This page is referenced by:

• 1 media/Gorilla kelly sikkema.jpg 2018-08-30T07:00:45-07:00 Animal Worlds: Short film 4 The Diary of Lola plain 2018-08-30T13:15:50-07:00

  The human is but a momentary blip in a history and cosmology that remains fundamentally indifferent to this temporary eruption. What kind of new understanding of the humanities would it take to adequately map this decentering that places man back with the animal, within nature, and within a space and time that man does not regulate, understand or control?

  - Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections (2011)
  
• 1 2018-10-17T12:10:58-07:00 Ecological justice: The 'Natural Contract' 4 Amy Huang plain 2018-10-17T23:12:24-07:00 In reflecting on the different ways in which our ‘Worlds’ have responded to the injustices and wrongdoings that humans have perpetrated on the earth, one thing is supremely apparent: humanity is faced with a new ethical imperative to enact justice in relation to the environment. Our examination of connections, flat ontology, ecodiegesis and agency all demand that we give attention and love to all the different worlds that intersect to make Earth. In saying this, I acknowledge the risk of circling back into paternalistic human-centric systems of justice.
  
  However, I draw on the work of Michel Serres, who proposes that the ‘social contract’ which commands our human interpersonal relations must be extended to encompass the world, in a ‘natural contract’. Those duties or responsibilities of care that humans share between one another should be advanced to non-humans as a simple recognition of and appreciation of another’s existence.
  
  As the Plant World shared, towards others, humans must see:

  their significance simply because of their existence amongst us

  
  Serres political philosophy draws heavily on ecological thinking, critiquing how humanity has removed ourselves from the system of nature by mastering and possessing the world. The result is that human laws and ethical obligations undermine humanity’s true relationship with the world – of co-dependency, like a single cell.
  
  As Insect worlds quipped, ‘find me one who weeps over a dead mosquito’. But, perhaps the message of our living book is to demand that humans see other lives, the life of the Earth, as grievable, based on a recognition of our commonalities, as well as respect for each other’s unique agency. As the closing lines of Lola’s Diary states: ‘Together, this is our world’.
  
  References: 
  
  Serres, Michel 1995, The Natural Contract, trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press.