VIII

Contents

Becoming intimate with the wild

A man sits on a fallen tree covered in mushrooms in a dark forest; a wolf watches him from the central shadows.

There is a necessary premise to the conversation we are about to have on the position of human beings in the universe. That premise starts by asking who, historically, has been allowed to count as human and who has considered themselves to be at the centre. We know that the historically specific Western bourgeois figure of Man came to overrepresent itself as human, and that colonial and racial orders created hierarchies among humans, and between humans and non-humans, in relation to that figure. The history of anthropocentrism is therefore one that first needs to be decolonised, not with the intention of returning to a romantic pre-colonial origin, but to avoid reproducing its mistakes and horrors.

Calling into question the idea that humans have a central place in the universe is not a project of reducing their dignity, agency, or meaningfulness. In fact, dislodging the presumption of human sovereignty increases the possibility of attunement to life itself, deepening our intimate connection with the natural world and allowing us to re-enter it. Not because we ever physically left it, but because we had learned to place ourselves ontologically, emotionally, and cognitively outside it, becoming its masters and consumers.

Decolonising our relationships to heal them of extraction, dehumanisation, and violence will not, by itself, demand the abdication of humanity’s self-assigned primacy over nature. A commons can still be anthropocentric: it can transform who among humans is able to use and benefit from the world without questioning the deeper presumption that the world is there for human use and benefit. That's why we need to enter the wild.

The survival of the concept of humans as beings outside nature, even in socially just spaces, does not come as a surprise. It need not depend on a conscious desire to subjugate nature. It can persist through forms of everyday life in which ecological processes and dependencies are heavily mediated and often hidden from ordinary view. Water arrives through a tap, food through a supermarket, waste disappears through pipes and trucks, and energy through a socket: the infrastructures that sustain us can background our belonging to and dependence on the natural world, making them disappear from view, while instrumentalisation encounters non-human beings primarily through the purposes they serve for us.

Drawing value from the natural world to meet human needs is not in itself a problem. Humans have long hunted deer for food, drunk from springs for water, and burned wood for warmth. We are still doing this; food, water, and warmth are simply separated by many more steps from the deer, the spring, and the wood from which they ultimately come. The problem arises when something is given value only as a function of its usability to us. Then the distortion becomes: a deer has value only as flesh, a tree as paper, a mountain as quarry.

One way of interrupting this reduction is to change the purpose of the encounter itself. A mountain can be approached as a summit to conquer, stone to extract, scenery to consume, or terrain to cross. But it can also be returned to, walked within, slept on, felt through weather, water, rock, fatigue, orientation, fear, and familiarity—becoming more rather than less inexhaustible as we know it better. Intimacy begins to replace mastery when arriving, extracting, or achieving stops being the measure of the encounter.

If value is not exhausted by usefulness, then what matters to us in its own right: sentient animals, all living beings, rivers, mountains, whole species, ecosystems, or ecological wholes? Some have suggested that humans should extend moral consideration outwards according to qualities we recognise in ourselves: the capacity to suffer, to feel, to think, to communicate, or to act intentionally. So, for instance, animals we recognise as capable of suffering may be protected from unnecessary harm, while much less consideration is extended to the annoying mosquito, or to the weed in the garden. This can radically widen the circle of moral concern while still leaving the human quietly at its centre, because other beings acquire significance according to how closely they resemble capacities we have privileged in ourselves. If the human is not the measure, resemblance to the human cannot be the only measure of what matters.

Other intellectual traditions begin elsewhere. In the Anishnaabe and Haudenosaunee traditions discussed by Watts, place is not an inert setting to which humans subsequently give meaning: land and thought are not first separate, and agency is not exclusively human. A river, mountain, animal, plant, or landscape therefore does not first have to resemble a human or another sentient animal before entering the field of relation. Such places and beings can shape the lives of communities across generations and even millennia—orienting movement, memory, subsistence, story, obligation, and identity for far longer than any single person can. Seen from within such relations, it becomes easier to understand why some traditions encounter particular rivers, forests, mountains, or waters not merely as resources or scenery, but as persons, spirits, ancestors, or divinities. If I recognise moral value in someone who crosses paths with me once, why wouldn’t I do the same for the tree that crosses paths with me every morning?

Taking such relations seriously also asks us to experiment with new ways of being in relationship with the wild. A mountain can become an earth-being, a waterfall a divinity speaking through laughter, and mushrooms older brothers that facilitated life. Different worlds can remain different and stay alive and in relation across different ways of being present to them.

