COHABITING EARTH

Seeking a bright future for all life

Edited by Joe Gray and Eileen Crist

SUNY Press, 2024, 318 pages

Hardback £71 | ISBN 9781438499970

Review by Janet Mackinnon

As a fairly traditional environmentalist primarily motivated by nature conservation and ecosystem restoration, I’d been seeking a book which considered these subjects from a range of perspectives and brought in some fresh thinking. Although BANC trustee Simon Leadbeater is among the contributors to Cohabiting Earth, this had not registered with me until longtime ECOS editor Rick Minter drew it to my attention, and we all agreed a review would be in order. It is worth noting, however, that it was an article by Eileen Crist on the Counterpunch website entitled ‘Tales from the Sargasso Sea’ that initially led me to the imminent publication of Cohabiting Earth. I then became aware that Crist is Associate Editor of The Ecological Citizen (to which Simon is again a contributor) and it was this link which further galvanised my interest. Another motivation was a desire to better understand current North American thinking on environmental and conservation themes in a year which has now seen Donald Trump re-elected as US president. This new book is a heart-felt and thought-provoking advocacy for an ecocentric worldview. Its key messages support the views of leading nature restorationist and founder of Trees for Life Alan Watson Featherstone as put forward in a recent interview for ECOS.

The sub-title of Cohabiting Earth is ‘Seeking a Bright Future for All Life’ and its central mission, according to US publisher Suny Press, is creating a “path of harmony between humanity and Earth by presenting a vision that is comprehensive in scope and offering a positive new identity for humanity.” I would therefore describe this as a work grounded in environmental and eco-philosophy which applies some paradigmatic shifts to diverse contexts, including nature conservation, rewilding and restoration. In this endeavour, the book’s foreword maintains it avoids “eco-apocalypse” narratives, on the one hand, and “nature panegyric” on the other. An example of the latter might perhaps be US author Julia Morley’s Future Sacred: The Connected Creativity of Nature. I mention this because Morley’s book has been positively received by compassionate conservationist Marc Bekoff and I reviewed it for the Alister Hardy Trust’s journal De Numine in 2019. Hardy was an acclaimed mid-20th century marine biologist whose later career focussed on the study of religions. In reviewing Cohabiting Earth I am, therefore, going to keep nature religion(s) and eco-apocalypse(s) in mind as the pragmatic John Gray is the only philosopher regularly ‘encountered’ during conversation in my locale.1 Bekoff, incidentally, recently conducted a highly informative interview with the present book’s editors on ‘Maintaining Optimism via Global Rewilding.’

Joint editor Eileen Crist (Associate Professor Emerita Virginia Tech) has an academic background in sociology (as does Simon Leadbeater) combined with a sustained record of well-informed writing on the environment. Her collaborator, UK-based writer Joe Gray, studied zoology and forestry, and now describes himself as ‘a nature lover, an amateur field naturalist, and a conservationist’ (again sharing common purpose with Simon). Mention should also be made to The Ecological Citizen’s intellectually formidable Editor-in-Chief Patrick Curry who writes of ‘Enchantment, Modernity and Reverence for Nature’ in Cohabiting Earth. The new book to some extent serves as a riposte to the 2009 Dark Mountain Manifesto, Uncivilization, and its legacy, both reviewed by Curry in a 2024 essay entitled ‘Light on the Dark Mountain.’ 2 Curry’s main criticism of what, with hindsight, might be viewed as a 21st century environmental movement – to which Extinction Rebellion, School Strike for Climate, Just Stop Oil etc arguably too belong – is ‘the lack of an overtly ecocentric dimension.’ However, it must be noted that ‘ecocentrism’ – denoting ‘a nature-centred, as opposed to human-centred (i.e., anthropocentric), system of values’ is a concept long contested both by its many opponents and among its diverse adherents.

In some important respects, the development of natural history (or nature education) and outdoor recreation share trajectories, synergies and tensions relevant to ecocentric vs anthropocentric discourses. This theme is pursued in an issue of The Ecological Citizen with a partial focus on natural history, and in a chapter of Cohabiting Earth entitled ‘Respecting Non-Human Life: The Guide for a Better Pathway in Outdoor Recreation’ by Joe Gray and Ian Whyte (a Canadian field naturalist). In ‘The enduring and elemental importance of natural history,’ US conservation biologist Thomas Lowe Fleischner passionately makes the scientific and more holistic case for this discipline in an era when its dedicated practitioners have declined.3 However, even something as demonstrably worthwhile as formal nature studies for secondary school pupils in England – the proposed Natural History GCSE – has seemingly met with an ‘official block’ from the new Labour UK government, apparently because of its connection with the previous Conservative administration.4 More traditionally (or in my school days), skills for outdoor recreation were often taught alongside knowledge of the environment and countryside together with respect for nature. Unfortunately, due to a range of factors, this may no longer be the case for many young people; although there are some excellent initiatives attempting to tackle the ‘nature deficits’ of mainstream education.

