Companion Grief: Encountering, Sensing and Educating on Death and Loss in The Anthropocene

Author: Professor Karen Malone, School of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, Centre fro Urban Transitions, Swinburne University of Technology.

In this time of extinctions we are going to be asked again and again to make a stand for life, and this means taking a stand for faith in life’s meaningfulness. We are called to live with faith. We are called to acknowledge in the midst of all we cannot choose, we can also make choices and that in the midst of terrible destruction, life finds ways to flourish and that the shimmer of life does indeed include us. – Deborah Bird Rose (2017)

Introduction
Grief and fear flourish as the precarity of the current state of the planet continues to rise. By altering climate, landscapes, and seascapes, as well as flows of species, genes, energy, and materials, we, humans, have damaged our planet, many say beyond redemption. As an unsettling ontology the naming of the Anthropocene disrupts a persistent ‘humanist’ paradigm in disciplines such as education by allowing new conversations to emerge around human-dominated global change; human exceptionalism; and the nature/culture divide. As a disrupting ontological tool it reveals on this damaged landscape there is no homogenous human race and the scale and impact of ecological damage is unequal, unethical and unjust; indigenous peoples, woman, children, and the other-than-human species we share this planet with are in it more than those entrenched in dominant western masculine cultures.

The naming of the Anthropocene is a recognition of death and grief deeply gauged out on physical and politically damaged landscape.  In this paper, I explore the implications of our shared grieving and “what it means to deal with at least the possibility of catastrophe” (Head 2016, p. 1). As educators, researchers we must begin to accept this collective phase of grieving and this grieving along with fear, anxiety, trauma and loss, will be central to responding to climate change, the ecological crisis and in particular the extinction of other species. I will argue that the work of grieving and mourning is important and necessary and has been till now often expressed in awkward, anxious dispassionate ways as grieving and loss emotions of our vulnerability and less them exceptionalism fragility they are difficult to reconcile with an anthropocentric scientific-technocratic capitalist hubris focused on documenting with a kind of evil fervor our shared demise.

Loss of loved places and species

The scale of species extinction occurring as part of the Anthropocene has been the subject of considerable literature – and I don’t intend to explore the numbers in detail but rather I am interested in the complex questions that arise around whose lives are grieved for, how and why? Why do we worry more about one species than another? That is, the politics of grief constitutes some others as legitimate objects of emotion. This differentiation is crucial in politics as it works to secure distinctions between those we acknowledge and those we view as other. These distinctions resonate with not just ‘other species’ other animals but also how we have as humans valued and positioned others lives as less important, the indigenous peoples, the poor, refugees, street people, travelers – being out of place, not belonging, being invisible, the unseen of the Anthropocene. 

Many scholars support the view the naming of the Anthropocene compels educators to acknowledge that our shared fate is determined by the fate of others and we have never been separate from nature, but at this time of sharing these catastrophic events it brings our attention to and the potential for a “re-focussing on the past/present/future entanglements of human and more-than-human lives and fates” (Gans et. al 2017, p. 67).

The Anthropocene therefore exposes the limitations of linear time. We cannot return to the past, nor can we can look to the future as a location of hope, a time/space of possibility. The Anthropocene takes us to new kinds of time, Grieving and loss are difficult to reconcile over these past entangled lives.  To take back our shared personhood in relation to other species, for example could change everything. To acknowledge the loss of our nonhuman kin who exist in the forests and oceans, deserts and wetlands that we have damaged is to comprehend the depth of our shared (human and nonhuman) collective grieving.

Extinction is eternal

Extinction, of course, involves the death of singular beings, the last Great Auk shot by a trophy hunter, the last passenger pigeon in a cage in Cincinnati Zoo, but it is also a specific kind of death: It is both a species of death and a death that concerns (in all the senses just mentioned) a species of beings. Michael Smith (2013) identifies five implication of species loss that I have summarised below:

1) The loss of a species of appearances in the world—of the innumerable ways in which beings become materially manifest in the world such that others sense their presence, whether through smelling, seeing, hearing, tasting (but also all the other senses that humans have no inkling of). We might, for example, think of touching and being touched by others where “being touched by” may have both the connotation of contact, of something communicated, and/or of being emotionally touched or affected, i.e. of a presence felt at the surfaces and/or in the depths of different beings.

2) The loss of a species of creative involvements in the world—of their unique contributions to and effects upon others and of the material possibilities offered through their worldly interventions, whether or not others sense these involvements.

3) The loss of a species of significance for the world—for everything that appears and has effects carries with it various semiotic possibilities, different ways of becoming meaningful for different beings according to their particular modes of existence. Extinction then is a curtailment of that species’ significance and potential,  with “significance” understood in a very broad sense, one far from being limited to any thing’s meaning for human beings.

4) The loss of a species of openness on the world—of the phenomenological experiences of a sensed world. For in many, and perhaps all, cases where we want to speak of death and/or extinction, those beings themselves experienced and sensed the world in certain, albeit very different, ways. Extinction entails a loss of a (relatively particular) mode of such experience, for example, of the dodo’s mode of experiencing the ecology of Mauritius.

