Shifting more‐than‐human relationships amidst social–ecological disturbance

Abstract

Social–ecological disruptions, such as changing climate, extreme weather‐related events and the COVID‐19 pandemic, can have cascading and long‐term consequences for people, ecosystems and multispecies relationships. As the early COVID‐19 pandemic disrupted people's lives through isolation and restricted human contact, more‐than‐human relationships played a heightened role in individuals' day‐to‐day lives with potential long‐term impacts on multispecies justice. We analysed 72 interviews conducted during the early (May–June 2020) COVID‐19 lockdown in the United States to investigate how social–ecological disruptions and spatial re‐orderings, exemplified by the pandemic, reassemble more‐than‐human relationships. We consider new relational values through a transformative multispecies justice framing, which contends that times of uncertainty can inspire meaningful connections with the more‐than‐human world, facilitating care and reciprocal relationships during times of disruption. Among interviewee accounts, we find that disorderings of daily life during the pandemic interweave with past and ongoing experiences of inequity to form mosaics of disruption. These mosaics of disruption created circumstances in which interviewees formed new connections with the more‐than‐human world. The more‐than‐human connections of interviewees sat along a spectrum and did not universally represent the same strength of relational values. The more‐than‐human connections were defined by individual's positionality and restricted geographies of the circumstances. However, the newly formed relationships seemed to be ephemeral, indicating that they would not necessarily endure outside of an early‐pandemic context. Thus, while individuals reported rearranged relationships out of pandemic precarity, their transitory qualities do not directly promise long‐term transformational multispecies connections. Our findings suggest that moments of disruption alone do not necessarily produce durable change and there is a need to go beyond merely recognizing relationality. Policy implications: Transformative multispecies justice requires long‐term, routine commitment to deepening relationships with the more‐than‐human world. While future social–ecological and spatial disturbances can be a window of opportunity to initiate multispecies relationships, future initiatives and policies must actively support and foster these relationships and strong relational values beyond the disturbances—recognizing the long‐term, non‐linear processes of transformation needed to address our future challenges.

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INTRODUCTION

The COVID-19 pandemic, while one in a series of historically unfolding crises from climate change to biodiversity loss to racial violence, provided a significant moment of rupture experienced by billions of people globally. Calls to reimagine the world soon followed, including reevaluations of humans' connections to nature. As life slowed dramatically and the sphere of activity shrunk for millions of people in places like the United States (though significantly, not for all people), media stories about the return of nature and people reconnecting to nature, emerged. While injunctions to take a walk evinced instrumental values that focus on nature's benefits to humans, the reconfiguration of everyday life also surfaced the idea that relational values, or human relationships with nature as an end in itself (Chan et al. 2018), were critical in understanding human–nature connections. The ruptures of the COVID-19 pandemic open a moment to examine the presence or emergence of relational values to nature in everyday life. It was also an opportunity to explore how relational values link to experiences of precarity and transformation during times of crisis, an inquiry that supports calls for addressing climate and biodiversity crises by shifting, supporting and leveraging relational values (IPBES, 2022).

While a focus on relational values does much to draw nature into the centre of conversations, it is unclear that focus on relational values alone is sufficient to engender the kinds of ontological transformations the climate crisis requires (Celermajer et al., 2021; Tschakert et al., 2021). There is a need to recognize humans and nature's profound inter-relationality and the ethical implications thereof. The multispecies justice framework has emerged as a response to such needs, aiming to enrich other approaches by ‘decentring the human and recognizing the everyday interactions that bind individuals and societies to networks of close and distant [more-than-human] others’ (Tschakert et al., 2021, p. 3). The framework contends that failing to recognize human entanglements with more-than-human others is connected to unmitigated extraction and degradation of the environment (Cronon, 1996; Heyd, 2005). Thus, multispecies justice aims to centre a relational lens outside of human ontological exceptionalism in order to view all aspects of the more-than-human world, including the insentient and nonmaterial, as indispensable. We use more-than-human to describe non-human beings with recognition of their capacities and interconnections that extend past human understanding. We use the term multispecies specifically when referring to bodies of literature that investigate more-than-human relations. In this paper, we explore how more-than-human connections have shifted or taken form amidst collective day-to-day restructuring during the early COVID-19 pandemic (May–June 2020), while attending to the emergence of both relational value and multispecies justice. Our research objectives are as follows:

• Describe novel connections to more-than-human species emerging in the context of COVID-19 disruptions;
• Investigate the relational values underlying these connections;
• Identify the extent to which these connections de-centre human experience and support non-anthropocentric ontologies.

THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC: RUPTURE, RELATIONAL VALUE AND MULTISPECIES JUSTICE

The COVID-19 pandemic, as a point of rupture, provides a context for closely examining how novel connections with the more-than-human take shape within a landscape of calamity. Requirements to stay at home and social distance to slow infection rates during the early waves of the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically reordered the spaces of daily life and engendered much reflection on the place of nature in everyday lives. Trapped indoors with little social contact, with yards and parks offering some of the only ‘safe’ opportunities for recreation, call to embrace nature and deepen relations with more-than-human beings abounded. Indeed, people did seek respite in the outdoors and the companionship of plants and more-than-human animals, and speculation on the possible broad, long-lasting effects of this new relationality emerged.

