Human-Plant Entanglement: Thinking with Plants in the Anthropocene is an edited collection that redefines the boundaries of phytocentric scholarship. By foregrounding the question of the Anthropocene at the centre of plant studies, this book illustrates how attentiveness to plant life can allow our habitual anthropocentric/instrumental assumptions to be invaded by a unique 'phytocentric' impression that presents a new ethical imaginary for a human-plant relationship. With twelve carefully argued essays, this book sets a new benchmark (...) in the field of Critical Plant Studies. (shrink)

Slaughter sets the debate about what is acceptable to do to animals at an extremely low bar. Recently, there has been considerable investment in developing cell-based meat, an alternative meat production process that does not require the raising and slaughtering of animals, instead using muscle cells cultivated in a bioreactor. We discuss the animal ethics impacts of cell-based and plant-based meat on human-animal interactions from animal welfare and rights perspectives, focusing on industrial meat production scenarios. Our hypothesis is (...) that the insertion of cell-based meat in the global meat market may alleviate farm animal suffering and potentially restore resources for wild fauna. We employed a conservative estimation of the cell-based meat contribution to the global meat market in the year 2040 to analyze the consequences for human-animal relationships for both wild animals and farmed domesticated animals. We discuss possible effects of an animal cell domestication process, previously described as the second domestication, on human-animal relationships. We consider its potential to reduce the impact of human demographic changes and land use on animal life, in particular whether there would be increased biomass availability and free land for wild animals. We anticipate a major reduction in animal suffering due to the decrease in the number of individual animals involved in food production, which justifies the adoption of cell-based meat from a utilitarian perspective. For the conventional animal food production that remains, further consideration is needed to understand which systems, either high or low welfare, will be retained and the impact of the innovation on the average farm animal welfare. Additionally, it seems likely that there will be less acceptance of the necessity of animal suffering in farming systems when meat production is uncoupled from animal raising and slaughter, supported by a deontological perspective of animal ethics. Consequent to this is anticipated the mitigation of relevant barriers to animal protection and to the recognition of animals as subjects by legislation. Thus, the development of the alternative meats may be related to a significant change in our relationship with non-human animals, with greater benefits than the prima facie effects on farm animals. (shrink)

In recent years, numerous artistic experiments have emerged that engage Critical Plant Studies in dialogue with various forms of artistic creation. The role of plants in these processes, their capacity to influence them, and their impact on human imaginaries are currently subjects of debate. This text aims to analyze these questions within the context of a specific artistic project. The piece Other Intelligences by the artist duo Maria Castellanos and Alberto Valverde introduces novel features regarding the role of (...) plants and the space of encounter between humans and plants. We will analyze this artistic device by applying concepts such as plant agency and performance, opacity, and some considerations related to ethics and care. Additionally, we will present observations of certain plant behaviors and the results of six interviews conducted with project participants. (shrink)

The “plant turn” in anthropology, while controversial, has led to a renewed focus on how humans relate to different species of plants. In this article, I aim to contribute to our knowledge of human-plant relationships by analyzing how historical actors used sacred plants in past ritual settings. I study criminal and civil cases involving shamans in late colonial Ecuador, with a focus on plant use. Legal records from 1782, 1793, 1800, and 1802 reveal information about the (...) use of fragrant plants believed to have transformative properties, the use of entheogens for non-visionary purposes, and even the incorporation of the sacred wanduc (Brugmansia sp) into the punishment of one shaman. This plant-focused approach to the reading of ethnohistorical documents provides a history of particular plants as they were used by individual actors in specific geographic and historical contexts, and sheds light on people’s understanding of human-plant-spirit relationships. (shrink)

Plants are commonly considered immobile, in contrast to humans and other animals. But vegetal existence involves many place-based forms of change: stems growing upward, roots spreading outward, fronds unfurling in response to sunlight, seeds traveling across wide distances, and other intricate relationships with the surrounding world. How do plants as sessile, growing, decaying, and metamorphosing beings shape the places they inhabit, and how are they shaped by them? How do human places interact with those of plants-in lived experience; in (...) landscape painting; in cultivation and contemplation; in forests, fields, gardens, and cities? Examining these questions and many more, Plants in Place is a collaborative study of vegetal phenomenology at the intersection of Edward S. Casey's phenomenology of place and Michael Marder's plant-thinking. It focuses on both the microlevel of the dynamic constitution of plant edges or a child's engagement with moss and the macrolevel of habitats that include the sociality of trees. This compelling portrait of plants and their places provides readers with new ways to appreciate the complexity and vitality of vegetal life. Eloquent, descriptively rich, and insightful, the book also shows how the worlds of plants can enhance our understanding and experience of place more broadly. (shrink)

This study sheds new insight on how historically oppressed and marginalized actors are able to pursue environmental sustainability based on alternative worldviews (e.g., Indigenous worldviews) rather than succumbing to those dominant in the Western society, based on a study of the Syilx (“Okanagan”) people in British Columbia, Canada. We found that the Syilx people enacted the ethical practice of nʕawqnwixʷ (“the reciprocal gentle dropping of thoughts, like water, into everyone’s minds to address the issue at the centre of discussion and (...) to reach collective consensus for action”), anchored in the Syilx worldview, to reconstruct the relationships between humans and nature. Two overlapping processes are involved: developing foundational principles for human–nature relations and carrying out reconstruction work. Ongoing enactment of nʕawqnwixʷ practice provided community-based agency, enabling the Syilx people to shift the conversation around environmental sustainability. From this, we discuss the theoretical potential of community-based agency for the study of environmental sustainability, and the role of Indigenous worldviews for (re)imagining human-nature ethics (and reorienting the theoretical lens of human-animal or human-plant ethics form a firm-centric focus to a community-oriented lens), and important implications for practitioners and policymakers in the field of environmental sustainability. (shrink)

