Nonhuman Forms Of Life Research Articles

Making the mos(s)t of nature? Cleantech, smart nature-based solutions, and the ‘rendering investable’ of urban moss

This article examines the ways in which ‘nature-based solutions’ (NBS) to urban environmental problems are contributing to a re-imagining of the forms and roles of vegetal life in cities. Specifically, we examine the versions of nature that are being produced within a subset of nature-based solutions described as ‘smart’ – that is, those involving the enrolment of non-human lifeforms into digital infrastructures comprising sensors, data flows and automated support systems. Whilst NBS are often celebrated for opening up cities to lively ecological processes – thereby contributing to more convivial, ‘more-than-human’ forms of urbanism – their smart incarnations are becoming a playground for entrepreneurial and financial actors seeking new ways to enclose, commodify and derive profit from non-human life in cities. To explicate this argument, we examine the case of a proprietary ‘nature-based solution’ to urban air pollution developed and sold to local authorities and corporate actors by a European cleantech start-up, predicated on optimising the air-filtering capacities of moss. Our analysis proceeds in three stages. First, we draw on scholarship on the bioeconomy to show how the commodification of moss in this case is predicated on discursive arguments which depict moss as at once inherently productive and regenerative, but also fragile and scarce in urban environments. Secondly, we show how this smart NBS is rendered investable through the enrolment of moss into a carefully designed digital apparatus, which purports to stabilise and optimise its air purifying work, thereby making its contributions to urban air quality continuous, consistent and calculable. Finally, building on an assessment of the entanglement of this example with specific urban geographies and modes of urban governance, we critically reflect on the role that smart NBS in general might yet play in either reinforcing or disrupting prevailing dynamics of privatisation, enclosure and green gentrification in cities.

Anatomy Lessons: Michele Beevors as Eco-Political Agent

This article responds to the large scale sculptural work by eco-political artist Michele Beevors, whose work has recently been extensively exhibited in New Zealand, Australia, and Austria. She brings her audience close to the tragedies of eco-extinction and the brutalities of human interaction with our vulnerable animal co-species. The article considers her work through four frames: 1. Violence: Dissection and Restitution; 2. Death: Specimen and Requiem; 3. Grief: Solastalgia and Entanglement; and 4. Labour: Materiality and Companionship. Through these four frames, the artist’s exploration of human relationships with non-human forms of life is highlighted as based in decolonial, feminist and activist values. The text includes memories and reflections from the author’s life where relevant to the themes presented by the artist.

‘Kukurúùkúù’: ecospiritual implications of the sounds of the cockcrow in Yoruba rural dwellings

This article examines the sound of the cockcrow in Yoruba rural spaces, phonically represented as ‘kukurúùkúù’, with a particular focus on the ecological and spiritual implications. The study highlights the timing functions of the cockcrow which have endured over the years in Yoruba rural societies, thereby foregrounding the interlinking between human and nonhuman forms of life among the Yoruba in Nigeria. Utilising an ethnographic approach through participant observation and key informant interviews conducted with selected Ifá priests, this study engages in a hermeneutic exploration of the Yoruba indigenous religion and literary genres to demonstrate the importance of the cockcrow, time, and nature in traditional Yoruba life and the implications for healthy cohabiting of human and nonhuman forms under conditions of environmental degradation. (This article is published in the thematic collection ‘African ecologies: literary, cultural and religious perspectives’, edited by Adriaan van Klinken, Simon Manda, Damaris Parsitau and Abel Ugba.)

Environmental Art and Falling from the Sky

Robyn Glade-Wright is an established environmental artist and practice-led researcher and has presented over 40 solo exhibitions. In this conversation, artist-scientist Emma Rehn speaks with Robyn about her 2023 curated exhibition Falling from the Sky, centred on the impacts of climate change on non-human forms of life, and a one-day symposium on arts approaches to environmental communication associated with the exhibition’s launch.