The overwhelm of the pandemic has been felt widely, through dramatic loss of human life and significant social, spatial and economic disruption. Most people's lives were rearranged nearly overnight as they sheltered in place. For example, many young people had to find new living arrangements after university campuses closed. Aside from logistical difficulties, social isolation, loneliness, anxiety, bereavement and other stressors deteriorated overall well-being. These immense challenges created by the pandemic were not distributed evenly across race and class (Lee et al., 2021; Lopez et al., 2021). Just as the COVID-19 pandemic has upended conceptions of daily normality, social and economic activity, everyday spatial order, perceptions of risk and safety and geopolitical relations, it has amplified existing inequities established by white supremacist systems. Specifically, food and housing insecurity, among a long list of overlapping injustices, have been disproportionately felt by low-income Black, Indigenous and people of colour (BIPOC) communities, particularly in urban areas in United States and United Kingdom, since the beginning of the pandemic (Powers et al., 2021). Moreover, these pandemic effects continue to be felt conjunctively with those of an increasingly widespread and varied climate crisis. Powers et al. (2021) outline how the COVID-19 pandemic both makes explicit and furthers environmental racism and health inequalities. Given the overlap of these crises, Perkins et al. (2021) frame the COVID-19 pandemic as a focusing event for addressing climate change, considering its scope and the rapid, insufficient global response it has engendered.

Given this potential for the COVID-19 pandemic to provide a space of inquiry transformations in the face of the climate crisis, researchers have focused on the changes happening to human–nature connections during this time. Recent work among scholars and global thought leaders have identified human relationships with nature as a key leverage point in addressing the climate crisis and associated challenges (Bataille et al., 2021; Chan et al., 2018). In particular, this work calls on researchers to identify the underlying values supporting human connection to nature and identify ways to shift towards or support relational values (Jax et al., 2018). All values have merit, yet proponents of relational value argue that certain values, namely instrumental ones, have been prioritized in contemporary global political and economic relations and underlie many of the current ecological crises facing earth (Himes & Muraca, 2018; Stålhammar & Thorén, 2019). While much pandemic research has focused on the role of existing connections to nature in supporting human well-being during the COVID-19 lockdowns, or on increased connection to nature during this time, far less scholarship has gone on to inquire after the values underlying these connections (Johnson & Sachdeva, 2022; Morse et al., 2020). Such inquiry is needed, because it is transformations in values, as much as the relations themselves, that are needed to meet the challenges posed by climate change and spur collective shifts towards more relational ontologies (IPBES, 2022).

While increased prioritization of relational value represents a promising direction in international discourse on the climate crisis, recognition of relationality can only support a partial transformation if it does not also include a recognition of multispecies justice. Fundamental to a multispecies justice framing is the idea that devaluations of and ruptures in relations between humans and more-than-humans are an offshoot of settler colonialist constructions of nature. Thus, in order to succeed, attempts to ‘reconnect’ with nature and embrace relational value must be decolonial acts that seek to repair and transform dominant forms of human–more-than-human relationality. Numerous Indigenous genealogies provide generous examples of prioritizing relationships over autonomous entities, and Indigenous ecological knowledge has been an important contributor to relational value frameworks (e.g. Country et al., 2019; Winter, 2019). Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer, biologist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, explains that our relationships to the land, not merely the land itself, are fractured. Hence, focusing on ecological restoration without seeking to restore these broken relationships is an ‘empty exercise’ (Kimmerer, 2013, p. 338). Kimmerer's ideas reflect one example of Indigenous genealogies of more-than-human interconnectivity, relational senses of place and nonhierarchical governance—see Kanngieser and Todd (2020), MacDougall (2011), Todd (2016) and Watts (2013) for further, although incomplete, illustration on what various approaches to restoring these broken relationships entail and the complexities in doing so. These genealogies have existed for tens of thousands of years prior to recent multispecies justice framing, a fact that is often obscured as predominantly white and western post-humanist scholars present their ideas as novel (Stewart-Harawira, 2012; Winter et al., 2021). Here, we wish to make explicit the significance of Indigenous scholarship in defining multispecies justice and the role this scholarship plays in the understanding of human relationships to more-than-human others during the COVID-19 pandemic we develop herein.

Significant to this understanding are the ways the multispecies justice framework focuses on rupture and its potential to transform more-than-human relationships. The framework proposes that not only do humans and more-than-human others share vulnerabilities through their material and affective entanglements but also these vulnerabilities serve as an impetus for care (Wallach et al., 2020) and collaboration through empathetic imaginings (Steele et al., 2019). As broader climate literature questions whether it is ‘too late’ or soon to be too late (Farbotko, 2020) to avoid irreversible climate change, branches of multispecies justice framing focus on the more-than-human communions occurring amidst the crisis. Specifically, multispecies justice scholars postulate what intentional collaboration across more-than-human landscapes looks like as we ‘stay with the trouble’ (Haraway, 2016) and recognize the claims of the more-than-human on us as a result of our entangled relationality. That is, rather than isolating ecological devastation as a focal point, this scholarship centres the multiplicitous ways in which humans and more-than-humans can engage in reciprocal, often unexpected, relationships and collaborations amidst ecological devastation.

