Eco-Empathy, or towards a co-creative sympoietic embodied relation with more-than-human environments

Abstract

When we talk about empathy, we usually refer to a “transposing” emotional process towards other human beings (often less fortunate, more fragile or co-dependent beings), sometimes towards animals (mostly mammals), occasionally towards works of art (where the concept originated), but very seldom towards soil, rocks, seas, clouds, mineral, vegetal and nonvisible features of our environed Earth. My proposed reflection on eco-empathy focuses on our co-creative sympoietic embodied relation with more-than-human environments, or what we commonly term natural landscapes. Philosopher Bruno Latour recently observed how “economy, the science of managing limited resources, has become an argument for forgetting all limits” (2020), decrying how in the name of globalization we have finally succeeded in universalizing the same economizing and calculating humanoid over the whole surface of the Earth. In effect, so-called globalization has accelerated a process of territorial imperialism whereby wildlife sanctuaries, vast expanses of forests, agricultural lands, and even urban parks are being destroyed, to the point of extinguishing many animal and plant species, causing environmental degradation, and turning humans into “development refugees”. However, geopower refers not only to the ways that power is exerted over and through the Earth (as drawn from Michel Foucault’s notion of biopower), but also to the more-than-human forces of the Earth that so often disrupt humanly regulated environments, and whose material manifestations are both aesthetic by themselves and also reimagined in artistic form (Val Plumwood; Elizabeth Grosz). Drawing on questions pertaining to the aesthetics of the Earth’s geopower, this communication explores the aesthetic embodied experience of more-than-human natural scapes and spaces, ranging from the intimate playful observation of the poetics of seeds (Gaston Bachelard), to the sublime and terrifying beholding of the vastest unattainable mountains (Caspar David Friedrich, Sebastião Salgado, Godfrey Reggio). By dialogically connecting our affective intensities with these scapes and spaces – as in the Home-Tree action research project – we may learn to experience our belonging to the world, and be able to “detach the figure of the Earth from that of the Globe”, i.e., from an image that “gave shape to the imperial idea of a universal power grab” and control (Latour).