ENVIRONMENTAL & SOCIAL JUSTICE
ENVIRONMENTAL & SOCIAL JUSTICE
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Animism vs. Biocentrism... ...continued from page 61
ics and Harvey’s relational ontology describe the same insight from different angles: We belong to systems that precede and exceed us. Third, both generate ethical imperatives that resist extraction and demand reciprocity. Taylor derives duties of respect from inherent worth. Harvey derives practices of care from the recognition of per- sonhood. Where Taylor argues, Harvey enacts — through ritual, cer- emony, storytelling, and the patient cultivation of attentiveness. Both arrive at similar conclusions through remarkably different gates: Hu - mans must learn restraint, honor difference, and participate rather than consume. Yet tensions remain, and honesty about them strengthens rather than weakens the dialogue. Animism’s inclusion of rocks, rivers, and storms exceeds biocentrism’s biological focus. Harvey’s spiritual-reli- gious framing contrasts with Taylor’s careful secularity. Some scholars caution that collapsing animism into Western philosophical catego- ries risks epistemological violence — flattening indigenous knowledge systems into convenient resources for academic argument. Plumwood herself warned against treating animism as a philosophical quarry to mine rather than a living tradition to learn from with humility and respect. Furthermore, biocentrism’s universalizing impulse — Taylor seeks principles applicable everywhere — conflicts with animism’s situa - tional specificity. Harvey emphasises particular relationships in par - ticular places. Tsing’s foragers navigate contingency, not categorical duty. This tension mirrors a broader divide between deontological ethics and relational virtue ethics, between universal rule and con- text-sensitive responsiveness. Toward a Generous Pluralism Perhaps the wisest approach is not forced synthesis but what we might call “generous pluralism” — allowing each framework to con- tribute what it uniquely offers while remaining honest about differ - ences. For indigenous communities, animism sustains cultural conti- nuity and ecological wisdom accumulated across millennia of attentive dwelling. For Western environmental philosophers, biocentrism pro- vides rational architecture compatible with secular institutions and legal frameworks. For practitioners in the mind-body-spirit commu- nity, both offer something more: a vision of belonging that counters the pervasive loneliness of modern life, the sense that we are isolated consciousnesses adrift in indifferent matter. What matters more than theoretical coherence is whether these frameworks facilitate genuine shifts in how we live. The legal person- hood granted to the Whanganui River drew simultaneously on Māori animist cosmology and Western rights discourse — a marriage of traditions that neither dilutes. Ecuador’s constitutional recognition of Pachamama braids indigenous cosmovision with environmental jurisprudence. These hybrid applications demonstrate animism and biocentrism can collaborate without either surrendering its distinc- tiveness. Listening Across Traditions The convergence of animism and biocentrism around non-human agency and interconnectedness signals something more than academ- ic interest — it reflects a growing collective hunger for belonging, for ways of knowing that do not reduce the world to inventory. Whether articulated through Harvey’s persons-in-relation, Taylor’s inherent worth, Plumwood’s philosophical animism, Tsing’s entangled assem- blages, or Lanza’s consciousness-dependent cosmos, the message converges on a single, radical claim: We are not separate masters sur - veying a dead mechanism. We are participants in worlds alive with agency, intelligence, and relationship. These frameworks need not compete. Tsing invites us toward what
she calls “arts of noticing” — practices that attend to specific beings, places, and relationships without demanding they conform to univer- sal principles. Animism teaches patience with mystery, the willingness to sit with what we cannot fully comprehend. Biocentrism demands rigour in argument, the refusal to settle for comfortable or convenient vagueness. Together they model something the mind-body-spirit community has long intuited: that intellectual humility and ethical commitment are not opposing forces but complementary disciplines. As planetary crises accelerate — biodiversity collapse, climate dis - ruption, the slow unravelling of ecological systems — the question is no longer whether non-human beings possess agency or whether ex- istence is interconnected. The rivers have answered. The forests have answered. The matsutake threading its mycelium through disturbed soil has answered. The question is whether we can quiet ourselves long enough to listen, and whether we have the essential courage and wherewithal to respond with wholesome and wholehearted compas- sion. The answer may not arrive in