Sustainability, feminist posthumanism and the unusual capacities of (post)humans

Abstract

Despite the current environmental crises of anthropogenic climate change and environmental degradation afflicting the world, dualisms of culture/nature, human/non-human and animate/ inanimate sustain a perspective on 'the environment' in which the human and the cultural are privileged over the natural world and other species. Policies on 'sustainable development' are likewise predicated upon efforts to assure future human prosperity. Our objective in this paper is to establish an alternative, post-anthropocentric perspective on environmental sustainability. Drawing on feminist materialist scholarship supplies an ontology to critique humanist approaches, and establishes the foundation for a posthuman sociology of environment, in which (post)humans are an integral but not privileged element. We consider the implications of this perspective for both sustainability policy and 'climate justice'. A posthuman ontology leads to the conclusionperhaps surprisingly, given the anthropogenic roots of current climate changethat some unusual human capacities are now essential to assure environmental potential.

Mapping the absence: a theological critique of posthumanist influences in marketing and consumer research

“…This is articulated as taking place through the denial of dualistic models, teleological trajectories, and formal hierarchies linked to totalising frames of thinking and thus notions such as patriarchy and colonialism (e.g. Fox & Alldred, 2020). Approaching the issue theologically suggests caution.…”

“…Based on this understanding, the human is no longer seen from the perspective of a privileged centricity that is separate from its technological and material milieu (also Denegri-Knott & Molesworth, 2013;Hietanen & Andéhn, 2018;Kozinets et al, 2017). Any form of posthumanist theorising, whatever its particular form and political impetus, would be seemingly impossible within a strict essentialist worldview (also Fox & Alldred, 2020). By performing transgressions in terms of going beyond and becoming immersed, posthumanism invites us to abandon all normative, essentialist understandings and to start 'to think inclusively [.…”

Re‐assembling climate change policy: Materialism, posthumanism, and the policy assemblage

“…Our own efforts (Fox & Alldred, , , ) to move beyond environmental anthropocentrism have drawn upon the elision of human/environment dualism (Bazzul & Tolbert, ; van der Tuin & Dolphijn, ) in posthuman and “new” materialist approaches (Coole & Frost, ; Thrift, ). The feminist eco‐philosopher Rosi Braidotti has promoted a “posthuman” synthesis of the opposing perspectives of humanism (a feature of Enlightenment thinking that elevated human reason over other authorities), and anti‐humanism (which re‐privileges the non‐human) (Braidotti, , pp.…”

“…Together, these ontological elements (relations, assemblage, affect and capacity) establish a posthuman ontology in which the entirety of the natural and social world is the environment, with nothing beyond it, and nothing (for instance, human societies and cultures) excluded from it (Fox & Alldred, , p. 48; ). Significantly, when it comes to understanding the processes involved in climate change, it shifts from an essentialist model of human and non‐human matter with fixed attributes (“a rock is hard but brittle, a human can think and talk”) to a relational ontology.…”

Guarding crops from monkey troops: farmer-monkey interaction near a nature reserve in Guangxi, China

“…In order to closely examine the mutual processes in human-animal relations, cognitive thought of embodiment is adopted. It recognizes that knowledge and practice are inseparable, illustrated as 'learning by doing' (Eden and Bear 2010). Therefore, both humans and animals experience embodied learning and attuning (Peltola and Heikkila 2015) or learning and adjustment (Boonman-Berson 2018) process in their interactions.…”