Ecocide Interdisciplinarity Series Talks for Justice

On May 2^nd, 2024, the project “Conceptualizing Ecocide” of the Pathways to Sustainability organized its second seminar titled "Ecocide as Semiocide: The Demise of Nature and Its Impact on Meaning" led by Dr. Yogi Hendlin, an environmental philosopher and biosemiotics expert from Erasmus University in Rotterdam. The seminar featured responses by Dr. Kári Driscoll (Faculty of Humanities, ICON Institute for Cultural Inquiry at UU), Dr. Luigi Prosperi, (Willem Pompe Institute for Criminal Law and Criminology, UU); and moderator Dr. Carolina Sanchez De Jaegher (Humanities/ICON at the UU).

The group working on conceptualizing ecocide has spent months exploring its multifaceted nature. This seminar offered valuable insights by delving deeper into the notion of ecocide as semiocide. Semiocide, a term coined by the Estonian semiotician Ivar Puura, describes the loss of meanings resulting from environmental destruction. Yet, throughout the seminar, it became evident that semiocide can also serve as a tool for rethinking emancipatory practices aimed at healing and repair.

Dr. Hendlin argued that ecocide is not just a metaphorical wound to our capacity to create meaning; from an interspecies perspective, it involves the destruction of species and habitats as well as the disruption of the network of relationships among them. Ecosystems are interconnected worlds that communicate and influence each other. When ecosystems lose their ability to ‘communicate’, they cannot function properly and face the risk of collapse. Some other key points highlighted by Dr. Hendlin in relation to the task of democracies and justice to stop ecocide included: 

Reflecting on Dr. Hendlin’s insights, Prosperi highlighted the limitations of anthropocentric paradigm in law, especially in addressing environmental harms. He reminded the audience that in law, what is criminalized is the conduct that results in harm to human beings. Unfortunately, he noted, “the degradation of the non-human world only gets attention insofar as it affects human beings.” Thus, “violence against animals may be relevant for criminal law only if it also affects human feelings for animals” advocating for a paradigm shift in the legal system. 

Additionally, Dr. Kári Driscoll highlighted two important insights within the emerging critique of ecocide as a short-sighted concept. First, he emphasized that conceptualizing ecocide requires a broader understanding of what is destroyed through ecocidal violence, beyond objective, quantifiable metrics such as biodiversity. Biosemiotics and the concept of semiocide might offer valuable perspectives in this regard. Driscoll’s comment raised the question of how to operationalize multiple conceptual tools, such as semiocide, within an interdisciplinary framework for ecocide that seeks to understand it multidimensionally and further influence change toward justice. Second, Driscoll noted that we should be careful not to fall into a reified binary of ‘us’ versus ‘them’, and rather seek to account for why and how an ecocidal and instrumentalizing worldview actively makes sense to so many people. The concept of Umwelt in biosemiotics might help to address the problem of conflicting worldviews.

Overall, the seminar provided a space for the pluriverse, encouraging alternative ways of sensing, living, and perceiving the world, moving beyond consumerism, which is viewed as a root cause of environmental distress. The pluriverse concept aligns with the idea coined by the Zapatistas in 1994 in Chiapas, Mexico: “a world in which many worlds fit.” Carolina Sanchez highlighted that ‘embracing these multiple perspectives can help us think outside the box’, which has been the goal of the 'conceptualizing ecocide' project since its inception.