The Bite of Planetary Justice: Storytelling, Law, and Resilience in the Anthropocene

Co-convened by Dr. Rob Amos (Birkbeck Law School), Dr. Harry Acton (School of Creative, Culture and Communication), and Dr. Stephen Willey (School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication), in collaboration with the Immersive Learning Team (James Cull), the session invited participants to reimagine planetary justice through narrative, law, and embodied ecological experience.

The session began with the literal snakebite, often treated narrowly as a human health issue, but here reframed as a concern of ecological harm and corresponding injustices, exposing the uneven consequences of human encroachment into nonhuman habitats. From there, it explored how metaphors of the “bite”—as danger, transformation, and legal power—shape our perceptions of human and nonhuman agency in the Anthropocene, drawing on methods of close reading, creative writing, and Virtual Reality (VR). At stake were not only the laws that respond to such events, but the deeper legal narratives that legitimise or obscure them. Participants examined how legal consensus itself is a kind of storytelling act—how certain ecological realities are rendered visible or invisible depending on whose voice is heard, whose pain is acknowledged, and whose survival is prioritised. Through a mix of immersive experience and critical discussion, the session asked: What does it mean to be bitten, to bite back, or to withdraw the bite altogether in the face of ecological collapse? And more pressingly: what stories do our laws tell—and fail to tell—about these encounters?

Embodied reading and multi-species justice

Framed by Kafka’s The Burrow, D.H. Lawrence’s Snake, Henry Hoke’s novel Open Throat, and recent philosophical and legal theory from Martha Nussbaum and Chris Hilson, the session foregrounded the interpretive richness of literary form in shaping ecological feeling. Harry Acton’s opening remarks situated the session in relation to ecocritical debates about the affective power of literature, noting that narrative can both mediate and disrupt our understanding of nonhuman others. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s call to “stay with the trouble,” Acton argued that storytelling is most valuable when it resists familiar, human-centred resolutions and instead invites a more entangled, unsettling ethical stance—one that sees humans not as sovereign agents, but as “mortal critters” entwined with nonhumans in an ongoing, “unfinished” reality.

Participants explored this through close reading and discussion, engaging with how literary techniques such as anthropomorphism, unreliable narration and linguistic play could complicate and enrich our sense of environmental vulnerability. The “bite” became a structural metaphor: at times violent or defensive, at others a vehicle for intimacy, ingestion, or infection—reflecting the unstable boundaries between self and other, law and ecology, human and animal.

Virtual reality and the reframing of perspective

A key innovation in the session was its integration of immersive VR experiences. Curated by James Cull of Birkbeck’s Immersive Learning Team, the VR stations allowed participants to step into environments affected by climate degradation, deforestation, and human-wildlife conflict. You can view the Playlist here.

As one participant noted during the final group reflection, “it felt like I had to account for my presence in that space.” Such statements point to the potential of VR to reorient ethical perception—not by abstract argument, but by visceral, spatial reconfiguration.

The VR reflection materials offered a scaffold for this inquiry, prompting participants to consider how embodiment, vulnerability, and choice in immersive environments intersect with legal notions of agency and responsibility. In particular, the experience of powerlessness—whether navigating an encroached forest or becoming prey as a wolf mauls a 360 camera—challenged anthropocentric assumptions that legal protections always equate to actual safety or justice.

From Paralysis to Pattern Recognition: Narrative as Critical Infrastructure

Throughout the session, a recurring theme was the potential of narrative to counteract the emotional stasis that can follow from ecological despair. As Acton noted, the saturation of declarative climate facts can produce not clarity but “stuplimity”—a paralysing blend of astonishment and exhaustion. Against this, the session offered narrative as a kind of critical infrastructure: not to replace scientific or legal modes of reasoning, but to work alongside them, giving shape to otherwise inchoate feelings of risk, injustice, and possibility.

Participants responded with insight and generosity. Some interpreted the literary texts as explorations of ecological grief, while others saw the VR scenarios as challenging the human-centred assumptions embedded in environmental law. Strangely, VR—by placing the human within nature rather than above or outside it—can help illuminate the entangled realities of human and nonhuman life, inviting a more relational understanding of environmental responsibility and legal imagination. A few described the session’s arc as one of ‘being made strange again’ to the environment—not to alienate, but to recover a sharper sense of entanglement and risk.

Toward a More Than Human Pedagogy

As part of the broader Birkbeck Climate Festival, The Bite of Planetary Justice exemplified the pedagogical ambition to engage students across disciplines in urgent and imaginative climate thinking. It also served as a pilot for future cross-disciplinary offerings that draw on immersive technology, narrative theory, and legal critique to interrogate planetary futures.

Whether through the perspectives of Kafka’s defensive mole, Lawrence’s hesitant ‘hospitality’ towards a nonhuman, or Hoke’s queer lion as narrator, participants were invited to experience the Anthropocene not simply as a scientific epoch, but as a condition of contested storytelling. The stories we tell about snakes, laws, and our own teeth matter. They frame who we think we are, what we owe, and to whom.