer that by talking about that experience.
Eight years ago when we were looking to move, to go out of the city and to live on what we hoped would be an intentional multispecies community, we came to this land where I'm sitting right now, and my partner and I asked if we could spend the weekend here before we bid on it at auction, so that we could really get a sense of the place, so that we could tread the place, so that we could have our bodies embedded in the place. And as we were walking around, swimming in the river, sitting in the dirt, of course we were talking about how much were we going to pay for it, because it was for sale. And we had a conversation about this idea of value, like what is value?
The real estate market, as you quoted me writing in the book, says value is what people are willing to pay for it. So what were the other people at the auction willing to pay for it? How did it compare with other places that had been "for sale"? That's one system of value.
But then when you're actually in the place, experiencing it in a way that is not entirely mediated through that system of meaning, you have a sense of the value of the land in many other different ways.
So one way, which you mentioned, is what's the value of the land for all of the other people who live here—the wombats and the birds and the microbes, and what's the value of the land for itself? And then what's the value of the land outside any instrumental value, like the land is this intrinsic good? So we don't say to each other, like, you don't look at me, I hope, and say, what's Dany's value? Like, what am I willing to pay for her?
We look at other human beings and we see them as having ultimate value, which is outside any exchange system. When we don't do that, we call that slavery or the reduction of human beings to things. Yet that's in the dominant capitalist, hegemonic system that rules so much of the world now. That's how we understand land, and that's how we treat land.
And to tie that back to some of our earlier conversation about colonialism and about the violence against Indigenous peoples, that's really one of the fundamental schisms—that, as I understand it, for Indigenous peoples, land isn't understood as having a value on an exchange market. Land is part of a set of kinship relationships where people have responsability to land, where land is a source of life and a source of meaning, and has this ultimate intrinsic value. And so when colonization then turned land into property, that was a profound violation, and remains a profound violation of the way in which Indigenous peoples understand, live on, relate to land.
In sum, the hegemonic understanding of land as property, as something that can be owned and that we can place a market value on and can be exchanged, does tremendous violence to all of these other understandings of land, all of these other experiences of land, not only, of course, primarily to Indigenous peoples and primarily to the other beings for whom land is a place of life, for the land itself; but also for people who are fully embedded or interpolated into that system. So for people like, say me, who are brought up in a system of Western property values, if you'll relate to land in that way, you actually miss out on a whole lot of meaning that is there. And that was so evident for me when I came here, that the land was offering a relationship and that that offer of relationship could not be reduced to value on a real estate market. And that I could accept that offer of relationship: of course, it meant that I had to engage in that real estate market, but that if I was going to accept that offer of relationship, I had to enter into a different understanding of who the land was.
Kamea Chayne: As someone leading the Multispecies Justice project, you've been keen on inviting people to take seriously the ethical claims of the more-than-human. And at a glance, people might take this to mean our need to expand the human part of human rights. To have the subject refer to other subjects and species who are not human.
But you push back against this as well for various reasons, including that subjects typically refer just to individuals, and even more broadly, that the idea of species itself relies on categorizations that are reductionistic, possibly exclusionary, and rooted in very particular human knowledge systems. What do you think is important to lay out and highlight in regards to how that subject or species is even defined?
Dany Celermajer: This is the very tricky part of the Multispecies Justice project—and of course, the Multispecies Justice project isn't the only framework that is trying to do this work; many others are. [And] of course, Indigenous peoples have been doing this since time [immemorial], but also ecofeminists, lots of different types of post-humanists... So I don't want to make a claim of exceptionalism here. We belong to a broader set of transformative, or in the case of Indigenous peoples, a reclaiming of an understanding.
But the fundamental point that that you were getting at is this is not an additive understanding or an extensionist understanding. It's not, Oh, well, first we thought it was humans, and now we understand that it is, for example, great apes and elephants, and then we can now extend it to dogs and pigs, and then eventually we might extend it to other sorts of beings, even beings other than animals, maybe trees, as we understand more about tree sentience; maybe mycelium, as we understand that mycelium is also capable of communication.
