Asher is joined in Crazy Town by Danielle Celermajer, author and professor at University of Sydney, for a far-ranging conversation about human rights and the more-than-human world. Dany shares how her personal relationship with the Shoah (Holocaust) set her on a path of human rights work and impacted her experience of the devastating Black Summer Fires that swept through Australia in 2019-2020. They discuss her journey towards scholarship and activism for the more-than-human world, the intersection of human rights and multispecies justice, and the way that individuals and groups of people have stepped up to care for the billions of non-human lives impacted by the fires and floods that have ravaged Australia in recent years. Finally, Dany shares ideas for how listeners can (re)connect with the more-than-human world. For episode notes and more information, please visit our website.
Transcript
Melody Travers
Hi, this is Melody. Welcome to Crazy Town. In this bonus episode Asher interviews Dr. Danielle Celermajer about her work as a human rights and multispecies justice scholar and activist. I hope you’re enjoying our bonus episodes. If you are, please let your friends and family know about Crazy Town by giving us a five-star rating and hitting that share button on your app. Now for the conversation between Asher and Dany.
Asher Miller
Dr. Danielle Celermajer is Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney, where she established two postgraduate human rights programs aimed at integrating human rights scholarship and practice. She’s also the lead of the university’s multi-species justice collective, something that I’d like to explore more with you today, and Deputy Director of the Sydney Environment Institute. Prior to joining the academy, Dany worked as a policy advisor and a speechwriter to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner and the Race Discrimination Commissioner in the Australian Human Rights Commission. Dany has also written and spoken powerfully and beautifully about her experiences surviving a brutally changing landscape in Australia, including her book Summertime written in the ashes of the bushfires that devastated Australia a few years ago. She lives on a homestead in New South Wales with her husband and a number of other species, including donkeys and wombats and… Who else, Dany? Who else is living with you?
Dany Celermajer
Pigs, wild ducks, sheep, goats, horses, dogs, possums. They’re all in the house. Yeah, the husband’s had to move out because there wasn’t enough space for everyone.
Asher Miller
No room. Yeah. Well, you’ve shared with me that you’ve had some strange bedfellows or roommates on the property, you know, as you guys have been dealing with floods and fires and all this stuff.
Dany Celermajer
Yeah, everybody finds — everybody apart from the chairman — seems to find a way of cohabiting in a climate-changing world. Wer’e the ones who seem to be having a lot of difficulty with that.
Asher Miller
We don’t like to have to cohabit or have to face the reality.
Dany Celermajer
Only if we get to dominate.
Asher Miller
Right? Well, first thing I’ll just share for our listeners is that we’ve gotten to know each other over the last few years, couple years, I guess. We actually had a chance to meet in person together for the first time over the summer, which was really lovely. I consider you a friend and somebody I learned a lot from. So I really appreciate you joining me here in Crazy Town, and for our listeners to get a chance to learn from you and hear about your experiences. I want to start with what got you involved in human rights work in the first place? And then maybe we could talk about how that morphed into multispecies rights and justice. But yeah, what’s the origin of the human rights work for you?
Dany Celermajer
I am the child of two survivors of the Shoah, the Holocaust. And my entire family, extended family, save my parents and my grandparents and, I think, a third cousin, were murdered in the Holocaust. And I was brought up with an extremely strong ethic around justice and around global justice and around human rights. So my earliest memories, I remember being, you know, knee high to a grasshopper, and telling everybody that I wanted to be a human rights lawyer when I grew up. And it may seem a little flippant the way that I put it. But I think that when we have these transgenerational callings, it’s not that we choose it, but it chooses us, and then we can choose to embrace it or not. So it was certainly in my bones, that the work of justice and the work of creating a world in which atrocities were not normalized and — at best, not normalized, and at worst, not allowed to flourish — was the path the path that I was set on before I was born, I feel.
Asher Miller
Yeah. Where’s your family from? Where were their their families from? And you were born in Australia? Is that right? So they, they emigrated?
Dany Celermajer
So I have COVID voice and COVID cough.
Asher Miller
Okay.
