Listening to the Nonhuman World: On Strategies for Saving the Biosphere

Editor’s Note: This is the second of a two-part essay. The first part is available here.

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IN ONE OF THOSE quirks of memory, I distinctly remember my high school calculus teacher describing his home state of Pennsylvania as “Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, with Alabama in between.” Tamaqua Borough, a coal-country community of 7,000 people, is firmly in Pennsylvania’s Alabama belt. Its population is poor and white, and has declined in every census since 1930. Over two-thirds of voters in its county cast ballots for Donald Trump in the 2016, 2020, and 2024 elections.

Tamaqua Borough, Pennsylvania, in other words, isn’t what comes to mind when you picture the home of pioneering ecological radicalism. But that’s what it is. In 2006, the town adopted a law—the Tamaqua Borough Sewage Sludge Ordinance—that set off a legal revolution. To prevent construction of a planned sewage sludge deposit facility, in a community already surrounded by three EPA Superfund sites, the Borough Council redefined legal personhood to include nature: “Borough residents, natural communities, and ecosystems shall be considered to be ‘persons’ for purposes of the enforcement of the civil rights of those residents, natural communities, and ecosystems.” In recognizing natural objects as legal “persons” with rights, the council intended to counteract existing corporate property rights to pollute and “to interfere with the existence and flourishing of natural communities or ecosystems.” It was the world’s first rights-of-nature statute.

But it wasn’t the last. Since 2006, and especially after 2013, there has been an “explosion” of “new laws that recognize natural ecosystems as subjects with inherent rights (implying humans’ responsibility to provide for their well-being),” as political scientists Craig M. Kauffman and Pamela L. Martin explain in their 2021 book The Politics of Rights of Nature: Strategies for Building a More Sustainable Future. There are now about 500 rights-of-nature legal provisions—in constitutions, national laws and regulations, international laws, local statutes, Indigenous laws, court rulings, and more—in over 40 countries and international bodies. In under two decades, the pair demonstrates with newly collected data, the rights of nature (RoN) have “gone from being a radical idea espoused only by a handful of marginalized actors to a legal strategy seriously considered in a wide variety of domestic and international policy arenas.”

The rights of nature, as law and as legal strategy, are not just refashioned animal-welfare laws. Since their inception, animal-welfare laws have aimed to protect individual animals from cruelty. The first such law was the UK’s Cruel Treatment of Cattle Act of 1822, championed by Irish MP Richard “Humanity Dick” Martin, which made it illegal to “wantonly and cruelly beat, abuse or ill treat” livestock. Rights of nature, by contrast, aim to protect Nature, with a capital N. As Kauffman and Martin find, despite extensive differences among rights-of-nature laws, “Nature is conceptualized,” across the board, “at the ecosystem level rather than at the level of individual flora and fauna.”

This focus on complex systems rather than independent components represents law trying to catch up with science. Existing Western-inspired legal systems, befitting the era during which they emerged, take a Newtonian view of the world, “one that sees Nature as a machine composed of fragmented, independent parts,” in Kauffman and Martin’s words. But science has moved past that understanding. Scientists now know that, “far from being individual stocks of resources, Nature comprises complex, nested, living ecosystems whose parts are all interconnected in ways that humans do not fully comprehend.” Advocates for the rights of nature want to bring the law up to speed, since even mainstream environmental law “is based on a paradigm that is out of sync with the laws governing the natural world.”

