On Becoming-with (Part 1)

What is the opposite of dominion, of empire?

What is the opposite of dominion, of empire? I ask, quite unusually, after watching the new Netflix Dinosaurs documentary with Ethan. Last night, both of us thinking of the 1988 animated movie The Land Before Time, we were giddy as kids. But by the second episode, we couldn’t take it seriously.

Immersion into one of Earth’s ancient epochs, the Triassic-Jurassic period, was ruined by imposed human storytelling, or what humans imagined was going on with the dinosaurs, which followed a pedantic formula. Introduce a defenseless species who must overcome a rivalry with another species. Follow its evolution into an apex predator that dominates the Earth. Then, extinction event. The formula restarts with a new dinosaur.

To be clear, I didn’t expect artistic sophistication from this documentary. I think I expected something more like Our Planet. I know that science storytelling needs an emotional narrative to engage people, but it’s dismaying that it seems the popular notion of life on Earth still revolves around violent competition: Dog-eat-dog, or large-being-eating-medium-being-eating-small being and all of them lost eventually to Earth’s oscillation between Ice Age and Global Warming. A string of violence punctuated with pointlessness. It’s a tired narrative that, in my opinion, has no place in the 21st century.

While it’s true that planet Earth herself is the greatest equalizer, I refuse to believe that domination is the natural desire of all species on Earth—because the extension of that belief is that human domination through imperialism, colonialism, capitalism and so on, is natural and therefore inevitable.

As Peter Kropotkin wrote, life on Earth has flourished not due to competition but through mutual aid; domination is a choice, and a very unlikely one if we look at more-than-human history.

Currently, drones are flying from Iran into the Gulf Coast countries and escalating the war that the U.S. and Israel began. Some historians are predicting the U.S. to lose this war, and that their loss will begin the fall of the American empire. It may be too soon to ask, but I ask out of necessity: What happens after empire? Do we dare, as the species responsible for bringing about the 6th mass extinction, to imagine something different to dominion? We are not all equally accountable, but we are all, in one way or another, responsible for the future of our planet.

What is the opposite of dominion and empire? Submission is not a sufficient answer if we’re looking for new ways of being. Yielding is more correct and happens to also be poetic. What Donna Haraway calls “becoming-with” (or making kin with) wider webs of life involves yielding our anthropocentric sensibilities. Like lichen, fungi, and bacteria that is so often in symbiosis with another living thing, we need to adapt to our planetary crises by allying ourselves to what would outlive us.

I plan to write more about this in the coming weeks, thinking through Haraway’s Staying With the Trouble and Ursula K. Le Guin’s imagined realities of animal communication, utopias, and more (thank you for your wisdom, Madam Le Guin!)