In policy, scientific, and grower communities, soils are being recognized as living and lively ecosystems. This liveliness is driving conceptual and practical transformations of agricultural labor from working the soil to working with the soil, promising to replace human labor with the activities of soil biota. This change to the material process of soil labor will deliver, it is hoped, a true ecological

In responding to the spatiotemporally specific geographies of extinction charted in the articles in this special section, this article reflects on the sociocultural factors that inform the ways in which extinction is framed and impede recognition of the enormity of the anthropogenic extinction event in which we are all bound. This article argues that we are living in an era of ecocide, where the degradation

P resent challenges and potential futures; principles for a pact on coexistence; proposals for living and thinking the Anthropocene in Chile: the core sections of the Manifesto speak to the present with the hope of activating futures other than those that, on current course, are the inevitable destination. How not to get there? How “to invent new possible futures”? The Manifesto offers a basis for

In an attempt to respond to the West’s general obliviousness to nonhuman semiosis, this article proposes a method for appreciating nonhuman poetics. By combining the critical tools of poetics and literary theory with insights from ethology and biosemiotics, Stuart Cooke outlines a method of criticism for nonhuman creative compositions. Drawing on the work of Gerald Bruns, Elizabeth Grosz, and Gilles

This essay operates at the intersection of the energy humanities and environmental justice studies to survey extractive fictions, a term I use to describe literature and other cultural forms that render visible the socioecological impacts of extractive capitalism and problematize extraction as a cultural practice. The essay first theorizes extraction and examines cultural representations of coal and

W e, academics, thinkers, activists and professionals, Chileans and foreigners, from the broad spectrum of natural and social sciences, the humanities, the arts and the spiritual world, make a call to rethink from its basis the way in which we inhabit “the human” and its place in the history of the Earth. Our call emerges in response to the Anthropocene, a notion proposed recently by the Subcommittee

[God] created one man only, dictates Scripture to us, yet if the slightest trait [difference] was enough, there would easily stick out thousands of different species of man: they display, namely, white, red, black and grey hair; white, rosy, tawny and black faces; straight, stubby, crooked, flattened, and aquiline noses; among them we find giants and pygmies, fat and skinny people, erect, humpy, brittle

A sking friends that have inspired my thoughts and practices to comment on the Manifesto was both troubling and exciting. Troubling because the Manifesto is a creature that is born from a very specific and place-based experiment, with its own set of questions, expectations, and limitations. Who could understand the tender care that the creature needs? Who could connect with the messy although life-enabling

This article provides the first international overview and detailed discussion of teaching in the environmental humanities (EH). It is divided into three parts. The first offers a series of regional overviews: where, when, and how EH teaching is taking place. This part highlights some key regional variability in the uptake of teaching in this area, emphasizing important differences in cultural and

Having evolved in a dynamic solar system, all life on earth has adapted to and depends on recurring and repeating cycles of light, heat, and gravity. Our sleep cycles, reproductive cycles, and emotional cycles are all linked in varying ways to planetary motion even though we continually disrupt, modify, or extend these cycles to go about our personal and collective business. This essay explores how

This article examines the visual politics at work in website photographs depicting environmental justice issues in the United States. Based on roughly 580 web-published photos collected from environmental justice organizations, the Environmental Protection Agency, the mainstream media, and traditional environmental organizations in the US, this article examines variations in how the subjects of environmental

A s many academics debate who is the “anthro” of the anthropocene, often doing so from seemingly disembodied vantage points, this important collection of essays demonstrates that toxic embodiment is a crucial lens for rethinking the human, not as an abstract force acting on the world, but as fleshy beings who are inseparable from their transcorporeal entanglements within the world. While the public

Asbestos is a fibrous mineral. Airborne asbestos—similar to nuclear radiation and chemical atmospheric pollutants—is invisible to the naked eye, and living and breathing alongside it has deferred toxic effects on human bodies. The toxicity of asbestos operates by breaching the boundary that appears to separate the insides of our bodies from our outward environments. Asbestos attests to the fact that

This article studies the depiction of indigenous struggles against the grab of minerals, crude oil, and other natural resources by private and government corporations in works such as Arundhati Roy’s travel essay “Walking with the Comrades” (2010). Roy’s narrative of her journey across the dense forests of Bastar in east-central India re-articulates the significance of this contested environmental

This article explores the cultivation of life in ruins. At the foothills of Appalachia, I focus on a permaculture farmer—Sally of Clearwater Creek—fostering arts of (making a) living on a damaged planet. Ethnography in the Anthropocene requires tending and attending to those making the best of the mess that’s been made: a commitment to noticing things not (only) falling apart, but (also) coming back

Tracing ticks in two different artworks and Leslie Feinberg's activist writing, Wibke Straube takes their lead in this article from philosopher Donna Haraway and her suggestion to think about engag ...

