more-than-human patients

Compiled with AI assistance and selectively reviewed. Please consult the cited passages; the books remain the authoritative source. About this companion

Editorial synthesis · provisional

Definition

More-than-human patients are RB3’s beings, systems and relations whose degradation can irreversibly contract future viability for human and non-human life. Forests, watersheds, pollinators and other living infrastructures exceed the isolated human as the sole ethical unit. The proposal preserves concrete ecological dependence and threshold awareness without implying mystical transcendence, human superiority or compulsory cosmic scope for every decision.

Explanation

The term patient concerns what can be affected and foreclosed, not only a human clinical recipient or an object of sympathy. Human agency already depends on metabolic, multispecies and systemic relations. The proposed entry preserves that constitutive claim without inferring that every ecosystem has one mind or a single human-like subjective perspective.

Ecological damage can remain undramatic until a threshold closes options for many beings. The author consequently includes more-than-human irreversibility in practical triage. This is a normative application of interdependence and temporal disparity, not a newly supplied numerical threshold model or proof that any particular environmental change is already irreversible.

The qualification explicitly limits scope: check ecological irreversibility when the domain plausibly implicates it, otherwise act at the appropriate human scale. Haraway’s companion-species lineage supports response-capacity rather than abstract love of nature. The proposal keeps that situated discipline and does not turn every local choice into unlimited responsibility for the cosmos.

Scope and attribution

Concrete ecological patients and plausible threshold scope differ from mysticism, one ecosystem subject or a demand for cosmic deliberation every time.

AB — The Actual Book

Source-verified occurrence; see the printed-page references below.

Occurrence locators: Notes: 248.

RB3 — The Real Book, Volume III: Murmurations

The developed account belongs to RB3 in the cited local scope, with antecedents and qualifications retained.

Occurrence locators: 240, 298, 301, 302.