Imagine politics in action—what comes to mind? Maybe a solemn government building, a ballot box, a campaign slogan. But politics also looks like a honeybee's waggle dance, a buffalo herd rising to stand. It looks, on an individual level, like an orangutan resisting captivity. If we think of democracy, fundamentally, as communal decisionmaking, then it's a process that many animals undoubtedly partake in too. James Bridle, in an essay adapted from his book Ways of Being, asks what it might look like for humans to expand our practice of democracy beyond ourselves. How can nonhuman animals and ecosystems be included in decisions that affect them? This effort has most recently taken the form of court cases arguing for legal personhood to be granted to nonhumans; while the case for Happy, an elephant at the Bronx Zoo, was denied, India's Ganges River and Colombia's Amazon rainforest have both been declared legal persons. In the near future, too, fully autonomous AI systems may need new frameworks of responsibility. Ultimately, any political or legal system that manages to address global problems will have to encompass the needs of the entire planet. "The enactment of a more-than-human politics calls explicitly for a politics beyond the individual, and beyond the nation-state," writes Bridle. "It calls for care, rather than legislation, to guide it." Camille Bromley | Features Editor |
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