Metamorphosis, Mediation, Mannat

In the South Asian discourse of Sufism, or Islamic mysticism, ‘natural’ functions can be transcended and bodily boundaries are permeable. Defying species boundaries, this relational ontology entails a belief in the capacity for bodily transformation, or metamorphosis, from one category of being to another (as from human to nonhuman animal). In turn, both human and animal actors enter into conversation with mediating ‘spirits’. To this day, these religious entanglements, passed down through generations, allow Sufi communities in Bangladesh and Pakistan to protect ‘sacred’ animals at shrines as vital refuges for wildlife species and to make an important contribution to their conservation. The relational dynamics allow for the cultural division between human and non-human life forms (plants, animals, and spirits) to be problematized, and permeable boundaries to be dissolved into liminal and dynamic zones of interaction. Deeply entangled, agents both human and non-human actively participate in shared ritual configurations that take place within and are nourished by a locally embedded Sufi spirituality. Ritual and devotional practices revolve around their intercessory mediation (shafa'at) with the divine, which endows them with spiritual agency, as they engage in cycles of exchange, such as the practice of taking vows (mannat). Within the framework of this Sufi-inspired, locally embedded spirituality, it is possible for animals to be genuine agents, to have spiritual ‘agency’ and to be involved in cycles of exchange.

Ina Batzke, Lea Spinoza Garrido and Linda M. Hess (eds.), Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene

Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene (2022) belongs to the Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, an interdisciplinary series edited by Clare Brant and Max Saunders that engages life writing with critical thinking across disciplines. Situated within the environmental humanities, this volume examines a variety of life writing in the context of the Anthropocene. It builds the argument that life writing has a critical role in contesting human self-centredness which has caused the ecological damage that continues to define the Anthropocene. As such, the book rests on a paradox: how can a genre defined by the figure of a ‘human self’ contribute to dismantling power structures, such as speciesism, without perpetuating these damaging structures of domination? Seven chapters and one interview emphasise that the Anthropocene has been a discursively produced narrative of fatal material consequences; for this reason, minimising and hopefully restoring some ecological damage requires that we find more equal and responsible ways of relating to non-human life forms and the environment in language.

Towards A Radically Relational Post-Grotowskian Performance Paradigm

Jerzy Grotowski chose to name his College de France lecture series La „lignee organique” au theatre et dans le rituel (The „Organic Lineage” in Theatre and Ritual), and the author, who attended and documented these final public talks, contends in this article that organicity constitutes a through-line connecting Grotowski’s theatrical and post-theatrical research. The author draws from these talks, as well as from her Grotowski-based training, including her work with Rena Mirecka, and her research collaborations with Indigenous artists and scholars from Turtle Island (North America), including Floyd Favel, who worked with both Grotowski and Mirecka. The author points out that in diverse traditional cultural practices whose role it is to enhance, restore, and sustain balance between human and non-human forms of life, organicity is understood as a living force endowing performative processes with energy, power, and efficacy. The post-Grotowskian performance paradigm envisioned by the author hinges upon a non-anthropocentric perspective informed by the ecological and spiritual dimensions of relationality articulated by several generations of Indigenous scholars. She contends that such a paradigm shift, which challenges artistic practices glorifying human creative agency, can provide a viable alternative to the dominance of (Eurocentric) new materialist/posthumanist theories of non-human agency.

More-than-human political geographies: Abjection and sovereign power

This article unravels the processes of abjection that render certain nonhumans as abject, devoid of value and amenable to elimination and killing. It argues that these processes play a constitutive role in practices of state-making and sovereign power. Abjection works towards the exclusion and rejection of certain parts of a supposed socio-material order, which, for one reason or another, confuse dominant categorizations, trespass certain spatial boundaries or challenge socially produced distinctions and hierarchies (Bataille, 1970 [1934]; Kristeva, 1982). Abjected nonhumans thus regularly become the target of state-induced practices of elimination and culling – as is the case, for instance, with species classified as ‘invasive’, as ‘pests’, as ‘biosecurity threat’ or as ‘disease reservoirs’. Yet, abjection also points to the ability of nonhumans to unsettle, challenge and confuse dominant boundaries and established orders. Abject beings inhabit “unruly edges” (Tsing, 2012) from which they challenge and transcend sovereign impulses to order, govern and eliminate their existence. Taking cue from previous works on abjection and sovereign power, on the one hand, and works on the role of nonhumans in political processes, on the other, I argue that abjection and state-making are not only intertwined but also crucially played out in relation to nonhuman forms of life and death. My wider conceptual aim is to illustrate what an engagement with processes of abjection has to offer for the agenda of more-than-human political geographies.

