How are human beings, animals and plants interconnected? What does the decline of biodiversity mean for these relationships and how we understand them? How can we transform or reconsider existing narratives in a changing world?
These questions were the subject of a recent interdisciplinary panel titled “Mending the Living World,” hosted by the Columbia Climate School, the Columbia Maison Française, Alliance Program and Villa Albertine. It was the inaugural edition of Albertine Conversations, a series designed to address the complex issues currently facing our society.
Archaeologist and associate professor at Columbia Climate School Kristina Douglass, French philosopher Corine Pelluchon, conservation scientist Ana Luz Porzecanski and biodiversity policy expert Cyrille Barnérias, discussed these and other challenging subjects in a conversation moderated by award-winning environmental journalist Sarah Sax.
“I’m incredibly excited to be in a panel that’s not another state of the crisis or crises panel,” Sax said in her opening remarks. “Rather, this [discussion] asks: How else we can understand this moment in terms of transition? What is ending? What is being revealed? And what might be beginning?”
Understanding any present‑day landscape and its physical, social or ecological features requires tracing the many layered histories that formed it, said Douglass. All these interactions have created this “palimpsest,” she explained, or a surface written over many times, where past events still shape the present.
Having recently visited the ancient Maya city of Caracol in modern-day Belize, Douglass presented the Maya as an example of how narratives about the past may be reevaluated. “I would invite us to reconsider this idea of collapse, because when we look at the Maya world and Maya cities, we know that at a certain point in time, the way they were living, the way they were using resources was no longer sustainable. A lot was shifting, including the climate. But what happened when those communities decided to dissipate, and leave these big urban centers like Caracol, has been framed to us now as a kind of collapse.”
“What if we actually thought of it instead as a form of flexibility and adaptation? The Maya encountered a situation in which their way of life was no longer sustainable. So they dispersed, they became more flexible, more mobile communities. And Maya communities are still alive today,” Douglass said. This “collapse” could then be viewed as a strategic shift for survival in response to environmental limits, climate change and resource pressures.
Douglass noted that her own archaeological work in southwest Madagascar highlights similar patterns. Over the last several thousand years, communities have thrived by staying highly flexible in terms of movement, social relationships, and in relation to the plants and animals around them, she explained. For example, they adapted fluidly to climate variability by shifting between fishing, herding, farming and other livelihood strategies as needed.
“Biodiversity has been declining in alarming ways, and the drivers of this decline have been accelerating. So clearly, we need to do something different,” Porzecanski said. In recent years, she suggested, there’s been an increasing push toward the need for transformative change, or a society-wide re-structuring or rethinking of the complex societal and ecosystem interactions around us. “Otherwise, we’re not going to address the root causes of our current polycrisis, which is a crisis of diversity loss, climate change, and social inequality and suffering,” she said.
Barnérias noted that using indicators like gross domestic product (GDP) as a sign of a country’s success is emblematic of our conflicting values when it comes to economic and global sustainability. “We know [that] GDP growth is mostly due to the use of natural resources and the destruction of them in a non-renewable fashion. For me, that really is a symptom of the way we see our society and the way we see our place in the world.”
Keeping these challenges in mind and looking to the future, Sax said, “people have talked about a need for reframing or creating a new social contract that would bring about a more equitable coexistence between humans and non-humans…. What exactly is needed for this kind of transformation versus collapse?”
“Climate is, I think, the most dramatic catalyst for us to rethink our relationships in the world,” Douglass responded. “The main difference between climate change one million years ago, as our human ancestors were developing new forms of cognition and technology,” and now is that “climate change today is driven by tremendous inequality and is exacerbating inequality worldwide.”
This inequality leads to many different kinds of injustices, she added, including at the intergenerational and interspecies levels. “What is this generation leaving for the generation that is coming behind? How are we treating plants and animals?”
Barnérias spoke to the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration and listening to Indigenous voices on their long-standing relationships with nature: “We know that we have to work outside of our lanes… to other ways of thoughts and…[to listen] to Indigenous people and their relationships with nature, which has really been integrated into this work.”
“The future is not fixed,” Pelluchon acknowledged. “It’s very difficult for people, especially young people, who feel that governments do not do enough. They understand what is going on but they continue to do business as usual.” We need more energy for people to appreciate that “ecology is not only a burden, but it’s also an opportunity.” Pelluchon said there needs to be more desire in this conversation and more enthusiasm, instead of the pervasive narrative of powerlessness and passivity.
“I would say anybody who’s trying to do something that advances society and gives us a chance at a livable future should try,” Porzecanski told the audience. “I would be encouraged if I see this work being oriented toward some of the causes I talked about—a relationship to nature that is not one of domination; a relationship is oriented toward the long-term and not the short-term; not the individual, but the common good; that is oriented toward justice.”