What happens when a forest becomes a plantation?

In this episode, I speak with Dr. Sophie Chao, whose extraordinary ethnography In the Shadow of the Palms: More-than-Human Becomings in West Papua traces the worlds of the Marind people—for whom plants and animals are not resources, but ancestors, siblings, and kin.

As oil palm plantations spread across their lands, Dr. Chao’s work illuminates how colonial and capitalist logics uproot not just forests, but entire cosmologies of care. We speak about multispecies justice, hunger, and the haunting question of what it means to live ethically in a world where growth often means loss.

References:
🪴 More Than Human Matters → https://www.morethanhumanworlds.com/mthm-archive

📚 The Promise of Multispecies Justice → https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-promise-of-multispecies-justice

🌿 In the Shadow of the Palms → https://www.dukeupress.edu/in-the-shadow-of-the-palms

🍃 Land of Famished Beings → https://www.dukeupress.edu/land-of-famished-beings

📖 “Introduction: Multispecies Justice” → https://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article/19/1/1/352091

⚖️ What does it mean to be a legal being beyond the spectrum of property to personhood?

In this conversation, Professor Maneesha Deckha, author of Animals as Legal Beings: Contesting Anthropocentric Legal Orders, speaks to me about the urgent need to move beyond the property–personhood binary that has long structured law’s relationship with animals.

Drawing on postcolonial, feminist, and critical legal thought, she invites us to imagine legal beingness—a framework that refuses hierarchy and embraces kinship, care, and coexistence.

Professor Deckha concludes with a haunting image of farmed animals, and speaks briefly about the politics of milk, about the multispecies economies of dairy in India, and about what it would take for law to recognise animals not as commodities.

🐄✨ Listen to this conversation on Courts of the Living, wherever you get your podcasts.

🎙️Season 1 Episode 7: 'Beingness'

References:

About Professor Maneesha Deckha: https://www.uvic.ca/law/faculty-and-research/our-faculty/profiles/deckha-maneesha.php

Animals as Legal Beings: Contesting Anthropocentric Legal Orders: https://utppublishing.com/doi/book/10.3138/9781487525873

Animals, Colonialism, and the Rule of Law: https://openurl.ebsco.com/EPDB%3Agcd%3A13%3A23401885/detailv2?sid=ebsco%3Aplink%3Ascholar&id=ebsco%3Agcd%3A187877960&crl=c&link_origin=scholar.google.ca

A Deeper Kindness: Animal Law & Youth Activism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg6QcF9rWk0; https://www.uvic.ca/law/asri/index.php

Towards a Feminist Postcolonial Milk Studies by Greta Gaard : https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265807927_Toward_a_Feminist_Postcolonial_Milk_Studies

Mother Cow Mother India: A Multispecies Politics of Dairy in India by Yamini Narayanan: https://www.amazon.in/Mother-Cow-India-Multispecies-Politics-ebook/dp/B0BS47ZVNP

"Women (respondents) in many of the villages would even voice their opinions around dog motherhood for example, and would say things like dogs also have the right to experience motherhood at least once in their lifetime."

At a time when our legal system views dogs as 'menace' on the one hand, and animal welfare organisations think about welfare as sterilisation and neutering of dogs on the other, Rashmi Singh Rana, PhD candidate at University of Technology Sydney & Nature Conservation Foundation India spoke to me about the vibrant personalities of the dogs she met for her research work. As dogs are sterilised as a form of protection, Rashmi asks crucial questions - who is really being protected, and under what circumstances.

References:

Donna Haraway's book titled 'The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness' (2003): https://www.amazon.in/Companion-Species-Manifesto-Significant-Otherness/dp/0971757585#:~:text=%22The%20Companion%20Species%20Manifesto%22%20is,here%20just%20to%20think%20with.

Krithika Srinivasan's article/paper titled 'The biopolitics of animal being and welfare: dog control and care in the UK and India' (2013): https://www.pure.ed.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/74826410/27674774._Srinivasan.pdf

Natasha Fijn's article/book chapter titled ' DOG EARS AND TAILS: Different Relational Ways of Being with Canines in Aboriginal Australia and Mongolia', in the book titled Domestication Gone Wild: Politics and Practices of Multispecies Relations (2018): https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/2500/chapter-abstract/1216210/Dog-Ears-and-TailsDifferent-Relational-Ways-of?redirectedFrom=fulltext

Robert B Ekvall's article titled 'Role of the Dog in Tibetan Nomadic Society', published in 1963 in the Central Asiatic Journal: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41926578

