Dominion Over the Earth: Invasive Species, Linguistic Imperialism, and Indigenous Knowledge
“…branding animals ‘invasive’ is not only unethical, but it is also based on a confused understanding of species migrations over time. The reason that the rhetoric of invasive species has become so popular is because it provides a simplistic account of what are in fact very complicated biological processes. As such, the invasive species discourse is too often used as a political tool to scapegoat other living things for problems that are in fact caused or exacerbated by humans […] This personification and demonizing of other living things is morally unacceptable because metaphors like these are not simply artistic embellishments, they are designed specifically to provoke emotions such as fear and revulsion. As a result, people are made to feel justified in either allowing their deaths or actively participating in them.””
The above quote comes from a paper entitled Wildlife Ethics and Practice: Why We Need to Change the Way We Talk About ‘Invasive Species’ written by Meera Iona Inglis. I came across this paper recently while researching ethical ways that humans deal with “invasive species.” A throng of items have precipitated my thinking about this topic: for one my home state, Pennsylvania, is currently dealing with an “invasion” of spotted laternflys and the PA Department Of Agriculture recommends that we literally “Kill it! Squash it, smash it…just get rid of it.” Artistic embellishment indeed.
Additionally, the phenomenon of feral pigs in the southeast United States came up for me in recent conversations. I learned that people in Texas, for instance, enjoy shooting pigs for sport out of helicopters in an effort to help curb the population of this apparently destructive species and that this activity is called “porkchoppering.” I came away from that conversation irked by a few things and one of those things was the use of language like “invasive species” which, as Ingles points out in her paper, definitely has European colonial/imperial underpinnings. As if that weren’t enough, my interlocutor just happened to be a conservative Christian who must have been unaware of my considerable interest in theology and philosophy because they pointed out matter-of-factly to me during the conversation that God did give humans dominion over the Earth and, after all, her resources are ours to be used… Needless to say I sat there while the righteous indigence bubbled quite thoroughly in me and I thought to myself, ‘WTF?!? Here we go!’ *loud fist-clenched knuckle crack* (Incidentally, I chuckled to myself about this interaction again after recently having watched season 2, episode 8 of Reservation Dogs ((which btw is a show I can’t say enough good things about)), particularly the part when Kenny Boy and Big stumble across a white-supremacist cult in the woods consisting of a group of “oil execs and politicians” who think they’re the real owners of Native land and who, in addition to doing things like fornicating with dead fish heads, credulously and comically chant “Ours! Ours! Ours!”; the point and criticism here is very well taken by me.)
The last tie-in to mention here is that Indigenous philosophy of science has become a big interest of mine which was perhaps kicked off by reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweet Grass in one of my book groups. Much of what I’ve been learning from Indigenous teachers fits very nicely with my already established (but always mutating) convictions as a process-relational panentheist and radical Anarcho-Christian practitioner who has a strong affinity for eco-theological perspectives like that of Sally McFague, who Sam Coker discusses very nicely by writing that her “Christic paradigm emerges from her view that the whole cosmos should be thought of as the body of God. The two dimensions to this paradigm McFague puts forth are shape and scope, shape being the “direction of creation…toward inclusive love for all, especially the oppressed, the outcast, the vulnerable,” and scope being “all of creation in a particular salvific direction, toward the liberation, healing, and fulfillment of all bodies.” For McFague, the story of Jesus reveals God’s solidarity with the oppressed and marginalized. The fact that Jesus is fully human, himself a part of the natural world, shows God’s concern not only for souls but for bodies. Because the scope of the Christic paradigm includes the whole of creation, Jesus is in solidarity with all suffering bodies, which in this age should include the more-than-human natural world.”