Amidst ongoing and amplified precarity, the ways in which people apprehend and relate to the world have shifted. Recent literature has already begun to outline how these shifts during the COVID-19 pandemic have led to clear changes in human and more-than-human dynamics (Soga et al., 2021). Multispecies justice scholarship contends that times of uncertainty can inspire meaningful collaboration with the more-than-human world, facilitating care and response or response ability (Haraway, 2016). In this paper, we explore how this collaboration might manifest in practice within a group of college-aged students during the initial lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic. Through a series of interviews in May–July 2020, we investigate how disordering through pandemic disruptions is spurring novel connections with the more-than-human world, as multispecies justice literature on grief and rupture suggests. To do so, we assess how the pandemic intimately impacts interviewees' lives through mosaics of disruption, what novel connections to more-than-human life emerge, and what values are suggested by those connections. We then further explore how these novel connections and underlying values may translate to a broader decolonial task of prioritizing human–more-than-human relationality over human exceptionalism.

STUDY DESIGN AND METHODS

To investigate the shifting more-than-human relationships during the COVID-19 pandemic and their potential for long-term transformative multispecies justice, we conducted a survey and set of follow-up interviews during the early months of the lockdown in the United States.

Survey

The survey examined how stay-at-home restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic impacted well-being and more-than-human connections among university students across the United States. We distributed a digital survey via email through personal networks to postsecondary educational institutions across the country from 12 April to 15 May 2020. During this time, many people in the United States were quarantined in adherence to the state-level shelter-in-place ordinances imposed in March 2020. As college campuses closed accordingly, most students either returned home or remained in off-campus housing. A total of 71 colleges and universities across 46 states were represented among survey participants (n = 1130) who completed a majority of the survey (Maurer et al., 2021). Survey questions included assessments of well-being, including perceived effects of nature; outdoor activities, including type and frequency; and risk in relation to COVID-19 (see Supplementary Material Appendix 1 for full survey instrument). Survey participants provided written consent before beginning the online survey, and all research was conducted with approval from the Columbia University Institutional Review Board (IRB).

The majority of survey respondents identified as cisgendered women (67.1%) and as white (57%), and lived in an urban area as defined by the population density of their ZIP code (51.3%). Respondents were roughly evenly distributed across school year and equal numbers did and did not receive financial aid (see Table 1 for full summary of survey respondent demographics). While otherwise representative of the undergraduate population in the United States, our survey population underrepresented African-American and Latino students and overrepresented women.

TABLE 1 Demographic summaries of survey and interview participants.

		Survey % (n = 1130)	Interview % (n = 72)
Gender	Women (cisgendered)	67.1	73.6
Men (cisgendered)	14.6	22.2
Non-binary	1.4	4.2
Did not disclose	16.4	0
Race	White	57	59.7
More than one race	9.5	16.7
East/Southeast Asian	6.7	11.1
Latino	3.7	4.2
South Asian	3.5	4.2
Black/African-American	2.2	0
Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern/North African, Black African	<1	2.8
Did not disclose	16.5	1.4
Population density	Urban	51.3	33.3
Rural	25.5	30.6
Suburban	19.6	36.1
Did not disclose	3.6	0
Year in school	First	13.7	8.3
Second	14.8	16.7
Third	19.5	13.9
Fourth	22.9	25
Post-graduate or Professional	13.8	36.1
Did not disclose	15.3	0
Receipt of Financial Aid	Yes	41.6	38.9
No	42.2	61.1
Did not disclose	16.2	0

Interview

To further explore the experiences of survey respondents with respect to well-being and nature, we conducted follow-up interviews. We selected a subsample of individuals from those who volunteered for a follow-up interview to be representative of population density (urban, suburban, rural), risk perception associated with COVID-19 (high, low) and demographics of the US undergraduate population. Individuals in the subsample were then emailed to request an interview. We interviewed a total of 72 individuals over Zoom, following a semistructured design. This design provided structure to ensure comparability, but allowed for deeper exploration with each individual participant (Schensul et al., 1999). Given the interviews were conducted virtually on zoom, participants shared their signed consented via email at the beginning of their interview. Interviews investigated whether participants were experiencing new encounters with the more-than-human, whether they were attaching new or increased meaning to these encounters and whether these encounters introduced potential transformations in more-than-human relationships. In addition to asking participants about any prior or current connections with more-than-human others, we also discussed challenges with mental health, living situations, time spent outside or other disruptions that might be occurring due to the pandemic (see Supplementary Material Appendix 2 for full interview schedule).

Interviewee demographics were comparable to survey respondents', with similar skews in terms of race and gender (Table 1). However, interviewees included a higher proportion of graduate or professional students when compared to the survey population, and were also less likely to receive financial aid (see Table 1 for full summary of interviewee demographics).

Interviews were transcribed verbatim and qualitatively coded by at least one member of the research team. A subset of interviews was coded by all members to assess intercoder reliability. Intercoder reliability was maintained via internal memoing and routine meetings to review findings. Coding occurred in two rounds. This first round employed a deductive approach as part of a mixed-method analysis; codes were derived from survey questions in order to allow interview data to support and elaborate survey findings (Kaźmierczak, 2013). The second round of coding used a set of inductively derived codes and followed a grounded theory approach (Charmaz, 2005). This allowed us to identify themes not originally included in research design and thereby bring participants' full experience and novel insights to bear on analysis (Pink, 2015).

While the college students we surveyed and interviewed had different intersecting disruptions concurrent with their displacement, their perspectives are certainly not globally representative of the realities of the COVID-19 pandemic and relationships with the more-than-human. Namely, all of our participants were English speakers from the United States and benefited from the privilege of both college education and having a physical space to relocate to after campuses closed. However, our goal was to collect data during an ephemeral period of disruption, and focusing on a case study of college students made it possible to study potential emerging relationships with the more-than-human during a time of displacement from college campuses.

