“human”

There are too many usages to meaningfully chart here. However, “human” left unqualified in any political discourse about water in the arid American West can perpetuate at least three hierarchical legacies: human-to-animal/plant, human-to-machine, and human-to-(sub)human.

If we are to take seriously Indigenous theories of interdependence, as well as Jennifer Daryl Slack’s call to attend to a non-anthropocentric [water] culture (see “culture”), we must challenge the human/nonhuman binary in everyday discourses about water in the arid American West. 

The human/nonhuman binary is “something weird,” writes N. Kathryn Hayles. “On one side are some seven billion individuals, members of the Homo sapiens species; on the other side sits everything else on the planet, including all the other species in the world, and all the objects ranging from rocks to clouds.”[1] An important amendment to Hayles’ definition is that historically not all members of the Homo sapiens species have been afforded “humanity.” In fact, the human/nonhuman binary unfolds into at least three problematic hierarchies that have historically undermined our ability to adequately understand participants in the water cycle; that is, human-to-animal/plant, human-to-machine, and human-to-(sub)human. 

Shifts in late twentieth century scientific culture have, according to Donna Haraway, called into question “the last beachheads of human uniqueness…language, tool use, social behavior, mental events.”[2] However, Gunkel notes that instrumentalist and anthropocentric philosophies still function as mechanisms to separate machines and animals/plants from humans. For instrumentalists, machines are a tool, a means to an end, “nothing more and nothing less.”[3] In turn, machines are “‘fit objects’ of exploitation, oppression, enslavement, and finally extermination.”[4] For Gunkel, instrumentalism works with anthropocentrism because plants, animals, and humans which have been determined to be “otherwise than human” are able to be turned into instruments of and for human knowledge production. The justifications for animal testing exemplify this anthropocentric instrumentality.

The resilience of this binary is easier to understand when we trace its history. The concept of the human/non-human binary follows the logic of the pure/impure binaries—what Sylvia Wynter calls “symbolic master codes”—that were a hallmark of ancient Greek thought and which have persisted to the Western present through different symbolic transformations. For the ancient Greeks, there was an “increasing perfection” from the earth/body to the heavens/universal truths.[5] This dualism was passed on through different cultural formations in the Western tradition, like the Medieval spirit/flesh code, Renaissance reason/passion code, (Social) Darwinian white male/“other” code.[6] In all these codes, traits associated with the “nonhuman” or “less than human” find themselves at the bottom of the social hierarchy.  

Decolonial theorists and environmental justice scholars bring into clear focus how such treatment extends to human beings through a problematic human-(sub)human hierarchy, a “sliding scale humanity” which excludes, for example, “barbarians, women, Jews, and people of color.”[7] Wynter, along with decolonial theorist Maria Lugones, show us that “human” has traditionally reified in Western culture the humans which count as “civilized” (fully human) versus “savage” (subhuman). Lugones writes: “I understand the dichotomous hierarchy between the human and the non-human as the central dichotomy of colonial modernity.” 

Beginning with the colonization of the Americas and the Caribbean, a hierarchical, dichotomous distinction between human and non-human was imposed on the colonized in the service of Western man. It was accompanied by other dichotomous hierarchical distinctions, among them that between men and women. This distinction became a mark of the human and a mark of civilization. Only the civilized arc men or women. Indigenous peoples of the Americas and enslaved Africans were classified as not human in species-as animals, uncontrollably sexual and wild. The European, bourgeois, colonial, modern man became a subject/agent, fit for rule, for public life and ruling, a being of civilization, heterosexual, Christian, a being of mind and reason. The European bourgeois woman was not understood as his complement, but as someone who reproduced race and capital through her sexual purity, passivity, and being homebound in the service of the white, European, bourgeois man.[8] 

For Lugones, the human/nonhuman binary has provided a basis for racial, gendered, and civilizational hierarchies.[9] The impact of this binary for people at the bottom of racial and gendered hierarchies is well documented today by environmental justice scholars. Overall, they show us that environmental injustices—the exploitation of both humans and the environment—disproportionately impact human populations that have historically been associated with the “non-human” side of this binary—“expendable” people and nonhuman environments.[10]

[1] Katherine Hayles, Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious, Book, Whole (London;Chicago; The University of Chicago Press, 2017), 30.

[2] Donna Haraway qtd. in David J. Gunkel, The Machine Question: Critical Perspectives on AI, Robots, and Ethics, Book, Whole (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2012), 30.

[3] Gunkel, 24.

[4] Gunkel, 30.

[5] Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 274, https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015.

[6] Wynter, 278.

[7] Zylinkska qtd. in Gunkel, The Machine Question: Critical Perspectives on AI, Robots, and Ethics, 29.

[8] Maria Lugones, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism,” Hypatia, no. Fall (2010): 743.

[9] Consistent with this account: Teddy Bear Patriarchy, Decolonizing Conservation Heroes. 

[10] David N. Pellow, “Toward A Critical Environmental Justice Studies: Black Lives Matter as an Environmental Justice Challenge,” Du Bois Review, 2016; Lisa Sun-Hee Park and David N. Pellow, The Slums of Aspen: Immigrants vs. the Environment in America’s Eden, Book, Whole (New York: New York University Press, 2011); Phaedra C. Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Pollution, Travel, and Environmental Justice, Book, Whole (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007).