The chapters of Cohabiting Earth are in three sections: ‘Restraint’; ‘Respect’; and ‘Reverence’. It may have been preferable to have started with reverence and progressed through respect to restraint, but I’m going to leave that judgement to other readers. In my experience, the former attributes are vital if people at the societal level and individually are to engage in restraint around the exploitation and consumption of natural resources, together with the reduction of waste materials. However, as restraint is something of a loaded word – particularly when discussing human population ‘management’- perhaps ‘Responsibility’ would have been a better section heading. State-led family planning and ‘birth control’ have become increasingly contentious issues beyond and within the environmental movement. Similarly, although the retro-futurism of former US Arch-Druid Report author John Michael Greer’s chapter on ‘Technologies Fit for an Ecological Future’ in parts appeals to me, I cannot imagine their full adoption by the broad church of ordinary Trump voters, or the elite ‘church of techno-optimism’ espoused by the likes or Elon Musk and fellow global plutocrats.5 Nevertheless, the present volume makes a good case for an ‘Ecological Citizenship’ movement, but perhaps more strongly engaged with ‘intersectional environmentalism.’

Given the above reservations about ‘Restraint’ – and despite being a supporter of this in practice – I’m going to focus now on the ‘Respect’ and ‘Reverence’ sections of Co-habiting Earth, but in reverse order. Patrick Curry’s chapter (13) on ‘the more-than-human natural world’ (an expression originated by the American eco-philosopher David Abram) is in my view one of its keynote contributions. Abram offers an introduction to this concept in another recent publication from the New York University-based ‘More than Human Rights (MOTH) Project’.6 The Rights of Nature movement appears to be gathering momentum around the world, taking on a wide variety of forms and suggesting that ‘Rights’ might be added to the other Cohabiting Earth key ‘R’ words.7 Returning to Curry’s chapter on ‘Enchantment, Modernity and Reverence for Nature,’ he refers to the late Australian Val Plumwood’s worldview (in Feminism and the Mastery of Nature) which ascribes “rational mastery of nature, including human nature, by certain humans, paradigmatically male’ as the ‘defining project of modernity.” Whilst Curry strongly caveats any support for ‘Eco-feminism’ – his extensive scholarship on J R R Tolkien implies a certain radical traditionalism – the definition provides an insightful juxtaposition with ‘Enchantment’ of the kind found in Tolkien and, indeed, C S Lewis: and this, he argues, is essential to understanding ‘the more-than-human natural world.’

Cohabiting Earth’s subsequent chapter (15) on ‘Rediscovering Tree Sentience and Our Reverence for Life’ co-authored by Simon Leadbeater and Helen Kopnina, continues the section theme but also clearly integrates ‘Respect’ and ‘Restraint’ with spiritual vision. The authors begin by tracing the very long – and indeed wide ranging and cross-cultural – history of belief in sacred plant consciousness, before ‘Scoping the Scale of Loss’ of the world’s forests, particularly since 1900.8 While emphasizing that “felling remains the main threat,” the chapter acknowledges that “changes in the climate’ may ‘become the primary peril,” citing the 2021 “apocalyptic vista” of wildfires in Russia, North America and Australia. Alongside interventions to tackle clear-cut felling and fires, the protection of old-growth forests is highlighted with reference to, among others, the work of renowned conservationist Dr Jane Goodall. Like Simon, the venerable Dame Jane is a vegan and strongly advocates a ‘mostly plant-based diet’ for ethical and environmental reasons: largescale intensive animal farming is generally viewed as one of the major global contributors to biodiversity loss, including forest destruction, and the production of greenhouse gases linked to climate change. It seems to me this world-famous primatologist embodies the spirit of Cohabiting Earth as she enters her 10th decade.

Jane Goodall remains best known for her African fieldwork with chimpanzees, and I want to turn now to a chapter (8) in ‘Respect’ written by Tarik Bodasing on ‘Coexisting with Africa’s Carnivores.’ This follows a contribution by Reed F Noss on ‘Protecting, Restoring and Rewilding Ecosystems’ and both focus on broadscale nature conservation challenges. Bodasing is currently a technical adviser to the RSPB on wildlife and forest crime based in Liberia, but has previously worked in the UK. Noss is a US-based conservation biologist, former senior academic researcher and scientific adviser to wildlife NGOs. The challenges of ‘Coexistence with large carnivores’ was explored in a 2023 article for ECOS by Hannah Timmins based on a report by her colleagues at Equilibrium Research entitled ‘Living with Tigers’ undertaken for WWF. This highlighted the importance of socio-cultural factors (including ‘Restraint,’ ‘Respect’ and ‘Reverence.’) Here the situation in Africa is described with reference to the importance of protected areas, the problems of trophy hunting, the illegal wildlife trade, and conflict with livestock farming. Rewilding initiatives are considered as part of ‘the path to coexistence.’ Noss (with Michael Soulé) co-wrote ‘the first article on rewilding as a conservation strategy’ in 1998, but in his chapter for Cohabiting Earth refers to an expanded definition used in a 2021 Conservation Biology article co-authored by Professor Steve Carver (a BANC trustee, who has also written extensively for ECOS).9

