On Interspecies Humility
originally published on the Queer Nature blog & instagram (2019).
“In indigenous ways of knowing, other species are recognized not only as persons, but also as teachers who can inspire how we might live. We can learn a new solar economy from plants, medicines from mycelia, and architecture from the ants. By learning from other species, we might even learn humility.” – Robin Wall Kimmerer, Nature Needs a New Pronoun
Seeing sound, smelling the past/ differentiating between hundreds of types of plants/ practicing herbal medicine/ weaving/ creating detailed mental maps of landscapes to recall where food is cached/ participating in interspecies language systems to transmit information at the speed of sound... these are just some of the things other-than-humans can do and that are part of extrahuman (“non-human”) cultures. Other species undoubtedly also have abilities that we (speaking as subjects of colonial “Western culture,”) don’t know about or might not have names for.
Human knowledge can often be traced back to wild knowledge and culture (I often wish that instead of the tired old nature/culture dichotomy, we’d say human culture & extrahuman culture—at least if we still want to do dichotomies). We at Queer Nature love studying evasion and stealth skills in the context of survival and connection to place—especially as folks of targeted statuses and ‘apocalyptic naturalists’ in an era of climate chaos. One mentor of ours, a former special operations forces instructor, shared with us that evasion experts often travel along what they call the “military crest,” a path along contour line about 3/4 of the way up a hillside, just below the ridge. This is of course, a very common place to find animal trails and is also a popular location for deer and elk to bed during the day. Professional evaders avoid being sky-lit on ridgelines, they travel only at dawn, dusk, and in inclement weather. They move slowly and deliberately. They might even climb a tree because people rarely look up in a dense forest. They step in each others’ tracks to hide their group numbers, like wolves do. As wildlife trackers we realized that all these things are things that our extrahuman kin, the deer and the wolves and the bears, already do, all the time. These vivid moments reminded us of the expertise of other-than-human beings, and humbled us in the recognition of all that we continue to owe to them in these times in which we live. (* Often we are reminded in our studies that so many of these skills that were learned from extrahuman cultures were beautifully adapted to human cultures by land-based peoples, and then copied or appropriated from indigenous peoples by imperial and colonial forces.)
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The word ‘humility,’ meaning a “modest or low view of one’s own importance,” has a striking etymology. It comes from the Latin humus, which means soil. To be humble is to ‘lower’ oneself toward the soil—toward the earth themselves—not out of self-loathing, but out of a desire to be in respectful relationship with another being. There seems, then, to be a paradox in humility—because what is more powerful, more full of potential and multiplicity, than the soil? What better model for so(i)lidarity than the ground that supports us all, and also decomposes our bodies after we die in order to share and redistribute our metabolic capital as nutrition for other beings? Learning skills of survival, evasion, and stealth has taught us humility and inter (and intra)-species empathy in very literal ways, because we’ve been pressed up against the soil, digging in it, covered in it, warmed by it and chilled by it. We’ve learned that the soil is way more powerful than us, and also that we’re spiritually stronger when we spend more time with them.
In 1998, Melanie Tervalon and Jann Murray-Garcia proposed that healthcare professionals ditch the term ‘cultural competence,’ and instead practice something they called ‘cultural humility’ in order to better provide care in a multicultural world. In cultural competence, minority cultures are treated as monolithic entities about which one can gain totalizing knowledge in order to facilitate successful transactions (deemed successful, of course, by the ones in power). However, with cultural humility, knowledge of the other gained through an extractive context in order to meet presumptuous goals of ‘care’ is called out as harmful. Cultural humility is instead a stance that centers lifelong learning without the transactional and patronizing expectation of competency, and also centers learning-with as opposed to learning-about. Approaches to this must involve acknowledgement of one’s own positions of power and privilege in relation to another as well as a commitment to continuous self-reflection throughout these relationships. Fundamentally, cultural humility is an orientation that embraces not-knowing in service of respecting another person’s sovereignty and expertise in their own culture and self. It’s remarkable that this brilliant concept is at least 20 years old, and yet still sounds revolutionary. Unfortunately, the amount of unexamined racism present in our world shows that it remains a concept in dire need of attention.
