Animal Rights
For much of modern environmental science, nature has been something to observe. A forest can be measured; a river can be mapped; an animal can be studied; climate systems can be modelled; ecosystems quantified, and species populations tracked.
But what happens when we understand nature not as something to be studied, but as something that we are in a reciprocal relationship with?
That question sits at the heart of Sentient Ecology, a broad and varied concept that challenges the conventional boundary between people and the natural world.
In a 2025 article titled “Ceremony and Sentient Ecology,” Myfany Turpin and Maya Ward write, “The solution to environmental crisis lies not only in the hard sciences, but also in the arts and humanities" (2). The idea sounds straightforward. Its implications are less so.
Sentient ecology asks humans to consider the natural world as a participant in an ecological relationship rather than as a collection of passive objects. Hikmet Kuran, describes the concept in Sentient Ecologies: Xenophobic Imaginaries of Landscapes as extending “the status of personhood” to categories of nonhuman beings (Kuran 252).
Using Kuran, and Turpan and Ward’s definitions, we begin to reevaluate the way we look at animal welfare and the impacts of climate change.
The Landscape is Not Just a Backdrop
Kuran approaches ecological sentience through landscapes. For him, a landscape is not merely a static background to our lives. It is constantly changing and communicating through sound, texture, movement, weather, geological processes, and the presence or absence of other forms of life (Kuran 252).
The difficulty is that the majority of Western society is not accustomed to hearing the natural world. Our ears are trained only for a human voice.
To regard nature as possessing agency is not necessarily to claim that it thinks as humans do. It is to question whether human beings should be the only measure by which agency, value, or significance is recognized.
Environmental policy has often been built around what nature does for humans: forests absorb carbon, wetlands reduce flooding, pollinators support agriculture. All of these statements are scientifically useful. But they also describe the natural world primarily in terms of its utility.
Sentient ecology asks what changes when the relationship runs in the other direction.
What do we owe the world that continuously sustains us?
An Ecology of Kinship
This question leads me to another, similar term: Kincentric Ecology. Associated with Indigenous understandings of the human relationship with the natural world, Kincentric Ecology creates a framework where humans are members of “an extended ecological family that shares ancestry and origins” (Salmon 1327). Moreover, life remains viable when humans recognize the surrounding world as kin.
This concept transforms traditional ideologies of environmental responsibility. If a forest is a resource, its protection can be justified by economics, public health or climate policy. If a forest is also understood as kin, the question becomes ethical.
These perspectives are particularly relevant to discussions of Indigenous ecological knowledge, where relationships among people, ancestors, animals, land, and ceremony can carry responsibilities that are simultaneously cultural, spiritual, and ecological.
Turpin and Ward examine one such relationship in their study of musical ceremonies among Indigenous Australian communities. They describe singing and other vocal practices as ways the communities enact responsibilities to ancestors, who in turn are understood to contribute to the health of the social and ecological world. Ward and Turpin write, “the quality of human-ancestor relationships can wither or thrive, motivating to care for beings, who in turn reciprocate by ensuring rain and healthy ecology that provides for people" (6).
Seen from outside the tradition, it might be tempting to separate ceremony from environmental management—to place one in the realm of culture and the other in the realm of science. But that division may be a product of Western thought.
For the communities described in the research, ecological responsibility does not necessarily begin with a distinction between the scientific and the cultural. It begins with relationships.
What About Animals?
This brings the conversation to a more familiar scientific question: Can animals experience the world in the same way humans can?
For decades, scientists have studied animal cognition, communication and behaviour. But the question of animal consciousness has often been more difficult to approach.