This horrible doctrine I mentioned above, which depicts humans as having dominion over the Earth, is most definitely the result of a very tiny bit of the Bible being translated into Greek and Latin from Hebrew which can unfortunately give one a baseline notion of God as being an all-powerful sovereign who creates ‘ex-nihilo’ or out of nothing. Augustine famously espoused this doctrine but because this interpretation was based on Greek and Latin translations of Hebrew we lose something very crucial, namely: the processual and co-creative nature of the Divine. Timothy Beal describes this in his essay found at Religion Dispatches:
“The Hebrew text, however, conjures a very different image, not of creation from nothing but emergence from chaos. How could it be so different from the Greek and Latin translations? It comes down to the very first Hebrew word in the story, bere’šit (“be-ray-sheet”), and how we read its very first letter, the bet (“b” sound), in relation to the rest of the word, re’šit. This word can be taken either as a noun, “beginning,” or as a verb, “began.”
If you read it as a noun, as the Greek and Latin translations did, then you take the bet as a preposition, “in,” and you get a simple declarative sentence familiar from the King James Version translation: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Full stop. What follows, “And the earth was without form, and void,” then describes the unformed, chaotic (tohu vabohu) earth that God just created from nothing. Taken this way, then, we imagine an absolute beginning, with God creating heaven and earth from nothing. Which is how the Greek and Latin translations took it.
But if you read this first word as a verb, as most Hebrew biblical scholars argue you should, then the bet modifies that verb, and you get something like “when began.” That leads to a translation something like, “When God began creating the heavens and the earth, the earth,” which was already there when God began creating, “was formless void.” Taken this way, we have a story that begins not at some absolute metaphysical beginning, with nothing, but in the midst of things, with God creating, or rather giving shape and form to, things that are already there in some sort of primordial formlessness.
This offers an image of God as a co-creative participant with the material universe, interacting with each element of creation as it emerges and integrates within a larger ecosystem. This is not creation from nothing but emergence from chaos, with a creator God who’s in relationship both with the material world and with the primordial deep from which it surfaces. God and matter are not categorically separate. On the contrary, they’re intimately connected.”
Recalling Robin Wall Kimmerer’s work, we find a close connection here regarding how the language we use to speak of the dynamic, pulsating, animated natural world of which we are a small part can either help us to affirm kinship with it or lead us to objectify it, deny it, and consume it:
“The language that my grandfather was forbidden to speak is composed primarily of verbs, ways to describe the vital beingness of the world. Both nouns and verbs come in two forms, the animate and the inanimate. You hear a blue jay with a different verb than you hear an airplane, distinguishing that which possesses the quality of life from that which is merely an object. Birds, bugs, and berries are spoken of with the same respectful grammar as humans are, as if we were all members of the same family. Because we are. There is no it for nature. Living beings are referred to as subjects, never as objects, and personhood is extended to all who breathe and some who don’t. I greet the silent boulder people with the same respect as I do the talkative chickadees.
It’s no wonder that our language was forbidden. The language we speak is an affront to the ears of the colonist in every way, because it is a language that challenges the fundamental tenets of Western thinking—that humans alone are possessed of rights and all the rest of the living world exists for human use. Those whom my ancestors called relatives were renamed natural resources. In contrast to verb-based Potawatomi, the English language is made up primarily of nouns, somehow appropriate for a culture so obsessed with things.
At the same time that the language of the land was being suppressed, the land itself was being converted from the communal responsibility of native people to the private property of settlers, in a one-two punch of colonization. Replacing the aboriginal idea of land as a revered living being with the colonial understanding of land as a warehouse of natural resources was essential to Manifest Destiny, so languages that told a different story were an enemy. Indigenous languages and thought were as much an impediment to land-taking as were the vast herds of buffalo, and so were likewise targeted for extermination.
Linguistic imperialism has always been a tool of colonization, meant to obliterate history and the visibility of the people who were displaced along with their languages.”
I think it’s safe to say that the Jewish idea of humans being given “dominion” over creation by God is more akin to imperatives that indigenous thinkers, like Kimmerer, might discuss with regard to reciprocating the gifts we’re given by Mother Nature (reciprocity) and then emphasizing our responsibility to care for creation, not to use it and dispose of it. The Bible certainly does NOT give authorization to view the natural world as a collection of lifeless, static objects to be simply consumed by humans.
