Humanities for the More-than-Human

In the previous episode, we explored how questioning anthropocentrism could help us better understand not just other species, but humanity itself. But what if we broadened our perspective beyond the biological? What would it mean to recognize the agency, rights, and personhood of rivers, mountains, and entire ecosystems?

To explore these ideas, we turn to the field of environmental humanities. We sat down with Federico Luisetti, professor at University of St. Gallen and co-organizer of the Swiss-based interdisciplinary research network Unruly Natures, and Sophie Gosselin, a philosopher who teaches at EHESS in Paris and has collaborated with Unruly Natures in Switzerland and beyond.

Our wide-ranging conversation explores the field of environmental humanities and its relation to the natural sciences, as well as their work on non-human agency, legal and political representation for rivers, and more.

This season is part of the Planetary Embassy, a global initiative across the Swissnex network. Discover more at https://swissnex.org/planetary-embassy/

Tectonic is a production of Swissnex in Boston and New York. Find us online at https://swissnex.org/boston/

Transcript

Brendan Karch

Welcome back to Tectonic. I'm your host, Brendan Karch. This season is about planetary diplomacy, asking what it would look like to represent the interests of other species, of plants and rivers, of ecosystems, and of the whole Earth. In previous episodes, we've defined the planetary as a concept and explored how to overcome entrenched assumptions about human exceptionalism that undergird our exploitation of nature. 

This episode shifts to discuss an academic field that is arguably at the heart of planetary diplomacy, namely the environmental humanities. While the natural sciences can measure and pinpoint our environmental problems, the environmental humanities ask fundamental underlying questions. For example, how human cultures have imagined, explained, valued, and related to the non-human world. Or how our ideas about nature, wilderness, and landscape have been shaped over time. Or what moral obligations we bear towards other species and ecosystems. 

To discuss the environmental humanities, we also turn to Switzerland, exploring these topics with two scholars active in Swiss networks. Professor Federico Luisetti from University of St. Gallen is co-organizer of Unruly Natures, which is a collective of environmental humanities scholars in Switzerland. His own research focuses on how non-living entities like mountains, rivers, and glaciers can challenge our traditional notions of personhood and the human-natural divide. We also chat with Professor Sophie Gosselin from France. She is an artist and philosopher who argues that solving the ecological crisis requires rethinking our ontological and political institutions. She has also been active in a Geneva-based proposal envisioning a diplomatic council for river basins. 

Our wide-ranging conversation with both scholars explores the broad goals of environmental humanities, how we assign agency to non-humans, and some of the real-life projects in planetary diplomacy unfolding around the world and potentially one day in Switzerland. We hope you enjoy the discussion.

Brendan

Welcome to the podcast, Sophie and Federico. This podcast today is really about the environmental humanities and what it means for Switzerland and the surrounding regions. But I thought maybe we could start by talking about your own backgrounds and how you got interested in the environmental humanities and what direction you came at it from. So, maybe we'll start with you Federico.

Federico

Thank you. My background is in philosophy. I studied philosophy in Italy, hermeneutics and aesthetics at the University of Torino. And then I moved to comparative literature and critical theory in the United States. I spent a few years at the City University of New York. And I came to the environmental humanities through a convergence of different trajectories. My interests from the very beginning have been the so-called naturalist philosophies. I learned a lot also from the so-called decolonial thought because I spent several years in the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and there I came to meet and understand better other epistemological and political viewpoints, other ways of considering the relation between nature and society, between you know, what is actually subjective and what is not, what is politically or socially or ecologically relevant and what is not. So, to quote decolonial theorist Walter Mignolo, “the universal cannot have one single owner, the universal is in itself pluriversal.” So, we need to start from this multiplicity of viewpoints on the relation between also humans and non-humans. And I see the environmental humanities not as a discipline, as such, but as an open field, a space for encounters, for dialogues, for conversation between the natural sciences, the humanities, the social sciences, but also society at large, activists, artists, policy makers. And it is only through this conversation, I think, that we can approach the current multiple planetary crisis. That's why I think, you know, environmental humanities are a quite relevant space nowadays.

Brendan

Thank you. So, Sophie, like Federico you are also a philosopher who has come to venture into the environmental humanities. Tell us a little bit about that journey and what really interests you about the environmental humanities.

Sophie 

Thank you, yeah, I come from philosophy. I studied at university in France, in Nantes and in Paris. While I was studying philosophy, I was at the same time involved in the roles of artistic creation and activism. And it was in this context that I became interested in environmental issues, particularly during my trip to the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in Brazil in 2001. I was really a young student at that time. And where I learned about the Landless Workers Movement, the MST, Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra. And well, I was very interested in the way that they were putting in practice new ways of inhabiting the land, of cultivating it, of caring for it, and rebuilding social bonds, all within a context of great inequality. And this had a profound influence on me and inspired me to create, when I came back to France, spaces for collective creation and invention, exploring new ways of building community.