Along with advancements in ecological science, the rights of nature are also rooted in Indigenous thought and activism. For Indigenous communities, who have been “a leading force in the global RoN movement,” these laws have proven useful tools to defend communal autonomies and to enshrine their cosmologies in the institutions of an all-too-frequently hostile state. This embrace of the rights of nature, however, is not fully seamless: “[T]he concept of rights is foreign to many Indigenous cultures,” Kauffman and Martin observe. Indeed, Indigenous peoples have mainly encountered rights as a legal weapon wielded against their independence, territory, and lives. The rights of nature, then, are not the Western legal application of Indigenous thought but rather, as legal scholar and advocate César Rodríguez-Garavito writes in his 2024 book More Than Human Rights: An Ecology of Law, Thought and Narrative for Earthly Flourishing, “the Western legal translation of the more fundamental notion that everything is alive, that all beings speak in their own ways.” And though we know that something is always lost in translation, it can be powerful nonetheless. “[F]or the first time we saw our Indigenous values and rights reflected in Western law,” a leader of the Ponca Nation of Oklahoma told Kauffman and Martin. “We are not people protecting Nature, we are Nature protecting itself.”

Rights of nature are a primary pathway that activists and policymakers are using to implement something like the visions advanced by Martha C. Nussbaum and Sharon R. Krause that I discussed in the first part of this essay (even if neither author gives the movement much thought). It’s where the rubber of theory is hitting the road of practice. And, in some places, the rights of nature have begun to move the state in a more ecological direction. Ecuador has made the most progress. Its 2008 constitution was the first in the world to recognize the rights of nature, including “the right to integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes.” These constitutional rights were immediately deployed in court: Kauffman and Martin count 34 lawsuits related to the rights of nature in Ecuador from 2008 to 2020.

Yet the most important RoN ruling in Ecuador—and, according to Rodríguez-Garavito, “the most sophisticated ruling on rights of nature anywhere in the world”—came down after Kauffman and Martin’s book went to press. In December 2021, the Constitutional Court of Ecuador found, in the Los Cedros case, that mining permits given to the national mining corporation inside a sensitive, biodiverse cloud forest were an unconstitutional violation of the rights of the forest itself. The ruling, universally described as “landmark,” prohibits all mining in Los Cedros Reserve in perpetuity. Further, the judges established that “the intrinsic value that the Constitution places on the existence of species and ecosystems through the rights of nature” generates “a constitutional obligation” for human restraint when faced with choices that may lead to irreversible damage to natural systems. What mattered in their thinking, the judges made clear, was not the mining’s likely “effects on human beings,” but rather “the extinction of species, destruction of ecosystems or permanent alteration of natural cycles or other types of serious or irreversible damage to nature.”

Such a court ruling must be applauded. But I still wonder whether courts are the right sites for working out these fundamentally political struggles. New Zealand suggests another possibility. In order to resolve disputes with two Māori iwi (tribes) stemming from injustices they have endured since the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, which established British sovereignty over their homelands, the New Zealand Parliament passed legislation granting legal personhood and rights to two specific ecosystems: the Te Urewera forest (in the Te Urewera Act of 2014) and the Whanganui River watershed (in the Te Awa Tupua Act of 2017, which uses the Māori name for the river). Unlike the Ecuadorian constitution, these laws do not recognize special rights for nature but rather grant particular ecosystems the same rights, duties, and liabilities available to any legal person (including humans, corporations, trusts, and more), such as the rights to property ownership and to take on debt. One result of these legal innovations is that the Te Urewera Forest and Whanganui River now own themselves.

The most interesting and important elements of the laws, however, are the new governance arrangements that were created to manage these ecosystems. As Kauffman and Martin show, by establishing new governance bodies premised on Māori principles and practices of “guardianship resulting from their duty to care for their ancestor,” understood as a place-bound ecosystem, rather than from the North Atlantic concept of rights, New Zealand can protect the rights of nature proactively, rather than seeking after-the-fact remedies through lawsuits.

In the case of the Whanganui River, the watershed management body, Te Kōpuka nā Te Awa Tupua, includes the river itself as a member, participating in deliberations and decisions about its own management. Flowing water, lustrous riverine stones, and New Zealand smelt don’t physically show up in the boardroom, of course. Guardians are appointed to speak for the river system as “an indivisible and living whole,” including “all its physical and metaphysical elements,” in the words of the Te Awa Tupua Act.

