in defense of the more than human (and all that we learn from them)

 

David Abram coined the term "more-than-human” in the late 1990s to “to indicate…that the human world is necessarily embedded within, permeated by, and indeed dependent upon the more-than-human world that exceeds it. With this framing, the rich and complex world beyond “the human” is uplifted and given further agency. In shifting how we view our fellow inhabitants of the earth, there is hope to encourage humility and create deeper awareness for the web of life on earth. Humans have created cascading and  immeasurable damages to the earth through processes of industrialization. The San Francisco bayfront is one of the many landscapes that has been exploited, extracted, and adulterated in the name of human production and capital development. The overdeveloped and extracted landscapes of industry were created with hubris. Many would call our current era, shaped by human-caused environmental damages “The Anthropocene.” Abram critiques this term, claiming that it “asserts humankind as the preeminent power afoot in the world". He offers a new framing, to propose a new perspective where our species takes responsibility for the conditions of our planet, decenters ourselves, and turns towards humility. He proposes the phrase The Humiliocene, the age of Humility, as a way to ground us back to the earth. The root of humility is humus – dark, organic material that forms in soil when plant and animal matter decays – after all. 

In moving towards the more than human as a framework of viewing the world, we are given the opportunity to expand our humility. We see that we are deeply entangled to this complex web of life that is formed around us.

There is significant literature from Harraway, Latour, and Tsing that discusses the phenomenon of “produced nature” as hybrid or cyborg landscapes. Hybrid landscapes are the products of nature-society inter-relationships that continually re-make land; they are not static but are instead fluid, complex and highly fluctuating. Hybrid landscapes acknowledge that the human and the environment are intrinsically connected. These landscapes can create new relationships between infrastructure design, connection to biotic and abiotic systems, and dynamic interactions between living and non-living things.

    In the interdisciplinary collaboration The Art of Living on a Damaged Planet, the authors describe the lingering effects of past decisions of development, and the opportunities for interspecies entanglements. Donna Harraway explains the interrelation of humans and more-than-humans as “...a vital entanglement of heterogeneous scales, times, and kinds of beings webbed into fleshly presence, always a becoming, always constituted in relating.” She rejects the idea of humans as separate, autonomous individuals, arguing instead that we are always "becoming-with" others in a "material-semiotic weave.” Investigating our entanglements of the creatures around allows for the deeper acknowledgement of the agency of the more-than-human. We can investigate how we are becoming-with our more-than-human neighbors of the post-industrial landscape. The entangled process of urban bayfront industrialization has been built upon larger social, political, and economic forces that have directly impacted the coastline ecologically. The post-industrial landscapes of the bay are built landscapes “consisting of assemblages of inseparable social processes and material forms of nature.” In this landscape, there is an opportunity to design specifically with the entangled human and more than human relationships in mind. In past and current port governance, the flexibility of the human-ecological relationship of the port has not been accounted for.