Shifting more‐than‐human relationships amidst social–ecological disturbance

Abstract

Social–ecological disruptions, such as changing climate, extreme weather‐related events and the COVID‐19 pandemic, can have cascading and long‐term consequences for people, ecosystems and multispecies relationships. As the early COVID‐19 pandemic disrupted people's lives through isolation and restricted human contact, more‐than‐human relationships played a heightened role in individuals' day‐to‐day lives with potential long‐term impacts on multispecies justice. We analysed 72 interviews conducted during the early (May–June 2020) COVID‐19 lockdown in the United States to investigate how social–ecological disruptions and spatial re‐orderings, exemplified by the pandemic, reassemble more‐than‐human relationships. We consider new relational values through a transformative multispecies justice framing, which contends that times of uncertainty can inspire meaningful connections with the more‐than‐human world, facilitating care and reciprocal relationships during times of disruption. Among interviewee accounts, we find that disorderings of daily life during the pandemic interweave with past and ongoing experiences of inequity to form mosaics of disruption. These mosaics of disruption created circumstances in which interviewees formed new connections with the more‐than‐human world. The more‐than‐human connections of interviewees sat along a spectrum and did not universally represent the same strength of relational values. The more‐than‐human connections were defined by individual's positionality and restricted geographies of the circumstances. However, the newly formed relationships seemed to be ephemeral, indicating that they would not necessarily endure outside of an early‐pandemic context. Thus, while individuals reported rearranged relationships out of pandemic precarity, their transitory qualities do not directly promise long‐term transformational multispecies connections. Our findings suggest that moments of disruption alone do not necessarily produce durable change and there is a need to go beyond merely recognizing relationality. Policy implications: Transformative multispecies justice requires long‐term, routine commitment to deepening relationships with the more‐than‐human world. While future social–ecological and spatial disturbances can be a window of opportunity to initiate multispecies relationships, future initiatives and policies must actively support and foster these relationships and strong relational values beyond the disturbances—recognizing the long‐term, non‐linear processes of transformation needed to address our future challenges. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.