Genebanking, the process of preserving genetic resources, is a central practice in the modern management of crop genetics, especially for the species used for food and agriculture. Closely interrelated networks of local, national and global actors are responsible for ex situ conservation. They all seek to make plant genetic resources accessible for all and now face new challenges arising from digitisation. Plant sciences are entering the postgenomic era, moving fast from initially providing a single reference genome for each (...) species (genomics), to harnessing the extent of diversity within crop species (pangenomics) and among their relatives (referred to as postgenomics). This paper describes the extent to which ex situ collections have already undergone a digital shift, or are planning to do so, and the potential impact of this postgenomic-induced dematerialisation on the global governance of plant genetic resources. In turn, digitising material (seed) collection changes the relationship between genebanks and genomic databases. Comprehensive genomic characterisation of genebank accessions is ongoing, and I argue here that these efforts may provide a unique opportunity for genebanks to further embrace the moral, ethical and ultimately political principles on which they were built. Repurposing genebanks as decentralised digital biocentres could help relocate capabilities and stewardship over genetic resources. Empowering local farmers by providing access, promoting the use and unlocking benefits from state-of-the-art tools of modern plant breeding may allow bridging the breeding divide. However, to accomplish such a paradigm shift, genebanks require a strong political mandate that must primarily originate from the access and benefit-sharing framework. Only so may the global challenges associated with the loss of biodiversity and food insecurity be addressed. (shrink)

Empathy, and its role in human-human and human-animal relationships has been discussed at length in recent years. Empathy for plants has received little to no attention. In this essay I briefly examine existing theory about human-plant empathy, primarily Marder’s account of a projective empathy. I use contemporary scholarship by Dan Zahavi, as well as phenomenological accounts of empathy, to query this understanding of empathy and to lay the conceptual groundwork for developing an account of empathy (...) for plants in line with Max Scheler’s embodied empathy. In doing so, I sketch an account of the basis for human-plant empathy, including the gestures and behaviors that an empathy for plants may pay particular heed to. The essay concludes by outlining how such an empathy for plants may be developed. (shrink)

This article demonstrates the possibilities and problems of the formation of a new type of human‐technique‐nature relationship ‐ the organic technique ‐ in modern civilization. It is a relationship in which neither human nor nature must adapt to the needs of technology; rather, the technique is embedded in nature and becomes 'human-sized'. We can find a model for building this new type of relationship in the construction of buildings from bamboo. The uniqueness of bamboo as a building (...) material manifests in two ways. The first relates to resources: bamboo is a very fast-growing plant, so cutting it's stem does not destroy the plant itself and in three to four years there is a new 'harvest'. This means bamboo has an extremely low cost, which is critical for developing countries with rapidly growing populations. Second, bamboo has a number of architectural advantages. Due to the flexibility and elasticity of this product, bamboo buildings are earthquake resistant. Such structures do not violate the natural landscape, but instead work with it; they are characterized by low cost and ease of construction, in a variety of forms. This has led to the widespread use of bamboo by leading architects and innovators from different countries. This article shows that the application of bamboo in architecture ‐ as opposed to artificial materials such as concrete, which exploit and destroy nature and impose their forms on cultures ‐ helps this building technique to integrate into the life of ecosystems and society, and thus to become a model of harmonizing human‐technique‐nature relations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"Everything is Breath":Critical Plant Studies' Metaphysics of MixtureElisabeth Weber (bio)In her book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Robin W. Kimmerer contrasts two creation stories that are thoroughly incompatible. One starts with an all-powerful male creator calling the world and its vegetation and animals into existence through words, and forming the first human beings from clay; the other starts with Skywoman tumbling (...) through the air with seeds in her fist from the Tree of Life growing in Skyworld. One ends with the condemnation of woman to give birth in "very severe" pains, with the cursing of the ground ordered to "produce thorns and thistles" as punishment for man who will eat his food only after "painful toil," and the expulsion from the garden; the other ends in gratitude for the collective caring of the animals, with the creation of "a garden for the well-being of all." One includes an original fall from grace whose burden will be passed down from generation to generation; the other acknowledges suffering without a trace of the burden of unearned guilt. One predicts death as a return to the dust from whence mankind was created; the other imagines death as becoming plant and fruit, as becoming gift, a rejoining the spirits of all ancestors, human and others, who surround the living in everything that is. The threat of one is the inexorability of a trajectory "from dust to dust" and the latter's association, with Plato, of something so diffuse that it doesn't merit a concept or idea; the promise of the other is an abiding relationship with all that is, the reciprocity of giving and gratitude, and the gladly assumed responsibility for the "inspirited" land.Kimmerer comments:Same species, same earth, different stories. Like Creation stories everywhere, cosmologies are a source of identity and orientation to the world. They tell us who we are. We are inevitably shaped by them no matter how distant they may be from our consciousness. One story leads to the generous embrace of the living world, the other to banishment. One woman is our ancestral gardener, a cocreator of the good green world that would be the home of her descendants. The other was an exile, just passing through an alien world on a rough road [...].1 [End Page 117]Cosmologies express collective imaginairies that have evolved over hundreds, even thousands of years. The Iroquois story recounted and rendered accessible by Kimmerer is one of countless creation stories that constitute an "important genre in many preliterate traditions" (Zolbrod 5). Kimmerer suggests that even though the Judeo-Christian creation story may have receded into the background of Western collective consciousness, it plays a role in the planet's devastation. What strikes the reader in the story of Skywoman is the centrality of reciprocity, of relation, and, as the woman's name indicates, the significance of the sky. While this might mean, on planet Earth, the atmosphere–the Earth's sky is blue because of the surrounding atmosphere–the implications of the sky's preponderance reach beyond the planetary into the cosmological. The "sky is not what is above. The sky is everywhere: it is the space and the reality of mixture and movement, the definite horizon starting from which everything has to draw itself" (Coccia 218-219) in order to breathe and live.In order to continue to breathe, breathe in the long-term, the long-term, that is, as Barbara Kingsolver put it in one of her poems, "from a tree's / way of thinking" (7), non-human kin's "way of thinking" will need to play a role in humans' self-understanding. Kyle Whyte underlines that it is not enough to respond with urgency to specific ecological crises (fires, flooding, etc.) alone, but, rather, "urgency must be aimed at addressing ecological and relational tipping points together":U.S. settler colonialism, for example, in a short period of time, inflicted displacement, drastic ecological changes, and lost or disrupted relationships with hundreds of species that indigenous peoples depended on through kinship ties for generations. These changes are more extreme than what many nonindigenous persons fear most about moving beyond... (shrink)