We live in an age of massive species loss that has been dubbed ‘The Sixth Extinction.” We also live in the shadow of another type of loss that scientists are calling “defaunation,” which is the loss of sheer quantity of non-human individuals on planet earth. This form of loss is more difficult for Western science to quantify because although individuals from a given species may still exist among us, they exist in severely reduced numbers. In the New York Times Magazine article “The Insect Apocalypse is Here,” I learned of a recent study that “found that if you look at the world’s mammals by weight, 96% of that biomass is humans and livestock; just 4 percent is wild animals.” Humans are now in a considerable position of power over other species, especially relative to the past. The marginalization of non-human species goes beyond the social-political sphere—it is ecological and it also can’t be totally storied or expressed through human language. Therefore, it is of a degree that we don’t fully understand.
Mass extinction and defaunation are some of the results of ecocide, the destruction of ecosystems through colonialism, capitalism, and their sub-processes. Environmentalism, in the ‘Western’ view is thought of as its own isolated political concern. However, white supremacy, racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and misogyny are all part of ecocide, because ecocide quite literally means the killing of the home. Oikos, the root of the words ecology and economy, means household in Ancient Greek. So perhaps we should consider that ecocide denotes not just the systematic killing of the living environment but actually the killing of our ability to be at home—in other words, the dispossession of belonging. For folks of different marginalized identities “ecocide” results in displacement, lack of access to land-based living, the creation of militarized borders, pathologization of queerness and divergence, and and many other things.
In this age of widespread erosion of belonging, those of us in positions of power and privilege in so-called Western society are in need of additional forms of humility—furthermore, ones that aren’t built out of shame (which humility actually isn’t, but out of awe!)
If cultural humility challenges the notion that we can ever be “competent” in another person’s culture, interspecies humility challenges the notion that we can possess totalizing knowledge about another species—and, for example, that we could ever gain enough knowledge about other species to fully quantify their roles in ecosystems, as is hoped for in traditional modes of conservation. Furthermore, interspecies humility acknowledges that other species can know “more” than we know about what we might call botany, zoology, chemistry, tracking, meteorology, and other fields. They also may know things about “us,” about human psychology, sociology, or biology that we would have no way of apprehending other than (maybe) through a practice of deep listening and trust building with the more-than-human world. With that said, to speak of disparities in knowledge among species reveals a problem inherent in our epistemology, for each organism has their own knowledge systems, ways of knowing and perceiving the world that allow them to gain strategic knowledge about their environment. Many people would say so-called modern humans are really good at this‚ at data gathering. But what if we’re actually very bad at it, from an ecological perspective? What happens when we use techno-science to gain and amass “strategic knowledge” about our environment at a very fast pace, in service of profit and control way beyond what we need to survive, in species isolation where we are separated from accountability with the rest of the living world? What if knowledge evolved to be used in service of living and surviving in a multi-species world made up of multi-species cultures? What if it did not evolve to be used for profit? Capital in its current forms may be a sort of cybernetic metastasis of knowledge. I say this obviously as a participant in this system in addition to a critic!
Interspecies humility is not just a scientific concept either; it is an ecological and interpersonal set of practices. It involves listening at a depth that most of us were never taught, in a way that de-centers ourselves and centers the one speaking (or tweeting, or howling), because listening without expectation of ‘getting answers’ or ‘fixing it’ is the first step toward healing trauma. We live under the spell of an imperial science, where to be a biologist, and therefore to be the creator and purveyor of knowledge about the biotic world, one must have certain degrees and do certain things like conduct experiments and publish on a schedule. This can sometimes create a heuristic that can be dangerous for the earth and contrary to ecological resilience—it dispossesses us of our ability to listen intently because we think that we aren’t authorized to. With that said, to think we are anti-science would be a brazen misinterpretation of our work. We are “anti” the ways that the practice of science and the philosophies behind these practices can perpetuate attitudes that harm beings, life, and the earth. We are also “anti” the ways that the institutionalization of science can erase the presence of indigenous knowledge, or lead people to devalue their own experience. We are “anti” the ways in which the practice of science can be disproportionately connected to the economy (especially in ways that uphold inequity). However, none of this means that we don’t appreciate the institutionalized practice of science. Often, we do, and the scientists whose work we follow often do interdisciplinary, intersectional, culturally humble work or work that questions humancentrism. The critical ecologists, the queer biologists, the prophets of climate chaos, and the muckrakers of monocultures—they are definitely out there.