Scientists’ Warning: Remove the Barriers to Contraception Access, for Health of Women and the Planet

The human population reached 8 billion in 2022 and is still growing, and will possibly peak at 10.4 billion in 2086. Environmental science mandates that continued growth of the human enterprise on a finite planet is unsustainable and already in overshoot. Indeed, 3 billion is an evidence-based target number, for our species in competition with all non-human life-forms. We must achieve zero population growth and, ultimately, a massive decrease. Commonly, even among environmentalists who are not “population-deniers”, human numbers are seen as a given, to be adapted to rather than influenced or managed. Yet, just and appropriate interventions exist. The fundamental requirement is the empowerment of women, removing the barriers in many settings to their education (including environmental education, and the reproductive ethics of smaller families) and to realistic, voluntary access to contraception. Wherever “reproductive health” includes access to rights-based family planning, this not only promotes the health of the planet but also women’s health through, inter alia, their choice to have fewer and better-spaced children. This is ethical, pragmatic, and cost-effective—a prime example of preventive medicine. Politicians (mostly men) everywhere must embrace this long-term thinking and significantly increase the currently inadequate funding of contraceptive care. Herein is another Scientists’ Warning: there is just one planet for all life.

Untimely Ecology: A Genealogy of Biosphere to Rethink Temporality in the Anthropocene

One of the critical challenges of our contemporary world is rethinking temporality to face the global catastrophe of the Anthropocene. Recent theories in social sciences and philosophy envision a new conceptualization of our biosphere in which human and non-human life forms, inert objects, and technological devices are entangled. However, these approaches present two major problems: a) they affirm that organic and inorganic processes are ontologically symmetrical and have the same type of agency; and b) they consider that technicity on planet Earth emerges in the hominization process. In this work, we will develop a genealogy of our biosphere that proposes an ecological and untimely alternative: life, from its earliest beginning, is a technical phenomenon that changes the face of the universe.

Planetary Memory and Trans-species Immunity

Drawing on Vladimir I. Vernadsky, Lynn Margulis, Alfred N. Whitehead, Karen Barad, and relevant immunological studies, this paper proposes a trans-species noösphere, embracing the zoe-techne of innumerable nonhuman lifeforms, especially infinitesimal microscale agents, viruses included. In doing so, I also articulate the coevolutionary perspective of diffractive mattering on planetary life, map several diffraction patterns of immunity, and present a possibility of political life as a heterogeneous co-constitution.

Good methods for good farmers? Mapping the language of good farming with “diligent farmers” in Hong Kong

This paper explores two questions facing the use of the concept of the ‘good farmer’ in rural studies: what are the most appropriate methods to understand good farming; and what is the relevance of the concept in non-western countries? The paper explores these issues in the context of pig farmers' biosecurity decisions and daily disease management practices in the New Territories of Hong Kong. Specifically, we argue that to broaden the relevance of the good farming concept, we need to devise specific methodologies to capture the relational practices among farmers, non-human life forms and substances that construct the ‘good farmer’ meaning in different cultural contexts. Firstly, we consider the language of ‘good farming’, its possible translations, potential meanings and alternative phrases used amongst Chinese-speaking farmers. Secondly, we develop a farmer-oriented methodology to analyse how these locally specific translations of good farming are constructed and used in relation to the management of animal disease. Drawing on 12 farmers' mapping and their interview discussion, we develop a narrated mapping methodology in which the creation of farm maps acts as a device to illustrate and talk about biosecurity and good farming. This visual method triangulates the graphical data with subsequent interview data of farmers' maps. From this we show how the idea of the ‘diligent farmer’ has much stronger resonance in Hong Kong than good farming. Farm maps identify specific symbols of diligence, highlighting values of productivism, environmentalism and social relationships. The mapping methodology also reveals the performative work involved in becoming a diligent farmer. In conclusion, the paper considers the broader methodological implications for the concept of good farming, suggesting that cultural linguistic differences need to be recognised in the concept, and arguing for further methodological advancement.