This essay suggests that Hans-Georg Gadamer’s descriptive phenomenology of ‘tarrying’ [Verweilen] can be configured as an essential component of musical experience. At issue is the type of effortful work that intensifies the subject’s most valuable musical experiences and that allows them to become more sustainable and sensitive. It is assumed that music’s presence in the subject’s life should blossom and indeed bloom over time, although this guiding assumption is left unexamined while the essay considers how a detailed phenomenology of musical (...) tarrying might afford the subject a way of underwriting the ways in which human-music relationships are configured. John Cage’s plant piece Child of Tree is deployed, perhaps counterintuitively, as an example of the ideal hermeneutic attitude underwriting tarrying, although it is suggested that the applicability of Gadamer’s constitution of tarrying extends beyond the musical-theatrical avant-garde. (shrink)

COVID-19 catalyzed a renewed focus on the interconnected nature of human health. Together with the climate crisis, it highlighted not only intra-human connections but the entanglement of human health with the health of non-human animals, plants, and ecological systems more broadly. In this article, we challenge the persistent notion that humans are ontologically distinct from the rest of nature and the ethics that flow from this understanding. Imposing this privileged view of humans has devastating consequences for (...) beings other than humans and for humans and impedes effective responses to crises. We situate the COVID-19 pandemic within the “polycrisis,” and argue that one component of addressing multidimensional crises must involve fully embracing a relational ontology and ethics. We discuss two approaches to relationality, one articulated by ecofeminists and the second inhering in an Indigenous Māori worldview. Two dominant approaches, One Health and Planetary Health, purport to take account of relational ontologies in their approaches to health, but, we argue, persist in casting the more-than-human world in an instrumental role to secure human health. We suggest that Multispecies Justice, which draws on ecofeminist and Indigenous approaches, affords a fully relational approach to health and well-being. We explore the implications of relationality, and suggest fresh ways of understanding humans’ connections with the more-than-human world. (shrink)

_Desk Set_, a 1957 20th Century Fox studio comedy, made with the sponsorship of IBM, charts the relationship between a reference librarian, Bunny Watson, and Richard Sumner, the inventor of a computer which appears to threaten her job. The film displays a thriving philodendron within Bunny’s skyscraper office, illustrating her organic style of thinking, and implicitly inviting us to see the plant in opposition to the computer. The suggestion that the plant is in some sense excessive, claiming attention (...) beyond the norms of the ornamental background houseplant, opens questions about how we look at plants on film. We find here a reframing of figure and ground, which relates the philodendron to moments where plants become conspicuous in early film and in horror. _Desk Set_ reflects a vegetal landscape characterised by all the commonplace instrumentalising of plants in modernity, amongst which the philodendron emerges as an exception. The plant does not point outwards to a putative wilderness. Instead, our looking at it allows us to contemplate it as an individuated specimen, and to move from that act of looking to recognise its deep entanglement with the urban environment, and with human care. (shrink)

This paper investigates how reticulate evolution contributes to a better understanding of human sociocultural evolution in general, and community formation in particular. Reticulate evolution is evolution as it occurs by means of symbiosis, symbiogenesis, lateral gene transfer, infective heredity, and hybridization. From these mechanisms and processes, we mainly zoom in on symbiosis and we investigate how it underlies the rise of (1) human, plant, animal, and machine interactions typical of agriculture, animal husbandry, farming, and industrialization; (2) diet-microbiome (...) relationships; and (3) host-virome and other pathogen interactions that underlie human health and disease. We demonstrate that reticulate evolution necessitates an understanding of behavioral and cultural evolution at a community level, where reticulate causal processes underlie the rise of synergistic organizational traits. (shrink)