5) The loss of a species constitutive of ecological community—where ecological community might be understood in terms of the combination and sharing of all these senses (appearance, effect, meaning, phenomena) of the relations between all of these and all other things that together compose the world.

Though each of these aspects of ecological/community relations (appearances, effects, meanings, experiences) can be thought of singularly they are materially inseparable (as they are for any individual life/death), so when we think of one we should consider all the other senses along with it. The senses in which they appeared to (were present in such a way as to be sensed by) others, the sense in which they effected the world (made things happen), their sense (meaning and significance) for others, the ways they themselves sensed (experienced) the world, the senses in which they constituted a community.

That is, to borrow and ecologically adapt Nancy’s phrase, we need to consider how “the sense of the world” is effected (created, brought about) and affected (changed, touched). These aspects of community can only make sense (things can only appear, only have effects, only be meaningful, only be experienced) in conjunction with each other and in terms of the creation and sharing of a world between beings (a world of appearances and effects and meanings and experiences). This creative sharing (the nature of which has yet to be unfurled) is how an ecological community is (relationally) constituted, and a loss to this world alters the constitution of this community irrevocably.  To be affected relationally, is to be mutually implicated, constituted as a being who is part of an ecological community. That is, to share love, pain, fear, grief, birth, death, loss – we are no longer alone in our humanness, we are coming into being by being animal, in kin with others.

Making and Sensing Kin

The purpose of, or to make ‘kin’ according to Haraway (2015) is to recognize this coming together and sensing of different entities who may not be tied purely by ancestry or genealogy. She argues the stretch and re-composition of kin represents the understanding that earthlings are all kin in the deepest sense – kin become the purest of entities in assemblages of the human, more-than-human, other than human, and by the fact that “it is past time to practice better care of kinds-as-assemblages” (Haraway, 2015, p. 162).

Our multi-species co-habitations therefore come with a sense of responsibility, a knowledge that we are kin together, we must and have shared lives. Noticing where we come together as kin is to be affected by sameness and differences. Our cohabitation as ecological communities with others provides opportunities for mutual reciprocity, care and protection. By troubling the conceptions of distinct borders and divisions between humans and non-humans, both human/nonhuman can be thought of as:

performative mutually responsive agents.  Learning to be affected, means “attending more closely to understandings of nonhumans garnered from the practice and experience of co-relationality” (Johnston 2008 cited Bear 2011, p. 302).

We are affected when touched by others. Being in the world with others, is to be in ecological community with the animals is to be touched by them: “The sense of the world is the touching of bodies each against the other, a touching sensed ecologically in different ways by different beings and different species of beings” (Smith 2013, p. 31). Derrida argues there is a sense in which:

touching is not a sense, at least not one sense amongst others. A finite living being can live and survive without any other sense; and this occurs with a host of animals that have no vision (it is possible to be sensitive to light without ‘seeing’), no hearing (it is possible to be sensitive to sound waves without ‘hearing’), no taste or sense of smell … But no living being in the world can survive for an instant without touching, which is to say without being touched … for a finite being, before and beyond any concept of ‘sensibility’, touching means ‘being in the world’.  There is no world without touching. (Derrida 2002 cited in Smith 2013, p. 31)

When we are touched by kin, when we are sensing ecologically the past, present and troubling future of a shared world with other species we are opening up to the affect of grief and loss.

Grieving ghostly kin

The haunted landscapes of our cities are sites where human/nonhuman kin co-exist, co-mingle.  Sites where we are “being worldly with” nonhuman kin in a landscape imbued with a fading past traced on to present and imagined futures.  

As humans reshape the landscape we forget what was there before … our newly shaped and ruined landscapes become the new reality. Admiring one landscape and its biological entanglements often entails forgetting many others (Gan, Tsing, Swanson & Bubandt, 2017, p. G6).

Ghosts remind us of the traces of a recent history, a ruptured past, and a past deeply sculptured in the granite of time. Ghosts reveal the histories of when different kin existed alongside others, where these assemblages of human/nonhuman bodies came together, only to be lost, to become extinct. There were stories of survival, some found ways to co-exist, adapt alongside and with humans on these damaged landscapes. As Gan et al. note,

 To track histories that make multispecies livability possible, it is not enough to watch lively bodies. Instead we much wander through landscapes, where assemblages of the dead gather together with the living. (2017, p. G5)

Thus, ghosts in the landscape remind us we have always been animal kin, we have meet in our past and when species meet again there is recognition (Haraway, 2008). Rautio reminds us having landscapes where species can meet are “crucial to coincidental encounters between humans and other species” (2017, p. 8).  Whether in the backyards of my suburban home or high in the hilltops of La Paz where we meet “affects which species we can meet, if any at all, and how” (Rautio, 2017, p. 8).  To get to the question of animate life on Earth, and then to envisage new answers, is to overcome decades of sedimented ontologies – settled ideas, lived constructs and understandings of what it is to be human, what it is to be an individual defined by the construct of species. To acknowledge the reflections of our humanness in other species is to rethink what it means to be human as species, as animal in relation with a host of other beings, who we share this planet. The landscape is littered with the lives of those lost beings and those who have adapted and flourished with humans.  

