Ecological Justice for Nature in Critical Systems Thinking

Abstract

The authors of this paper provide a brief overview of the rights-based literature that has been used to produce mechanisms to acknowledge non-human agency in critical systems thinking (CST). With consideration of recent studies of plant cognition, we propose that by recasting CST's underlying commitments, we may produce new ontologies and new ways of working with the embedded stakeholders of socioecological systems. While the discursive shifts are simple, to recast 'social awareness' as 'socioecological awareness' and 'human emancipation' to 'emancipation', these changes open up the boundaries, scope and relevance of practice. We see this as a second turn and the next important movement in CST.

Systems thinking and the biopsychosocial approach: A multilevel framework for patient‐centred care

“…A topical issue addressed in such reports is also that of the growing evidence of the impact of environmental crises, like the increasing levels of pollution all over the world, natural disasters and climate change (World Health Organization, 2013). This reaffirms the necessity to include our relationship with the non-human environment in theoretical perspectives that analyse multilevel systems of interactions and relationships (Stephens, Taket, & Gagliano, 2019). Dramatic recent events have also refocused our attention towards infectious diseases and to the ecology of their spreading and evolution (Johnson, Ostfeld, & Keesing, 2015).…”

Place as partner: material and affective intra-play between young people and trees

“…Processes, formerly assumed to be available only to some animals and humans, including perception, memory, learning, decisionmaking and intra-species communication, have all been recently attributed to trees (Beresford-Kroeger 2010;Gagliano 2015Gagliano , 2017Gagliano, Mancuso, and Robert 2012). This revising and blurring of boundaries between what it is sentient/non-sentient is helpful in envisaging how agency moves within tree-people relations (Stephens, Taket, and Gagliano 2019). Plants, for example, interact with their environment through chemicals, conveying messages that are acted upon by recipients and as Gagliano and Grimonprez (2015) argue recognising language 'beyond words' both acknowledges plant agency and aspects of our kinship with them.…”

“…Both trees and humans are holobionts, co-dependent with many other life forms within and external to our bodies; assemblages of different species together form ecological units (Mills et al 2019). Many relationships between species are mutual and collaborative, maintained by communication and collective intelligence (Gagliano 2013;Stephens, Taket, and Gagliano 2019;Mills et al 2019). Notably, Deleuze & Guattari use the concept of 'rhizomatic' relations to reconfigure ideas of relationality, moving away from hierarchical models of 'tree logic' (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 13), which interpret relationships as linear, divided, dualistic and ranked (Doel 2000, 131).…”

Building Policy Coherence for Sound Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Management in a Developing Country

“…In recent years, CST has emerged as key concept researchers apply in numerous regulatory contexts. The approach facilitates the interrogation of a different perspective on cause and effect, on the subjects and objects of regulation, and on interactions between different modes of regulation (Stephens, et al, 2019). CST comes from the ecology and general systems theory (Jackson, 2006).…”