Triangulating narratives from a prospective mining site in northern Norway, this article works to identify (and render graspable) a particular effect of retroactive shock— tracing its resonance through experiences of chemical exposure, colonial racism, cultural erasure, and destruction of the built environment. Linking these experiences, the argument sets up and explores an analytical space within

With a focus on global cancer epidemics, the article discusses biopolitics in the Anthropocene, against the background of a notion of dual governmentality, implying that efforts to make population ...

In this article, I narrate an ethnographic storyline that involves forest inhabitants, local politicians, development professionals, and scientific researchers in both representational and nonrepresentational worlds of knowing. I discuss how and why, in Angola, making forest knowledge through relations of distance to the forests is crucial for attaining institutional legitimacy over the forests. This

In popular conservation discourse, Rhododendron ponticum is portrayed as an alien invader let loose on the British countryside by misguided gardeners. In Scotland, eradication campaigns tend to be favoured over more pragmatic approaches to management, even though the methods employed can be destructive and long-term success is often limited. In line with recent work critiquing categorical approaches

This article describes a colonial encounter in north Norway between Sami practices for fishing and knowing the natural world, and the conservation policies of state policy makers. In Sami practices the world is populated by powerful and morally lively human and nonhuman actors. In caring for the land and its lakes in practical ways it is important to sustain respectful relations with those actors.

What does it mean to do violence in deep time? How is deep time evoked in our understanding of environmental harm? Environmental transformations have figured prominently in the recent history of Mongolia. Shifts in land use have been associated with severe pasture degradation, and the precarity of herding livelihoods has been a factor accelerating urbanization. Most recently, the intensification of

Humans and yeast have a long history of productive collaboration in making a global array of fermented foodstuffs including wine, bread, and beer. Synthetic biology is now changing the shape of human-yeast work. The Sc2.0, or “synthetic yeast,” project aims to completely reengineer the Saccharomyces cerevisiae genome, designing an organism with improved capacities for scientific research and diverse

T here are many different ways of thinking about gaps in knowledge. Engraved on the copper face of the Lenox Globe circa 1500, one of the oldest known terrestrial globes, are the evocative words: “Here be dragons.”1 This was used by cartographers to signify dangerous or unexplored territories and drew on a long history from classical times when lack of knowledge equated to danger. This danger was illustrated

Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendes’s interactive documentary Bear 71 (2012) depicts the “story of a female grizzly bear monitored by wildlife conservation officers from 2001–2009” in Banff National Park. The film’s visuals are composed of fragments from critter-cam footage, which alternate with a minimalist interface: a grid populated with dots signifying other animals and plants living in Banff. This

In the late summer of 2009, a massive firestorm swept through more than one million acres of dense bush in the southeast corner of Australia, killing 173 people and leaving more than 7,000 homeless. In the aftermath of the disaster, commentators almost universally described the blaze as “unprecedented.” This essay examines that claim in the light of contextualizing environmental histories and finds

In this choral essay we, an assorted group of academics interested in inorganic life and matter, explore a mode of thinking and feeling with our objects of inquiry—chemicals, waste, cement, gas, and the “project” as a particular form of circulation and enactment of materials and things. To experiment with alternative modes of knowing, we went to Puchuncavi, the largest, oldest, and most polluting industrial

The fractured timespace of the Anthropocene brings distant pasts and futures into the present. Thinking about deep time is challenging: deep time is strange and warps our sense of belonging and our relationships to Earth forces and creatures. The introduction to this special section builds on scholarship in the environmental humanities concerning the ongoing inheritance of biological and geologic processes

In his celebrated 1974 essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” Thomas Nagel stages a human-bat encounter to illustrate and support his claim that “subjective experience” is irreducible to “objective fact”: because Nagel cannot experience the world as a bat does, he will never know what it is like to be one. In Nagel’s account, heterogeneity is figured negatively— as a failure or lack of resemblance—and

The climate catastrophe to come is traumatically affecting, whether in its micro and macro manifestations, in the threat it poses to existing ways of life, in its upending of entrenched understandings of the workings of the world, or in the injury it is doing to particular lives and wider ecologies. It works on ecologies and bodies alike as a kind of wounding, one not simply or solely to the everyday

Six years after the cease-fire that halted the 2006 war between Lebanon and Israel, southern Lebanese indicted the remains of Israel’s weapons for contaminating their lands, stunting their crops, and making them sick. Against local and international discourses claiming inconclusive evidence and uncertainty about the toxic effects of the war, my southern Lebanese interlocutors insisted on causally linking

