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Abstract
Drawing from material feminists, posthumanists, and science and technology studies, I conceptualize humans as the products of contingent, ongoing practices with more than humans. Humans are not merely dependent on nonhumans, but entangled with them. From technology to animals, nonhumans are active participants in the world’s becoming, co-constituting the very being of humans—including our body, identity, and agency. Based on this conceptualization, I first address ethical issues at the intersection of food, agriculture, and technology by comparing the worlds associated with the landrace Carolina Gold and the genetically modified Golden Rice. Each rice is evaluated based on the criterion of biocultural diversity and how well each promotes open-ended futures of multi-species flourishing. In the second part, I work to cross pollinate environmental ethics with social epistemology. In particular, I critique social epistemology’s anthropocentric focus on propositional knowledge and argue for expanding social epistemology to include nonhuman animals. By recognizing that nonhuman animals are epistemic agents with tacit, embodied knowledge, I argue that it is possible for humans to commit epistemic injustices against nonhuman animals. These injustices wrong them as knowers and givers of knowledge, silencing their testimony and erasing their competencies in different knowledge practices. In the third part, I turn to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s account of gratitude, gift giving, and reciprocity to advance an affirmative and joyful environmental ethic. Each person has a specific responsibility to share their unique gifts with the world in return for the gifts they receive from nature. Since reciprocity requires knowing oneself and the nonhuman recipient, I argue that open-ended curiosity is a virtue that enables humans to better understand nonhumans through the co-creation of shared worlds and the attunement of bodies.