DeepSummary
The episode is an interview with Thom van Dooren, an associate professor at the University of Sydney, about his book 'The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds'. Van Dooren discusses his interdisciplinary approach to studying crows and the environmental challenges they face, drawing from philosophy, cultural studies, and science. He explores the complex relationships between humans, crows, and other species across different sites, examining issues like colonization, urbanization, and climate change.
Van Dooren explains his focus on crows, describing them as intelligent, adaptive birds that are both thriving in human-transformed landscapes and facing endangerment in some areas. He highlights the importance of understanding environmental issues as inherently cultural and social, and of considering the diverse perspectives and histories of local communities in conservation efforts.
The interview delves into Van Dooren's concept of a 'multispecies ethics', which involves taking seriously the ways in which human and non-human lives are entangled and interdependent. He advocates for a situated, pluralistic approach that attends to the particularities of each context and the multiplicity of voices and worldviews involved, while striving to find ways for various forms of life to coexist and flourish.
Key Episodes Takeaways
- Van Dooren's work takes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing from philosophy, cultural studies, science and other fields to study human-animal relationships.
- His focus is on developing a 'multispecies ethics' that attends to the entanglements and coexistence of human and non-human forms of life.
- This approach emphasizes understanding environmental issues as inherently cultural and social, and considering diverse perspectives and histories.
- Van Dooren advocates for a situated, pluralistic ethics that engages with the particularities of each context while acknowledging the multiplicity of voices involved.
- His work highlights the importance of attending to non-human forms of life, such as crows, and considering their experiences, behaviors, and ways of 'worlding'.
- He aims to develop an ethics that is grounded in the particular but can also be adapted and applied across different contexts and species.
- Van Dooren's methodology involves fieldwork, interviews, and engaging with local communities to understand their relationships with the environment.
- His goal is to find ways for various forms of life to coexist and flourish in the face of environmental challenges like extinction, colonization, and climate change.
Top Episodes Quotes
- “Environmental humanities is really an emerging field over the last 20 years or so. I mean, obviously in many ways it has deeper roots, but it's something that people have been talking about and actively trying to bring together for about, for about 20 years.“ by Thom van Dooren
- “And so the multi species approaches to ethics is trying to hold all of that multiplicity in the frame, to do it justice in some way, and to muddle through, I guess, in a way that takes it all seriously and figures and makes a stand for some kinds of possibilities and not others, but makes us stand in a way that is, and this is, I guess, again, a central theme of the book that is about an ongoing process of learning, of revision, of attending to others where there aren't any final answers.“ by Thom van Dooren
- “So it is to draw out those, how these cultural differences really make a difference, but also how people act in the world in a way that is not just about maximizing economic self interest, but is about the cultural histories that they bring with them.“ by Thom van Dooren
- “The multi really matters here. And for the multi and multi species is about taking seriously the multiplicity of the world, of diverse ways of being, whether they're human or non human, and attending to them and figuring out how to live well with them.“ by Thom van Dooren
- “So the kind of ethics that I'm interested in is not particular in the sense that it has nothing to say to anything else, but particular in the sense that it is mindful that translation and travel are always labour, that we have to ask the question about how this kind of approach might be helpful over here, or if it might be helpful over here, or if it might be helpful with this other kind of species and then do the work of relentlessly here.“ by Thom van Dooren
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Episode Information
New Books in Environmental Studies
Marshall Poe
1/6/24