Whose Roads These Are…?

#newspaperinlearning #animalstudies #sentientbeings

#literaryanimalstudies #habitatstudies

13th November 2023

This particular news report in The Times of India, Chennai Edition dated 11th November 2023, caught my attention for the simple reason that, I personally found the headline quite reductive! 

‘Ambattur residents say stray cows make their roads unsafe!’

Although the headline foregrounds an issue per se, the headline suffers from acute apathy, by othering the ‘sentient beings’ that co-inhabit the region along with us!

Reductive headlines such as these, engender the process of othering, wherein one group (in this case, animals) are conveniently categorised as ‘them’ or ‘theirs’ thereby subtly segregating ‘them’, insulting ‘them’, stigmatising ‘them’, excluding ‘them’, leading to increasing suspicions on ‘them’.

In short, othering focusses primarily on the differences, in order to dismantle and to destroy any connectedness between the two resulting in discrimination and denial of empathy to the group thus ‘othered’.

The mentality of pronouncing ‘their road’, signals a deep disconnect between the Human and the nonhuman, and therefore could sound ridiculous and  blasphemous as well, by all means, according to Bioregional thinkers.

In this regard, yet another redeeming article by historian and environmentalist Nanditha Krishna in the editorial page of the New Indian Express, Chennai Edition, dated 12th November 2023, proves an invaluable resource that calls for a more empathetic treatment of animals who coinhabit the bioregion along with humans.

The article is titled, “THE PLANET BELONGS TO ANIMALS TOO”.

Reproducing a few paragraphs from her article for our perusal –

Animals share the earth with humans, but in a mad desire to acquire more land for agriculture, industry and cities, people want to kill off other inhabitants of our planet. 

When a minister’s relative’s plantation is visited by an elephant or used for a nap by a tiger, the politician demands the immediate destruction of the animal. Every day we read of people and politicians abusing animals.

says Nanditha Krishna.

It would be apt here, to describe a bioregional sci-fi novel titled, Always Coming Home by American writer Ursula K. Le Guin, published in the year 1985, from The Bioregional Imagination, Edited by Tom Lynch, Cheryll Glotfelty et al.

Here goes the story of Always Coming Home –

This story takes place not far away (California) but rather in a far- distant future. Large nation-states and industrial economies are long gone, replaced by social decentralization that resonates with bioregional ideals –

“the very loose, light, soft network of the human cultures, which in their small- scale, great number, and endless diversity, manufactured and traded more or less actively, but never centralized their industry, did not ship goods and parts far, did not maintain roads well, and were not engaged in enterprises requiring heroic sacrifice, at least on the material plane”.

The book centres on the Kesh, a community that exhibits many of the anarchist philosophy and values seen in The Dispossessed, such as communism of production and distribution, absence of social hierarchy, and communitarianism.

Unlike the Anarresti, however, the Kesh display a deep sense of place and bioregional consciousness.

The protagonist, Stone Telling, recalls that as she left her home valley of Na,

“I began to feel the Valley behind me like a body, my own body. My feet were the sea- channels of the River, the organs and passages of my body were the places and streams and my bones the rocks and my head was the Mountain”.

Animals are considered part of one’s family, and there is a type of communion, even communication, with rivers and rocks. Reality is characterized by dynamic interrelatedness –

“It was the network, field, and lines of the energies of all the beings, stars and galaxies of stars, worlds, animals, minds, nerves, dust, the lace and foam of vibration that is being itself, all interconnected”.

Le Guin conveys an ecological holarchy in which things are both a system with subsystems as well as a subsystem of larger systems –

“. . . every part part of another part and the whole part of each part, so comprehensible to itself only as a whole, boundless and unclosed”.

The interconnection of humans and the more- than- human world is repeatedly emphasized –

“Thinking human people and other animals, the plants, the rocks and stars, all the beings that think or are thought, that are seen or see, that hold or are held, all of us are beings of the Nine Houses of Being, dancing the same dance.”

How beautiful the ideal, ain’t it?

How far more ecstatic it would be, if the ideal were to become the real?

Habitat Studies has a solution for this human vs nonhuman divide, by emphasising on the importance of each student –

‘becoming a scribe for a local species of plant or animal, researching its presence in literature, reading scientific studies of it, encountering it in the field, discovering its contemporary and historical uses, learning its names in different languages, and writing about it. In time, students “become” their species and learn to perceive the world from the standpoint of that plant or animal’. [from The Bioregional Imagination]

So yes! What we need is simply this - 

Let us together strive to incorporate a bioregional pedagogy as part of our educational strategies, for promoting a more empathetic attitude to the millions of species on this planet, that co-inhabit and dwell, along with us. 

The need of the hour is to celebrate empathetic treatment, compassionate conservation, respectful coexistence and entangled empathy with the non-human!

I would like to sign off with the endearing words of the legendary Dutch primatologist and ethologist Frans de Waal –

‘‘If part of the other resides within us, if we feel one with the other, then improving their life automatically resonates with us”. 💚