Brendan

Great, it sounds like for both of you that decentering the human and decentering the anthropocentric perspective is crucial to what the environmental humanities is. Why do you see this task as such an important and crucial part of the environmental humanities?

Federico

The relation between humans and non-humans is a central concern, not just for Sophie and myself, but in general in the environmental humanities and related disciplines. I think the reason why we collectively came to the realization that we have to rethink this relation has to do with the current environmental crisis. So, traditionally, at least in our Western cultural and scientific context, we have no problem whatsoever recognizing at the scientific level the fact that biotic and abiotic elements form altogether an ecosystem and that humans are a key component of this world of relations. So, starting from the soil, biological life depends on light and water, on mineral, of atmospheric conditions. And yet, if we look at what the social sciences and the humanities have been doing, especially, I would say, since the Enlightenment, we are mostly concentrated on humans as a niche within planetary life. And this is a problem right now because current environmental crises and all the ecocides  that we are experiencing force us to rethink this relation between humans and non-humans. So, we have to recognize that humans are part of a larger web of life and non-life, of a larger interrelated field. We have to move beyond anthropocentrism, but also beyond the separation of anthropocentrism and ecocentrism, and consider the relation between subjects that are both human and non-human.

Sophie 

Yeah, well, what I could say that for me, this de-centering is essential — it restores a place to what has been excluded or marginalized by modern metaphysics and politics. I started working or developing another form of philosophy, which is called field philosophy and which is a practice of philosophy that is not merely armchair philosophy, but it's also engaged with society and field investigations, much like sociologists and anthropologists do. And because the idea is to put in the center the body relation, because it allows us to conceive of non-humans like participating in the shaping of the worlds we inhabit. And the question then arises, and this for me is also a practical question, what is the agency of non-humans? How do we experience it? Are there different forms of agency? Not only in the way they act in space, but also in how they inscribe themselves and unfold over time. For example, the time of a forest is not the same as that of a human community. So, in what ways does the recognition of these forms of agency compel us to redefine the contours of community, of what we call society?

Federico

If I can add a reflection — so, one of the key goals of the environmental humanities is to overcome the rigid separation between the natural sciences and also technologies in general and the humanities and social sciences. But this is quite hard if we continue to confine non-humans within the field of nature, which is what the natural sciences are studying, without any direct connection with the humanities and social sciences. So, it's this separation between non-humans as something belonging to nature, which is studied by the natural sciences and the social sciences, and the humanities dealing with the human experience, which is problematic. We cannot, let's say, leave the natural scientists on their own. We need to collaborate with them to offer other perspectives on non-humans that integrate their understanding of what these non-humans are. So, this is the main goal of the environmental humanities. And through this process, the humanities and the social sciences must change as well. They are already undergoing a major shift in their conceptual apparatus because we are learning from the natural scientists. 

Brendan

So, it's easy, I think, for a listener to think about the non-human or the more-than-human world and interests and imagine how we might think about a whale and a whale's interests or even another mammal and a mammal’s interests. Maybe a little bit harder but still possible to think about representing the interests of a tree or a fungi mushroom. But Federico, I believe you talk about a third ecology, which is the non-living world, to represent the interests of water molecules or to represent the interests of a stone. How do we stretch the boundaries of our own sort of human centrism and human imagination? What does it look like to represent the interests of parts of the earth that are important for us, but are literally not alive?

Federico

Yes, this is a key question. In my work, I suggest that we should start from the idea that there isn't one unified ecology, but at least three main approaches that nowadays are composing the ecological field. The first ecology is what I define a neoliberal approach, which is an attempt to see nature as capital. So nature is considered as a resource, as a service for society, and can also be quantified accordingly, depending on the kind of services it provides to human societies. The second ecology is what dominates environmental humanities, which is an approach that relies on cooperation, symbiosis, alliances. It's what contemporary biologists such as Lynn Margulis have called a multi-species approach, an approach based not on competition and selection as a ruthless process of warfare between biological actors, but on cooperative process. So this is the approach that led to the vision of Gaia as the living planet in which all natural elements are contributing to planetary life. But, at the same time, I think we must also focus on what I call the third ecology, which concentrates on elements which are not biotic, which are not alive in a biological sense, such as rivers or mountains, or even the air that we breathe, and which are are central for sustaining life on the planet.