All this talk of guardianship may not be quite right, however. As political ecologist Mihnea Tănăsescu points out in his incisive and insightful Understanding the Rights of Nature: A Critical Introduction (2022), the Te Awa Tupua Act never describes these bodies as “guardians.” Indeed, he writes, the Māori worldview does not allow humans to be the guardians of places, which for them “are not dumb matter, but are charged with ancestral power that has its own logic within which human beings have to fit themselves.” In place of “guardians,” the evocative language of the law establishes governing institutions to be the ecosystem’s “human face.” “A ‘human face’ is not a guardian,” Tănăsescu argues, “but something more like a representative”—an arrangement of “truly revolutionary nature.”

Such arrangements represent new and uneasy ground for both the government of New Zealand and the iwi—an “ontological and legal hybridization” between Western and Māori traditions, in Tănăsescu’s words. Yet it is precisely on this unsteady bridge called the rights of nature that political theorist Christine J. Winter believes we might “find the crack” that opens to “politically radical” possibilities. “If corporate legal persons have the right to participate in the democratic process,” especially, but not only, in the United States after Citizens United v. FEC (2010), she asks, why shouldn’t Te Urewera and Te Awa Tupua, “who are now also legal persons?” Could these ecosystems, via their human faces, vote? Could they donate to candidates? Could they run for office? How, Winter wants to know, will they “demand a seat at the (democratic) table” to “rebalanc[e] the politics that are driving the Anthropocene”?

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The first step toward giving the more-than-human world a seat at the table is to listen to what it is saying. The Te Awa Tupua Act establishes one means of humans listening, directing humans to pay close attention to the “insight, guidance, and premonition” provided by the river’s kaitiaki, a nonhuman “spiritual guardian.” This may work in Aotearoa, but the Māori worldview is not available to all of us. Still, the nonhuman world is saying a lot—are there other ways to listen?

Let’s first recognize that we often literally cannot hear nonhumans: the human ear lacks the infrastructure to perceive much of the sonic spectrum where other living beings speak. “Our physiologies—and perhaps our psyches—limit our capacity to listen to our nonhuman kin,” writes Karen Bakker in her magnificent 2022 book The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants. The book details how scientists have constructed a “planetary-scale hearing aid” of microphones and other digital sensors installed around the earth that offers us “an opportunity to listen to nonhumans in powerful ways,” allowing us to digitally eavesdrop on “the hidden conversations ongoing across the natural world.”

In 2024, Bakker, an uncommonly curious scholar who joyfully and fruitfully trespassed far beyond her home discipline of geography, published a new book, Gaia’s Web: How Digital Environmentalism Can Combat Climate Change, Restore Biodiversity, Cultivate Empathy, and Regenerate the Earth, that expands on The Sounds of Life to demonstrate how emerging technologies are transforming environmental governance and creating the opportunity, if used wisely, to “renew humanity’s relationship with planet Earth.” Gaia’s Web recounts how scientists have built—and continue building—“ambitious digital environmental monitoring systems” that are collectively revealing “much that was once hidden about the natural world.” Networked digital monitors, microphones, hydrophones, satellites, and sensors—what she calls “Digital Earth systems”—come in all shapes and sizes, from cameras orbiting in space to tiny digital devices affixed to the backs of honeybees. They can track animal movement, behavior, and communication, plant growth and health, and the well-being and conditions of ecosystems, oceans, and the atmosphere, mostly in near real-time. By processing and analyzing all these data, we have created “a ‘digital twin’ of our planet: a virtual model of our world, rendered in digital data.”