Literary Bioethics: Animality, Disability, and the Human by Maren Tova Linett

<i>Literary Bioethics: Animality, Disability, and the Human</i> by Maren Tova Linett

Clues of an environmental education for solid waste management: What do children draw in a municipal school in Cambé, PR?

One of the biggest challenges faced in Brazilian cities is proper solid waste management. The school can be an interlocutor in raising awareness by directing the teaching and learning process in order to change the individual and collective behavior of students. Thematic workshops are characterized as a pedagogical intervention in which environmental education is approached in a dynamic, interactive and creative way. The objective was to identify the perceptions that children from a municipal school in Cambé, PR, have about the solid waste theme, based on drawings made during a workshop called “Composting at school”. The workshop was conducted by 11 undergraduate students attending the Environmental Engineering course at the Federal Technological University of Paraná – accompanied by a professor coordinating the action. As teaching methods, dynamic exercises, games and conversations were used, all with the aim of integrating children and promoting a reflection on the role of each one in proper solid waste management. At the end of the activity, an evaluation questionnaire was proposed to the children, which contained the proposition of a drawing, so that they could portray what they learned and their perceptions about the solid waste theme. From a view guided by Content Analysis, the drawings were classified into three categories: a) workshop stages and dynamic exercises; b) techniques for solid waste management; and c) non-human life forms in solid waste management. The workshop was a promising environmental education strategy, as it was noted that the greater the interaction and the lighter and more pleasant the activity, the greater the learning.

How can the unnaturalness of cellular agricultural products be familiarized?: Modeling public attitudes toward cultured meats in Japan

IntroductionThis study aims to clarify how the unnaturalness of cellular agricultural products can be familiarized to society, using the case of the Japanese public's receptivity to cultured meats. Perceived unnaturalness is a key factor in the rejection of emerging technologies. While past studies have examined the explanatory factors involved in the public acceptance of cultured meats, the relationships among multiple factors have not been fully examined. Cultured meats and cellular agricultural products have been positively evaluated because they can contribute to future food sustainability, so the trade-off between perceived unnaturalness and sustainability is a significant issue for the public.MethodThis study uses a questionnaire survey with 2,000 Japanese respondents, which was conducted in 2019. Using a categorical data analysis approach, the strongest explanatory factors for receptivity were comprehensively searched among attitudes toward cultured meats, eating habits, demographics, and so on.Results and discussionThe results indicated that perceived unnaturalness showed a strong explanatory power for the rejection of cultured meats, but awareness of world famine problems increased acceptance of cultured meat, if the degree of the respondents' concern for unnaturalness was moderate. The perceived animacy of non-human life forms is also associated with acceptance of cultured meat, which may reflect Japanese cultural values. These results suggest multiple pathways to overcoming the disgust of new food technologies in the social implementation process.

African Ecocriticism, Interspecies Relationship, and Kyuka Lilymjok’s Twilight for a Vulture

