“Material vulnerability shares the character of the ‘face’ that calls, making an ethical demand. Material vulnerability becomes visible, for example, in animals left as road kill, mountains levelled for coal, forests razed for paper products and bodies subject to nuclear fallout. The mutuality of a material vulnerability is at the crux of understanding not only compassionate action as an ethical response but also the way actions of hospitality and service rely on more-than-human agencies.” (Anne Elvey, Reading With Earth, p. 141-2)
Anne Elvey’s Reading With Earth is defined by a gentle eco-feminist hermeneutics that places compassion at its core, deeply connected with an awareness of material vulnerability. Compassion is about interconnectedness, shared vulnerabilities, and the potential for collective care. Elvey, drawing on Levinasian philosophy, emphasizes the material vulnerability that “shares the character of the ‘face’ that calls.”[1] We witness the shared vulnerability of humans and more-than-human on the “animals left as roadkill, mountains leveled for coal, forests razed for paper products and bodies subject to nuclear fallout”[2], and this witnessing entails “compassionate action as an ethical response.”[3] An act of compassion involves “cross-species and material agencies at work … its fleshy solidarities and resistances.”[4] Formed by senses and the body, compassion implies the body as ground: Elvey refers to the etymological links (in Hebrew and koine Greek) between compassion, maternal, and the corporeal.
Compassion is about cross-species relatedness. It is an ethical response to shared vulnerabilities across species, one which prioritizes the interconnectedness of all life forms. Elvey refers to Luke 10.30–37, where the parable illustrates a “fleshy space of solidarity” where compassion emerges from recognizing and responding to the material and existential vulnerability of others. Compassion also extends to an ecological consciousness and accordingly urges humans to care for the Earth and its beings as part of a broader ethical practice.
According to Elvey, compassion is not just about a direct connection between two individuals, like “an injured animal and me in a moment”; instead, it arises from and reinforces the interconnectedness of all life, emphasizing our shared ethical responsibility as part of the larger fabric of the world.[5]
Compassion is about recognizing the material givenness of human and more-than-human: “the reality of a material givenness that encompasses not only bodies … but also the relatedness that is an ethical reality.”[6] Material givenness reveals the inherent vulnerability of bodies, habitats, and Earth itself; how and through which acts they are exposed to eco-political traumas, climate change, pollution, and systemic oppression.
According to Elvey, an ecological feminism shaped around the reality of material givenness provides the ground for practices of compassion –a shared vulnerability that allows us “to feel in our bodies the structures of oppression that rely on the dead bodies of animals, including humans, structures for which trauma is constitutive rather than accidental.”[7] Material vulnerability is the tissue that connects beings and environments, human and non-human entities alike. “Ethics of entanglement” values caregiving that sustains life and respects the material interdependencies of human and more-than-human.
[1] Anne Elvey, Reading With Earth, Contributions of the New Materialism to an Ecological Feminist Hermeneutics (Bloomsbury, 2022), 141.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid., 153.
[5] Ibid., 147.
[6] Ibid., 149.
[7] Ibid.
liquid ground 