"Novel Overtures to the More-Than-Human World" is not only focused on climate change and its implications. It does raise compelling issues that may intrigue readers of Reckonings as they have me.
Climate change affects not only humans like us, but the overwhelming number of species that are not human: yet they are our kin; thus "the More-Than-Human World." It's an awkward construction, yes, but it should be clear to us all that the well-being of our own species, homo sapiens, is intimately, consequentially interwoven with the quality of non-human life with which (with whom?) we share this planet.
"Nature," we are accustomed to say, or "the natural world," as if it's ours to enjoy, despoil, care for or not, alarm, be alarmed by, admire or ignore. At the bottom of this message is an alternative construction in the essay by David Bollier (http://www.bollier.org/ and https://centerforneweconomics.org/people/david-bollier/).
Readers may also enjoy Robin Wall Kimmerer's related essay in The Ecologist magazine, "Living beings are our kith and kin."
In Kimmerer's essay and in her altogether admirable book cited below, Kimmerer suggests we need a new pronoun in order to avoid objectifying the world of nature. Her choice, with good reason, is the word kin. I admire that suggestion. Living together as we do, we are all kin. So why not use as well the words us, our and we? We are one with the forest, the tree, the field, the marsh. Especially when I am quiet, I love our gathering, the soft breeze in our leaves and branches, our face and hair.
Although the phrase "kith and kin" has become archaic (at least the kith part), originally it meant one's relations. The word kith is Old English, and the original senses were ‘knowledge,’ ‘one's native land,' and ‘friends and neighbors.’ The phrase kith and kin originally denoted one's country and relatives; later one's friends and relatives. (See the Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.)
Please read Kimmerer's moving and deeply informed book, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (2013). In its preface she writes:
"I could hand you a braid of sweetgrass, as thick and shining as the plait that hung down my grandmother's back. But
it is not mine to give, nor yours to take. Wiingaashk belongs to herself. So I offer, in its place, a braid of stories meant to heal our relationship with the world. This braid is woven from three strands: Indigenous ways of knowing, scientific knowledge, and the story of an Anishinabekwe scientist trying to bring them together in service to what matters most. It is an intertwining of science, spirit and story—old stories and new ones that can be medicine for our broken relationship with earth, a pharmacopoeia of healing stories that allow us to imagine a different relationship, in which people and land are good medicine for each other."
Here is David Bollier's essay:
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2021-03-10/novel-overtures-to-the-more-than-human-world/
Robin Wall Zimmerer
Mirror Lake, Milford Sound, New Zealand