This isn’t so much a book about technology, however, as about what actions and acts of imagination technology makes possible. Bakker is most interested in how digital technologies have composed “Gaia’s Web,” a planetary-scale system of “interconnected digital and natural networks” that makes possible new kinds of environmental governance and even politics. For instance, Gaia’s Web can solve two enduring obstacles to effective environmental protection: scarce data and after-the-fact enforcement that “punishes but fails to prevent environmental harm.” Pervasive digital observation can eliminate those concerns. Data is now cheap, abundant, and real-time, supporting regulators to “gather systematic evidence and enable timely enforcement.” Bakker provides numerous examples of these methods “achieving some success”: satellites helping the governments of Ghana and Indonesia track and reduce illegal fishing vessels in their waters; Human Rights Watch using remote sensing to uncover illegal mining and logging operations; park rangers in Malaysia, Uganda, Cambodia, and Russia using machine learning to predict where in their vast territories poachers might strike next; game wardens in Costa Rica, the Philippines, and Indonesia deploying recycled cell phones throughout their forests to detect the sounds of poaching (“like chainsaws, engine noise, or gunshots”) and get near-instant alerts.

Gaia’s Web is an exciting book, and Bakker is an excited environmentalist. She believes that digital technologies “could provide useful tools to address urgent environmental crises” and that they “should be used to advance environmentalism.” But she is no Pollyanna; her analysis is founded on a well-earned ambivalence toward tech and the tech industry. Alongside accounts of amazing scientific and technological breakthroughs, Bakker offers measured assessments of the “novel risks to humans and nonhumans alike” posed by Digital Earth systems. Skeptical of corporate power, surveillance capitalism, data monopolies, and “the parallels between military surveillance and eco-surveillance,” Bakker asks the right question: “Who gains and who loses from Digital Earth?” The answer, she argues, isn’t yet set in stone. Gaia’s Web holds “perils and promise,” “regressive and progressive possibilities,” and the direction it takes will result from political struggle, especially the fight for democratic regulation of these technologies and their owners. She’s no techno-determinist, and she makes a strong case that with the right politics we can harness our new technological capacities and direct them toward “abundant, inclusive futures.”

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The most remarkable parts of Gaia’s Web force us to rethink what politics could even look like. They are, she admits, “inevitably speculative,” but she admirably grounds her speculation with examples of technologies currently under development or already out in the world. Across these chapters, Bakker demonstrates that, if we so choose, we can “instantiate a multispecies future.”

My favorite multispecies future in the book is already underway. Off the coasts of Southern California and southeastern Canada, in two of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, whales are helping to steer hulking cargo ships. In the Santa Barbara Channel, scientists at UC Santa Barbara developed and implemented Whale Safe, “an AI-powered monitoring system that creates virtual whale lanes, enabling safe passage for cetaceans by preventing ship strikes in real time.” The system combines data from underwater acoustic monitoring, AI algorithms, oceanographic modeling, whale sightings, and ship-location tracking by satellites to produce “a whale presence rating overlaid on a map, similar to a weather report, which is relayed in real time to ship captains, who can decide to slow down or leave the area altogether.” Whale Safe then tracks ships using many of the same monitors to see whether they comply and, if not, encourages the public to name and shame noncompliant vessels.

In the Gulf of St. Lawrence, similar technologies are deployed to protected endangered right whales along with stiffer penalties: noncompliant ships are fined hundreds of thousands of dollars by the Canadian government. “Only a few decades ago, North Atlantic right whales were hunted to the brink of extinction,” Bakker observes, “but today the few hundred remaining whales influence the movements of tens of thousands of ships in a region home to 45 million people.”

Bakker points to whale lanes as an already existing digitally enabled environmental governance collaboration between humans and other species. “Through digital technologies,” she writes, “whales are being enrolled in ocean governance.” They have been given a seat at the table where they can advocate for their interests—in this case, merely by swimming where they please. In more audacious cases, however, Bakker pushes us to think about more substantive, iterative, perhaps deliberative multispecies collaborations, where “digital technologies may allow nonhumans to participate as active subjects” in the governance of this planet, “rather than [as] passive objects.” Using Digital Earth systems to detect nonhumans’ preferences as expressed by “signals—biochemical, vocal, vibrational, gestural”—points to “a very different future for environmental governance.” This is a future that has blown past Western notions of political community, indeed of politics. This is a future that extends “political voice” and “the political franchise to nonhumans.”

