“You wonder,” writes Bharati Mukherjee in her novel The Tree Bride, “if everyone and everything in the world is intimately related… You pluck a thread, and it leads to…everywhere.” And she goes on to ask: “Is there a limit to relatedness?” The necessity for rethinking human beings emanates from the multiple entangled pandemics, unstable weather patterns that jeo pardise food production, rising sea levels that compound the risk of catastrophic flooding, and the effects of poverty, war, and recession which are global in scope and unprecedented in scale. Therefore, to be human in the twenty-first century requires understanding the realities of human-induced climate calamities, realizing the dangers of the carbon economy as well as ecological limits to capitalism and developing non-anthropocentric worldviews to find out the possibilities of the common planetary futures.
The current climate crisis challenges western modernity. PLANETARITY and Enlightenment ideas, mostly anthropocentric and rooted in the Platonic and Judeo-Christian metaphysical traditions. However, humanists, as Bruno Latour puts it, were “concerned only about humans; the rest, for them, is mere materiality or cold objectivity”. Captive to Cartesian dualism and instrumentalist rationality of industrial/capitalist modernity, our material entanglements in the past have led to environmental catastrophes, exploitation of resources, and eco- technological evolution signaled by the Anthropocene, necessitating a critical re-engagement with the Enlightenment binary of man versus nature. Post humanist discourse in the recent decades advanced towards a non- dualistic understanding of multiplicity and radical interdependency suggesting that human is not the be-all and end-all. It argued that the human, in a shared world, is co-constituted by its humananimality, leading us to rethink the human in relation to the planetary consciousness.
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