This article analyses Averroes/Ibn Rushd´s (d. 1198) views on motherhood in his commentary on Plato´s Republic. The starting point for this inquiry is Averroes´ comparison of the women in his society to plants. Averroes argues that performing the duties of motherhood, i.e. being children´s primary caregiver, does not constitute nor involve any form of human virtue. Averroes´ low esteem for activities of motherhood has hitherto been ignored. This paper argues that the comparison of women to plants does not hinge (...) on societal criticism solely but on at least two additional factors: Aristotle on plants in De Anima and on this low appreciation for tasks of parenthood. Furthermore, this paper aims to show that the latter is incompatible with Aristotle´s views in his ethics and biology, which emphasize, respectively, the friendship that characterizes the parent-child relationship and the intelligence and virtue needed to raise the next generation. (shrink)

AbstractIn many cultures, interactions between humans and plants are rooted in what is called “relational values”—values that derive from relationships and entail reciprocity. In Mexico, biocultural diversity is mirrored in the knowledge and use of some 6500 plant species and the domestication of over 250 Mesoamerican native crop species. This research explores how different sets of values are attributed to plants and how these influence management strategies to maintain plant resources in wild and anthropogenic environments. We ran workshops (...) in two communities in a highly biodiverse region in western Mexico, to ascertain the values and management activities related to important plant resources. The relationship between values attributed to plants and management activities was examined through redundancy analysis. A total of 180 plant resources were mentioned during the workshops, with a broad spectrum of values attributed to them, including material, non-material, and regulatory dimensions. We divided plant management strategies into three general categories of increasing intensity and complexity. We found that participants in the Indigenous community value and manage more wild plant resources than people in the non-Indigenous community. We also identified relationships between plant resource values and the type of management performed; for example, more intensive forms of management, such as sowing seeds, were used for seasonal plants that had a food value. By valuing and managing different sets of plant resources from forest, agricultural plots, and home gardens, people enabled multi-functional landscapes to form, illustrating a key feature of relational values in agroecosystems, which promotes both conservation and domestication of plants. (shrink)

How does anthoethnography contribute to the development of understandings of aesthetic experiences of wild plants and wildflower tourism? As exemplified by the quintessentially aesthetic industry of wildflower tourism, the culture of flora represents diverse engagements between people and plants. Such complex engagements offer further avenues for research. The critical methodology of anthoethnography has been one such approach to circumscribing the values, practices and rhetoric of wildflower tourism. Interviews have revealed perceptual phenomena such as the orchid and everlasting effects as two (...) counterpoised examples of the differences between visual aesthetic values occurring in the region. For appreciators such as Tinker, botanical science substantiates visual experience by showing the functional role of plants within habitats. However, the taxonomic eye is not the only judge of the value and significance of flowering plants. As underscored by Nannup, Aboriginal perspectives offer complex cultural modes of engagement and rich directions for wildflower tourism based in bodily experience. An anthoethnographic approach produces accounts of the spectrum of human perceptions of wildflowers in order to proffer potential directions for wildflower tourism of the future. Through a participatory aesthetics of flora in contemporary Australian landscapes, appreciative interactions with plants will occur not only through visual values, but also through the smell, taste, sound, or feel of plants and how one moves through communities of flora. Scientific knowledge can amplify visual and embodied modes. However, as an anthoethnographic lens has shown, wildflower tourism in the Southwest is weighted towards visual experience. Indeed, the history and contemporary practices of wildflower tourism encode ocular values that can posit a separation between post‐colonial cultures and native flora. A promising direction is towards participatory relationships beyond the aestheticisation of the surface qualities of flora and beyond the ‘conquest of the world as picture’. In an era of rapid species loss, wildflower tourism will increasingly embrace concepts of conservation, Aboriginal knowledges and the recognition of spiritual heritages, and the appreciation of plants beyond their visual impact. The expression of human sensory capacities for plants joined to an ethos of botanical conservation, drawing from scientific thought, can better ensure the longevity of flowers through the evolution of the culture of flora in the region. (shrink)

Stress associated proteins (SAPs), novel A20/AN1 zinc‐finger domain‐containing proteins, are fast emerging as potential candidates for biotechnological approaches in order to improve abiotic stress tolerance in plants – the ultimate aim of which is crop‐yield protection. Until relatively recently, such proteins had only been identified in humans, where they had been shown to be key regulators of innate immunity. Their phylogenetic relationship and recruitment of diverse protein domains reflect an architectural and mechanistic diversity. Emerging evidence suggests that SAPs may act (...) as ubiquitin ligase, redox sensor, and regulator of gene expression during stress. Here, we evaluate the new knowledge on SAPs with a view to understand their mechanism of action. Furthermore, we set an agenda for investigating hitherto unexplored roles of these proteins. (shrink)

The main aim of this article is to examine the contrast between humanism and anti-humanism as two different modern paradigms of considering the individual’s relationship with nature. My thesis is that ecology, as an ideological discourse, reshaped the both the democratic and totalitarian perspectives on humanism and anti-humanism by addressing liberties, self-care, and authenticity in terms of normative laws for environment, health, and the idea of naturalness. Reconsidering Luc Ferry’s analysis from The New Ecological Order: Tree, Animal, Human, I (...) will explain how a social-critical theory of modernity might be conceived in the terms of humanism and anti-humanism, represented by different ecological discourses whose main contribution was to add to the modern social contract the value of non-human beings, including animals, plants, and natural objects as subjects of law (in their most democratic versions) or to discount the value of humans (in their totalitarian structures), viewing racism, for example, as a clinical, biopolitical, and hence “ecological” discourse. I will argue that this condition is a cultural symptom of the anti-natural attitude of the modern individual. (shrink)

