Description
Ecocide represents far more than merely the disruption and annihilation of entire ecosystems, species and key earth system processes (Higgins et al, 2013; Mehta & Merz, 2015). As the late anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose (2012) poignantly observed, the present era of ecocide marks a ‘double death’ in the form of the untimely obliteration of the ‘deep biological rivers that constitute entire species’ (Jones et al, 2020, p. 391) as well as the disruption of life’s capacity for regeneration. That is, ecocide effects the incalculable, irrecuperable diminishment not only of our ‘multispecies earthly oikos’ (Jones et al, 2020, p. 392) but, crucially, of entire ways of being as coalescences of terrestrial possibilities (Qureshi, 2025, p. xvi). Yet, as the potentialities of terrestrial vitality can never be wholly extinguished, hope always abounds, for instance as seen in the thousands of alternative ecological worldviews and modes of relationality exhibited by many indigenous peoples the world over, and in the budding ecocide movement. The latter has seen over 400 ‘rights of nature’ initiatives, largely indigenous-led, proliferate across 39 countries (Putzer et al, 2022). However, as crucial as such legal innovations and victories are, they alone cannot uproot centuries of colonial-capitalist imaginaries that frame the earth and its inhabitants as mere commodities to be endlessly consumed and extracted for profit. This intervention critically and imaginatively explores the challenges, possibilities and glimmers of ecocentric values and worldviews as essential foundations of transformations for multispecies conviviality. How do we begin to collectively craft new stories of the earth as agentic kin, rather than dead resource? What happens when a maple tree is not an ‘it’, but a ‘she’ (Kimmerer, 2003)?