Brendan

So, I think that a lot of the thinking and the work that you're doing in imagining the terrestrial condition, imagining the agency of non-human actors, even this third ecology actors, a lot of this work can be seen as a precursor to representing the interests of this non-human world, having a true diplomacy or somehow bringing them into the realm of human protections, human rights, human laws. So, Sophie, your book addresses this issue through, in the beginning at least, through the concept of a river and a river having rights in particular, the story of a New Zealand river, the Whanganui, which now enjoys legal representation. So, what does that look like? How did that come to be that a river now has legal rights and what does that look like in practice?

Sophie 

First, I must recall that the recognition of the Whanganui River as a legal person is part of a broader movement known as the Rights of Nature which truly took off in South America in 2008 when the people of Ecuador voted in favor of a constitutional proposal to grant rights to nature. This was followed in 2010 by Bolivia, which proclaimed the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba during the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. And in March 2017, the New Zealand Parliament recognized rights not to the Earth as a whole, but to a specific environment, the river, Whanganui, recognized as Te Awa Tupua, which is its cosmological name, and which comprises the totality of material and immaterial in the interdependent connections between humans and non-humans inhabiting the river. It is really a political agreement. This is an important element because it constitutes a political treaty entered into by the New Zealand government with the formerly colonized people, which recognized Māori cosmology in the person of Te Awa Tupua defined as, I quote the law, “an indivisible and living role comprising the Whanganui river from its mountains to the sea, including its physical and metaphysical elements.” So, the river forms a person in its own right inhabited by various forms of life, both human and non-human. And unlike the modern political paradigm, which is based on the separation of mind and body, conceiving of a river or a living environment as a person requires taking into account the living connection, the spiritual bond, which binds living beings to a shared destiny. It is this living bond that is expressed in the Māori adage ‘I am the river and the river is me’. And so this political treaty led to the creation of a set of institutions responsible for safeguarding the health and well-being of Te Awa Tupua, which together form its human face. And so within the framework of these institutions, what is very interesting for me, is that actors must consider their action from the perspective of Teahua-Tupua and no longer solely from the perspective of human interests.

Brendan

So, the work you describe is clearly of a river people who are, you know, inseparable in some sense from the environment of their river. New Zealand, of course, is very far away from Central Europe, from Switzerland. If you asked a Swiss person, I don't necessarily think they would say they are a river person in the same way. Nonetheless, rivers are essential to Switzerland and to the wider Central Europe. Switzerland is sort of the water tower of Europe, the Rhine, the Danube and other major rivers emanate from the snowmelt of the Alps in Switzerland. So, what lessons, if any, can we take from this case for thinking about rivers in Switzerland and in the surrounding area? And what work have you been doing in this regard?

Sophie 

Well it is happening a bit everywhere. Because there are more and more initiatives in Europe to recognize rights to environments and to rivers. In 2023 and 2024, we were invited as artists in residence in Geneva by a structure called Utopiana, which is an arts and ecology space, to explore these issues. And we then envisioned the creation of a potential institution that could be called the Diplomatic Council of River Basins, and drawing inspiration from an event tied to the local Geneva context, as well as to the unique characteristic of Switzerland within the European context. So, the question is how can we conceive of a diplomacy of interdependence that starts with local communities and their living environments, rather than a detached diplomacy serving major economic interests that are increasingly ravaging the heart and its habitability? So, at the conclusion of this residency in Utopiana, we drafted a manifesto entitled Towards a Diplomatic Council of a River Basins, which outlines the broad principles of this terrestrial diplomacy or geopolitics.

Brendan

Great, thank you. So, maybe a question for you, Federico. Sophie gave us a great sense of how rivers are crucial ecosystems and how Swiss people maybe should think more about how they are river people  and how the surrounding areas are inhabited by river people. If you're talking to a Swiss person who doesn't know about the environmental humanities and doesn't know about the work that you do, why would you convince them that environmental humanities are important to their lives in Switzerland?

Federico

Well, Switzerland has a big problem with the environment. And I will name just two major issues that I guess most Swiss citizens are not fully aware of. The first issue has to do with the loss of biodiversity. And the second one involves water and energy. So, in terms of biodiversity, Switzerland is one of the poorest among all EU and OECD countries. So, because of intensive agriculture, extensive use of fertilizers and pesticides, infrastructures, very efficient infrastructures, but still infrastructure of all kinds, and urbanization that goes along with cementification, Switzerland has almost completely destroyed its biodiversity. The process of eutrophication has reached incredibly high levels. And what is left of biodiversity in Switzerland is confined paradoxically to small pockets of urban natures in a city environment or to Alpine or pre-Alpine regions. As for water and energy issues, Switzerland is facing a huge crisis that will get pretty soon quite catastrophic, because according to most glaciologists, unless there is a planetary reversal in the emission of a greenhouse gases within 80 years, so the space of a couple of generations, most glaciers in Switzerland will be gone completely. We're speaking of 1,400 glaciers that will disappear in 80 years. And if we describe the environmental condition that we are facing right now in Switzerland, because of the extensive use of hydropower, which can be defined and should be defined, of course, as a renewable energy source and yet as major environmental consequences. But because of this massive infrastructure that we have built in Switzerland, there are 188 major dams in Switzerland, 80 percent of water bodies are practically dead zones. So, we have destroyed the ecosystems of our rivers and this is a state of the environment that we are learning, for instance, from the work of EAWAG, the Swiss Federal Institute for Aquatic Science and Technology. And they continue to describe the catastrophic consequences of this way of managing a water system, which is what in the environmental humanities we call hydro-modernity.

