We are a group of scholars who have been meeting regularly
over the past few years. Most of us have had a connection with the Australian National University.
In 2001 Deborah Bird Rose convened a group of leading scholars to discuss the
role of the humanities in ecological and environmental thought in the 21st
century. Together, Libby Robin, Val Plumwood and Deborah Rose began to form the
group that is leading the ecological humanities in Australia. Our highlights include an
on-line publication, our own separate publications, an
on-going series of intellectual events, and many vivid and challenging conversations
amongst ourselves, with colleagues from the bush, and with colleagues from around
the world, some of whom we have been able to host at the ANU.
Philosopher Val Plumwood articulated two necessary and vital
projects that face us today: to re-situate humans within ecological systems,
and to re-situate non-humans in ethical terms. Importantly, Indigenous people
in many parts of the world, and most certainly in Australia, have for millennia
held humans within ecological systems and practice an ethic of connectivity
that includes sentient beings of all kinds, animal, vegetable and mineral.
Cross-cultural dialogue is one of the most important arenas for enhancing
contemporary western knowledge.
The ecological humanities is a cross-paradigm,
cross-cultural endeavour dedicated to bridging the great chasms of knowledge
that have arisen during the course of the west’s long-term commitment to extreme
binaries. The most seriously damaging chasm is that which puts humans in a position outside
of and in some senses superior to the natural world. Along with this chasm,
there is an accompanying binary which attributes all mind in humanity and would
see the rest of the universe as effectively mindless. Erroneous understanding
of our situation on earth, and desensitising understandings of the capacity of
living beings empathetically to respond to each other, are rendered more
intractable by the fact that within the academic world, another major chasm
exists – that between the humanities and
the natural sciences.
Disciplines within the humanities traditionally work with
knowledge founded in subject-subject encounters, and with the idea that humans
are the only beings who were possessed of a subjectivity that could be
encountered. The humanities have worked with the big questions of what it means
to be human, but answers necessarily were limited by the fact that humanity was
not thought to be part of the natural world. The sciences traditionally have
constituted themselves through objective analysis of creatures and systems that are
expressively inert. Only recently has the concept of dialogue (as subject-subject
encounter) been taken seriously within science. Perhaps the most succinct
expression of this situation is that of Ilya Prigogine who famously wrote: ‘I have always
considered science to be a dialogue with nature.’
The edge where sciences and humanities rub against each
other is energised around dialogue and connectivity. The ecological humanities
aims to carry knowledge and critical analysis in numerous directions,
facilitating and encouraging dialogue between sciences and humanities, and between
experts in western and other knowledge systems, and facilitating and
encouraging a concept of the human as in connection with the world – embedded,
embodied, and in dialogue. In working back and forth across traditional barriers
to knowledge, we are confident that new knowledge forms will arise. We are
extremely mindful of the need for new knowledge in the face of the urgency of
anthropogenic catastrophes, including global climate change, extinctions, and
loss of ecosystem integrity and productivity.
If ‘we have never been human’, in Donna Haraway’s
exciting terms, we have nevertheless from time to time managed to be humane, as
Patrick Curry reminds us. To be humane is to open ourselves to the world around
us in the certainty that we can experience solidarity and sympathy. And if
human nature itself is an interspecies relationship, as Anna Tsing tells us,
our becoming human is situated within a world of ‘nature’ which is
‘discursively structured, saturated with messages and stories, and patterned
throughout’ (Curry).
Ground - Collage by I. Macfalane
Val Plumwood on ‘two tasks’ Environmental Culture: The
Ecological Crisis of Reason, 2002, London:
Routledge, p. 8.
Ilya Prigogine, The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and
the New Laws of Nature, New York:
The Free Press, 1997, p 57
Donna Haraway, When Species Meet, 2007, Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Anna Tsing In press, ‘Unruly Edges: mushrooms as companion
species’. In Thinking with Donna Haraway, edited by S. Ghamari-Tabrizi.
Patrick Curry ‘Nature Post-Nature’ in New Formations, 64 (Earthographies), Spring 2008, 51-64.
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