Being nature: interspecies articulation as a species-specific practice of relating to environment

Abstract

Rather than categorically teaching us ways to be less anthropocentric, environmental education could be about educating us of the ways in which we already are nature as human animals. In this paper, one species-specific practice of human relating to environment – interspecies articulation – is argued as one way of being nature. Interspecies articulation is about finding and composing connections to our surrounding nonhuman world with a focus on as if the joints comprising meaningful connections between us and the not us. The interest is in how humans and nonhuman animals continually create the conditions for each other's existence. The data of the Rautio's recent study on perceived beauty in everyday life environments speak for a need to decentralize the human agent as the sole author of his/her self-environment relation. A crucial aspect of the ‘making' of this relation through articulation was found to be a fundamental openness to the serendipitous agency of one's material surroundings – human as well as nonhuman and also inanimate.

Keywords:

• language
• articulation
• self-environment relation
• anthropocentrism
• interspecies articulation

Notes

1. While the notion ‘aesthetic’ is not limited to esthetically pleasing, but a negative esthetics is also possible (see e.g. Berleant 2011), the focus of the mentioned study was solely on positive aesthetics as the broader research objectives were to challenge the prevailing discourse of the rural Finnish north as bleak and unwell (see Rautio 2010a, b).

2. All quotes from research data in this paper are from the letters by the four participants, introduced in detail elsewhere (e.g. Rautio 2010a, b).

3. Having said this, I do wish to stress that we need not fall into the opposite trap: the Rousseauian idea of authentic and pure, noble children who are corrupted through being educated.