Brendan

Yeah, I think it's very interesting how you point out that a country known for its scenic beauty, attracting people from all over the world, actually has these underlying ecological crises of biodiversity, effects of global warming, water loss, eutrophication, so the increase of nitrogen in various water supplies and sources. How are the network of environmental humanities scholars in Switzerland addressing this? What fields are they addressing it from? How are you talking to each other? But more importantly, how are you talking or working to talk to the wider public? 

Federico

The environmental humanities have been spreading in Switzerland as in many other European and also non-European countries in the last 20 years. So we are not alone in the University of St. Gallen in promoting this reorientation of academic research in a more collaborative and interdisciplinary way. There are professorships also in other universities in environmental humanities. At the University of Freiburg, for instance, there are working groups, there are  teaching programmes, and there are all kinds of initiatives. Also museums that are pushing for rethinking the relation between the environment and knowledge at large. What we have tried to do with our research group and project and network called Unruly Natures, which together with the designer and ecologist Flurina Gradin we founded in 2020, is to provide an open space for these dialogues between disciplines, practitioners, and also activists and communities. So we try to involve scholars, but also protagonists of environmental activism coming from different fields and communities, both in Switzerland and abroad. So, we represent a variety of disciplines, such as political geography, design, philosophy, visual arts, cultural theory, law, architecture within our group. Well, I say “our”, but we consider ourselves as really an open network, which has the main function of seeding ideas, thoughts, and collaboration. And this is why also Sophie and I have collaborated for years in a very open and flexible way. 

Brendan

 So, it does sound like there's quite a bit of activity in Switzerland and also some experimentation. A question then maybe to close out for both of you. How do you find you can promote mutual understanding and collaboration between the environmental humanities and the natural sciences looking at these same problems?

Sophie 

I think a good way to do that is through action research initiatives, such as what is developed by Unruly Natures, but also what we try to undertake on the Loire River with the Loire Parliament Collective. And maybe to give an example, I mention a project we launched in September 2023 called the Grande Remontée de Loire. Every year, Loire riverboat captains travel upriver by boat to attend the Boatsman Festival held in Orléans in late September. And the Grande Remontée de Loire aimed to seize this opportunity to organize a large convoy of boats on the Loire, traveling upriver from the estuary to Orléans and during which the Declaration of Voices and Rights of the Loire, drafted by the collective, was presented and shared. And what is interesting is that this convoy was an opportunity to meet river residents face to face, but also to involve researchers and the research community involved on the Loire. And different laboratories were involved to participate with artists in each stop that was organized during this convoy. So, what was very interesting is that it was through this regular event, which is organized every three years, we are building a solidarity between research inhabitants and also political solidarity among the different communities. And a new culture is emerging, a river basins culture, a bioregional culture, a culture of Loire, is emerging through these collaborations that happen by really research action and field action. 

Brendan

Great. Thank you. Federico, do you have anything to add on this question? How do we promote understanding and collaboration between environmental humanities and the wider public as well as natural scientists?

Federico

Yes, for us, in environmental humanities and related disciplines, we are shifting our focuses away from an obsession with the autonomy of the human and of society, and we are learning how to integrate the human into this planetary dimension. So, it's the planetary urgency that is bringing us close to natural scientists. And what we can bring to them is an understanding that the planetary is everywhere and is every day with us. It's part of our life because, you know, climate change and all the crises that we have just described and the ecocides and the water crisis, the toxicity, and overall the organization of the economy through extraction flows and consumption disposal of resources that are moved all across the world. These are planetary dynamics that we live every day through everything we do. So, I think a focus on the concreteness of the planetary is what brings us close to natural sciences and helps us intensify in this dialogue.

Brendan

Yeah, if there's a common thread I see it is this focus on concreteness, on praxis, on going out to a place in ecology that you care about, that you live with, and finding collaborators there who also care about this place and this ecology from a different perspective.

Sophie 

That's it, exactly.