DeepSummary
The episode is an interview with Professor Danny Celermajer, who leads the Multispecies Justice project at the University of Sydney. She discusses her background and how her experience as a child of Holocaust survivors shaped her commitment to justice, initially focused on human rights but gradually expanding to include justice for all beings. Celermajer critiques the limitations of human rights frameworks and institutions like the UN, which are still fundamentally based on the power of nation-states.
Celermajer unpacks the idea of "multispecies justice" as recognizing the deep entanglements and relationships between humans and the more-than-human world, rather than just extending individual rights to other species. She problematizes human interventions in ecosystems based on limited understandings, as well as utilitarian ethical frameworks that seek to minimize suffering without accounting for complex systemic relationships.
The conversation touches on the reductive ways land and the more-than-human world are valued under capitalist property systems, contrasting with indigenous understandings. Celermajer also reflects on the meaning of hope as a discipline of working towards flourishing possibilities beyond our current imagination, while acknowledging the inevitability of suffering due to the climate crisis.
Key Episodes Takeaways
- Human rights frameworks and institutions have significant anthropocentric limitations in addressing ecological crises and injustices facing the more-than-human world.
- The concept of "multispecies justice" frames justice not through extending individual rights, but recognizing the fundamental entanglements and relationships between humans and other beings.
- Capitalist valuation systems treat land and nature as commodities, failing to account for their intrinsic values and relationships with other beings.
- Indigenous knowledge systems offer more holistic understandings of humans' relationships with ecosystems compared to extractive Western paradigms.
- Utilitarian ethical frameworks focused solely on minimizing suffering can miss complex systemic dynamics and relationships in ecosystems.
- Anthropocentric language and concepts need to be pluralized carefully when applied to the more-than-human world to avoid misrecognition.
- Practicing humility about the limits of human knowledge is crucial when intervening in or "managing" ecological systems.
- Hope can be reframed as an ethical discipline oriented towards unfurling unimagined flourishing possibilities beyond present constraints.
Top Episodes Quotes
- “I use the language of entanglement rather than the language of interdependence, because entanglement implies that what's fundamental is relationship. And so if we think about the fundamental nature of being. Being a network, and then you have these nodes in the network where you can kind of artificially draw a line around it and say, or that's a tree, that's a microbe, that's an individual human. But those are effects of the network, rather than the network being something that joins them all together.“ by Danny Celermajer
- “So I think there are some really tricky paths to navigate there. On the one hand, you don't want to do this act of recognition by misrecognition, which is what bio is getting at, where you impose a pre existing, limited system of meaning on a world which is full of difference and complexity and otherness that we haven't yet encountered on the other hand, I think there's a type of imperative to share the good words around.“ by Danny Celermajer
- “Hope is a discipline. Hope understood as an orientation to a world where possibilities that are opening up expand beyond our current capacity to imagine what might unfold.“ by Danny Celermajer
- “There's even more problematic and offensive arguments that I've heard where, surprisingly, they come from people who are committed to animal ethics primarily out of a utilitarian framework where I've heard people say things like, well, what we need to do is we need to minimize suffering, right? And so, for example, if we take the relationship between predator and prey, well, we need to protect the prey from the suffering that's involved in predation.“ by Danny Celermajer
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Episode Information
Green Dreamer: Seeding change towards collective healing, sustainability, regeneration
Kamea Chayne
2/22/23
“I use the language of entanglement rather than interdependence because entanglement implies that what’s fundamental is relationships.”
What are some of the limitations of human rights frameworks and the institutions that uphold them? What does it mean to go beyond recognizing our interdependence to seeing our deep entanglements with our more-than-human world? And how is the much more holistic framing of “multispecies justice” still reductive in terms of the forms of beings that they recognize?
In this episode, we welcome Professor Dany Celermajer, Deputy Director of the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney who leads the Multispecies Justice project. Through the experience of living through the black summer bushfires with a multispecies community, she began writing about a new crime of our age, Omnicide and subsequently Summertime.
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// The musical offering featured in this episode Don't Ask Me by RVBY MY DEAR. //