Agricultural diversification in the Midwestern Corn Belt has the potential to improve socioeconomic and environmental outcomes by buffering farmers from environmental and economic shocks and improving soil, water, and air quality. However, complex barriers related to agricultural markets, individual behavior, social norms, and government policy constrain diversification in this region. This study examines farmer perspectives regarding the challenges and opportunities for both corn and soybean production and agricultural diversification strategies. We analyze data from 20 focus groups with 100 participants conducted (...) in Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa through a combined inductive and deductive approach, drawing upon interpretive grounded theory. Our results suggest that when identifying challenges and opportunities, participants center economics and market considerations, particularly income, productivity, and market access. These themes are emphasized both as benefits of the current corn-soybean system, as well as challenges for diversification. Additionally, logistical, resource and behavioral hurdles– including the comparative difficulty and time required to diversify, and constraints in accessing land, labor, and technical support– are emphasized by participants as key barriers to diversification. Agricultural policies shape these challenges, enhancing the comparative advantage and decreasing the risk of producing corn and soybeans as compared to diversified products. Meanwhile, alternative marketing arrangements, farmer networks, family relationships, and improved soil health are highlighted as important opportunities for diversification. We contextualize our findings within the theories of reasoned action and diffusion of innovation, and explore their implications for farmer engagement, markets, and agricultural policy, and the development of additional resources for business and technical support. (shrink)

ABSTRACT One of the overarching problems of the world today is that too many people see themselves as dominating other groups of people, and dominating nature. That is a root problem. And thus part of a core solution builds from Kohlberg’s commitment to a universal moral orientation, though extended to include not only all people but the more-than-human world: animals, trees, plants, species, ecosystems, and the land itself. In this article, I make a case for this form of ethical (...) extensionism, and then present psychological evidence for it in both children and adults, including studies with inner-city Black youth and their parents. Then I build on Piaget’s, Kohlberg’s, and Turiel’s emphasis that interaction with the physical and social world is a critical mechanism for development. My corollary is this: that to reverse the incredibly fast human-caused destruction of nature—the wellsprings of human existence—we need to deepen and extend people’s interactions with nature, and with its relatively wild forms, even in urban environments. Toward this end, I discuss my current body of research and framework for urban design based on what are referred to as interaction patterns. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Paradoxical Pleasures of Human ImaginationOmar Sultan HaqueHow Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like, by Paul Bloom. W. W. Norton, 2010, 280 pp., $26.95.Have you heard about that chump who dished out $48,875 for John F. Kennedy's dusty old tape measure? The rock star who allegedly snorted his father's ashes with some cocaine? The creepy German guy who put out an advertisement (...) for someone who would let themselves be eaten by him (only to have hundreds volunteer)? The story about the man who was tired with his wife, but powerfully aroused when he was convinced he was with an exact duplicate of her? How can a staunch atheist also believe in the numinous? Why do people buy expensive wines, and bottled water, even though in blind taste tests, they can't distinguish them from the cheap stuff? Why buy pâté when your palate can't distinguish it from dog food? Why do people pay hundreds of dollars to hear the famous violinist Joshua Bell perform, but then cannot even spare a dime when a disguised Bell plays the same music on the subway in regular garb? Why might someone who trains people to prevent falls and injury enjoy watching a comedian fall and hurt himself? Why would someone pay a few hundred thousand dollars for art that consisted of someone else's unmade bed?It may be is easy to feel smug when thinking about this panoply of apparent irrationality in individual decisions and general human propensities. But the things that uniquely delight us may not be as [End Page 182] capricious as they seem. Many of the pleasures (curious or ordinary) that we get from our relationships with food, sex, irreplaceable objects, performances, safety and pain, music, literature and the imagination may have a deeper logic. They may be explicable by a better understanding of how our evolved minds work, and don't work, amidst our historically novel environments. Or so argues Paul Bloom—a cognitive developmental psychologist at Yale University—in How Pleasure Works, a brilliant and articulate synthesis of philosophy, psychology, evolutionary biology and the arts that elucidates the seemingly whimsical and once mysterious sources of our uniquely human hedonic satisfactions.The theory Bloom utilizes to systematize aspects of a number of pleasure phenomena is called psychological essentialism. This is an idea that has been developed in the last two decades by Bloom and the psychologists Douglas Medin, Andrew Ortony, Frank Keil, and Susan Gelman, among others.1 Psychological essentialism claims that, as Bloom puts it, people reliably, at a very young age, cross-culturally and throughout history, think that "things have an underlying reality or true nature that one cannot observe directly and it is this hidden nature that really matters." We assume that objects, artifacts, non-human animals, people and groups have invisible essences and unseen orders that account for their surface properties. In one of Keil's experiments, for instance, children thought that a dog made to look like a toy dog, a porcupine that had a surgery to make it look like a cactus, and a tiger stuffed into a lion suit were still a dog, porcupine and tiger, respectively. However, when each animal had its 'innards' altered, children said the animals changed into different categories, like objects or plants.2 Psychological essentialism for artifacts or tools is somewhat different from that for animate entities; the essence of artifacts is their history and the intentions of their creators.3According to How Pleasure Works, because of psychological essentialism, many human delights seem to arise that cannot be explained by simply appealing either to their low-level sensual qualities or their practical utility. Thus, the theory helps clarify some of pleasure's paradoxes. Like parents who affectionately keep tokens of their children's time as a baby, someone can enjoy owning a tape measure from a famous person because of its history of uses or other associations with important places or people. Snorting dad's ashes (however noxious to the nostrils), or pigging out on someone whom you admire, can be deeply meaningful because it feels as if one is... (shrink)