Bakker here is tossing into the dustbin of history the idea, foundational to Western philosophy and society, that human beings are the only “political animal.” In this act of ecological enfranchisement, “the environmental becomes inescapably political, but the political is not solely human.” Nussbaum, Krause, and Kauffman and Martin (in their analysis of the “guardianship model” of the rights of nature practiced in New Zealand) make similar moves, arguing for the political inclusion of the menagerie of political animals. But their proposed mechanisms for giving nonhumans political representation is less fleshed-out than Bakker’s. Political representation always involves some amount of hand-waving and conjuring—after all, it is “the making present in some sense of something which is nevertheless not present literally or in fact,” as political theorist Hanna Fenichel Pitkin once defined it—yet to my mind, Bakker’s model requires the least. In the construction of Gaia’s Web, she sees “a potential means” for giving nonhumans practical, meaningful political representation. Like our current political technologies, principally the ballot, Gaia’s Web offers imperfect but manageable tools for aggregating the diversity of political voices.

At the heart of this new form of democracy lie digital systems that Bakker, riffing on the late Bruno Latour, calls “Parliaments of Earthlings”—“digital systems that enable the exchange of information between species, and a means for a collective of nonhumans to guide and perhaps constrain human behavior.” This “digitally enabled multispecies democracy” doesn’t depend on voting, in an echo of Nussbaum and Krause. Nonhumans make their voices known to politics not by casting periodic ballots but by “the continuous sharing of digital information” about themselves. We should certainly be wary of systems that claim to be democratic and to not need voting—the Chinese government uses continuous monitoring of digital information, like online complaints about local officials or environmental hazards, to offer “democratic” responsiveness. But for the purposes of a multispecies politics looking to influence human action, digital monitoring is the right path: a “technically feasible” method for letting us “listen more closely to our nonhuman kin.”

We shouldn’t kid ourselves, however: politics is still about power. Bakker recognizes that possessing the ability to listen to nonhumans doesn’t necessarily mean that we will. Most of human history is a record of powerful people with fully functional ears ignoring the political voices of less powerful people. As in those cases, “the vast power and information asymmetries” that mark the relationships between humans and nonhumans mean that we’re always working “on an unequal footing.” This is a reminder that the emergence of multispecies democracy may be eased by the use of technology, but it is not a technological project. It is a political one. “Digital technologies enable voices to be monitored, but do not require that they be included,” Bakker writes, distinguishing between the technological means and the political ends. Just because we can hear them doesn’t mean we have to listen.

Why might the powers that be, who have benefited from the current state of human domination of nature, choose to listen? Even granting rights to nature doesn’t force us to listen to nature: rights are not self-enforcing, and the powerful regularly claim the right to trample the rights of the less powerful. Maybe we can point to self-interest. Our planet faces many challenges, and collectives, we know, make better decisions than individuals, since collectives have more knowledge and experience. So, to tackle the planet’s problems well, we should expand the decision-making collective.

This is the epistemic argument for multispecies democracy: other species know things about the world that we humans don’t. They have different perspectives, different sensoria, different minds. We can (selfishly) take advantage of these differences across a collective for the benefit of all—“just as,” Aristotle once said, “feasts to which many contribute are better than feasts provided at one person’s expense.” W. E. B. Du Bois expanded on this ancient intuition to make a forceful case for inclusive democracy. “The vast and wonderful knowledge of this marvelous universe is locked in the bosoms of its individual souls,” he wrote in 1920. “To tap this mighty reservoir of experience, knowledge, beauty, love, and deed we must appeal not to the few, not to some souls, but to all. The narrower the appeal, the poorer the culture; the wider the appeal the more magnificent are the possibilities.” It is a “crime,” he argued, to prevent humans—or, in our case, nonhumans—from speaking for themselves, not because of how it effects the silenced individual but because it deprives the community of their unique knowledge. “[B]y our ignorance,” Du Bois wrote, “we make the creation of the greater world impossible.”