Dany Celermajer
So my mother’s family was from Warsaw. And her father was a doctor in the Allied Army, and her parents, who were the only survivors, migrated to London after the war, and she was hidden during the war by a Catholic woman and brought up as a Catholic and then rejoined her family. And that’s a very interesting story because she was highly ambivalent about her Judaism, having been brought up for the first eight years of her life, quite antisemitic. She came to Australia, in the early 60s when she was engaged to a Bavarian, a blond, blue-eyed Bavarian. My father’s family came from Lviv in that part of world which you can stand in one place and be in five different countries if you stay long enough. And they escaped Lviv in the end of 1941, and they were in hiding in Warsaw for the rest of the war. And my father’s sister, Alma, who I write about a little bit in Summertime, who was a very important figure in my imagination, was discovered in hiding and was murdered during the war. So only my father and his parents came out alive. And they then migrated to Australia around, I think, 48 or 49.
Asher Miller
They survived in hiding throughout the German occupation of Warsaw. And it wasn’t just the Warsaw Uprising in the ghetto, but but all the violence that happened there with the Polish population as well, yeah?
Dany Celermajer
Survived and lost a daughter, so that the shadow of her existence was very much a presence through my childhood.
Asher Miller
There’s so much that we could talk about in terms of generational trauma. And it’s interesting that you, you spoke of it as, you know, your path was set for you before you were born, in the sense, right?
Dany Celermajer
Very much so. And, you know, this is leaping forward, but after the black summer fires, which I’m sure we’re going to talk about… several weeks after the fires and dirt I called the woman who had been my analyst for a number of years, who’s also a second generation survivor. And I remember saying to her, I didn’t know that it could all break apart. And she said to me, “Yes, you did.” And that observation of hers, knowing me as she does, really went clunk for me. And in fact, I’ve had conversations with quite a few second generation survivors. And my experience, and I’m not generalizing, but at least with this group of people, is that there is a level of knowing that the world can fall apart. That, you know, Indigenous peoples have, that peoples who have these intergenerational experiences of the world breaking have, that people who have been formed within the privilege of Western modernity have an embodied expectation that the world stays whole. And so imagining that it can break is really outside their frame. Whereas for me, for us, it’s inside the frame. And so when it happens, I’m not saying that it doesn’t profoundly shake our understanding of the world. But it feels more like recognition than a first time encounter.
Asher Miller
Yeah. Two quick thoughts about that. One is, I would be curious if you feel that that knowing that you carried in you changed your experience of what you’ve gone through, not only with the fires, but I know a lot of the flooding since. As in, did it lead you to be more well equipped, emotionally or psychologically or not? Maybe that’s something we could talk about. The other quick thought is, you talked about Aboriginal populations there in Australia. This is a not nearly as severe example, but I remember after Donald Trump was elected here in the United States, in 2016, there was a tremendous amount of shock in certain circles. And I remember hearing from a number of African American commentators, like, “You’re surprised. Why are you surprised? We’re not surprised.”
Dany Celermajer
Yes. And as Indigenous peoples around the world continue to remind us, importantly, their world was broken, you know, 400 or 200 years ago, depending on when colonization has happened. And the promise of modernity that is supposed to make life better — that’s the official narrative that is now under threat because of a climate-changing world. That promise of modernity has delivered nothing but genocide and land theft and destruction of culture for those peoples. So I think depending on who you are, the narrative looks very different. To come back to your first point about whether the pre-experience of being a child of survivors left me better equipped or mentally adjusted. I don’t know that being mentally adjusted is a phrase that many people would use.
Asher Miller
Yeah, for second generation.
Dany Celermajer
But certainly I did feel able to be present to what was the case. So I wasn’t constantly wishing that it wasn’t happening, I was able to be with what was there to an extent, and to respond to what was there. And for many, many years, I had rehearsed in my mind what it was like to be with those you loved, when your lives were under threat. And I remember many, many times, thinking, if that was me, I would want to be there with presence and with love and with care. And one of the great tragedies for me of Alma, my aunt, was that she died without her family. She was separated from them. And so that was instilled very deeply in me again, this idea that when there is great trauma and great violence in life, I want to be able to be present and loving to those around me, no matter what’s happening. I don’t want to face this in a state of fracture with those who I care about.
