Reframing Decision-Making Criteria Around More-Than-Human Vulnerabilities

Reframing Decision-Making Criteria Around More-Than-Human Vulnerabilities

Increasing information detailing and describing the scale, depth, and speed of the current sixth great extinction event fails to impact upon planning and policy decisions where these continue to be framed within narrowly anthropocentric and human-exceptionalist terms. Such terms lack the capacity to account for complex ecological interdependencies or diverse and multispecies ways of knowing and experiencing. One of the things needed if this is to change is a change in the evaluative criteria that count within decision making frameworks. Biodiversity, ecological resilience, and ecocultural diversity must replace economic power and security as the principal evaluative criteria.
This presentation interrogates the roles of human integrity and security as drivers of the sixth extinction. When a desire for security is combined with the capacity to destroy or exclude perceived threats to that security, violence is predictable. For a privileged human today, the capacity for the violent exclusion of whatever may seem like a threat to current or future security extends to the possibility of destroying everything. Knowing the excluded may be endangered, ecologically keystone, climate change inducing etc. fails to signify in the accounting framework when the criteria privilege one’s own current or future security. Economic measures are largely calculated based upon this kind of privileged valuing of human integrity and security. The largest parts of our economies are targeted towards things that keep our integrity (health, food production), things that keep us secure (military, insurance), things that keep us separate (houses, property), and things that reproduce these things (transport, infrastructure, education). None of the largest economic drivers relate to ecological values. My analysis will draw upon work by Michel Serres and Deborah Bird Rose among others and considers modes of decision making that invite multispecies vulnerability and attentiveness.

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