The new boom in research and interest in non-human sentience and sapience (in particular, “critical plant studies” and the Rights of Nature movement) calls for a deeper theoretical engagement with ethics, ontology, religious studies, and metaphysics. This panel explores the biological and ethical promises of these new frameworks, while critically analyzing their incompleteness. While welcoming the agency and personhood of our non-human kin is one way to enter into deeper, and perhaps decolonial, relationships with the more-than-human world, this panel explores the complexities involved, asking questions like: When do our frameworks of analysis perpetuate the very violence and colonial assumptions we seek to do away with? When do our imaginaries and cosmologies promote ecological hope? And what philosophical and religious frameworks can create mutually beneficial relationships nonhumans? Muslim environmentalism, Black Studies, Hindu perspectives on animals, Buddhist perspectives on trees, Dark Green Religion, and Korean mythology on big cats are considered.
This paper explores the role of non-human agency in addressing ecological violence through the lens of W.E.B. Du Bois's "The Comet" and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Employing the concept of "melancholic hope," the paper argues that by centering celestial bodies and non-human entities, these works of speculative fiction challenge anthropocentric narratives and expose the slow violence of systemic racism, imperialism, and extraction. Drawing on religious frameworks that consider non-human sentience and sapience, this paper examines how marginalizing these perspectives perpetuates ecological imbalance and undermines the sacred equilibrium necessary for the survival of all species. Engaging with literature and art that re-centers the non-human nurtures our moral imagination and makes possible alternative paradigms for a more inclusive and sustainable Anthropocene. This paper invites scholars of religion to consider the transformative potential of melancholic hope in fostering a responsible and empathic relationship with our planetary cousins.
One of the little examined margins of ecological thought is the kinship between human and arboreal beings. The recent emergence of “critical plant studies” tries to remedy this, and we find ourselves in the midst of a boom of popular books on trees. Both graft enchantment at trees’ newly (re)discovered sentience and sociality onto inherited ideas of sacred groves, world trees and the apparently unstinting generosity of trees. Entwining easily with what Bron Taylor calls “dark green religion,” these discussions also often recapitulate dubious ideas of planty passivity and selflessness which are both biologically and ethically incomplete. In this talk I weave together representative contemporary discussions with the more complicated and profound sentience and sociality of the enlightenment-hosting ficus religiosa and the San Diego native Torrey Pine, precious to the Kumeyaay, to ask: what can trees teach us about the spirituality of non-violence?
This paper explores the entangled reality of coloniality in the relationship between human and non-human animals, drawing on the insights of Jacques Derrida and Donna Haraway as well as the gaze of Beom in the Korean tradition. Derrida generates a profound rupture in the discussion of human and non-human animals where the problems of ability and passivity resurface through the symbolic actions of gazing and naming. Haraway expands on Derrida’s insights, advocating for an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates a more comprehensive understanding of animals. In furthering this discussion, I invite beom, Korean-origin big cats, to serve as a lens through which to explore animals and animality from a non-Western tradition and reveal the intersection among colonialism, Western imperial power, and the naming of species. Through the gaze of the beom, the notion of passivity in animality will be challenged by a deeper appreciation for the shared experience of living together.
When does the recognition of “humanity” or “personhood” to nature’s bodies enable, rather than restrict, certain kinds of violences? I focus on a few key examples: bestiality practices in medieval England, the violent taming of wild elephants in 19th century Malaya, and the sacrifices of goats to deities in rural India. In understanding the relationship between ontology and violence, does it matter what kind of “violence” we are discussing, whether it is operating within an intimately interpersonal home or at the large-scale of mass factories? How can thinking with Black scholars, such as Saidiya Hartman and Zakiyyah Jackson, give us resources to understand when recognition of humanity licenses, rather than restricts, violence? For those who are invested in both more-than-human cosmologies and environmentalism, we need a more precise ontological and ethical framework than a generic respect of agency or personhood of nature’s bodies to conceptualize nature-human relations.