The field of relation is not one-way: we are not the gardeners of heaven. Ecological interdependence does not wait for our care in order to exist; the ethical question is how we inhabit the relations that already sustain us. Contemporary Yorùbá environmental philosophy describes reciprocal care through mutual courteousness: humans sustain, constrain, affect, and sometimes overwhelm waters, soils, plants, animals, and places that sustain, constrain, affect, and sometimes overwhelm them.

Here, the wild does not mean a pristine nature from which humans are absent. That fantasy can reproduce the very separation we are trying to leave behind: humans here, wilderness elsewhere. The wild names instead what remains capable of exceeding human design, interpretation, and control. It can be present in a forest, a garden, a city, another animal, a human body, or a river running through concrete. Participation need not mean leaving the world untouched: cultivating, harvesting, restoring, tending, and protecting can belong to intimate relation when our actions remain responsive to what a place and its beings allow. What makes it wild is not that we have never touched it, but that our touch does not exhaust what it can become.

In the relational reciprocity of the cosmos, other beings and systems remain other to us. The existence and meaning of a forest, an animal, a river, or a mountain exceed the ways through which humans encounter them; their existence is never exhausted by their relation to us. To leave the human centre is to come into intimacy with the wild, the uncontrolled, the unmanicured: with the recognition that life does not need us to define itself, even as it can stand in definitional relation with us.

Perhaps one of the deepest affronts to human arrogance is the intimate realisation that we are edible. We encounter the food web from the position of the eater, but the wild does not recognise the exemption we grant ourselves. Under different conditions, our eating body will itself become food.

Living in intimacy with the wild also means accepting the cycles of life and death in which we participate. Life feeds on life; bodies age, suffer, are injured, decay, and die, while fungi, microorganisms, plants, and other beings turn what has died into conditions for life again. Predation, killing, decomposition, and regeneration are part of ecological interdependence. They need to be acknowledged not to find a romantic justification of violence as “natural,” but for precisely the opposite reason: to resist the fantasy that being in ethical relation with the whole means inhabiting a universe without harm and suffering. Death is not an error outside the processes of life; it participates in the transformations through which living systems continually become otherwise. The question as we enter the wild is not how we conquer death, but how we avoid unnecessarily amplifying suffering across the ecology while accepting our participation in relations that inevitably involve consumption, loss, and death. The wild is not good or gentle; it is chaotic, true, and alive, including in its relationship with death.

READ / ENCOUNTERCanticle of the CreaturesFrancis of Assisi

Around 1225, Francis of Assisi composed The Canticle of the Creatures in the Umbrian vernacular, praising God through a world addressed as kin: Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Brother Wind, Sister Water, Brother Fire, and Mother Earth. Near the end, as Francis approached his own death, the poem adds Sister Bodily Death to that family of creatures.

Hover for English translation.

Praised be you, my Lord, through our sister Bodily Death,
from whom no living human can escape.
Woe to those who die in mortal sin;
blessed are those whom she finds within your most holy will,
for the second death will do them no harm.

Intimacy makes loss felt. The disappearance of a species, the clearing of a forest, or the silencing of an animal once familiar to a place is the end of a relation. Grief can belong to ecological intimacy with the wild: not because the beings we grieve belonged to us, but because relation makes us vulnerable to and within their disappearance.

Intimacy with the wild requires attention. To encounter the wild is difficult if everything that appears before us is immediately managed or translated into our plans, fears, projections, and desires. Contemplative attention slows the pace of interpretation: something outside us becomes sufficiently present that, for a moment, we become more present to it than to our own preoccupations. Relational attention allows us to learn through the differences and mysteries we encounter in the wild.

That intimacy is not exhausted by knowing the wild; it is also an act of unknowing it: relinquishing the expectation that the reality we encounter there, including ourselves, can be possessed through concepts and categories. Much of our waking life is already spent naming, analysing, interpreting, calculating, comparing, and organising a world increasingly manicured for human purposes. We do not need to enter the wild simply to acquire more knowledge. We remain in relation with what, in the deep wild, exceeds our capacity to comprehend fully because we are no longer seeking mastery or conceptual ownership. As we enter the wild, literally and metaphorically, we loosen the expectation that cognitive knowing can exhaust what we encounter and remain open to emergent relational wisdom.

As we enter the wild with attention and grow intimate with it, the wild enters us and passes through us. Our bodies grow, desire, heal, age, become ill, reproduce, transform, and die through processes that are never entirely ours to command. Emotions, dreams, intuitions, impulses, and relationships also move through us beyond the reach of rational control alone. To become intimate with the wild is then to become intimate with the uncontrollable, the unmanicurable, the ungardenable: the dark force of life itself moving through the chaos of existence.

