As we enter the proposed era of the Anthropocene, or Age of the Human, it is clear that our way of being human is damaging a once vibrant kinship with the earth. We continue to sever [1] ourselves from our ecosystems, discarding a love for the environments we are very much a part of. In her book, ‘Being Human’, Anna L. Peterson (2001, pg.2) states that “most western belief systems define humans as unique among the rest of life; humans are the only animal with ‘x’, [x being] some essential trait lacking in all other animals and setting people not only apart from but also above them”. This anthropocentric trait could span from Western religions establishing an eternal soul to various philosophical theories exploring the ‘only human’ quality of reason. Each quality further externalises nonhuman life from humans, deepening the severance between the two. In order to deconstruct what this ‘x’ could be and concurrently examine “traditional western ways of thinking about nature and human nature” (Peterson, 2001, pg.50), I focus on the subject of storytelling to analyse the cultural severing taking place in our communities. As Peterson (2001, pg.18) says, “Only in the light of stories can people come to understand themselves, the multiple roles they play, and the origins and trajectories of their communities”. In analysing various stories and myths in Western culture, I aim to suggest one answer as to why the human species is disconnecting itself from nature and evaluate how our relationships with nonhumans [2] are suffering through the teachings embedded in stories.
Through certain stages of childhood, talking to animals and plants is welcomed as a cute pastime; it is accepted as a regular oddity of a child’s imagination, showing signs that our children are developing healthy, creative personalities. Yet, as we hit the age of 10 onwards, the previous normality in these acts of kinship is established as weird, and an othering occurs from the decision that life, and indeed literature, “should not be about talking toasters or friendly frogs” (Morton, 2017, pg.18). Stories, especially as we grow older, reinforce the Severing in a common exclusion of nonhuman protagonists, an absence which reflects the growing disconnect to the natural world. How many stories can you name which don’t revolve around a human (or human-like) hero? As our stories adopt anthropocentric views, centre the human figure, or place the human species in positions of power over others, we cultivate a way of being human that severs our vital relationships to nonhuman life, losing compassion for lives outside our own species, and establishing a greater negligence of care for the environment.
The origin myth for Christianity is one that is deeply entwined with Western societies, influencing our behaviours and beliefs for centuries. Yet, this particular story makes a clear separation between humans and nonhumans, establishing a severing from nature at the very roots of our beginnings. A short extract goes as follows.
On the sixth day, God made all the beasts of the earth, the cattle and everything that creeps upon the land. God then created a man, Adam, in his own image, and then a female, Eve, to stand beside him. God blessed them and said, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish in the sea and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing upon the earth’. God had now finished all of his work and on day seven, God rested. The Garden of Eden became a home for the happy couple.
The separation can be seen in three parts as explored by Peterson in Being Human. Firstly, “humans alone are created in God’s likeness” (2001, pg.29). We claim our uniqueness through the assertation that only we possess qualities of God, qualities supposedly lacking in other species. Secondly, we are “given dominion over the rest of creation” (pg.29) The language used here cultivates beliefs of our uniqueness as humans. We are installed with a sense of superiority as we are given the power to control and dominate other animals, placed us at the top of the hierarchical triangle by God. Thirdly, the narrative that humans fell from Eden embeds the idea that “all that is fully human is fallen from Eden, separated from the mother, in the domain of the artificial, deracinated, alienated” (Haraway, 2008, pg.11). What makes up the human body from the hair on our heads to the thousands of cells bursting in our fingertips is severed from the very world we are made within.
The story leads us to believe we are the divine, the rulers and the fallen; alienated and separated from the ecosystems we must protect and relationships to nonhumans we must cherish. The world is established to be governed by human figures, controlling everything from the plants in the soil to the birds in the sky. And as we centralise the human existence, we exclude nonhuman realities and remove any kind of agency other lifeforms have over their own life. When stories like the Christian Creation story neglect lives outside of our own species, there is a persistent alienation towards other lifeforms from humans that begins to extend outside of literature, reinforcing the Severing in our ecosystems with deeply upsetting consequences to our kinship with nonhuman life. Why can we not have more stories reflecting the perspective of a worm or a fly for instance? While stories can have damaging effects to our behaviours, they can also carve a path to guide us towards futures that weave human and nonhuman realities in networks of mutually beneficial care. In our current climate, we must begin to “maintain and repair a world so that humans and non-humans can live in it as well as possible in a complex life-sustaining web” (Puig de La Bellacasa, 2017, pg.97). And the speculative narratives created in storytelling present a way to set this in motion as we imagine worlds where humans are not the centre of life, rather one part of the web, all as equally important as each other. As Anna Tsing (2015, pg.156) says in her book ‘Mushroom at the End of the World’, we must engage with other kinds of narratives to be able to enlarge what is possible, encompassing adventures from all kinds of beings into our literature and, consequently, our everyday.