Don Messerschmidt's book titled 'Big dogs of Tibet and the Himalayas' (2010): https://www.amazon.in/Big-Dogs-Tibet-Himalayas-Messerschmidt/dp/974524130X

Himalayan Guardian Dogs: Unsung Sentinels of the Shepherds of the Himalayas: https://roundglasssustain.com/wild-vault/himalayan-guardian-dogs

Supreme Court Order in WP (Civil) No. 5 of 2025: https://api.sci.gov.in/supremecourt/2025/41706/41706_2025_9_802_62686_Order_28-Jul-2025.pdf

Animal Birth Control Rules, 2023: https://awbi.gov.in/uploads/regulations/167956418266ABC%20Rule%202023.pdf

Wanted: Menacing Dogs for TV Thumbnails: Wanted: Menacing dogs for TV thumbnails https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/08/13/wanted-menacing-dogs-for-tv-thumbnails

For the Dumagat in the Philippines, nature and all the resources in their ancestral land is a gift from the Supreme Being, Makidepat, to be used justly and never to be owned. As dam building projects destroy and denude the Sierra Madre mountain range, Dumagat people rise up in resistance against development induced displacement and a worldview which aims to exploit and dispossess. In this episode on Save Sierra Madre day, listen to Enjo and Deewa discuss the Dumagat people's worldviews on nature, and their powerful resistance against environmental destruction.

🐝 “If you see a bee, what do you do? Step back, so that you don’t get stung?”

.

.

.

"The Solega person extends their hand for the bee to sit on, and talks to it"

So begins my conversation with Dr. Samira Agnihotri, whose work with the Soliga people in southern India shows us what multispecies coexistence can mean in practice. Samira leads the Coexistence Fellowship, which supports teams of researchers and conservationists over two years to study, imagine, and implement the coexistence paradigm. At its heart is a simple but radical philosophy: that conservation is strongest when it builds on local partnerships, shared knowledge, and the capacity of communities themselves.

References:

1. https://youtu.be/AxoLB-UZT9I?feature=shared

2. https://youtu.be/pOTCf56kcQA?feature=shared

3. https://www.climaterise.in/blogs/fireside-chat-with-dr-samira-agnihotri-on-reimagining-coexistence

4. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/conservation-science/articles/10.3389/fcosc.2021.691900/full

5. https://brill.com/view/journals/beh/157/14-15/article-p1239_7.xml

6. https://science.thewire.in/politics/rights/call-to-decolonise-ecology-conservation-field-research/

In Episode 3 of Courts of the Living, Irham Yunardi, Programme Coordinator at HAkA, speaks about HAkA’s inspiring work in Indonesia’s Leuser ecosystem — the last place on Earth where elephants, tigers, orangutans, and rhinos still share a home.

From stopping a hydroelectric dam threatening elephant habitats, to ensuring a palm oil company finally paid USD 26 million in fines for environmental damage, HAkA shows how community empowerment, advocacy, and vigilance can protect one of our planet’s most vital ecosystems.

References:

https://haka.or.id

Who is listening when a river cries to its people?

In episode 2 of Courts of the Living, Dr Rahul Ranjan discusses the legal lives of rivers, examining questions of personhood, rights and how rivers and their people might be in peril.

Even as the rights of rivers is slowly gaining momentum at the national and international levels, with many people starting to speak up about this, Dr. Rahul's work examines something fascinating - grief as a structuring affect in the Himalayas, and the ways in which hydropower projects put the rights of our rivers in peril.

References:

Can you hear the Rivers Sing? Legal Personhood, Ontology, and the Nitty Gritty of Governance: https://law.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/3094881/Clark-et-al,-Can-You-Hear-the-Rivers-Sing.pdf

Beyond legal personhood for the Whanganui River: collaboration and pluralism in implementing the Te Awa Tupua Act: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13642987.2024.2314532

Indigenous Water Rights in Law and Regulation: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/indigenous-water-rights-in-law-and-regulation/DFA764BDE6898B2DA778B5117262C5AB

Dr. Deyatima Ghosh is an ecologist integrating field ecology and animal cognition to understand conservation. In this episode, she takes us on a journey into the lives of amphibians in India’s Western Ghats. Starting from her article - The Special, Spatial Lives of Amphibians, Dr. Ghosh talks to Courts of the Living on herpetofauna’s intelligence, on conservation behaviour, and what it means to decenter anthropogenic approaches to conservation.