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• 1 2018-10-17T05:07:23-07:00 Recognising injustice in the Anthropocene 4 Amy Huang plain 2018-10-17T06:03:48-07:00 Throughout this book, a theme that crosses all worlds is a lamentation of the injustices that human activity has inflicted on the rest of the Earth. Part of the character of the anthropocene is that the manipulation of geology and ecosystems to work for humanity has come at the expense of the wellbeing of other aspects of nature.
  
  In their quoting of Martin Luther King Jr, the plant world opens up a dialogue surrounding justice and injustice for the natural world, in which humans must participate. I especially found their development of the concept of 'plant blindness' in ‘Plant Blindness A short Film’ insightful because it exposed the constructed hierarchical relations that dominate human understanding. Immediately, I recall the ethical transgressions explored in the Animal Worlds: Photo Essay, as well as the violent imagery of demolition and construction in the close reading of Robert Frost's, ‘A brook in the city’.

  Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

  - Martin Luther King Jr
  
  What is exposed by these fragments of exploitation and violence against non-human bodies, whether they be geological, biological, atmospheric or botanical, is a more deeply ingrained, problematic attitude of anthropocentrism or human exceptionalism, which touches every micro-landscape. It is this attitude which creates power relations where humanity strives for mastery of all. Ecocritic Val Plumwood shares that this egotistical Western notion of a Cartesian self is central to creating divides between human and non-human. This binary separation becomes the justification for the possession and mistreatment of others. The perpetuation of an artificial dichotomy of human/nature thus permits injustices against the non-human world to continue.
  
  
  References:
  
  Plumwood, Val 2001, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason, Abingdon: Routledge.
• 1 media/2017-12-21-16-54-52-1200x800.jpg 2018-08-29T14:38:11-07:00 Plant Blindness a short film 3 By Stephanie Lim (z5113551) and Cale Leishman (​z5075676) plain 2018-08-29T14:45:33-07:00
  By Stephanie Lim (z5113551) and Cale Leishman (​z5075676)