In my current design practice, the idea of nonhuman centred stories influences me as I consider the way narratives can be used to build sustaining and loving kinships with the earth and all beings upon it. “Can I show landscape as the protagonist of an adventure in which humans are only one kind of participant?” for example (Tsing, 2015, pg.155). If we see realities from nonhuman perspectives or if we see ourselves in realties where our humanness supports ecosystems, maybe this could provide incentive through found empathy to care for our environment. In a project called ‘The Treaty of Finsbury Park’ by studio Furtherfield (Catlow and Frost, 2022), stories are used to depict nonhuman realities in order to organise and shape the environment, in this case Finsbury Park, with all species involved in an interspecies democracy. Stories, and nonhuman narratives, play their role here in helping shine light on the need for multispecies consideration when it comes to decisions on our planet, and they also help to reconnect us with the living beings we share our spaces with. In my work, I hope to use stories in the same way as I begin to explore methods of decentralising the human to imagine worlds of more interconnected living to nature.
PLAYING PLANT:
In a Donna Haraway quote, “Whom and what do I touch when I touch my dog? And how is “becoming with” a practice of becoming worldly?” (2008, pg.3), the concept of becoming with is examined as a potential way of extending our understanding of the world, and therefore our understanding of being human. In my final year project, I am aiming to explore the notion of Becoming Plant by merging the human and nonhuman body and/or experience, and in doing so, stimulate new ideas of humanness. As a result, I began my work by imagining worlds where plant and human bodies are combined; humans able to grow plants and plants able to grow humans. Through extending the body to include plant bodies, I establish the inescapable fact that we are a part of a plant’s existence, and them us, ontologically affecting one another and the environment. “If you see plants and water as part of your existence, then why would you want to damage them?” (Morgan and Hantelmann, 2021, pg.18). In addition, the physical merging of bodies could stimulate exploration into nonhuman realties so we may better understand nature in such a way that we learn to reform mutual, loving relationships with nonhumans as we do with humans, opening our circles of care outside anthropocentrism.
bell hooks comments that ‘What we cannot imagine cannot come into being’ (2015, pg.14). We can imagine a world using the speculative narratives and designed tools to guide ourselves to restore lost kinship to nonhumans and learn to interact with plant bodies differently outside an anthropocentric attitude. As I move forward into my practice, I have been planning to use design fictions to imagine new origin stories that reconnect us to the beings we share our spaces with, and I intend to continue making props and tools that extend our bodies and support these tales, encouraging conversations between others that include multispecies perspectives. As we move away from tales like the Christian Creation story that teach a way of being human that dominates and controls, there is hope within the wonder of stories that we may be able to reimagine our way of being human in the natural world. Through intertwining the worlds of all beings, we may reconnect with nature. By decentralising the human body, and narrating nonhuman realities, we can find an interspecies democracy where care is given in abundance for all lifeforms. The trees, the dogs, the rocks and the humans can all be valued with equal significance to each other. Neither need be less. Life can indeed be about friendly frogs.
To ‘become with’ plant. To grow branches for arms and legs, branches that spread and multiply, rooting our hybrid bodies into the earth, pulling the human species back down into the environment they are very much a part of.
FOOTNOTES –
[1] Described in Timothy Morton’s book, ‘Humankind: solidarity with nonhuman people’, The Severing gives name to a trauma that some humans persist in imposing on each other, and consequently, on other nonhuman lifeforms (2017, pg.17). It refers to a world, our world, in which any being thought to be outside of human social space, whether it is alive or not (be that trees, dogs or rocks), is regarded simply as external to us (pg.13). It is likely that this Severing affects not only our physical bodies, since our bodies are comprised of nonhuman life, but also affects our psychic’s as well (pg.7).
[2] In this essay, I use the term nonhuman to describe animals, plants, soil and all manner of living things alike. I encompass the term ‘More than Human’ which refers to beings described by Sarah Whatmore, to argue for the hybridity of humans and non-humans and their co-fabrication of the socio-material (2006, pg.603).