Advocates of the questioning of the dominant anthropocentric perspective of the world have been increasingly strongly presenting ethical demands for a new solution of the relationship between humans and other beings, saying that adherence to the Western philo-sophical and theological traditions has caused the current environmental, and not just environmental, crisis. The attempts are being made to establish a new relationship by relativizing the differences between man and the non-human living beings, often by attributing specifically human traits and (...) categories, such as dignity, moral status and rights to non-human living beings. The author explores antecedents of the standpoints that deviate from the mainstream Western philosophy, in terms of non-anthropocentric extension of ethics, and finds them in the fragments of first physicists, which emphasize kinship of all varieties of life. Pythagoras, Empedocles, Anaxagoras and Democritus, in this context, considered certain animals and plants as sacred, i.e. they believed that they are, in a sense, responsible for what they do and that they apart from being able to be driven by a natural desire, being able to breathe, feel, be sad and happy, also have a soul, power of discernment, awareness, the ability to think, understanding and mind. Finally, the author believes that solutions or mitigation of the mentioned crisis are not in the simple Aesopeian levelling of animals and plants "upwards", but in an adequate paideutic approach which in humans will develop an inherent ethical model of accepting non-human living beings as creatures who deserve moral and decent treatment and respect. (shrink)

Cartographies of Postcolonial Vegetal Politics resorts to Deleuze-Guattarian grammar to enunciate the productive disjunctures of vegetality while cartographizing differential repetitions of postcolonial vegetal politics.

In this paper, we discuss Næss’s concept of ecological self in light of the process of identification and the idea of self-realization, in order to understand the asymmetrical relationship among human beings and nature. In this regard, our hypothesis is that Næss does not use the concept of the ecological self to justify ontology of processes, or definitively overcome the idea of individual entities in view of a transpersonal ecology, as Fox argues. Quite the opposite: Næss’s ecological self is (...) nothing but an echo of the theme of the home and of belonging to a place, and, therefore, it deals with a positive relationship of the individual with its environment. This allows us to reshape environmental ethics starting from environmental ontology, and recalling the primacy of the latter on the former: the very theoretic background of an ethical view might only be a suitable interpretation of human nature and properties, starting from a relational viewpoint that may help understanding us our asymmetrical relationships with the world. (shrink)

This paper presents the intelligent virtual animals that inhabit Omosa, a virtual learning environment to help secondary school students learn how to conduct scientific inquiry and gain concepts from biology. Omosa supports multiple agents, including animals, plants, and human hunters, which live in groups of varying sizes and in a predator-prey relationship with other agent types (species). In this paper we present our generic agent architecture and the algorithms that drive all animals. We concentrate on two of our animals (...) to present how different parameter values affect their movements and inter/intra-group interactions. Two evaluations studies are included: one to demonstrate the effect of different components of our architecture; another to provide domain expert validation of the animal behavior. (shrink)

This paper explores the role of African worldviews in biodiversity conservation and sustainable development. African worldviews recognise the interdependence and interconnectedness of human beings, animals, plants and the natural world. Although it is not always the case that what one does depends on what one thinks and believes, indigenous African people's ideas and beliefs about the human–nature relationship have influenced what they have done in and to nature. In African worldviews, the present generation has moral obligations to the (...) ancestors and future generations. It ought to preserve the environment, which is rich in biodiversity, for posterity. This paper insists that it is extremely urgent that every effort be made to document the knowledge of peasant farmers and indigenous people in general. This paper further stresses that indigenous environmental knowledge makes a big difference to sustaining diverse environments, and it is imperative to preserve such knowledge before it dies out. (shrink)

TAFKAV may be described as the systematic development of a poetic interpretation of communication as text flowing between particular subjects and humans. The concept of text here extends beyond information in general to any number of objects subject to interpretation. The hermeneutic circle describes a process of understanding a dynamic relationship and refers to the idea that one's understanding of the whole is established by reference to the constituent parts and vice versa. Neither the whole nor any individual part can (...) be understood without reference to one another, hence it is a circle. However, this circular character of interpretation does not make it impossible to interpret a relationship rather, it highlights that meaning must be found within a dynamic relational context. The projected installation will explore communication with the plant kingdom, specifically with flowers. The aim of this experiment is to build a potential flow of human-plant information that generates a rhythm or pace and a series of constants that can then be codified arbitrary, as with all sign systems in a system of communication and hence a system of meaning. (shrink)

Tom 1. Aspekt posthumanistyczny i transhumanistyczny -- tom 2. Od humanizmu do posthumanizmu.