Asher Miller
Yeah, I really hear that. Let’s back it up a little bit, or kind of switch gears just a little, because we could talk about this for a long time. And I shared with you before I had worked at the Shoah Foundation. I’m not a child of survivors or grandchild of survivors, but I was very close with a family of Holocaust survivors who were like my surrogate grandparents, and was something I carried with me. Similarly to you, I think I had a very strong sense of both justice and the possibility of real darkness in the center of humanity. And that experience working in the Shoah Foundation just out of college was profound for me. But again, I want to bring it more to the present, because you run this or work on this multispecies justice collaborative at the university, and I’m curious about what was your journey moving from… not that it’s one or the other — I think part of your work is to point out that it’s not one or the other — but moving from a focus on human rights to thinking about multispecies rights or multispecies justice?
Dany Celermajer
It’s such an important question, Asher. So from really the beginning of my moral formation, I didn’t have a people-based or a nation-based conception of justice. I had what I thought was a Universalist conception of justice. But the boundaries of that universalism ended at the human race. And that’s the dominant paradigm that we live in. And so that went relatively unchallenged for me for a long time. In fact, to be a human Universalist within a Westphalian system of nation states still places you somewhat on the outer edge of conceptions of justice. But three things happened that change that for me. The first was, I have always had an experiential connection with other animals and with the more-than-human world. So there was a disconnect between what was true for me personally and what was true for me professionally. And I was able to hold that for a long time, but that contradiction just became intolerable for me. And it no longer made sense in my own life to draw a boundary between humans as being subjects of justice or the violence against humans mattered from a moral and political point of view, but that violence against others didn’t matter. So that was the first contradiction. The second was, as you said, I’m an academic. I spend a lot of my time reading and talking, and in many fields — in philosophy, in biology, and social theory — the idea that humans are separate from the more-than-human world is just falling apart. So we increasingly understand that humans are entangled. You know, most of what’s actually in our bodies isn’t even human DNA — where our lives are completely dependent on others, interdependent with others, and the idea of either the human individual or the human as a bounded part of being just doesn’t make sense intellectually anymore. And then the third was the world. Here is the world where the types of violence that flow from capitalism and colonialism and extractivism — whether it’s industrial animal agriculture or mining or climate change or mega-development — having impacts right across the human and more-than-human world. So you know, if we take something like the black summer fires as a very literal example, the fires didn’t go to their checklist and go, “Yep, humans have language, they have the capacity to make hypothetical conceptions. So they’re protected. But, you know, these others who don’t have these exceptional qualities somehow are going to be in the face of the storm.” So the world very literally is shaking those boundaries and giving us an experience of our shared vulnerability. And I don’t just mean the natural world. I mean, the effects of this hyper-extractive capitalism that we live in, something like industrial animal agriculture, obviously affects the animals, is terrible for the environment, and is terrible for the people who live within it. Huge rates of domestic and family violence around abbatoirs and people who work in those situations. Enormous exploitation of migrant workers. As we know, during the COVID pandemic, people who worked in meat processing were some of the most harmed due to the pandemic. So there are many ways in which what is unfolding in the world makes it obvious that those boundaries of injustice don’t lie between the human and more-than-human world. That’s a long answer. But those three combined for me to realize that my work had to be not at the interface of the human, animal and environment, but really thinking about us as Earth beings, who have a highly differential and uneven, but a shared fate.
Asher Miller
On that last one, Bill McKibben, the climate activist and writer, spoke a lot about how you can’t negotiate with physics and I think you’re making a similar point which is, quote/unquote, nature’s not going to draw a boundary, right, and say, “This is a protected class of species.” And at the same time, we have created, for some of us in particular, we have created a lot of protection. So it hasn’t been equally impactful, not only between different humans, but also between species, right? Like, we’ve still allowed ourselves to avoid the true consequences thus far.
Dany Celermajer
Absolutely. And all the mores and to require justice to be multispecies, because the effects of the worlds that humans or certain humans have created (not all humans) are these highly extractive worlds where we concrete more and more, we build on more and more, we pollute rivers, and we hate the climate. Climate justice, the idea of climate justice, looks at the differential impacts of climate change, or environmental justice looks at the differential impacts of environmental degradation on different groups of humans. I, of course, care about that. I’m not discounting that at all. But if we look at who is on the front line of environmental injustice, or climate injustice, it’s other species. I mean, look at the biodiversity crisis that we’re facing. Look at the collapse of ecosystems. That is not because of what nature, if that exists, has done to itself. That’s because of what a particular form of human life has done to all Earth beings and in the black summer fires, I think 33 or 34 human beings were killed directly. It’s estimated that around 450 died as a result of respiratory conditions from the smoke from inhaling from the fires. Three and a quarter billion, three and a quarter billion! You can’t even begin to get your head around that number. But that number of animals other than humans who were killed in those fires. You know, if you’re a human, you got all sorts of warnings. There were evacuation centers. There was all sorts of protection. The fire service would come and protect two things: human life and human property. But there was no protection for the more-than-human world, other than insofar as that was instrumental to the protection of human life and human property.