In 2012, a group of neuroscientists gathered at the University of Cambridge for the Francis Crick Memorial Conference and issued what became known as the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness. The declaration challenged the idea that human beings possess a biological monopoly on consciousness. Its authors concluded that the absence of a human-like neocortex—a part of the brain associated with thinking, language, and sensory perception (Lodato 1)—does not necessarily prevent an animal from experiencing affective states. They pointed to neurological, neurochemical, and neurophysiological evidence indicating that non-human animals possess the biological substrates associated with conscious states and intentional behaviour. The declaration specifically included mammals and birds, as well as other animals such as octopuses (Low 2).
The point was not that an octopus thinks like a human being. But rather, consciousness does not have to look human to exist. An animal's brain may be structured differently from ours while still supporting experiences such as pain, fear, awareness, and goal-directed behaviour.
Beyond the Language of Resources
This is where animal welfare and environmentalism begin to overlap. Both fields have traditionally relied, at least in part, on the language of protection. Protect animals from unnecessary suffering. Protect forests from destruction. Protect biodiversity from extinction. Protect communities from climate-related disasters.
But protection still leaves humans in the position of deciding what is worth protecting.
Sentient ecology proposes a different emphasis: relationship.
Under this framework, animals and landscapes are not valuable only because humans find them useful. Their significance transcends traditional models of importance.
However, this does not make scientific measurements irrelevant.
Climate models can tell us how quickly temperatures are changing. Ecology can show us how species interact. Neuroscience can help us understand animal consciousness. Conservation biology can identify populations at risk.
Science can tell us what is happening. Ethics asks what we do with that knowledge. The two questions need not compete
A Different Kind of Climate Resilience
Climate resilience is usually discussed in purely practical terms: stronger infrastructure, emergency planning, renewable energy, flood defences, and better forecasting. All of these matter deeply. But true resilience also depends on relationships. Human societies cannot separate themselves from the ecosystems they rely on. Our food systems rely on pollinators and soil, just as our communities depend on healthy watersheds. The more we understand these ties, the harder it is to draw a clean line between environmental health and human health.
This is where sentient ecology comes in. It pushes us past a basic question of survival and asks whether resilience means simply making our civilization better at withstanding a damaged planet, or whether it means learning how to live in a way that places less pressure on the living things we share it with.
Learning to Listen
There is something deceptively simple about the idea of listening to nature.
It challenges our assumptions that humans stand apart from nature; that the value of the natural world begins and ends with its usefulness to us; or that compassion and scientific rigour belong to separate conversations.
Sentient ecology offers a way of questioning all three. It does not require abandoning science for philosophy, or replacing evidence with emotion. Instead, it suggests that environmental problems may require more than one way of knowing.
The climate crisis is a scientific problem. It is also an ethical one.
Humane Choices recognizes the interconnectedness of people, the planet, and animals, and we urge everyone to be more considerate of this relationship when making everyday decisions.
Animal welfare is a scientific concern. It is also a question about how humans understand their obligations to other living beings. The natural world is a physical system. But it is also the place—and the community—in which human life is embedded.
We should not just be protecting the earth because it's our home, but because it is also a living thing that doesn’t deserve to die.
Works Cited:
Salmon, Enrique. “Kincentric Ecology: Indigenous Perceptions of the Human-Nature Relationship.” Ecological Applications, vol. 10, no. 5, Oct. 2000, p. 1327. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.2307/2641288.
Lodato, Simona, and Paola Arlotta. “Generating neuronal diversity in the mammalian cerebral cortex.” Annual review of cell and developmental biology vol. 31 (2015): 699-720. doi:10.1146/annurev-cellbio-100814-125353
Low, P. The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness. Proceedings of the Francis Crick Memorial Conference, Churchill College, Cambridge University, July 7 2012, pp 1-2.
Turpin, Myfany, and Maya Ward. “Ceremony and Sentient Ecology.” The World of Music (New Series), vol. 14, no. 2, Dec. 2025. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.59998/2025-14-2-2582. pg.6)
Kuran, Hikmet. Sentient Ecologies. Edited by Alexandra Coțofană, 1st ed., Berghahn Books, 2022. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.3167/9781800736627.