A 2023 issue of The Ecological Citizen edited by Joe Gray and Eileen Crist had ‘a partial focus on rewilding’ and it is to their contributions that I would now like to return. Her individual chapter in Cohabiting Earth, ‘For the Bounteous Beauty of the Living Seas,’ considers the “health of the world’s largest ecosystem” and mentions Charles Clover’s 2022 Rewilding the Sea, reviewed by me for ECOS. However, it is a quote from Rachel Carson’s 1951 The Sea around Us that opens Crist’s discussion, primarily focused on pollution and ‘industrial’ over-fishing, and she strongly recommends British marine biologist Callum Roberts’ 2007 The Unnatural History of the Sea to understand the historical scale of ocean exploitation. Her Counterpunch article, ‘Tales from the Sargasso Sea’, which originally led me to Cohabiting Earth is also available as a blog on The Ecological Citizen website. Recently described by Greenpeace as a ‘Sea of Opportunity for Ocean Protection,’ the status of ‘Ocean Sanctuary’ is currently sought for this ecologically rich and fascinating part of the Atlantic.10 At the centre of the Sargasso Sea is the UK Overseas Territory of Bermuda which has played a key role in marine conservation. ECOS has covered conservation issues relevant to the UKOTS, including the UK Government’s ambitious programme of Marine Protected Areas, over many years. These islands and surrounding territorial waters include some of Earth’s most significant biodiversity; their remoteness and often sparse (or non-existent) human populations mean the ‘more-than-human natural world’ is still largely in the ascendent. However, Gray’s and Crist’s introduction to Cohabiting Earth compares such wild places to dwindling metaphorical ‘islands’ in the Anthropocene’s global ocean Technosphere.

Concluding reflections: ‘Intractable Quandaries’

Simon Leadbeater and Helen Kopnina use the expression ‘Intractable Quandary’ in their contribution to Cohabiting Earth on plant sentience. As a matter of interest, I googled this term to discover where else it might have been applied. Co-incidentally, the search engine took me to the Harvard University Press X account and a tweet about a review of Daniel Susskind’s 2024 book Growth: A History and A Reckoning. The ‘Intractable Quandary,’ it seems to many people, lies in the relationship between economic ‘growth’ and nature conservation, broadly defined, and the challenges of what has been called ‘decoupling.’ 11 As well as important UK academic positions, Susskind ‘has worked in various roles in the British Government’ according to his website Economic growth is very much the mantra of the present administration, a sort of re-working of New Labour, that continues the 21st century rhetorical war on spatial planning and, by association, undermines good environmental governance. Although the North American context is very different – notably much bigger and wilder – the Trumpian appetite for de-regulation (and natural resources) is even greater. I’m not sure Cohabiting Earth, or indeed any other recent book for that matter, really gets to grips with this particular intractable quandary but it does make important and well-written contributions to the evolution of eco-philosophy, and discourses around human relationships with ‘the more-than-human natural world.’ The presence of authors with academic backgrounds in sociology is interesting; but the apparent omission of any reference to the late American sociologist Bill Devall, arguably still one of the best writers on the 20th century deep ecology movement, is an oversight. Devall was among the first to identify and elegantly describe vital differences between this and the mainstream reformist environmental movement (also a target of criticism in the present volume); differences which, on the one hand, may represent another form of intractable quandary or, on the other, a necessary condition for ecological variation.

References

1. https://censamm.org/blog/bbc-podcast-john-gray-the-recurrent-dream-of-an-end-time

2. Curry P (2024) Light on the Dark Mountain: An essay–review. The Ecological Citizen 7(1): 55–63.https://www.ecologicalcitizen.net/pdfs/epub-100.pdf

3. Fleischner TL (2025) The enduring and elemental importance of natural history. The Ecological Citizen 8(1): epub-115 https://www.ecologicalcitizen.net/pdfs/epub-115.pdf

4. https://schoolsweek.co.uk/natural-history-gcse-stalls-after-official-block https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/blog/jen-davis/natural-history-gcse

5. https://theconversation.com/what-is-techno-optimism-2-technology-scholars-explain-the-ideology-that-says-technology-is-the-answer-to-every-problem-222668

6. More Than Human Rights: An Ecology of Law, Thought, and Narrative for Earthly Flourishing, César Rodríguez-Garavito, ed. (New York: NYU Law, 2024) https://mothrights.org/wp-content/themes/nyu-moth/assets/images/book/pdfs/ripped/15-More-Than-Human-Rights_Book-On-the-Origin-of-the-Phrase-More-Than-Human.pdf

7. https://sdgs.un.org/partnerships/rights-nature-catalyst-implementation-sustainable-development-agenda-water

8. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/chimps-may-be-performing-rituals-shrine-trees-180958301

9. Guiding principles for rewilding. Carver, Steve et al Conservation Biology, Vol. 35, No. 6, 12.2021, p. 1882-1893 https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cobi.13730

10. https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/resources/sargasso-the-sea-of-opportunity-for-ocean-protection

11. https://eeb.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Decoupling-Debunked.pdf

Cite:

Mackinnon, Janet “COHABITING EARTH” ECOS vol. 2024 , British Association of Nature Conservationists, www.ecos.org.uk/cohabiting-earth/.

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