Asher Miller
Well, that is certainly true from a structural, institutional standpoint, and kind of collective resource standpoint. But did you see people making an effort as individuals and small communities to try to protect the more-than-human?
Dany Celermajer
Yes, that’s a very, very important question. So the state was silent and inactive with respect to other animals. I should say there was a tree called the Wollemi pine. And there was only one known stand of native Wollemi pines in the world, and it’s in the state of New South Wales. It’s secret where it is because it’s so precious. This is a very ancient tree, and the state did protect that stand of Wollemi pines. So in this exception, where something from the more-than-human world stood out as having this unique value, it did find itself able to do that. But it was completely inactive when it came to looking after ecosystems or other animals, companion animals, farmed animals, native animals. But this was one of the inspiring and hopeful characteristics of the black summer fires. People had an experience of the threat and the loss to other species that I think brought to consciousness, how much they matter in human lives. And people were amazing. So you mentioned before that I live on an intentional multispecies community. We had thought that we were not going to evacuate. Obviously we couldn’t evacuate the wild animals, but the domesticated animals, because we live very remotely, it’s difficult to evacuate them. But I woke up on the morning of the 28th of December. I didn’t wake up because I hadn’t slept the night before, but made the decision on that morning, that we were going to evacuate everybody. And I put out a call on a local group. And two hours later, there were three trucks at my place to evacuate the animals, places for them to go. These are people who I had never met in my life. These extraordinary networks of care developed. There was a meeting called in my local town to set up feeding and watering stations for wildlife who had survived the fires. Because you can imagine, yes, most of the wildlife was killed. But those who survived were now in habitats that had been completely destroyed. There was no food, there was no water. And when the first meeting was called hundreds of people came to it, hundreds of people volunteered to go out and set up feeding stations and watering stations for the surviving wildlife. So there was a massive disconnect between the value system that was institutionalized at the level of the state, and the experienced value system of people that we talked so much about human exceptionalism and anthropocentrism, and the marginalization of the concerns of beings other than humans. But what we saw was that people were profoundly concerned about what was happening to other animals and to environments, and many people wouldn’t leave because they wouldn’t leave their animals. And the trauma that people have suffered because of what happened to animals was absolutely… and you know, three years later, after the floods that you mentioned and COVID, that people are still carrying that trauma.
Asher Miller
That was something I wanted to ask you about, which is, it wasn’t, at the highest level, institutionalized or anything. But you saw that, at the personal level, the community level. Did it take the crisis to awaken that in people? And has it persisted? I mean, you’re talking about people carrying the trauma — I’m just wondering if they’re still carrying the prioritization or the recognition, as well.
Dany Celermajer
We’re actually doing a project, looking at the community networks that developed to care for and rescue animals during the fires. And, unfortunately, because… so the fires came to an end in mid January 2020, and what brought them to the end was the first flood event. And then by March, we were in COVID. So we have had an intensity of crises, one on top of the other — what people sometimes refer to now as turbulence — which has made it very difficult to actually consolidate those networks. In some places, like Northern New South Wales, where there’s extremely strong community organizations… and I don’t know how many of the listeners know, but the town of Lismore, quite a large regional town in New South Wales, was completely destroyed in the floods earlier this year. And those community networks which have become semi-formal, they’re called resilience groups. They’re extremely active. The ones around us have become dormant. But the project that we’re working on is trying to work out how can the state provide the environment and the resources, so that those networks can do the work that they’re so good at doing because communities want to do it, communities are capable of doing it, if they have the right type of infrastructure, but they do need a push.