CONNECTIONS TO NATURE DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

From the initial survey, the majority of participants (n = 791; 70%) answered that their most recent trip outside improved their connection to nature. Twenty-nine per cent responded that going outside had no effect on their connection to nature, and only 1% reported their connection to nature worsened by going outside. Congruent with the survey results, all but one of the interview participants (n = 71) reported connecting with an aspect or aspects of the more-than-human world during the pandemic.

Further exploration of these connections by interviewees revealed that the majority of more-than-human connections were directly influenced or motivated by different pandemic-related disruptions (n = 44; 61%). From the individuals who reported a pandemic-specific connection to the more-than-human, 13 reported a major disruption to their well-being and ability to cope, 23 reported more manageable disruptions and six reported little to no disruptions to their subjective well-being. The disruption to interviewees' well-being was based not just on concern for the pandemic but also bound up in the disruptions to their living situation and daily routines. While many participants suddenly relocated because of the pandemic, changes in living situation did not influence novel connection to nature (chi-square test: χ²(1, N = 40) = 1.6, p = 0.21). Yet, a change in time spent outside due to the pandemic was associated with reporting a novel more-than-human connection (χ²(1, N = 63) = 4.6, p = 0.03), though only two individuals reported no change to their time spent outdoors. Notably, different disruptions to either living situations, time spent outside, or one's ability to cope were not mutually exclusive among interviewees. In fact, many interviewees experienced a variety of disruptions that interplayed with one another, forming a mosaic of disruption.

MOSAICS OF DISRUPTION

While no two interviewees' experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic were the same, we observed interlocking patterns in which pandemic disruptions reordered everyday life. The experience of one interviewee, Lucille, helps illustrate this mosaic. When Lucille's college transitioned to fully online courses at the start of the quarantine period in March 2020, she moved back into her family's two-bedroom apartment in Inwood, a majority Latino neighbourhood in Manhattan, New York City. During the time of the interview, Lucille, a Latina woman, shared the apartment with her parents and grandparents, some of whom had pre-existing health conditions that put them especially at-risk during the pandemic. With her household in mind, Lucille spent nearly all her time sheltering-in-place inside the apartment to prevent contracting and spreading the virus to her family. Her extensive time indoors intensified challenges to maintain her well-being, including experiencing gnawing anxiety about finding a job post-graduation. Between balancing home dynamics, school assignments and overall uncertainty, she described herself as feeling ‘depressed and dehumanized’.

Lucille's early-pandemic life consisted of a variety of indeterminacies. At first glance, these indeterminacies appear as fragmented, isolated obstacles such as a crowded living space or impending unemployment. As Lucille and other interviewees began to fully explain their situations, their narratives revealed that these seemingly disconnected fragments composited and interrelated with one another to form a mosaic structure. These effects of the pandemic's disruptions were not felt in isolation, but in relation to one another. Many of these fragments seemed to have fractured off larger challenges present prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. While the pandemic introduced novel disruptions such as widespread social isolation, it simultaneously placed together and magnified the fragments of existing vulnerabilities in new ways, often within highly restricted everyday geographies. Through this rearrangement and amplification of stressors, we identified that interviewees' relationships with more-than-human others shifted as well.

EMERGING MORE-THAN-HUMAN CONNECTIONS THROUGH DISRUPTION

Regardless of interviewees' individualized mosaics of disruption, nearly all found themselves making new connections to the more-than-human world. Only one of the 72 interviewees reported that they did not feel any connection to the more-than-human world during the pandemic. This interviewee expressed appreciation for the green spaces accessible to them, but did not feel like they could pinpoint any specific connection to the more-than-human. As mosaics of disruption during the pandemic isolated individuals, rearranged daily spaces and routines and emphasized new coping strategies, our interviewees seemed to shift their awareness towards the more-than-human world around them. In other words, navigating new terrains of living prompted situations in which interviewees seemed more prone to intentionally convene with the more-than-human world.

For example, interviewees who reported spending significantly more time indoors while quarantining began to pay more attention to more-than-human others in their windows or fire escapes. Katherine, an undergraduate student in Minnesota, reported that her long hours indoors while quarantining led to her noticing the squirrels that play on a tree outside of her apartment. Similarly, Mark, a grad student in Washington D.C., began observing the spider in his window while feeling stuck in his shared apartment and spending most of his days in his room. ‘I probably never would have noticed it before’, he admitted, but he watched the spider almost daily, tracking the (re)formation of its web, its catches and meals, its comings and goings. Lucille, who was among a group of interviewees who did not consider herself to have a particularly intimate relationship with more-than-human others prior to the pandemic, started to keenly take notice of the pigeons outside her window while experiencing her own isolating mosaic of disruption. She explained that, at first, the pigeons' movements merely provided a sense of distraction and visual stimulation amidst quarantine monotony. Over a few weeks, however, she realized that she could identify where the pigeons were nesting and which nests had been removed. These squirrels, spiders and pigeons found their way into our interviewees' personal, shifting landscapes. Their mosaics of disruption rendered other beings incredibly visible amidst the all-too-human experience of sheltering in place.