The image of totalitarianism is central to liberal ideology as the nefarious antithesis of free market exchange: the inevitable outcome of planned economies, which control their subjects’ lives down to the most intimate detail. Against this image of complete state control, the multispecies ethnography of early Soviet institutions gives us a fortuitous edge to ask how centrally planned economies structure

In 2009, exploratory drilling of geothermal wells in Iceland’s Krafla volcanic caldera unexpectedly struck magma. The fact that the encounter didn’t have catastrophic consequences has excited considerable interest - and an international research facility is now being set up to explore energy generation and other possibilities of closer engagement with magma. We take this event as an incitement to explore

I would like to thank Caroline Wendling for her generosity in communication; the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK, without whose support this article could not have been written; and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful direction.

Extinct as a result of overhunting and habitat loss, the great auk, or garefowl, leads a hidden taxidermied existence in museum storerooms, sheltered from potential further degradation. As an environmental icon, however, the bird inspires a lively political economy of re-creation. Engaging from an anthropological perspective with practices of collecting, representing, and re-creating the great auk

From a distance, Antarctica invokes extreme imaginaries and possibilities. In the practice of everyday human Antarctic life, however, daily tasks and risks are heavily managed, mitigated, and overseen. To analyze the spectacular and mundane natures of human life in Antarctica, I will compare the paramilitary practicalities of Antarctic research station and field camp life with the visions of the Antarctic

One of the late Beatriz da Costa’s last projects, Dying for the Other (2011), presents three channels of video footage from testing environments, including laboratories, hospitals, kitchens, and living rooms offset by pink mice wriggling in their cage, living and dead mice weighed and handled by breast cancer researchers, and the materials of laboratory and medical work: test tubes, petri dishes, scalpels

At the turn of the previous century Henri Bergson suggested that sympathy offered a way to understand interspecies relationships. Samuel Butler took Bergson’s ideas to an absurd extent by mixing them with readings of Charles Darwin and claiming a vital impulse for machines. By interspersing a story of humans and machines with insect life, Butler pointed to a broad imaginative web of interspecies and

Based on multidisciplinary archives as well as fieldwork and interviews, this article focuses on the intertwined nature of movements of resistance by humans and plants struggling against genetically engineered soy monocultures in Argentina, which we provocatively conceptualize as interspecies resistance. Roundup Ready (RR) soy is genetically engineered to be resistant to the herbicide Roundup, which

The apprehension of the last three factors of the Drake equation, fi · fc · L, is misguided or at least not very well examined. This article scrutinizes the underlying suppositions involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) research. What is meant by “intelligence,” “technology,” and “civilization”? What makes them possible, and how do they evolve? The present examination aims

This article explores how taking physical cosmology and the entities that populate its fringes on their own terms might prompt anthropology to rethink what and how it thinks of life. Physical cosmologists work with inanimate matter that lies at the frontier of existential possibility, positing scales and concepts that seem to negate commonsense notions of life and nonlife. Although a common reaction

This article uses the history of an unrealized technology to rethink conventional accounts of American spaceflight that cast the space cabin as the ultimate expression of humans’ capacity to technologically master their environments. Drawing on archival and published sources, I detail the history of the bioregenerative life-support system, a system in which simple organisms—most commonly algae—would

A growing number of researchers in the social sciences and the environmental humanities have begun to focus on the wider universe and how it is apprehended by modern cosmology. Today the extraterrestrial has become part of the remit of anthropologists, philosophers, historians, geographers, scholars in science and technology studies, and artistic researchers, among others. And there is an emerging

In the last quarter-century many scientific, environmental, and popular publications have used a metaphor comparing species extinction and the loss of biodiversity in the modern era to the destruction of the ancient Library of Alexandria in Egypt more than 1,500 years ago. The rhetorical figure is characteristic of the environmental humanities, for it invokes the value of cultural and literary treasures

Astronomers searching for an Earth-like planet elsewhere in our galaxy imagine the significance of such a discovery. They tell each other a story about pointing to the star around which such an exoplanet exists and knowing with certainty that there is a world upon which humans could comfortably live. The story, told in white papers, at scientific conferences, and to broader publics, features a mother

Ice cores from Antarctica, Greenland, and the high-mountain cryosphere have become essential sources of evidence on the climate dating back nearly 800,000 years. Earth scientists use ice cores to understand the chemical composition of the atmosphere, which has been trapped in the air bubbles between the ice crystals as they form annually; this knowledge also feeds into modeling the climate’s future