There are two fundamental problems with that approach. The first is it continues to think of all of these different beings as individuals who get [unintelligible], kind of like Noah's Ark: now you come in, now you come in, now you come in. That's the first problem. But the second problem is it relies on a logic where the model for the subject of justice is a particular type of human being, and others are included to the extent that we can recognize ourselves in them. So this a type of narcissism, like how close to you, how close to the human, understood in a particular way, are these other beings? And if they're sufficiently proximate, then we, the humans who are the gatekeepers, are going to let them in. So those are two problems.
The alternative is very difficult to articulate because the language that we use is a language of separation, a language of individualism, a language of exceptionalism... But the alternative is to understand—and you got at this earlier in one of your questions where you talked about re-conceptualizing the human and you used the language of interdependence... I would go even further.
“Interdependence” still implies that there are different beings who are dependent on each other and that there's no such thing as the human outside these entanglements with other beings. If you just think about the human... way more of the DNA in the human body is “non-human” than “human” DNA. The idea that there's this thing of the human that you can draw a line around, and outside of that being is the non-human, and inside that being is the human—it just doesn't even make scientific sense.
If we think about it in perhaps a more accessible way, human life, well, all animal life, is completely dependent on the availability of oxygen. The availability of oxygen is completely dependent on plant life.
I use the language of entanglement rather than interdependence because entanglement implies that what's fundamental is relationships.
So if we think about the fundamental nature of being a network, and then you have these nodes in the network where you can kind of artificially draw a line around it and say, well, that's a tree, that's a microbe, that's an individual human, but those are effects of the network, rather than the network being something that joins them all together. I hope that makes sense.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Interdependence fundamentally suggests that it's between different beings. And I love the invitation to recognize our entanglement, and I would also say, like our expanded senses of embodiment, so what we understand to be our body, and taking a more holistic view of what that entails.
Part of what has been central to this show has been recognizing how our underlying worldviews shape our politics, moralities, identities, and how we show up in the world. And along these lines, you've also explored how our senses of human exceptionalism or otherwise deep humility could affect our ethics—particularly as it has to do with the more-than-human world. I would love it if you could unpack this a little more, including how you might trouble the deeper roots of an ethics of minimizing suffering through interventions. Are there examples you could share? And what could a more multispecies sense of ethics entail?
Dany Celermajer: Let me start with an example. In the field of conservation, conservation biology, ecological conservation... We have seen a series of interventions designed to what's called "manage" landscapes, and those interventions are based on a very limited understanding of the way in which ecosystems work. And the humans place themselves outside those systems as the experts who can manage the system. So you already have a problem, that we're outside it. And so the humans make a series of decisions about who ought to live and who ought to die, and how many of different types of beings there ought to be, so you already have a problem there in that the human places themselves in this position of the knowing subject and all other beings as objects.
Now, part of the problem that flows from that, is that we tend to—and I use the word way very cautiously here, I'm talking about a particular way of being human—have quite limited understandings, or always have very finite understandings of the complexity of those systems. And so, often, we can make very grave mistakes. So if we think about examples where humans thought that there was a pest species that needed to be managed, and then introduced a predator of that pest, who became an even greater problem for the functioning and flourishing of that ecosystem.
There's a huge amount of arrogance—but also this assumed right to somehow manage the system, as if you're managing a little ecosystem that is in front of you in a glass cabinet, when actually this is a much more complex world that has logics that defy our current capacity to understand them.
Indigenous peoples who have lived for, in some cases tens of thousands of years, in ecosystems, have much more nuanced, complex understandings of the way in which ecosystems work. And as I understand it, they don't extract themselves from those ecosystems. So their whole forms of governance and forms of life are designed to allow for a flourishing ecosystem, but the type of interventions that we have seen emerging from Western modern science often have this much more external relationship with ecosystems. There's even more problematic and offensive arguments that I've heard, where, surprisingly, they come from people who are committed to animal ethics, primarily out of a utilitarian framework, where I've heard [them] say things like, Well, what we need to do is we need to minimize suffering, right?
And so, for example, if we take the relationship between predator and prey, Well, we need to protect the prey from the suffering that's involved in predation. But of course, those predatory relationships are part of a much larger and more complex system of the flows of life that allow for all of those different beings to sustain themselves in that particular environment across time. But if you just take this dyadic relationship between the predator and the prey, and extract it from what is actually a complex of multi-dimensional interactions, and you just try and manage that one part of it, because your ethical commitment is to minimize suffering as you understand it... Then you can completely destroy that ecosystem which relies on a set of dyadic relationships that can't actually be abstracted from it, but that, when you bring them together, keep the whole system going.