Other interviewees who did have access to backyards and parks also found themselves developing new relationships with more-than-human others. One interviewee began to count the number of bunnies that she saw each day on her runs. Another interviewee found themselves returning to a hill in their neighbourhood where they could gaze out onto the horizon line. Like Mark or Lucille, these interviewees explained that these encounters with the more-than-human provided a necessary sense of novelty and emotional attachment to their day. Sam, an undergraduate student in Portland, Oregon, reconnected with the ecosystems in their childhood backyard when they returned home after their college transitioned to virtual learning. They described spending more time during the lockdown laying in the grass, watching the pollinators and birds flutter by. They added that ‘all of those things make me feel a lot more refreshed and energized and less anxious’. The various stressors ignited through their own mosaic of disruption during the pandemic led them to seek time in their backyard, as they had as a child. They described a heightened pull towards the complex networks of bugs living on each blade of grass. They mentioned that they felt more cognizant of the ecologies surrounding them.

Thus, while connecting with the more-than-human was nearly universal, the connections that interviewees formed out of disruption did not share the same qualities, and this variation was tightly bound up in their different geographies. For example, some interviewees' relationships re-emerged from more-than-human bonds in the past as they revisited childhood landscapes while for others, attachments with the more-than-human world seemed to be especially circumstantial to their spatially restricted present. Some interviewees had the privilege of proximity to diverse more-than-human ecosystems and actively explored these landscapes. Other interviewees like Mark, Katherine or Lucille, seemed to notice the quieter, more-subtle beings sharing their spaces out of boredom or desire to feel less alone. These differences shaped the emotional tenor of connections and suggest a spectrum in the quality of more-than-human connection during the pandemic.

SPECTRUM OF PANDEMIC-RELATED MORE-THAN-HUMAN CONNECTIONS

Given the restraints of language in expressing relationships, especially with the more-than-human world, we were privy to only soft sketches of each interviewees' experiences. Nevertheless, within these sketches, we were able to define four recurring types of emerging more-than-human connections based on differing qualities of relational values (Table 2). Connections based on noticing were the most common and reflect the least association with relational value. Another form of noticing—naming—was mentioned less frequently by participants. Other forms of connections, interaction and perspective shifts, were the second and third most frequently mentioned forms of connection and suggest a stronger sense of relational value. Finally, connections based on nostalgia were the least frequently mentioned but the most strongly associated with relational value for our interviewees. We exemplify this spectrum below.

TABLE 2 Descriptions and exemplary quotes of different multispecies connections in green spaces during the pandemic, as well as frequency of overall and pandemic related connections. Connection types are ordered by increasing intensity of relational value. Total number of reported connections equals 96.

Type of connection	Definition	Exemplary quote	Overall mentions	Pandemic-related mentions
Noticing	Interviewee describes connection with an aspect of green space through a heightened awareness of the aspect	‘During the pandemic, I definitely have been noticing people's garden plants a lot more so. There's an older man who lives on the corner of our street who started growing a garden. It is really fun going by there everyday and seeing his garden grow and kind of flourish. I do not talk to the man at all, but seeing the garden is beautiful’	37 (39%)	24 (25%)
Naming	Interviewee describes connection with an aspect of green space through the act of identifying the name of the species	‘I enjoy walking around and thinking ‘this is a Pacific Madrone’ or ‘this is a specific type of pine tree or specific type of animal.’ I think that after I identify it I have a feeling of belonging with it’	8 (8%)	4 (4%)
Interaction	Interviewee describes connection with an aspect of green space with an explicit encounter with the aspect, in which some sort of exchange occurs	‘A particular hummingbird is now pretty much my best friend, because I see him more often than I see anybody else. So, in that particular way, I've been connecting with nature because he almost has been a substitute for people. I honestly talk to him more than I talk to some of my friends’	24 (25%)	13 (14%)
Perspective Shift	Interviewee describes connection with an aspect of green space by detailing a change of mindset or idea provoked by the aspect	‘I'm usually lying on the grass and I like seeing all the little things that are going on down there. There are ecosystems on just three blades of grass and soil. It is such an awesome reminder of that perspective’	19 (20%)	17 (18%)
Nostalgia	Interviewee describes connection with an aspect of green space by naming a past encounter or awareness of the aspect which makes them more prone to feeling connected to it	‘I really like hearing the Sandhill Cranes. And I have a little bit of a connection to them. When I lived in Colorado, I would go and drive all the way up to Steamboat Springs, to go attend the Yampa River Crane Festival and go see the cranes as they migrate through’	8 (8%)	2 (2%)

Lucille exemplifies the many new more-than-human connections based on noticing that emerged out of pandemic disruptions. As previously described, Lucille's developing relationship with the pigeons was notable. Her mosaic of pandemic disruptions, which included extreme spatial restriction, illuminated the human–more-than-human entanglements within her own apartment complex. Nevertheless, while her curiosity of the pigeons evolved into what might be considered an affinity for the birds, her relationship with the pigeons did not seem to evolve past this into new depths of connection. Despite her appreciation for pigeons certainly growing during her time quarantining, she expressed that although the pigeons were ‘suddenly really interesting’, she does not know if she will continue to watch them outside of a pandemic time.

Lucille's tone in describing her newfound relationship with the pigeons differs from that of another group who experienced what might be categorized as a more defined emotional attachment with more-than-human others through interaction. Among these interviewees was Rob, a grad student in Los Angeles, who experienced a decline in well-being while quarantining alone. As someone who explicitly valued human connection, Rob described this isolation as at times excruciating. During lockdown, Rob started noticing a hummingbird that continued to visit the patio outside of this apartment. The consistent presence of the hummingbird soothed him as he spent his hours alone and the connection shifted from noticing to something more relational. With sincerity, albeit a sheepish smile, Rob described the hummingbird as ‘pretty much my best friend’ whom he ‘sees more than anybody else’ and ‘talks to more than he talks to some of his friends’.

