Words have this remarkable efficacy, a kind of dangerous but splendid magic: they transform the world by altering our perception of the world. And the ways that we speak profoundly influence our sensory experience. Obviously, this has particular import when we’re speaking of the law, where phrases are codified in a manner that will inform legal cases sometimes far into the future. Many of the matters that snagged my attention at our gathering had to do with language-with how we choose to articulate certain conundrums, with the words and phrases that we deploy in order to make sense of things. I think we’d all have much more fun if we could dispel the delusion that these activities belong in entirely different departments of human life.ĭA: I completely agree with you. All have to interpret and communicate their insights, often ambiguous, uncertain, and contradictory, using imaginative language composed of metaphor and analogy. Scientists, lawyers, judges, artists, and philosophers are-and have always been-emotional, creative, and intuitive, whole human beings, navigating worlds that were never made to be cataloged and systematized. The bifurcation between the “sciences” and the “arts”-itself founded on a centuries-old bifurcation of the world into “primary” quantities and “secondary” qualities-has erected all sorts of confusing boundaries that we stumble over, mistaking them for natural features of our minds. What we call arts and sciences both arise from our faculties of imagination, wonder, and curiosity-regarding the phenomena unfolding around us and regarding our own ability to meaningfully experience these phenomena. I had the sense that one of the things we were doing was exploring ways to form a lichen that could rise to the many challenges of reimagining legal frameworks in our times.įrom my perspective as a biologist, interdisciplinarity is satisfying for other reasons. ![]() Viewed in this way, lichens’ extremophilia, their ability to live life on the edge, is as old as lichens themselves, and a direct consequence of their symbiotic way of life. Whenever it was that lichens occurred for the first time, their very existence implies that life outside the lichen was less bearable. When a volcano creates a new island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the first things to grow on the bare rock are lichens, which arrive as spores or fragments carried by the wind or birds-likewise when a glacier retreats. This is a recurring theme in the history of life: by coming together, radically different organisms can extend their reach and achieve things that none of the individual players-whether bacterium, alga, fungus, animal, plant-could achieve by themselves. I was left with a sense that interdisciplinarity is a superpower. Merlin Sheldrake: I found this convergence enormously inspiring. ![]() Our sensate bodies, after all, provide our sole access to all these other animals, to the plants and the fungi, to the rainforests, the rivers, the surging winds and the gathering storms. Each of these are necessary ingredients for any sort of wisdom-for thinking, that is, not just with our abstract intellects, but with the whole of our creaturely selves, reflecting with the entirety of our feelingful, intelligent organisms. We were all drawn together by our bodacious love and concern for the wider and much wilder community of earthly agencies, for the whole cantankerous collective of what you so aptly call “entangled life.” And this made for a very convivial gathering indeed, surging with reflective insights and conundrums, but one that also held space for grief-the grief that most of us were carrying in relation to the vast and unprecedented losses in the human and more-than-human community-and also for some music-making. Published in partnership with the More Than Human Rights (MOTH) Project, and following the project’s inaugural symposium, this conversation reimagines the legal frameworks through which we define rights and well-being for the more-than-human web of life.ĭavid Abram: The symposium was for me an eye-opening encounter with courageous judges, lawyers, philosophers, scientists, and legal scholars from different lands, all of whom are in heartfelt service to something much larger than ourselves-larger than our individual and egoic concerns, larger even than the well-being of our particular species. Exploring the many kinds of selves that compose our breathing biosphere, cultural ecologist David Abram and mycologist Merlin Sheldrake assert the selfhood and agency of the fluxing multitudes with whom we share the Earth.
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