Martin Johnson Heade exercises biocentrism through examinations of intra-species, inter-species, species-ecosystem, and species-planetary relationships. Heade realizes the anthropogenic change occurring around him constitute an incompressible scale of implications, turning to self inflection through ecological reflexivity as a mode of interpreting the early stages of the Anthropocene.
However, Heade’s attitude is not unwavering and he struggles to acknowledge the breadth of peoples and their relationships with the natural world. Despite being vocally opposed to the agent of empire and its impact on indigenous groups, Heade falters in his consideration of ecological dynamics that develop in the face of human exploitation. He removes indigenous people in his equations of preservation, remarking on the “semibarbarism [that] still reigns [in Florida] and the natives [that] still shoot deer in the summer and quail in season, and out.”39 He becomes frustrated by the disregard for hunting practices, notably constructed by a privileged circuit of white individuals and pushed onto communities already forced to the margins of society.
Heade is selectively dismissive of the racial and sociopolitical inequalities in Florida integral to framing a biocentric perspective. This issue brings into consideration the distortion and misuse of ecological reflexivity, specifically the dangers of the responses it 'enables.' Heade misunderstands what may and may not be justified in the name of protecting nature, because he neglects perspectives that must be acknowledged to shape equitable, and therefore successful, conservation practices. In entering, then stepping out of his biocentric position, we not only witness Heade's struggle, but more importantly the alarm of advancing towards irreversible dissonance if we do not recast our existence of entitlement as one of cohabitative being-in-the-world.