Ecocide and the Animistic Turn
It’s been nearly a year since Unseen Beings was released, and in that time I have been overjoyed to receive countless messages from readers all over the world who have felt some resonance with the book. This has included folks from many different backgrounds - secularists and spiritualists, Christians and Buddhists, medical practitioners, scholars, policy-makers, and nature-lovers. Everyone seems to have been able to take something useful away from the book, and in many different ways.
I have often struggled to sum up Unseen Beings ‘in a nutshell,’ because it’s somewhat of a kaleidoscopic synthesis of many different ideas and fields of research. But at its core, I suppose there is, in fact, a central argument that I was trying to make:
Anthropocentric disenchantment is a toxic, delusional, and scientifically indefensible ontology which profoundly hinders our ability to effectively understand and engage in the world. An animistic worldview is a more suitable basis for effectively grappling with the complexities of environmental ethics, ecology, the climate crisis, and what it means to be human in a more-than-human world.
Anthropocentrism and animism can be understood as two extreme ends on an ideological spectrum. Anthropocentrism represents the view that humans are either the only living beings who can be identified as conscious agents with intrinsic value, or are otherwise the single most important species, to the point that our desires automatically supersede the rights and needs of all others. An anthropocentric worldview, put plainly, argues for a world that principally functions for our human benefit - all others be damned. Given how deeply this view is engrained in our modernist cultural frameworks, our moral and ethical systems are also skewed to automatically favour the human, with no real need to extend moral concern to other-than-human beings.
Animism, on the other hand, recognises that humans are only one of countless kinds of ‘persons,’ and that maintaining healthy and workable relationships with non-human persons is an important part of our individual and social existence as living beings in a living world. For animists, all biological lifeforms (at a bare minimum) are understood to be aware in some capacity, though a diverse array of lived experiences can be found within that wide bracket. It would be a sorely unobservant animist who thinks that a daffodil has the same kind of experience as a racoon - but difference does not mean mutual exclusivity, and animists suggest that there is something consistent that underlies our varied experiences of life. Tibetan Buddhists might call foundational quality rig pa - the primary continuum of ‘awareness’ in and from which all experience arises. This is not quite the same thing as consciousness (rnam shes), which can take an array of forms. Rig pa is something far more fundamental - a basic awareness that pervades all manifestations of mind (sems).
On a strictly biological level, it has become quite difficult to ignore the fact that indeed all living organisms on this Earth (all of whom are our very distant cousins) possess something akin to this idea of rig pa - some fundamental ‘experience’ of being alive, regardless of what that might look like. Even the tiniest microorganism exhibits some capacity to experience and process ‘sensory’ data, to learn, to make decisions, and to communicate. These are not processes that ‘things’ do - they are specifically processes that ‘persons’ do. On this basis, even a lightly animistic worldview is both defensible and arguably essential for a scientifically literate society.
Of course, animists are known to go beyond biology in their acknowledgment of minded beings. Rocks, rivers, mountains, lakes, and even entire ecosystems can be regarded as ‘persons’ of some sort - sentient beings with a capacity to feel, to suffer, and to actively engage with those around them in manifold ways. While our sciences have not quite caught up to this way of thinking, it’s worth noting that the study of holobionts - compound organisms made up of many different forms of life - seem to confirm some of these ideas. An old-growth forest can, and should, be regarded as a community of discrete organisms, but it can also rightly be regarded as a kind of ‘being’ in and of itself, particularly due to the involvement of mycorrhizal fungal networks. These forest ‘beings’ are particularly adept at processing data from many different sources and making collective decisions as a more-or-less cohesive whole. To behold such a complex system in its fullness is somewhat beyond our usual capacity as humans. Indeed, we struggle to recognise that around 50% of the cells in our own bodies are non-human and that we, too, are a kind of holobiont.
This is one of the most compelling justifications for a belief in so-called ‘nature spirits.’ While most familiar mythic traditions establish beings like ‘lake spirits’ as ‘mountain gods’ as invisible spirits who live in their respective natural abodes - their associated topographic phenomena can just as readily be identified as their physical bodies. It may be that so-called ‘forest spirits’ are not invisible or imperceptible at all, but rather the personified conglomeration of many discrete organisms working in union as a collective entity. The same might be said for a lake spirit, who may be physically embodied in a lake itself, or for a mountain god who, rather than being some bearded man sitting atop a lofty peak, is embodied in the rocky and verdant contours of the imposing mountainous landscape.
There are, of course, many other kinds of ‘nature spirits’ in global animistic traditions. Elves, fairies, nymphs, sídhe, nāgas, gnyan, huldufólk, and the tylweth teg are all examples of ‘nature spirits’ who have been seen to co-inhabit our world since time immemorial. As many of these beings are distinctly humanoid in their appearance and manner of existence, they have been some of our closest spirited kin through the millennia. In many cultural traditions, a good human life partly depended upon maintaining good relations with such beings - whether by making offerings, honouring their abodes, or observing behavioural taboos to avoid offending or harming them without justification. Animists do not (necessarily) live by some fixed moral code set in place by an omniscient overlord - rather, they live according to an array of highly specific and localised social contracts, made both with other humans and with non-human beings.