Urban and agricultural communities are interdependent but often differ on approaches for improving water quality impaired by nutrient runoff waterbodies worldwide. Current water quality governance involves an overlapping array of policy tools implemented by governments, civil society organizations, and corporate supply chains. The choice of regulatory and voluntary tools is likely to influence many dimensions of the relationship between urban and agricultural actors. These relationships then influence future conditions for collective decision-making since many actors participate for multiple years in water (...) quality improvement. In this policy analysis, we draw on our professional experiences and research, as well as academic and practitioner literatures, to investigate how different types of water quality interventions influence urban-agricultural relationships, specifically examining policy tools on a regulatory to voluntary spectrum. Interactions between farmers and other rural agricultural interests on one hand, and urban residents and their stormwater managers and wastewater treatment plants on the other, influence dynamics relevant for water quality improvement. We suggest that the selection of policy tools within complex governance contexts influence urban–agricultural relationships through financial exchange, political coalitions, knowledge exchange, interpersonal relationships, and shared sense of place. Policy tools that provide a means to build relationships and engage with people’s emotions and identities have potential to influence personal and community change and adaptive capacity, while processes such as lawsuits can catalyze structural change. Engaging these relationships is particularly critical given the need to move out of polarized positions to solve collective problems. (shrink)

While many theories exist to explain the complexity of environmental behaviour, the role of individuals’ relationship with nature has not yet been fully clarified. This paper attempts to operationalise human-nature relationships. It expands upon a scale assessed by an iterative process of mixed methods in the US and Europe. This scale is then used to assess individuals’ relationship with nature, and whether such relationships correlate with environmental behaviour. The value scale of Schwartz's Theory of Basic Values is used to (...) validate the results. The results verify that people hold multiple human-nature relationships, confirm strong correlations between human-nature relationships and values, and reveal that individuals’ behaviour is connected to the relationship they have with nature. (shrink)

Humans are social beings. However, we are not alone in the realm of social reality; we share this space with diverse entities, including more than just animals. The term "social" has recently been applied to describe the collective behaviors of microorganisms and plants, as well as interactions among parts and groups of organisms. Therefore, there is a need to develop a framework that enables the study of social phenomena in a clearer and less restrictive manner. In this thesis, I lay (...) the groundwork for such a framework by describing the basic building blocks of social systems and their implications in the study of social behavior. This project necessitates breaking down disciplinary boundaries between the biological, cognitive, and social sciences to provide a more comprehensive perspective on the social phenomenon. In Part I, I review recent proposals that describe social systems based on interactions. I argue that these models can be extended to other interactive systems beyond animals, questioning the limits of the standard view of social systems. Also, by challenging an argument that supports a gap between humans and nature, I advocate for a broader understanding of social reality that includes both human and nonhuman beings. In Part II, I present a new framework for studying social systems consisting of three fundamental building blocks: interactions, relationships, and social units. I argue that interactions are vital components of social systems, highlighting their dynamic and entwined nature. Relationships, arising from distinctive patterns of interactions sensitive to the identity of the individuals, play a crucial role in these systems and encompass both objective and subjective components. Lastly, I develop an account of social units as cognitively autonomous individuals, drawing on biogenic approaches to cognition. Thus, I propose that a social system emerges when cognitively autonomous individuals (social units) engage in repeated interactions and form relationships. In Part III, I apply this framework to two entities that are subjects of contemporary debate: groups and plants. I argue that both groups and plants are potential social units. Specifically, plants interact repeatedly and demonstrate the ability to differentiate between individuals, providing evidence of their capacity to form social relationships. This framework serves as a guide for studying the social behavior of these entities and offers valuable insights into their interactive systems. Overall, this expanded framework establishes connections between social phenomena across different taxa and levels of organization, facilitating comparative investigations. It introduces new perspectives on social behavior, encourages interdisciplinary collaboration, and broadens our understanding of multi-species interactions. (shrink)

_Wittgenstein and Levinas_ examines the oft-neglected relationship between the philosophies of two of the most important and notoriously difficult thinkers of the twentieth century. By bringing the work of each philosopher to bear upon the other, Plant navigates between the antagonistic intellectual traditions that they helped to share. The central focus on the book is the complex yet illuminating interplay between a number of ethical-religious themes in both Wittgenstein's mature thinking and Levinas's distinctive account of ethical responsibility.

The ways in which people conceptualize the human–nature relationship have significant implications for proenvironmental values and attitudes, sustainable behavior, and environmental policy measures. Human exceptionalism (HE) is one such conceptual framework, involving the belief that humans and human societies exist independently of the ecosystems in which they are embedded, promoting a sharp ontological boundary between humans and the rest of the natural world. In this paper, we introduce HE in more depth, exploring the impact of HE on (...) perceptions of the human–nature relationship, the role of culture in HE, and speculating on the origins of HE. We consider potential implications for environmental decision-making, conservation and environmental science, and promoting proenvironmental behavior. We present empirical evidence on the pervasiveness and consequences of HE in WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) populations, and potential interventions. Finally, we close with implications of human-exceptionalist thinking on other sustainability-related fields, including conservation practices, nature management, climate change adaptation, and environmental science. Understanding the cognitive and social drivers of this disconnect is vital on a planet now dominated by environmental change, as not only are humans increasingly impacted by natural disasters, but the choices they make can have ever more dire consequences for the sustainability of ecosystems. (shrink)

This paper examines the identity of Asian swamp buffalo (Bubalus bubalis) from different value orientations. Buffalo were introduced into Northern (Top End) Australia in the early nineteenth century. A team of transdisciplinary researchers, including an ethicist, has been engaged in field research on feral buffalo in Arnhem Land over the past three years. Using historical documents, literature review, field observations, interviews with key informants, and interaction with the Indigenous land owners, an understanding of the diverse views on the scientific, cultural, (...) and economic significance of buffalo was obtained. While the diverse stakeholders in buffalo exploitation and management have historically delivered divergent value orientations on the nature of the human–buffalo relationship, we argue that over time there is the possibility of values and ethical convergence. Such convergence is possible via transdisciplinary and transcultural agreement on the value stances that constitute the construction of the being or identity of buffalo in the face of the overwhelming need to manage population density and gross numbers. (shrink)

What does American pragmatism contribute to contemporary debates about human-animal relationships? Does it acknowledge our connections to all living things? Does it bring us closer to an ethical treatment of all animals?