Kamea Chayne: Right. And there are really a lot of limitations to human knowledge systems in general, because I think we try to conceptualize the complexities of the world. But I think in reality, the complexities cannot be properly reduced or framed, into these concepts understood by our knowledge system. So I think it all just calls for much greater humility, on our end.
In our past conversation with Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, he noted that "we've lost sight of the violence of inclusion. To be included is to give up our names, something, just to be seen. Recognition is not to be beheld, it is to be reformulated in ways that are acceptable to a dominant force. So there's something lost in the act of recognition."
That was from a particular context of possibly problematizing the process of humanization itself—with that human referring to the more atomized self. But here in a similar way, you've also laid out the limitations of multispecies justice as merely an extensionist project. What leads you to emphasize particularly the word merely in this context? And how could a broader inclusion in the concepts of rights and human rights actually lead to deeper forms of exclusion?
Dany Celermajer: So I very much appreciate Bayo's observation. The use of the word merely, to an extentionist project speaks back to the problems of extententionism that I addressed before, that it uses a logic of sameness and [that] it also reinforces the notion that the human understood in a particular way is the ultimate measure of moral value, and it makes individuals primary instead of recognizing the primacy of relationships.
I'd like to pick up, though, on this notion of the violence of recognition, where recognition is assimilation into a dominant system of meaning, rather than sitting with difference, and allowing for difference to speak itself. And I think that speaks back to the last question that you asked me, about the dangers and the arrogance of "managing environments". That the danger is bringing a logic that has been created in a very limited environment: in the lab or in the conference center, and then imposing it on a world that is full of difference, that is full of complexity and reducing it, rather than allowing its difference and its complexity to shape our understanding, we try and shape it with our existing understandings and so do violence: I think that's part of what Bayo is getting at there.
But it's tricky, right? So there's a place in Summertime, where I talk about the dangers of anthropomorphism and I'm drawing on the work of a wonderful, no longer alive French-Lithuanian philosopher called Emmanuel Levinas, who talked about our encounter with what he called the face, as the moment of ethical recognition, where we recognize that the other is not only an object in my world, but has their own world, is a site of their own experience, and not reducible to who I think they are, or what I think they are. And I talk about my encounter with the face of Katy. Katy was a pig with whom I shared a life, who was killed on the 31st of December 2019. And then I talk about recognizing, increasingly, that trees have faces as well. But then there's this really obvious Anthropocentrism, or anthropomorphism, there, because face is something that humans have or that animals have, it's not something that trees have.
The problem is that all of these words that take the morphology of the human, understood in a particular way, are the words that carry moral value.
When we think about something like agency or freedom or moral value, these are glued, they're sutured to a particular understanding of the human being, and then when we apply them to beings other than humans, it seems that we're anthropomorphizing. But we've taken all the good words for ourselves, right?
And so I think there's a tension, on the one hand, you don't want to do this act of recognition by misrecognition, which is what Bayo's getting at, where you impose a pre-existing limited system of meaning on a world which is full of difference and complexity and otherness, that we haven't yet encountered. On the other hand, I think there's a type of imperative to share the good words around, and what I say in Summertime, is maybe if we share those words around, maybe if we say, Well, a tree does have agency, then those words will start to change their meaning when they are attached to other types of being. So I think there are some really tricky paths to navigate there.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, and it seems like it could be a reframe, as in, are these things necessarily viewed as anthropomorphizing, or could we possibly see this as pluralizing what the words themselves mean? So like, intelligence, agency, sentience, face, family. I think we could see it both ways, possibly with nuance. It could either be viewed as making them more like humans, or that people can have greater empathy for them. Or it could also just mean kind of queering and pluralizing the meanings of what [these words] mean.
Finally, I'd love to touch on the word hope. Not to be reductive, but on the show, I have really seen mostly two camps of people on this front—people who strongly believe hope is crucial as a source of motivation for action, and those who are very wary, for example of the false illusions it might perpetuate.
