HERMEX6 · Understanding Sixth Extinction as a Hermeneutical Challenge

Understanding Sixth Extinction as a Hermeneutical Challenge

There is sufficient consensus within the scientific community as to the fact that we find ourselves in the middle (or at least on the very edge) of a mass extinction. Mass extinctions are usually described as substantial biodiversity losses that occur rapidly on a global extent, with concurrent alteration and degradation of the ecosystems. Among these catastrophic events, the one which is currently taking place started at the end of the last glacial period, when the human species was emerging as a global superpredator, and is now significantly accelerating due to the increasing overexploitation of the planet – although it remains a ‘slow’ event in comparison to others in the past. At its current stage, the so-called sixth extinction (or “Holocene extinction”) involves humankind both as a victim and as an agent. Through its impact on the global environments (overhunting and meat consumption, overfishing, pollution, direct destruction of ecosystems like forests and wetlands…), humanity reveals itself as a species that has achieved the ability to directly affect its own fate and that of most living beings. HERMEX6 starts from the following assumption: the current amount of scientific data on the global biodiversity crisis does not correspond to an adequate comprehension of the issue. In short, we know more than we understand. Extinction, in this sense, is an attested emergency that unfolds in the background of our experiences: a matter of fact that has yet to become a matter of concern. This situation stems from a significant lack of cognitive, narrative and experiential frames that can link our personal circumstances to the ongoing catastrophic events and the related scientific knowledge. In fact, such events are not simply objective phenomena, but rather large-scale processes that need to be collectively experienced, conceived and narrated in a variety of ways that are yet to be invented. Environmental humanities rarely thematize this aspect, leaving unexplored the distance between scientific facts and socio-cultural narrations. Very few extensive studies have been devoted to the disproportion between abstract and lived knowledge of environmental emergencies and to its philosophical and cultural roots and implications; even fewer works analyse this aspect in relation to the global biodiversity crisis. The Sixth Extinction has been the subject of historical reconstructions, theoretical analyses and popular science essays as well as of some philosophical inquiries, but it has never been studied as regards its epistemic invisibility and hermeneutical issues. Philosophical hermeneutics, on the other hand, has rarely interrogated itself on how an environmental emergency can be interpreted, experienced and communicated and how languages relate to ecological catastrophes. HERMEX6 aims to compensate this lack in the literature. Its goal is to tackle these issues from a highly interdisciplinary perspective by hybridizing methods in the humanities and to introduce an innovative approach from which every environmental discipline will potentially benefit. The disciplines involved in the project are philosophical hermeneutics, socio-cultural theories of scientific knowledge and environmental communication. Philosophical hermeneutics emphasizes that all knowledge is interpretative and all epistemic relationships are lived human experiences. The hermeneutical perspective, however, has traditionally disregarded the hard sciences, thus remaining tied to ancient dualisms (interpretation vs. explanation, humanistic knowledge vs. natural sciences, language vs. nature) and to spiritualist or anthropocentric preconceptions. In this sense, theories of sciences that specifically assess the passage from scientific knowledge to concrete and lived knowledge can be useful to clarify how explanatory processes interlace with interpretative ones without falling into metaphysical disputes. By focusing on the rhetoric practices related to ecological issues, instead, environmental communication offers a pragmatic view on the concrete strategies to narrate natural emergencies. HERMEX6 aims to implement a hermeneutics of sixth extinction as a clear and pragmatic understanding of the performative intertwinement of descriptions and prescriptions in which the interpretative knowledge consists of. Among other aspects, I will address how visualization and the use of images (diagrams, charts, photographs…) impact our understanding of the biodiversity crisis; how and when the extinction of animal and vegetal species links to a sense of loss and to the interpretative frames of human grief; the different impact of fiction, nonfiction and political discourses on our emotional investment and the role of environmental metaphors; how spatial contiguity and temporal proximity play a role in our unconscious connections of facts and values; and how storytelling can help developing ecological attention to other forms of life and favouring adaptation to the environmental catastrophe. All these different issues can be conceptualized and elucidated through the conception of an integrated and situated knowledge of natural environments.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union