So then the language and philosophical/theological concepts we use affect how we see our worlds. Check. And the Earth and its inhabitants are not static objects but Divinely created, constantly changing, moving, and adapting subjects. Check. But, the skeptic might still wonder, ‘what about the destruction caused by some of these non-native species? Should we stand by and do nothing about these lanternflies and ferral pigs?!? They’re causing thousands of dollars of damage for crying out loud?!?’
These are good questions but the first thing that should immediately be highlighted here is that conflating commercial and environmental concerns when discussing “invasive species” makes it sound, as Eric Johnson astutely points out, “as though threats to the bottom line of a business are tantamount to an ecological problem.” Johnson continues explaining that this “…is particularly troublesome considering some businesses — industrial monocropping or cattle farming, for example — that are protected against invasive species by federal and state management programs are themselves hugely harmful to biodiversity. Scientists on both sides of the invasive species debate agree this conflation is problematic.”
This being the case, then, let’s be constructive now and continue learning from Indigenous teachers. Nicholas J. Reo and Laura A. Ogden are two people who have thought about this issue from an Indigenous perspective. Reo, an assistant professor of Native American and environmental studies at Dartmouth College, alongside anthropologist Laura Ogden, have been researching how invasive species mitigation could be approached differently. In their paper they discuss how Indigenous knowledge (like that of the Anishnaabe cited by Reo in the paper) allows one to overcome native-non-native binaries that dominate much of the scientific discourse and encourages one to view species who find their way into new habitats as Diaspora nations in their own right, and not necessarily a menace but an opportunity. Reo and Ogden write:
“Our findings illuminate three key aspects of Anishnaabe perspectives about introduced species that contrasts with the mainstream conservation perspectives. First, for Anishnaabe, plants and animals are family members and respected as elder siblings to humans. Plants and animals move across the landscape, and mobility is not inherently good or bad, regardless of precipitating cause. Second, humans have an obligation to figure out the nature of our relationship with new arrivals, which includes careful consideration of their potential gifts and our reciprocal responsibilities. Neglecting our responsibilities for longstanding plant and animal relations is one way Anishnaabe people explain the ecological impacts of introduced species. Third, Euro-American approaches to land management, such as invasive species eradication programs, can create barriers to Anishnaabe fulfilling their responsibilities to plant and animal kin.”
Thinking of plants and animals as family really does change things, doesn’t it? It forces us to start from a less antagonistic place and implores us to think differently and creatively. To be honest this is right up my alley. I’m proudly on the record espousing how important imaginative divergent thinking is. Taking the option of imperially eradicating non-native species OFF THE TABLE has the powerful potential to open doors for us that have never been opened before. The answer, however, as an interview with Reo documents, “isn’t always clear, but Reo’s home community and other Anishinaabe nations are exploring different ways to be stewards to these new nations […] ‘This is a completely different orientation than most scientists take in their work,’ he said. ‘I think some scientists would be open to, and benefit from, taking a more participatory, relational approach in their work.'”
I will not pretend to have easy answers to potentially problematic ferrel pigs or lanternflies but I sure do think that a good start would be to completely drop the tough guy attitude with regard to conquering nature and begin to take Indigenous knowledge seriously by thinking creatively and faithfully about how we as humans fit in with our other-than-human family. I have read that, with lanternflies in particular, for example, one potential benefit might be that “the honeydew secreted by lanternflies which had feasted on the tree of heaven not only led to changes in flavor deemed beneficial to the marketing of late-summer Pennsylvania honey, but was reported to have less ash content than aphid honeydew, thus making it a better cold-weather food source to produce healthier bee colonies and resist parasitic mite infestations.” And speaking of honeybees, let us not forget that they are also non-native to the USA. Regardless, if nothing else is to be said here about any of this, let us at least conclude by admitting that it would probably behoove us all in the U.S. to get used to these “invasions” because, like it or not, climate change is only going to exasperate migration of species, human and non-human alike.
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Painting above: Sioux Eagle Dancer by Oscar Howe
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