As interviewees' connections with the more-than-human deepened, the opportunities for recognizing further forms of relationality, such as a perspective shift, emerged. For example, Susan, who moved back home to the suburbs in Maryland after their college transitioned to online learning, found that daily walks felt crucial for ‘clearing their head’ after hours of anxious confinement. Susan returned routinely to the sensory experience of sitting in the grass. While at first they found that the green areas in their neighbourhood provided visual stimulation, they found more connection with the grass by routinely running their hands through it. With this physical contact, they described receiving a sense of groundedness and calm.

Varying subtleties shaped each interviewee's emerging connection with the more-than-human world, amounting to a spectrum of different qualities of relationships. While distinguishing and defining these is highly interpretative, our inquiry shows that interviewees experienced the pandemic through individualized mosaics of disruption, containing distinctive challenges and leading to distinct novel connections with the more-than-human. Just as individuals' deterioration of prior daily structures or ‘unworldings’ through pandemic rupture could be differentiated, their ‘reworldings’ are personalized as well. Combined with a variety of different perceptions and backgrounds with the more-than-human world, we see that interviewees did not gravitate towards other beings in the same ways.

IMPLICATIONS FOR OUR CONDITION OF CRISIS

While observing the different qualities of more-than-human connections spurred by pandemic reorderings, we are led to consider if disruption itself could be grounds for recognizing the relational values of nature and moving towards transformational multispecies justice. Our results suggest that pandemic disruptions are indeed inviting more-than-human connectivity, at least among our study population of American university students. Does such a ‘reworlding’ amidst crisis have the potential to lead to long-term prioritizations of relational value and provide lessons which translate to a wider population within a broader context of the climate crisis? To begin to address this question, we revisit the ways in which our interviewees' lives are interwoven with the more-than-human and the different qualities ascribed to these relationships. These ranged from the most common—noticing—exemplified by Mark's cohabitation with the spider to less frequently reported relationships of perspective shift and nostalgia, as when Sam engaged in sensory integration with the bug ecologies of their childhood backyard.

These shifts in relationship to the more-than-human world, while occurring in the intimate space of daily life, are directly connected to the broader global crisis of COVID-19. The ways in which widespread global pandemic disruptions trickle down into new relationships as subtle as Susan's connection to a blade of grass speak to the ways interconnectedness across scales generates constant shifts in lived experience—what Tsing (2017) labels indeterminacy. These scalar shifts have the potential, at least, to operate both ways. As mosaics of disruption (re)arrange life across scales, humans and more-than-human others are engaged in a continuous reciprocal motion, or ‘becoming-with’ (Haraway, 2016).

From this onto-epistemology, pandemic disruptions that alter the texture of everyday life are bound to reshape relationships with the more-than-human world in one way or another, and through this reshaping potentially gives rise to recognition and valuation (Jax et al., 2018). Our interview results support this proposition, as seen through Rob's friendship with the hummingbird during extreme loneliness or Katherine's new noticing of squirrels playing outside her window. These accounts speak to rupture and grief's ability to spur novel more-than-human connectivity and to cultivate relational value. Thus, we discerned that for many individuals, social and spatial reordering and heightening of disruption led to new ways of valuing, even in small ways, relations with the more-than-human world. These new ways of valuing highlight the role of disruption in destabilizing the terrain from which settler colonialist, instrumental valuations of nature are normalized, and reinforce the possibility of continued human–more-than-human collaboration through future climatic changes and destruction, potentially working towards more liveable futures (Chapman & Deplazes-Zemp, 2023).

MORE-THAN-HUMAN CONNECTIONS AS PARTICULAR TO POSITIONALITY

Yet, interviewees themselves did not see their new connections as necessarily leading to a lasting, transformative change in how they would continue to relate to and value others. Rather, in their own words, participants often explicitly named that their experience was particular to their positionality and the exceptional spatial reordering of their everyday lives. These participants generally defined their more-than-human connections as a by-product of their circumstances as ‘dislocated’ university students with upended daily routines, rather than an impetus for further exploring more-than-human relationships.

For example, one participant, Rick, found that he was ‘much more conscientious’ about sitting with the flowers and trees in a nearby neighbourhood park since the pandemic started. He described this shift as experiencing a ‘deeper delight’ while being among the trees hearing the birds amidst lockdown. However, when asked if he expects to maintain this newfound appreciation once social distancing orders are lifted, Rick said that he expects to be less inclined to return to the park once the weather becomes hotter. For Rick, his increased awareness of the more-than-human world felt particular to not only the pandemic itself, but the time of year. Leo was another participant who predicted his new more-than-human connections fading over time. Leo, who ‘started noticing the creek and trees’ in his backyard with more detail during the pandemic, admitted that ‘If things go back to normal, then I will probably spend less time outside intentionally. And more incidentally’. Similarly, another participant, Clara, discussed this same transience. Clara was asked if she plans on continuing a lockdown ritual of running her hands through creek water to feel the texture of the stones lying underneath. She guessed that she might continue ‘for a month or so and then I'll just go back to being as I was before the pandemic. You know, we have short attention spans’. These interviewees indicated that while their experience of the pandemic led to new attachments with the more-than-human, these attachments were not anticipated to translate into lasting changes. In other words, newfound recognition of relational value did not seem to inspire motivation or provide the resources for longer-term transformational change.

Interviewees also named their positionality in terms of race and class privilege as a major factor that enabled their experiences with the more-than-human. For example, Gill, one of the many interviewees who returned to their parents' house in a suburban area after their college campus shut down, explained, ‘I feel really lucky to have access to a park and green space so close to me, and I think that if I didn't, it would be a really different experience’. They added that travelling to areas outside their neighbourhood with ample opportunities to experience diverse ecologies, such as state or national parks, is considered ‘risky’ amidst recommendations to stay in place to slow the spread of the virus. Thus, they felt dependent on green spaces in close proximity, not knowing if they would develop the same perception of ‘nature as a safe haven’ without their front yard and local parks. Another interviewee, John, who was able to spend time in state and national parks in the Pacific Northwest during lockdown, mentioned how his whiteness offers a sense of comfortability in these spaces, referencing his own settler-privilege in colonized land.

Through these participants' accounts, we found that while they were experiencing shifts in their more-than-human relationships and recognizing relational values, these shifts were imbricated in contexts of multilayered privileges. The disparities in privileges are further exemplified by the interviewees without access to spaces that allow them to readily experience different ecosystems. For example, Laura, whose family home is in a residential neighbourhood near a highway in Southeast Bronx, New York City without nearby parks, explained that ‘If we want to go to a green space we have to either go to another borough or upstate’. Even though not all of the interviewees were privileged in the same ways, we find that a considerable number of individuals directly connected their emerging more-than-human connections to green space access. Thus, not only did interviewees not see their connections as necessarily lasting after the lockdown but they also recognized the unjust social and spatial distribution of these opportunities. These uneven distributions became part of the re-ordering of everyday life among the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic and further underscore that while relational values exist in the intimate space between people and nature, their potentialities and possibilities are shaped by multi-scalar factors like socio-spatial injustice (Maurer et al., 2023; Schaafsma et al., 2023; Stålhammar & Thorén, 2019).

This awareness of transience and positionality in pandemic experiences sits alongside recent literature that suggests while the contemporary moment is often portrayed as one of unprecedented apocalypse, the widespread suffering and forced resiliency for BIPOC communities are not new. Rather, structural violence is consistently rearranged and built-upon (Yusoff, 2018). Human exceptionalism and white privilege work to obscure this long-standing reproduction, consistently rendering the most recent collective traumas as both indiscriminate of race and historically unprecedented (Yusoff, 2018). This act in itself continues to proliferate colonial violence, as Western narratives erase BIPOC histories of genocide and systemic racism (Sabzalian et al., 2021). Thus, while this paper specifically examines pandemic disruptions, we understand these as one point of social–ecological rupture emerging from a long-standing condition of crisis. Moreover, the necessity for increased relational value of nature and transformative multispecies justice is one produced by these very same narratives and acts of violence. Together these two insights further highlight the need to consider the durability of transformation in human relations with the more-than-human across longer temporal scales, clarify for whom transformative relational values are imperative and why, and reflect on the limits of relational value alone to support and foster such transformation.

REORIENTING BEYOND ENTANGLEMENT AND RELATIONAL VALUE

The themes of ephemerality and positionality with regard to more-than-human connections that prominently emerged from the interviews reinforces our understandings of the limitations in merely recognizing entanglement or value. Transformative multispecies justice requires not only a simple recognition or appreciation of connection but also active and explicit decolonial work. For example, Collard et al. (2015) offer that noticing entanglement alone cannot create abundant futures. Rather, they write that creating abundant futures ‘means supporting already existing worlding practices that enact worlds different from those produced by European imperialism and settler colonialism’. The long-term healing of injured human and more-than-human relationships necessitates undoing colonial formations of supremacy that severed these relationships in the first place. Put another way, we need to not only recognize the relational value of nature but also actively propagate it.

Such work requires long-term commitment. ‘[It] require[s] us to live these relations, to know what comprises these relations and what they entail, and to manifest kinship and reciprocity every day’ (Kanngieser & Todd, 2020: 389). Kanngieser and Todd also cite Indigenous scholars' writing on fostering relationality with the more-than-human world, such as Watts (2013) concept of ‘Indigenous Place-Thought’ and Brenda MacDougall's (2011) idea of reciprocity through kinship. Transformational multispecies justice is thus built upon a labour of self-reflexivity as a lifelong practice and asks us to engage with the multiscalar, structural factors that shape the contours of possibility for more-than-human relationships. In contrast, many of our interviewees' experiences appeared to be hinged on shorter term convenience, for example, temporary spatial proximity, driven by an abrupt rupture in the patterns of daily life. This spatio-temporal specificity, and its intersection with interviewees' positionalities as American university students, contributed to participants' lack of expectations for lasting transformations in how they related to the more-than-human world after lockdown, despite feeling some quality of emerging connection out of pandemic rupture.

