I've been having a blast reading the articles in an issue of the online journal Environmental Humanities dedicated to the emerging field of "multispecies studies." It's actually a set of studies in various disciplines and "environmental humanities" is itself a new kid on the block, but that overlappiness fits. Multispecies studies isn't just attending to the fact that human beings share the planet with other species, but is committed to understanding the human as so entangled with others as to be itself already a multispecies. As Anna Tsing puts it, Human nature [in all its myriad forms] is an interspecies relation (2).The chapters move from the quaint and charming scene of French city-dwellers heading for the hills with sheep, both species trying to relearn too quickly abandoned practices of seasonal grazing called transhumance (29), to the unnerving discovery that hookworms (see below) are keystone species in our microbiome, "gut buddies" without whom we are vulnerable to various maladies. Jamie Lorimer quips: Living well with a stable, background, and unconsidered microbiome is possible only as a result of having a world at home in us. (72)
There's more to come but I'm already tingling. Where it will take me I don't know. The already world-changing idea that humans share a world with other species in a kind of international politics (as a famous scholar of Amazonian religion puts it) seems like the shallow end of a pool that goes deep indeed. I've come across many of these ideas before - though not transhumance (which sounds like it should have a multispecies meaning of its own, perhaps adverting to our own migratory nature!) or keystone worms. Several are adverted to in the Arts of living on a damaged planet: Ghosts and monsters of the anthropocene, and of course our pash Lyn Margulis has been teaching us to think like "consortia of consortia" in a world made of and for symbiosis for a while.
But what could this mean for religion? Indigenous "cosmo-visions" appreciate the reciprocal care of many species, as indeed - Frédérique Apffel-Marglin would remind us - does the folk wisdom of most people who have ever lived, including perhaps most people living now. One could think of Buddhist interdependence or the liquid congealings of the Dao or the inner life of the Trinity, but, really, could any of our ancestors have imagined that we have not only co-evolved with plants and other animals but, looking inward, are only 10 percent or 1 percent human, depending on whether our essential identity is pinned to human cells or genes (Lorimer 57)? Another frontier is to take the multispecies angle even beyond this to "lively" interchanges with the abiotic; this is the way some scholars bring in gods and spirits of various kinds. Can I go there?