In conversation with

Coloniality of the human

Sylvia Wynter — Man / overrepresentation of the humanReadClose

Wynter, S. (2003). “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257–337. DOI ↗

Wynter traces how historically specific Western conceptions of the human came to be presented as though they described humanity itself. She distinguishes the human species from successive genres of Man produced through European religious, political, colonial and later biocentric orders, and examines how these genres were constituted through racialised distinctions that positioned colonised and enslaved peoples as their subordinated Human Others. Her argument joins colonial power to systems of knowledge and classification, asking how the prevailing definition of the human shapes what appears natural, true and politically possible.

María Lugones — colonial human / non-human hierarchyReadClose

Lugones, M. (2010). “Toward a Decolonial Feminism.” Hypatia, 25(4), 742–759. DOI ↗

Lugones develops a decolonial feminist account of colonial modernity in which race, gender, sexuality, labour, knowledge and relations with the living world are not separate additions to colonial rule but interlocking parts of it. She argues that colonial domination imposed a hierarchical distinction between the fully human and those colonised peoples cast toward animality or non-humanity, while also imposing a modern colonial gender system. The article develops resistance from within the lived, fractured worlds produced by coloniality rather than treating liberation as a return to an untouched pre-colonial origin.

Mastery, hidden dependence, use and moral extension

Val Plumwood — relation without absorptionReadClose

Plumwood, V. (1991). “Nature, Self, and Gender: Feminism, Environmental Philosophy, and the Critique of Rationalism.” Hypatia, 6(1), 3–27. DOI ↗

Plumwood argues that dominant Western rationalism has organised human/nature relations through hierarchical dualisms that identify reason, culture and the dominant self against a subordinated sphere of nature. She criticises both instrumental accounts of nature and ecological theories that try to overcome separation by absorbing the non-human world into an enlarged self. Her alternative is relational without being assimilative: human beings can recognise dependence and connection while still acknowledging the independence and difference of what is related.

Val Plumwood — mastery / backgrounding / instrumentalisationReadClose

Plumwood, V. (1993). Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. Routledge. Source ↗

Plumwood analyses the logic of dualism through which a dominant identity constructs itself against a subordinated and supposedly inferior other. Across human/nature, reason/nature and related hierarchies, she identifies patterns including backgrounding, radical exclusion or hyperseparation, incorporation and instrumentalisation. The book traces these patterns through Western philosophy and develops an ecological feminist critique of mastery that seeks to recognise dependency and relation without collapsing difference or treating the non-human world as material for dominant purposes.

Maria Kaika — hidden ecological dependenceReadClose

Kaika, M. (2004). “Interrogating the Geographies of the Familiar: Domesticating Nature and Constructing the Autonomy of the Modern Home.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 28(2), 265–286. DOI ↗

Kaika examines the modern Western bourgeois home as a space represented as private, safe and autonomous while remaining materially dependent on socio-natural flows. Using the domestication of water as a central case, she traces infrastructures that bring water and energy into domestic life and carry waste away while making many of those material processes difficult to see. The article argues that the apparent separation between home and nature is historically produced through networks that connect them even as those connections are pushed out of ordinary perception.

Peter Singer — sentience / equal considerationReadClose

Singer, P. (1974). “All Animals Are Equal.” Philosophic Exchange, 5(1), Article 6. Source ↗

Singer argues for extending the principle of equal consideration beyond the human species. Equality, in his account, does not require identical treatment or identical rights for beings with different capacities; it requires that comparable interests receive comparable consideration. He rejects species membership by itself as a sufficient reason to discount an animal’s interests and develops the capacity for suffering and enjoyment as the central basis for having interests that must enter moral consideration.

More-than-human worlds and relational knowledge

Vanessa Watts — Place-Thought / more-than-human agencyReadClose

Watts, V. (2013). “Indigenous Place-Thought & Agency Amongst Humans and Non-Humans (First Woman and Sky Woman Go on a European World Tour!).” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 2(1), 20–34. Source ↗

Watts develops Place-Thought through Anishnaabe and Haudenosaunee intellectual and cosmological contexts. She challenges the separation of thought from place and the restriction of agency to human subjects, describing land as active within the creation and maintenance of society rather than an inert setting upon which humans subsequently impose meaning. The article also examines how colonial categories can transform Indigenous accounts of relations among human beings, land, animals, sky and spirit worlds into stories or beliefs detached from the worlds in which those relations operate.