In this same breath, we aren’t entitled to knowledge about non-humans either, especially if we keep thinking that listening leads to knowledge which leads to producing something in order to gain capital. Especially if we keep thinking that knowledge can be gained honorably without relationship. If we aren’t entitled to knowledge, but still want to build relationship with other-than-human beings, we must expand the concept of consent beyond the human, too. Surely this will lead to an existential moment, because how does the land and their other-than-human denizens say yes or no? I don’t claim to have the answers. With interspecies humility, I see each individual as an expert in their own species-ology, and my role is at best a witness of this expertise. I realize that species-level generalizations, such as those advertised in “field guides” might only be of provisional use when I really get to know the individual denizens of those “species” living in my backyard—this is something trackers have known for thousands of years. This is because these individuals possess personhood, personality, and you don’t have to sentimentalize it, you can tell from the tracks they leave behind. This personality is partially the ongoing result of a lifelong conversation with their environment, definitely the equivalent of several PhDs, if we’re going to go there. Who cares if they philosophize about their own existence—most humans don’t even have time for that. (The benchmark of sentience as a signifier of personhood is elitist and useless when harbored by a species that exists in toxic systems of human supremacy and species isolation.) To counter or reframe that a little, ornithologist Richard Prum notes in his book The Evolution of Beauty that the inner experiences of animals are actually of utmost importance because emotions (including joy, desire, and enchantment) drive behaviors critical to species survival (like courtship). I couldn’t agree more, and there is in fact a whole contingent of people who are trying to advocate for the importance of emotion as a central force in ecology and beyond.
My initiation into interspecies humility—though I wouldn’t find the words for it until years later—came the summer I turned twenty-one, spent working on a sheep dairy farm in mid-coast Maine. Having grown up in a Greek-American family, sheep had always triggered a dreamy nostalgia in me. Their meat, milk, wool, and presence on the landscape were things I had come to associate with my time spent in Greece as a kid. My great-grandfather had been a shepherd in Arcadia, the traditional home of the god Pan—himself the ancient patron of shepherds—and my mom had grown up in a pastoral village thick with the smells and sounds of the cloven-hoofed. On a spiritual level, I felt somehow descended from these creatures. Although they didn’t give birth to me, they unequivocally made that birth possible because they and my ancestors took care of each other in order for each to survive. To me, sheep are one of the proverbial uncles or aunts to the human species—not our direct ancestors, but our auxiliary ones, no less important. (As a queer creature who may not have children of my own, I often wonder with my spouse Pinar—to whom will we one day be—if not the much-romanticized direct ancestors—ecological ancestors?)
As a student of religious studies as well as animal sciences, I also sensed a holy paradox in sheep and the relationship between our two species. “Sheep” are synonymous with conformity, complacency, and stupidity in popular culture while also simultaneously being a symbol for the Christian god. Something seems pretty off there, to say the least. Ovis aries, the domestic sheep, is thought to have been domesticated 8,000 years ago in the Near East, and without them sharing with us their ability to turn cellulose into protein, my ancestors and I certainly would not have existed. A split or double consciousness haunts our relationship with these tender yet resilient creatures. I often wonder if we in Western culture, through our shifting stories and collective memories of these beings have come to resent them and view them with ridicule partially because of our obvious ancestral dependence on them—a dynamic that echoes with mother-wounds that become all the more inflamed in a misogynistic society. Is it possible that we could be in some sort of avoidant or abusive relationship with an entire species? Unfortunately, it’s probably not just one species—but many.