Of course, skeptics have a ready rebuttal: we aren’t ignorant! “There’s nothing that [whales] could tell us about what they need that we don’t really already know, which is to stop hunting them, stop catching them in our nets, stop polluting their environments, and try and just leave them alone for a little bit,” Luke Rendell, a leading cetacean biologist, recently told a reporter. “I don’t think we need an AI translation tool to know that’s what the animals would probably ask for if they could.” Maybe so.

Or maybe not—or at least not all. “Combining living organisms with digital technologies will create a set of new roles for nonhumans that we cannot fully anticipate,” Bakker emphasizes. There’s something fundamentally democratic about brazenly flinging open the doors of political possibility. The political theorist David Runciman has argued for lowering the voting age to six partly on these grounds. “[D]emocracy is meant to be surprising,” he observes; a democracy without surprises, therefore, isn’t very democratic. As democracies around the world seem to have been lulled into soporific complacency, the biggest surprise of the past decade turned out to be the size and strength of their anti-democratic movements. The surprises that will follow the establishment of more ecological democracies will, I hope, be more restorative. “[B]ut who knows what we can do,” as Nussbaum asks in Justice for Animals, “until we exercise political imagination?”

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Full disclosure: I read Gaia’s Web in draft and gave Karen feedback while she was still working on it. Not that she needed my advice—the manuscript was near perfect. “The book is phenomenal,” I gushed to her by email in April 2023, a view I haven’t changed upon reading the published text. “It’s engaging, beautifully written, makes a hugely important argument, and is going to expose readers to a vast new world of possibilities that will change how they think about solutions.”

Reading the book now, however, is a different, more difficult experience. Karen died that August, after a brief and vicious illness. I only knew her for just shy of a year, but over those months, through Zooms, phone calls, emails, and one delightful dinner, she became an important mentor and, I hope she’d agree, a friend.

Karen intended The Sounds of Life and Gaia’s Web to be followed by a third book, in what she conceived of as an informal trilogy on how technology is changing the relationships between humans and “our cousins on the Tree of Life.” We’ll have to figure the rest out on our own.

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Of all the books considered in this two-part essay, Gaia’s Web offers the most viable political path forward. (The rights of nature movement analyzed by Kauffman and Martin describes a legal pathway that is already building a record of success, but it remains very much a juridical, rather than political, movement.) Without much fanfare, governance practices built upon Digital Earth systems are already underway, as the whale lanes demonstrate. Its quiet, technological, almost technocratic approach is in fact key to its viability. For better or worse, Bakker’s “digital biocentrism” demands less of people than either eco-emancipation or justice for animals. While Krause waits for her ecological ideals to be “internalized by enough people over time” to make a difference and Nussbaum appeals to people “with a conscience” to work toward change that “depends on all of us,” Gaia’s Web has begun to enroll other creatures in their own governance of their ecosystems and to reconstruct the human relationship with the rest of the biosphere. Imperfectly, yes—and the existing mechanisms fall far short of the more robust, mature, and radical ones that Bakker hopes for. But compare the real-world examples meant to inspire and assure readers that appear, tellingly, in the conclusions of Krause’s Eco-Emancipation and Nussbaum’s Justice for Animals to the examples that permeate Gaia’s Web and the cases of Digital Earth systems in practice are more inspiring, assuring, and exciting.

This is, in part, because Bakker believes we can act first and change hearts and minds later. She understands that paradigm shifts can follow action, rather than precede it. Her argument is that emerging technologies can, if used well, cultivate empathy and change our relationship with nature, not the other way around. In other words, Bakker is a pragmatist eager to make progress now using any tool available. She doesn’t require that we first purify ourselves and expunge society’s sins, as too many green arguments insist.

