Animal ABidings: recoverIng from DisastErs in more-than-human communities

Introduction

What and how can we learn from animals about recovering from disasters? How can we hear them in their own terms, translate their stories, and include their perspectives in human knowledge about disasters? This project explores the resilience of multispecies communities and their capacities for healing and bouncing back from disasters through the point of view of nonhuman animals.

Context

It departs from the current context of the acute climate crisis, which sets the stage for Dantesque scenarios of impending climate-driven disasters such as wildfires, floods, tornados, and hurricanes. These events lead to extensive loss of both human and nonhuman lives, livable dwellings, and species extinction.

Focus on Wildfires

Focusing on wildfires as disasters that challenge previous expert knowledge due to climate change and human exploitation of natural resources, we propose to compare three countries where wildfires have taken on increasingly critical proportions every year:

1. Brazil
2. Australia
3. Portugal

Addressing the Species Gap

We address a species gap in our knowledge of disasters, and wildfires in particular, by exploring the possibilities of learning with animals how to live and cope with extreme change and uncertainty in wildfire-prone areas.

Interdisciplinary Approach

Drawing on contributions from sociologists, anthropologists, ethologists, biologists, and geographers, ABIDE aims at attuning to, translating, and including the voices, stories, and experiences of animals into our knowledge of how multispecies communities can better recover from the traumatic experience of wildfires.

Goals

In the end, we seek to build the foundations for a new interdisciplinary framework for addressing humans' and animals' ability to build and abide in multispecies communities that are more resilient to wildfires and other disasters.

Aspirations

In so doing, we aspire to identify the landmarks of a post-species episteme, and thus push forward the frontiers of knowledge of human-animal relations, as well as contribute to a more-than-human governance of disasters.