Marisol de la Cadena — earth-beings / partial connectionsReadClose

de la Cadena, M. (2010). “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections beyond ‘Politics’.” Cultural Anthropology, 25(2), 334–370. DOI ↗

De la Cadena examines Andean political practices in which mountains, water and soil enter public action in ways that exceed the modern separation between human politics and a non-political domain called nature. She describes earth-beings and uses the idea of partial connections to analyse alliances in which different worlds can act together without becoming fully commensurable. The article develops a pluriversal account of politics in which an entity can enter political relations without first being translated into either a natural resource or a cultural belief.

Aanuoluwapo Fifebo Sunday — mutual courteousness / more-than-human careReadClose

Sunday, A. F. (2025; first published online 2024). “Addressing More-than-Human Care through Yorùbá Environmental Ethics.” Environmental Values, 34(1), 43–59. DOI ↗

Sunday develops a contemporary account of more-than-human care grounded in Yorùbá ontology, epistemology and axiology, with sustained attention to water and Ọ̀ṣun. She proposes mutual courteousness as a reciprocal account of conservation that does not place humans in the sole position of caring for or managing a passive natural world. The article connects this ethical argument with material and political questions surrounding water, ownership, colonial law, extraction, pollution and conservation in Nigeria.

Nurit Bird-David — relational epistemologyReadClose

Bird-David, N. (1999). “‘Animism’ Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology.” Current Anthropology, 40(S1), S67–S91. DOI ↗

Bird-David re-examines anthropological accounts of animism through ethnographic work with Nayaka people in South India. She argues that earlier theories often treated modern Western distinctions between person and object, nature and supernature, or knowledge and belief as universal starting points. Her alternative account develops relational epistemology: personhood and knowledge can emerge through ongoing relations, sharing, responsiveness and practices that educate attention, rather than by first treating the world as a set of detached objects to which personhood is later attributed.

Wildness, participation and attentive relation

William Cronon — wilderness critique / wildness beyond separationReadClose

Cronon, W. (1995). “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” In Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature; reprinted in Environmental History 1(1), 1996. Source ↗

Cronon traces the cultural history of the American wilderness ideal and argues that treating authentic nature as a pristine realm outside civilisation can reproduce the very human/nature dualism environmentalism seeks to overcome. He examines the erasure of Indigenous histories from supposedly uninhabited wilderness and questions an environmental ethic focused only on remote protected landscapes. The essay instead asks readers to recognise autonomy, otherness and ecological responsibility in ordinary inhabited places as well as in designated wilderness.

Kathleen Dean Moore — wildness in ordinary lifeReadClose

Moore, K. D. (2005). “The Moral Equivalent of Wildness.” The Sun, July 2005; excerpted from The Pine Island Paradox. Source ↗

Moore begins with a wilderness philosophy course and the question of whether experiences associated with wild places can be carried back into ordinary life. The essay then unsettles that premise by asking whether wildness is really confined to remote landscapes at all. She turns attention to night, weather, air, water, bodies and ecological processes within towns and cities, distinguishing legally bounded wilderness from a wildness with no equivalent geographic boundary. The essay also explores silence, listening, mystery and the problem of living by different ecological ethics in places that remain materially connected.

Enrique Salmón — kincentric ecology / situated participationReadClose

Salmón, E. (2000). “Kincentric Ecology: Indigenous Perceptions of the Human–Nature Relationship.” Ecological Applications, 10(5), 1327–1332. DOI ↗

Salmón develops kincentric ecology through Rarámuri understandings of humans as participants in an extended ecological family. He discusses iwígara and ecological relations in which humans, plants, animals, weather and land affect and are affected by one another. The article also describes practical forms of participation—including harvesting, cultivation, burning, pruning, transplanting and tending—whose appropriateness depends on familiarity with particular places, species and regenerative capacities rather than on the absence of human intervention.

Deborah Bird Rose — attentive interaction / incomplete knowledgeReadClose

Rose, D. B. (2013). “Val Plumwood’s Philosophical Animism: Attentive Interactions in the Sentient World.” Environmental Humanities, 3(1), 93–109. DOI ↗

Rose develops Val Plumwood’s late idea of philosophical animism as a mode of encounter rather than an attempt to imitate or appropriate Indigenous animisms. The article centres on attentive interaction, active listening, situated knowledge and gratitude in a world where living beings attend and respond to one another. Drawing on Australian Aboriginal country and ecological examples, Rose describes knowledge as participatory and incomplete, including predator/prey relations in which humans are participants rather than external observers.