Grief as discussed by Van Dooren is a complex biosocial process that extends beyond humans. He examined mourning among crows for example as a way to context human exceptionalism:

Death does important boundary work in this kind of philosophical thought. Knowledge of death, or a relationship with death, here joins a long list of other ‘lacks’ other characteristics of attributes that are thought to ground an essential difference between humanity and animality; be it the possession of language, mirror self-recognition, rationality, moral agency or any number of other characteristics. (2014, p132)

For Van Dooren grief is intimately entangled with the evolution of complex social relations, the act of bearing or witness loss is sufficient to acknowledge that other species, the other than human world also grieve loss death, and the scale of species loss will only exacerbate the visibility of the unseen grief and loss experience by our nonhuman companions. It brings into being questions such as: “What are lives?” As answers, science has proposed only one possible way to conceive “what is a life”. This way is defined by species categories, which in turn are defined by morphological and phylogenetic markers. A life unfolds in linear time, with a distinct beginning in “a birth”, and an ending in “a death”, defined by the existence of a single organism. But no being survives or leads “a life” without that life being sustained by other organisms. And so the species problem is a genuine problem, simultaneously both empirically and philosophically. Different answers to it produce different real life experiences and conditions for experience literally sustain some lives and cast others as lives of “least concern”. 

The species of least concern are often the kind Jamie Lorimer (2014) defines as awkward, disruptive, out of place.  By this he refers to a sense of mutual vulnerability. Species such as pigeons or crows, rats, foxes and possums who share our everyday life environments, perch on our windowsills and fences, eat from our trash cans or gardens, are both close and distant, intriguing and disturbing – both in our face and as species of the “least concern” almost non-existent. 

By attending to these ideas of specism they can be understood as methods of attuning into how something not-self is similar to your self and tending that not-self as part of your self. Tuning and tending are practices that don’t require species constructs. On the contrary, they require you to understand yourself not primarily as a member of the species “homo sapiens” or “human” but as a responsive ‘being’ irrespective of species.  This is not necessarily a strangely metaphysical attempt. It can be a question of simple reframing. What if you defined who counts as your family by including all who eat from the same fridge? Sleep in your bed? Teach your grand-daughter how to drink? What if you defined your kin by thinking about who shares the environments of your neighbourhood (in my case possums who are lively users of my yard as I sleep)? What if you bonded with all whose presence were sensed by you? 

Peoples’ experiences of very close relations with other animal individuals are often explained dismissively as anthropomorphism, the attribution or projection of human characteristics onto individuals of other species. Widely seen as unfortunate and erroneous, anthropomorphism is despised as anthropocentric and just plain self-centered. But the entire notion of “anthropomorphism” relies on the construct of species – rather than the relation between two persons. 

Conclusions

The impact of climate change, habitat destruction, overpopulation and human consumption means the sixth mass extinction in Earth’s history is under way and it is thought to be more severe than previously feared. Those animals “who must grapple with the threat of extinction might be seen as simply going before us, reaching a space humanity may enter soon enough, and so they speak from a place we have not yet learned to find a voice for”. (Poet Peter Boyle, cited by Bird 2011, p. 107). A quarter of a billion years ago the earth went through a period called ‘the great dying’. An extinction event where 96% of the species of plants and animals on the planet were lost, it nearly ended all life on the planet.  Humans and all nonhuman species currently living on the planet are descendants from the surviving four percent of life.  We are tied together by a genealogy, a history in our bodies entangled on this landscape.  Noticing attunes us to worlds otherwise unrecognised; reconfiguring our sensing of bodies forces us into a new kind of historicity.  

I will finish with some questions rather than answers – this blog is a brewing of ideas, thoughts and urgencies about what is means to inhabit the Anthropocene. A key characteristic of the enlightenment tradition has been that of an individual and collective optimism; an imaginary hopeful future.  In realisation of the damaged planet inherited through this period of the Anthropocene there is work to be done both theoretically and philosophically in order that we the Anthopoceneans are prepared for the future that lies ahead. It is to comprehend firstly we humans are not at the centre of all things, the Earth will survive without us. To take back our personhood in relation to other species, for example could change everything. To acknowledge the loss of our nonhuman kin who exist in the forests and oceans, deserts and wetlands that we have damaged is to comprehend the depth of our shared (human and nonhuman) collective grieving.  Grief and other painful emotions, fear, anxiety, trauma, powerlessness will (and already are for many who live in countries already living in blasted landscapes) will be our companion on this journey. Giving voice to these emotions will be difficult when those who benefit from our current conditions will do all they can to hide and disguise the death and dying. How will we know what we are grieving for? How will choices be made?  What kin will be lost, sacrificed in order that others will survive?

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