Robert Booth

Eric Katz has recently claimed not only that rewilding is inherently paradoxical, but also that its paradoxes reveal rewilding's implication in the very mindset of anthropocentric domination against which it is floated as a partial solution. In this paper, I argue that rewilding need not in principle be committed to a pernicious anthropocentrism. With the assistance of an important distinction between ‘synchronic’ and ‘diachronic’ wildness, I firstly argue that rewilding need not be viciously paradoxical in any unequivocal sense. I then suggest, with the aid of Henry David Thoreau's account of synchronic wildness, that rewilding might rather be geared to inculcate hypersensitivity to nonhuman otherness particularly conducive to an anti-domination mindset. Hence rewilding may remain a live tool in responding to the challenges that characterise our shared world.

Despite thinking that an appropriately nonanthropocentric approach to the more-than-human world requires understanding phenomena to be ontologically basic, Karen Barad engages with phenomenology only fleetingly. Here, I suggest that Barad ought to take Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology more seriously for two reasons. First, Barad’s objections to his prospects for a suitably nonanthropocentric phenomenology rely upon a misdirected charge of representationalism. Second, Merleau-Ponty offers theoretical and methodological tools corrective to our tendencies toward metaphysical and behavioral colonialism which align with Barad’s project, yet, insofar as her agential realism remains committed to a very strong metaphysical naturalism, appear unavailable to her.

The key to mitigating the environmental crisis isn’t just based on science; it depends upon a profound philosophical revision of how we think about and behave in relation to the world. Our ongoing failure to interrupt the environmental crisis in a meaningful way stems, in part, from how we perceive the environment—what Robert Booth calls the "more-than-human world.” Anthropocentric presumptions of this world, inherited from natural science, have led us to better scientific knowledge about environmental problems and more science-based—yet inadequate—practical “solutions.” That’s not enough, Booth argues. Rather, he asserts that we must critically and self-reflexively revise how we perceive and consider ourselves within the more-than-human world as a matter of praxis in order to arrest our destructive impact on it. Across six chapters, Booth brings ecophenomenology—environmentally focused phenomenology—into productive dialogue with a rich array of other philosophical approaches, such as ecofeminism, new materialism, speculative realism, and object-oriented ontology. The book thus outlines and justifies why and how a specifically ecophenomenological praxis may lead to the disruption of the environmental crisis at its root. Booth’s observations and arguments make the leap from theory to practice insofar as they may influence how we fundamentally grasp the environmental crisis and what promising avenues of practical activism might look like. In Booth’s view, this is not about achieving a global scientific consensus regarding the material causes of the environmental crisis or the responsible use of “natural resources.” Instead, Booth calls for us to habitually resist our impetus to uncritically reduce more-than-human entities to “natural resources” in the first place. As Booth recognizes, Becoming a Place of Unrest cannot and does not tell us how we should act. Instead, it outlines and provides the basic means by which to instill positive and responsible conceptual and behavioral relationships with the rest of the world. Based on this, there is hope that we may begin to develop more concrete, actionable policies that bring about profound and lasting change.

In recent years many eco-phenomenological philosophers have argued that a more positive analysis of one’s relationship with more-than-human nature can be achieved through taking up Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh. Taking such an ontology seriously seems to facilitate even the possibility of our being able to express “what the world means to say.” I argue, however, that we should be cautious about both taking up such an ontology and making such ontological claims because in doing so we fail to take sufficiently seriously the impact of sedimentation in both perception and reflection and thus violate the remit of radical reflection that is essential to Merleau-Ponty’s characterization of philosophy.

A common commitment amongst speculative realists holds that phenomenology is irredeemably hostile to nonhuman alterity because phenomenology is correlationist. Since phenomenologists deny unmediated access to the modality of the in-itself, their correlationism purportedly consists in subsuming the more-than-human world into one’s own (narrowly anthropocentric) intentional horizon, a move that promises correspondingly disastrous environmental implications. Merleau-Pontian phenomenology appears to be especially guilty in this regard since Merleau-Ponty argues that taking our situated embodiment sufficiently seriously entails that any other entity encountered must always take the form of an “in-itself-for-us.” In this paper, I argue that the charge of correlationism against Merleau-Pontian phenomenology can be disarmed because it is either false or insubstantial. In either case, I argue, if we are to remain sufficiently open to more-than-human alterity to evade the dangerous sort of anthropocentrism that anticorrelationists rightly speak against, we would do well to retain the very subject-object ambiguity that motivates the correlationist charge against Merleau-Pontian phenomenology in the first place.