Iris Murdoch — attention / unselfingReadClose

Murdoch, Iris. 1970. The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Relevant essay: “The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts.” Source ↗

Murdoch’s essays examine moral perception, attention, freedom, fantasy, and the relation between the self and a reality that exceeds its wishes. In “The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts,” she describes unselfing as a movement of attention away from self-preoccupied fantasy toward something real and independent of the observer. Her well-known kestrel example presents an encounter with natural beauty as one possible occasion for that shift in attention; it is not a claim that nature reliably produces moral improvement.

Linda Hogan — multispecies relation / loss / restorationReadClose

Hogan, Linda. 2011. “The Healing of Wild Horses: Our Truths Come From Tenure on This Land.” YES! Magazine, 9 March 2011. Source ↗

Hogan moves among ceremony, animal relations, Chickasaw history, colonial displacement, wild horses, disappearing species, damaged land, and ecological restoration. Relations with animals are embedded in histories of Indigenous dispossession and survival rather than presented as detached encounters with “nature.” The essay also attends to distinct animal intelligence, nonverbal communication, knowledge accumulated through long tenure and observation, and restoration as an active re-entry into relations among land, water, plants, animals, and people.

Edibility, death and ecological participation

Val Plumwood — edibility / prey perspectiveReadClose

Plumwood, V. (2012). The Eye of the Crocodile. Edited by Lorraine Shannon. ANU Press. Source ↗

This posthumously published collection brings together Plumwood’s writing on death, predation, animals and human exceptionalism. In the opening chapters she reflects on surviving a crocodile attack and develops the prey perspective: the recognition that humans are not only eaters but edible animals within ecological food relations. She uses this encounter to challenge cultural narratives that place the rational human outside ordinary animal vulnerability while also refusing to make predation a simple moral model for human conduct.

Val Plumwood — food / death / ecological participationReadClose

Plumwood, V. (2008). “Tasteless: Towards a Food-Based Approach to Death.” Environmental Values, 17(3), 323–330. DOI ↗

Plumwood argues that dominant Western approaches to death often preserve human exceptionalism by imagining the human self outside the ecological circulation of food. Drawing on her own encounters with death, she develops a food-based account in which human bodies are material participants in ecological relations and can nourish other life after death. The article explores reciprocity in the earth community while resisting accounts that treat human death as either pure spiritual escape from materiality or merely the meaningless termination of an isolated organism.

Artistic and experiential encounters

Francis of Assisi — creaturely kinship / bodily deathReadClose

Francis of Assisi. c. 1225. Canticle of the Creatures. Authoritative Franciscan source and translation context: Franciscan Media. Source ↗

Francis’s poem addresses sun, moon, wind, water, fire, earth and bodily death through kin language—Brother Sun, Sister Water, Sister Mother Earth, Sister Bodily Death—within an explicitly Christian act of praise directed to God. The creatures are neither independent deities nor secular symbols of ecological unity; their kinship belongs to a Creator–creation theology of praise, humility and creaturely mortality.

Bernie Krause + United Visual Artists — multispecies soundscape / listeningReadClose

Bernie Krause + United Visual Artists. 2016. The Great Animal Orchestra [audiovisual installation]. Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. Source ↗

This audiovisual installation combines Bernie Krause’s recordings of terrestrial and marine soundscapes with a visual translation created by United Visual Artists. The work presents recordings from ecologically diverse habitats as spatialised sound and light, making patterns of animal vocalisation perceptible while also documenting environments increasingly altered or silenced by human activity.

Véréna Paravel + Lucien Castaing-Taylor — decentered sensory perspectiveReadClose

Véréna Paravel & Lucien Castaing-Taylor. 2012. Leviathan [film]. Source ↗

Filmed aboard a commercial fishing vessel off the New England coast, Leviathan uses small cameras attached to bodies, decks, equipment and other moving positions to record work at sea from unstable and shifting perspectives. Fishermen, fish, birds, machinery, weather and water enter the film without a conventional explanatory narrator, producing a sensory documentary of commercial fishing, labour and the marine environment.

Maya Lin — extinction / ecological memoryReadClose

Maya Lin. 2009–ongoing. What Is Missing? [multi-sited memorial / media project]. Source ↗

Maya Lin’s multi-sited memorial uses maps, videos, ecological histories, scientific information and personal memories to document species and habitat loss while also recording restoration, recovery and possible future action. The project describes itself as a memorial to the planet and organises material around memory, ecological change and responses to biodiversity loss.