Gaia’s Web takes people as we are. It doesn’t demand that we accept the truth and validity of Indigenous cosmovisions, Buddhist ontologies, or the creation story of chapter two of Genesis (where humans are “to work” the earth and “take care of it”) over Genesis, chapter one (where we are to “subdue” it). It doesn’t tell us to place all our eggs in the basket of ending capitalism and other noble, implausible dreams. More modestly, it shows us how to make gains where we can. “More locally made goods, more no-go zones, fewer ships, smaller ships, and slower ships might be more effective solutions” to the distresses we cause whales, she knows. “Yet in a political economic climate in which such measures are unlikely, whale lanes may offer one useful conservation tool.” Given that the political-economic climate (and the climate climate) looks even grimmer than when Bakker wrote, we who care about the biosphere must be open to every win we can get.

Maybe it’s unfair to judge Nussbaum’s and Krause’s bracing, far-looking philosophical accounts based on present-day plausibility. I’ve written this kind of normative speculation myself, and I tire of the easy protest, “but how’s it going to happen?” At the same time, Nussbaum and Krause, and for that matter the RoN movement, adhere to a specific conservatism that only Bakker rejects. Bakker is the only author to challenge the nation-state—the political form that has carried us into the Anthropocene—and offer an alternative. She argues that Digital Earth systems, like whale lanes and other mobile marine protected areas, “challenge two core assumptions of contemporary politics: political boundaries are fixed and static, and nations have the right to claim territories within certain boundaries as their exclusive possessions.” In her new approach to governance, she opens the door to imagining new institutional forms better equipped for our planetary condition, a condition indifferent to borders and sovereignty.

The other authors, by contrast, not only leave the state untouched but in fact demand a strong state. They all envision the political incorporation of nonhumans into existing state structures. Whether seeking to see nonhumans “as citizens” (Nussbaum) or folding them into our rights-based legal system, they are committed to establishing a multispecies politics “that can be coercively enforced by the state,” as Krause advocates. Bakker, too, sees a role for the state in pursuing digital biocentrism, but she also sees a path around it. And circumventing the state, ironically, makes Bakker’s argument more plausible than the others. Are we really to expect that the state is suddenly going to become a vehicle for ecological harmony?

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All four books discussed across the two parts of this essay invoke hope. The authors understand the depths of the problems facing nature and how hard it will be to fix them. Nevertheless, they all end up concluding something along the lines of “our time is a time of great hope for the future of animals” (as Nussbaum comforts). Writers focused on doom and gloom often make this gesture, leaving what the novelist Jenny Offill calls the “obligatory note of hope.” It feels like the courteous thing to do. I mean, isn’t that what I’m doing here?

I’m not here to lecture that when it comes to biodiversity—our earth’s delirious bounty of billions of years of evolution—it’s always darkest before the dawn. But once your eyes adjust to the tenebrous night of the ecological present, you may start to notice faint but growing streaks and flashes in the darkness. With these books as your guide, you might see flitting sparks—a sign that people are hard at work, striking iron into iron. Most people can’t yet see these sparks, and powerful interests want to extinguish them before they even catch. But maybe?

Hope isn’t optimism. Optimism is an expectation for the future, while hope is a stance that one takes toward the future, regardless of expectations. Hope is a discipline, a way to live in the world. So I wouldn’t say I’m optimistic, but scanning the mounting conversations on “new political institutions and forms of political incorporation for nonhuman nature,” as Krause puts it, maybe I can allow myself to be hopeful. If the folks who are actively trying to build this future can be hopeful, then who am I to not be?

Living well in the biosphere is “perpetually unfinished business,” as Krause writes. All we can do is dive in and commit ourselves to “continuing effort, learning, progress, mistakes—and more effort.”

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