Weakly Anthropocentric

Christopher D. Stone's 1972 law review article "Should Trees Have Standing?" helped launch movements to extend legal personhood to natural objects such as forests and rivers. Richard Powers's 2018 novel The Overstory addresses Stone's article explicitly in its diegesis but not, finally, to grant literary personhood to natural objects. Instead, I argue, the novel mounts, by way of its musings on pareidolia, a defense of weak anthropocentrism. This defense recognizes the ineluctability of human embodiment and the human sensorium from our perspective. The novel's weak anthropocentrism, I conclude, is a powerful and timely riposte to both anthropo-supremacist and flat-ontological perspectives

Anthropocentrism · Human species · Natural (archaeology · Natural law · Personhood