grand declarations, but in medita- tive daily acts of attention, mindfulness, pausing maybe to name and recognize the tree outside our window, respecting the watershed that feeds our cities, refusing to treat land as simply mere real estate wait- ing for extraction. Such spiritual practices accumulate quietly, like the infinitesimal mycelial networks beneath the forest floor, building ca - pacity for countless transformations ahead. In that gathering of presence lies the real possibility for healing — not for the earth alone, but for ourselves as we remember who we were always meant to be, in a meaningful relationship with all living worlds. May we continue to kiss the lips of nature and receive its breath of life. Sheer Zed is an author, Buddhist shaman, musician, and artist. He has contributed to Inner Traditions, Hadean Press, Indie Shaman, and Rituals & Declarations. A coun - tercultural activist, underground music artist, and magical practitioner for more than 30 years, he lives in Bristol, United Kingdom. https://linktr.ee/SheerZed
that consciousness does not emerge from the cosmos but creates it. In Lanza’s framework , life and biological awareness are not incidental by-products of fourteen billion years of cosmic evolution but the very foundation of existence. Space, time, and the laws of physics become tools of perception rather than external absolutes. Without conscious observers, the universe would not exist. It is a startling claim, and one that mainstream physics regards with con- siderable scepticism. Yet it opens a fascinating dialogue with contem - plative traditions, particularly Buddhist philosophy. Madhyamaka schools teach pratītyasamutpāda , or “dependent origination,” and śūnyatā , or “emptiness,” holding that all phenomena arise interde- pendently and lack intrinsic, independent existence. Both Lanza and Buddhist philosophy elevate consciousness as fundamental and reject substantialist metaphysics claiming matter as primary reality. Yet the divergences are as instructive as the convergences. Lanza deploys physics-based arguments positioning consciousness as caus- al agent, literally bringing the universe into being. Buddhist philoso- phy employs meditative insight toward soteriological aims, viewing consciousness not as something that constructs reality but as the lens through which we perceive the empty, interdependent nature of all phenomena — including the observer-self. However, Jainism’s inter- dependence principle affirms all beings share fundamental unity. En - vironmental harm thus becomes self-harm, demanding compassion toward all life forms as core spiritual practice and that “if one does not care for nature one does not care for oneself.” Where Lanza claims ob - server-dependence proves consciousness creates spacetime, Buddhist texts dissolve the very distinction between observer and observed, re- vealing both as empty of inherent existence. Lanza’s biocentrism, despite its dense scientific vocabulary, retains a subtle dualism: consciousness on one side, the constructed universe on the other. Buddhism collapses this duality entirely; yet, both chal- lenge the naive realism assuming a mind-independent external world “out there” waiting to be discovered. Both suggest our cognitive ap- paratus participates in shaping experienced reality. Both unsettle En- lightenment certainties privileging matter over mind. For readers navigating the territory between animism and biocen- trism, Lanza represents an ambitious, if scientifically disputed, at - tempt to place consciousness at the cosmological center, echoing ani- mist intuitions about a sentient, responsive universe while employing the language of physics. Whether his theory withstands scrutiny is al- most secondary to the question it forces: What if consciousness is not a flickering accident in a dead cosmos but the medium through which existence knows itself? Where These Worlds Touch So where do animism and biocentrism genuinely meet? Firstly, on the question of non-human agency. Harvey’s community of persons, Tsing’s entangled assemblages, Taylor’s teleological centers of life, and Plumwood’s self-willed agents all refuse the image of nature as pas- sive. Each in their view insists that other beings act, respond, pursue goods, and transform worlds. The mountain holds geological memory. The mushroom negotiates with tree roots. The organism pursues its own flourishing. None wait for human permission. Second, both frameworks foreground interconnectedness; not as sentimental aspiration, but as ontological bedrock. For animists, humans exist within kinship networks extending across species and generations — ancestral lines that include animals, plants, and places. For biocentrists, ecological communities constitute irreducible wholes whose value exceeds any sum of individual parts. Taylor’s holistic eth-
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62—PATHWAYS—Fall 26
PATHWAYS—Fall 26—63
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