Asher Miller
In many cases, they’re the only ones who can do it. And we at Post Carbon Institute, we had hosted a conversation on mutual aid networks. And we had someone who you may have met, Daniel Aldrich, who works on social ties and social cohesion in researching how the strength or weakness of certain types of social ties determines the ability of communities to recover from disasters, and made a pretty compelling case that having those ties are really key in those moments of crisis. It makes me wonder, because you talked about this turbulence — you know, people are talking about polycrises — sometimes we use the term the Great Unraveling, this coming together of environmental and social crises and us getting hit with one after the other, sometimes simultaneously, like with COVID and fires or flooding. And I wonder if this does apply to the more-than-human as well, which is if those social ties and those networks didn’t exist pre-crisis, when crisis happens, maybe they form and that that helps for the next crisis. I am curious if you’ve seen that. And I’d like you to maybe talk a little bit about what the experience has been like over a period of years now, right? Because you talked about the black fires a few summers ago, but you guys have been dealing with apocalyptian, biblical flooding nonstop, right? I mean, just waves and waves of this. What is that experience like for you? What’s that experience like for people that, you know in the sense of like… it feels like you’re in a different phase or state of this unraveling of the climate system than maybe a lot of our listeners are, certainly in than me.
Dany Celermajer
It’s a very important and complex question. And I think there are a number of variables that affect the answer. So my first big answer is I think that the type of networks that emerge and start to consolidate during crisis have tremendous potential for ongoing resilience, not a word that I’m keen on, but for community strength and community ability to navigate, but they have to have conditions that nurture them. And those conditions include some conditions in the what we call natural world. So when there is battering from fire and flood and COVID and flood and flood, that impedes their functioning, but they also need to have support from the state. You know, the state can do all sorts of things to support those networks by providing them with resources, by assisting them with just the infrastructure of networking and basic equipment. So that’s the first part of the answer. And the second part is, I think it’s really critical to understand that people are operating from very different baselines. And often, the people who are most active in these networks… firstly, it’s mostly women. And not only women, but it is quite gendered. And some of the work that is the most important work is consistent with the gendering of the way that we think about work: not recognize the work. So there was a huge amount of work that gets done in actually allowing people to continue to function, what sometimes gets called emotional labor. But that work in holding communities together is extremely important work. And so that needs to be valued in itself. And people need to be supported. Now, I have spoken to some of the most extraordinary people who were right there in the middle of the fires driving around through fire zones, going out and feeding animals who had been left because the people had evacuated, or who set up wildlife systems. And some of them are still going and they’re still going strong, and they’re still out there doing that work. But there are other people who, because they haven’t had the support, and frankly, because of the socioeconomic situation they’re in… I mean, there are people whose livelihoods have been destroyed because of the floods and COVID. And they are now exhausted. I think it’s really important to see exhaustion as a dynamic process, not as a permanent state. They would love to be involved, being involved in networking with your communities, supporting your community, being part of creating a world where we — all of us, human and more-than-human — can live as well as possible in the face of climate disasters is actually a profoundly empowering thing to do. Rather than being alone, rather than feeling like this is coming down upon me, in my isolation, the experience of being with others finding the best possible way through, not necessarily a good way through, but the best possible way through is a very nurturing experience for people. But they also need to have the support to do it. And if people have lost their homes and lost their livelihoods, then it becomes very difficult for them to make the contribution and also to have that empowering experience.
Asher Miller
And to be present like you… when we first started talking to you, you were sharing how important it felt to you to be present with those you love. In these moments of crisis to be not alone, but also be fully yourself in those moments seems quite key. One reaction I had to one of the comments you made around the need for the state to bring in resources from the outside, I completely agree with that. Part of that is also just the recognition of what you said on, quote/unquote, unpaid labor is not being viewed as a value, which is part of the same illness, mental illness that our society has, in general, right? Everything has to have a financial value. But what happens as we’re deeper and deeper into this era of crisis that we’re in, that we’re coming into, where I fully expect… and I don’t know what the experience was like in Australia, where fires spread everywhere, flooding everywhere, I’ve often thought about that here in the US and the West Coast. We have these fires, and they’re worsening, and they’re happening more frequently. We’ve still had a situation however, where we’re able to bring in resources from the outside, firefighters coming from hundreds, thousands of miles away, you know, because they’re not dealing with an acute fire themselves. But at some point, we might all collectively have diminished capacity. You know, there might be fewer resources at the state level.
