With intensifying extreme weather events, global species decline and a laundry list of other issues attributed to climate change, the end of the world can appear inevitable.

On Wednesday evening, however, Claire Farago offered a novel solution to climate divisions through art and culture, arguing that by better relating to animals, humans can erode the false hubris that caused the subjugation of nature in the first place.

Farago, professor emeritus of art history at the University of Colorado Boulder, spoke at Doheny Memorial Library about her book, “Writing Borderless Histories of Art: Human Exceptionalism and the Climate Crisis,” published in June. The event was hosted by the Levan Institute for the Humanities, and Daniela Bleichmar, who ended her tenure as director of the institute this year, moderated the book talk.

“Farago has been a pioneer and a leader in expanding the world of art history,” Bleichmar said during the book talk.

Farago said the main focus of “Writing Borderless Histories of Art” is the historical relationship between European assumptions about art and society and the degradation of the environment on a global scale.

Farago argued that a key cause of the environmental crisis is the Aristotelian concept of “human exceptionalism,” or the belief that humans’ mental, technological and artistic abilities are what differentiate them from animals.

However, she said that recent scientific discoveries of nonhuman sentience, culture and neurochemistry, comparable to those in humans, caused her to question why humans are in a position of authority to judge.

Farago proposed a more borderless expansion of both cultural identity and institutional creativity, à la philosopher Jacques Derrida’s “The Animal That Therefore I Am,” which flips the conventional narrative by observing humanity’s lack of rationality and abundance of animalistic traits.

“[People must reach] into the abyss to breach the flimsy wall that humans maintain between themselves and all other animals,” Farago said.

The book cover features the iconic “Earthrise” photograph by Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders, depicting the planet as it partially materializes above the lunar surface. Farago said she chose it for its “ambivalent” quality and symbolic relevance to her writing.

“I wanted this book to present clear kinds of choices but also a very positive image of what art can do to promote [the] sustainability of the planet by rethinking itself,” Farago said.

Co-sponsors of Farago’s book talk included the Early Modern Studies Institute, the Visual Studies Research Institute, the Wrigley Institute for Environment and Sustainability and the Levan Institute’s Environmental Humanities Working Group.

Farago said that more critical and interdisciplinary questioning of the nature-culture relationship and the “technologies of making” are needed.

“Technology is always shaped by culture and power. It’s an expression of human experience,” Sean Fraga, co-leader of the Environmental Humanities Working Group and assistant professor of environmental studies and history, said.

Fraga approached Bleichmar during the COVID-19 lockdowns to begin a working group at the Levan Institute. He was paired with Devin Griffiths, associate professor of English and comparative literature, to create the Environmental Humanities Working Group, a collaborative space for interdisciplinary environmental scholarship.

“We’re interested in how people make meaning out of their interactions with the natural world … and how [this varies] across time and place and culture,” Fraga said. “All of that helps us to see how environmental problems today are also social and cultural and historical problems.”

Both Farago and Fraga identified Western colonist ideology as detrimental to humanity’s relationship with the environment and as manifested in the commodification and exploitation of natural resources.

Farago emphasized a transcultural approach to solving the environmental crisis. She argued that Indigenous perspectives are necessary in undoing centuries of deeply Eurocentric and exploitative knowledge production.

“Many Indigenous cosmologies and knowledge systems do not distinguish between the sentience of humans and other animals,” Farago said.

The talk ended with Farago screening a short snippet of Netflix’s “My Octopus Teacher” (2020), in which filmmaker Craig Foster detailed his encounter with the titular octopus as it ingeniously escaped a pyjama shark attack by shrouding itself in shells and deftly maneuvering itself onto the shark’s back, before burrowing into a hiding spot.

The octopus’s “artwork,” she argued, was not this shell sculpture but the entire sequence of the animal’s impromptu evasion and escape.

Farago concluded with an open call to recognize and “transgress” the human-animal border and its history; since art is always driven by its context, and art creates future contexts, she said, challenging the origins of our anthropocentric assumptions is “imperative.”

“Objectivity is only possible through the joining of partial views into a collective subject position that creates communities based on concrete circumstances … We need to change the way that humans and the rest of the animal kingdom are related,” Farago said.