Anthropomorphizing Nature

ANTHRO POMOR PHIZING N AT U R E

This is a text for a concept of a new type of burial, developed for a course of the Willem de Kooning Academy. This burial would consist of composing bodies and turning them into soil. This soil is used to grow a plant of your choice in a park. With this burial one can donate their body to nature and become the energy for a plant to flourish on. The park would remain a park and will not act like a cemetery. It is a joyous place where people can relax, have picnics and walk their dogs. Our group was assigned the park “Het Dakpark” in Rotterdam, Netherlands.

By Chris Nelck, March 2021

How willing are people going to be to donate their bodies to nature in the future?

Recently I have been getting a lot into philosophy and sociology. I am now reading the Epistemology of Resistance by José Medina. A book about why and how inequality, racism and sexism exist in our democracy. No wonder that once we started this project I got curious about the theoretical side of the project. How is our relationship with nature going to change over the years? Two things stood out to me that I would like to discuss: a funeral for a glacier in Iceland and, closer to home, the trees next to Rotterdam central station. I am not a scientist and I encourage you to criticize or discuss any part of this writing. I would love to take this a step further in the future and write an essay about it.

Ahmed moet verkassen na 125 jaar trouwe dienst!

While walking to my work I am always greeted by six beautiful trees, who are growing next to central station. I just recently noticed that they were wearing banners. It was an action against the removal of the trees in order to build a new 140-meter-high architectural attraction, the Tree House. The Tree House is, ironically enough, going to be a green, sustainable building with offices and living spaces. Each tree had a banner with their name and how old they were. One said “Bram wordt bedreigd na 90 jaar trouwe dienst”, Bram is being endangered after ninety years of loyal service. This made me wheeze when I read it, to my surprise, for me being the leftist nature lover that I am. It just sounded ridiculous. Keeping track of age and giving names are both very human like qualities. Are people really trying to make a tree more human-like in order to gain peoples empathy and attention? Aren’t we overestimating the worth of six trees in a city with 160.000 other trees?

By naming plants or objects, we are attributing a humanlike mind to it. We have a history of naming cars, bikes, houseplants and animals.

This humanlike element drives us to take better and longer care for it. When your houseplant called James starts looking a bit rough, you take care of it instead of just getting a new one. The new plant would just not be the same as poor James. But why do we do this?

“Human brains are tuned to try to understand other human’s intentions, thoughts and feelings. This concept is called Theory of Mind. Specific regions of the brain contain populations of ‘mirror’ neurons, which display the same activity when we’re performing an action as when we observe others performing an action. People with deficits in the

regions where these mirror neurons are located correspond to deficits in empathy and Theory of Mind. Unsurprisingly, these are the same regions of the brain that are active when a person is anthropomorphizing.” 1

This quote mentions the Theory of mind. The Theory of Mind helps us understand others. It makes us capable of reading other people’s emotions, beliefs and knowledge. When we see someone participate in an action Theory of Mind allows us to think about what someone might be thinking in that moment. Thinking about thinking.

Because we are so tuned on understanding humans, the same region in our brains is active while trying to understand something with vague human characteristics, these characteristics can be as small as the front of a car looking like a face. This leads us to project human qualities on non-human objects. This is called anthropomorphizing.

Ahmed, one of the trees named by the activists, is no longer a tree, it is that tree called Ahmed.

1 Axelrod, J. (2018, 1 maart). Why Do We Anthropomorphize? Geraadpleegd van https://psychcentral.com/news/2018/03/01/why-do-we-anthropomorphize#1

anthropomorphize verb

gerund or present participle: anthropomorphizing

attribute human characteristics or behaviour to (a god, animal, or object).

“people’s tendency to anthropomorphize their dogs”

The funeral of Okjökull Anthropomorphism, giving human characteristics to animals, objects or nature, is very relevant in environmental politics. “In general anthropomorphism of nature fosters conservation behavior”1 and that is exactly what we need during this climate crisis. It has already been used in an Icelandic environmental campaign for their melting glaciers.

In August 2019 around a hundred activists, former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson and Iceland’s prime minister Katrin Jakobsdottir walked up to the remaining bits of the glacier Okjökull to install a plague. It was the first ever glacier of Iceland to melt.

The whole happening was done in a funeral form. A funeral, the way we in the west traditionally hold it, is a ritual made up by humans. Doing it for a glacier would seem rather pointless. But by doing so the issue of climate change becomes more visible and more relatable for us humans.

There has been an overall shift in our attitude towards nature. The nature versus mankind changed into us using nature as a tool (humanization of nature), and now into a feeling of sentiment. It is something to be protected and cared for. I wanted to mention this because anthropomorphism extends that protective attitude.

Now back to our project. Why do I keep going on about anthropomorphism? I think anthropomorphism is the key to the realization of our project. Donating parts of your body is now a human to human action. Trees or plants would have to stand equal to humans or at least we would have to see some correlation between humans and 2 Saving Mr. Nature: Anthropomorphism enhances connectedness to and protectiveness toward nature. (2013, 1 mei). Geraadpleegd van https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/ S0022103113000292

plants to do such action. Seeing our relationship with nature change and seeing anthropomorphism getting more normal towards natural phenomena, I am pretty optimistic about the future of our idea. However, 2050 seems too optimistic to me. Even within our generation it might still not be the most popular idea, but I would not be surprised if the generation after us fully accepted the concept of treating trees and plants more like humans.

Axelrod, J. (2018, 1 maart). Why Do We Anthropomorphize?

Geraadpleegd van https://psychcentral.com/news/2018/03/01/ why-do-we-anthropomorphize#1 BBC News. (2011, 21 januari). A Point of View: Has our relationship

with nature changed? Geraadpleegd van https://www.bbc.com/ news/magazine-12241405 Bucklin, S. (2017, 3 november). The Psychology of Giving Human

Names to Your Stuff. Geraadpleegd van https://www.thecut.

com/2017/11/the-psychology-of-giving-human-names-to- your-stuff.html Cherry, K., & Gans, S. (2020, 7 april). How the Theory of Mind Helps

Us Understand Others. Geraadpleegd van https://www. verywellmind.com/theory-of-mind-4176826 Ditmars, A. (2020, 2 november). Deze milieufilosoof vindt dat we

moeten oppassen voor het humaniseren van dieren en planten.

Geraadpleegd van https://www.trouw.nl/duurzaamheid-natuur/ deze-milieufilosoof-vindt-dat-we-moeten-oppassen-voor-het- humaniseren-van-dieren-en-planten~b51021f9/ Gemeente Rotterdam. (2020). Bomen | Rotterdam.nl. Geraadpleegd

van https://www.rotterdam.nl/wonen-leven/bomen/ Leasca, S. (2020, 7 maart). Rules for naming houseplants, according

to scientists. Geraadpleegd van https://www.latimes.com/ lifestyle/story/2020-02-28/what-should-i-name-my-plant Yearley, S. (2005). The “End” or the “Humanization” of Nature?

Organization & Environment, 18(2), 198–201. https://doi. org/10.1177/1086026605276013