Amid mounting concerns over viral and bacterial outbreaks in industrial farm settings, scholars of modern industrial agriculture have increasingly focused their attention on the dangers posed by an “excess of life.” While important, this focus tends to produce a narrative in which life is associated with disruption, pathology, and chaos, while that part of the animal that remains productive comes to

Darjeeling, a district in the Himalayan foothills of the Indian state of West Bengal, is a former colonial “hill station.” It is world famous both as a destination for mountain tourists and as the source of some of the world’s most expensive and sought-after tea. For decades, Darjeeling’s majority population of Indian-Nepalis, or Gorkhas, have struggled for subnational autonomy over the district and

Taking as its provocation Leo Bersani’s fleeting turn to questions of ecology at the end of his 2002 essay “Sociability and Cruising,” this piece asks what it would mean to use the practice of cruising as an unexpected model for a new ecological ethic, one more deeply attuned to our impersonal intimacies with the human, nonhuman, and elemental strangers that constitute both our environment and ourselves

In this article I pose a series of questions about the relationships between the temporal rhythms of late capitalism and the flourishing of those relational “onto-epistemologies” so celebrated by recent theorists of the ontological turn. Bringing together recent research in political and environmental anthropology influenced by the ontological turn and the temporal insights of Michel Serres, one of

This article examines the DNA-based biopoetry of Christian Bök in relation to its antecedents in the art-science experiments of Joe Davis, Pak Chung Wong, and Eduardo Kac. In particular, I develop an ecocritical analysis of the process of encipherment at the center of their works. Wong encoded lyrics from the song “It’s a Small World After All”within the DNA of a bacterium. Similarly, Kac employs encipherment

At an urban parrot sanctuary in the Midwestern USA, humans care for eightysome parrots from more than a dozen species. Many of these parrots have personal histories that include various forms of neglect, abuse, and abandonment. The article explores the forms of interspecies communication through which human caretakers interpret and respond to the psychic lives of these parrots—psychic lives that are

Projects of coastal reclamation have allowed humanity to expand its terrestrial foothold, often quite dramatically, although the act of extension may be forgotten as we come to naturalize these new lands as timeless terra firma. Against this possibility, my investigation of the 1880s reclamation of the Elizabeth Bay foreshore on Sydney Harbour, Australia, is a work of recall or recovery. The introduction

How does contemporary music cultivate ecological thinking and climate-change awareness in our era of global warming? This essay investigates how the music of Pulitzer Prize–winning Alaskan composer John Luther Adams incites ecological listening and shapes an ear for climate change. It examines Adams’s evolving signature style of composing and/or performing with climatic elements and natural forces

Scholars in the humanities and social sciences are experimenting with novel ways of engaging with worlds around us. Passionate immersion in the lives of fungi, microorganisms, animals, and plants is opening up new understandings, relationships, and accountabilities. This introduction to the special issue offers an overview of the emerging field of multispecies studies. Unsettling given notions of species

T homas Merton, the American intellectual turned Trappist monk, recounts in The Seven Storey Mountain that his conversion to Catholicism was triggered by reading an account of a sermon in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a novel that draws from Joyce’s own departure from the faith. Merton fully recognizes the oddness and paradox of such a reading, but there was something, he thinks

This essay discusses the changing notions of landscape and nature at work in the video installation Mountain Pine Beetle and explores some of the forces that eventuated in the devastated landscapes of the Rocky Mountain West brought on by the infestation of the mountain pine beetle beginning in the early 2000s—an infestation caused, in no small part, by what some scientists have called a perfect storm

Mineral evolution (ME) is a geologic paradigm postulating that Earth’s minerals formed sequentially and have interacted with life forms for billions of years. The evolution of Earth and its minerals is therefore entangled with the evolution of life. This “Provocation” ponders the implications of ME for the environmental humanities in general and for Anthropocene narratives in particular. ME relies

We acknowledge the financial support of the Aarhus University and the University of Iceland as well as the Norwegian Centre for Advanced Study (CAS), which hosted the research project "Arctic Domestication in the Era of the Anthropocene," led by Marianne Elisabeth Lien, and funded our stay in Oslo during the academic year 2015-16. Also, we thank other colleagues and CAS participants who commented and

P ope Francis’s ecological muse in his 2015 encyclical on climate change and inequality is also his namesake. The pope begins his letter with lines from a canticle attributed to the long departed friar from Assisi. The saint is the first to evoke our human sisterhood with the feminized figure of our planet.1 But the pope’s subsequent admonishments are contemporary, and his own: “This sister now cries