Dany Celermajer
And the question is, what’s the sum total of resources that we’re dedicating to this? I mean, the United States, let’s take the country that you live in. If even a portion of the military budget was to be re-purposed, to caring for the climate catastrophe, then we wouldn’t be talking about the problem of distributing resources. It’s only if we assume that we’re coming from this ridiculously low baseline where our priorities are still making war on the rest of the world. I mean, that’s what’s gonna shift. And then, and then the resource distribution question looks very different.
Asher Miller
Yeah, I hear you 100%. On that, I want to get back to another comment that you made. And then I’d like you to share some suggestions for our listeners. But you talked about three things that happened for you that set you on this path towards multispecies justice. And the first one you mentioned was your personal relationship with the more-than-human. And I’m just curious, did that come from certain experiences you’ve had? Was that innate in you? What would you say to people who’ve, you know, they’ve grown up in urban environments, and they’ve never been fortunate enough to take a walk in the woods, or go to the ocean, or whatever it is. I mean, their kids who grew up never seeing the stars because they live in cities. So I’m just curious, was it a need for you? Was it that you were fortunate enough to be able to have these interactions? Do you feel like it’s really key for people to have those kinds of interactions, that we expose them to that?
Dany Celermajer
I do think that encounters with others is critical to opening our consciousness to the wonder of what it is to share the world. And certainly, urbanization and mega-urbanization impedes that. At the same time, even in cities, you know, there are other critters who live in cities, too, if we notice them. You know, there are birds, and in your neck of the woods, there are squirrels. And you know, there are all sorts of critters. There are some really wonderful projects now on getting people in urban spaces to notice the beings with whom they share the world. So, yes, it’s much easier to pay attention if you’re living in the woods. But it’s not just about what’s there. It’s also about what we pay attention to. And our educational systems can certainly make a difference to that. And the second dimension is, art and literature can just be absolutely extraordinary in opening people to the wonder of the more-than-human world. I was doing a podcast interview a little over a year ago, and this is a podcast about animals. And I know that at the end of this podcast, they always ask a number of regular questions. And one of the questions is, what is the piece of animal scholarship that most influenced you? And I was thinking about that. And I wanted to give the very un-esoteric answer of Black Beauty, because I remember reading that book as a child, and that book that so poignantly depicts the first-person consciousness, obviously refracted through the lens of human consciousness, but nevertheless, opens that possibility of wonder — that it’s not just that there are all these other beings that we can look at, and listen to, but they’re having an experience of the world. They’re looking and listening, and smelling and feeling and echo-locating. And doing all of the other amazing things that animals and trees and funghi do to exist in the world. So literature or film or music is another source of encounter. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t also have to come into face-to-face relationships with others. I think we do. And when we do, and when we allow the possibility of that encounter being an encounter of friendship and love, it’s extraordinary what can happen to us. One of my takes on what has been the dominant approach to certainly animal justice, a little bit less so where the ecological justice is: so often, we’re told what we shouldn’t do. You know, cruelty to animals is terrible. And industrial animal agriculture is terrible. And all of that is true. But there’s another side of it, which is that when people have the experience of what it’s like to be in friendship with another, what it’s like to gaze upon another and see them, living their lives, it’s profoundly enriching for our lives. My life is infinitely better for the relationships that I have with others. And so I guess what I’m saying is it’s not just about slapping people on the wrist. It’s also saying, “Can you imagine all of the beings that you can be friends with, like you’re not just limited humans. Life can be so much bigger and richer and more beautiful and more profound and more full of wonder if we allow ourselves to share the earth with other Earth beings and be in relationship with them.”
Asher Miller
I’m really struck by what you said. I hadn’t thought about this before. But you’re right. If we just look around us, we see those opportunities for connection. And you talked about literature. We’ve been in conversations with others where we’ve been talking about the polycrisis, we’ve been talking about the collapse of systems. We’ve started delving even into considerations of equity and the different experience of different communities around the world — Global North, Global South, Indigenous, what have you. Hardly any discussion of other species, and it felt like you had to carry that. I’m shifting gears here, but I’d love for you to speak about what that experience is like for you. I mean, it feels like, one, you’re able to have this emotional, visceral connection to that, which really kind of blows me away, Dany, because I think it’s hard to hold that raw emotion. But it feels like you somehow tap into that, and stay present with it. But what’s that experience for you? And do you feel like it’s… do you feel like it’s changing in the circles that you you operate in that are outside the multispecies justice conversations?