As you've shared, "Too often this word, this feeling, especially delivered over the radio, strikes me as a low-cost soporific. Placation. Immunity from the ongoing assault." How do you see hope often used as a form of placation? And to not fall into a hopelessness that settles on inaction, how do you reframe or where do you find your sources of a more rooted sense of motivation—to realize alternative futures?
Dany Celermajer: So the metaphor that I have come to associate with that soporific version of hope, is a magic carpet. So one finds oneself in a very difficult place, where one's infused with a range of uncomfortable emotions, fear, grief, rage, and so on, that you want to get away from. And so you get on the magic carpet of hope, and it flies above the experience of tomorrow and the day after, where you're going to have to navigate a world which is full of challenges and yourself, who is full of these difficult emotions, and you end up in a place where everything's okay. That magic carpet has a counterpart in the magic carpet of despair, which also takes you over all of the difficulties of navigating the actual world into a place where it's all terrible. It's all gone. It's going to be apocalyptic.
Both of those are a type of escape from living the day-to-day of reality with all of its difficulties and complexities, but also joys and relationships, and so on. There's a beautiful quote by an author called Mariame Kaba, where she, I think, is drawing from her grandma, who said hope is a discipline. And I think hope is a discipline.
Hope understood as an orientation to a world where possibilities that are opening up expand beyond our current capacity to imagine what might unfold.
And I think that links back to what you spoke about earlier, humility—that we don't know what the future is going to be, and that there is a moral obligation upon each of us and upon our communities to work towards a future which is as capacious, and where the possibility for the flourishing of all beings is as great, as possible, but not in a naive way.
That that future, no matter what we do now because of the carbon that is already locked into the environment—right now there is an enormous amount of suffering, just an inexpressible amount of suffering, that is happening through climate crisis... Right now. There will be tomorrow, there will be the next day. There will be next year. There will be in a decade. There will be in three decades. That is locked in. That is something that we need to have the fortitude to be able to be present to, at the same time as endorsing a commitment to do what each of us can and what we can do collectively to make it as good as possible. So I think joining humility and hope, is a way of grounding hope in the reality of what is, but also being open to the reality of what could be, which is beyond our current capacity to know.
*** CLOSING ***
Kamea Chayne: What has been an impactful book that you've read or a publication that you follow?
Dany Celermajer: I'm a huge fan of the Indian writer, Amitav Ghosh. His latest nonfiction, The Nutmeg's Curse, is a brilliant treatise on the link between colonial and environmental violence. But I'm going to say, too, I hope that's okay, his novel, Gun Island, treats the complexities of environmental destruction and habitual violence against marginalized people in a way that really does justice to the complexity of those issues. And it's also just a magical book. So that's a book that profoundly inspired me.
Kamea Chayne: What is a personal motto, mantra or practice that keeps you grounded?
Dany Celermajer: I'm constantly reminding myself of the truth of my own finitude, quite literally, that I'm going to die and be forgotten. I think that's a really good way of putting yourself in your place in the universe. And a practice is... So I live with about 35 other domesticated animals and the practice of just bringing them food, cleaning up their manure, making sure they have dry and cool shelter. So just those practices of daily care and attention to a whole lot of other beings.
Kamea Chayne: What is one of your greatest sources of inspiration at the moment?
Dany Celermajer: It's always the animals and the land, the generosity of trees. Trees are just so generous. I live in a very hot place. And if you go into the rainforest, the cool of the humus, which has been created by all of the trees that have died and the living trees themselves. The humor of the donkeys, the emotional intelligence of the pigs, the kindness of the horses, who look after a really old blind horse who is amongst them, the sense of power of the black cockatoos who live here. They are an infinite source of inspiration for me.
Kamea Chayne: Dany, thank you so much for joining me here on the show today. And for all that you've inspired in us, it was really an honor to have you. For now, what final words of wisdom do you want to leave us with as green dreamers?
Dany Celermajer: Very often environmental and animal ethics have been oriented towards the bad things that we do, that we mustn't treat the environment badly, that we mustn't be cruel or violent towards other animals. And I think that's an important part of the moral orientation, but increasingly I like to think about it as, what are the relationships that are available to us? What are all of the relationships with beings in the more-than-human world that are potential friendships, that are potential love relationships? That if we didn't think that our only pool of friends and lovers were those amongst humans, but included the more-than-human, what an extraordinary, wonderful, full of wonder, world we find ourselves in.
