ENVIRONMENTAL & SOCIAL JUSTICE
ENVIRONMENTAL & SOCIAL JUSTICE
Animism vs. Biocentrism... ...continued from page 11
and places they depend upon.” Crucially, Plumwood drew on both indigenous perspectives and contemporary ecological science, refusing to treat animism as mere cultural artifact while resisting uncritical appropriation of indigenous worldviews. She understood the same logical structures subordinat- ing nature also marginalize women and indigenous peoples, and her ecofeminist analysis linked environmental domination with intersect- ing forms of oppression. This insight anticipated by decades contem- porary movements connecting climate justice with racial equity, gen- der justice, and decolonization. Plumwood’s contribution is the suggestion that animism and bio- centrism need not be rivals. Both reject hyperseparation. Both recog- nize non-human agency. Both demand ethical transformation. Where biocentrism builds its case through rational deduction toward inher- ent worth, animism teaches through embodied practice toward recip- rocal responsibility. For Plumwood, these were complementary path- ways toward what she called “situated ethics” — morality emerging from specific ecological relationships rather than abstract universal principles imposed from above. Anna Tsing: The Mushroom That Teaches If Plumwood bridges philosophy and animism through ethical ar- gument, anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing offers perhaps the most viscerally grounded exploration of non-human agency operating across both registers. Her 2015 award winning work, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins follows the matsutake mushroom — a prized, pungent fungus flour - ishing not in pristine wilderness but in human-disturbed pine forests across the Pacific Northwest, Yunnan, and Japan. Tsing’s matsutake reveals what she calls “more-than-human agen- cy”: fungi, trees, soil microbes, foragers, and capitalist market forces co-producing one another through continual encounters. The mush- room’s ectomycorrhizal networks exchange water and nutrients with surrounding trees in intricate underground partnerships. Human pickers from displaced communities navigate volatile supply chains. Markets fluctuate. Forests regenerate in surprising configurations. Nothing in this picture is passive. Nothing is merely acted upon. Tsing’s concept of “entanglement” refuses the separation between ecological and economic life that Western thought takes for granted. She beautifully describes forests as “assemblages” where no single ac- tor controls outcomes, where indeterminacy is the rule, where survival depends on collaboration with unknowable others. Her work demon- strates something very vital: acknowledging that non-human agency need not require spiritual personhood in Harvey’s sense. Biological processes, fungal networks, and ecological disturbances possess their own generativity — a creativity that exceeds human planning and de- mands humility. For Tsing, the matsutake reveals what biocentrism theorizes but sometimes fails to embody: life’s extraordinary capacity to flourish amid all manner of devastation, not despite entanglement but through it. This resonates deeply with animist understandings of interdepen- dence while remaining accessible to secular readers who may hesitate at the language of spirits. The mushroom does not speak, yet it acts. It responds. It transforms landscapes in ways that command attention and, perhaps, reverence. Robert Lanza’s Biocentric Universe: When Consciousness Becomes Cosmos Beyond environmental ethics entirely lies a more radical proposi- tion. Dr. Robert Lanza, a stem-cell biologist and scientific provocateur, proposed what he called the “biocentric universe” theory: the claim
worth,” value completely independent of its usefulness to humans, and that this worth grounds moral duties of non-maleficence, non-in - terference, and fidelity toward all organisms. Taylor’s framework is notably expansive. Unlike rights-based approaches that extend mor- al consideration only to sentient creatures capable of suffering, Tay - lor’s biocentrism includes bacteria, fungi, plants, and entire ecological communities within the moral circle. His criterion is elegantly biolog- ical: organisms are “teleological centers of life,” beings pursuing their own good in their own way, deserving respect precisely because they are ends in themselves rather than means to human ends. Yet Taylor’s secular framework differs from animism in significant ways. It invokes no spirits, no consciousness in stones, no personhood for rivers. Where animism ascribes relational subjectivity to both biot- ic and abiotic nature, biocentrism grounds moral consideration in the observable fact of living purposiveness. This distinction is not trivial, but neither is it an impasse. Val Plumwood: The Philosopher Who Walked Between Worlds The late Australian philosopher Val Plumwood occupies a singular position at this intersection, and her story carries an almost mythic quality. In 1985, while kayaking in Kakadu National Park she survived a crocodile attack, an encounter that shattered any illusion of human supremacy and transformed her understanding of what it means to be prey within a living ecosystem. Plumwood emerged from the experi- ence with a profound conviction that nature possesses its own agency and sentience, irreducible to human projections. Deborah Bird Rose
New Zealand granted the Whanganui River personhood in 2017. Photo source: Wikipedia.
documented Plumwood’s intellectual legacy in her posthumous es- say , “Val Plumwood’s Philosophical Animism: Attentive Interactions in the Sentient World.” She traces Plumwood’s turn toward what she called “philosophical animism,” an ontology insisting the living world is powerful, self-willed, and possessed of its own modes of awareness. Throughout her career, Plumwood dedicated her academic life to arguing against what she termed the “hyperseparation” of humans from the rest of nature and what she called the “standpoint of mas- tery,” a reason/nature dualism in which the natural world — including women, indigenous people, and non-humans — is systematically sub- ordinated. Her alternative vision described nature as “a community of interdependent self-willed agents, who are owed ethical consideration along with the communities they form and the ecological processes
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BEFORE SESSION
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60—PATHWAYS—Fall 26
PATHWAYS—Fall 26—61
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