Calling for a More-Than-Human Politics

We are a collective body of many parts, both inside and out. By seeing the self not as an individual hero, but as one among many — human and non-human — a new kind of tentacular, multi-kind, multi-species politics of care might emerge, as Isabelle Stengers and Philippe Pignarre would argue.

how do we resist the gravitational pull of the impasse and deflect these invisible forces of power? How do we imagine different worlds within the current political landscape?

A politics that gives us a new kind of relational agency to help us imagine alternatives for living with and through global warming. A politics which allows us to invent new practices of more-than-human care, humility, imagination, interdependence, resistance, revolt, loss, mourning and resurgence.

Innovation → Resurgence: Innovation is a tricky one, unfortunately, co-opted by the association-of-move-fast-and-break-things as (infinite) growth, addition and mutation. Innovation fixates on new; different; change. On the other hand, ‘resurgence’ (renewing, restoring, regenerating) focuses less on endless growth and more on cyclical forms of nurt... See more

Planning → Gardening: Numerous people from architects to permaculturists have advocated the move from top down ‘planning’, towards the nurturing practice of gardening, when we design cities.

Extinction → Precarity: The philosophical construct of considering ‘life as precarious’ (Ann Tsing) foregrounds both life and death. It focuses on how human existence is deeply interdependent with other life and therefore necessitates the need for care of others, the need for being vulnerable to others and to put unpredictable encounters at the cen... See more

now, more than ever, we need to reject the division within ourselves, between ourselves, and from the deep ecology that sustains us. Because we don’t exist in isolation, we never have. And we are now entering a time where we face our own destruction if we continue to live in the illusion of isolation.

The possibility of sitting with the discomfort of uncertainty and being open to multiple views of the world is difficult. Our prospective brains are not quite trained to maintain multiple worlds and views when simultaneously being forcefully told by all media possible what we should see, hear and believe. But, we all know, very well, the dangers of... See more

“You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed