The Entangled Web: Embodied Freedom as a Framework for Multispecies Flourishing

The question posed by the Religion and Ecology Unit, "How is the human claim to freedom entangled with other life forms?", pierces to the heart of our ecological predicament. This question challenges dominant narratives of freedom that have long privileged human autonomy and dominion over nature, reinforcing frameworks that justify ecological degradation. Given the consequences of defining freedom as detachment, sovereignty, or control, it is critical to rethink freedom in a way that accounts for interdependence, materiality, and shared vulnerability. In this paper, I argue that embodied freedom—freedom understood as relational, material, and inseparable from ecological entanglements—offers a necessary reorientation for ethical and ecological thought. Specifically, I propose a framework of embodied freedom that (1) acknowledges multispecies agency and (2) takes seriously our ecological vulnerability, thereby offering a more just and sustainable foundation for thinking about freedom in an era of planetary crisis. 

To set the context for this argument, I will begin by examining how dominant models of freedom have historically shaped landscapes and ethical thought. Historian William Cronon, in Changes in the Land, illustrates how colonial ideologies transformed not only ecosystems but also the very concepts governing human-nature relationships. The construction of "wilderness" justified the displacement of Indigenous peoples, erasing their knowledge and reciprocal care for the land, while the notion of "resource" reduced living ecosystems to commodities. These conceptual frameworks persist, systematically curtailing the freedom of non-human beings, fragmenting habitats, and silencing non-human agency. Similarly, as Kyle Powys Whyte demonstrates in his work on Indigenous climate justice, colonial ideologies have directly shaped contemporary environmental crises, revealing that the freedom of Indigenous communities is inextricably linked to the health of their ancestral lands. 

Against this backdrop, I develop embodied freedom as an alternative. While H.G. Geertsema defines embodied freedom as foundational for human existence and fulfillment, I extend this concept beyond human experience, arguing that freedom is not an abstract ideal but a lived, material condition—one always in relation to the bodies, ecologies, and species with which we are entangled. Drawing upon Anna Tsing’s work on fungal networks and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s concept of reciprocal relationships, I argue that embodied freedom compels us to recognize multispecies agency: the ways in which non-human beings actively shape their environments and participate in the conditions of freedom. Freedom, then, is not about withdrawal from constraint but about participating in the web of interdependent life. 

However, recognizing agency is not enough. Embodied freedom also demands that we take seriously ecological vulnerability. As Martha Fineman argues in legal theory, vulnerability is a universal and inescapable condition of life, one that challenges the dominant liberal emphasis on autonomy. Extending this insight to ecology, I argue that freedom is never about escape from dependency but about responding ethically to the vulnerabilities we share with other species. Climate change, habitat destruction, and pollution are not merely external threats but structural conditions that shape the possibilities of freedom for all beings. If we accept that freedom is embodied, then we must also accept that it is necessarily vulnerable. This recognition shifts us from a paradigm of mastery to one of care, where ethical responsibility is defined not by control but by participation in multispecies flourishing. 

Ultimately, this paper develops embodied freedom as a conceptual and ethical framework that reorients our understanding of both human and non-human agency. By challenging the traditional opposition between freedom and dependency, this framework invites us to think beyond human sovereignty and toward relational models of ethical responsibility. In doing so, it offers a way to move beyond narratives of domination toward a vision of freedom that is grounded in interdependence, vulnerability, and the shared life of the planet.