When I started becoming interested in agrarianism and place-based skills in college I found myself drawn to be near these gentle beings, to enter into my own relationship with them. I sought out sheep farms that centered sustainable grazing—which appeared to be a strange revival of ancient relationships between ungulates and grasses within the constraints of late-capitalist rural landscapes. I also was drawn to dairy sheep because of how much I loved the many cheeses derived from their milk, especially feta and kasseri, both staples of rustic Greek cuisine. Dairy sheep, I came to find, have special temperaments because unlike animals raised solely for meat, they often live much longer and also have lots of contact with humans over their lifetimes. This type of contact—which includes milking—is intimate, filled with an unavoidable interspecies sensuality, and therefore requires trust to be built. Through this the dairy shepherd becomes all the more part of the ovine family—she is stitched into their social web and therefore is given more opportunities to see them as individuals (which they already are). To be trusted by a sheep—or by any herd or flock ungulate whose nervous systems have been shaped over thousands of years by their wariness of predators—is a huge honor. It’s what helped me understand what humility felt like. Horse people understand this, too.
In several years of working with sheep every summer, I watched their incredible mix of gentleness and resilience shine through in a hundred ways. I saw their unabated glee when they were led to a fresh pasture full of clover. I saw how discerning they were with what they ate—how they could differentiate between plants like trained botanists. I saw their vigilance when, in response to a threat, they attuned to each other’s body language with the speed of electricity. I noticed how they seemed to know when a storm was coming. I marveled at how their wool both kept them cool in the heat and warm in the cold, and helped them belong wherever they stood on the earth. I admired them. I fell in love with them.
It seemed like most humans—especially in a culture of hyper-individualism—wanted to be less like sheep, but after getting to know them, I wanted to be more like them. They seemed to belong so well to the land. They were so emotionally in tune with each other because their survival had always been a collective endeavor. When you fall in love with a being, you see their soul—and this applies across species, too. The ovine soul is hard for many of us socialized in ecocidal cultures to see, mostly because we don’t expect it to be there—the system of human supremacy benefits from the alleged soullessness of these beings. But I found their souls to be like a camouflaged bird’s nest—difficult to notice from afar, but up close, a marvel. Subtlety can be brilliant—and it’s often a successful survival strategy. As I started to talk to other shepherds, and read shepherding literature like the French Serpent of Stars that bordered on the mystical, I realized that this experience of deep, heartbreaking kinship with sheep was an open secret within this rustic vocation. Shepherding was like an ancient mystery cult that enshrined the paradox that sheep were the ones that took care of us, not the other way around.
Scholars in the critical field of animal studies are now starting to reframe domestication, too (even though people who work the land and who are living in the thick of multi-species family [eco]systems already knew this). What they are affirming is that “domestication” (which is such a varied and diverse phenomenon to begin with) is not just about power-over—it’s not the history of human dominion or “independence.” That’s a narrative that colonial cultures (and certain religions like later forms of Christianity) imposed on it. The story of domestication(s) could also be the opposite—the history of human dependence, interspecies relating, and therefore, vulnerability, accountability, responsibility… the old dichotomies of domesticated versus wild, agrarian versus hunter, don’t help anymore, because it’s all a spectrum.
Another dairy farm I worked at several years later was home to a sheep I’ll never forget. Sydney was a small black Icelandic ewe, and she was by far the most gregarious sheep I’d ever met, remarkably fond of humans. Any time a person, (familiar or new) approached the flock, she would rush ahead to meet them. Many shepherds will tell you, especially of the more hardy and ancient breeds, that there is often an “alpha sheep” who act as the recon scout for the rest of the flock, sniffing out new aspects of their environment in order to detect danger. However, there was another sheep in this flock that better fit the description of that stoic but wary guardian—Sydney on the other hand had a charming silliness about her and seemed simply obsessed with making new human friends at any opportunity. The other sheep seemed to regard her inter-species sociality with apathy, as if they were used to it. When I would go sit with the flock in the pasture, Sydney would always come over, ears flopping in sync with her urgent stride, to greet me. I’ll never forget one morning when I was sitting in the pasture and she came up to me, circled in front of me several times like a dog, and then sat right in my lap! We sat cuddling for a while, and I couldn’t quite believe what was happening, given all of the conditioning I’d had around who and what “sheep” were supposed to be. Recalling memories of sweet Sydney now, I am humbled once again as I realize that in her immense curiosity and love for those beyond her own species, Sydney was practicing interspecies humility long before I ever put words to it for myself.