Plants, Animals and Personhood

This course is intended to be an opportunity to review the relation between the word “person” and plants and animals, with whom humans abide in a biosphere with no natural boundaries or territories.  While personhood is a recognition of human capability and agency, we have not taken many steps in the direction of recognizing the capability and agency of plants and animals.  Moreover, it is clear that we have diminished many of their functions and even annihilated many of their entire populations.  Nonetheless, there is movement to change this. In our course, three major features of personhood are explored: standing, rights and identity.  Each of these three features are divided into two types:  legal and spiritual standing, juridical and birth rights, and empirical and narrative identities.  Animals and plants are discussed in the context of each of the six types; and are discussed in that order (animals first and plants second) because the movement to change the existing conditions has been more active in relation to animals than to plants.  The growing tendency to blend both plant personhood and animal personhood into environmental or Nature personhood will also be explored.  The overall aim is to help reverse the deleterious conditions generated by the Anthropocene, in which we, and the plants and animals, struggle to live.