Transformation, however, does not look like the colonized definition of progress that infiltrates dominant western culture; ‘it happens in cycles, convergences, explosions’ (brown, 2017: 2015). Both the nonlinear and long-term natures of transformation prevent us from drawing a singular conclusion about how our participants' pandemic mosaics of disruptions and more-than-human connectivity might metabolize together in the future. Our interviewee accounts suggest potential, more ambiguous change along broader transformative pathways, rather than being concrete examples of change in themselves. In this ambiguity lies possibility. While the majority of participants expressed that they do not expect their relationships to more-than-human others to necessarily last after lockdown, we find examples of participants who felt otherwise. Some reported they expected to continue with changed habits, such as taking walks with their partner, while others indicated lasting changes in the ways they experience and value more-than-human spaces. ‘[I'm] definitely more appreciative of green spaces and just being able to feel free out there’. Parks and backyards taken for granted prior to the pandemic were now seen as places of refuge by many participants, some of whom speculated, and at times hoped, that their appreciation of these spaces and the more-than-human relations comprising them might continue after lockdown orders were lifted.

Further nuance within interviewees' narratives reveals that desires for novel connections and behavioural changes to persist are not necessarily linked to expressions of relational value. Interviewees who suspected that their shifts in more-than-human connections might be longer term often spoke of in terms of ‘resources’ and ‘personal enjoyment’, centring benefits humans might receive from the more-than-human world rather than relational values such as mutual, reciprocal human-more-than-human relationships. One interviewee, for example, explained ‘I never did that before [take a walk outside]. I never thought that was a fun thing to do. Now, I would say that it is a very enjoyable task’ (emphasis added). In statements such as this, while interviewees indicate increased interest in being in more-than-human spaces, they do not relay clear intentions of further cultivating more-than-human relationships nor do they indicate enduring characteristics of relational value.

Taken together, interviewees' narratives of novel connections to nature amidst mosaics of disruption and the spatio-temporal specificity of accompanying relational values suggest a complex relationship between crisis and transformative change with respect to more-than-human relations. The fact that some interviewees believe that their new appreciation for the outdoors may outlive the lockdown period does not directly connote the possibility for life-long dedication to making kin with the more-than-human. Rather, we find this possibility in the unpredictability of transformation. While most of the pandemic connections we reported among interviewees read as ephemeral, we do not know how the more-than-human relationships formed or deepened during lockdown will continue to transpose in the future. Only time, and inevitable future crises, can tell how the more-than-human relationships we found among our interviewee sample will develop. Instead, our findings make a compelling case for more fully engaging multispecies justice and its calls for collaborative survival in our efforts to engage both crisis and relational value to spur transformation in human–nature relations, while also recognizing for whom such transformations are imperative and why. This entails noticing not just our relations with more-than-human others but also those factors across time and spatial scale that would support and nurture, or obscure and hinder, such relations (Tsing, 2017). It must also entail explicit decolonization efforts, which are neither individual nor abstract, and which seek to embrace the nonlinear, iterative and punctuated rhythms of transformation (Todd, 2016; Tuck & Wayne Yang, 2021).

Lastly, while we have supported relational value as a positive form of human-more-than-human connection, we must acknowledge that we cannot be certain such values are always beneficial for more-than-human others. Embracing transformative multispecies justice should warrant further, careful investigation of how more-than-human entities might connect with humans, and if they would choose these connections.

CONCLUSION

Based on our collection of interviewee accounts, we conclude that the COVID-19 pandemic is facilitating varying degrees of connectedness with the more-than-human world and revealing relational values of nature. We found that nearly every interview participant reported a connection with more-than-human others, and the majority of these were directly related to pandemic disruptions, such as changes in living situations, new challenges to well-being and changes in time spent outside.

While individual interviewees' accounts differed, we discerned a pattern of various pandemic indeterminacies compounding with one another to form mosaics of disruption. The COVID-19 pandemic not only initiated new challenging circumstances but built upon and interwove with existing disparities. While these mosaics of disruption spurred novel more-than-human connections, these connections themselves are highly particular and not universally of the same quality. Nevertheless, interviewee accounts reinforced theories of shifting more-than-human landscapes amidst times of crisis, potentially foretelling continued shifts in the inevitable disturbances caused by climate change. However, interviewees reported that more-than-human connections were imbricated in both ephemerality and positionality. Interviewees in their own words asserted that they do not necessarily imagine their connections enduring outside of an early-pandemic context. In doing so, interviewees indicated the limits of relational value as an impetus for transformation and supported the need to move beyond merely recognizing relationality. Rather, different Indigenous multispecies scholars clarify that transformation must include a daily commitment to understanding our more-than-human relationships over a lifetime and the ways these are embedded within existing forms of disparity and injustice. Thus, disruption, as grounds for transformation, may seed change but like all struggles, requires long-term commitment and cultivation outside of colonized depictions of progress to bring those seeds to fruition.

AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

Megan Maurer (MM) and Elizabeth M. Cook (EC) conceived the ideas; Olivia Visnic (OV), MM, Liv Yoon (LY), and EMC designed methodology; OV, MM, and LY collected the data; OV, MM, LY, and EMC analysed the data; OV, MM, and EMC led the writing of the manuscript. All authors contributed critically to the drafts and gave final approval for publication.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to acknowledge funding from NSF-RAPID grant #2029301, ‘Examining How Access to Green Space Impacts Subjective Well-being during the COVID-19 Pandemic’. We would like to thank Patricia Culligan, Brian Mailloux, Benjamin Orlove and Georgia Sparks for their contributions and support in this project, as well as the anonymous reviewers who provided feedback to improve this work.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST STATEMENT

The authors report no conflicts of interest.

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

The anonymized survey data, coding and interview protocol can be accessed on GitHub (). The interview data will be made available upon request.

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