This chapter takes three plant types – the shady tree, the happy crop, and the wayside flower – as starting points for an exploration of ancient attitudes towards plants as both in harmony with and divergent from human worldviews and goals. It demonstrates how the same or similar plants can represent very different moods in different settings, sometimes positively reinforcing a human view, sometimes obstructing it. The connection between the sense of a human lifespan and the longevity or brevity of plants’ lives is forged and reforged in different contexts, while very human concerns with morality and aesthetics are differently projected onto these three broad categories of plant. Ranging from the earliest Greek works to the mid-imperial period of Rome, the chapter highlights both some continuities and some differences emerging in the course of around 900 years of literary engagement with plants.

Humankind has entered the Anthropecene era. The world faces numerous threats to the survival of humanity and other species. While diverse disciplines have risen to meet global challenges, psychology has largely focused on individual aspects such as cognition, emotion, and behavior. This chapter aims to support psychology in adapting to global challenges by introducing a novel tool, the panological model. This model comprehensively accounts for the complex relationships between multiple levels of analysis. The first part of the chapter introduces the core characteristics and innovations of the panological model, which seeks to expand upon Uri Bronfenbrenner’s bio-ecological model. These advancements include: a paradigm shift from anthropocentrism to ecocentrism, a new systemic vision, and a redefiniton of the role of time. The second part of the chapter combines the model with the principles of global fairness, wellness, and worthiness. This integration shows how psychology can gain a deeper understanding of macro-level phenomena, enabling it to address pressing global challenges like international conflicts, pandemics, and environmental sustainability.

This chapter addresses some of the scientific, philosophical and theological arguments brought to bear on the debates surrounding human–robot relationships. Noting that we define robots through our relationships with them, it shows how factors such as emotion and agency can indicate things such as a theory of mind that condition users to expect reciprocal relationships that model a sense of partnership. These factors are important in ‘lovotics’, or a trend in social robotics to produce robots that people want to develop relationships with. Such relationships, however, at least given current capabilities in robotics, will always fall short of conditioned expectations because robots, rather than being full partners, are largely reducible to the self or user. The chapter introduces the notions of anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism to demonstrate these critiques, and then moves on to consider alternative figurations of relationships – drawing in particular on articulations of relationality – that may enable us to rethink how we image and imagine robots.

We propose researchers of environmental violence have much to gain by considering the relevance of degrowth critiques in characterizing and addressing environmental violence. We argue a more dynamic, intersectional, and less anthropocentric definition of environmental violence reveals how pervasive forms of violence against the biosphere are still embedded in many contemporary strategies for sustainability. Recognizing these limits as well as their overlaps with degrowth can help us better identify assumptions and practices that address environmental violence’s sources and far-reaching consequences.

This chapter argues that to practise social work in the Anthropocene it is crucial to decentre the human. This decentring does not involve devaluing the human but embedding their experience in the non-human world. We begin with a discussion of the Anthropocene along with the ecological crises and the growth in population, production and consumption as issues that underpin it. We highlight the importance of moving from anthropocentrism to Gaia in the way we understand the relationship between the human and the non-human world. This shift will enable social workers to rethink the social, the community and human rights in more ecocentric ways and will have implications in the ways social workers engage in activism and practice to affect social change.

The fields of critical animal studies and feminist new materialisms have important implications for anthropology. In attending to ethics in human-animal relations, these fields not only decenter but also destabilize the very category of the Human. In conversation with critical animal studies and feminist anthropology, multispecies ethnography thinks with nonhumans and honors their specificities as both individuals and species. Multispecies ethnography encourages analysis of humans’ entanglement with other species as well as thinking about seemingly inanimate matter such as rocks as animate entities. Recognizing the animacy of objects offers interesting and important insights for ethnography. In this chapter, the author provides an overview of the cross-pollination of the multispecies and new materialist turns to explore how feminist and queer studies of the non/human are important for anthropology. Multispecies and feminist new materialist interrogations of sexuality are discussed, focusing on their innovative and important ethical contributions to human understandings of sexuality. The author argues that anthropology is uniquely positioned to intervene further in this conversation and posits that queering multispecies ethnography, rather than simply using nonhuman animals to reify or resist human formations of sexuality, can offer an opening to interrogate sexuality as a multispecies entanglement.

This chapter examines the influence of William Bartram´s Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida on the writing of Wordsworth and Coleridge in the 1790s and highlights the uniqueness of Bartram´s eco-centric approach to sublimity in early American thinking about the natural world. A practiced botanist and natural illustrator, Bartram delights in cataloguing plant and animal lives, but the Travels also offers a significant intervention into trans-Atlantic discourses of sublimity. Bartram´s sublime overwhelms the perceiver with plentitude rather than terror, and he narrates experiences of sublimity from amidst the rich life he delights to describe rather than at a distance. He emphasizes continuity between human and more-than-human lives. Bartram also resists the nationalistic orientation of his American contemporaries, attending to native and local epistemologies. The chapter concludes with comparisons between passages of the Travels, Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” and Wordsworth’s “Ruth.”

Making good decisions about sustainability requires explicit consideration about what criteria to use. Three grand traditions dominate most policy discussions: utilitarianism, deliberative ethics and anarchism/libertarianism. The chapter proposes seven criteria for good decisions. Three are criteria for the outcomes. A good decision should enhance the well-being of humans and other species while reducing stress on the environment; be efficient in allocating resources; and enhance individual freedoms. Four are criteria about process: take account of uncertainty in both facts and values, as well as value conflicts; promote fairness in both the decision process and its outcomes; rely on human cognitive strengths and compensate for weaknesses; and allow for social learning.

This chapter introduces the main theorists associated with ecological hermeneutics, their objectives and strategies. It demonstrates how an ecological approach can be applied using a specific story from the book of Judges as a case study.

This chapter examines the concept of speciesism by committing itself to an ameliorative inquiry. Accordingly, when engaging in antispeciesist theory, “speciesism” should be reserved for the unjustified instances of disadvantageous consideration or treatment of individuals, either by an appeal to species membership or by an appeal to other allegedly species-specific attributes. Next, it disputes the claim that anthropocentrism and speciesism are equivalent notions and that anthropocentrism, because it is inevitable, justifies speciesism. It then provides additional reasons for why anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric versions of speciesism are unjustified. Finally, it assesses a position that might be construed as a further instance of discrimination – modal personism. It concludes by suggesting that as an account of moral considerability, personism – modal or actual – is deeply flawed and should be rejected.

This chapter considers Virginia Woolf’s experiments in animal biography. It opens by presenting Woolf’s unpublished draft ‘Authorities’ note to Flush: A Biography (1933) as evidence of her knowing engagement with anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism, before going on to read that text alongside her first experiment in the genre, Orlando: A Biography (1928). In doing so, the chapter draws on correspondence between Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, as well as the latter’s rarely discussed book Faces: Profiles of Dogs (1961), to illustrate how canine companions take centre stage in their amorous discourse. It then turns to another overlooked intertext, Thomas Browne’s 1646 Pseudodoxia Epidemica, also known as Vulgar Errors, to show Woolf’s queering of his early modern belief that hares can change sex from female to male. Finally, the chapter places Flush in dialogue with a lesser-known dog biography the Woolfs considered for publication at the Hogarth Press (and which Woolf cleverly alludes to in her canine biography): Inordinate (?) Affection: A Story for Dog Lovers (1936) by composer, memoirist and suffragette Ethel Smyth.