According to Levinas, the history of western philosophy has routinely ‘assimilated every Other into the Same’. More concretely stated, philosophers have neglected the ethical significance of other human beings in their vulnerable, embodied singularity. What is striking about Levinas’ recasting of ethics as ‘first philosophy’ is his own relative disregard for non-human animals. In this article I will do two interrelated things: (1) situate Levinas’ (at least partial) exclusion of the non-human animal in the context of his (...) markedly bleak conception of ‘the state of nature’, and (2) drawing on Orwell, Wittgenstein and Gaita, argue that, despite his more positive evaluation of animality (specifically a dog named Bobby), Levinas is guided by a number of anthropomorphic prejudices; not least that the epithet ‘the animal’ can be used in the general singular. (shrink)

In the following paper I shall outline a number of preliminary ideas concerning the relationship between the Holocaust and certain themes which emerge in the work of Emmanuel Levinas. As this relationship is distinctly twofold, my analysis will include both a textual and a rather more speculative component. That is to say, while I shall argue that reading Levinas specifically as a post-Holocaust thinker clarifies a number of his philosophical and rhetorical motifs, so, in turn, does this challenging body of (...) work offer a means by which to re-think both the horror and ethical significance of the Holocaust itself. During the course of my argument I shall additionally refer to the writings of Primo Levi, Jacques Derrida and Martin Heidegger through whom I hope also to establish the central role guilt and confession play in Levinas’s own thinking. (shrink)

Limits to Action: The Allocation of Individual Behavior presents the ideas and methods in the study of how individual organisms allocate their limited time and energy and the consequences of such allocation. The book is a survey of individual resource allocation, emphasizing the relationships of the concepts of utility, reinforcement, and Darwinian fitness. The chapters are arranged beginning with plants and general evolutionary considerations, through animal behavior in nature and laboratory, and ending with human behavior in suburb and institution. (...) Topics discussed include operant conditioning; the principle of diminishing returns; and issues in relation to mating strategies. Biologists, sociologists, economists, and psychologists will find the book interesting. (shrink)

It has recently been asserted that legislative moves to consider plants as ethical subjects are philosophically foolish because plants lack autonomy. While by no means the sole basis or driving criterion for moral behavior, it is possible to directly challenge skeptical attitudes by constructing a human-plant ethics centered on fundamental notions of autonomy. Autonomous beings are agents who rule themselves, principally for their own purposes. A considerable body of evidence in the plant sciences is increasingly recognizing the (...) capacity of plants to assess, perceive, and act on their environment. The primary purpose of their doing so is to generate the conditions for their own flourishing. With these plant purposes in mind, it is evidentially inappropriate to treat plants purely as instruments. In this age of environmental crisis, knowledge of plant intelligence and autonomy opens up a new debate on respecting and promoting the well-being of the plants that make life on Earth possible. (shrink)

Animals have encountered cruelty and suffering throughout the ages. It is something perpetrated up till this day, particularly, in factory farms, animal laboratories, and even in the name of sports or amusement. However, since the second half of the twentieth century, there has been growing concerns for animal welfare and the protection of animal rights within the discourse of environmentalism, developed mainly in the West. Nevertheless, a recently developed Islamic Ecological Paradigm rooted in the classical Islamic traditions contests the ‘Western’ (...) monopoly of modern environmentalism, sug­gesting that there is much in Islamic traditions dealing with environmental issues in­cluding non-human animal species. IEP asserts that several centuries ago Islamic traditions significantly focused on and strongly advocated for animal welfare and animal rights. This paper explores and examines animal rights within the broader spectrum of Islamic environmentalism or Islamic eco-ethic. While the philosophical roots of IEP concerning animal rights date far back in seventh century, it can potentially make both ethical and educational contributions to the twenty-first century environmentalism and animal rights movements. (shrink)

Should blood be bought and sold is in crude terms the question asked and answered by Richard Titmuss in his recent book The Gift Relationship. Dr Raymond Plant, a lecturer in philosophy at Manchester University, analyses Titmuss' arguments in a paper which we are printing in two parts. Titmuss has taken the provision of blood as his example of the gift relationship--and by extension that of health care generally. Dr Plant considers in turn each of Titmuss' arguments that (...) blood should not be a marketable commodity, the moral objections to which seem to be the erosion of freedom and of truth telling, the separation of society through the cash nexus, and its converse that the provision of health care is a means for the integration of society. Dr Plant also examines the views of other commentators on the Titmuss' theory of the value of a 'free' blood transfusion service and other medical care as a means of integration in society, and ends with his promise that in the second part of his paper he will examine Titmuss' principles not in terms of the market but rather as related to the principle of social justice. (shrink)

Volume 46, Issue 6, November 2020, Page 744-759.