This approach to life is arguably quite reasonable, given everything we know about the wonders of our world (including how much we don’t know!). But it is also fundamentally enchanting. This is crucial, because both are equally important in cultivating a life worth living. Without reason, our societies would crumble, but we equally cannot stand to live without enchantment. Enchantment, in this sense, does not mean illusion or delusion, but rather the fundamental cocktail of wonder, empathy, and joy that arises when we behold the magical beingness of an ‘other.’ It is a relational experience - one that emerges through connection, not through instrumentalist knowledge. Without it, we our capacity to meaningfully engage with others becomes severely debilitated, particularly with those who may appear most different to ourselves.
Over the past couple millennia, especially in the Western world, permissible forms of enchantment have largely been relegated to the domain of institutional religion. Indeed, this was one of the ways that religion garnered such immense power in our societies. By controlling and limiting the experience of magic and wonder, religion controlled the narrativization of some of our most sacred and powerful human experiences. Our pandaemonia of ambiguous nature spirits were replaced with binarised angels and demons, and the minded complexity of the ‘natural world’ was reduced to a storehouse of resources given to us by ‘God.’ In many cases, going against such frameworks bore the penalty of death, but there remained many who bravely retained their connections with the spirited unseen, even in the face of such consequences.
Outside of religion, storytelling and art remained particularly potent spaces in which animism and nature spirits persisted. They’re found in poetry, paintings, architecture, literature, plays, and a great many other creative media. Some were still sacralised or demonised in such works, but many others weren’t. And importantly, these traditions continue into the present day. While we tend to be quite reductive and anthropocentric when it comes to our ‘serious’ modern dramas, genres like fantasy and science fiction remain an open ground for dynamic engagements with non-human entities, and many indeed offer their readers and audiences an authentic experience of enchantment. Particularly in our increasingly non-religious and ‘secular’ societies, it is vital that we nourish these precious remnants of our mythic legacies, as they may hold the keys to our recovery.
On Ecocide
In recent months, my research has focused quite heavily on the topic of ecocide, defined by the Independent Expert Panel for the Legal Definition of Ecocide in 2021 as “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts.” While the notion of ecocide was first discussed in the 1970s, its modern popularity is largely due to the efforts of the late Scottish barrister Polly Higgins, who in 2010 began an effort to compel the UN’s International Law Commission to codify ecocide as an international crime, alongside genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression. While her goal has not yet been fully realised, conversations are ongoing, and we may yet see a future in which ‘crimes against the environment’ are treated with the profound weight that they warrant.
But how are we to relate to such a crime? How can we conceptualise the moral and ethical dimensions of ecological harm? And are our current perspectives sufficient for effectively mitigating, controlling, and preventing environmental crime? After all, international law is notorious for being quite difficult to effectively enforce, so will such a move actually produce tangible results? These are important questions to ask, and my work is largely dedicated to provoking some of these discussions.
‘Enforcement’ can, of course, take many forms. Formal social control via the criminal justice system is only one piece of the puzzle. Informal methods are often far more important, such as effective socialisation, community welfare, the maintenance of social bonds, and the cultivation of empathic values. According to many criminologists, these kinds of controls ultimately play a far more important role in preventing crime than criminal justice itself. While more formal systems are certainly necessary in many cases, the stories that we tell are ultimately more powerful than prisons and sanctions in augmenting human behaviour.
Another important criminological consideration in the topic of ecocide is the intersection of law and morality. Some ‘crimes’ are regarded as crimes because they are (rather universally) deemed to be immoral - murder, rape, and theft are common examples of this, which are known as as mala in se (‘wrongs in(/of) themselves’). These kinds of crimes are illegal because we understand them to be wrong. But there are other kinds of crime which are quite the opposite. The cultivation and use of cannabis and psilocybin, for instance, are considered crimes (in most places) not because they are immoral, but merely because they are legally prohibited. These kinds of crimes are known as mala prohibita, or ‘wrongs [because they are] prohibited.’ While some will make moralistic arguments against the use of mind-altering substances on religious grounds, these are also ultimately sacralised mala prohibita based on doctrinal tradition, not rational ethical arguments.
Why does this matter? Well, if we are going to establish ecocide as an international crime, we will need to deal with the tricky matter of morality. As it stands, the most prominent moral argument against ecocide centres around the fact that it negatively impacts humans. We talk about resource depletion and pollution, the loss of human life and habitats, and the welfare of the human generations to come as the core reasons that mitigating the environmental crisis should be seen as a moral imperative. Certainly this would itself justify regarding ecocide as a malum in se, but will the perpetrators of these crimes actually see it this way? Indeed, will we see it this way as bystanders, consumers, and workers who often directly benefit from these crimes? Or will we simply regard it as another guideline to be broken? It is no surprise that many (particularly those with right-wing political orientations) already characterise such efforts as an attack on human prosperity - a bit of bureaucratic red tape designed to destroy capital and limit present human flourishing.