Dany Celermajer
I certainly think that there is more and more recognition of humans’ entanglement with the more-than-human world. I also think that there are a lot of people who are coming out of the shadows. We speak about the West being human exceptionalist or extractivist. But no tradition, including the West is monolithic. There are lots of different ways of being within the West. And there are lots of different ways of being across the world. And I think increasingly we’re seeing other voices, other understandings of the world, getting more airplay, particularly Indigenous voices — not enough, but Indigenous understandings of the world. So I do think that there’s a shift. I think the dominant approach, as you say, is still extremely anthropocentric at the institutional level and at the intellectual level. My experience of carrying a particular type of voice or perspective in that is generally: I’m so driven to do what I do, and I just say what I see to be the case. And so it doesn’t feel like I’m doing anything. It just feels like I said before, it’s doing me in the same way as if I was to ask you, you know, Asher, “How does it feel for you to stand up for your boys’ health and wellbeing?” You would just say, “Well, there’s no Asher, who doesn’t do that standing up for their health and wellbeing — is me, I’m constituted by my relationships with them. And same for me, I’m constituted by my relationships with other beings.” So in one sense, it doesn’t feel like I’m doing anything. It doesn’t feel like I’m pushing against anything. And there are times, particularly when I am in the presence of people who do have profound ethical concerns about what’s happening in the world, and yet continue to marginalize the impacts on beings other than humans, I can feel an enormous amount of frustration, and sometimes I feel a bit of despair. And despair really comes from the temporality of the problem. The type of shifts that we need to make in how we understand the world and our place in it are huge transformations of most profound background assumptions about our own being. And those types of transformations can take decades or centuries or millennia. But we don’t have that. That break between the two types of temporalities of transformation can leave me impatient, angry, despairing — a whole lot of pretty strong negative emotions. And then I just come back to, “Well, this is the work that has to be done.” And I think that if you can bring people to: what actually makes your life meaningful? What brings beauty and what allows your life to be the life that you want to live? I would doubt that for many people, some part of the modern human world wouldn’t be in there: a place that they love to go, a garden, where they go for holidays, a beach, the ocean — that when we look at what is it actually like to be living the life that we want to live, we couldn’t imagine doing that without a flourishing more-than-human world. So I think to the degree that we can get people to connect with that truth of their experience, the experience they already have, that, I hope, is a path to strengthening that recognition that it’s not actually just about us humans or certain humans who look like us who live like us.
Asher Miller
There is more opportunity for us to be engaging and valuing the more-than-human. For listeners who are just even beginning to think about this, what would be your advice to them as a way of stepping into that space?
Dany Celermajer
Perhaps to start, go into your imagination to either another being, another animal, or another place that you find enchanting and wonderous. And try to carve in your life some time to spend with that being, with people that you love, and not to make it work, you know, not to make it like, “This is something that I have to do. But actually, this is something that is going to enrich my life, the life of my family, my wellbeing, my health, to spend time.” And it could be in literature, it could be in film. It would be better if it was in an actual body to body encounter. But I think building those encounters into our life so that they become less exceptional, so that they become more habitual. I’m a big one for building habits. Who you spend time with is going to determine who you love and who you care about. And if you spend a little bit more time with squirrels in the park, or the fireflies or the, you know, the soil… Oh my god, look at how kids look at soil! Spend some time feeling what the soil is like under your feet. Have an embodied experience of those encounters. Build them into your life as habit, and then watch them grow and flourish.
Asher Miller
That’s really well said. Thank you so much. It makes me actually excited to get outside, and I’m just even trying to count right now all the different interactions I could have, just looking at my window. I feel super-lucky to even think that, and I think you’re right that you can get that in every place, because nature has a way of being around us even if we’ve done our best to hermetically seal our environments. Thank you so much, Dany, for taking the time. Thank you for your work, and we’ll talk soon.
Melody Travers
That’s our show. Thanks for joining us in Crazy Town. This is a program of Post Carbon Institute. Get More info at postcarbon.org.