Ecocriticism in Africa, often framed by the postcolonial problem, appears to have a lot of focus on the notion of environmental justice. This kind of ecocriticism, rooted in protest aesthetics, aligns with the eco-activisms of the likes of Wangari Mathai of Kenya and Ken Saro-Wiwa of Nigeria who have, in different ways, contributed immensely to the literary awareness and the physical confrontation against the institutional powers that cause environmental degradation in Africa. These environmental writers expose the business of extractive capitalism responsible for harmful practices like gas flaring, oil spills, oil bunkering, water and air pollution, tree felling, and other activities that are inimical to the biodiversity of the continent. Considering the general degradation that reduces the postcolonial societies to what Frantz Fanon calls the wretched of the earth, it could be agreed that these writers’ focus on the environmentalism of the poor is not out of place. However, this rubric deemphasizes the nonhuman implication of the environmental tragedies, leaves untapped the full potentials of those literary genres that aestheticize relations across species, and expands the vision for ecological sustainability. To change the narrative, this article uses Kyuka Lilymjok’s Twilight for a Vulture to highlight the roles of nonhuman beings of the environment by analyzing the interspecies relationships that occur when species are brought closely together in the Nigerian environment. Both humans and nonhuman species found in Nigerian environment do not exist in isolation; they relate to each other. These relationships or interactive moments open contact zones of proximity and provide opportunities for contrasting various forms of human relationship with the nonhuman world. This is not to privilege nonhumans over humans, but rather to emphasize the ways these nonhuman life forms are linked with humans.

Clenched and Empty Fists: Trauma and Resistance Ethics in Han Kang’s Fiction

Broadly speaking, the literary history of human–nonhuman metamorphoses conveys certain ethics regarding human-to-human relations by mediating these relations through metaphors of inhumanity. Where such transformations appear in the literature of the present, however, the human is often decentered, fostering an uneasy consort between human and nonhuman beings and ways of being. Taking the fiction of South Korean author, Han Kang, as a case study, this essay examines the political or civic value of reinvigorating vegetal or arboreal transformation in contemporary stories that unfold against a backdrop of global climate change and ecological collapse. I argue that Han’s work depicts the mimicry of or engagement with nonhuman forms of life as both passive strategies for resisting human acts of violence and exploitation and alternative models of sociality and care. Drawing especially on the unruliness of plants and non-animal organic matter, Han’s translated works invite readers to consider what human subjects can learn about both individual and networked, interspecies modes of protest from green subjectivity.

An Ecocentric Reconsideration of Bakhtin’s Grotesque Realism in Sexing the Cherry

Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry (1989), which is regarded as one of the best examples in the postmodern fiction, offers a new space for re-considering genders, identities and environmental problems by effacing the boundaries of story/history, self/other, male/female, reality/fantasy, material/immaterial, nature/culture, natural/unnatural, and human/nonhuman. Questioning the monologic discourses of anthropocentrism and androcentrism, the novel deals with social restrictions, political upheavals, religious conflicts, authoritative inequalities, gender issues, and environmental destruction in multiple contexts. Winterson’s novel presents the voice, subjectivity and agency of the monstrous, the most feared, the ignored, the muted and the oppressed, including all human beings regardless of their gender and nonhuman life forms. To achieve this aim, the author retells some events in English history in a detailed way through the voices and perspectives of larger-than-life characters. In doing so, Winterson seeks to deconstruct the officialdom, authoritarian power relations, political hierarchies and social inequalities. She also attempts to eliminate the patriarchal and anthropocentric biases and norms for ecological justice. In this sense, the novel suggests a carnivalesque space with a multiplicity of self and voice and offers a dialogic world with infinite possible ways of existence, fluidity and interdependence of beings. Within this framework, this article seeks to explore Sexing the Cherry in the light of Bakhtinian grotesque realism within the ecocentric view to discuss the effects of the authoritarian, hierarchical and patriarchal attitudes of the human on human and nonhuman communities. In her novel, the author tries to revive the agency of the nonhuman to oppose Cartesian binary oppositions that keep humans away from their physical environment and lead to an anthropocentric tendency that reduces both nature and all its nonhuman inhabitants to objects. Therefore, the article aims to show grotesque responses and challenges demonstrated by the main characters to the environmental problems depicted in the novel. Consequently, Winterson, in accordance with Bakhtin’s grotesque realism, imagines a world of optimism and equality and focuses on the union and harmony of the human with the nonhuman.

Learning to Listen

Learning to Listen

The Green Depression: American Ecoliterature in the 1930s and 1940s by Matthew M. Lambert

<i>The Green Depression: American Ecoliterature in the 1930s and 1940s</i> by Matthew M. Lambert