At the end of the day, we humans tend to struggle with thinking in the long-term. We know, for instance, quite a bit about the grievous health effects of smoking, drinking, or eating a poor diet, and yet the momentary pleasures that such activities confer often trump any concerns that we might have about future suffering. Even when we ourselves will pay the price, we are adept at suppressing fears of future risks in the pursuit of present gratification. Unless direct harm is immediately and obviously identifiable, we struggle to perceive it as harm. So long as an act can be regarded as a ‘victimless crime’ (of which, to be fair, there are many), most people will gauge their own potential participation in such acts on a highly personal moral basis - even in the face of potentially hefty legal consequences. Consider, for instance, the thriving cannabis culture in Thailand, which only legalised the drug in 2022 after about a century of prohibition. Even when possession could lead to decades-long imprisonment, even for tourists, the cannabis scene continued to grow and thrive over the past 70 years.
What does this tell us? Well, for one, we struggle to consider even the welfare of our own future selves when making behavioural choices, and attempting to do so with the future welfare of others is significantly more complicated. We also tend to decide which laws to follow and which to break based on our own values and morals, and not necessarily the legal limits imposed upon us. There are important exceptions to this, which is why laws are still often important, but ultimately we are more likely to break a law if we do not feel morally compelled to follow it, or if the negative consequences of our actions are delayed or invisible. There is a lot more to unpack here, but put simply, we relate to moral crimes (i.e. mala in se) quite differently to mere legal prohibitions. Most empathetic and socialised individuals will avoid violently attacking someone because they simply do not want to cause harm, and if a situation were to arise where it would be personally deemed necessary, this would likely be (rather quickly) negotiated on personal moral, rather than legal, grounds.
The issue of necessity is itself quite interesting, since it will become necessary to determine what kinds of activities and beings would be considered in an anthropocentric approach to ecocide. If we consider the killing of non-human animals to be a significant factor in ecocide, then where would this leave the 92+ billion land animals bred and slaughtered each year in global food systems? Or the trillions of aquatic animals who face similar fates? The vast majority of these animals are fed to populations in which a reliance on animal-based foods is no longer a ‘necessity,’ and the environmental and climatic impact of these systems are catastrophic. Are government subsidies for animal agriculture (including in places like the Amazon) identifiable as an endorsement of ecocide?
Ethics, Morality, and Care
Deconstructing personal behaviours like diet and consumption can be incredibly tricky for many people, and most might prefer to remain at least somewhat ignorant to the true ‘costs’ of the products we consume (and financially endorse). But once we come face-to-face with these realities in an earnest and open-hearted way, and allow ourselves to see the ‘others’ (human and non-human) who are exploited and harmed by our behaviours, many find themselves forced to enter into a more serious moral negotiation.
The harms associated with ecocide are not restricted to future or distant human societies. Many are wholly immediate, profoundly dire, and truly catastrophic in their scope. Deforestation doesn’t just cause harm by depleting human resources or travel destinations. The very act of bulldozing a forest causes harm by killing countless living beings, destroying habitats, and annihilating entire ecological collectives teeming with sensitive life. Water pollution, desertification, deforestation, mining, etc. are not crimes against some amorphous and inert ‘environment’ of resources - they are crimes against living beings, seen and unseen, whose lives have value beyond their utility. It is not merely a matter of social morals - it is a matter of ethics, rationally grounded in an acknowledgment of the causation of suffering.
Our ability to grapple with these more-than-human ethical dimensions of ecocide is profoundly important. If we believe that non-human beings lack any intrinsic value, then we will find no shortage of moral arguments and clever innovations to justify our exploitation of them. If trees are only important because they sequester carbon and produce oxygen, then some tech ‘philanthropist’ can just invent a machine to turn carbon into oxygen and bam - problem solved. If animal agriculture is only ‘wrong’ because of methane emissions and the destruction of natural ‘environments,’ then we can simply offset our dietary choices with some token donations to rewilding projects so that future humans can still have wilderness for their holidays. In this light, our primary concern with ‘sustainability’ should raise some serious red flags. What is it that we’re actually trying to sustain? The answer is exploitation.
This is why, in my view, the effective mitigation of ecocide depends upon our capacity to think animistically - to expand our sphere of moral concern to include not only all humans, but indeed all forms of life. This cannot be generalised as some kind of abstract concern for ‘biodiversity’ (which also often centres around human welfare). It needs to be specific. We need to empathically care about rhinoceroses and cows, and about oak trees and rivers and jungles and orchids. We need to find ways to remind ourselves that we are in relationship with these beings, and to establish a sense of moral and social obligation to safeguard their welfare alongside our own. This simply cannot be effectively done on an anthropocentric basis. We need to care. We need animism.
For more on the topics of ethics, morality, and care, check out my recent appearance on the Be Mythical podcast: