Staying Together: NatureCulture in a Changing World (Environment and Society) 1666935395, 9781666935394

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Staying Together

Environment and Society Series Editor: Douglas Vakoch As scholars examine the environmental challenges facing humanity, they increasingly recognize that solutions require a focus on the human causes and consequences of these threats, and not merely a focus on the scientific and technical issues. To meet this need, the Environment and Society series explores a broad range of topics in environmental studies from the perspectives of the social sciences and humanities. Books in this series help the reader understand contemporary environmental concerns, while offering concrete steps to address these problems. Books in this series include both monographs and edited volumes that are grounded in the realities of ecological issues identified by the natural sciences. Our authors and contributors come from disciplines including but not limited to anthropology, architecture, area studies, communication studies, economics, ethics, gender studies, geography, history, law, pedagogy, philosophy, political science, psychology, religious studies, sociology, and theology. To foster a constructive dialogue between these researchers and environmental scientists, the Environment and Society series publishes work that is relevant to those engaged in environmental studies, while also being of interest to scholars from the author’s primary discipline.

Recent Titles in the Series Staying Together: Natureculture in a Changing World, Edited by Kaushani Mondal Learning in the Anthropocene: Reimagining Education in the Twenty-First Century, by Carl A. Maida The Social Life of Unsustainable Mass Consumption, by Magnus Boström Everyday Life Ecologies: Sustainability, Crisis, Resistance, by Alice Dal Gobbo Environmental Legacies of the Copernican Universe, by Jean-Marie Kauth Anticipatory Environmental (Hi)Stories from Antiquity to the Anthropocene, edited by Christopher Schliephake and Evi Zemanek Mapping the Environmental Humanities: The Emerging Role of GIS in Ecocriticism, edited by Mark Terry and Michael G. Hewson The Bangladesh Environmental Humanities Reader: Environmental Justice, Developmental Victimhood, and Resistance, by Samina Luthfa, Mohammad Tanzimuddin Khan, and Munasir Kamal Loren Eiseley’s Writing across the Nature and Culture Divide, by Qianqian Cheng The Saving Grace of America’s Green Jeremiad, by John Gatta Art and Nuclear Power: The Role of Culture in the Environmental Debate, by Anna Volkmar Contesting Extinctions: Decolonial and Regenerative Futures, edited by Luis I. Prádanos, Ilaria Tabusso Marcyan, Suzanne McCullagh, and Catherine Wagner Embodied Memories, Embedded Healing: New Ecological Perspectives from East Asia, edited by Xinmin Liu and Peter I-min Huang Ecomobilities: Driving the Anthropocene in Popular Cinema, by Michael W. Pesses

Staying Together NatureCulture in a Changing World

Edited by Kaushani Mondal

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available 978-1-66693-539-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 978-1-66693-540-0 (ebook) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

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Staying Together

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Kaushani Mondal

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Dwelling in the Liminal: Intimacy, Enfolding, and Openness in More-than-Human Entanglements Clara Soudan

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Natureculture, Lifedeath

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Dominic Boyer

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Visualizing Staying Together: Multispecies Kinship, Caretaking, Justice, and Rebellion Subhankar Banerjee

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Imagining Species: Humanity and the Senses in Contemporary Literature Caren Irr

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Making Kin with Plants: Poetry in the Phytosphere John Charles Ryan

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Beyond Civilization: How Far Are We Prepared to Go in Parochializing “Progress”? Alf Hornborg

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Ecoliteracies: Epistemic Habits and Critical Knowledge between Arts and Science Research Giulia Bellinetti, Tamalone van den Eijnden, and Jeff Diamanti

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Our Classroom: Reflections on Teaching Global Environmental Justice Art in the Venice Lagoon Jennifer Garcia Peacock

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Contents

Index

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About the Contributors

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Chapter 1

Staying Together Kaushani Mondal

We are joined by fragility—“bound to volatile ecologies,” argues Claire Colebrook. This urges us to think about the relations between time, space, and species. As citizens of “fragile planet” we are at once thrown into a situation of urgent interconnectedness, aware that the smallest events contribute to global mutations, at the same time as we come up against a complex multiplicity of diverging forces and timelines that exceed any manageable point of view. (52)

Connected through fragility, imagined and real, we find ourselves at the edge of chaos: out of order, struggling to keep order, overwhelmed by disorder, and, in a large way, deranged—thrown into confusion. We are at the bend of losing our sanity of living under the pressure of an insanity of living where everything about this planet is anthropomorphized in a Baconian gust of avarice and domination. Not that the humans stand deranged but the whole nonhuman community is on the line, struggling to find the axis to survive and sustain. The last hundred years have seen a terrible beauty in the making—a transformed nature, a seriously altered habitat, a dismantled bio-egalitarianism, a being with others under the menace of permanent disruption. Are all crises attributed to humans? Are we to believe the discourses of environmental skepticism? Without attributing the humans as prime players in the ongoing climate tragedy, environmental skeptics are seeing planetary upheavals as major causes of derangement. It is staying together in catastrophe. It is a natural cycle of the planet to induce such changes but, perhaps, accounting the greenhouse emission or denuding icebergs in the Arctics or waste disposal remain confusing points for these community of argumentators. We need not bother; the planet will reset itself. Humans may continue 1

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doing what they are in the habit of doing; the planet will forget and forge, adjust and accommodate; humans can live with impunity. So are we a community of exonerated offenders? But the lions and the plants do not produce carbon emission as humans do. They do not try to territorialize and outterritorialize as humans are accustomed to doing. They don’t use weapons to protect and kill. Humans are unique in their ways of survival that declare that living is about outliving others, surviving is survival at the cost of others, something that Lynn White Jr. traced back to a particular verse in the book of Genesis around the theme of domination (Genesis 1:28). The world is precisely anthropogenic. Despite the ways in which nature and the planet adjust and adapt, humans are all powerful and manipulative to ruin the axis of existence. They don’t believe in the secularity of living; communal and sectarian, humans know only one form of existence that will keep their flag flying over the planet. Joshtrom Isaac Kureethadam argues by pointing out that The anatomically modern humans, the Homo sapiens sapiens, emerged nearly 195,000 years ago, and the Holocene epoch during which our current civilizations rose began just around 12,000 years ago. The arrival and flourishing of modern humans in our planetary home is indeed very recent when compared to the long geological history of the earth. In fact, the last time that our home planet experienced a similar rise in the global average temperatures as could occur in the current century without mitigation efforts, was a period named by scientists as the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) which occurred as far back as 55 million years ago when a massive amount of carbon in the form of methane—about 4.5 trillion tons—entered the atmosphere, causing temperatures to shoot up by 5C (9F). The big difference is that while the previous episode was caused by natural factors and stretched over a period of 10,000 years, today human activities are releasing greenhouse gases 30 times faster than the rate of emissions that triggered a period of extreme global warming in the Earth’s past, capable of achieving the same effect in just 300 years. (13)

So derangement is our unavoidable reality, a predicament that makes us secular with other beings for death-drive dominates the planet-species across land, sea, and air. For me, Robert Kirkman’s claim that “environmental problems are, in a word, endemic” (153) hardly makes sense. Kirkman’s arguments underlie ecological crisis as an “ever present potential within human condition” (153) and, hence, the alarm bells are ringing unreasonably loudly for environmental degradation is an inevitable part of our existence leading us to the crisis and catastrophe of the planet. A stance such as this argues for an oblivion of recuperation of nature; it works against the abuse that humans have put the planet to. It exonerates humans from the damage it has caused and clearly does not claim any derangement that has brought all biotic communities

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into the bounds of peril and disaster. In fact, derangement as a secular crisis owes to over technologization: Heidegger considered technology as a “mode of revealing” (13) which is about both how technology helps us to manifest ourselves and how technology as a category of objects reveals themselves to us. But if such has been the acts of revealment since humans first made their engagement with technology, things are no longer the same as an aeroplane or industrial waste machines are very different from the windmills. The former extracts and destroys in a non-sustainable way while the latter turns the energy of nature into useful sources of energy. The technological mode of being cannot be our defense against technology as essential to survival. Derangement is a form of technological misuse, a misappropriation of our technological mode of being. We have forgotten what it means to live and survive non-technologically. Perhaps, Heidegger means both in the sense that being technological is also understanding the non-technological being of existence. Watching a river is about watching a non-technological mode of being revealing to us in joy and delight; it is also technological in the way human crowd around it, harness its waters, bring down vegetation to build a bridge, pollute the surroundings as tourists on vacation. They bring more objects of technology into the world of the river to unworld a separate form of existence called derangement. Perhaps, this ecofascist attitude through technology does not make humans the only offender in this whole set of things; nature is just not “standing reserves.” Our living together brings a complex relationship between things and humans, the biotic and the non-biotic; this complicates the issue of technology as unavoidable, as habit, as necessity, and avoidable also. Amitav Ghosh niches his book The Great Derangement on three points of explications: three conceptual performatives in recognition, sublime and improbability to see how this derangement through climate change, natural upheavals and climate emergency can work. For him our deranged state has brought us before an imaginative failure—a terrible lack in comprehending what is thrown at us and what we are stretched by. This deficit is difficult to imagine as an invincible invisibility of becoming that threaten where we are and what we are and what awaits us. Imagining the calamity and failure to imagine are forms of suffering: a kind of sufferance that has deep effects on our unfolding processes of derangement. How does this deficit build an imaginary that brings us all into a secular space of extinction and destruction? The secularity of derangement—the denouement in our planetary existence—and the disorder have brought all species together into a common point of mutual recognition. It is through recognition that we identify our self and the other. Recognition can be a (in)determinate moment where recognizing the other can come through understanding as much as the lack of it. It is the lack, the ignorance, that spells the line of disorder—not

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recognizing is not recognizing oneself too. Interestingly, Amitav Ghosh writes that To recognize, then, is not the same as an initial introduction. Nor does recognition require an exchange of words: more often than not we recognize mutely. And to recognize is by no means to understand that which meets the eye; comprehension need play no part in a moment of recognition. (Ghosh 2016, 5) To add to the derangement, we can say that recognition is just not mute always; it can be misplaced, misdirected, where recognizing the other in our surroundings and nature can be misemphasized within an anthropogenic hegemony and where understanding is bereft of empathy, lacks sensibility toward the other and becomes largely solipsistic. This is like negating the other to recognize oneself; the negation of the other’s presence is a way of connecting the self with the other. This means when we negate the essentiality of a tree to declare how much we need the absence of it to flourish. Ghosh writes further that The most important element of the word recognition thus lies in its first syllable, which harks back to something prior, an already existing awareness that makes possible the passage from ignorance to knowledge: a moment of recognition occurs when a prior awareness flashes before us, effecting an instant change in our understanding of that which is beheld. Yet this flash cannot appear spontaneously; it cannot disclose itself except in the presence of its lost other. The knowledge that results from recognition, then, is not of the same kind as the discovery of something new: it arises rather from a renewed reckoning with a potentiality that lies within oneself. (5–6)

In fact, it is the “lost other” that inculcates the recognition to generate greater secularity—lost species, lost trees and plants, lost seasons, lost oceans, lost lands. This loss can be a memory to “come together” and also an overcoming of the ideology of power and domination that has defined how interspecies existence has come to rule this planet in the last hundred years. Thoreau cannot visit a Walden because a Walden does not exist, it is lost. It is a painful recognition of our continued derangement. Our staying together has changed. Human recognition of nature or the nonhuman nature has been ideological and power centered resulting in a misrecognition that created a serious controversy. The misrecognition of the nonhuman nature—the birth of the Anthropos tyrannus—has left the other with less independence and the human agency with an illusion of liberation: this is illusion because the more the misrecognition continued the greater were the shrinking of spaces between species resulting in man realizing how the planet is getting increasingly inhospitable and, hence, uninhabitable and, hence, foreign. So, the categories by which the recognition failed demanded that those categories are

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revised and reinstated to continue with a secularity that is the only promise for a planetary cohabitation. Derangement is negative, but within this disorder, there is a bend that can come through re-cognition emerging in a new ethics of co-specicism. Ghosh observes that But the earth of the era of global warming is precisely a world of insistent, inescapable continuities, animated by forces that are nothing if not inconceivably vast. The waters that are invading the Sundarbans are also swamping Miami Beach; deserts are advancing in China as well as Peru; wildfires are intensifying in Australia, as well as Texas and Canada. There was never a time, of course, when the forces of weather and geology did not have a bearing on our lives—but neither has there ever been a time when they have pressed themselves on us with such relentless directness. (82–3)

So, the narration of our coming together and being together has to change, not simply a re-narration but an investment in a probability that perhaps can find a way out of fiction. Not a mere fabula or fictionalization; but a reflection and representation of probability that gives a philosophy of hope in our daily grind in a carbon democracy. This relocates the imagination that I have been talking about at the beginning—a radical imagination that tries to understand the climate caprices, massive upheavals across the planet, and global warming as it destroys our fine balance of coexistence. What Ghosh via Freud calls the uncanny makes our planetary status debatable. How much of a responsibility do we have to keep the axis in place? Do we deserve to claim our planetary citizenship after all the marauding violence that we perpetrate? If the earth was uncanny in the beginning, our misrule and overdominance have made it uncanny in ways that we never thought were possible; the improbable is our uncanny today. Ghosh is right to note that in the era of global warming, nothing is really far away; there is no place where the orderly expectations of bourgeois life hold unchallenged sway. It is as though our earth had become a literary critic and were laughing at Flaubert, Bankim, and their like, mocking their mockery of the prodigious happenings that occur so often in romances and epic poems. This, then, is the first of the many ways in which the age of global warming defies both literary fiction and contemporary common sense: the weather events of this time have a very high degree of improbability. They are not easily accommodated in the deliberately prosaic world of serious prose fiction. (35)

This announces how the uncanny is our point of “staying together”: it is through recognition and improbability that we reach the uncanny. The powerful uncanny and the overpowering improbable have changed the way we narrate our times and our times through fiction. Derangement has changed our

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frames of literature, our politics of representation, and, with it, our connect with climate and fiction. Ghosh notes that All of this makes climate change events peculiarly resistant to the customary frames that literature has applied to “Nature”: they are too powerful, too grotesque, too dangerous, and too accusatory to be written about in a lyrical, or elegiac, or romantic vein. Indeed, in that these events are not entirely of Nature (whatever that might be), they confound the very idea of “Nature writing” or ecological writing: they are instances, rather, of the uncanny intimacy of our relationship with the non-humans. (43)

Our unbalanced equations with the nonhuman have thrown us into the reality of the improbable and the uncanny. Our togetherness is emphasized through possible extinction, de-anthropogenization, and discontinuities. Derangement has become hyper objective in that a majority of people are unaware of what global warming is doing to us and consider the minority view as elitist, selective, and a wealthy group burden. The hyper objectivized nature is the source of the uncanny and the improbable. This hyper objectivity shocks our imagination and leads us before a derangement which we never thought would be our reality. This is also a misanthropic imagination that engages with the improbable to build a fresh world of mourning. The mourning is less over what is getting lost for the coming generation penguins or polar bears will be picture-reality only. The mourning is mostly about what our callousness is throwing us into as more realities are transformed into pictures or images to look back at a forgotten time. The predicament of staying together in derangement is not just about our lost time; it is a way of entering into an image gallery of past events and past realities. It is the rupture with time and tradition of experience and seeing. It is a deep rupture that constructs our emotional and intellectual detachment from a past which we shall forget to mourn; memory of nature is fleeing, perhaps. The mourning and the uncanny bring us before the future where the narrowing of distance from the present is another form of ecophobia. An “all is well” and “all must be going well” are the two approaches that mourning provides for a withdrawal from acts of destruction and imminent catastrophe is the only vantage point from where life can be lived and survival can be made survivable. In a post-natural world with a new sense of nature and with increasingly reversal of roles where man continues to de-anthropogenize himself, derangement is our new order. And derangement is our new poetics of living together. Staying together, as I argue, is sharing “natural capital”; we face an indifferent nature which is there even if we say it is not. Nature has its inherent ways of sharing; it has its own order, family, and values. It runs by its own rhythm and law—its own motion and mind. However, humans bring their

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own logic of exchange, the rules of their habitat, and concepts of cohabiting biodiversally. My book is not to show if staying together works on human principles alone; the natural capital is a complex performing unit. We think of the limit of nature because we cannot think after a limit. Human thinking about nature becomes muddled after a point. We imagine an apocalyptic future because human imagination cannot see what could be on the other side of the possible apocalypse. Our limits are also conditions for staying together. Our inabilities to understand nature make it essential to relationize the nonhuman other. Our togetherness thrives on being understanding of the fact that the being of human cannot be outside the nonhuman. Critical togetherness is not being human only. Subhankar Banerjee sees such knowledge of cohabitation as an antithesis to “fortress conservation” (chapter 4). Adumbrating the ethos of staying together as critical—not to be “uncritically romanticized”—he proposes “four component parts of ‘staying together’ and the necessary struggles to ensure its ongoingness: multispecies kinship; multispecies caretaking; multispecies justice; and multispecies rebellion.” This is the “more than human entanglements” that Clara Soudan discourses in her chapter (chapter 2) where she sees liminality (a version of staying together) “between entanglement and openness: namely, between our being rooted in an inextricable intimacy with more-than-humans, along planetary processes of worlding in which we are involved, and the radical openness to the overflowing possibilities of our co-becomings.” She observes that there is a “radical embeddedness into a multispecies weave of embodiment and our open creative becomings.” Perhaps, “species fiction” of which Caren Irr talks about in her essay (chapter 5) makes contextual sense through a literary imagination where interspecies relation is also a form of interspecies becoming. This connects well with John Ryan’s arguments about kinship with plants—ideas of phytopoetics and phytosphere—that sees the human world as integrated with the botanical world (chapter 6) and human and plants as locked in deeply nuanced interdependencies. He writes that in the Anthropocene era of pervasive biodiversity loss, embracing plants as kin is crucial to imagining possibilities for equitable co- existence. A sense of kinship with plants recognizes the evolutionary, cultural, and corporeal imbrications between humans, flora, and other organisms.

Alf Hornberg (chapter 7) cultivates a “spectrum of approaches” to build a “critique of modern civilization” and tries to vision “how its ecological contradictions could be overcome.” He thinks of “a radically different understanding of the history of human civilization” raising “questions about how far we are prepared to go in relinquishing what we have come to know as progress, in order to reinsert ourselves, as one species among others, in the

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organic cycles of local ecosystems.” Being one is then being with the multiple; we cannot stay alone for planetarity demands that we cannot stay single and singular. Conditions of survival and planetary civilization are such that a composite existence is the norm left for us to follow and believe in. Does that bring nature and culture as binaries in the living equation of things? Dominic Boyer in chapter 3 rethinks suturing nature and culture into a “new conceptual beacon”—natureculture. In a bid to ward off petrofascism, ecofascism, and “liberal extractivism,” Boyer calls for a “revolutionary infrastructure.” Staying together can come through what he alongside Timothy Morton calls “Subscendence” throwing the act and concept off with transcendence, arguing for an “ethical strategy for encouraging humble, playful decomposition and recomposition, for holding the mania and terror of the ecological emergency at bay, for making life out of the death around us.” This critical natureculture configurations can lead us to ecoliteracies the way Bellinetti, van den Eijnden and Diamanti argue (chapter 8). They vouch for ecoliteracy through specific forms of knowledge about ecological processes that emerge specifically through creative and artistic orientations towards lively materialities—forms of knowledge that are often literate, too, in the scientific paradigms and practices responsible for a given domain but not reducible to them.

From ecoliteracy programs to Jennifer Garcia Peacock’s arguments about framing and forming “our classroom” (chapter 9) through teaching environmental justice and art on a global scale, we encounter a distinct form of “staying together” through a variety of communications, conceptual intercourse, and multiform reflections. Sanne Van Der Hout shows us through his reading of Sloterdijk’s Spheres Trilogy that systems of solidarity that were effective “on a smaller scale, for example within families or tribal, regional and national unities” (427) do not prove effective these days. Der Hout writes that the scale of responsibility is crossing all borders. As the terrestrial sphere has turned one big “interior space,” Sloterdijk urges us to move away from a traditional dualistic scheme based on “self” versus “other,” or “culture” versus “nature” must move toward a mentality in which the “we” and the “us” are the pre ing categories of moral thinking. To put it differently: we must get rid of distinction between environmental and other contexts. (427)

Nature thinking is not done in isolation from all its inhabitants. Cooperation is significant—operations at a variety of levels but not something that can flourish at the expense of the other. David Wood notes that

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The central virtue is the recognition of the constitutive quality of relationality: things are what they are by virtue of their relation to other things. What look like external relations are, if not internal, at least constitutive. Living things eat each other, breathe and drink the elements, live in communities, while inanimate things have properties that depend on other things. (162)

Cooperation, I would like to argue, is both cooperative acts and mutually operative. Rising heat can kill us; it can kill and is killing a variety of species. Water is rising and is getting more polluted with time. We are cooperating in a nature to die and go extinct together. We may be staying together but are we living together anymore? Wood notes further that everywhere, it is the interplay of relative forces that produces results, not the absolute forces themselves. What the ecological perspective teaches us is that things with no obvious point to their existence play a role in the life cycles of other beings. It teaches us that the survival of a particular species may depend on the preservation of an environment with very specific features. And it teaches us that the life, death, and flourishing of things is tied up with other factors, conditions, and creatures in ways for which we typically do not have a map, and under variability tolerances we do not know. (162)

Staying is not about living. We live by making maps but often we are products of ignorant mapping. Our cospecies are not guests of the humans. We should stop thinking of our role as host in this planet. Our staying together is being each other’s host; I host an insect as much as a butterfly hosts me. The common predicament of derangement introduces or forces upon us the idea of care. This is “care ethics” which introduces ethical imagination as intersubjectivity. Care builds its sense development from “cry” to “lamentation” to “grief.” However, with time it developed its positive senses in being for the other, in fond of the other, inclined to the other. Humans are never without their other in plants and animals; and care in the sense of “grieving together,” lamenting together, and mutual inclination seems quite appropriate in my understanding of existence. Caring for each other is staying in opposition but not antagonism; it is a vibrant coming together of facts and emotions and measuring the elements of correspondence that they can generate. This is a mutual recognition that comes from an encounter between the human and the nonhuman. The understanding of care is never easy to grasp in such relationality but through recognition we reach at a site of pairing and collaboration. This befits planetarity because a certain kind of intimacy is constructed both at the conscious and unconscious levels of living and existence. Staying together is having a relation established and having several relations in the making and being surprised by many more. The more humans care about

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the other, the greater are the chances of humans getting cared and looked after; the more humans live in dynamic opposition with their other biotic counterparts, the greater are chances to understand everything affectively and co-relatively. Communitarian care as care across species is a mode of being by which we come to know and try to understand other species and life-forms. Caring is listening and attuning to the other; this act or mode of being becomes the ground and condition of throwing up possibilities and what Heidegger calls the disclosiveness or revealment. Staying together in deranged times is being in the world and being with others in willingness, contingency, and inevitability. Humans need to make themselves available to sustain earthly life and experiences. In fact, the association and disassociation with nature are dialectical; in a Lacanian sense, man, the child, submits to the mother earth only to find alienation that disrupts him to a point of further violence to possess. The loss of control begets the urge to control more. The ravaged earth is the expression of a reactionary child dispossessed by the very fact of not being able to dominate the mother. Nature/earth is the unobtainable object of desire. It is the desire that leads to misrecognition that I have argued earlier. Desire, dispossession, and unobtainability combine to produce a lack which makes man chase nature more for possession and in the process lose further control over it. This dialecticism works to a point where nature becomes deranged, and the man stands further dispossessed. The predicament of derangement then is both conscious and unconscious. The symbolic order of Anthropocene is built in this way where after the language of possession we now have the language of protection and catastrophe; the symbolic order makes us build forms of discourses that threaten the man with disappearance (call extinction) and possible resilience. Threatened by castration the human struggles to find his meaningful subjectivity within an imperiled existential crisis. As Lacan (2004) explains this as it is in so far as his desire is beyond or falls short of what she says, of what she hints at, of what she brings out as meaning, it is in so far as his desire is known, it is in this point of lack, that the desire of the subject is constituted. (218–219)

This is the nature, rather natures, that is deranged at various levels, alienated at many points of becoming. Nature is imagined into a being that the human feels cannot be identified with. Lack of identification with nature is our derangement today. Failure to understand nature is the nature outside our symbolic order of immediacy and cognition. Staying together, paradoxically, is alienation; this is a lack in the symbolic that troubles us; the trouble is not simply with earth scientists and climatologists but with ordinary humans who start to face it materially and emotionally. This is a continual process of separation. Like, we aspire for what is

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seriously lacking in nature and yet surrender to the processes of readjustments that capitalist developments make, rendering us further and further away from the mother figure. In fact, the memory of a losing nature fleets past. Living with nature now is the impossibility of not being able to connect with Nature. Disconnection in ecological consciousness is derangement. The deranged nature is not a static state; it is dialectical in its recuperation, sustainability, and relentless lack. The difficulty is that nature now is inescapably implicated in culture. And without culture, it is difficult to believe in a nature. Even the calamitic nature that confronts us is a consequence of the cultured and cultivated nature, and this state is our permanent fate. Our state of ecomourning must understand that the impossibility of ending separation is the fate that makes ecological understanding a singular discourse. Nature now is nature in disrepair. Staying together in derangement is our new ontology. So if derangement is what we have to live with, our ways of cohabitation—the oikeios—cannot be a Cartesian arithmetic. We are as much invested in nature as nature is invested in us. This is a deeply secular thought. Derangementecology demands that we believe in a non-Cartesian mode of existence where natureculture is our predicament even if we decide not to believe in it. Lack, loss, denudation, irreparability are cluster words of an ecological consciousness which survives in loss and submission to a changing nature. The human subjectivity in relation to nature has changed, has been under process, and is making us “globe the earth” (in the words of Ranjan Ghosh, 212–3) in ever intriguing and demanding ways. However, if the political is brought to nature, what kind of green politics are we a part of? In trying to make us live in a dangerous boat—common peril, common destiny—critics like Ulrich Beck feel that we have been de-politicized and our political passions have been blunted. Our secular predicament is not just about a common danger; it is not merely about a catastrophe that is impending on all in equal measure and force. Violation in nature is political because we don’t violate in the same way; identities matter and also our positions of power and privilege. Violators vary as also the forms of nature. Nature at peril is a common slogan for a singular nature. But can nature be so homogenous as green activism makes it out to be? Erik Swyngedouw explains that certain particular imaginings of Nature are speaking of endism or ecocide. Swyngedouw quotes Zizek’s Lacanian reading to enunciate how nature builds a series of signifiers when its central element of understanding is empty (nature does not exist, as Zizek says.) Swyngedouw writes that Nature constitutes exactly such central (empty or floating) element whose meaning can be gleaned only by relating it to other more directly recognizable signifiers. Nature becomes a symbolic tapestry, a montage, of meaning, held

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together with quilting points. For example, “biodiversity,” “eco-cities,” “CO2,” or “climate change” can be thought of as quilting points (or points de capiton) through which a certain matrix of meanings of Nature is articulated. These quilting points are also more than mere anchoring points; they refer to a beyond of meaning, a certain enjoyment that becomes structured in fantasy (in this case, the desire for an environmentally balanced and socially harmonious order). In other words, there is always a remainder or excess that evades symbolization. (71–2)

Nature leaves remainders and, hence, a secular understanding demands not a singular deranged nature but a matrix of meanings where nature can be unnatural or deviant or wayward or queer. Derangement multiforms its manifestation. Nature today is nature limitless, nature delimited. Derangement in my opinion requires various forms of recognition where recognizing nature speaks about certain set of values, opinions, and ideologies. This is the political in nature. With multiple meaning signifiers, this becomes the nature that Zizek likes to see. A nature that is not empty in the center is dead and “unreal.” Also, the emptiness makes us think about entanglement differently. This is not simply a binary between culture and nature; it pushes the problematic of natureculture into the forefront and declares how things have collapsed between the two. If nature is multiple, undergoing multiplicity of derangements, nature ceases to be a coherence. Nature assembles outside anthropocentric determinations; nature succumbs to deassemblage under human impact and other “inhuman” forces too. The universalizing theory of nature under crisis and mourning just does not fit into the life of things. Derangement then for me is an episode that is organic and human but also erratic and sporadic. And crisis is peril where the Real in nature is too complex to be understood as unitary and homely. Whatever be the form and version of nature we live in, the negotiations affecting the human and the nonhuman, the underlying secular consciousness is rooted in fear. We are brought into a complex of varying degrees of fear and anxiety. The fear that nature has always evoked in us has changed now; nature has created more anxieties than ever before. Also, previously nature used to be unpredictable in the sense that we did not know what to expect next—the nature tomorrow is not really dependent on nature today. But the equation has changed where nature today has a somewhat consequential fate awaiting in the future. Nature has natures, but the flow of nature, underwritten by fear, is gradually getting into a unidirectionality where the only prognosis is a calamitic imagination. Swyngedouw is right to see that This cultivation of “ecologies of fear,” in turn, is sustained by a particular set of phantasmagorical, often apocalyptic, imaginations. The apocalyptic imaginary of a world with endemic resource shortages, ravaged by hurricanes whose

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intensity is amplified by climate change, pictures of scorched land as the geopluvial regime and the spatial variability of droughts and floods shifts, icebergs that disintegrate around the poles and cause sea levels to rise, alarming reductions in bio-diversity, the devastations raked by wildfires, tsunamis, spreading diseases like SARS, Avian Flu, or HIV. These imaginaries of a Nature out of synch, destabilised, threatening, and out of control is paralleled by equally disturbing images of a society that continues piling up waste, pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, deforesting the earth, etc. We seem to have an unquenchable fascination with such dystopian imaginaries. (75)

But, again, does this anthropocenic imaginaries produce the depoliticization or can we argue back to say it is a new form of repoliticization? It is, I would like to argue that it produces varieties of fear and anxiety levels leading to a symbolic order of dystopian and often regenerative imaginaries. A section fights back; a section succumbs; a section transforms itself; a section becomes indifferent; all are different forms of repoliticization. I am tempted to ask if derangement or the fact of our secular calamity or this staying together in crisis is a simple and often a simplistic discourse of nature-depredation and anthropocenic overpowerment? Is the shrinking of ecological space just about man-centric damage and not about a certain section of people who amass obscene amount of capital and wealth, have access to the technology that causes the worst damage to nature and habitat, decides to fight wars and bomb the planet for their good and ego, and damage ecology for their own good and prosperity? Are we all party to this or a mere section of powerful people who wrought the damage and we then all share the precarious boat and struggle to save our lives? Kathleen McAfee rightly points out that Claims of superior, scientific knowledge, often flying in the face of deep local knowledge and experience, have supported major projects for reordering landscapes, frequently with disastrous consequences and nearly always with inequitable results. A brief sampling might note the ill-fated hydrological reengineering of Tenochtitlán, the replacement of community forests by scientifically managed imperial woodlots, the substitution of Cartesian-grid, monocrop planting for native polycultures adapted to local soils and rains, the violent suppression of women’s practical healing knowledge by an all-male medical elite, the new enclosures of landscapes and forests by today’s agro-efficiency engineers and would-be “global” conservation organizations acting in the name of nature and the best interests of “humanity.” One need not deny the power of Enlightenment reason, or dismiss the achievements of scientific method in engineering and medicine, to be justifiably leery of agendas to “guide mankind” with knowledge—and, as strongly implied, superior values—possessed by an unspecified “we.” (66)

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Limits to “green grabbing” and limits to planet grabbing could have come to our rescue. But who decides the limit? The collective we or the specific “we”? The hegemonic decision makers or the overwhelmed majority who struggle under the misuse and misrecognition of the powerful few? McAfee raises pertinent questions, claiming that If climate change is indeed epoch-changing and humans are a geological force, is this not the worst time to abandon the lessons of history, the insights of the humanities, and the tools of social science? Is not the urgent political task first that of communication—and the creation of languages and modes of interacting that enable diverse communities to see and hear each other without becoming subordinate to or even like each other—and so the forging of ties, networks, practices, movements, and institutions through which the world’s environmentally affected might wrest control of our “environments” from those who gain from their destruction? That can help us prefigure and continue building equitable and, yes, sustainable worlds? (71–2)

Living together is not an easy plan. Listening to each other, forming communities of resistance, adaptation, resilience, and protest is harder. Wrestling control from the climate changers, the merchants of technological dominance and disaster is the hardest. Derangement addresses the material but not without it being a medium to emotions and the unconscious. My understanding of derangement then builds somewhat on Carl Von Essen’s ecomysticism (2010) where Von Essen sees mystical experiences as natural and material. This is interesting because we are in trace not like an ascetic but a profound materialist who sees a mystical connect with the environment through the dwindling of the matter, the dispossession that derangement brings in our material existence. So ecomysticism is a centrifugal force that moves through the senses to the outer material world as largely different from panentheism. It extends relational panentheism to a point where experiences with nature are extrospective, connecting with the material nature and its vagaries. This is not about trying to find God in the outer world or trying to experience nature introspectively; ecomysticism looks at derangement differently. It is the materiality of derangement that concerns us. We are left to identify with the outer world and its degeneration, the loss and lapse, and realize that there are no clear boundaries to separate us from the depredations around. Derangement has made us physically responsive to the cataclysm. We are destined to struggle materially, and it is through matter that we connect with the natural world and emotively try to reach its core and concern. Ecomysticism, I would like to argue, denudes our anthropocentric ego and reduces us into a connector within the expanding consciousness of living together.

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Derangement, despite the profuse apologies of the environmental skeptics, cannot but owe to the Homo faber, the human fabricator (173), as Bronislaw Szerszynski (2012) argues. All roads end and begin with the Homo faber; all glows and cycles of nature are affected by this species. The problem with this species is that it is continually under a deconstructive bind. If nature is changing and is being transformed, the subjectivity of Homo faber is under revision too. The present of man and nature is the temporal space that is always leaving behind traces to build a new image of a future. Man is deranged because nature has been in the process of derangement. We stay together in uncertainty. Deborah Lilley observes that from the perspective of negative capability, maintaining the tension provided by the possibility of “uncertainty” is essential to maintaining the integrity of the aspiration to “fact and reason.” In this way, the acceptance of the ungraspable character of climate change through the practice of a form of negative capability provides opportunities to open up new dialogues not only between the problem and its interpretation but also within the means and methods of those interpretations. (101)

We align with nature only to withdraw over a certain sense of incompletion and unfulfillment. The fear is keeping us together as nature changes itself in every turn of our existence. If deconstruction recenters without losing the center, Homo faber is one such center that raises promises of more centers of existence and more deranged points of living. Interspecies living happens at these various points of living. Derangement is not a permanent state of experience because derangement pans out at various points of manifestations at different levels of meaning and consequences and with it species existence keeps shifting points of survival. Nature is under deconstruction and derangement as a concept is under deconstruction too.

REFERENCES Colebrook, Claire. 2013. “Framing the End of Species.” Symploke, 21, no. 1–2: 51–63. Essen, Carl von. 2010. Ecomysticism: The Profound Experience of Nature as Spiritual Guide. United States: Inner Traditions/Bear. Ghosh, Amitav. 2016. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. India: Penguin Books. Ghosh, Ranjan. 2012. “Globing the Earth: The New Eco-logics of Nature.” SubStance, 41, no. 1: 3–14. https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2012.0008. Heidegger, Martin. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Translated by William Lovitt. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc.

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Hout, der Van Sanne. 2014. “The Homeotechnological Turn: Sloterdijk’s Response to the Ecological Crisis.” Environmental Values, 23, no. 4: 423–442. Kirkman, Robert. 2002. Skeptical Environmentalism: The Limits of Philosophy and Science. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kureethadam, Joshtrom Isaac. 2017. The Philosophical Roots of the Ecological Crisis: Descartes and the Modern Worldview. United Kingdom: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Lacan, Jacques. (1977) 2004. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Reprint, London and New York: Karnac. Lilley, Deborah. 2013. “Theories of Certain Uncertainty.” SymplokƝ, 21, nos. 1–2: 97–108. McAfee, Kathleen. 2016. “The Politics of Nature in the Anthropocene” in “Whose Anthropocene? Revisiting Dipesh Chakrabarty’s ‘Four Theses’.” Edited by Robert Emmett and Thomas Lenkan. RCC Perspectives: Transformations in Environment and Society, 2: 65–72. Szerszynski, Bronislaw. 2012. “The End of the End of Nature: The Anthropocene and the Fate of the Human.” Oxford Literary Review, 34, no. 2: 165–184. https://doi .org/10.3366/olr.2012.0040. Swyngedouw, Erik. 2011. “Whose Environment? The End of Nature, Climate Change and the Process of Post-politicization.” Ambiente & Sociedade, 14, no. 2: 69–87. https://doi.org/10.1590/S1414-753X2011000200006. Wood, David. 2005. The Step Back: Ethics and Politics after Deconstruction. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Chapter 2

Dwelling in the Liminal Intimacy, Enfolding, and Openness in More-than-Human Entanglements Clara Soudan

In her experimental “play-poem” the Waves, Virginia Woolf explores the boundaries between organic world and social life, natural and cultural rhythms, along with the frontiers of her characters’ own porous beings, which permeate each other as they grow. As it brilliantly chronicles the fluidity of our being in the world, the Waves offers a tale of permeability, of seawalls overflowed. Perpetually blurring the boundaries between inside and outside, self and world, individual and collective, restless and permanent, Woolf interweaves realms that are traditionally approached as hermetically sealed. Her novel transcends dichotomies, collapsing a dualistic order which ultimately opposes culture to nature. Diving into the modern breach of dualism, it floods its banks, collapsing its rigid structure and sanctioning the radical interwovenness of life. Haunted by an overwhelming sense of in-betweenness, the Waves depicts a liquid life of entanglement, rooted both in a multiplicity of attachments and in perpetual overflowing. It is simultaneously infused with the awareness of a radical entanglement where the boundaries between the characters and their worlds dissolve, all the while depicting life as an overflowing stream of becoming. The Waves tells us a tale of weaving, a tale about the stream of our becoming interwoven with the world and the lives surrounding us, both emerging from and creating us. Indebted to Woolf’s prescient genius and sensitivity, this chapter explores the idea of liminality within the present context of ecological catastrophe and from the perspective of ecological thought. It is driven by the following interrogation: How may a philosophy of liminality illuminate the open processes of entangled becoming in which we find ourselves rooted? The reflections unfolded in this chapter stem more precisely from the tension between entanglement and openness: namely, between our being rooted in 17

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an inextricable intimacy with more-than-humans, along planetary processes of worlding in which we are involved, and the radical openness to the overflowing possibilities of our co-becomings. How may we think through the conflation of our radical embeddedness into a multispecies weave of embodiment and our open, creative becomings? How may we inhabit the chaos of an overflowing dualism? As I dive into the intricate folds of such an entangled openness, drawing upon the work of Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, David Abram, Merlin Sheldrake, Carla Hustak, Natasha Myers, Catherine Keller, and others, I argue for an ecological thought of the liminal. I first examine the ways in which the liminal allows us to approach a radical intimacy with more-than-humans, before considering how it might unveil this intricate, porous entanglement as a creative, sympoietic process. I then reflect upon the ways in which the idea of liminality might enable us to think about the openness of the world, as well as illuminate our ethical and political responsibility to tend this precarious openness and cultivate imaginaries which embrace the hopes, yearnings, and possibilities contained in our entangled becomings.

FOR AN ECOLOGICAL THOUGHT OF THE LIMINAL How does the present ecological disaster relate to the liminal? The concept of liminality was originally developed in the field of anthropology to analyze the structure of rites. Arnold Van Gennep, who first coined the term at the beginning of the twentieth century, illuminated the transformative dimension of ritual passages in small-scale societies, before Victor Turner rediscovered the importance of liminality for modern societies to approach processes of social and cultural change. The concept of liminality allows Turner to understand processes of dissolution of traditional order and the emergence of new social forms, structures, and narratives. The latter regards the liminal as “a realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise” (Turner 1967, 97). Liminal or “liminoid” experiences thus describe transitional states “betwixt and between” moving orders, where creativity and uncertainty unfold (Thomassen 2009). Nearing the end of the twentieth century, postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha’s liminality model offers to rethink “the realm of the beyond” traditionally rendered through the prefix “post”—such as in postmodernism, postcolonialism, postfeminism, or posthumanism. He opens his collection of essays The Location of Culture with a quote from Martin Heidegger’s “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” suggesting the full presence of what emerges within, but also around and beyond the boundary: “a boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, a boundary is that from which something begins its presencing.” Boundaries simultaneously indicate what they contain and what overflows

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them. Reflecting on the boundary between the “human” and the “animal,” Jacques Derrida’s concept of limitrophy is thus concerned with “what sprouts or grows at the limit or around the limit, but also what feeds the limit, generates it, raises it, and complicates it” (2008, 29–30). Arch deconstructor of dichotomies, Derrida reminds us that we inhabit the “abyssal limit,” always composing and decomposing, folding and unfolding fluid boundaries. Emphasizing the radical openness of our condition, while also echoing the contingency of the present times of ecological collapse, Bhabha claims that “we live on the borderlines of the ‘present’” (Bhabha 1994, 1). His perspective on cultural postmodernism illuminates the shiftiness and hybridity of liminal conditions, in which communities experience a sense of disorientation, “a disturbance of direction,” clearing a space for creation and interruption. Bhabha’s analysis of borderline conditions resonates with present ecological issues as activists from all around the world gather on the edge of irreversible environmental loss to resist the imperialist expansion of an extractivist and ecocidal capitalism. They do so in the thin hope of reclaiming their entangled trajectories of becoming, to cultivate the possibility of a viable future for all earthlings. In this light, environmental consciousness in times of ecological collapse resembles a liminal dwelling: beyond modernizing narratives of growth and progress, in-between worlds ending and emerging, beyond dualistic natureculture ontologies, in a realm of hybridities, entangled in hope and despair, on the threshold of thought and becoming. Crucially, ecological awareness is invested with an overwhelming sense of responsibility toward future generations, summoning us to intervene while we still can. In the essay “Border Lives: the Art of the Present,” Bhabha writes: to dwell “in the beyond” is also to be part of a revisionary time, a return to the present to redescribe our cultural contemporaneity (. . .) to touch the future on its hither side. In that sense, then, the intervening space “beyond” becomes a space of intervention in the here and now. (Bhabha 1994, 7)

Bhabha points here toward an understanding of the present as a reflexive, contingent in-between space, an open time of encounter, interruption, and creation, deploying complex interweavings of beings and processes entangled in each other. This highlights the eventfulness of the present as the planet awakes to a new era in which human activity has become a dominant geological force whose impact on earth history is now permanent. In this liminal chiaroscuro, on the edge of the world, complexity, hybridity, and uncertainty birth the present. The contemporary ecological crises locate us indeed on the edge of an abyss, offering a horrifying glimpse into the contingency and precariousness of the living world. Leading to irreversible loss such as mass extinctions or ecosystemic collapse, the trespassing of ecological thresholds (re)activates an apocalyptic rhetoric and epitomizes the polysemy of the term

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crisis. The Greek assumes indeed a variety of meanings, including that of a paroxysmal moment of rupture, choice, decision, judgment, trial, issue, or event. What is referred to as an ecological crisis indicates a disruption, a bifurcation in the linear trajectory of progress, a breach in the hegemonic ideology of consumerism as well as in the neoliberal model of development. It calls for a suspension of some of the processes in which we are collectively engaged, clearing a liminal time for reflection and for reassessing the political choices that we did not make. Isabelle Stengers names “the intrusion of Gaia” that which “calls us into question” “an unprecedented or forgotten form of transcendence” which interrupts and summons us imperiously to think and imagine beyond the great narratives that have paved the way to our blindness (Stengers 2015, 47, 43). Bhabha’s reflections on postmodernity thus also illuminate the present struggle for ecological thought to think of a burgeoning and hybrid world of overflowing entanglements from within the dualistic boundaries of modern epistemology: The wider significance of the postmodern condition lies in the awareness that the epistemological “limits” of those ethnocentric ideas are also the enunciative boundaries of a range of other dissonant, even dissident histories and voices— women, the colonized, minority groups, the bearers of policed sexualities. (Bhabha 1994, 7)

To these dissident voices we must add the realm of the nonhumans, who we discover have been addressing us all along from the other bank of naturalist ontology (Despret 2021). As we shall see, the liminal may also refer to the intimate space between beings, the porous membrane of their enmeshed coexistence. The liminality of ecological thought therefore also lies in it embracing the collapse of dualistic ontology. Sanctioning a radical entanglement between beings, ecological thinking overthrows a conceptual architecture grounded in dualism and systemically opposing nature to culture, matter to spirit, object to subject, organism to their environment, human and nonhuman, etc. It transcends polarities to dive into an interstitial realm of hybridity and fluidity. Inspired by Plato’s notion of metaxy, political philosopher Eric Voegelin shines a light on the permanent in-betweenness of being. In the final volume of his Order and History, he develops the idea of metaxy as an irreducible erotic tension experienced as the very structure of existence: a being torn between poles, suspended over a gulf in a creative interpenetration of immanence and transcendence (Voegelin 2000). Voegelin’s philosophy of the metaxy echoes the present situation as it describes our being suspended in-between worlds, as well as the emerging consciousness of our entangled implication in collective processes of becoming and unbecoming. The event often referred to as Anthropocene demands that we dwell in liminality among complex and overflowing beings which subvert and confound rigid

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categories of thought. It summons us to think on the edge of the world, in the ruins of capitalism, beyond obsolete narratives, at the borders of species to meet beings whom we discover inhabit us. A thinking of relationships and interactions, ecological thought opens a bridge across organisms and their environment, beyond nature and culture, devoted to what haunts the liminal and overflows dualism. As we encounter a realm of more-than-humans on our entangled trajectories of becoming, dwelling in the liminal, I argue, might help us approach an overwhelming intimacy.

A MORE-THAN-HUMAN INTIMACY In her novel Passion Simple, which narrates an all-consuming liaison, Nobel Prize author Annie Ernaux writes of her lover: “thanks to him I got closer to the limit which separates me from the other, to the point that I sometimes imagined I would cross it.” An encounter at the border of otherness, Passion Simple recounts the abyssal hunger which sometimes draws us to the other, the delicious torture of desire, and the insatiable craving to bridge the distance between two beings. The narrator’s longing for her lover becomes a promise of fulfillment, and the boundary between absence and presence gets blurred as the passion turns into an obsession. Annie Ernaux introduces us to the obscure edges of intimacy, where the self dissolves and becomes permeated by otherness. Under the spell of a love affair, wandering somewhere between emptiness and the deluge of a devouring passion, her narrator’s identity is shot through with alterity, bewitched by otherness. The presence which inhabits her is intimate yet withdrawing, reminiscent of Luce Irigaray’s thinking of alterity, where “the other is already within her.” The feminist philosopher depicts an otherness intimately woven through the self—an alterity “so near that she cannot have it, nor have herself” (Irigaray 1985, 31). Traditionally defined as the science of relationships between organisms and their environment—or rather, the study of the radical entanglement of diverse life-forms in complex processes of becoming and world-composing—ecology, I suggest, is grounded in a concern for such bewildering intimacy between beings. In “The Dark Ecology of Elegy,” philosopher Timothy Morton reminds us that “ecology is profoundly about intimacy,” having to do with an uncanny intricacy with other beings—humans and more-than-humans alike (2010, 257). Morton’s critique of the concept of nature illuminates its failure to register this radical intimacy attaching us to the more-than-human world. They redefine ecological consciousness as the discovery of our being “profoundly covered in, surrounded by and permeated by all kinds of entities that are not (us)” (“What Is Dark Ecology?” 56). Acknowledging that nonhumans inhabit at profound levels of the human, Morton’s dark ecology

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embraces this radical intimacy with nonhuman others through the figure of the strange stranger. The prism of dark ecology unveils the ecological issue as one of unfathomable intimacy with the strange, (re)awakening us to a profound wonderment about the presence of others within us. Such intimacy is inextricable, summoning us to coexist with a host of strangers surrounding and penetrating us—crawling, walking, flying, visible and invisible people of the world. Studying bacteria and microbes, evolutionary theorist and microbiologist Lynn Margulis—who contributed with James Lovelock to the formulation of the Gaia hypothesis—describes “the long-lasting intimacy of strangers” as a fundamental practice of becoming-with in earth history (1998). Her theory of symbiogenesis posits that evolution occurs through co-evolving symbiotic relationships, thus challenging the central tenets of neo-Darwinism: instead of competition between individuals, life emerges from a pool of intimacy, togetherness, and connection. Subverting the boundary between inside and outside, the constellation of multispecies entanglements she observed disavows the definition of organism as a neatly definable biological unit. Scott Gilbert, Jan Sapp, and Alfred Tauber thus proclaim that “we have never been individuals”: compiling evidence against the idea of a bounded biological individual from recent studies in genetics, immunology, evolution, development, anatomy, and physiology, they argue for a symbiotic view of life (Gilbert, Sapp, and Tauber 2012). In Entangled Life, biologist Merlin Sheldrake also illuminates the many ways in which fungi overthrow our modern understanding of individuality by infiltrating and sustaining nearly all living systems in a hidden and mysterious web of wonder. According to him, fungi teach us to “soften the boundaries of ourselves,” therefore “rephrasing selfhood as a question” rather than a postulate (Sheldrake 2020). As they form promiscuous connections with various life-forms around them, feeding plants or helping to restore contaminated ecosystems, fungi exemplify multispecies partnerships as well as the radical cohabitation of beings embedded in one another. Radical mycologists thus pledge to “cultivate new fungal relationships” in the hope of adjusting to life on a damaged planet (Sheldrake 2000, 180). The Radical Mycology Convergence is indeed dedicated to “creating more meaningful relationships between humans and fungi” and to grow “from domination toward allyship with the Fungal Queendom” (Radical Mycology Convergence website 2023). In The Mushroom at the End of the World, anthropologist Anna L. Tsing suggests that “follow(ing) matsutake guides us to possibilities of coexistence with environmental disturbance,” thus placing a mushroom at the heart of the quest to maintain a sense of possibility amidst the ruins of capitalism (Tsing 2015, 4). As it unfolds a reflection around the queerness of our entanglement with other life-forms, Tsing’s multispecies ethnography offers a profound reminder of the radical

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embeddedness of our lives—never self-contained and bounded but always in relation and in process. “Selves are already polluted by histories of encounter; we are mixed up with others before we even begin any new collaboration” (Tsing 2015, 30). Tsing and Sheldrake’s depictions of complex ecological arrangements, mycelium networks, and fungal relationships forward what I suggest is a cardinal issue of contemporary ecological thought: namely, that of the strange grace of relations, the porous boundaries of beings, and the mysterious, ambiguous intimacy between them. In a fascinating conversation with philosopher and magician David Abram, Merlin Sheldrake wonders if he had gotten infected by mushrooms to spread their voices to the humans. He mentions the “fungal angels” who “exhilarate everything according to their needs, wants, ends,” and regards his book Entangled Life as “in some way the product of these fungal angels.” David Abram claims in his turn: “I have wetlands within me,” thereby displaying an understanding of knowledge as a mutual process, always stemming from a radical implication with other life-forms, moved by a “fascination for the otherness of the world” and aspiring to a peaceful coexistence between diverse beings (Abram and Sheldrake 2021). Together with Sheldrake, they weave the notion of truth as “an index of relationships,” referring to the recovered sense of our embeddedness in terrestrial processes of becoming—a feeling that would reach us in the form of the remembrance of a primordial togetherness. The recent scientific findings highlighting the importance of symbiosis are thus presented by the biologist as a recovery from the “detour” of modern sciences into the ecocidal fetishes of reductionism. In this statement, Sheldrake echoes both the platonic idea of anamnesis, which conceives knowledge as a recovery, and Bruno Latour’s exposure of the fetishes of modern scientific practice (Latour 2010). Against the modern pitfalls of reduction, moved by the intimate conviction that “everything is listening,” Abram and Sheldrake reflect on the possibilities of addressing and being addressed by the more-than-human world, for instance through prayer, music, poetry, or magic. With this interrogation, they bridge the modern cliff insulating humans from the realm of the more-than-humans and envision consciousness as a process rooted in multispecies intimacy. As they confound our perceptions, alter our consciousness, and even disrupt our sense of self, psychedelic mushrooms open new cognitive possibilities by providing a “reimagined sense of one’s relationship to the world.” Psilocybin’s promising therapeutic potential in treating mental health conditions such as severe anxiety, depression, or addiction illustrates the hope that rises as we embrace more-than-human intimacies (Sheldrake 2020, 116). In a beautiful thought experiment inspired by recent scientific discoveries and the discipline of “therolinguistics” invented in the 1970s by sciencefiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin, philosopher Vinciane Despret imagines that we learned to listen to, and in part decipher, what nonhuman animals

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are saying (Despret 2021). Her Autobiography of an Octopus explores morethan-human languages, from the poetry of spiders or the sacred architecture of wombats to the octopuses’ profound fear of not being able to reincarnate due to the depletion of ocean life. Despret’s speculative stories stem from the postulate that the more-than-human world is speaking, echoing Abram’s claim that “everything speaks” (Abram 1996). Similarly, in the awe-inspiring incipit of Richard Powers’ The Overstory, “the air is raining messages,” messages which “rain down like seeds.” A pine tree covers a woman leaning against its trunk with cryptic messages: “the tree is saying things, in words before words.” Immersed throughout their lives in a network that first seems to evade their perception and understanding, the nine characters are slowly initiated by alien yet intimate vegetal kin to the withdrawn aspect of the more-than-human world. Trees disclose a world overflowing our cognition, a terrestrial presence which escapes us, inaccessible to a modern regime of thought: “all the ways you imagine us . . . are always amputations.” In this choral novel, trees are the eloquent ones: they address, command, and summon humans to listen and open themselves to an intimacy that surpasses them. Their “chorus of living wood” sings: if only our kind cared to listen— “we’d drown you in meaning” (Powers 2019, 4). Weaving a multispecies fabric of flourishing perspectives and encounters, The Overstory voices the vegetal kingdom in ways that compel a renewed understanding of its agency, intentionality, and desire to communicate. In a dazzling portrayal of human-plant entanglement, Richard Powers writes the emergence of meaning across life-forms as both withdrawing and overwhelming. Disrupting the modern dichotomy between matter and meaning, his writing disseminates consciousness as an entangled process running across species and “alongside us, unseen.” The stories woven by Richard Powers and Vinciane Despret invite us not only to cultivate an epistemic humility or a sensitivity toward more-than-human ways of knowing. They summon us to attend to a radical intimacy, acknowledge the presence of more-than-humans among us, and attune ourselves to them. Attentive to the kinds of relationships enabled by different thoughts, practices, and languages, Ursula K. Le Guin claims that “science explicates” while “poetry implicates.” Her poems thus celebrate our intimate implication with more-than-human kinfolks, creatures without nervous systems, and even nonliving beings. In her poem “The Marrow,” she writes: “there was a word inside a stone,” thereby waving to a more-thanhuman realm which is always addressing us. As she embraces our kinship with fellow creatures and delights in the awareness of belonging to the “infinite connectedness” of the world, Le Guin summarizes: “I guess I’m trying to subjectify the universe, because look where objectifying it has gotten us” (2017, M16). Le Guin understood that words birth relationships and stories weave the world, that different languages, thoughts and registers may tend

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to obscure or embrace the radical intimacy between beings. In Donna Haraway’s words: it matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. (Haraway 2016, 12)

What happens, asks Haraway, when “those old saws of Western philosophy and political economics,” indeed the notion of bounded organisms and their environments, “no longer sustain the overflowing richness of biological knowledges, if they ever did”? (Haraway 2016, 30) CREATIVE ENFOLDINGS, SYMPOIETIC WANDERINGS Which stories may bridge the permeable borders of ourselves, always rooted in otherness, always flooded with a more-than-human intimacy, with the openness of our entangled becomings? Alfred North Whitehead’s physical cosmology addresses this aporia by approaching beings as processes of becoming and unfolding a process-relational ontology in which creatures are events of interrelation—“occasions” “prehending” the world from which they become. Whitehead’s process metaphysics is one of radical entanglement, where potentiality and actuality are interwoven into each other, and immanence and transcendence coincide away from modernity’s fallacies of bifurcation. Heralded by thinkers such as Isabelle Stengers, Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, or Catherine Keller, contemporary reflections around worldly processes of coinhabitation and emergence unfurl a Whiteheadian legacy. With her “terran worldings,” Donna Haraway reminds us that processes of world-composing and decomposing are always enmeshed in each other. Thus, we are actively involved in the ongoing event of becoming-with, engaged in the advent of the worlds which we contribute to articulate: “we relate, know, think, world, and tell stories through and with other stories, worlds, knowledges, thinkings, yearnings.” Haraway contends that living on a damaged planet “demand(s) sympoietic thinking and action” (Haraway 2017, M45, M31). From the Ancient Greek sún, “together” and poí sis, “creation,” sympoiesis means “creating-with,” “making-with,” or in Haraway’s language, “worlding-with.” In Staying with the Trouble, Haraway recalls that “the core of Margulis’ view of life was that new kinds of cells, tissues, organs and species evolve primarily through the long-lasting intimacy of strangers” (Haraway 2016, 60). Lynn Margulis’ theory of symbiogenesis depicts a lifegiving, world-composing intimacy between holobionts—sympoeitic entities which do not precede their relatings but rather consist of contingent knots,

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complex assemblages, and entwined processes of becoming-with. Lynn Margulis thus discovers the radical intimacy between strangers as a creative process. Inspired by this discovery, a sympoietic thinking acknowledges both our radical implication in each other and the life-composing aspect of our being enfolded in others’ processes of becoming. In their article “Involutionary Momentum,” Carla Hustak and Natasha Myers unfold an “affective ecology” attentive to the intimacies binding plants and insects together. Studying processes of pollination, they illuminate a movement of “involution” at the heart of these encounters. What they specifically aim to track is “the very momentum through which organisms reach toward one another and involve themselves in one another’s lives” (Hustak and Myers 2012, 96). While the evolutionary logics indicates an unfolding outwards, “a kind of speciation through divergence in the shape of branching trees,” involution refers to an enfolding, a curling inwards reminiscent of Le Guin’s poetic implication. Tuning in to the movement of involution at the heart of interspecies intimacies requires reading with our senses attuned to stories told in otherwise muted registers. Working athwart the reductive, mechanistic, and adaptationist logics that ground the ecological sciences, we offer a reading that amplifies accounts of the creative, improvisational, and fleeting practices through which plants and insects involve themselves in one another’s lives. (Hustak and Myers 2012, 77)

Hustak and Myers’ proposition for an “ecology of interspecies intimacies” thus emphasizes a more-than-human creativity at stake in the involutionary movement, where entangled life-forms improvise new becoming-with as they enfold each other (Hustak and Myers 2012, 106). Haraway qualifies the “irresistible attraction toward enfolding each other” as an “insatiable hunger” and “the vital motor of living and dying on earth”—thereby echoing Henri Bergson’s élan vital, a creative impulse at the heart of the emergence of life (Haraway 2016, 58). Waving toward the Leibnizian-Deleuzian metaphor of the fold, Bruno Latour suggests an idea similar to Hustak and Myers’ involution: “living forms are folded many times over because they have engulfed the outside world inside the provisional border of their selves” (Latour 2016). His Facing Gaia ventures into a political cosmology which embraces the collapse of the border between inside and outside. In their talk “On Touching the Stranger Within,” feminist philosopher and quantum physicist Karen Barad offers a dazzling reflection around the ontological enfolding of matter—“always already threaded through with an infinite alterity.” Their analysis of a pervading, ubiquitous ontological touch dissolves the boundaries of selves, while their depiction of electrons “(re)birthing themselves in their engagement with all others” suggests a movement of involution in which “intra-related” life-forms creatively involve themselves in each other. They ask: “is touching not by its very nature always already an involution,

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invitation, invisitation, wanted or unwanted, of the stranger within?” (Barad 2018). Barad’s relational ontology conceives the emergence of matter in this ubiquitous touch, an intimate and mutual inhabitation which they call “intra-actions.” In an important sense, in a breathtakingly intimate sense, touching, sensing, is what matter does, or rather, what matter is: matter is condensations of responses to the desires/desirings to be in touch, a collective responsiveness/responsivity. (Barad 2018—my emphasis)

Our entangled becomings are thus inextricable from this ontological intimacy, this desire to touch and respond to the possibilities arising from the boundless otherness, the “unfathomable multitude” of the world. “Matter is an enfolding, an involution, it cannot help touching itself, and in this selftouching it comes in contact with the infinite alterity that it is.” From this ubiquitous touching, Barad—who claims that “a delicate tissue of ethicality runs through the marrow of being” (2007, 396, my emphasis)—draws an ontological response-ability toward our entangled possibilities of becoming: Intra-acting responsibly as part of the world means taking account of the entangled phenomena that are intrinsic to the world’s vitality and being responsive to the possibilities that might help us flourish. Meeting each moment, being alive to the possibilities of becoming, is an ethical call, an invitation that is written into the very matter of all being and becoming. We need to meet the universe halfway, to take responsibility for the role that we play in the world’s differential becoming. (Barad 2007, 396—my emphasis)

In a post-Kantian fashion, Barad derives from the quantic entanglement of matter an ethical imperative of response-ability toward the other, human and more-than-human. In this ethics of entanglement, response-ability is inextricable from matter: “each bit of matter is constituted in response-ability; each is constituted as responsible for the other, as being in touch with the other” (2018). Isabelle Stengers enjoins us to embrace and cultivate our ability to respond to this ubiquitous ontological touch as she suggests, in praise for the collective volume Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, that the art of inhabiting implies “allowing one-self to be touched and induced to think and imagine by what touches us.” Being present to the unfolding processes of becoming in which we are collectively involved entails indeed allowing oneself to be fecundated by an intimate otherness always already present within the entangled possibilities of becoming. As the works of Barad, Hustak, and Myers demonstrate, the intimate, more-than-human co-inhabitation reflected upon earlier enfolds us into becoming, thus disclosing the liminal space of intimacy as a space of possibility and creation. So that, on the threshold of the

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worlds, “amid the porous tissues and open edges of damaged but still ongoing living worlds,” we might draw from the well of intimacy and liminality to birth new entangled becomings (Haraway 2016, 33).

TENDING THE OPENNESS In “No Small Matter: Mushroom Clouds, Ecologies of Nothingness, and Strange Topologies of Spacetimemattering,” Karen Barad emphasizes a radical openness at the heart of matter, its emergence and its possible becomings. They argue that “matter is spectral, haunted by all im/possible wanderings, an infinite multiplicity of histories present/absent in the indeterminacy of timebeing.” With quantum field theory, Barad discloses being and time as shot through with virtuality and indeterminacy. They invite us to cultivate political imaginaries which embrace the radical openness of the present as well as the yearnings contained in our entangled becomings. That which they call “the void,” and which I refer to as openness, is “a desiring orientation toward being/becoming, lush with yearning and innumerable imaginings of what could be/might yet have been.” Never settled, always radically open: the present overflows with possibilities “disruptive of mere presence,” perpetually transcending present becomings and releasing trajectories as they condemn others (Barad 2017, G112–G113). What this thought radically undoes—in addition to a dualistic understanding of being and non-being or a linear conception of time—is the modern trope of the end of history and the sense of resignation it produces by collapsing the horizon of political thought and action. Embracing the radical openness of the world and acknowledging that our entangled becomings are inhabited by possibilities are crucial to reclaim a sense of hope in the ruins of capitalism and amidst ecological collapse. Cultivating this openness as a space of possibility, as a germinating abyss— which Barad also calls a “source” or “a womb that births existence”—is an ecological issue for it is inextricable from the more-than-human intimacy at the heart of our entangled becomings. It calls upon us to tend a porous boundary between worlds, between times, and between beings as we dwell on the edge of worlds and attend to the magic of our intimate enfolding with other life-forms. The precarious yet overflowing openness of the world demands that we world worlds flooded with possibilities, lush with yearnings. In this regard, ecological thought addresses the edge-dwellers in us who dwell in liminal spaces, summoning us to tend the boundary and keep it porous (Abram 1997). Investing us as guardians of the openness, ecology is a call to venture into the borderland, beyond the limits of our ontologies and epistemologies, undoing lines of segregation that seek to capture that which overflows. In her article “Lines of the Innumerable,” process theologian Catherine Keller— whose work cultivates a joyous and irreverent interdisciplinarity—reflects

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upon the eminently political dimension of boundaries, reminding us that the discipline served by hard lines and hermetic boundaries is “convenient to the regnant political order.” She draws our attention to the subversive potential of tracing sandy lines of relation—between thoughts, disciplines, oppressions, beings, species—lines which subvert hierarchies as they “bend and twist, bifurcate and intersect, mesh, tangle” (Keller 2018, 2). Weaving such lines allows us to birth narratives able to “gather up the complexities and keep the edges open and greedy for surprising new and old connections” (Haraway 2015, 101). We are indeed in dire need of narratives that render the world’s perpetual overflowing and its unrelenting withdrawal from the many reductions, reifications, and petrifications it suffered under the modern cosmology of nature. The prism of liminality, I have suggested, enables us to embrace the profound ungraspability of what is unfolding, so intimate and yet perpetually withdrawing, as a radical dimension of our being intricately entangled, enfolded in the otherness of the world. As we dwell in the ruins of ecocidal capitalism, we are reminded that thinking happens on the edge of an abyss. Cultivating an attention to the liminal and preserving the tension comprised in the idea of liminality offers a tool of resistance against the closure of thought. It is the task of philosophy to keep the doors of thought open, to keep weaving hopeful worldlings, to dare to gaze into an unfathomable intimacy with morethan-humans, and to disrupt the attempts at enclosing a world of overflowing.

REFERENCES Abram, David. 1996. The Spell of the Sensuous. Perception and Language in a MoreThan-Human World. New York: Vintage Books. Abram, David and Jeremy Hayward. 1997. “The Boundary Keeper.” Shambhala Sun Magazine, May 1997. Abram, David and Merlin Sheldrake. 2021. “Magic and Ecology: Entangled Life.” CRASSH Cambridge, April 2, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v =aVpVc7VKOrM. Abram, David and Sophie Strand. 2022. “Magic as Radical Embedding in our Web of Relations.” Advaya, October 31, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yC8m2 -v4SwE. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2017. “No Small Matter: Mushroom Clouds, Ecologies of Nothingness, and Strange Topologies of Spacetimemattering,” in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, edited by A. Tsing, H. Swanson, E. Gan, and N. Bubandt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, G103–120. ———. 2018. “On Touching the Stranger Within—The Alterity that therefore I Am-.” the Poetry Project. https://www.poetryproject.org/library/poems-texts/on -touching-the-stranger-within-the-alterity-that-therefore-i-am.

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Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques. 2008. The Animal that Therefore I Am. Edited by Marie-Louise Mallet. New York: Fordham University Press. Despret, Vinciane. 2021. Autobiographie d’un poulpe et autres récits d’anticipation. Paris: Actes Sud. Gennep, A. van. 1960. The Rites of Passage. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Gilbert, Scott F., Jan Sapp, and Alfred Tauber. 2012. “A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals.” Quarterly Review of Biology, 87, no. 4: 325–341. Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2017. “Symbiogenesis, Sympoiesis, and Art Science Activisms for Staying with the Trouble,” in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, edited by A. Tsing, H. Swanson, E. Gan, and N. Bubandt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, M25–50. Hustak, Carla and Natasha Myers. 2012. “Involutionary Momentum.” Differences, 23, no. 3, 74–118 Irigaray, Luce. 1985. This Sex Which Is Not One. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Keller, Catherine. 2018. “Lines in the Innumerable: Enmity, Exceptionalism and Entanglement.” Literature & Theology, 32, no. 2, 131–141. Latour, Bruno. 2010. On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2016. “Does the Body Politic Need a New Body?” Yusko Ward-Phillips lecture, University of Notre Dame. Margulis, Lynn. 1998. Symbolic Planet. A New Look at Evolution. New York: Basic Books. Morton, Timothy. 2012. “The Dark Ecology of Elegy,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy, edited by Karen Weisman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 251–271. Powers, Richard. 2019. The Overstory. London: Vintage. Radical Mycology Convergence. 2023. https://radicalmycologyconvergence.com/ pages/about-the-rmc-1#rmcethos. Accessed January 23, 2023. Sheldrake, Merlin. 2000. Entangled Life. How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures. New York: Random House. ———. 2020. “The Philosophy of Fungi,” interviewed by Freddie Sayers. Unherd, September 10, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZlmQHlZBCE&t =1046s. Accessed January 19, 2023. Stengers, Isabelle. 2015. In Catastrophic Times. Resisting the Coming Barbarism. London: Open Humanities Press. Thomassen, Bjørn. 2009. “The Uses and Meanings of Liminality.” International Political Anthropology, 2, no. 1, 5–28. Tsing, Anna L. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Turner, Victor. 1967. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Voegelin, Eric. 2000. The Collected Works. Vol. 18: Order and History. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.

Chapter 3

Natureculture, Lifedeath Dominic Boyer

At the brink of ecological emergency—or perhaps already slipping down its rocky slope—we might ask ourselves, What brought us here? What but also who. Because hands were on tillers and whips and then someone later mined the coal and fed it into machines before someone else later swapped out the coal for oil and meanwhile many burned, burned, burned fossil fuels until the air filled with carbon dioxide and methane and a thousand other compounds. Whether we want to name our current condition Anthropocene or Capitalocene or something else entirely, its operational logic has been a way of thinking and acting in which some human interests exceed others and all human interests exceed those of the nonhuman world, the world called “nature.” Indeed, nature in this worldview is little more than a bundle of resources for the purpose of human development (e.g., “culture”). This singular conceptualization of “nature” as an object for manipulation by human “culture” has inspired widespread philosophical critique in recent years, prompting Isabelle Stengers (2015) and Bruno Latour (2017) to reanimate the Gaia concept and Timothy Morton to call for an “ecology without nature,” among other interventions. More than just ontological challenges, these interventions call for new ethics that appreciates, as Donna Haraway puts it, the “sympoietic tangling .  .  . of earthly worlding and unworlding” (2016). Such criticism, though both well-intentioned and accurate, feels rather late to the game, the “oh shit!” as the car jumps the guardrail and sails over the cliff’s edge into a sky full of consequences. Depending on mass, angle, velocity, and gravity one hopes there would be time for a moment of “we should have listened” to the many humans and nonhumans who never read a word of continental philosophy but who knew all the same that there were no Archimedean points from which sovereign isolated beings could observe, command, and control the world around them. If the most inconvenient, 31

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inefficient, and mongrel mode of philosophy available (anthropology) has taught us nothing else, it has shown that the fundamental injunction that oriented the vast majority of human behavior for the vast majority of human time was never know thyself but rather know thy relations (to thy kin, to thy place, to thy web of life). At the brink of ecological emergency, if we suture nature and culture together into a new conceptual beacon (e.g., natureculture), will it illuminate a better path forward? Will there be time for the wounds to heal? Anyone would be right to be skeptical since in the Global North there are so many bad habits to unlearn, conceptual and otherwise. But I take seriously the caution of the Neshnabe philosopher Kyle Powys Whyte that apocalyptic narratives favor the colonizer, encouraging the acceptance of extinction over the much harder ethical work of restoring relations of trust, consent, and mutual thriving in a deeply damaged world (2018). We need decompositional politics that unmake the ecocidal trajectory that sweeps along those of us living today and recompositional politics aimed at restoring relational possibility (Boyer 2023). What but also who. Some part of the work of decomposition has to involve accountability. If there were Nuremberg trials for the ecological emergency, who would be interrogated, who would bear witness, what sentences would be adequate to the crimes? What lessons might we learn to guide recomposition and avoid repetition of the mistakes of the past? Although I would love to see fossil fuel company executives put on trial as much as anyone, they are little more than mushrooms growing on the ancient rotten log of European liberalism. Today’s mainstream liberalism projects itself as kinder, more inclusive, and smarter than liberalisms past. As regards the ecological emergency, we bear witness to the slow mainstreaming of ecoliberal sentiments in various liberal-democratic polities across the world. But it is unclear how much this gentler nascent ecoliberalism is really willing to break with the colonial relations that codified and globalized European liberal principles in the first place. Because it is not too much to say that liberalism was born into the world as an ideological expression of colonial extractivism. Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing, among others, have argued persuasively (2019) that the colonial plantationocene—with its violent organization and dispossession of human and nonhuman beings for the purposes of European expansion, commerce, and consumption—was a crucible and accelerant of European modernity (including liberal notions of freedom and property) as well as transnational capitalism. Lockean liberalism, the Ur-form that inspired so much elaboration and popularization across the eighteenth century, holds that property is anchored in the control over bodily productivity or labor. Labor and property are enhanced by reason and industry (read: technology). And whomever has better reason and technology has a divine

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right to dispossess those possessing less reason and technology of their land and resources. Listen to Locke in chapter 5 of the Second Treatise: As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property. He by his labour does, as it were, inclose it from the common. Nor will it invalidate his right, to say every body else has an equal title to it; and therefore he cannot appropriate, he cannot inclose, without the consent of all his fellow-commoners, all mankind. God, when he gave the world in common to all mankind, commanded man also to labour, and the penury of his condition required it of him. God and his reason commanded him to subdue the earth, i.e., improve it for the benefit of life, and therein lay out something upon it that was his own, his labour. He that in obedience to this command of God, subdued, tilled and sowed any part of it, thereby annexed to it something that was his property, which another had no title to, nor could without injury take from him.

God bestowed the world to mankind as a commons but also issued a divine edict to labor in the development of the world’s resources. So, from wilderness and the wastes, Locke imagines, civilization was born, midwifed by private property. But the issue of consent troubled him and his contemporaries. How could one be a good Christian while enclosing resources from the world commons, thus potentially depriving one’s fellow humans of their ability to prosper? God gave the world to men in common; but since he gave it them for their benefit, and the greatest conveniencies of life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the industrious and rational, (and labour was to be his title to it;) not to the fancy or covetousness of the quarrelsome and contentious.

The commons is only ever prologue for liberalism. As in the popular game Minecraft, God teleported us into terra nullius. And from that point forward, only reason and industry mattered. You can sense what this fantasy is cathecting. America is much on Locke’s mind, the model wilderness that Europeans of his era had lately discovered and begun to populate. They needed an origin narrative, an impetus, an excuse. “Thus in the beginning all the world was America,” he says, a place of tremendous abundance but also, inconveniently, non-European humans who laid claim to and made use of its resources. There cannot be a clearer demonstration of anything, than several nations of the Americans are of this, who are rich in land, and poor in all the comforts of life; whom nature having furnished as liberally as any other people, with the materials of plenty, i.e. a fruitful soil, apt to produce in abundance, what might serve

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for food, raiment, and delight; yet for want of improving it by labour, have not one hundredth part of the conveniencies we enjoy: and a king of a large and fruitful territory there, feeds, lodges, and is clad worse than a day-labourer in England.

Can one imagine a better retroactive alibi for the first wave of European colonization? Through liberalism, Europeans could imagine they had every right to dispossess non-Europeans of their “large and fruitful” territories because of their stubborn unwillingness to improve them through labor. Please don’t mistake my argument. Writing at the end of the seventeenth century, Locke did not set colonization in motion; Columbus carried sugarcane plantings with him on his second voyage to the New World in 1493; there were prototype slave-driven plantations in São Tomé ready for westward expansion by 1500. Locke simply codified into philosophical principles and discourse the extractivist habits and relations that had already been formalized through nearly two centuries of the killing fields of the plantationocene: freedom and property for a few, misery, toil, dispossession, and death for the many. And it is not just Locke on trial; all the hallowed classic works of liberalism and their hollow discourse on freedoms and rights—e.g., Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois (1748), Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755), Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), Paine’s Rights of Man (1791), Kant’s Zum ewigen Frieden (1795)—emerged during an era in which the murderous practice of trans-Atlantic slavery to benefit European “comforts of life” was steadily increasing. As Haraway and Tsing rightly assert, the colonial plantationocene remains with us today. Ruminating on the epitome of colonial plantation sucropolitics, Haiti, Rolph Trouillot reminds us that pastness is a position, not a fixture (1995). Lockean liberalism is thus less a historical fossil and more like a soil layer that continues to nourish modern liberalism’s stalks and shoots. And it is not the only soil layer that should concern us. The sheer quantity of human and animal labor needed to maintain the plantationocene eventually proved to be its undoing. So, in the decades leading up to the Haitian revolution—the Creeper that blew up a huge chunk of the Caribbean Minecraft assemblage—the liberal political imagination became quite taken with automata and machines. Machines met liberalism’s thirst for productivity, while also being politically and economically expedient. Abolitionism was on the rise in the eighteenth century, and forcing so many unruly humans to live and die in machinish ways was leading to greater and greater capital losses. What is little known but indisputable is that the first prototypes for steam engines replacing human labor in manufacturing were not assembled and tested in Europe—the James Watt hero narrative—but rather in places

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like Jamaica (Deerr and Brooks 1940) where plantation masters had already composed a detailed episteme of the clockworks of plantation life (e.g., Martin 1785). No one described better than Karl Marx how industrial capital waged war to annihilate human labor in the nineteenth century. But the roots of that campaign began with coal-fueled steam engines decades earlier, engines that created the possibility of a new kind of coal-based liberalism, I call it carboliberalism, an extractivist project in its own of course, but one that decisively shifted the majority of its productive powers away from human and animal labor and toward fossil-fueled machinery. Carboliberalism brought with it new machinic freedoms of mobility and consumption, appearing to transcend time and space through locomotion and flooding the world with machine-produced goods that came to be understood as essential features of living a good and modern life (Barbour et  al. 2010). At the same time, human lives and labor became perhaps even more expendable as interchangeable machinic sidekicks. Yet, as in the New World plantations, resistance rose, and certain vulnerabilities in the carboliberal apparatus were identified. Coal was heavy and could only be moved along fixed rail lines. It also still needed a great deal of human labor under dangerous conditions to surface it. Those labor conditions created strong social bonds among miners that could be channeled into powerful political will. The vulnerability of coal transport offered useful chokepoints for blockades and strikes that allowed the rising militant organization of industrial workers in the late nineteenth century to demand what Tim Mitchell calls “carbon democracy” (2009). Paradoxically or at least fragilely, the materiality of coal led to broader workers’ rights, a temporary social democratic compromise, and a new emphasis on the redistribution of wealth in the middle twentieth century. But liberalism was again one step ahead of justice, conspiring to institute a new extractivist order. It mutated again on the back of gasoline-powered automobility, embracing oil for its greater energy density, its liquidity, and its mutability. Pressurized by geological forces from below, oil’s availability wasn’t as dependent on human labor as coal’s had been; it was light and could evade the chokepoints of rail; best of all, oil was plastic; its petrochemicals created a whole new material substrate for commodities, allowing goods to become cheaper still, more obsolescent, more individualized, and ready to wear and to eat. Wherever you are reading this paragraph, chances are that the whole room is filled with the kin of oil—the fabrics, the fixtures, the paint, the sockets—in ways that we scarcely comprehend. Petroliberalism is not just an ideology; it is a whole sociomaterial environment. Our citizenship is thus an oily business, and our default political solidarity with oil is profound. And we each in our own ways serve the reproductive interests of the petrostate, by which I mean not just governments that earn money from oil sales, but rather

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the entire military-industrial-extractivist-mobilist-consumerist complex that saturates Global Northern modernity and its victims. The petrostate is the primary and urgent target of decompositional politics today, what we need to fight and disassemble to earn the right to put its remnants on trial. Although we may wish it well in its evolutionary journey, liberalism, frankly, is not a reliable ally in decompositional politics. Liberalism morphs constantly, like the shadow companion of capital that it has always been. Petroliberalism will do everything with its considerable powers to persist, including adding a verdant sheen to its public appearance. Much ecoliberalism is covertly petroliberal for this reason, especially when it pins the world’s hopes on nonsensical formulations like “green growth.” Although there are, to be sure, worse political trajectories than ecoliberalism at present—petrofascism and ecofascism come to mind—we need to cultivate a decompositional praxis that does not rely on ecoliberal progress. We need instead a politics that is stubbornly committed to extricating the world from the fossils of liberal extractivism. Part of this praxis could be the making of what I call “revolutionary infrastructure” (2018). Infrastructure is like Trouillot’s sense of the past in that it is not a thing or a place but a relation. The infrastructural relation is one of enablement. And enablement is intrinsically multiple. A harbor pier enables a human to walk above water, but the same pier enables a barnacle to have a home. Any given infrastructure thus enables multiple relations and diverse potential futures even as it may disable others. Infrastructure is thus a very useful mode through which to practice a politics of the future that seeks to disable toxic legacies. The method of decompositional politics draws close to the core of what is enabling the reproduction of our genocidal, ecocidal trajectory today, working strand by strand to disable it. That “work” is also play and requires affect, imagination, and commitment—like the commitment to water infrastructure that Nikhil Anand (2011) called “hydraulic citizenship” in the context of his fieldwork in Mumbai. It also requires political solidarity with the nonhuman to cultivate spaces of refuge, sanctuaries of the otherwise, if you will. Revolutionary infrastructure sounds abstract and perhaps pompous, but let me assure you it is sometimes as simple and humble a practice as digging a hole in the ground. To illustrate, I will close with an example of more-thanhuman infrastructural solidarity drawn from ongoing fieldwork on flooding and green stormwater infrastructure in my petropolitan home, Houston. You need to know that Houston has experienced a major flood on average once a year since its founding. That makes it sound like Houston is some innocent victim of natural forces, but the situation is obviously more complicated. Some humans thought it was a fine idea to build a megalopolis in a swamp after all. As Dilip da Cunha and Anuradha Mathur argue, wetness has frustrated

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and opposed European colonial logics since Alexander the Great (2018). The fight against wetness is always the fight for dry land, the fight for dry land which can be made property and developed to yield value. Liberalism is and has always been xeroliberalism. As a ground zero for the cancerous legacies of both plantation slavery and American petroculture, it is thus unsurprising that a wetlands settlement like Houston has fought wetness since its inception. It has deployed tons of steel and concrete to command and control water to stay in its place. It is a game for experts and elites. Conventional stormwater infrastructure is extremely high energy to create, highly expensive to finance, takes forever to complete, and is increasingly ineffective given the rapid pace of climate change. Within only twenty years, Houston’s 500-year flood plain became a 100-year flood plain. In the past decade, we’ve experienced three 500-year rainfall events occur within twenty-four months, one of them Hurricane Harvey, which distributed $125 billion worth of damage on its own. So, Houston is wet and getting wetter, as technopolitical actors like Harris County Flood Control and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers devise lunatic schemes like a network of deepwater tunnels that would cost billions to create and maintain with almost no impact on flooding whatsoever (Boyer and Vardy 2022). Suffice it to say that Houston’s conventional infrastructural situation today is what Lauren Berlant terms “cruel optimism” (2011), in which the supposed object of one’s desire actually compromises one’s possibility of flourishing. Unless of course we recognize that the real purpose of conventional stormwater infrastructure is less managing water than asserting the elite power and authority to do so. So, What to do? How to extricate an increasingly amphibious city from the technopolitics of the petrostate? An unlikely band of humans including community organizers and community members in three neighborhoods of Northeast Houston—long sacrifice zones to local white supremacist politics of coal, oil, railroads, and highways—alongside a civil engineer, a landscape architect, a graphic designer, and an anthropologist, have been collaborating to create one million rain gardens in Houston as an alternative to conventional technopolitical stormwater infrastructure. One million? Well, at least two rain gardens to start with. And what is a rain garden? A very humble infrastructure that consists of digging a hole or trench in the ground a few feet deep. Into the dugout, you place logs, branches, sticks, leaves, mulch, pretty much anything at hand. And then you fill back in the soil and plant it over, ideally with local coastal prairie vegetation whose root systems can run meters deep and are excellent at sponging up water. Plants thrive in them, insects and other small animals love them and as rain gardens age, their logs and leaves decompose, creating new, excellent soil that can be harvested in a periodic process of rain garden renewal. In Northeast Houston, the plan is to use that soil for raised bed urban gardening to combat the food apartheid

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that plagues the area. Meanwhile, the rain garden prevents rainwater from becoming runoff by holding it until it can absorb into the soil. A local green infrastructure visionary named Art Storey once calculated that if each and every building in Houston had just a modest sized rain garden adjacent to it, the technopolitical apparatus of Harris County Flood Control would be put out of business. We know that liberalism suspects that technological advancement is the key to any form of progress. But look here! The tools that are needed to make a rain garden are no more than medieval technology: shovels and wheelbarrows. Depending on the size of the project, a rain garden can take as little as a few hours or as much as a few days to create. The main cost is finding people willing to dig and fill, and plant. So, here is the revolutionary idea we have been sharpening. What if Houston were to declare a rain garden week (or month or year) and ask its citizens to do nothing other than dig and fill and plant the green areas around their buildings? At the end of that period of time, Houston’s flooding problem would largely be solved, all without channelizing bayous and installing giant storm sewers and digging massive detention ponds, and, most importantly, without waiting for decades for a concrete and steel engineering solution that will never come. A Houston jeweled by a million little wet and wild sanctuaries would not only be a much better place to live now but it would also be a place that might still steal a future from the jaws of its toxic history. In that Houston, a new body might grow inside the cancer instead of the other way round. Revolutionary infrastructure projects like rain gardens in this example are experiments in creating new relations and enabling alternative future trajectories to the reproductive politics of the petrostatus quo. Yet, because it is hard to make something out of nothing, revolutionary infrastructure often captures and redistributes the materials and energies within existing infrastructural ecologies to do its thing. We squat petroculture and disable it from within. For example, it is no secret that the modern shovel coevolved with the resource extractive economy of mining. But in a rain garden, those shovels move into a new set of ecological relations that Timothy Morton and I have called “subscendence” (2021). If transcendence means rising out of relations and searching for those Archimedean points from which to command and control the world below, subscendence means hurtling back toward earth, meshing back into relations with the world, decomposing ecocidal and genocidal infrastructures and composing new infrastructures enabling mutual flourishing. Subscendence is an ethical strategy for encouraging humble, playful decomposition and recomposition, for holding the mania and terror of the ecological emergency at bay, for making life out of the death around us. Indeed, if we are willing to think natureculture these days, shouldn’t we be thinking lifedeath too?

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Cancer is not a bad example. Cells turn cancerous when they, like European settlers perhaps, decide to aggressively pursue their own isolated, Archimedean reproductive trajectory regardless of the health of the ecosystem that brought them into the world. The cancerous surge of life is a short-term rush of pleasure that dooms the host in the long run. Death and life are, intimately, absolutely bonded. At a cellular level, we can find a connection between liberalism and fascism too. I met a scientist in early 2022 in Los Angeles, a gentleman whose lab has cured cancer, or at least has cured the metastatic property of cancer. He showed us pictures of how cancer cells work, and they look like those monsters from War of the Worlds with long spindly legs that they use to crawl about in the body, spreading their cancerous mischief from place to place. But it turns out those legs are actually fasces—bundles of filaments held together by little bands, sort of like the metal hoops that hold barrels together. And what this brilliant fellow and his team have done is to create a drug that snips those little bands apart. Once the bands are snipped, the legs collapse in on themselves like spaghetti, and the cancer cells can no longer move, leaving them easy targets for radiation therapy. Apparently, this miracle drug stops metastasis in something like 90 percent of cancers. It is still in its early-stage trials yet, which is why you likely have not heard about it. The point is not only that cancer’s terra nullius voyages throughout the body depend on fascism. But also that fascism (and, by extension, liberalism) is much less than it purports to be. Just a little snip in the right place can make all the difference, decomposing something that until then seemed so righteously sure of its power and trajectory. That’s subscendence in action, deflating bloated transcendent attitudes, behaviors, and institutions. Lifedeath could be the motto of decompositional politics. The constant cycling between life and death is an oscillation that champions of the desert monotheistic northern enlightenment tradition are typically very uncomfortable with. They really don’t like the death part of the cycle anyway. Death is always a very bad scene, something terrifying to be viscerally feared. Which is why the desert monotheisms send their dead to a wholly other realm, mostly to suffer and on very rare occasions to experience bliss. It’s been obvious since Durkheim at least that desert death narratives are just protocols for social control, ethics at gunpoint. If you don’t stay attuned to the deity and nod along with the clerics, then expect that demons are going to torment you for eternity. Just like religious dogma, transcendence philosophy (i.e., conventional philosophy) is a gargoyle that likes to perch over a world organized by very neat and compartmentalized terms. Nature over here. Culture over there. Death over here. Life over there. Clean design lines. Like a beautiful table on display in a Scandinavian design studio. Sarah Ahmed once noticed how male philosophers of a certain age constantly use tables as their examples because tables are what they know. Their circumstances

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(e.g., the women and children whose care work supports them) allow them to sit quietly in front of tables all the time, not having to cook for themselves, let alone to do laundry. All that time on their hands allows them to have their little floating world and become the artisanal craftsmen of the mind. But their fingernails are clean. It’s an ecological emergency, friends, and it’s time for everyone to get down together into the muck and get dirty.

REFERENCES Anand, Nikhil. 2011. “Pressure: The Polytechnics of Water Supply in Mumbai.” Cultural Anthropology 26(4): 542–563. Barbour, Ian, Harvey Brooks, Sanford Lakoff, and John Opie. 2010. “Energy and the Rise of American Industrial Society,” in The Energy Reader, edited by L. Nader. London: Wiley-Blackwell, 32–44. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press. Boyer, Dominic. 2018. “Infrastructure, Potential Energy, Revolution,” in The Promise of Infrastructure, edited by N. Anand, H. Appel, and A. Gupta. Durham: Duke University Press, 223–243. Boyer, Dominic. 2023. No More Fossils. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Boyer, Dominic and Mark Vardy. 2022. “Flooded City: Effects of (Slow) Catastrophe in Post-Harvey Houston.” Current Anthropology 63(6): 615–636. Da Cunha, Dilip. 2018. The Invention of Rivers. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Deerr, Noel and Alexander Brooks. 1940. “The Early Use of Steam Power in the Cane Sugar Industry.” Transactions of the Newcomen Society 21(1): 14. Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble. Durham: Duke University Press. Haraway, Donna and Anna Tsing. 2019. “Reflections on the Plantationocene: A Conversation with Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing.” Edge Effects. https://edgeeffects .net/haraway-tsing-plantationocene/. Latour, Bruno. 2017. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Translated by Catherine Porter. London: Polity. Martin, Samuel. 1785. An Essay on Plantership. Antigua: Robert Mearns. Mitchell, Timothy. 2009. “Carbon Democracy.” Economy and Society 38(3): 399–432. Morton, Timothy, and Dominic Boyer. 2021. Hyposubjects. London: Open Humanities Press. Stengers, Isabelle. 2015. In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. Translated by Andrew Goffey. London: Open Humanities Press. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1995. Silencing the Past. Boston: Beacon. Whyte, Kyle Powys. 2018. “Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral Dystopias and Fantasies of Climate Change Crises.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1(1–2): 224–242.

Chapter 4

Visualizing Staying Together Multispecies Kinship, Caretaking, Justice, and Rebellion Subhankar Banerjee

The old adage “don’t judge a book by its cover” isn’t useful for modernday ecocritics or scholars who do close reading of environmental texts and images. Take, for example, Rob Nixon. A literary studies scholar, Nixon opens the third chapter of his widely acclaimed and influential book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor with an ecocritical reading of the cover image of late Ogoni writeractivist Ken Saro-Wiwa’s detention diary, the posthumous A Month and a Day: “His moustache looks precise and trim; his eyes are alight; a gash scrawls across his temple,” Nixon observes. “But it is his pipe that governs the picture. It is an intellectual’s accessory, a good pipe to suck and clench, to spew from and lecture with” (Nixon 2011, 103). Nixon draws the reader’s attention on the “pipe” and then makes a powerful visual resonance. Saro-Wiwa had expected tobacco to kill him. . . . In the end, it was the other pipes that got him, the Shell and Chevron pipes that poured poison into the land, streams, and bodies of Saro-Wiwa’s Ogoni people, provoking him to take up the life of protest that was to be his triumph and his undoing. (Nixon 2011, 103)

A tobacco-smoking pipe has nothing to do with a pipe that carries oil, and yet, by forcing a juxtaposition of the two, Nixon helps create an image that stays in our mind. The small and large, the wood and steel, the personal and political, coalesce into a single visual frame. The ecocritical reading of the cover of A Month and a Day becomes a portal to what follows in Nixon’s chapter. What do you see? I ask after putting up the cover page of State of Art Report on Biodiversity in Indian Sundarbans on a large TV screen in the 41

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classroom (Danda et  al. 2017). There is no rush; take your time, I tell the students. The face of a tiger is the first observation from several students. Tiger is the most charismatic animal in the Indian Sundarban, which is part of the largest mangrove forest on earth, spanning across coastal Bangladesh and West Bengal, India.—1 Sundarban is situated on the confluence of the deltas of three mighty rivers—the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna—collectively known as the Bengal Delta, the largest river delta on earth. Sundarban is also the only mangrove forest that provides home to tiger. Birds, crab, turtle, dolphin, shark, trees, crocodile, snake, deer, pig—a steady stream of observations from the students roll in. From a distance, the cover image is the face of a tiger, but as you look closely, you realize that the face is made up of numerous other animals and plants—small and large, iconic and overlooked. The cover illustration by Arnab Roy signals that while the tiger is the most famous resident in the Sundarban, there are many other species that live in this mangrove forest and depend on each other. The report celebrates animal and plant life in this global biodiversity hotspot. The ecology of life in the Sundarban includes over 400 species of birds (Chandra 2020), about 350 species of fish, dozens of mangrove tree species, and numerous invertebrate species that the birds and fish feed on, while the mangrove tree roots provide nursery for juvenile fish (Chandra et al. 2017). But what’s missing? I ask. After some silence, a student observes, human! Even though more than four million people live at the edge of the protected areas in the Indian Sundarban and have built complex ecological relations with the forest and its nonhuman lives, including tiger (Jalais 2010)—the cover image of State of Art Report on Biodiversity in Indian Sundarbans excludes the human. Is the exclusion a mere oversight? I think not. The illustration should instead be regarded as an exemplification of the fortress conservation model that keeps humans outside of protected areas. Fortress conservation originated in the United States with the establishment of the Yellowstone National Park in 1872. The idea is straightforward: establish a fortress, drawing a hard boundary around an area deemed worthy of conservation; evict the original human inhabitants; and declare their traditional practices illegal. The establishment of Yellowstone led to the eviction of Indigenous peoples from their traditional homelands, destruction of their food security, and criminalization of their cultural practices (Spence 1999; Jacoby 2001). During the second half of the twentieth century, fortress conservation continued its colonial march from the United States to the Global South, accompanied by a shift in conservation justification—from aesthetic values of land to iconic species like tiger (Banerjee and Dunaway 2023). Influential Western conservation NGOs like WWF, Wildlife Conservation Society, and others have been and continue to be the key agents of advancing fortress conservation to the Global South. Their efforts, at times, have led

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to gruesome murders, rape, torture, and other human rights abuses against tribal and other rural residents in Africa and Asia (UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment 2021; Banerjee 2021c). In recent years, just as biological annihilation (which includes species extinctions and population declines) escalates, so has the call for expanding “fortress conservation” as a mitigation measure. This call has been suggested and is being advanced largely by Western scientists, conservation NGOs, and nation-states (Dinerstein 2019; Banerjee 2021a). But their efforts have also encountered spirited resistance from human rights defenders and their allies, particularly from the Global South and Indigenous peoples (Dawson et  al. 2023; Banerjee 2021b). The ethos of “staying together”—the coexistence of human and nonhuman animals and plants—as discussed in this chapter and elsewhere in this volume is antithetical to the aims of fortress conservation and aligns more with the efforts of the human rights defenders and their allies. If the cover image of State of Art Report on Biodiversity in Indian Sundarbans is an example of what “fortress conservation” looks like, what does “staying together” look like then? How do we visualize the concept? MULTISPECIES REBELLION Consider the cover of Mahasweta Devi’s novel ͧΏά΃ҝΏͧΛ·͵ΚΏ (Aranyer Adhikar), first published in 1977. A literal translation of the title from Bengali to English would be Rights over the Forest. Devi was not only one of India’s most celebrated novelists of the second half of the twentieth century, but she was also one of India’s most influential advocates of tribal peoples and their rights. The cover illustration of ͧΏά΃ҝΏͧΛ·͵ΚΏis by Khaled Choudhury, an artist and an important early member of the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), which was established in 1943. The IPTA made significant contributions to India’s struggle for freedom from the British colonial rule. In Choudhury’s cover drawing in ͧΏά΃ҝΏ ͧΛ·͵ΚΏ, we see a towering human figure, standing tall, legs wide apart, a bow in one hand and an arrow in the other. The figure is made up of trees, mountains, birds, the sun, and other human figures—men and women, some with bows and arrows while others play flutes or drums, some ready to dance to the music—all created with line drawings in deep green color. It is not a placid scene of green sustainability, however. The main human figure, with toes touching the ground and heels slightly raised, is standing in the midst of red flames rising, with smaller human figures (painted in green color) with bows and arrows running across the lower third of the image from left to right. It is an image of rebellion created with red and green colors that we may call multispecies rebellion,

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which is being fought not only with weapons like bows and arrows but also with flutes and drums, music, and (the suggestion of) dancing. How do you sustain an environmental justice movement that lasts decades? With music, dancing, and food, as much as with political strategies and actions. I still remember my first visit to Arctic Village, an Indigenous Gwich’in community in Arctic Alaska. An emergency gathering had been called to respond to George W. Bush’s aggressive push to open up the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas exploration and development, a place the Gwich’in people call “Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit,” or the sacred place where life begins (James 2013, 262). Community members from all fifteen Gwich’in villages across Alaska (United States) and the Yukon and Northwest Territories (Canada) had come to the gathering, which took place in June 2001. Several hours each day were devoted to presentations and discussing strategy. But just as much time was set aside for fiddle music and jig dancing (Banerjee 2013, 254). Almost two decades later, in 2019, when I asked Indigenous scholar-activists Melanie Yazzie and Nick Estes about the resilience of the Red Nation, an influential Indigenous liberation collective that they cofounded in 2014, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Yazzie replied, “I think celebrating and cheerleading and being optimistic is really what’s given us our resilience. It gives us and our people confidence to keep doing the work” (Yazzie and Estes 2021, 440). A week before the interview with Yazzie and Estes, at the opening panel of the Indigenous Knowledges Conference, convened by Professor Jennifer Denetdale at the University of New Mexico, Navajo artist and social justice activist Radmilla Cody sang after her remarks. It was beautiful and powerful. When I reminded Yazzie of the experience, she said that incorporating more of such artistic acts “will encourage us to find a sense of joy and political purpose in our art in the same way we experience joy at a protest” (Yazzie and Estes 2021, 443). It is no surprise that Choudhury, a theater person, would include in his drawing flutes and drums, music, and (the suggestion of) dancing. The human figures in his drawing seem to be saying, “We are the forest people,” not unlike how an Indigenous Gwich’in person in Arctic North America says, “We are the caribou people” (James 2013, 262). They are also saying, “We are the protectors of this forest,” not unlike how many Indigenous peoples in North America are calling themselves “Water Protectors” as they fight to stop the construction of various major oil pipelines that would pollute their land and water (Estes and Dhillon 2019, 2). Choudhury’s drawing is an apt portal to Devi’s anti-colonial narrative. It is also an exemplary visualization of “staying together”—the coexistence of human and nonhuman kin. Mahasweta Devi’s ͧΏά΃ҝΏ ͧΛ·͵ΚΏ is situated in the late nineteenthcentury colonial India. The narrative focuses on tribal freedom fighter Birsa

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Munda’s Ulgulan (revolution) against colonial exploitation of tribal homelands and their resources and to regain traditional rights. The central figure in Choudhury’s drawing is likely Birsa Munda. The more than a century of British colonial destruction of tribal homelands and their resources, which led eventually to Birsa Munda’s Ulgulan, also coincided with the colonial government’s policy to exterminate “dangerous beasts and poisonous snakes” from India (Rangarajan 2001, 22). “Over 80,000 tigers, more than 150,000 leopards and 200,000 wolves were slaughtered in the fifty years from 1875 to 1925,” writes Mahesh Rangarajan, the eminent historian of India’s wildlife. “It is possible this was only a fraction of the numbers actually slain for rewards; officials recorded only those cases where they paid out a sum of money” (Rangarajan 2001, 32). In the late eighteenth century, the British government in India instituted a policy of eliminating India’s dangerous wildlife, starting with the tiger, but it also included the elephant, the wild buffalo, and the Indian one-horned rhinoceros. “They were a scourge to be wiped out,” Rangarajan notes. “Such practices were new to India: no previous ruler had ever attempted to exterminate any species” (Rangarajan 2001, 23). Thankfully, the colonial massacre of India’s wildlife and, after independence, the killing of wildlife by India’s feudal elites failed to wipe out most of India’s wildlife (though some species did go extinct in India during that long killing spree, including the Asiatic cheetah). Today, tribal and other rural peoples continue to live with or live adjacent to dangerous animals like tigers, elephants, rhinos, and snakes. Staying together must not be uncritically romanticized, however. It is challenging and at times leads to fatal incidents, but there is much that we can learn from such coexistence. Over the past half century, Indian natural scientists, environmental historians, environmental anthropologists, journalists, and writers have collectively contributed immensely to our understanding of the various facets of the coexistence of human and nonhuman lives or staying together (Banerjee 2014; Gadgil and Guha 2000; Ghosh 2004; Guha 1989, 1994; Jalais 2010; Mehtta 2021; Rangarajan 1999). But so far little attention has been paid to visual culture, which is the focus of this chapter. How do we visualize staying together? First, we need to consider visual works—photographs, drawings, paintings, digital art, and more—not merely as illustrations that may accompany an article or historical analysis but instead as primary sources, what historian of environmental visual culture Finis Dunaway calls “active agents” and which then contribute to building what he calls “grassroots visual culture” (Dunaway 2015, 1; 2021, 7). I focus on four component parts of “staying together” and the necessary struggles to ensure its ongoingness: multispecies kinship; multispecies caretaking; multispecies justice; and multispecies rebellion. Khaled Choudhury’s cover drawing for Mahasweta Devi’s ͧΏά΃ҝΏͧΛ·͵ΚΏ is a powerful

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example of visualizing multispecies rebellion. We turn our attention now to the other three: kinship, caretaking, and justice.

MULTISPECIES KINSHIP A sincere conversation on staying together ought to begin with how we consider nonhuman animals and plants with whom we share this earth. Are they beneath us, in a hierarchical sense of significance, as has been articulated and advanced by Western philosophy, religion, and science? Or should we consider them as our kin, as Indigenous peoples have long articulated in their creative and cultural practices? Art historian Alan Braddock has done an eye-opening ecocritical reading of a sixteenth-century engraving, The Great Chain of Being, by Diego de Valdés (1533–1582). Heavenly beings occupy the top of the illustration. “Below the heavenly host of angels, we see the earthly sphere arranged in clearly demarcated strata, with human beings closest to Heaven, followed by birds, sea creatures, quadrupeds, and flora,” Braddock notes (Braddock 2021, 116). He also explains how centuries of Western thought led to the visualization of such a hierarchy. Rooted in Western classical principles going back to Plato (ca. 428–347 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE), such imagery embodied beliefs about nature as a coherent system of life-forms arranged on a sliding scale, or scala naturae, according to varying levels of animation and intelligence,

Braddock writes. During the medieval period in Europe, this tiered scheme became imbued with religious assumptions about divine creation, dictating that all life originated with God in perfect plentitude for eternity, anthropocentrically ranked with human beings at the top of the earthly realm, just beneath Heaven. (Braddock 2021, 114)

By contrast, consider a twentieth-century print from Arctic Canada. Untitled (Composition with Taleelayu) is a 1962 copperplate engraving on paper attributed to Johnnie Ashevak and/or Kenojuak Ashevak, husband and wife, of Kinngait (Cape Dorset), Nunavut, Canada (Wight 2012, 96). The image is made up of six figures: Inuit sea goddess Taleelayu (or Sedna), an Inuk (singular for Inuit), two sea creatures, and two birds. The goddess, the human, and the nonhuman creatures of the sea and sky are in a circle with hands/feet/wings/tails/fins touching, as if engaged in a dance in the act of multispecies world-making (Banerjee 2019). There is no hierarchy; all—the goddess, the human, and the nonhuman animals—are on the same plane of significance. The jubilant scene, created with spare lines and dots, is an

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exemplary visualization of what we may call multispecies kinship. The kinship depicted here is also about sustenance, not merely for aesthetic pleasure. Inuit people hunt the birds and the sea creatures that are depicted in the print, which provides them with nutritional sustenance, and they also honor those animals as kin with cultural and spiritual practices. Perhaps it is easier to visualize kinship with animals that are likely not going to harm you, as in Untitled (Composition with Taleelayu). But how do you visualize kinship with an animal that may kill you, like a polar bear or tiger? Consider Bear by the Window (2004), an ink and pencil crayon drawing by the late Inuk artist Annie Pootoogook, also from Kinngait (Allen 2011, 50). Her polar bear looks very different than what we are used to seeing in popular media in which the depiction is either celebratory—cute, cuddly, dancing—or apocalyptic—starving, drowning. Such depictions tend to romanticize, exotify, or dramatize the animal. Pootoogook’s polar bear is unsentimental, a part of contemporary Inuit life and resists any attempt to turn the animal into an object of spectacle (Banerjee 2017). We do not see the face of the bear, but instead its rear end. Pootoogook portrays the bear as a scavenger, reaching toward a toppled trash can outside a government-built home, but as it looks up, it sees the partially visible face of a child through a crack in a window curtain—the curiosity of the bear meets the curiosity of the child, possibly Pootoogook herself. The meeting of those two gazes makes Pootoogook’s Bear by the Window an exemplary visual depiction of multispecies kinship, with an animal that may kill you.

MULTISPECIES CARETAKING August 2019. It was raining heavy when my sister Sudakshina Sen, a passionate photographer of wildlife, and I arrived in Western Ghats. The Western Ghats spans from north to south across six states in India—Gujarat, Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu. It is a global biodiversity hotspot and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Monsoons came late that year but were in full swing with fury. Extreme flooding happened across the country, killing hundreds of people and displacing millions. Not only people but also tigers, elephants, and rhinos died. Images of charismatic wild animals trying not to die-from-drowning were circulating widely: an exhausted tiger resting on a bed inside a shop; a bewildered male elephant standing on a rock in the middle of a raging river; eight exhausted rhinos resting on a small patch of elevated ground in the Kaziranga National Park. One journalist observed that it was a “sure-shot imprint” of climate change (Sangomla 2019).

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The sinuous state highway SH-78 includes forty hairpin bends as it rises up the Anamala Hills, or Elephant Mountains. To the east is Anamalai Tiger Reserve in Tamil Nadu and to the west is Parambikulum Tiger Reserve in Kerala. Large herds of elephants cross back and forth between these protected areas following their traditional migration routes. All along SH-78, there were large signs of elephant crossings, urging drivers to slow down. We also saw a small sign affixed to a bicycle that was parked by the roadside. One copy of the sign was attached with two screws on the front above the tire and another was attached to the carrier on the back (figure 4.1). Two stenciled images in solid black—of a male and female lion-tailed macaque— were overlaid on a white board. A few words written in both Tamil and English in red color accompanied the image—GO SLOW—LION TAILED MONKEY CROSSING. The lion-tailed macaque, a primate endemic to the Western Ghats, is endangered. It was raining hard; a fallen tree had blocked the road. We sat inside the car for almost two hours while local residents started to cut fallen branches and clear the road. On the back carrier of the bicycle, we saw a plastic bottle filled with cooking oil. It is possible that the owner of the bicycle parked it and went to help clear the road.

Figure 4.1 Lion-Tailed Monkey Crossing, Western Ghats, Tamil Nadu, India, 2019. Source: Photograph by Subhankar Banerjee.

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How is the sign on the bicycle different from other roadside animal crossing signs that urge drivers to slow down? Fixed roadside animal crossing signs are like art on a museum wall—for us to see from a distance. The sign on the bicycle, by contrast, is like a traveling flute player—it goes wherever the bicycle goes; it is part of daily life in the community. It is for a tourist like me to see, and it is also for local residents to see and chit-chat over a cup of tea. It is possible that the owner works for a local conservation organization that helped produce the sign and/or such an organization pays the owner a small sum of money (as a company would for installing a large billboard on someone’s rooftop); or the owner made the sign himself out of concern and care for the endangered macaque. It is a low-cost production compared to fixed roadside animal crossing signs that are usually quite large. The visible wear and tear indicate that the sign has been in use for some time. It is an example of “visual culture from below” (Banerjee and Dunaway 2023, 184). The road was finally cleared. We started moving again, only to stop after a kilometer or so. We spotted a lion-tailed macaque on a tree by the roadside. It was raining very hard. Some local residents eagerly approached us and offered help. They were excited to show us where all the macaques were sitting on various trees, and also assisted me in making a few photos. Making photos while lifting the lens up in the midst of heavy rain wasn’t easy. I photographed a mother and her young baby, who was clinging tightly to the mother. After a few clicks, the lens and the camera fogged up; I put it away. I thanked the local residents who helped me before continuing on our journey. The original intent of creating the sign on the bicycle was surely to alert tourists and local drivers to slow down for the endangered macaque, a plea for accommodation. But being so intimately integrated into the daily lives of the owner and the community, the sign has become much more. It is an exemplary visual depiction of multispecies caretaking.

MULTISPECIES JUSTICE Even though I grew up a short distance from the Sundarban, it wasn’t until August 2019 that I first visited there. I split my time between the Sundarban Tiger Reserve and several villages just outside of it, and obsessively photographed two items during that visit: creekside signs in the tiger reserve and the yellow nylon fence at its northern periphery. Perhaps I was searching not so much for pretty pictures of animals and the forest but for signs of visual culture. I photographed almost every creekside sign and almost every yard of the nylon fence. One of the villages I visited was Shamshernagar. It is situated just outside the northeastern periphery of the tiger reserve. Standing on the eastern edge of the village, you see Bangladesh just across the Raimangal River.

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Figure 4.2 Barrier as Bridge: Living with Tigers, Sundarban, West Bengal, India, 2019. Source: Photograph by Subhankar Banerjee.

Samshernagar is a rather remote place and difficult to get to. Here, the forest and the village meet, separated only by the yellow fence and a narrow creek (figure 4.2).2 It was monsoon season and that is why you see water in this section of the creek which otherwise stays dry for most of the year. A tiger can easily walk out of the forest, and then walk or swim across the creek, and enter the village. But the yellow nylon fence serves not only as a physical barrier but also as a psychological barrier to tigers who seem to avoid the fence, perhaps fearing getting entangled in its webbing. Living with tigers in close proximity as in Shamshernagar is no easy thing. Fatal incidents can happen. On April 11, 2004, a male tiger strayed from the Sundarban Tiger Reserve and entered Shamshernagar. In the evening hours the tiger killed an elevenyear-old girl named Rupali Baulia at her home. It was the only known incidence of human-kill by a tiger inside a village in the Indian Sundarban in many years. The tiger continued to stay in the village and killed some livestock. But he was finally trapped by the forest service two days later and was released the following day in another part of the tiger reserve, in the Harinbhanga block (Vyas 2012, 315). I read about the incident in a brief article in The Times of India published a few days after the tragedy (TNN 2004). The name of the victim was wrong as was the account of what happened. I returned to Shamshernagar in November 2022, with the hope that I may have a chance to speak with a family member who still remembers the story from more than eighteen years ago.

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Basanti Baulia, the mother of Rupali Baulia, was working at the vegetable garden in front of the house when we arrived, late morning on November 23. She graciously agreed to speak with me. The first thing she showed us was Rupali’s samadhi at one edge of the garden, a modest concrete structure painted pink. In Hinduism, a samadhi is a shrine or memorial built to commemorate the dead. With calm and a soft voice, Basanti Baulia recounted the story of her daughter’s death (Basanti Baulia, audio interview with the author in Bengali and subsequently transcribed and translated to English): It happened right here in this house. This is my father-in-law’s house where we have always lived. It was Sunday evening. Rupali and her brother were studying in the room. Rupali’s father (Bimal Baulia) had just returned from the haat (market) and brought some food for the children. The children came outside on the porch. I was in the kitchen. There was commotion; her father told me that he thought that the children were fighting. He came outside and saw the tiger had grabbed Rupali. He was shocked; there wasn’t even a laathi (wooden rod) nearby. I came out of the kitchen and hit the tiger. The villagers had gathered by then; there was a lot of shouting. The tiger left. But he had already bit into Rupali’s stomach; she was a tiny girl; the contents of her stomach were outside. Her father wrapped her and brought her to me. The police came and wanted to take her to the hospital, but she had already died. That evening the villagers built a samadhi for her. The village women were mad, shouting at the forest service staff and damaged their boat. But Rupali’s father urged them to calm down and told the forest service staff that, “My daughter died; nobody else should die; please, you must do something.”

The construction of the yellow fence was underway. But Rupali Baulia’s death put priority and urgency to the project. “There has not been a single tiger-kill inside our village since Rupali died, or inside any other village in our Sundarban,” Basanti Baulia told us. “We are very grateful for the fence.” The forest service has also built a satellite office in Shamshernagar, not far from the Baulia home, across the creek on the other side. As I was leaving, I appreciated her beautiful vegetable garden. “Her father goes to the forest to catch fish and crab; I stay home and work on the garden.” Tears were coming down her cheeks as she said those words. Multispecies justice is not merely theory or analysis; it is also praxis (Banerjee 2018). It brings concerns and conservation of nonhuman animals and plants and their habitats into alignment with environmental and economic justice. The yellow fence is visual evidence of justice served, for Basanti Baulia. It is also more than that. The extensive yellow fence across the Sundarban Tiger Reserve that looks like a barrier and makes the tiger reserve seem like some kind of a fortress actually serves as a bridge-of-trust between the villagers and the forest service staff, who used to deem each other as adversaries not that

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long ago. The yellow fence has created its own visual culture and history, and sparks conversations on how to live with wild tigers as neighbors. In May 2020, Cyclone Amphan tore through the Sundarban and damaged parts of the yellow fence. It was subsequently repaired, offering modest but much-needed income during the pandemic to some of the villagers who worked on the repair. Conservation in the Sundarban also requires economic justice for the villagers, some of whom are among the poorest residents of West Bengal.

CONCLUSION Following an appeal from a group of wildlife conservation organizations, on February 13, 2019, India’s Supreme Court ordered the eviction of over 1.1 million tribal and other forest-dwelling families (estimated to be five to seven million individuals) from forests that had been their ancestral homelands (Dhillon 2019). Following the ruling, then director of IWGIA (International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs) Julie Koch said that “The irony is that by implementing this old-fashioned and dangerous conservation viewpoint, indigenous peoples are seen as a problem rather than a part of the solution to protect and maintain the forests” (Koch 2019). The “conservation viewpoint” that Koch is referring to is fortress conservation. There are nearly 500 villages inside India’s tiger reserves; it remains a government priority to relocate them. This thinking is deeply flawed and unjust. Instead of uncritically following a Western conservation model, the Indian government would do well to honor the country’s long tradition of coexisting with wild animals. We do need to protect and defend critical places where animals give birth and nurse their young, like the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or the core area of the Sundarban Tiger Reserve. But we also need to be vigilant and mindful about defending the coexistence with our nonhuman kin wherever it may exist. We must not rely on the fortress conservation model that is built on the foundation of separation and confinement and often leads not only to human rights abuses but also to the severing of relations that Indigenous and other rural peoples have built with their nonhuman neighbors. Visual culture is not only useful but essential to understanding the complexities of staying together with nonhuman neighbors. Visual images can also be essential tools to advocate for the ongoing, sustainable relations. I have outlined here four component parts of visualizing staying together: multispecies kinship, multispecies caretaking, multispecies justice, and multispecies rebellion. Multispecies kinship helps us to consider a more equitable (not hierarchical) and compassionate relationship with nonhuman animals and plants, while multispecies caretaking brings attention to stewardship.

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But when staying together becomes challenging or is threatened, communities and their allies need to organize for multispecies justice, and in extreme situations, perhaps even multispecies rebellion.

NOTES 1. Both singular—Sundarban/Sundarbans—and the plural are used to refer to the mangrove forest. This chapter uses the singular, Sundarban. 2. Figure 2 was first introduced in a postcard “Nature as Classroom: Barrier as Bridge: Living with Tigers” as part of an installation titled “Beyond Fortress Conservation: Postcards of Biodiversity and Justice,” cocreated by Subhankar Banerjee and Finis Dunaway with design by late David Mendez. The installation was included in the project “A Library, a Classroom, and the World,” cocurated by Subhankar Banerjee and Jennifer Garcia Peacock, for the 2022 Venice Biennale art exhibition Personal Structures organized by the European Cultural Center, Venice, Italy, April 23–November 27, 2022.

REFERENCES Allen, Jan. 2011. Annie Pootoogook: Kinngait Compositions. Kingston: Agnes Etherington Art Centre. Banerjee, Ananda, ed. 2014. Nature Chronicles of India: Essays on Wildlife. New Delhi: Rupa. Banerjee, Subhankar. 2013. (introduction to) “We’ll Fight to Protect the Caribou Calving Ground and Gwich’in Way of Life,” in Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point, edited by Subhankar Banerjee, 254–255. New York: Seven Stories Press. Banerjee, Subhankar. 2017. “Why Polar Bears? Seeing the Arctic Anew.” In Living in the Anthropocene: Earth in the Age of Humans, edited by W. John Kress and Jeffrey K. Stine, 117–120. Washington: Smithsonian Books. Banerjee, Subhankar. 2018. “Resisting the War on Alaska’s Arctic with Multispecies Justice.” In “Beyond the Extractive View” special issue of SocialText online, edited by Macarena Gómez-Barris, June 7, 2018. Banerjee, Subhankar. 2019. “Art as Long Environmentalism.” In “Ecocriticism” special issue of Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, edited by Karl Kusserow, Spring (5.1). Banerjee, Subhankar. 2021a. “Visualizing Global Biodiversity: Toward an Understanding of Sacred Places and Relations.” Delivered over Zoom due to the Covid19 pandemic, Art, Faith, and Social Justice Lecture Series, Yale Institute of Sacred Music in partnership with Yale McMillan Center South Asian Studies Council, Yale University, January 28, 2021. https://youtu.be/arC3WSU7j9c. Banerjee, Subhankar. 2021b. “Bridge the North-South divide for a UN Biodiversity Framework that is more just.” Mongabay, September 23, 2021. https://

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news.mongabay.com/2021/09/bridge-the-north-south-divide-for-a-un-biodiversity -framework-that-is-more-just-commentary/. Banerjee, Subhankar. 2021c. “Murder, Rape, and Torture: Fortress Conservation on Trial.” Counterpunch, November 5, 2021. https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/11 /05/murder-rape-and-torture-fortress-conservation-on-trial/. Banerjee, Subhankar and Finis Dunaway. 2023. “Beyond Fortress Conservation: Postcards of Biodiversity and Justice.” Environmental History, 28, no. 1 (January): 180–207. https://doi.org/10.1086/722771. Braddock, Alan. 2021. “Mestizo Mnemonics: Diego de Valadés, Rhetorica Christiana, and the Earthly Art of Memory.” In Picture Ecology: Art and Ecocriticism in Planetary Perspective, edited by Karl Kusserow, 114–131. Princeton: Princeton University Art Museum. Chandra, Kailash, J. R. B. Alfred, Bulganin Mitra, and Biswajit Roy Chowdhury. 2017. Fauna of Sundarban Biosphere Reserve. Kolkata: Zoological Survey of India. Chandra, Kailash, Amitava Majumder, and Gopinath Maheswaran. 2020. Birds of the Sundarban Biosphere Reserve. Kolkata: Zoological Survey of India. Danda, A. A., A. K. Joshi, A. Ghosh, and R. Saha, eds. 2017. State of Art Report on Biodiversity in Indian Sundarbans. New Delhi: World Wide Fund for Nature-India. Dawson, Ashley, Fiore Longo, and Survival International, eds. 2023. Decolonize Conservation: Global Voices for Indigenous Self-determination, Land, and a World in Common. Brooklyn: Common Nations. Dillon, Amrit. 2019. “Millions of Forest-Dwelling Indigenous People in India to be Evicted.” The Guardian, February 22, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com /world/2019/feb/22/millions-of-forest-dwelling-indigenous-people-in-india-to-be -evicted. Dinerstein, E., et  al. 2019. “A Global Deal For Nature: Guiding Principles, Milestones, and Targets.” Science Advances, 5, no 4. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv .aaw2869. Dunaway, Finis. 2015. Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dunaway, Finis. 2021. Defending the Arctic Refuge: A Photographer, an Indigenous Nation, and a Fight for Environmental Justice. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Estes, Nick and Jaskiran Dhilon. 2019. “Introduction: The Black Snake, #NODAPL, and the Rise of A People’s Movement.” In Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NODAPL Movement, edited by Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon, 1–10. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gadgil, Madhav and Ramachandra Guha. 2000. The Use and Abuse of Nature. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Ghosh, Amitav. 2004. The Hungry Tide. New York: HarperCollins. Guha, Ramachandra. 1989. “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique.” Environmental Ethics, 11 (Spring): 71–83. Guha, Ramachandra, ed. 1994. Social Ecology. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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Jacoby, Karl. 2001. Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of Conservation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jalais, Annu. 2010. Forest of Tigers: People, Politics & Environment in the Sundarbans. New Delhi: Routledge. James, Sarah. 2013. “We Are the Ones Who have Everything to Lose.” In Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point, edited by Subhankar Banerjee, 260–266. New York: Seven Stories Press. Koch, Julie. 2019. Quoted in “Millions of Forest-Dwelling Indigenous Peoples Are Facing Eviction in India.” IWGIA (International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs), March 6, 2019. https://www.iwgia.org/en/india/3314-millions-of-indigenous-peoples-facing-eviction-india.html. Mehtta, Megnaa. 2021. “Crab Antics: The Moral and Political Economy of Greed Accusations in the Submerging Sundarbans Delta of India.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 27, Issue 3: 534–558. Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Rangarajan, Mahesh, ed. 1999. The Oxford Anthology of Indian Wildlife, Volume II: Watching and Conserving. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Rangarajan, Mahesh. 2001. India’s Wildlife History: An Introduction. Delhi: Permanent Black. Sangomla, Akshit. 2019. “Monsoon Watch: The 2019 Season has the Sure-Shot Imprint of Climate Change.” DownToEarth, August 13, 2019. https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/climate-change/monsoon-watch-the-2019-season-has-the-sure -shot-imprint-of-climate-change-66152. Spence, Mark David. 1999. Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks. New York: Oxford University Press. TNN. 2014. “Tigers Maul Two to Death.” The Times of India, April 14, 2004. https:// timesofindia .indiatimes .com /city /kolkata /tigers -maul -two -to -death /articleshow /615216.cms. UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment. 2021. “HumanRights Based Approaches to Conserving Biodiversity: Equitable, Effective and Imperative,” August 2021. https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Documents/ Issues/Environment/SREnvironment/policy-briefing-1.pdf. Vyas, Pradeep. 2012. “Biodiversity Conservation in Indian Sundarban in the Context of Anthropogenic Pressures and Strategies for Impact Mitigation.” PhD diss., Saurashtra University. Yazzie, Melanie K. and Nick Estes. 2021. “From the Red Nation to the Red Deal: A Conversation with Melanie K. Yazzie and Nick Estes.” In The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change, edited by T. J. Demos, Emily Eliza Scott, and Subhankar Banerjee, 437–447. New York: Routledge.

Chapter 5

Imagining Species Humanity and the Senses in Contemporary Literature Caren Irr

One positive feature of the COVID-19 pandemic is the stimulus it provides for thinking from the point of view of species. An infection creates a relation between species; as Tedros Gebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization, has reminded us, “the only aim of the virus is to find people to infect.”1 In response to such infections, humans investigate other species and build solidarity with each other as members of a single species. Following the lead of scholars in the environmental humanities, we can expand on that project to recognize that no species is ever alone. We can remind ourselves that human existence always consists of a multispecies togetherness; the bodies we imagine ourselves to be inhabiting alone are in fact teeming with microorganisms that sustain as well as infect us. “Truly nothing is sterile,” Donna Haraway concludes, because all life-forms are “bathed and swaddled in bacteria and archaea” (Haraway 2017, M29). Daily cycles of food and waste as well as inhalation and exhalation provide evidence of our inevitable multispecies existence. No one is ever one; no one is ever alone. While knowledge of these quotidian interspecies relations makes scientific sense, the concepts and narratives used to organize the everyday lives of humans often lag behind that perception. This is where a literary imagination becomes valuable. Imaginative writing can help readers to visualize species relations from fresh angles and begin to grapple with our inevitable togetherness. It is in this spirit that this chapter explores literary works addressing the species concept. This discussion also builds on Karl Marx’s early writings on species-being. Introduced in Economic-Philosophical of 1844 in a passage on humanity’s relation to nature, Marx’s adaptation of the concept of species-being 57

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describes a human capacity for acting on nature through labor. “Man is not only a natural being,” he writes. he is a human natural being; i.e., he is a being for himself and hence a speciesbeing, as which he must confirm and realize himself both in his being and in his knowing. Consequently, human objects are not natural objects as they immediately present themselves, nor is human sense, in its immediate and objective existence, human sensibility and human objectivity. Neither objective nor subjective nature is immediately present in a form adequate to the human being. And as everything natural must come into being, so man also has his process of origin in history. But for him history is a conscious process, and hence one which consciously superseded itself. History is the true natural history of man.2

In this passage, Marx defines human species-being as a historical process that requires confirmation and realization in tandem with the co-production of objective and subjective natures. In other words, human species-being develops in relation to the vicissitudes of historical nature; it is neither fixed nor static. Furthermore, species-being itself and the ways in which we know it are mediated. Understanding species-being requires an investigation into the ways we have learned to consider species-being. Significantly, this mediation through history and narrative involves the senses. “Human objects are not natural objects . . . nor is human sense,” Marx emphasizes. The world we perceive through our senses as well as the organization of the senses themselves in arrangements particular to certain species both have histories. Recognizing the mobile, historical character of human species-being thus prompts consideration of the mediations of the senses in particular. We must learn how to grapple with the ways human senses transform alongside and in the process of the transformations of nature. When we recognize the malleability of our senses, we release the latent capacities of species-being—the “species-potential.” Recognizing species-potential and multispecies relations is essential for contemporary environmental sensibilities. As the geographer David Harvey asserted in 2000, “a conversation about our species being is desperately called for” because this conversation supports a multispecies emancipation from the instrumental relations to nature that threaten planetary well-being (Harvey 2000, 207). Questions of reproduction, population, extinction, embodiment, and the future of human social life are essential to this conversation. Each of these topics can be investigated from the perspective of a hope for multispecies emancipation. WRITING THE ANIMAL Contemporary literature addressing species questions constitutes a thematically coherent grouping that is here designated “species fiction.” This body

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of work directly addresses human species-being as a multispecies relation. The most common approach that such writings take is a consideration of relations between particular specimens of two or more species. In these localized narratives, they reflect on the commonalities as well as distinctions between species; furthermore, with remarkable consistency, species fictions consider the senses. Species fiction is not a brand-new phenomenon; it has a history. In eighteenth-century English literature, for instance, animal allegories were often used to teach behavioral ideals to children. In the nineteenth century, animalthemed fiction invoked liberal principles to develop a rights-based approach to animal welfare. Then, in the early twentieth century, modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf explored animal subjectivity, often using it to exemplify the unknowable and irrational other.3 These shifting literary treatments ran parallel to scientific trends. Early scientific naturalists’ interest in classification schemes reinforced a literary concern with behavior, while later geneticists’ interest in code drew attention to scripts shared across species. Then, in the twentieth century, neurobiology shifted attention to mental processes. Fiction writers followed these trends in scale as well as topic—redirecting their concern from whole organisms and observable actions to microbiological units and the neuron. What remained consistent, though, from Melville’s whales to Jack London’s wolves and Hemingway’s bulls, was the use of literary animals to illuminate questions of humanity as a species. Following this pattern, in the twenty-first century, species fiction demonstrates widespread concern with anthropogenic climate change and mass extinction. Important examples of this trend include Lydia Millet’s stories of celebrity encounters with animals in Love in Infant Monkeys, Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (a comic novel about a girl raised with a chimpanzee as her sister), Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker (an ambitious literary fiction that pairs sandhill crane migration with neuropsychology), and Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend (the fictionalized memoir of a writer who takes care of the Great Dane that had belonged to a friend who committed suicide). Together these fictions map out major contemporary options for imagining speciation in the context of extinction. A recurring motif in these fictions is the incompetence of humanity. Alienated in various ways from perceived social norms, the human protagonists of species fictions commonly inhabit an inauthentic state that emphasizes their own moral and pragmatic failings. These protagonists are uncomfortable in their humanity and so either imitate animal behavior (Nunez) or conversely repress the allure of their animal side because they find themselves only capable of imitating expected human norms (Fowler). The sense of self-alienation and suspicion exhibited by these protagonists is perhaps most sharply articulated by the central figure in Richard Powers’

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The Echo Maker. Suffering from Capgras syndrome (the belief that one’s closest friends and family have been replaced by imposters), Powers’ hero occupies a highly anxious condition with respect to self and environment. Unlike, say, Donna Haraway’s enthusiastic cyborgs (posthuman subjects who embrace their enmeshment with the nonhuman and relish their overflowing boundaries), this incompetent human subject occupies an interregnum, a stasis, a problem with no apparent solution. The incompetent subject is posthuman only to the degree that it might be thought in another context to be postracial—that is to say, only in the most unpersuasively idealist manner. The incompetent subjects appearing in these texts do not exalt the abandonment of the tired apparatus of the human so much as they inauthentically inhabit it askew, orienting the human toward an animal being whose fascinating co-presence launches an investigation into the species as concept and practice. This stance differentiates twenty-first-century species fiction from some of its predecessors in the Anglo-American tradition outlined above. In particular, it swaps out a concern for animal consciousness (Do they think like we do?) with questions of common sensation (How do we taste, touch, smell, hear, and see each other?). With this shift comes a release from some of the double binds of anthropomorphism—especially the attribution of the inner lives of humans to other species in order to recognize their recognition of us. Turning to the sensorium also sidesteps most of the questions raised by activists about whether or how nonhuman animals might share in the human social contract as bearers of rights. Instead of these efforts to absorb animals into human concerns, the core question of the twenty-first-century species novel becomes instead how the incompetent human subject shares a sensory continuum with one not necessarily representative nonhuman animal. This question is often accompanied by a corollary concern with the best ways of articulating that sensorium in human forms in the wake of the animal’s absence. These are, after all, stories written in the context of mass extinction. They all turn in crucial ways on the loss of the animal to whom the incompetent human is bonded. The migration of cranes means the loss of the only witnesses to the accident that damaged Powers’ hero. Nunez’s hero mourns a deceased dog, and Fowler’s novel revolves around the removal of a sibling-like chimpanzee from the family home. Each of these fictions examines humans floundering because they have lost access to “an alterity that underwrites the formation of the [human] subject” (Boggs 2013, 5). Lacking reference points and companionship, thesefiction all express a deep species loneliness—“a deep and unnamed sadness stemming from estrangement from the rest of Creation” (Kimmerer 2013, 208-09). The protagonists of these species novels long for a specific creature within Creation and for the forms of human subjectivity anchored by animals who co-create them. This dynamic

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of loss and creation (one that contrasts sharply with a scientific understanding of our collective conviviality) forms a pattern I call the species dialectic. This pattern can be clearly seen in Lydia Millet’s collection of stories, Love in Infant Monkeys. In this volume, a grammar of the senses emerges, linking human and nonhuman animals. In “Edison and Golakov,” for instance, the murderous elephant Topsy is executed; she is “penalized for her sins against God and man” (Millet 2009, 61). The graphic manner of her execution—an electrocution staged and filmed by the famous inventor Thomas Edison— makes her, too, a celebrity and possibly even a divinity. This death recalls a thesis developed by Emmanuel Levinas—namely the idea that the capacity to sacrifice oneself is the hallmark of the human; Topsy verges on the human.4 According to Millet’s pedantic narrator, however, Topsy’s sacrifice is unwilling, so the film of her death “represents an early example of what has since come to be called a ‘snuff’ film” (62). This is one of several ways that Millet’s story alienates the reader from Edison’s elevation of the elephant, suggesting that her technologically mediated death represents not a full humanization but rather a crisis for the human subject. The symbolic role of the elephant in the collapse of the inventor-genius’s grasp of reality becomes the real focus of the story. This concern with epistemological uncertainty is reinforced by the parody of scholarly interpretation of sources that frames the narrative. Insecure in their knowledge and relationships, the unstable humans are rocked by the traumatic death of the animal in the stories. They experience their insecurity through a sensorium that has four loci, nodes that reappear in other versions of the species narrative. 1. An Intense Exchange of Gazes In “Edison and Golakov,” as in so many animal-themed narratives, the human subject imagines a deep bond forming when he stares into the eyes of the animal; he finds himself altered, enriched, and transformed by that gaze. Edison is overheard exclaiming to the film of Topsy that “you hold me in your dead eyes” (69). He also “saw in her eyes the longing of all men for a better place” (70). The force of the dying or dead animal’s gaze (even when mediated, as here, by the film image) triggers a universalizing moral inquiry. This is not a one-to-one communication but rather an allegorical situation. The exchange triangulates through the species—reinforcing the needs of “all men.” 2. An Excess of Ambiguous Sound Another central motif in this story is overhearing. Golakov’s reported eavesdropping provides access to Edison’s unhinged and elliptical speeches to the

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dead Topsy. Partially deaf and hyperbolically articulate, Edison imagines himself in dialogue with the dead elephant; his querulous and blasphemous spiritualism then produces an abundance of speech that is subsequently extended through layers of transmission that include the valet’s letters and the apparatus of academic interpretation and narration. This excess prompts the disingenuous narrator to hope that ultimately “the elephant will have spoken . . . as eloquently as she spoke to poor Golakov’s Edison” (71). Inverting the conventional possessive and its attribution of greater social power to the possessor (e.g., Edison’s valet) and suggesting a sort of possession by the spirit animal, the sonic elements unsettle boundaries through their proliferation. 3. An Empathetic Touch While the audio-visual senses often unleash vibrant hyperbole, touch regularly appears in species fiction as a source of low, quiet, and nonverbal empathy. In Millet’s brief story, considerable attention is devoted to the “sandals” strapped to Topsy’s feet during the electrocution; the episode concludes when she “collapses onto her side” (62). Edison is then described as “watching as the blaze rose around the charring elephant’s wood and copper-shod feet” (63). As his relation with the image intensifies, he rests his head on the rug and ultimately “fall[s] flat on his face only to recover when his burly valet lifted him off the floor” (69). Empathizing with the burning feet, Edison hysterically prostrates himself, falling to the same level at which the elephant’s agony is described as occurring. In so doing, he reproduces in himself the need for a caring and salvational touch from the valet. 4. Horror of the Orifice—Usually the Mouth Empathetic tactility provides a partial compensation for the largely oral horrors of species fiction. Displacing perhaps the carnivore’s self-loathing, scenes of orality in species fiction often invoke abject horror. In “Edison and Golakov,” these include the burning cigarette fed to Topsy, Edison’s revulsion at oral copulation, and Golakov’s addictive consumption of cough medicine. Orality is associated with a panic triggered by crossing the threshold between interior and exterior of the body; this panic recalls the Moebius-like relation of species and spaces. Just as the communicative potential of an exchange of gazes spills over into an excess of extra-rational sound, empathetic touch reaches its horrifying other in the continuity signaled by the orifice. These four sensory moments constellate species fiction. (The peculiarities of smell are discussed below.) In “Edison and Golakov,” they combine to form a self-negating structure in which the dead elephant transcends the physical world, drawing the inventor-executioner after her into a scene of

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otherworldly madness. The inventor’s technological rationality triggers a deadly duel that forces him to confront and pulverize his own sensibility. The loss of multispecies intimacy damages the human. Other stories in Millet’s collection use the same moves to create different effects. “Chomsky, Rodents,” for example, tackles some of the same themes relating to the limitations of techno-rationality in a somewhat lighter spirit. Here, too, the animals are dead and gone while the exemplary human subject remains attached to their traces (the habit-trail) and here too that subject’s grasp loosens—quite literally. The story ends with the titular Chomsky letting go of the rodents’ plastic housing. The difference, of course, is that the figure triangulating this relationship within the similarly complex frame narration is a harried mother rather than a Bulgarian drug addict. Celebrating her own animal being, Melinda confronts her father-in-law Chomsky. Even though this story, too, turns on the question of sacrifice (the mother who “has to come second to herself” [116]), the long and linear masculine path of breeding, rationality, and animal containment here falters not under the weight of its own delusions but rather in the face of the everyday crisis of blood, milk, and vomit—the sensory evidence of human animality. Also, in “Chomsky, Rodents,” touch is more central and more legitimately empathetic. The grip of the baby’s hand on Noam’s fingers, the feel of the plastic raft, the baby wipes and crumbs, Melinda’s aching feet and back—all these palpable details build toward the final release. Even Melinda’s request for sympathy is described as having a “texture” (121). The connective bonds of touch play a strong central role in the story, contributing to its more affirmative and light-hearted mood. That said, the other senses are still significant and perform functions directly comparable to those in “Edison and Golakov.” K. and Noam “shared a glance” that reinforces Noam’s genius (117), and the gaze of the animal (here, the woman) is essential to the story’s revelation. Melinda “white-lipped crossed her arms in front of the baby carrier and glared at” Noam before explaining the excellence of the mammalian condition. Even the granddaughter’s concern with darts that might put out an eye keeps the intense and risky exchange of gazes in a central role in the story. Similarly, inexplicable sound produces uneasy effects. A baby’s cry and silent gerbils and hamster in this dialogue-heavy story all contribute to the shift of mood associated with the passing of an imaginary Hindenberg. Even oral horror reappears in the vomit marked as grotesque by snarky teens whose appearance in the story seems to have no other purpose than the articulation of this judgment. In short, Millet’s Chomsky story plays the same notes as “Edison and Golukov,” although they appear in a different order and with a different mood. Millet’s species stories repeatedly establish a tactile connection between species, deepen it through the interlocked gaze before extending

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into dangerous territory through sound and orality. The anxiety they generate involves the prospect of a toolless, unreasoning human abandoned in the dump, left alone without animal companions in a wasteland spoiled by technology and overconsumption. The sensory motifs that Millet develops appear in many contemporary species fictions. To make that case, one might move patiently, book by book, through a long series of examples, noting the sensory elements evident in each instance. However, the more efficient approach taken here focuses on scenes in which the horror of the orifice (shorthand: the horrifice?) appears. From these scenes, the rest of the sensorium can be reconstituted. It is also in these scenes that we find the most acute registration of the dilemmas of the species dialectic. In each of the three novels under examination, the horrifice scene is located at the traumatic kernel. It is also framed in a self-consciously elaborate manner that draws attention and suggests a certain discomfort with the role of this scene in the surrounding narrative. I read this framing as a formal means for reckoning with the anti-animal aspect that lingers within the framework of the species novel. The horrifice scene is positioned with particular care in Karen Jay Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. Throughout this novel, the adult narrator describes the various effects of living with and then losing Fern, the chimpanzee with whom she was raised. The reasons for Fern’s removal from the family home are not revealed until about 5/6ths of the way through the novel, however. While imprisoned in a cold cell, the narrator Rosemary begins shaking uncontrollably as she enters “the unremembered, much disputed, fantasyland of the past” (Fowler 2014, 247). She recounts “a compromise between remembering something painful and defending yourself against that very remembering” and reports that “the memory I had of the thing that never happened was a screen memory” (247). This vivid memory replaces a sensation so unsettling that is never narrated directly. The screen memory centers on a kitten that Rosemary had let Fern hold. When the kitten’s mother arrived “hissing and spitting,” she scratched Fern, “and Fern swung the tiny perfect creature against a tree trunk. He dangled silent from her hand, his mouth loose. She opened him with her fingers like a purse” (250). Rosemary gawked at this violence in horror and then ran to tell her older brother, but when they returned neither cat was anywhere to be seen. Presumably Fern (who was damp) had hidden the kitten’s body in a stream. A few days later, an angry Rosemary told her mother she was afraid Fern would hurt her, and the removal began. This screen memory hinges, of course, on the loose dead mouth of the kitten and the opening of his body “like a purse.” The gaping bloody body

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reveals the kitten’s shift from “perfect creature” to pulpy horror as well as Fern’s shift from sister to killer. This double animality is shrouded in explanations and lies—including the lie that Rosemary fears Fern. Twenty pages later, the narrator reveals that “what [she] meant to say” was that “there was something inside Fern [she] didn’t know. That [she] didn’t know her in the way [she’d] always thought [she] did. That Fern had secrets and not the good kind” (270). The loose mouth of the kitten horrifies Rosemary because it reveals the existence of those secrets, that “something inside” that remains unknown to the human sibling, no matter how close she feels to the chimpanzee. The mouth is a portal comparable to (continuous with) the implicitly vaginal purse and is described as provoking a kind of epistemological castration as well as the human betrayal of the animal sibling. This scene seems itself to be a scrambled reorganization of episodes in the scientific literature surrounding the historical human-raised chimpanzee Nim Chimpsky. The subject of a recent biopic as well as a few allusions in Fowler’s novel, Chimpsky was taught sign language by a team led by a psychologist at Columbia University.5 There is also film footage of him eagerly holding kittens. The project came to an end, though, when Chimpsky began to mature and became physically and sexually aggressive with his human teachers. Like the fictional Fern, the historical Nim Chimpsky was then relocated to an experimental facility that sold chimpanzees to labs doing medical research. The novel, however, directly positions concerns over human safety as a secondary effect of the human inability to comprehend animal secrets; it also preserves Fern from testing—concluding with Rosemary leading a kindergarten class focused on chimp behavior and regularly visiting Fern. In its central, traumatic screen memory and its aftermath, in other words, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves redirects and softens the violence of human/animal interactions. It defends against the proposition that its title raises: the proposition that humans and chimpanzees constitute a complicated “we” that incorporates and also excludes itself. If, after all, “we” primates are all one family, we are a family that inflicts considerable domestic violence on itself. We are all murderers, perhaps as deserving of execution as Topsy the elephant. The horrifice motif in Richard Powers’ Echo Maker similarly turns on blood and violence. Each of the novel’s five parts opens with a prose poem narrated from the point of view of the migratory sandhill cranes that witness the devastating and mysterious truck accident that causes the main character’s neurological damage. Like the motive for Fern’s removal, the precise events of the accident remain obscure throughout most of the novel. The cranes who observe the crash fly north to the arctic to breed, carrying the story with them. When they return in Part Four, though, they sail overhead like “feathered dinosaurs bugling, the last great reminder of life before the self” (Powers

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2006, 277). Opening a window into the deep time of the evolutionary unconscious, the cranes replay a primal scene. In this scene, a newly fledged crane learns the secret of migration; “how it’s done, no person knows and no bird can say,” Powers writes (277). During this process, the space around the fledged crane colt explodes. His father is hit. He sees his parent sprayed across the nearby earth. Birds scream into the shattered air, their brain stems pumping panic. This chaos, too, lays down a permanent trace, remembered forever: open season. (277)

Human self-knowledge is blocked by violence toward other species. Unlike Fowler’s traumatic scene, the violence in Powers’ novel is not titfor-tat, but it resembles Fowler’s approach in producing an explosive, vocal shattering that culminates in the horrifying form of openness of the hunting season. Powers’ cranes are, after all, the titular echo makers whose raucous cries reverberate across the frozen ground. The violence they experience also correlates to human violence to self and environment—in particular, a suicide attempt by the main character and a development scheme that threatens to eradicate the crane’s nesting place. These several horrors align at the climax of the novel, leading to the ultimate separation of human and animal. The opening of the novel’s coda envisions a posthuman condition “when the river is gone. When the surface of the earth is parched and spoiled, when life is pressed down to near-nothing . . . millions of years after people work their own end” (443). Hawks, simmers, plovers, and sandpipers will survive, and “cranes or something like them will trace rivers again”; “Nothing will miss us,” Powers concludes (443). Reversing the terms of many postapocalyptic extinction stories, he envisions animal endurance and the end of humanity. The horror permeating that scene is our collective human misrecognition of the memories of our animal witnesses, our failure to appreciate our own plastic capacity for change, and the weakness of our knowledge and schemes regarding nonhuman life. A more existential horror, then, Powers’ horrifice invites engagement with what ought to be the dreadful prospect of the disappearance of humans as a species. The icy mood of Powers’ fiction provides a marked contrast to the more playful metafictional approach that Sigrid Nunez adopts in The Friend. In the eleventh of the twelve parts of her novel, Nunez’s unnamed narrator asks herself “how should the story end?” and then proceeds to engage in a kind of workshop or therapy conversation that triggers questions such as “what news did the woman hear?” and “did she eat anything?” (Nunez, 181-2). This sequence leads her to an imagined visit to the home of the writer friend who—in the rest of the novel—has committed suicide, leaving her to care for his Great Dane, Apollo. However, in this sequence, the friend’s attempt was unsuccessful, and the two enjoy a lengthy conversation about the ethics of

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writing. The conversation concludes when the narrator reveals that she has been writing a novel about her friend’s attempt; in the novel she turns his miniature dachshund Jip into a Great Dane. The friend is shocked and upset that she is writing about him and expresses his mock horror at the friend’s betrayal: “There I am in the hospital, at the lowest moment of my entire life, and you’re at the computer churning out pages,” he exclaims (197). The passage concludes with the dog—“the dog is a major character? Please tell me nothing bad happens to the dog” (197). Of course, in the next and final chapter the dog dies. In this little metafictional sequence, this novel about a writer and teacher of writing who writes about the death of another writer plays with its own everyday postmodernism, inverting its own premise so that one is not sure if anyone has actually died. The sole remaining constant is the dog and the love he inspires. Whether large or small, the animal is the lodestar—the comforter, listener, and lover. He is explicitly depicted as the Beast to the narrator’s Beauty, utterly gentle and in decline. In the dominant storyline, he is also the remainder of human suicide, and he mourns. His life is not immune to violence or suffering. But, as noted above, the novel destabilizes the authority of our readerly knowledge about violence in order to leave us with a close witnessing of the death of the animal. The Friend has moved past the violence of the animal (Fern) and the violence of human aggression toward animals (Powers) to a different version of the extinction story, one that allows the human subject to mourn her own losses in the dying of the animal and to experience first-hand the broader condition of species loneliness. Rather than deferring a nearly incomprehensible shock and horror to a future after the apocalypse, in other words, The Friend finds a means to inhabit it in the present and without revulsion. Perhaps for this reason, it finds a place for aroma. This is the only species fiction I have examined to date that invests deeply in the smell of the animal; Nunez explores that sense that Anna Tsing describes as “a useful guide to the indeterminacy of encounter” arrives—that is, smell (Tsing 2015, 46). In the final scene, in particular, the New York narrator decides she has to leave her apartment, because “Jesus it smells like a stable, said a delivery man. Someone else said a zoo” (Nunez 2019, 206). Soon, the dying dog’s odor is everywhere—in her clothes, skin, and hair. Overcome by this permeation, although not disgusted by it, she takes Apollo to the countryside to die. She watches him, comparing his calm presence to her own fear that in writing she will lose memories by covering them up with invention. “You really are another species,” she tells him (208). She examines mementos of the dead collected by the comatose woman whose home she is visiting, and in the final paragraphs watches tiny butterflies (or perhaps cabbage moths?) drifting toward Apollo. “They should watch out for you, o eater of insects. One snap of the jaws would take out most of them” (212). But, he does not twitch. A gull cries, and she finds she cannot say “my friend.” These multiplied mouths

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in the final lines of the novel circle around the apostrophic “o,” reduplicating the dog’s godlike moniker (Apollo), as he is renamed the friend. The mouths that finally do not open—both his and hers—bind them in mourning; they create a quieter, aching sort of horror. The pair have fled from the urban scent of death to their fluttering seaside idyll. Rather than the pained exchange of glances, the empathetic warmth of another body, or the overflow of language that arises from talking to and about animals, The Friend concludes with this quietly sealed mouth, and the story and its subject expire simultaneously. In these several versions of the scene of the animal’s mouth, we find a good sampling of the contemporary options for engaging in the species dialectic— that is, the combination of possible relations between human and animal. In all of these versions, a violent exchange occurs, an animal dies, and a human discovers an irremediable loneliness following from their expulsion from solidarity with the animal. All of these fictions also turn on heavily knotted scenes that proceed by way of inversions and displacements. Yet, within those consistencies, a definite range of options arises. The relation between a particular human and an individual animal (that is, the localized multispecies relation) can easily be imagined as one defined by crime or love; the antithesis of the love story is readily available in the figure of loss. We have lots of narrative conventions for that tale. It is, however, the negation of crime that our writers find difficult to figure. From the too-easy fantasy of Fern’s final “humane” incarceration, visited by admiring kindergarteners, to Apollo’s perfect seaside death, Topsy’s apotheosis, and the crane descendants surviving extinction, authors turn to magical solutions in order to bring the crime/justice motifs in their species stories to a close. This burst of fantasy at the point of closure reveals, in my estimation, an ideological hole—something too complicated or disruptive to imagine in the more realist terms of the rest of these fictions. Novelists fill the hole with magical reconciliation and figurative excess. In scholarly discourse, this is the location where the slogan “multispecies justice” arises. Is it similarly magical? Ursula Heise points out in Imagining Extinction that the project of developing a sound multispecies justice that defines and balances the obligations that humans have to nonhumans as well as to each other is contested and culturally variable. Treating animals purely instrumentally as the raw materials of projects of extraction of value is an ethical horror and an economic reality. Yet, radically expanding the rights discourse used in liberal democracies to include animals risks unraveling the protections afforded to vulnerable human groups and worsening prejudicial associations between animals and disempowered human groups; there is no easy fix. Furthermore, notions of proximity, distance, and human responsibility toward various species differ considerably among cultures. A scientific pseudo-neutrality about classification of animals rapidly gives way to cultural

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variation when we move, with ethologists, to behaviors and interactional nets—to relations. A full concept of culture might even need to include characteristic human-animal companionate pairings as one of its defining aspects. Multispecies relations, in other words, trouble existing concepts of justice and raise complex problems for cultural comparison. In this troubled place, where we seem to feel a compelling narrative need for a fourth term to complete the crime, love, and loss series (that is, to round out the dialectical negations of existing relations), invention enters and fails to satisfy. None of the species novels examined here solves the problem of imagining multispecies justice in any fully robust manner, but they all successfully point (especially in their scenes of horror) toward the empty space that it might someday inhabit. My own modest suggestion is that a richer species narrative may need to climb over the more limited ethical and intrasubjective aspects of “justice” that mainly frame these literary experiments and move toward a more political and social formation. The project of envisioning a more multidirectional multispecies justice will prove an important one for contemporary literature if that literature is to speak seriously to a condition of environmental crisis. To get there, our writing may also need to go beyond the apparent immediacy of the human sensorium, working through the local and cultural aspects of sensation to something like a transnational and politically enlivened enjoyment of the tangible world we share with the earth’s animals. If, in E. O. Wilson’s words, every species has its own sensory world, we need a literature that can perceive in manners beyond the historically constrained world of the human.

A MULTISPECIES SENSORIUM For a final twist that moves our discussion in a new direction, we can turn to a short story that seeks to expand our understanding of the senses and human relations to animality and speciation. The story appears in Sharona Muir’s wildly inventive 2016 collection Invisible Beasts. The collection presents itself as the field notes of a naturalist who has inherited the ability to perceive species of animals that are invisible to most other humans. These include, for example, Truth Bats (a species that abandons human liars) and the Hypnogator (a charmingly myopic variety of alligator). Muir’s densely and poetically written stories draw heavily on the vocabulary of naturalistic observation in order to stretch the reader’s attention to the point where heightened alertness to the hypothetical as well as the actual arises. This practice expands our relations not only to the living world within and around us but also to our own sensory organs. Muir imagines her readers expanding momentarily beyond

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our current biological limits. In so doing, she exposes the potential for continuing transformation of our own species as well as others. Muir’s heroine Sophie inherits her ability to discover “hard-to-see phenomena” (Muri 2016, 11) from Darwinian predecessors, but her stories are presented to the human species as a whole. Convinced of “the urgency of biological crisis” and mass extinction, she urges humans to “think and act differently” as we become “much more aware of our human blindness—a blind spot in our collective mind, roughly the size of the planet” (12–13). To revise our way of seeing, to adapt senses to the invisible planet that includes us, Sophie’s ideal readers will need to adapt and evolve beyond current sensorial limits. The final story in the section entitled “Imperiled and Extinct Invisible Beasts” presents this challenge especially well. “The Golden Egg” is a tale of “fortunate epiphany .  .  . when the big picture comes overwhelmingly together” (153). It describes Sophie’s encounter with “a waxy, ochre body the size of a lychee nut,” a body that “holds what the human race craves: riches and longevity” (156). Exposed in the face of a quarry, the egg reveals “the deep past” and “a dazzling wheel” of creaturely appearance and disappearance through geological cycles (156). The story zooms through this past in the instant when Sophie decides whether or not to reach for the egg with her human hand. Both preceding and anticipating touch, vision is much at stake here. Sophie perceives the planet-sized processes that allowed for this “most fortunate of animals” and its symbiotic companion, the trilobite—beginning with “a major extinction” triggered by the arrival of algae and plants (157). The egg turns from flat to spherical, developing a hard core of mineralized waste and later a tough external membrane. The trilobites nibble away at the shell, allowing the egg’s self-fertilized progeny to escape. Running parallel to the fate of the earth, the egg survives a second extinction event when “the globe heats up, and methane steams from the seabed”—the planet becoming a “huge, blue, putrid egg” warning of the dangers of an overheated climate (160). It survives the extinction of the trilobites and the asteroid-induced extinction event that wiped out dinosaurs. It endures by adapting its internal and external energy needs. Filled with heavy water, it feeds from the periodic radiation released by cosmic rays, and it turns and rotates with the earth’s slow wobble. “It lives at the point of balance among powers: Sol, Earth, bacteria” (162). In this magnificent state, the egg becomes visible to Sophie’s needier human eye, reachable by her extended hand. Recounting the moment of encounter, Sophie’s narration veers into the mythic. She recalls the ancient Greek Sibyl of Cumae, longing for death in her jar, as well as ancient human cave paintings that depicted animals in profile but with two eyes, both looking intently at the human. Sophie reverses that gaze, however, and the story ends with her notation of the fact that this

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animal “has no eyes, but you can look at it” (164). In the midst of our latest extinction event, humans can gaze upon the balanced, self-contained egg, recognizing perhaps its own adaptations and the planetary history and exchanges that make our encounter with it possible. Instead of experiencing our own confirmation in the eye of the other, or rashly making use of the egg’s riches, we can open ourselves to a new kind of imaginative looking steeped in imagination rather than knowledge and in so doing recall the ideal of balance. Something like a kinesthetic or embodied intelligence emerges here, one that hints at another sort of sensory life beyond the confines of our current being. Muir leaves the story here, never resolving the question of whether Sophie reaches out to grasp the egg. The title strongly suggests, though, that the wisest course would be to leave it alone, allowing those riches to rest on the earth. The title’s allusion to Aesop’s fable “The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg” reminds readers of the foolishness of a man who kills his magical goose. Rather than appreciating the golden egg the goose lays every day, he greedily tears her apart, seeking to possess all the gold at once. This story is often glossed with the moral that “those who have plenty want more and so lose all they have” or something comparable. It cautions against intrusion, invasion, dissatisfaction, and lust for money. Muir’s twist, however, is to place the chick within the egg, rather than the egg inside the bird. The planetary egg contains us all, and in cracking it we risk not only our livelihoods but also our own being. Her moral thus involves a shift of scene and sensation that balances the menace of loss with appreciation for survival and endurance through a series of extinctions. To feel our own extinction looming while gazing back at the survivors: that is the task Muir’s story presents. From the invisible point of extinction, then, Muir’s story offers her readers an entry point into the problem of species-being that expands the options. If authors of the human/nonhuman species novel emphasize a shared sensory world, Muir opens up our perceivable relations to new options that extend beyond the immediate present to sympathy with nonhuman creatures of the past and the future. While no single temporality of imagining species solves the urgent environmental problems apparent today, this expansion of the options reminds us of the acts of imaginative will involved in pulling together to achieve a satisfactory, if temporary, balance between the human multispecies and the planet we inhabit.

NOTES 1. See Tedros Gebreyesus, July 13 media briefing at WHO headquarters in Geneva. https://countercurrents.org/2020/07/coronavirus-pandemic-may-get-worse -and-worse-and-worse-warns-who/.

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2. See Karl Marx. 1956. “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy in General,” in Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Translated by Martin Milligan. https://www .marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/hegel.htm. 3. On the history of literary representations of animals, see Anna Feuerstein, The Political Lives of Victorian Animals: Liberal Creatures in Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Caroline Hovanecs, Animal Subjects: Literature, Zoology, and British Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Bruce Boehrer, Molly Hand, and Brian Massumi, eds., Animals, Animality, and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 4. Levinas is quoted in Payne, Mark. 2010. The Animal Part: Humans and Other Animals in The Poetic Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 5. The film referred to is Project Nim, dir. James Marsh (2011).

REFERENCES Boehrer, Bruce, Molly Hand, and Brian Massumi, eds. 2018. Animals, Animality, and Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boggs, Colleen. 2013. Animalia Americana: Animal Representations and Biopolitical Subjectivity. New York: Columbia University Press. Feuerstein, Anna. 2019. The Political Lives of Victorian Animals: Liberal Creatures in Literature and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fowler, Karen Joy. 2014. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. New York: Putnams. Haraway, D. J. 2017. “Symbiogenesis, Sympoiesis, and Art Science Activisms for Staying with the Trouble.” In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, edited by Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt, M29. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Harvey, David. 2007. Spaces of Hope. Berkeley: University of California Press. Heise, Ursula. 2016. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hovanecs, Caroline. 2018. Animal Subjects: literature, Zoology, and British Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed. Millet, Lydia. 2009. Love in Infant Monkeys. New York: Soft Skull Press. Muir, Sharona. 2016. Invisible Beasts. New York: Bellevue Literary Press. Nunez, Sigrid. 2019. The Friend. New York: Riverhead. Powers, Richard. 2006. The Echo Maker. New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux. Tsing, Anna. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in the Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Chapter 6

Making Kin with Plants Poetry in the Phytosphere John Charles Ryan

Humankind is deeply interconnected with the botanical world. As sources of food, agents of healing, and icons of beauty, plants are essential to societies worldwide. While proffering materials vital to existence, vegetal life also galvanizes personal identity, provokes community sovereignty, and embodies cultural heritage. The autonomic act of breathing foregrounds the constant symbiotic exchange between plants and other creatures. Nourishing, inspiring, and omnipresent, plants represent 90 percent of the global biomass (BarOn, Phillips, and Milo 2018). Nonetheless, humankind tends to overlook the multidimensional importance of flora. Botanist Josef Svoboda (1989) argues that due to the abundance and ubiquity of plants, “this green world has been taken for granted from ancient to modern cultures, as has been the air we breathe” (104). In the Anthropocene era of pervasive biodiversity loss (Meng et al. 2021), embracing plants as kin is crucial to imagining possibilities for equitable coexistence. A sense of kinship with plants recognizes the evolutionary, cultural, and corporeal imbrications between humans, flora, and other organisms. In this context, philosopher Donna J. Haraway (2016) stresses that “the task is to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present” (1). For Haraway (2016), the term sympoiesis denotes “making-with” as a “word for worlding-with, in company” (58). Haraway implies that language is the fundament of learning to live with plants—of worlding-with, of making kin with photosynthetic beings. Accordingly, this chapter brings the ideas of phytopoetics and the phytosphere into dialogue in order to understand contemporary phytopoems narrating human-plant interdependencies. Through the lens of the phytosphere, the analysis focuses in particular on rhizospheric poetics of the root-soil interface, phyllospheric poetics of the leaves, and endospheric poetics of the interior of plants. Countering a view of flora as passive, poetry 73

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contoured by the phytosphere restores attention to the agencies of plants within their multifaceted spheres of relation. As such, the phytosphere can be understood a site of language propagation and a catalyst of embodied identification with botanical life.

PHYTOPOETICS: THE POETRY AND POIESIS OF PLANT LIFE In the diverse literatures of the world, readers can find a range of poems illuminating the spiritual, aesthetic, moral, political, and ecological significance of plant life. Focused on flora, these kinds of works contemplate the complexities of forests, grasslands, mangroves, trees, shrubs, bushes, vines, flowers, herbs, and other botanical forms. From the United States, England, and Australia to India, Iran, Chile, and elsewhere, plants figure saliently in poetry concerned with nature, ecology, the physical environment, and human-land interactions (Laist 2013). As a case in point, nineteenth-century American poet William Cullen Bryant’s lyrical “To the Fringed Gentian,” originally published in 1829, evokes the wetland species in celestial terms as “Blue—blue—as if the sky let fall / A flower from its cerulean wall” (2006, 73, ll. 15–16). Contrastingly, twentieth-century British poet Ted Hughes’ (1973) thistles push tenaciously skyward as they “spike the summer air / Or crackle open under a blue-black pressure” (55, ll. 2–3). Hughes’ tactile imagery evinces the thistle’s vibrant material presence—its distinctive prickly leaves and multihued flower bracts. Noteworthy, as well, is the Western poetbotanist tradition originating in the investigations of Erasmus Darwin, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Alexander von Humboldt, and other polymaths, then subsequently advanced by John Clare, John Ruskin, and D. H. Lawrence (Mahood 2008). In more recent years, the writing of contemporary poets such as Judith Wright, Alice Oswald, Elisabeth Bletsoe, and Mary Oliver exhibits sustained attention to the biocultural richness of plant life (Ryan 2017). In South American literature, for further illustration, Pablo Neruda’s Canto General (2000, originally 1950) exalts the arboreal nature of the continent. Considered the greatest epic poem of the twentieth century, Neruda’s narrative places Chilean beeches at the center of ancient genealogical networks encompassing people and forests. The Anthropocene context, however, has provoked a marked shift in plantcentered poetry away from matters of symbolism, aesthetics, virtue, and knowledge toward the immediacies of species survival on a planet undergoing cataclysmic change. As an emergent geotemporal designation, the Anthropocene “reflects profound and ongoing Earth System change,” not the least of which is the degradation of floristic ecologies worldwide (Zalasiewicz et al.

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2019, 331). Climate destabilization, biodiversity decline, biocultural injustice, and the loss of traditional botanical knowledge strongly characterize the present era. Consequently, ecologists argue that the pace of plant extinction will continue to accelerate (Gao et  al. 2020). Parallel to these pernicious threats, nevertheless, lies a steadily growing body of empirical research into plants’ intelligent capacities (Segundo‐Ortin and Calvo 2022). As studies of vegetal cognition reveal, plants are not merely the passive objects of human deliberation but, to the contrary, they exert their own percipient faculties to cope with environmental fluctuations and maintain interdependencies with other creatures. Alert to temperature changes and tactile cues, plants transmit various signals to enhance communication with humans, animals, insects, fungi, and fellow flora. Plants’ gustatory sensitivities facilitate resilient adaptation to grazing by herbivores, desiccation by drought, and a host of other ecological extremes. Through multisensorial transactions, comparatively sessile plants forge relations with mobile organisms. Rather than unilaterally acting upon the photosynthetic body, other creatures participate in diverse modes of dialogue and symbiosis with plants. Connecting the burgeoning recognition of vegetal perceptiveness to biospheric alteration, biologists František Baluška and Stefano Mancuso (2020) emphasize that “considering plants as active and intelligent agents has [. . .] profound consequences not just for future climate scenarios but also for understanding [humanity’s] role and position within the Earth’s biosphere” (1). Against this background, the concept of phytopoetics coalesces around the three pillars of poetry, poiesis, and praxis. As a botanically inflected ecopoetics, phytopoetics calls attention to creative makings focusing on the botanical realm, the lives of plants, human-fauna-flora relations, and threats to botanical futures. Not delimited to poetry, though, phytopoetics also signifies social, cultural, psychological, or metaphysical praxes that attempt to integrate modes of existence specific to plants. Heterogeneous phytopoetic realizations, enactments, and embodiments thus aim to work in partnership with the wisdom of botanical life. In this sense, phytopoetics privileges the potential for human becoming to entrain to the poiesis—the dynamic transformation— of botanical life over time, across seasons, and in places. Accordingly, phytopoetics heralds a shift from the representational (in which language depicts a plant-object in the world and reinscribes human-botanical binaries) to the intermediational (in which language, broadly defined, constitutes a lively medium of interchange between percipient subjects). Indeed, existing phytopoetic theory foregrounds the capacity of plant agency to overturn longstanding denigrative perceptions of vegetal life. Rather than inert objects to be overwritten, plants are vibrant agents contributing to literary, cultural, social, political, and intellectual domains. Extending Aaron Moe’s (2016) formulation of zoopoetics, Joela Jacobs (2019) understands phytopoetics as integral

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to elucidating “the role of plant agency in literary creations and the cultural imaginary” (1). Accenting the term’s etymological origins in phyto (“plants”) and poiesis (“cultural making”), Jacobs (2019) asserts that “encounters with the vegetal prompt new ways of poetic expression and critical reflection that further entangle the cultural and literary with the biological, social, and political spheres” (3). What’s more, invoked in response to Aboriginal Australian artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s yam paintings, the term denotes “plantpoiesis-people” assemblages that bring prominence to traditional narratives of flora as ancestors and kin (Ryan 2020, “Abstract,” para. 1). The framework of phytopoetics recognizes the basis of poetry, poetic thought, and creative making in poiesis—in notions of becoming, bringing forth, emerging, and actualizing. Positioning botanical life at the core of poetic genesis, phytopoems attend imaginatively to “the shared florescence of plants, places, people, and all else that exists” (Ryan 2020, “Abstract,” para. 5). Phytopoems function in a variety of ways with respect to plant life, botanical justice, and human-flora intersections. While some phytopoems narrativize ancestral knowledge of plants at the periphery of the dominant scientific paradigm (for example, Neidjie 1989), others integrate the language of botany exemplified by Linnaean hierarchies of families, genera, and species (Costello 2021). Additionally, some phytopoems experiment with speaking modes in which poet-narrators address plant personae and, conversely, in which plants as communicative subjects speak back to audiences in the first-(vegetal) person voice (Glück 1992; Murray 1992; Oswald 2009). Located within the phytopoetic ambit, as well, are writings that engender plant-language correspondences where poetic typography evokes the embodied presence of living flora (McClure 1959; Glazier 2022). Many phytopoems hence approach language—verbal, visual, sensory, material, visceral—as intermediational. Highlighting the assemblages emerging in the interstices between agents—human and botanical, material and immaterial—the idea of intermediation frames a phytopoetic approach. For literary theorist N. Katherine Hayles (2007), intermediation refers to an emergent pattern in a medium producing a subsequent emergent pattern in another medium. The result is a multitiered system—or dynamic heterarchy—entailing feedback and feedforward loops: “Distinguished by their degree of complexity, different levels continuously in-form and mutually determine each other” (Hayles 2007, 100). Poietic processes transpire through the intermingling of “partners in a dynamic heterarchy bound together by intermediating dynamics” (Hayles 2007, 101). Consequently, plants, non-plants, language, and texts become “bound together in complex physical, psychological, economic, and social formations” predicated on recursive feedback loops (Hayles 2007, 101). Following Hayles’ train of conceptualization, phytopoetic makings arise at the junction of continuously in-forming agents reciprocally contouring one

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another. As humans and our languages in-form plants, so too do plants and their languages in-form us. As such, phytopoetics can also signify any praxis aiming to incorporate distinctly vegetal modes of existence. These modes include embodied cognition and systems intelligence—or what biologist Anthony Trewavas (2002) calls “mindless mastery,” the capacity for percipience in the absence of a creaturely nervous system (841). Although relatively immobile, plants have evolved the qualities of percipient sessility and alert repose. These and other traits allow plants to recruit motile organisms such as insect pollinators through evolutionary innovation. Moreover, as Michael Marder (2013) observes, the plant corpus is “a loose alliance of multiple temporalities of growth” (104). In this sense, plants corporealize multitudinous temporalities and timescales through iterative processes of seeding, fructifying, dehiscing, and aestivating in connection with seasonal cycles. Inherently polylingual, plants orchestrate electrical, acoustic, and chemical signals to communicate within and across species (Gagliano, Ryan, and Vieira 2017, 3–100). In the context of biomimicry, then, the resilient capacities of botanical life proffer models of sustainable multispecies inhabitation (López et al. 2017). Beyond a conception of phytopoetics as limited to poetry declaimed textually on a page, these modalities of plant-centric praxis synchronize human imagination with botanical sapience.

PARTICULARIZING PLANTS: POETRY IN THE PHYTOSPHERE One of the challenges negotiated by a phytopoetic disposition is plant blindness (Balding and Williams 2016; Bouteau et  al. 2021; Wandersee and Schussler 1999). For James Wandersee and Elisabeth Schussler (1999), originators of the term, plant blindness foregrounds “the perceptual and visual-cognition bases of why plants are often overlooked and neglected” (82). Wandersee and Schussler (1999) posit the phenomenon as the inability to notice the flora of one’s surroundings compounded by the broader failure to value the aesthetic, cultural, and ecological significance of botanical life (82). In their view, this widespread bias propounds an erroneous view of plants as inferior to animals and hence undeserving of serious consideration (Wandersee and Schussler 1999, 82). Developing the idea of plant kinship blindness, moreover, François Bouteau and colleagues (2021) contend that from the perspective of evolutionary development, plants and animals belong to sister groups. Although flora and fauna share a common phylogenetic history beginning 3.9 billion years ago, the modern refusal to recognize genetic kinship between animals and plants persists due to the ideological categorization of the latter as inferior on the chain of being. Nonetheless, homologies

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between plants and animals—for example, the occurrence of cellular signaling and innate immunity in both—have the potential to inspire feelings of identification, attachment, and empathy with respect to our chlorophyllic kin (Bouteau et  al. 2021). Integral to the conceptual formulation of phytopoetics, then, is the phytosphere. Understood vis-à-vis the semiosphere, the phytosphere becomes a material-semiotic nexus of communication between species. Phytopoetic makings arise as human consciousness extends into the phytosphere. Following the idea of intermediation, the phytosphere in-forms phytopoetic processes in “a dynamic heterarchy bound together by intermediating dynamics” (Hayles 2007, 101). Ecologists approach the idea of the phytosphere in various ways (Larcher 2003; Saito et al. 2007; Svoboda 1989; van Elsas, Turner, and Bailey 2003; Yang et al. 2013). For Josef Svoboda (1989), the phytosphere represents the planet’s vegetation as a whole in relation to the lithosphere (rocks), zoosphere (animals), homosphere (humans), and other ecological spheres (107). Svoboda stresses how the emergence of land plants significantly altered the earth’s climate. Between 3.2 and 3.5 billion years ago, the advent of photosynthesis enabled plants to populate oceans and continents. To maximize nutrient production from light, terrestrial flora developed leaves, stems, branches, trunks, and other conspicuous anatomies (Blankenship 2010). Approximately 400–500 million years ago, non-vascular land plants comparable to mosses significantly depleted atmospheric carbon dioxide, acquiring carbon and expelling oxygen (Svoboda 1989, 110). Before terrestrial flora appeared, high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere maintained a stable climate. Since then, however, climatic fluctuations between warmer and colder periods have fostered the evolution of complex life-forms including terrestrial animals (Kalderon-Asael et  al. 2021). The zoosphere and homosphere, therefore, have developed within the contours of the phytosphere: “In this unique function of a food base and keeper of the oxidizing atmosphere rests the ultimate value of the Phytosphere in the hierarchy of identifiable physical realities” (Svoboda 1989, 111, italics and capitalization original). Whereas Svoboda adopts an evolutionary stance on the phytosphere, Walter Larcher (2003) conceptualizes the term broadly as a plant’s immediate surroundings, in which ecological transactions influence floristic life cycles (10). For other ecologists, the phytosphere more specifically comprises the interior and exterior of a plant, forming an integrated microecosystem that includes aboveground and subterranean structures (Yang et al. 2013, 1). The concept of the phytosphere illuminates the complex interactions between plants and other life-forms. In particular, the phytosphere is a conducive habitat for symbiotic microorganisms facilitating soil nutrient uptake and fortifying resistance to pathogens (Saito et  al. 2007, 93; Yang

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et  al. 2013, 1). Rather than an inert source of nutrients, the phytosphere is “an ecosystem teeming with diverse flora and fauna including different groups of microbes that are useful as well as harmful for plants” (Pande et al. 2021, 1). Interfaces between mineral and organic components of the soil concentrate decaying organic matter from the bodies of worms and other creatures (van Elsas, Turner, and Bailey 2003, 527). In addition to maintaining microbial diversity, the phytosphere mediates genetic transfer and signal transmission. Phytospheric microorganisms have coevolved with communication mechanisms between plants and non-plants via cell-to-cell synapses and compounds similar to neurotransmitters (Simard 2018, 194). Indeed, plants orchestrate an ensemble of secondary metabolites functioning as signals, carriers, and messengers (Witzany 2010, 27). In the root zone or rhizosphere, for instance, an estimated 100,000 such compounds constitute the “molecular vocabulary” of vegetal communication (Witzany 2010, 29). As Svoboda (1989) further observes, an ecosystem is intrinsically “a cosmos of individuals, populations and communities that interact on many planes, exchange an immense variety of compounds and communicate through innumerable languages” (106). Ensuring the vitality of the microecosystem, an “interkingdom” signaling network mediates interactions between plants, microbes, and other organisms (Khan 2022, 1). To bolster communicative exchanges, plants secrete exudates promoting the colonization of beneficial bacteria. More precisely understood, the phytosphere is a structurally diverse system comprising the rhizosphere, phyllosphere, and endosphere. The rhizosphere is the soil habitat in proximity to the roots of the host plant whereas the phyllosphere is the microbial environment associated primarily with leaf surfaces. In contrast, the endosphere is the microbiome within plant tissues (Saito et  al. 2007, 94–95). Microbial ecologist Lorenz Hiltner devised the term rhizosphere to describe the fine layer of soil providing the substrate for roots’ communicative secretions (Hartmann, Rothballer, and Schmid 2008, 7). Hiltner noted that the microbial composition of the root zone significantly affects plant nutrition by rendering carbon, nitrogen, phosphate, and sulfur available (van Elsas, Turner, and Bailey 2003, 527). The “wooded web”—a popular contemporary term for the rhizosphere—catalyzes information exchange within populations of plants as well as between plants and animals, insects, fungi, people, and other creatures (Gross 2016, R182). In arboreal rhizospheres, subterranean fungal systems known as mycorrhizal networks facilitate forest memory. Symbiotic alliances with mycorrhizae provide trees the energy required for memory processes, thus activating “the diverse intelligence present among humans and forests” (Simard 2018, 197). In the Pacific Northwest, according to ecologist Suzanne Simard, memory

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processes located in the rhizosphere result from the interaction of trees, fungi, fish, bears, and humans. Roots scavenge nutrients from decaying salmon bodies carried by bears from rivers to trees. Through the rhizosphere, ancient cedars, spruces, and firs incorporate salmon-derived nitrogen into their rings, producing long-term histories of fish runs and variable environmental conditions embedded in tree bodies and forest habitats. Mother trees nourish their symbionts with organic compounds, a process that simultaneously enhances the health of neighboring trees and bolsters the biodiversity of the ecosystem (Simard 2021, 275). As demonstrated by the example of the rhizosphere, the phytosphere is a nexus of signs operating symphonically to facilitate communication, memory, and meaning making. Within the contours of the semiosphere, the phytosphere emerges as the groundwork of phytopoetics. For Jesper Hoffmeyer (1996), the semiosphere directs expression, movement, and sensation as well as electrical, chemical, and thermal signaling (52–68). Toward consilience between the biological and linguistic, Hoffmeyer (1996) contends that “the biosphere must be viewed in the light of the semiosphere rather than the other way around” (viii). For Hoffmeyer, the biosphere is first and foremost a semiotic system where organisms respond discerningly to ecological variables, engendering meaning relative to other life-forms (Harries-Jones 2016, 194). In proposing the term semiosphere, Yuri Lotman (1990) extended Vladimir Vernadsky’s articulation of the biosphere to posit the concept as “the semiotic space necessary for the existence and functioning of languages” (123). Lotman’s formulation constitutes a “radical reconceptualization” of language that situates communication and culture at the center of ecological processes (Hartley, Ibrus, and Ojamaa 2021, 11). As a dialogical space, the semiosphere nurtures difference, reciprocity, and mutuality (Lotman 2005, 216). At the dynamic boundaries between elements in a semiosphere, information is translated and meaning is produced. The semiosphere reflects a high degree of heterogeneity “defined both by the diversity of elements and by their different functions” (Lotman 1990, 125). Not only a hotspot of microbial activity, the phytosphere as semiosphere is a matrix of memory transmission characterized by “diachronic depth” (Lotman 2005, 219). Ecosystems thus can be conceived as assemblages of coordinated semiospheres in perpetual information exchange. Approached vis-à-vis the semiosphere, the phytosphere becomes a space engendering dialogue, diversity, reciprocity, translation, and memory between plants, people, and other creatures. Taking shape within phytospheric delineations, phytopoetics aims to particularize plants, liberating vegetal life from the backdrop of human consciousness. The following three sections explore these assertions in detail through examples of contemporary poetry attentive to the rhizosphere, phyllosphere, and endosphere, respectively.

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“BURIED IN THE DARK EARTH”: RHIZOSPHERIC POETICS Phytopoems of the rhizosphere draw attention, sensoriality, and imagination downward into the underground microecosystem. For critic Christy Wampole (2016), “[w]ith its moisture, silence, darkness, minerals, and subterranean creatures, the rhizosphere is the home of the root and a kind of follicle or life-sustaining pouch” (24). Not only the domain of the root, as Wampole observes, the rhizosphere is also a plexus of communication, exchange, and reciprocity between diverse life-forms. A noteworthy antecedent of contemporary rhizospheric poetry is Walt Whitman’s “Calamus” (1891, originally 1855). Whitman’s enigmatic cluster of poems in Leaves of Grass (1891) takes the form of an extended address to calamus with evocations of the plant’s “perennial,” “faint tinged,” and “pink-tinged” roots (95–112). Although the dominant reading of the cluster positions the plant as a symbol of homoerotic male love (for example, Miller 1998, 95–98), such critical appraisals elide Whitman’s prescient engagement with nineteenth-century plant ecology. Calamus is a wetland species belonging to the iris family and bearing leaves that emerge from a spreading rhizome. Poems of the rhizosphere, such as Whitman’s “Calamus,” often emerge from both real and imagined contact with the root-soil interface through planting, composting, tending, tilling, and other acts. This assertion is especially palpable in Louise Glück’s “The Wild Iris” (1992), John Kinsella’s “Exposing the ‘Rhizanthella Gardneri’ Orchid” (1997), and Brenda Hillman’s “To Mycorrhizae Under Our Mother’s Garden” (2022). Whereas Glück’s phytopoem narrates the activities of the poet-horticulturist from the perspective of a sapient iris, Hillman’s speaker addresses the mycorrhizae of the substrata beneath her mother’s garden. In contrast, the observer in Kinsella’s poem bears witness to the unearthing of a rare endemic orchid in an uncultivated environment. Coupled to an ethics of stewardship, practices of embodied participation in the rhizosphere inform the phytopoetics of Glück, Kinsella, and Hillman. Their work locates literary consciousness of vegetal life in this typically hidden segment of the phytosphere. Through the extension of body, intellect, senses, memory, and imagination, the human becomes a rhizospheric participant accessing the subsurface domain where symbiotic relations between soil, plants, and microorganisms prevail. American writer Louise Glück’s titular poem from her phytopoetic collection The Wild Iris (1992, 1) endows the common ornamental species with attributes of consciousness and memory. Sited in the rhizosphere, the poem directs narrative attention upward to the barren winter garden perceived by the iris from below. Emerging from either bulbs or rhizomes, irises are perennial plants. Glück’s hands-on experience gardening in the New England

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region of the United States enabled her to become intimately familiar with the growth cycles of the species. In their perenniality, irises archive the mnemonic residues of each seasonal senescence and rebirth. Awaiting spring’s arrival, Glück’s iris reveals an embodied memory of its buried state. The poem adopts the viewpoint of the subterranean iris apprehending the anemic light of the sun, the quick movements of birds in shrubs, and the clattering of pine branches in the wind. Through heightened spatial awareness of changes in the aboveground ecosystem, the iris endures, despite the constraints of its dormancy as a bulb. Nonetheless, the poet reminds us, it is dreadful to endure: as consciousness buried in the dark earth. (Glück 1992, 1, ll. 9–10)

Glück figures the iris bulb as a locus of reflective activity. Stanzas such as this concur with scientific understandings of visual, sonic, spatial, and proprioceptive perception by plants (Karban 2017). Her rhizospheric poetics, moreover, harmonizes with Charles and Francis Darwin’s (2016) late nineteenth-century postulation that the root system “acts like the brain of one of the lower animals,” coordinating “impressions from the sense-organs” (419). The expansiveness of perennial consciousness, however, contrasts sharply with the narrowness of human memory, as asserted by the iris-speaker’s blunt characterization of the poet-gardener as devoid of the capacity to remember transitions between worlds. The bold declarations of the iris typify the piercing directness of vegetal voice in Glück’s phytopoetics. Like Glück’s “The Wild Iris,” Australian writer John Kinsella’s “Exposing the ‘Rhizanthella Gardneri’ Orchid” (1997, 227) situates phytopoetic consciousness principally in the rhizosphere yet oscillates between the plant’s subterranean and aboveground domains. As the only known underground blossoms in the world, members of the Rhizanthella genus lack the ability to photosynthesize, acquiring carbon instead from host plants through specialized associations with mycorrhizal fungi (Thorogood, Bougoure, and Hiscock 2019). In Australia, a few extremely rare and localized orchid species exist under the soil surface for the entirety of their “subterranean life history,” even when flowering (Thorogood, Bougoure, and Hiscock 2019, 154). Kinsella’s phytopoetics arises at the threshold of the underground and aerial as the narrative shifts between human exhumation of the flower and its ordinarily concealed state. Within the rhizosphere’s delineations, language assumes the shape of orchid poiesis. Kinsella narrativizes the plant’s distinctive ecology, invoking its technical classification as a saprophyte that feeds on decaying organic matter. The orchid’s mutualisms—its unusual pollination by termites and affiliation with the host plant, broom honey myrtle—feature centrally. Although the orchid’s visible parts gradually come into view, the diction

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remains gustatory as the orchid tastes the air, its mouth sweet with the imminence of flowering. Imagination and sensoriality extend into the rhizosphere, summoning the orchid’s interrelationalities in the absence of vision: its liaisons go unnoticed as the scrub is peeled back. (Kinsella 1997, 227, ll. 13–14)

These unnoticed liaisons are subsoil mutualisms between rhizospheric creatures. As the orchid is carefully disinterred, its leaves unfurl and its flower reddens. Kinsella’s phytopoetics thus resists the aesthetic allure of the broad flowering vista typical of Southwest Australian flora, especially in the antipodean spring, turning attention in contrast to the (usually) unseen reaches of the musty rhizosphere. Kinsella’s account of orchid unearthing hybridizes poetic and rhizospheric language. Comparably, American writer Brenda Hillman’s “To Mycorrhizae Under Our Mother’s Garden” (2022) incorporates technical terminology such as ectomycorrhizal fungi, hyphal tubes, glomalin proteins, and N-rich molecules. Rather than the American New England and Southwest Australian settings of Glück and Kinsella’s phytopoems, respectively, Hillman’s narrative reflects the botanical character of the American Southwest, presumably southern Arizona, where she was born and raised. A characteristic member of the region’s flora is the prickly pear, a cactus with a symbiotic relationship to arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi that penetrate its roots, enhancing drought tolerance (Lahbouki et  al. 2022). Whereas Glück’s phytopoem features an iris-persona speaking back to the poet-gardener and reader, Hillman’s ode addresses the fungal symbionts directly. As similarly evident in Kinsella’s work, poetic imagination descends into the subterranean zone through the orientational clauses “under her clothesline” and “beneath feldspar” (Hillman 2022, n.p., ll. 5, 6). Alternating between the macroscopic and microscopic, the speaker envisions the enigmatic mycorrhizal ecology subtending her mother’s cherished garden: Nets of roots, fate-kept not-death fungal sheets, steady there, abiotic mediators, ones toward all. (Hillman 2022, n.p., ll. 7–8)

Mutuality between psyche, garden, and rhizosphere crystallizes through references to the interinvolved moods of fungi, molds, and mother. The near-homonymic resonances of mold and mood sonically situate the phytospheric network as a locus of healing—as a refuge for mending moods. Through the biolinguistic phrases “[a]mpersands of storage compounds” and “micro-essays / of endomycorrhizal” (ll. 18, 19), Hillman’s phytopoetics demonstrates the rhizospheric molding of poetic language. Yet, while

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attuned largely to the rhizosphere, the poem also invokes the “stomata, pores in leaves” (l. 11) of the phyllosphere, the focus of the next section.

“UNFURLING A GESTURE”: PHYLLOSPHERIC POETICS Phytopoems of the phyllosphere focus predominantly on leaves, leaf-environment interactions, and the cultural significance of foliage. The leaf surfaces of plants are unique microbiomes consisting of the phylloplane, the outer topography, and the phyllotelma, the exterior waterscape (Leveau 2019). Populated by bacteria, yeast, fungi, protists, algae, and other life-forms, the phyllosphere represents “the above-ground homolog of the rhizosphere” (Lemanceau et al. 2017, 116). As a plant-microbe-habitat interface, the phyllosphere shapes resident microbial communities by modifying its anatomical and chemical composition. Recruiting phyllospheric microorganisms necessitates a communication network that can be disrupted or enhanced strategically by the host plant (Lemanceau et al. 2017, 121). Mediated by molecular signaling, the network formed by the plant and allied creatures is known as a holobiont (Lemanceau et al. 2017, 122). An influential late eighteenth-century precursor of contemporary phyllospheric poetry is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Metamorphosis of Plants (2009, originally 1790). Emerging from Goethe’s meticulous examination of botanical transfiguration, the long poem conceptualizes the leaf as the recurrent morphological unit constituting flowers and fruits: “Like unto each the form, yet none alike” (von Goethe 2009, 1, l. 5, italics original). The idea of plant metamorphosis—from which the science of plant morphology developed—reflects the “process by which one and the same organ appears in a variety of forms” (von Goethe 2009, 6). In the Goethean mode, phyllospheric poems often arise from sustained, meditative observation of foliar transformation. This assertion manifests poetically vis-à-vis the vegetal subjects of Ted Hughes’ “Fern” (1973), Elisabeth Bletsoe’s “Stinging Nettle (Urticus dioica), Castle Hill, Stowey” (2010), and Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner’s “Basket” (2017). The work of Hughes, Bletsoe, and Jetnil-Kijiner explores the phyllosphere as a plexus of communication, expression, musicality, nourishment, healing, and cultural identity. In Bletsoe and Jetnil-Kijiner’s poems, additionally, immersive tactile participation in the phyllosphere counters the detached perception of foliage at a distance. British poet Ted Hughes’ “Fern” (1973, 67) opens with the immediacy of phyllospheric encounter: “Here is the fern’s frond” (l. 1). Rather than conflating the plant with its foliage through the phrasing “fern frond,” Hughes’ choice of the possessive “fern’s frond” recognizes the leaf as one organ among many. Indeed, with their prominent leaf structures, ferns uniquely rouse the botanical imagination. As Henry David Thoreau (qtd. in Emerson

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1862) observed in the nineteenth century, “[n]ature made ferns for pure leaves, to show what she could do in that line” (n.p.). As the dominant organ in ferns, fronds consist of a fiddlehead (furled bud) and aerophore lines (aerial roots for gaseous exchange) (Vasco, Moran, and Ambrose 2013, 5). Bearing neither seeds nor flowers and, instead, reproducing via spores, ferns require a specialized lexicon to distinguish their foliar anatomy from other vascular flora. Not only photosynthetically active, fronds propagate the fern vegetatively, disperse spores, and support nitrogen-fixing bacteria (Vasco, Moran, and Ambrose 2013, 4). In Hughes’ (1973, 67) phytopoem, the frond is “unfurling a gesture,” a figuration connoting the phyllosphere’s inherently communicative nature on the margins of the audible spectrum of the human (l. 1). The alliteration of “f”s in the first line—“fern’s frond, unfurling”— reinforces the correspondence between poietic language and plant corporeality. Foregrounding plants’ gestural modes as sessile life-forms, Hughes likens the plant to “a conductor whose music will now be pause” (l. 2). Attuned to the fern’s non-aural expressiveness, “the whole earth dances gravely” (l. 4). Vegetal silence inspires terrane choreography. Later in the poem, the fern also dances “gravely” like a warrior returning to his kingdom, a simile implying the plant’s autochthonous belonging. At the same time, the plant’s movement invokes European folklore regarding the power of fern seed to confer invisibility, a belief dramatized, for instance, by Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Consequently, Hughes’ fern is an ancestral literary subject rendered kindred in the po(i)etic present. Like Hughes’ gesturing fern, British poet Elisabeth Bletsoe’s noxious nettle is a commonplace species with a rich history as a medicine, food, fiber, irritant, and weed. Although a distinctive member of the British flora, nettle has been disseminated globally by human activities. Bletsoe’s botanically and topographically precise “Stinging Nettle (Urticus dioica), Castle Hill, Stowey” (2010, 106–107) cites an antiquated spelling of the genus, implying the centuries-old cultural traditions surrounding the plant. The modern taxonomic designation, Urtica dioica, reflects the particularities of the nettle phytosphere. More specifically, the genus Urtica derives from the Latin uro for the burning sensation experienced after touching the leaves, whereas the common name originates in the Anglo-Saxon netele, denoting the stinging hairs and fibrous stems used to produce textiles (Kavalali 2004, 1). Bletsoe characterizes the nettle as “beset with little prickles,” using quotation marks to indicate her paraphrase of many early botanists’ preoccupation with this unpleasant feature of its phytosphere. The prickle is a: flagella for the subjugation of wayward flesh. (Bletsoe 2010, 107, ll. 14–16)

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Just as the fern’s dance articulates its historical agency, so too does the nettle’s sting elicit cultural legacies through its fleshly registers—the capacity of its phyllosphere to subjugate. In parenthesis, Bletsoe cites the case of Gladys Brown, a photographer of Linnaeus’ original collections who in 1940 was stung while handling a nettle sheet created 200 years earlier (Mabey 2015, 180). The poem then shifts from the plant as a perennial nuisance to the plant as a healing agent for the circulatory system, a medicinal attribute observed by sixteenth-century herbalist John Gerard and others. Weaving through the folk values associated with the species, Bletsoe recuperates kin relations to nettle, countering its stigmatization as a physically threatening and ecologically repugnant weed (Ryan 2019). Bletsoe evokes the haptic legacies of nettle as an agent of affliction and recovery. Immersive interaction with the phyllosphere precludes the possibility of detached observation of flora. Comparably, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner’s concrete poems, both entitled “Basket” (2017, 4–5, 80–81), center on the Marshallese tradition of sensory contact with the phyllosphere through the practice of basket weaving. Embodying the matrilineality of Marshallese society, the term iep jƗltok denotes “a basket whose opening is facing the speaker” (Jetnil-Kijiner 2017, n.p.). The poem employs second-person address in referring to Marshallese women as well as to: dried strips of leaves. (Jetnil-Kijiner 2017, 4)

As a polysemous signifier, Jetnil-Kijiner’s “you” implies the interdependence between leaves and weavers. Marshallese artisans use plants such as pandanus (bǀb), basket grass (wnjjooj-in-ep), and beach grass (wnjjooj kakknjmknjm) to create mats, baskets, and other textiles (Merlin 2023). Representing sustenance, fecundity, munificence, and memory, the poems’ oval mise-en-page summons iep jƗltok as a botanical presence poietically shaped by human hands. In the second “Basket,” however, the imperialist appropriation of the Marshall Islands promulgates the exploitation of women, land, sea, and flora. The friction between creation and destruction concretizes perceptually in the basket’s elongated form, where the more pronounced spacing between words suggests the weakening of iep jƗltok as a cultural vessel. A sense of resilience, nonetheless, materializes in both poems through nourishing gestures of swelling, offering, and keeping that are set in sharp distinction to defiling behaviors of scraping, dumping, and littering. The baskets and their constituent plants contribute to the recuperation of Marshallese identity by affirming the value of tactile engagement with the phyllosphere. The recovery of phyllospheric cultural traditions depends on the revival of weaving practices

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in tandem with biocultural conservation (Hiraishi 2018). Accordingly, the poetry of Jetnil-Kijiner, Bletsoe, and Hughes reveals modes of perceptual extension into the phyllosphere, bringing plants and people into contact and, hence, dialogue. The process of becoming familiar with plants while recognizing their differences—of making flora kin—is similarly crucial to endospheric poetry, which is the focus of the following section.

“CHASMIC SPACES BETWEEN”: ENDOSPHERIC POETICS In contrast to rhizospheric poetry of the root-soil interface and phyllospheric poetry of the leaves, endospheric poetry directs the human sensorium to the interior domains of plants. The endosphere supplies an internal habitat for bacteria, fungi, yeast, and other microorganisms known as endophytes that colonize plant tissues without harming their hosts (Compant et  al. 2021, 1812–1813). Interactions between plants and endophytes confer benefits to both (van Overbeek and Saikkonen 2016, 231). Co-evolving with their hosts, microorganisms regulate vital processes such as photosynthesis, transpiration, stomatal control, nutrient uptake, osmoregulation, and stress adaptation (Rho and Kim 2017; Sarkar et al. 2021). Communication between endophytic colonies and the host, moreover, stimulates the production of secondary metabolites coordinating plants’ interactions with other organisms (Khare, Mishra, and Arora 2018, 7). A salient forerunner of contemporary endospheric poetry is Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden (1791). The major two-part poem dramatizes photosynthesis, transpiration, metabolism, signaling, and other processes through the interplay of mythological beings and impassioned plants. The first part, The Economy of Vegetation, presages photosynthesis as “vegetable perspiration” through the actions of sylphs who “wed the enamoured oxygen to light” (Darwin 1791, 163, l. 34). Spirits regulate water movement, or transpiration, as “refluent blood in milky eddies bends” (Darwin 1791, 195, ll. 419–420). As demonstrated by The Botanic Garden, endospheric poems narrativize the inmost worlds of flora, where symbioses between humans, plants, and microorganisms predominate. Poetry of this kind allows readers to envision physiological transactions inaccessible to ordinary perception. Examples of endospheric poetry include Michael McClure’s “Point Lobos: Animism” (1959) and the author’s “Rock Orchid Hyphae” (2020) as well as the non-textual work Microcosms. Located in the endosphere, the poetry of McClure and the author evokes vegetal interiorities. Although a work of visualization rather than poetry, Microcosms develops an optical language to generate representations of the inner topographies of sacred flora.

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American poet Michael McClure’s “Point Lobos: Animism” (1959, 4–5) oscillates between plants’ internal and external spheres. Although topographically specific in its reference to Point Lobos, a coastal locale in California, the phytopoem is less botanically precise than Bletsoe’s “Stinging Nettle.” Instead, McClure foregrounds the voice of plants experienced as a collective presence animating place. Drifting between the inner and outer—between the endosphere and biosphere—the poem also tracks between the possibility and impossibility of sacramental union with flora. McClure’s visceral phytopoetics co-implicates human and botanical physiologies as the speaker recalls kneeling by a salt pool, awakening to the “soul like a clambering / Water vascular system” (McClure 1959, 4, ll. 26–27). The term vascular interinvolves the human circulatory system with the xylem and phloem tissues transporting water and nutrients in land plants. At the same time, McClure’s diction evokes the vegetal soul as an expression of the internal poiesis of vegetal life. The inner-outer dyad, however, reverses as the narrator declaims the impossibility of speaking of lupines and tulips when one witnesses his name: Spelled by the mold on the stumps When the forest moves about one. (McClure 1959, 5, ll. 39–40)

In the contact zone between bodies, the conventions of signification break down. As the forest engulfs the narrator, particular plants (lupines, tulips) meld into the vegetal whole (ecosystem, forest). Instead of the human extending into the endosphere, the botanical collective internalizes the human— “the forest moves about one.” The exclamatory line “Light. Light! Light!” then calls attention to photosynthesis as the outcome of beings in dynamic exchange (McClure 1959, 5, l. 42). Endospheric in focus, “Point Lobos: Animism” is also macroecological in its emphasis on the relationalities between place, people, plants, and other life-forms. As similarly legible in Glück’s “The Wild Iris,” subjectivity in McClure’s phytopoem becomes destabilized as bodies, minds, sensorialities, and languages entwine. Comparable to McClure’s poem, American-Australian writer John C. Ryan’s “Rock Orchid Hyphae” (2020, 56–61) intensively probes the endosphere as a site of communication. The poem’s vegetal subject, the rock orchid, inhabits a locale known as Budds Mare on a gorge slope in New South Wales, Australia. The poem graphically imagines the endophytic communities within the orchid. In particular, Ryan figures the haptic sense as the gravitational pull between bodies—human, botanical, endophytic—that drives equilibria at various scales. Fungal endophytes populate the plant’s inner landscape. The hyphal filaments of mycelia facilitate fungi-fungi and endophyte-orchid communication when in proximity to other hyphae (Money

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2011). The lineation of “Rock Orchid Hyphae” optically evokes the reaching of hyphae across the orchid’s internal space in anticipation of encounter: in communion nonetheless, to stretch filaments in airy possibility, to breach chasmic spaces between— threads of hyphae, unseen reach to deep green. (Ryan 2020, 61, ll. 135–140)

On a macroscopic level, the poem is chiasmatically evocative of the gorge at the edge of which the orchid balances precariously. Stemming from the Greek root khiasma denoting two objects positioned crosswise—and homonymic with khasma for “gulf”—the term chiasma refers to the interstitching of diverse elements. Arranged in two justified columns of text divided by a blank space, the form of “Rock Orchid Hyphae” generates multiple significations as the reader tracks up and down, right to left, and diagonally across its arrangement. Instead of gazing hypnagogically across a picturesque landscape, one’s eyes move saccadically across focal points—words, lines, stanzas. The gorge and orchid become homologues. Like McClure’s “Point Lobos: Animism” and Ryan’s “Rock Orchid Hyphae,” biologist Jill Pflugheber and literary scholar Steven F. White’s Microcosms: A Homage to Sacred Plants of the Americas (2023) visualizes the endosphere normally excluded from the human purview. At the intersection of plants, art, and consciousness, the project heightens public appreciation of sacred species through the application of an innovative technological process. To generate endospheric renderings, the researchers employed confocal microscopy—short for confocal laser scanning microscopy—an optical technique for the three-dimensional imaging of plant interiority. The confocal process produced vivid depictions comparable to colorful abstract artworks. Microcosms navigates the inner worlds of more than seventy species considered sacred by Indigenous cultural groups of North and South America. One plant is sweetgrass (Hierochloe odorata), known as Óhonte Wenserákon in the Mohawk (Kanien’keha) language and Wicko’bimucko’si among Chippewa people. Native North Americans use sweetgrass for basketry, healing, smudging, and other purposes. A confocal representation of the species features organic purple forms suspended over the plant’s green interior dimensions. In engendering an endospheric poetics, Microcosms illuminates the vital importance of sacred flora as well as Indigenous people’s longstanding relationships to ceremonial plants. The inclusion of homage in the project

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subtitle, furthermore, signifies respectful acknowledgment of kinship with the plants with whom humankind participates in symbiotic exchange at every moment of consciousness. As a non-textual example of creative engagement with the endosphere, Microcosms reinforces this chapter’s earlier claim that phytopoetics includes not only poetry on the page but diverse creative makings imbricated with the poiesis of vegetal life.

CONCLUSION: MAKING KIN WITH PLANTS Donna Haraway argues that kin signifies more than individuals connected through genealogy. An expanded conception of the term means that “all earthlings are kin in the deepest sense” (Haraway 2016, 103). For Haraway (2016), kin-making involves “making persons, not necessarily as individuals or as humans” (103). Making kin and “making kind (as category, care, relatives without ties by birth, lateral relatives, lots of other echoes) stretch the imagination and can change the story” (Haraway 2016, 103). Through deep attention to vegetal spheres of being, poetry offers the perceptual and linguistic resources for making kin with plants—for stretching the imagination and changing the story about life on Earth in response to the precarities of the present. Extending Haraway’s notion of “making persons” to the botanical world, phytopoetics both familiarizes and defamiliarizes us with plants, preserving their alterity within processes and practices of kin-making. In the light of their relations with other creatures, plants are paradigms of adaptive resilience. As this chapter has shown, poetry of the rhizosphere, phyllosphere, and endosphere illuminates plants’ responsive, expressive, and percipient capacities. Drawing from botanical wisdom to enhance planetary well-being, an ethics of cohabitation in the Anthropocene must consider plants, humanvegetal relations, and phytospheric sympoiesis.

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Hayles, N. Katherine. “Intermediation: The Pursuit of a Vision.” New Literary History 38, no. 1 (2007): 99–125. Hillman, Brenda. “To Mycorrhizae Under Our Mother’s Garden.” Poets.org. Accessed January 16, 2023. https://poets.org/poem/mycorrhizae-under-our-mothers-garden. Hiraishi, Ku uwehi. “Marshallese Women Revive Traditional Weaving.” Hawai’i Public Radio. December 5, 2018. Accessed January 16, 2023. https://www .hawaiipublicradio.org/local-news/2018-12-05/marshallese-women-revive-traditional-weaving. Hoffmeyer, Jesper. Signs of Meaning in the Universe. Edited by Barbara J. Haveland. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996. Hughes, Ted. Selected Poems: 1957–1967. 1st ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1973. Jacobs, Joela. “Phytopoetics: Upending the Passive Paradigm with Vegetal Violence and Eroticism.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5, no. 2 (2019): 1–18. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i2.30027. Jetnil-Kijiner, Kathy. Iep JƗltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2017. Kalderon-Asael, Boriana, Joachim A. R. Katchinoff, Noah J. Planavsky, Ashleigh v. S. Hood, Mathieu Dellinger, Eric J. Bellefroid, David S. Jones, et al. “A LithiumIsotope Perspective on the Evolution of Carbon and Silicon Cycles.” Nature 595, no. 7867 (2021): 394–98. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03612-1. Karban, Richard. “The Language of Plant Communication (and How It Compares to Animal Communication).” In The Language of Plants Science, Philosophy, Literature, edited by Monica Gagliano, John C. Ryan, and Patrícia Vieira, 3–26. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Kavalali, Gulsel. “An Introduction to Urtica (Botanical Aspects).” In Urtica: Therapeutic and Nutritional Aspects of Stinging Nettles, edited by Gulsel Kavalali, 1–11. London: CRC Press, 2004. Khan, Naeem. “Molecular Communication Between Plants and Plant-GrowthPromoting Microorganisms for Stress Tolerance.” Microorganisms 10, no. 1088 (2022): 1–3. https://doi.org/10.3390/microorganisms10061088. Khare, Ekta, Jitendra Mishra, and Naveen Kumar Arora. “Multifaceted Interactions Between Endophytes and Plant: Developments and Prospects.” Frontiers in Microbiology 9, no. 2732 (2018): 1–12. https://doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2018.02732. Kinsella, John. Poems 1980–1994. Fremantle, WA: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1997. Lahbouki, Soufiane, Raja Ben-Laouane, Mohamed Anli, Abderrahim Boutasknit, Youssef Ait-Rahou, Mohamed Ait-El-Mokhtar, Soumaya el Gabardi, et al. “Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi and/or Organic Amendment Enhance the Tolerance of Prickly Pear (Opuntia Ficus-Indica) Under Drought Stress.” Journal of Arid Environments 199, no. 104703 (2022): 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaridenv.2021 .104703. Laist, Randy, ed. Plants and Literature: Essays in Critical Plant Studies. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013. Larcher, Walter. Physiological Plant Ecology. 4th ed. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2003.

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Lemanceau, P., M. Barret, S. Mazurier, S. Mondy, B. Pivato, T. Fort, and C. Vacher. “Plant Communication with Associated Microbiota in the Spermosphere, Rhizosphere and Phyllosphere.” In How Plants Communicate with Their Biotic Environment, edited by Guillaume Becard, 101–33. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2017. https://doi .org/10.1016/bs.abr.2016.10.007. Leveau, Johan H. J. “A Brief from the Leaf: Latest Research to Inform Our Understanding of the Phyllosphere Microbiome.” Current Opinion in Microbiology 49 (June 2019): 41–49. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mib.2019.10.002. López, Marlén, Ramón Rubio, Santiago Martín, and Ben Croxford. “How Plants Inspire Façades. From Plants to Architecture: Biomimetic Principles for the Development of Adaptive Architectural Envelopes.” Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 67 (January 2017): 692–703. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2016 .09.018. Lotman, Yuri. Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. Edited by Ann Shukman. London: I.B. Tauris, 1990. ———. “On the Semiosphere.” Sign Systems Studies 33, no. 1 (2005): 205–29. Mabey, Richard. The Cabaret of Plants: Botany and the Imagination. London: Profile Books, 2015. Mahood, M. M. The Poet as Botanist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Marder, Michael. Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. McClure, Michael. Hymns to St. Geryon and Other Poems. 1st ed. San Francisco, CA: Auerhahn Press, 1959. Meng, Honghu, Xiaoyang Gao, Yigang Song, Guanlong Cao, and Jie Li. “Biodiversity Arks in the Anthropocene.” Regional Sustainability 2, no. 2 (2021): 109–15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.regsus.2021.03.001. Merlin, Mark. “Plants by Scientific Names.” Plants and Environments of the Marshall Islands, 2023. Accessed January 16, 2023. https://www.hawaii.edu/cpis/MI /Home.html. Miller, James E. “Calamus (1860).” In The Routledge Encyclopedia of Walt Whitman, edited by J. R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings, 95–98. New York: Routledge, 1998. Moe, Aaron M. Zoopoetics: Animals and the Making of Poetry. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016. Money, Nicholas P. “Introduction: The 200th Anniversary of the Hypha.” Fungal Biology 115, no. 6 (2011): 443–45. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.funbio.2010.09.014. Murray, Les. Translations from the Natural World. Paddington, NSW: Isabella Press, 1992. Neidjie, Bill. Story About Feeling. Broome, WA: Magabala Books, 1989. Neruda, Pablo. Canto General. Edited by Jack Schmitt. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000. Originally 1950. Oswald, Alice. Weeds and Wild Flowers: Poems by Alice Oswald, Etchings by Jessica Greenman. London: Faber and Faber, 2009. Pande, Anjali, Bong-Gyu Mun, Da-Sol Lee, Murtaza Khan, Geun-Mo Lee, Adil Hussain, and Byung-Wook Yun. “NO Network for Plant–Microbe Communication

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Chapter 7

Beyond Civilization How Far Are We Prepared to Go in Parochializing “Progress”? Alf Hornborg

During the half century since mainstream discourse in the Global North lost its postwar faith in the inevitability of progress, we have seen voluminous debate about the long-term viability of modern civilization.1 There were of course numerous critics of modernity from the very start, but the early 1970s marked the end of three decades of growth and general optimism throughout much of the world. President Nixon’s abandonment of the gold standard in 1971 unleashed the era of financialization. The 1970s were years of recession, oil crises, and environmental alarms. Concerns over global inequalities and the environmental impacts of economic growth were formally recognized through events such as the UN Conference on the Environment in Stockholm in 1972. A number of influential books were published that criticized mainstream economics for not acknowledging the social and ecological limits to growth (e.g., Georgescu-Roegen 1971; Odum 1971; Commoner 1971; Meadows et  al. 1972; Schumacher 1973; Illich 1973). The determination and assertiveness of movements celebrating ways to improve the future of humankind in the 1970s gave way to widespread postmodern hesitations about our dubious constructions of reality. Out of this collective loss of confidence in modernity emerged the neoliberal market fundamentalism that was established in the 1980s. Capitalism and growth had to be revitalized. Proponents of neoliberalism demanded that governments and movements accept that the market must follow its own logic, with as little political intervention as possible. While critiques of neoliberal capitalism and growth have continued and grown ever more pervasive, equally prevalent today is the realization that the inertia of the capitalist economy appears to be unstoppable. Although official alarm about climate change, biodiversity loss, inequalities, and other highly 97

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disturbing consequences of the world economy dominate contemporary media and the modern consciousness, there is a growing sense of hopelessness. If the years around 1970 alerted us to many of the failings of capitalism, the dominant assumption was that these shortcomings could be rectified through political campaigns and decisions. Such hopes have now largely withered. The ubiquitous rhetoric on sustainability and green transition inspires little enthusiasm as the annual COP meetings continue to deplore inexorably rising temperatures, greenhouse gas emissions, and the combustion of fossil fuels. My overarching question in this chapter is how we might handle these irreconcilable contradictions of modern civilization that are evident in the 2020s: its urge to universalize modernity versus its awareness that this means destroying the biosphere; its pledge to abandon fossil energy versus its inability to do so; its celebration of its own progress versus its dread of extinction; its official aversion to consumerism versus its inherent injunction to consume; its advocacy for the local versus its unyielding globalization; its romantic affection for wildlife, wilderness, and indigenous peoples versus its relentless devastation of them all. The contradictions between the professed values and the unremitting trajectories of our contemporary world invite reflection. They imply either that official discourse is a mere mystification that obscures the economic or political motives of powerful people, or that the concepts of “modernity” and “capitalism” fail to capture the real driving forces of the trajectories that we deplore. It seems unlikely that the official concessions on inequalities, climate change, conservation, and so on are but a deliberate cover-up for continued devastation. The reason why public values—in support of justice, biodiversity, renewable energy, and other elusive ideals—have not won over business as usual is that the mainstream modern worldview fails to fathom what ultimately propels what we call capitalism or why it should be incompatible with justice and sustainability. To make a long story short, I have elsewhere (Hornborg 2019) traced the capitalist “system” to the aggregate injunctions of the artifact of all-purpose money. To change the logic generated by the idea of money, we must redesign that artifact itself. The logic of money is unjust and unsustainable because it inexorably generates economic polarization and accelerates the dissipation of resources. Rather than dwell on this argument and on how money might be redesigned to alleviate such tendencies (Hornborg 2017), I here consider a spectrum of approaches to the critique of modern civilization and visions of how its ecological contradictions could be overcome. I shall focus on why none of the suggested remedies is likely to give us much hope. The aim is to clear the way for a radically different understanding of the history of human civilization, inspired by the reassessments of human “progress” recently presented by James C. Scott and co-authors David Graeber and

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David Wengrow. My ultimate goal is to raise questions about how far we are prepared to go in relinquishing what we have come to know as progress in order to reinsert ourselves, as one species among others, in the organic cycles of local ecosystems. This is not to debate the (unevenly distributed) advances in human health, food security, communication, mobility, science, or harnessing of nonhuman energy—as if such advances could be entered in a balance sheet and weighed against the threat of extinction—but to assess the viability of the human species under conditions of modernity. What is required of us if we are to remain long-term components of the biosphere?

DISPELLING ILLUSIONS OF REMEDIES To most people who have seriously considered the predicament of the human species in the Anthropocene, the unavoidable conclusion is that the current trajectory of world society is unsustainable. If it is not fundamentally transformed, most of us would acknowledge, it will lead to the collapse of civilization. A substantial share of media space and national budgets are devoted to deliberations on various schemes for how to avoid such a disaster. Environmental economists have long proposed that problems can be alleviated if the “costs” of environmental damages are “internalized” in market prices, as if physical changes in ecosystems had a price that money could cover. This is a profoundly misleading notion that completely disregards the contradictory relation between the entropy law and economic processes, as elucidated by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1971). A number of heterodox economists have proposed various radical reforms of economics,2 but mainstream economists have responded with silence. Marxism has failed to dissociate itself from the productivism and technological optimism out of which it was born (Phillips 2015; Bastani 2019). Many people have hoped that the wished-for changes would result from a widespread shift toward more frugal, sustainable, and “post-consumerist” values reflected in social movements and democratic decision-making, but the tendency over the past fifty years has been diametrically opposite (Schandl et al. 2016). For decades, we have been aware of the average person’s “overshoot” and “ecological footprint” in the Global North, but such measures have only grown more alarming (Catton 1980; Rees and Wackernagel 1996; WWF 2022). Meanwhile, the world population continues to increase, expanding the number of people aspiring to modern levels of consumption. Some visionaries have hoped for a world government that would deal with injustices and unsustainability, but in 2023, a global government seems further away than ever. Ever since Schumacher and Illich, utopian thinkers have imagined localized, small-scale economies based on simpler technologies and organic agriculture

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(e.g., Schumacher 1973; Illich 1973; Mander and Goldsmith 1996; Heinberg 2007; McKibben 2007; Greer 2008, 2011; Trainer 2020; Smaje 2020), but in offering inversions of modernity, these attractive visions in effect celebrate the premodern conditions that modern economies have displaced and continue to negate. Like the currently burgeoning concept of “degrowth,” they do not clarify how the inertia of modernization and growth could be resisted or reversed. For example, even if there would be an average of 0.2 hectares of agricultural land globally available per capita, it is clearly inconceivable that the populations of the world’s megacities could be reschooled, relocated, and housed on parcels of land carved out of the endless expanses of virtually uninhabited fields now industrially cultivated with fossil energy. The industrialization of food production seems to have been irreversible. Given the threat of “peak oil” and especially climate change, the imperative of abandoning fossil energy is very widely embraced, but the feasibility of decarbonizing the entire world economy is a highly contested issue (Heinberg 2004, 2005; Kunstler 2005; Smil 2015; Murphy et al. 2021). Considering that more than 85 percent of global energy use is currently fossil and that total energy use continues to rise with modernization and population growth, it is not realistic to imagine a future world society basing most of its energy demands—of which electricity is but a fraction—on non-fossil sources. Technologies for harnessing renewable energy at that scale would require not only vast amounts of space but also absurdly huge volumes of rare earth minerals. The task of decarbonization would necessarily mean abandoning hopes of universalizing the modern, high-energy lifestyles that are conventionally seen as indexical of development. Whether leaning toward the left or the right, the so-called “ecomodernists” express faith not only in new energy technologies but also in imaginative technological solutions such as geoengineering, asteroid mining, and the colonization of other planets (Asafu-Adjaye et  al. 2015; Phillips 2015; Bastani 2019). Their recurrent mistake is to neglect the astronomic amounts of energy that would be required to mechanically draw significant amounts of carbon dioxide from the air, transport minerals from asteroids, or travel in space. In this respect, direct air capture is a fantasy of science fiction worthy of imaginative novelists like Kim Stanley Robinson (2020). A fundamental flaw in ecomodernist visions is their disregard for the huge resource requirements of the miraculous new technologies, which would often derive from the very areas that they imagine could be “rewilded” as humans retreat into their urban homes. The appropriation of resources will also generally implicate asymmetric material transfers between different social groups, to the disadvantage of extractive areas. Conventional recipes for sustainability thus offer us little hope. Neither economists, engineers, climate activists, nor back-to-the-land degrowth

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advocates persuade us that modern civilization can abandon its currently unsustainable trajectory, short of social collapse. While most people tend to repress such insights, it is not surprising that more drastic approaches emerge. Many serious analysts consider collapse to be an unavoidable scenario but anticipate social renewal beyond the envisaged disaster (Tainter 1988; Homer-Dixon 2006). Others have decided to accept or even embrace collapse (Hine and Kingsnorth 2009; Scranton 2015). Yet others have chosen to militantly confront the technological infrastructures through which capitalism usurps the planetary landscape, even advocating violence or sabotage (Kaczynski 1995, 2016; Zerzan 2002; Malm 2021). These are the lengths to which people will go to alleviate their distress over the blind inertia of modern civilization, mechanically pursuing its implacable course toward disaster. What options finally remain but to open ourselves to a complete shift of perspective on human history? Is what we thought was the universal progress of humankind merely a series of strategies for the aggrandizement of privileged elites? Such a fundamental distrust of what we are accustomed to thinking of as “civilization” can find support in the recent efforts of James C. Scott (2017), David Graeber, and David Wengrow (2021) to rethink the history of human progress. When the inevitable crisis facing modern society can no longer be denied, we must learn to think of civilization in new ways. To be able to fathom the future, we must renegotiate the past. No one has expressed this better than the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman: It is high time to start wondering: are those forms of life-in-common, known to most of us solely from ethnographic reports sent back from the few remaining niches of bygone “outdated and backward” times, irrevocably things of the past? Or is, perhaps, the truth of an alternative view of history (and so also of an alternative understanding of “progress”) about to out: that far from being an irreversible dash forward, with no retreat conceivable, the episode of chasing happiness through shops was, is and will prove to be for all practical intents and purposes a one-off detour, intrinsically and inevitably temporary? (Bauman 2012, xix)

CIVILIZATION AS THE WRONG TURN James C. Scott is an anthropologist and political scientist who has examined historical processes with a focus on how human groups have resisted various strategies by other groups to subordinate and control them. The anthropologist David Graeber and the archaeologist David Wengrow have similarly surveyed anthropological and archaeological evidence from all over the world suggesting that people over many millennia have experimented with hierarchical forms of social organization and repeatedly chosen to abandon them. What all three have in common is the recognition that the development of

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human civilization has entailed increasing economic inequalities and power asymmetries. They also appear to share the aspiration of endorsing alternative, consciously anti-hierarchical political projects. In Against the Grain, Scott focuses on the social, political, and ecological processes underlying what we tend to think of as the dawn of civilization in Mesopotamia, beginning around 5000 BCE. He reviews recent archaeological evidence on the first emergence of sedentary settlements, the domestication of plants and animals, and the rise of the earliest states. Challenging the conventional story of settled agricultural life as human progress, Scott argues that the abandonment of mobile foraging was a transition that was forced upon ancient populations against their will. It was a matter of domesticating human beings as much as other species. In other words, political elites enforced sedentary, agricultural life because it provided them with means of controlling human labor. Among the detrimental consequences for the mass of these early agriculturalists were poorer diets and health, harder work, less leisure time, and the miseries of oppression. These problems were well known and gave mobile pastoralists and hunter-gatherers good reasons to resist permanent settlement. Indeed, the ubiquitous walls built by early states served not only to keep invaders outside but also to keep the agricultural population inside. Substantial parts of the population in early states were sources of coerced labor, such as debtors, serfs, or enslaved war captives. Against the Grain sheds new light on the form of society that has dominated only 5 percent of the history of our species—yet most of its recorded history, up until the transition to fossil energy. Scott persuasively argues that the prominence of early state societies in traditional accounts of human history is largely a result of the biases of archaeological and historical research, focused on the states’ self-glorifying monumental structures and written documents, while most of the population continued to live outside the reach of tax collectors. Even the connection between sedentarism and agriculture is not as close as we usually believe, as in early Mesopotamia there were settlements of up to 5,000 inhabitants with scarcely any agriculture and, conversely, mobile groups who would settle only briefly to plant and harvest crops. The earliest sedentary settlements were in ecologically productive wetlands rather than in arid areas requiring irrigation. The traditional story of how civilization was born must thus be rewritten. The earliest states were products of political strategies aimed at controlling human populations by concentrating them in cities or tying them permanently to land, appropriating substantial parts of their labor and their harvests. The pervasive emphasis on cultivating grain reflected state strategies of measuring, taxing, transporting, and storing the products of their labor. Although there were sedentary populations practicing irrigated agriculture without a state, “there was no such thing as a state that did not rest on an alluvial, grain-farming population” (Scott

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2017, 117). Recording the flows of labor and grain was the original incentive for the development of writing, which served as an instrument for states “to move beyond sheer plunder and to more rationally extract labour and foodstuffs from their subjects” (146). Scott argues that the fragility of early states—the frequency with which they collapsed—was largely a consequence of their ecological conditions. In addition to external factors such as drought or war, early states based on urbanism and irrigated agriculture were intrinsically susceptible to the selfinduced problems of epidemics, siltation, flooding, and salinization. The epidemics that ravaged crops, livestock, and humans would have been common effects of concentrating plants, animals, and people in unprecedented ways, whereas siltation, flooding, and salinization—all leading to declining yields—were results of deforestation, erosion, and irrigation. States weakened by such conditions would have been particularly vulnerable to rebellion, invasion, or climate change. Instead of deploring the phenomenon we think of as “collapse,” however, Scott suggests that we might celebrate the recurrent fragmentation of oppressive states into their constituent settlements. What to the elites—and to archaeologists—seems like a collapse should instead often be understood as a disaggregation or dispersal that may have enhanced the well-being of the bulk of the population. To most people, the “dark ages” vilified by historians appear to have been experienced as times of escape from “war, taxes, epidemics, crop failures, and conscription” ( 217). In Scott’s view, we must also rethink the relation between civilizations and so-called barbarians, who were “simply the vast population not subject to state control” (32). During what he calls the “golden age” of the barbarians, the peoples outside the states were numerous, mobile, and independent. They successfully preyed on the food and other resources accumulated by the sedentary communities, launching raids against or demanding tribute from them (Scott calls it “protection money”). They also entered into symbiotic trade relations with them: Ranging widely in a far more diverse environment, only the barbarians could supply the necessities without which the early state could not long survive: metal ores, timber, hides, obsidian, honey, medicinals, and aromatics. The lowland kingdom was more valuable as a trade depot, in the long run, than as a site of plunder. (34)

A corollary of the early states’ strategy of controlling human labor was that the main commodity provided to them by the barbarians was slaves. The barbarians also served as mercenaries for the states. In selling other barbarians and their military service to the states, says Scott, “the barbarians contributed mightily to the decline of their brief golden age” (35). But during their golden age, barbarians were not just defined by but symbiotically linked to

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civilizations. Many were “political and economic refugees who had fled to the periphery to escape state-induced poverty, taxes, bondage, and war” (234). In raiding agricultural communities or offering them “protection” from other raiders, the barbarians at times were difficult to distinguish from early states: If we step back and widen the lens, barbarian-state relations can be seen as a contest between the two parties for the right to appropriate the surplus from the sedentary grain-and-manpower module. (242)

Intriguingly, the earliest city-states of southern Mesopotamia suggest a template for a specific urban niche that continued to preoccupy states throughout history: textile industries. The export of textiles from the city of Uruk around 3000 BCE gave its elites access to the metals and other imports that were crucial to their position. The nine thousand women coerced to work in Uruk’s textile workshops alone represented around 20 percent of the city’s inhabitants (159). Like other workers, they required rations of grain. The large-scale conversion of human labor into exchange-values used to appropriate resources from elsewhere is a familiar theme through five millennia since Uruk. Scott reflects: What if we were to examine slavery, agrarian war captives, helots, and the like as state projects to domesticate a class of human servitors—by force—much as our Neolithic ancestors had domesticated sheep and cattle? (180)

This is indeed a different way of understanding the dawn of civilization than we are accustomed to. The incentives for early state development, urbanism, and the permanent dependence on agriculture appear to have been no less predatory than those of the marauding barbarians. Moreover, in tracing the roots of industrial export production to the textile workshops in Uruk, we must reflect on the inherent aim of all urban industrialization: to gain a profit from converting manufactured goods into ever more materials from the hinterlands—that is, to appropriate increasing volumes of resources. The rations of grain distributed to nine thousand textile workers in Uruk must have represented a mere fraction of the exchange-values of the cloth that they produced, or the industry would not have been as critical to the state that supervised it. Such considerations were clearly cognate to deliberations on wages in British textile factories five millennia later. THE MYSTIFICATION OF ENLIGHTENMENT Turning to The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow, we find a similarly critical approach to what mainstream accounts refer to as

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the progress of civilization. The authors are as prepared as Scott to question conventional narratives that present civilization as an improvement of the human condition, compared to what went before. Drawing on a vast range of historical and archaeological cases, they argue that, prior to the establishment of stratified, urban civilizations, human populations in many parts of the world self-consciously chose to reject hierarchical forms of social organization. They often did so after having experimented with such social forms, sometimes by shifting between hierarchy and egalitarianism on a seasonal basis. Rather than unwittingly participating in the development of hierarchical civilizations, people were reluctantly coerced into permanently living under such conditions. The fundamental question that Graeber and Wengrow repeatedly raise is, “How did we get stuck?” (Graeber and Wengrow 2021, 115, 119, 140, 503, 519). In other words, through what social and cultural processes did people who were used to living in egalitarian societies become compelled to accept permanent inequalities? Like Scott, Graeber, and Wengrow reinterpret tribal, non-state societies as “people who systematically avoided fixed, overarching systems of authority” (382). Their ambition is to retell human history from the perspective of periods and places not dominated by such systems, like the “dark age” following the abrupt abandonment of the city of Cahokia on the Mississippi River around AD 1350 (452, 469). This means treating the rejection of phenomena like urbanism or slavery as just as significant as their emergence (523). It also suggests a reinterpretation of the many ethnographic descriptions of seasonal shifts between egalitarian and hierarchical—and dispersed versus concentrated—forms of social organization, for instance, among the Nambikwara, Inuit, Kwakiutl, and indigenous tribes of the Great Plains (106–111).3 Scott has suggested that the state itself, in much of the world, was a “seasonal institution” (Scott 2017, 15). From a longer-term perspective, even the historical rises and falls of civilizations can in some cases be understood as experiments with hierarchical forms of social organization that, after a time, yield to self-conscious egalitarianism. In addition to Cahokia, Graeber and Wengrow mention the abandonment of Teotihuacán in AD 550 and its successors in central Mexico (Graeber and Wengrow 2021, 345) as well as the periodic breakdown of state authority in ancient Egypt (416–417). Some prehistoric peoples also appear to have consciously abandoned cultivation and reverted to foraging (105–106, 254). Such deliberate rejection of undesirable forms of social life can also account for cases where neighboring peoples have chosen diametrically opposite modes of existence, not simply as markers of ethnic identity but as reflecting convictions about how people should relate to one another (105–106, 254). Examples may include the “anti-agricultural” and egalitarian indigenous peoples of California in relation to the agricultural peoples in the adjacent Southwest (165)

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and to the hierarchical, slaving societies of the Northwest Coast (207). A similarly deliberate contrast may explain the difference between the imperial Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan and the considerably more democratic city-state of Tlaxcala (349). Archaeological evidence from several sites in Ukraine, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and central Mexico suggests that some of the earliest cities may have emerged without any significant concentration of elite power (322, 358). The myriad cases discussed by Graeber and Wengrow suggest an ambivalence about hierarchy that not only pervades the history of human societies but continues to polarize the critics and defenders of civilization (115, 495). This polarization is highlighted by the indigenous American critique of European society in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The meeting of European and Amerindian cultures prompted both sides to reflect on the differences between them (61–62). Although generally treated as European constructions used to challenge the authoritarian establishment, Enlightenment references to the wisdom of the “noble savage” reflected a genuine and incisive Amerindian critique of the abysmal inequalities of European society. Graeber and Wengrow write: No doubt it would be too much to suggest that the Enlightenment itself had its first stirrings in seventeenth-century North America. But it’s possible, perhaps, to imagine some future non-Eurocentric history where such a suggestion would not be treated as almost by definition outrageous and absurd. (473)

In other words, the intimation is that the lofty Enlightenment ideals that we think of as products of civilization may originally have derived from people who Europeans at the time considered to be uncivilized savages. HOW DID WE GET STUCK IN CIVILIZATION? Graeber and Wengrow’s narrative of human history traces several millennia of human ambivalence about hierarchy. Their several quotations from indigenous American critiques of European society repeatedly emphasize that its detestable inequalities derive from money (52, 54–55, 58). However, apart from some insightful but scattered reflections on the social consequences of money, Graeber and Wengrow present no systematic argument to the effect that the artifact of money may be the answer to their overarching (but unanswered) question, “How did we get stuck?” This is doubly perplexing, considering that Graeber had previously written a monumental volume exposing the insidious cultural logic of money (Graeber 2011), and that the authors cite Marshall Sahlins’ observation that indigenous societies today almost always

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contrast their own cultures to “the white man’s ‘living in the way of money’” (Graeber and Wengrow 2021, 58). But if we take the indigenous critique seriously and combine it with Graeber and Wengrow’s scattered reflections on the cultural peculiarities of money, it is indeed possible to implicate the artifact of all-purpose money in a potential answer to their most fundamental question. According to the French Baron de la Hontan, the indigenous (Wendat) sage Kandiaronk at one point in the 1690s said to him: I affirm that what you call money is the devil of devils; the tyrant of the French, the source of all evils; the bane of souls and slaughterhouse of the living. . . . Money is the father of luxury, lasciviousness, intrigues, trickery, lies, betrayal, insincerity, of all the world’s worst behaviour. (54–55)

Referring to Graeber’s earlier work on money, Graeber and Wengrow elsewhere note that the administrative power of early empires “is almost always accompanied by some kind of system of equivalence run amok” (425). They note that “[b]oth money and administration are based on similar principles of impersonal equivalence” (emphasis in original). What money and bureaucracy have in common is that they make people interchangeable—and their own, often cruel repercussions unnegotiable. In agreement with Scott, Graeber and Wengrow note that the significance of grain in the early states was that it was an ideal basis for taxation. “Like money,” they continue, “grain allows a certain form of terrifying equivalence” (444). The notion of abstract equivalence—or abstraction, for short—had major implications not only for the organization of economies and administration but also for human thought. Between the eighth and third centuries BC, new schools of philosophy emerged in cities in Greece, India, and China that had recently adopted coined money (450).4 This was also a period when chattel slavery spread over much of Eurasia. It seems that the potential economic and cultural repercussions of monetary equivalence, having first been conceptualized in the grain states of southern Mesopotamia, were deeply entrenched in different parts of the Old World in what Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age. The history of money should thus not be approached merely as a matter of how goods and services are exchanged but in terms of its wider implications for culture, cognition, and politics. In organizing the late eighteenth-century world economy, it even provided the foundation for modern, market-based technology. I am finally perplexed by how lightly Graeber and Wengrow treat Kandiaronk’s indictment of money. All-purpose money is an obvious answer to their question, “How did we get stuck?” At times, they come very close to such a conclusion, but rather than an explicit proposal they provide

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tantalizing hints. Paradoxically, their reluctance to identify money as the root of our troubles may be the flip side of their book’s main shortcoming: its next to complete disregard of material aspects of social life. Its several hundred pages make very little mention of ecology, energy, technology, or even material artifacts. The impression we are left with is that what counts are people’s ideas, values, and visions about social life, not the material conditions that prompt or coerce them into accepting certain kinds of social relations. Given their idealist approach, Graeber and Wengrow do not discuss how the circulation of monetary signs can bring about the ecological changes, energy flows, and technologies that, while almost completely neglected in their account, can be assumed to have played crucial roles in the development of the societies they mention. In this respect, there is a big difference between the accounts of early state development in Mesopotamia provided by Scott, on the one hand, and the authors of The Dawn of Everything, on the other. Whereas Scott consistently emphasizes the influence of material factors such as ecology, epidemiology, and the features of particular domesticants, Graeber and Wengrow focus on contrasting cultural values. To be sure, Graeber and Wengrow are as critical of civilization as are its countless dissidents throughout history: There is no doubt that something has gone terribly wrong with the world. A very small percentage of its population do control the fates of almost everyone else, and they are doing it in an increasingly disastrous fashion. (Graeber and Wengrow 2021, 76)

However, there is no indication in their book that what has gone wrong with the world has anything to do with biophysical things like ecology, climate, or resource flows. There thus seems to be a final chapter missing in their new history of humanity—a chapter on modern technology. It would show how the artifact of money from the eighteenth century got us all “stuck” in an increasingly unequal global system of resource flows. These asymmetric social exchange relations are organized (and obscured) by money and continuously reinforced by the uneven accumulation of technological infrastructure that they make possible. Graeber and Wengrow’s narrative seems to end with the Enlightenment, before the Industrial Revolution and the abolition of slavery. To explain how we got “stuck” in the obscenely unequal modern world, we must reconceptualize what happened subsequently. We must rethink what the artifacts of money and machines have been doing since the nineteenth century, through the expansion of “enlightened” European modernity, to solidify global inequalities.

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CONCLUSIONS I introduced this chapter with a brief overview of current discourse on how to alleviate the social and ecological contradictions of modern civilization. My discomforting conclusion was that none of the proposed remedies would be likely to prevent collapse. The predicament of seeing collapse as inevitable must prompt a radical shift of perspective on human history. I suggested that two books that are useful in supporting such a shift are James C. Scott’s Against the Grain and David Graeber’s and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything. Between the lines of their scrutiny of archaeological and ethnographical sources, we may sense the possibility of a different kind of existence: unmodern, even uncivilized, but much more aligned with our human constitution since hundreds of thousands of years. Ever since the Enlightenment, it has been evoked, sometimes ridiculed, in the image of the “noble savage,” which today reverberates in concepts such as “indigenousness,” “decoloniality,” and the “pluriverse.” We do not quite yet know what it would mean, but we can share the hope that many years from now, some of our descendants will find a way of more modestly integrating their lives in the organic communities of living beings, as one lifeform among many.

NOTES 1. Parts of this chapter overlap with Chapter 11 of my book The Magic of Technology (Hornborg 2023). 2. Some prominent examples from recent decades are Herman Daly, Margrit Kennedy, Richard Douthwaite, Lester Brown, Bernard Lietaer, Peter Victor, Tim Jackson, Steve Keen, Anitra Nelson, Mary Mellor, Kate Raworth, and Giorgos Kallis. 3. In such seasonal shifts, however, there is no clear correlation between hierarchy and settlement size: for instance, whereas the Nambikwara and Inuit were more authoritarian when communities dispersed, the Great Plains societies were most hierarchical during the winter gatherings (Graeber and Wengrow 2021, 114–115). 4. Richard Seaford (2004) has traced the extensive cognitive repercussions of money in ancient Greece.

REFERENCES Asafu-Adjaye, John, Linus Blomqvist, Stewart Brand, Barry Brook, Ruth DeFries, Erle Ellis, Christopher Foreman et  al. 2015. An Ecomodernist Manifesto. http:// www.ecomodernism.org Bastani, Aaron. 2019. Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto. London: Verso.

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Bauman, Zygmunt. 2012. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity. Catton, William R., Jr. 1980. Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Commoner, Barry. 1971. The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology. New York: Knopf. Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas. 1971. The Entropy Law and the Economic Process. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn: Melville House. Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. 2021. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. London: Allen Lane. Greer, John M. 2008. The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers. Greer, John M. 2011. The Wealth of Nature: Economics as if Survival Mattered. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers. Heinberg, Richard. 2004. Power Down: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers. Heinberg, Richard. 2005. The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers. Heinberg, Richard. 2007. Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers. Hine, Dougald, and Paul Kingsnorth. 2009. “Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto.” The Dark Mountain Project. http://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/ Homer-Dixon, Thomas. 2006. The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization. Washington, DC: Island Press. Hornborg, Alf. 2017. “How to Turn an Ocean Liner: A Proposal for Voluntary Degrowth by Redesigning Money for Sustainability, Justice, and Resilience.” Journal of Political Ecology 24: 623–632. Hornborg, Alf. 2019. Nature, Society, and Justice in the Anthropocene: Unraveling the Money-Energy-Technology Complex. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hornborg, Alf. 2023. The Magic of Technology: The Machine as a Transformation of Slavery. London: Routledge. Illich, Ivan. 1973. Tools for Conviviality. New York: Harper & Row. Kaczynski, Theodore. 1995. “The Unabomber Manifesto: Industrial Society and Its Future.” The Washington Post, September 19, 1995. Kaczynski, Theodore. 2016. Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How. Scottsdale, AZ: Fitch & Madison. Kunstler, James H. 2005. The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century. New York: Grove Press. Malm, Andreas. 2021. How to Blow Up a Pipeline. London: Verso. Mander, Jerry, and Edward Goldsmith, eds. 1996. The Case Against the Global Economy and For a Turn Toward the Local. San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books. McKibben, Bill. 2007. Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.

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Murphy, Tom W., D. J. Murphy, T. F. Love, M. L. A. LeHew, and B. J. McCall. 2021. “Modernity is Incompatible with Planetary Limits: Developing a PLAN for the Future.” Energy Research & Social Science 81, 102239. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629621003327 Phillips, Leigh. 2015. Austerity Ecology & The Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence of Growth, Progress, Industry and Stuff. Winchester: Zero Books. Robinson, Kim S. 2020. The Ministry for the Future. London: Orbit. Schandl, Heinz, Marina Fischer-Kowalski, James West, Stefan Giljum, M. Dittrich, Nina Eisenmenger, Arne Geschke, M. Lieber, Hanspeter Wieland, Anke Schaffartzik, Fridolin Krausmann, S. Gierlinger, K. Hosking, Manfred Lenzen, Hiroki Tanikawa, Alessio Miatto, and Tomer Fishman. 2016. Global Material Flows and Resource Productivity: Assessment Report for the UNEP International Resource Panel. Paris: United Nations Environment Programme. Schumacher, Ernst F. 1973. Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered. New York: Harper & Row. Scott, James C. 2017. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Scranton, Roy. 2015. Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books. Seaford, Richard. 2004. Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smaje, Chris. 2020. Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity, and a Shared Earth. London: Chelsea Green Publishing. Smil, Vaclav. 2015. Power Density: A Key to Understanding Energy Sources and Uses. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Tainter, Joseph A. 1988. The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trainer, Ted. 2020. The Simpler Way: Collected Writings of Ted Trainer. Edited by S. Alexander and J. Rutherford. Simplicity Institute. Wackernagel, Mathis, and William Rees. 1996. Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers. WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature). 2022. Living Planet Report 2022. Gland: WWF. Zerzan, John. 2002. Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization. Los Angeles, CA: Feral House.

Chapter 8

Ecoliteracies Epistemic Habits and Critical Knowledge between Arts and Science Research Giulia Bellinetti, Tamalone van den Eijnden, and Jeff Diamanti

This chapter proposes the concept of ecoliteracy to name the forms of knowledge and agency currently emerging at the epistemic intersection of arts and science research practice, and it does so through the lens of tacit and embedded modes of meaning making uniquely relevant to the analytic and political concerns of the environmental humanities. What we mean to draw attention to are the specific forms of knowledge about ecological processes that emerge specifically through artistic and humanistic orientations toward lively materialities. In other words, ecoliteracy names practical relations of embedded reading and writing practices; practices that should be understood as literate regardless of scientific description or designation. In the short case studies provided here, these materialities include reactive and bio animate sculpture and textile, as well as a humanistic style of reading with botanical lab science and biological theory. These are only two short instances where ecoliteracy helps to distinguish between a range of epistemic habits of thought, but they are the kinds of practices that increasingly get foregrounded in higher education in the environmental humanities as well as the arts-science collaborations working at the community level in environments experiencing legible impacts of anthropogenic climate change. There are much larger cultural archives intimated here, as well as a rapidly growing bibliography of scholarly literature about artistic and creative research (or in the North American context, “research generation”),1 but we noticed that the forms of knowledge and practical agency unique to this orientation toward ecological processes had not been treated as a question of literacy (even if in pedagogical and epistemological terms, much of 113

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how humanities scholars and artists come to co-create ecological knowledge occurs through a caring and curious mode of experiential learning). “Literacy” carries a lot of normative baggage. Historically allied with hierarchical metrics convergent with class and ethnic privilege in colonial and white-supremacist discourses associated with civilizational curricula and pedagogical discipline, literacy insinuates a regulative process involving both norm building and norm verification at the level of educational apparatuses designed to optimize specific ambitions of nineteenth-century bildung. That is not the kind of literacy we have in mind here, though a critical engagement with the scientific and cultural traditions historically responsible for reading ecological complexity is certainly a key feature of what we include in the potential parameters of today’s ecoliteracy. Drawing from over a decade of university teaching, field research, and curatorial practice in museums and art academies, we mean to recognize what is already being practiced in a range of ostensibly disconnected but epistemically complementary communities of creative researchers. Our interest here is in reflecting on a largely latent concept of tacit understanding in the humanistic and social sciences by studying grounded, situated, and vernacular knowledge of ecology; knowledge proving crucial for empowering communities in their experience of both anthropogenic climate change and ongoing environmental racism and toxic colonialities. Literacy here will mean not a normative metric of comprehension or ability based on state-level testing, but instead a cumulative and reflective understanding of the unique ethical affordances and pressures of a given scene of world-building. No less empirical for its emphases on situated particularities, we mean to propose a concept of literacy about ecology and an ecology of knowledge practices that is practically idiographic and therefore not regulated by a nomothetic domain of meaning. In a seminar room studying the elemental alterity of carbon molecules in Anaïs Tondeur’s “Carbon Black” series, or in an artist studio studying the microbiology of soil semiosis, or in an experimental laboratory learning from botanical semiotics, nobody is asking whether the photograph, the installation, or the plant’s interpretation are true or false. Instead, the epistemic orientation in environmental humanities and creative ecologies research is toward the question of how meaning is made in a particular context of multispecies collaboration. Asking after the how of meaning making, instead of the question of what a thing is or which laws explain its properties, requires an ethics of interpretation that deliberatively invites an epistemic porosity between subjects and objects of knowledge—“thinking like a mountain,” like a krill, or the endocrine disruptors leaching off Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCB) treated office windows and into the lipid tissues of fish and those that subsist on their protein.2 Across the overlapping disciplines informing the field of environmental humanities research, questions of literacy are largely

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addressed through the tension between legibility and interpretation. Rob Nixon, for instance, frames the “environmentalism of the poor” as a reading practice that runs at odds with state- and corporate-centered hermeneutics of environmental risk and harm. This opposition is crucial since the kinds of ecological dynamics often tacitly experienced in communities materially exposed to toxic negligence require a time-sensitive and embodied form of reading in order to counter the algebra of “permissible threshold” deployed to turn bodies into statistics. “Attritional catastrophes,” Nixon explains, “that overspill clear boundaries in time and space are marked above all by displacements—temporal, geographical, rhetorical, and technological displacements that simplify violence and underestimate, in advance and retrospect, the human and environmental costs” (2011: 7). Spilling out across circumscribed units of space, time, and indeed bodies allows for environmental exposures to toxins and ecological violence to go unseen and to escape the legal parameters of violence and responsibility, especially when the toxicological manifestation of exposure results from long-term bioaccumulation and amplification far removed from the scene of the crime. Nixon thus shifts attention away from an event-based concept of violence in order to elaborate on the forms of reading that poor and disadvantaged communities practice in their fight to counter the epistemic constraints of legal and corporate amnesia. This fight involves a reading practice attentive to time-sensitive narrative categories common in literary and aesthetic thinking, since “to engage slow violence is to confront layered predicaments of apprehension: to apprehend—to arrest, or at least mitigate—often imperceptible threats requires rendering them apprehensible to the senses through the work of scientific and imaginative testimony” (2011: 14). Crucial here is the double movement of reading and writing with the empirical sense-ability of ecological realities that require immersive and tacit forms of knowledge over time. To render the biotic metabolization and embodied relations that accumulate and indeed animate the lived realities of grounded culture involves a range of vernacular reading practices, including knowledge of seasonal vegetation and hydrological patterns, as well as a haptic taste for molecular modifications to food, drinking water, and botanical entanglements. This kind of rendering apprehensible through the interplay of shared knowledge of a place and attention to what is particular (and perhaps shifting) in that place, and a witnessing of that knowledge over time, bridges reading and writing in the vernaculars of ecoliteracy. Finding creative and often aesthetic modes to tacitly apprehend “sights unseen” troubles the normative gaze otherwise claiming monopoly on empirical ecology, and “entails facing the challenge, at once imaginative and scientific, of giving the unapparent a materiality upon which we can act” (2011: 15–16). At once practical and disruptive, thinking about ecoliteracy as a mode of dialogical interpretation simultaneous to living in and building

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worlds puts more stress on the literariness of literacy and grounds different metrics of empiricism in the epistemic worlds of embodied culture. In a resonant and complimentary account of How Climate Change Comes to Matter, environmental communications specialist Candis Callison weds this form of practical and engaged knowledge to what Wittgenstein argued were the social parameters of authority as activated authentication. Proposing “vernacular” knowledge as the domain of this action-oriented process of meaning making, Callison means to “differentiate the ways in which climate change is multiply instantiated as heterogenous, interconnected, and related forms of life, but also to point to the ways in which discourse is a materialsemiotic practice experienced and generated through multiple mediated and non-mediated means and human and nonhuman participants” (2014: 25). At stake in reading vernacular knowledge as knowledge is the often-shorthanded assumptions underwriting efforts to increase scientific literacy in efforts to combat misinformation and denialism, but the idea that climate change and its variegated impacts on lived ecologies rest on the fact/fiction spectrum betrays the semiotic negotiations from which all knowledge and logic (to return to Wittgenstein) unfold. Science and technology studies scholars such as Sheila Jasanoff have long argued that this negotiated inflection to the meaning of a fact (and indeed the determination of a fact) is not unique to non-scientific community but extends to lab- and model-based sciences too (2004: 2). Bridging the contested gap between a realist and constructivist frame, Callison is able to think with what might seem like paradoxical contexts through which climate comes to matter, such as in evangelical communities in the US South or corporate social responsibility (CSR) debates—paradoxical because the orthodox view in environmental politics is that these types of communities either do not know their science adequately or for epistemic biases are actively denying its facticity. On the contrary, thinking about the vernacular grammars and lexical concerns through which meaning is made in such communities leads to a critical insight into how the description of empirical fact and the interpretation of its meaning are never settled matters (and how consensus and action often betray normative expectation). Attention to the interpretive frameworks brought to make sense of empirical facts has long oriented linguistic and humanistic analysis, but by proposing “ecoliteracy” we are suggesting that a range of grounded and creative forms of meaning making ought to be considered as empirically meaningful, and that further study into how ecoliteracy is practiced in shared in artistic community ought to be resourced in university education and research. Indeed, the very origins of the environmental movement in Rachel Carson’s still seminal intervention into the postwar imaginary stem from a combined effort to vernacularize empirical studies of early toxicology and life sciences and the narrative creativity required to make the slow and largely

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“silent” violence of chemical contamination apprehensible in the wake of industrial chemistry and agriculture. Combining pastoral, popular science, and a chemo-cultural lexicon of sub-individual modes of molecular and metabolic interpretation practiced across an ecosystem’s trophic chain, Carson’s contribution to environmental politics doubles as a literary act, and the literary act of Silent Spring politicizes the fictional neutrality of empirical science. It is no accident that Nixon, Callison, and so many other contemporary scholars of environmental humanities trace a line from the epistemic cultures of environmental justice to the figurative language underwriting Carson’s public impact in the 1960s—to what Nixon terms the poetics of “temporal camouflage” and “belatedness” (2011: 210) unleashed by Carson’s attention to “biomagnification and toxic drift, forms of oblique, slow-acting violence that, like climate change, pose formidable imaginative difficulties for writers and activists alike” (10). We recognize in this archive of writing and meaning making a number of iterative patterns that inform the creative and collaborative efforts actualizing vernacular knowledge—specifically knowledge of how meaning is made with and in an ecological culture—whether in the lab, studio, or field—and the two case studies we introduce next are meant to help establish some of the provisional terms of analysis and affordance of ecoliteracies. First, we introduce a range of artistic practices involved in textile and ecodesign work in the context of the Future Materials Bank at the Jan van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands—practices that forward new perspectives on the functional and aesthetic affordances of botanically generated fibers for a world inundated with hydrocarbon materialities. Second, we consider the more-than-human literacies of plant bodies inspired by interdisciplinary conversations in the context of the Netherlands-based research group that investigates plasticity across different organisms. While our case studies are obviously non-exhaustive, our ambition is to help build out the citational record available to researchers and artists seeking an epistemological environment for collaborative inquiry.

TACIT SPROUTINGS, EPISTEMIC TEXTURES In the vast diversity of the processes of making, the inert world of matter presents itself to the maker as a surface to be transformed according to conceptual forms, emerging from the human creative mind. Cultural imagination envelopes itself around a separate universe of material substances; it transforms their surfaces butnever penetrates them. The Kantian separation between the brute world of matter and the conceptual forms that are impressed on it reflects the metaphysical divide that supported the affirmation of scientific paradigms above other kinds of epistemic practices. In

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this metaphysical order, culture and materials do not mix. In his essay “On Weaving a Basket,” anthropologist Tim Ingold departs from these considerations to problematize and eventually subvert their inherent logic. An artifact “comes into being through the gradual unfolding of that field of forces set up through the active and sensuous engagement of practitioner and material” (2011: 339), he argues. One of the authors of this chapter has had the chance to observe and learn about these sensuous engagements in the context of her involvement in the Future Materials program at the Jan van Eyck Academie. The Future Materials program supports research and disseminates knowledge on sustainable material alternatives for art and design practices. It includes an online material archive, a physical material lab, a fellowship program for young material researchers, and a series of workshops, talks, and educational activities. In the stories artists and designers shared with her, it is possible to recognize manifestations of the practice of ecoliteracy as we are outlining it in this chapter. Interrelations between materials and the formal results of the fields that shape them are central to creative practices of making. Forms of objects in an environment grow from “a field of forces,” where animal, vegetal, material, and human forces are mutually involved. As Nixon maintains, material agentic forces, toxicities, and other environmental narratives often unfold in such minute scales or through such slow rhythms that escape human conceptions of time and space. Creative material-making practices, as forms and sources of vernacular knowledge, are ways to engage in attentive readings of the situated material rhythms that shape landscapes. Anthropologist Anna Tsing reminds us of the importance of delving into these rhythms to learn and practice the arts of living on a damaged planet (Tsing 2017: G11, 2021: 34). A specific sense of intimacy (Haraway 2016: 60) arising from the immersion in more-than-human rhythms, is something experienced in vernacular knowledges and diverse disciplines whose work is centered on direct and sustained interaction with organic or inorganic materials (Myers 2015: 47–48; Kirksey and Helmreich 2010: 551; van Dooren, Kirksey, and Münster 2016: 7). Researchers in life or physical sciences, artists, craft(wo)men, farmers, and many others feel they often live and work between different temporalities, human and not. The persistency of their engagement with specific material configurations makes the site of their work central. Labs, studios, workshops, or fields become intimate spaces where environmental rhythms gradually become legible and perceptible. Presenting here a number of material practices in the fields of arts and design that follow specific materialities through laboratories, workshops, studios, fields, and wild spaces, we hope to exemplify the different modes in which ecoliteracy is practiced. In the current context of ecological collapse, there is an increasing concern for the social and environmental impact of art and design practices. An

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increasing number of artists and designers are developing, reviving, or experimenting with materials that would be generally called “sustainable” (“Future Materials Bank”). Most of these materials are closely bound to a specific environment or to situated crafts that have been gradually built by communities in a sustained engagement with a specific locality. These materials are tools for artists and designers to engage meaningfully with the contexts in which they operate. If vernacular forms of knowledge are built through attentive and sustained engagements with a field, in material experimentations, repetitive mundane rituals such as feeding and watering, retting and turning, monitoring growth, and facilitating biological rhythms in studios and labs, become epistemic habits. While busy in these routine activities, practitioners partake in nonhuman temporalities. The mind slows down, and the bodily sensorium becomes attuned to the temporalities of material transformations. Mutually involved in a field of relationalities with the materials (Ingold 2011: 342, 2010: 7), human practitioners sometimes confess to having developed a sense for the temperament of their material. Rather than being a projection of anthropomorphic qualities on the materials (van Dooren, Kirksey, and Münster 2016: 7), the perception of material temperament is a precognitive sensation of how biological materials might or might not respond to certain conditions and forces. Sharing insights into her research on pigments derived from the blue elf cup fungus, material designer Liene Kazaka tells the struggles of understanding bacteria-fungi conflicts in the ecology of a petridish (Kazaka 2022). Blue elf cup, or Chlorociboria aeruginascens according to the conventional scientific nomenclature, colors its growing surfaces with a bright green-blue pigment. Fascinated by its shades, Kazaka decides to explore the possibilities of working with fungi in the production of pigments and to start growing a blue elf cup culture in her lab. She takes a blue-colored piece of wood from a forest and brings it to her lab. Regulating humidity, temperature, and light, she follows the biological scientific literature to enfold the log and its fungal guest in an artificial atmosphere of care, which eventually leads to an unexpected result. Under the beneficial conditions created by the designer, other fungi, which inhabited the log without being visible to the human eye, started growing, sprouting into mushroom forms and soon prevailing on the blue elf cup. After many attempts of growing her desired blueproducing fungus, Kazaka learned that blue elf cup is a very delicate fungus, which is easily subsumed by bacteria or other fungi. With benevolent humor, Kazaka describes her fungal companion as a “princess” or a “lazy guy” that requires dedication, care, and attention to grow. The multiple temporalities and affective modes of material research transform these projects into journeys in which humans and materials are companions (Haraway 2003: 4; Natasha Myers 2015: 41). Abla el Bahrawy is an artist based in Amsterdam, who conducts long-term research on the cultural,

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social, economic, and political significance of papyrus. In her research, el Bahrawy combines archival and museological research, visits to paper production and printing facilities, interviews with historians, curators, crafts(wo) men,3 and direct involvement in making, printing, and coloring papyrus paper. When she started exploring the world of papyrous, el Bahrawy did not expect this plant to become so entangled with her life. In her studio, I could see papyrus plants, stems, and leaves in different stages of the drying process, as well as a collection of paper samples. At the time, she feels the plant actively participates in her research by drawing her attention toward specific directions and possibilities, rather than others. Her artistic research project has become a multispecies quest. The texture or the structural properties of materials can help to interpret environmental manifestations, such as contamination, droughts, or even migration (Ingold 2011: 12). Their colors, the smoothness of their surfaces, or the density of their structure tell stories of environmental disruptions and provide suggestions for future possibilities. Transforming papyrus stems, into threads and weaving them together, el Bahwary started noticing how meanings are produced by and incorporated into botanical bodies. She learned to connect the color nuances, the stiffness or fragility of the stem, and the different lengths of the fibers to the different environments where the plants have grown, to the climatic shifts they have experienced, as well as the planetary journeys they have traveled under the rule of capital.4 Forms account for small and entangled environmental rhythms gradually built into materials’ structural properties. Slowing down and paying attention to the material world are ways of practicing ecoliteracy in times of ecological emergency. Anna Tsing states that “landscapes enact more-than-human rhythms, to follow these rhythms, we need new histories and descriptions” (Tsing 2017: G12). Some of these stories are told in colors, textures, and volumes. Material forms are stories interwoven by human and material agencies. They are manifestations of an autopoiesis process, according to Ingold (Ingold 2011: 345). Artisans, artists, and designers are involved in the same system as the materials they work with; their activity does not transform that system; it is part and parcel of the transformation of the system itself. There is inherent reciprocity in human-material relations, which can be literally and metaphorically caught if we think of the haptic quality of creative processes of making. The idiosyncratic quality of touch, which differentiates this sense from all the others, is its reciprocal character. “When we touch, we are always touched in return” maintains science and technology scholar Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017: 96). Similarly, designers who are reviving ancient techniques to work with vegetal fibers from flax and nettles, talk about how the manual manipulation of the stems is an arduous, but also important, moment to understand the material.

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The Linen Project aims to reactivate the economic viability of small-scale local flax cultivation and linen production in the Netherlands, promoting the inherent connections within and between (cultural) heritage, education, agriculture, design, crafts, and the economy (“The Linen Project,” a). Most of the process of linen production is made with ancient techniques. In the porosity of touch, bodily membranes and vegetal tissues exchange sensorial and affective meanings in a relational process of knowing. This is particularly evident in the scutching and hackling phases when the fibers are passed through a metal comb to eliminate the last wood components of the stems. The rhythmic action of hackling has the intimacy of combing hairs, and reacting to this gesture of care the fibers start softening and slowly releasing their silver tone (“The Linen Project,” b). These bodily exchanges with the material field exemplify how ecoliteracy shifts the emphasis of the epistemic discourse from production to ambiguous reception (Oosterling. In: Braidotti and Hlavajova, 2018: 123). Haptic experiencing allows the perception of the imperceivable politics of every day (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017: 99). Bodily engagement with materials such as the ones described above, unveils the existence of another world, a world in the making before “events” become visible. In this sense, haptic experiences occurring between the material and the human are world-making gestures; they create minute and ephemeral realities, promises of future worlds. In what follows, we will further examine the possibility of understanding the existence of another world, when this otherness bypasses the conscious haptic experience that in this section was described as the interface between humans and the more-than-human world. This poses the question of how we can read the epistemic habits of bodies that are utterly different from us.

KNOWING FRUITS, LITERATE ROOTS While a couple of sunsets ago, everything felt fresh at the outer edges— soft, sensitive, permeable—now, there was the slow shiver of an acidic realization. The signs were clear. And then, while the outer skin thickened, the message was internalized and change was apprehended. The days of unworried self-development were over. Emergency is when the days are dry. Emergency is anatomical withering and architectural adaptation. And now, all energy is directed to those who come after.5

We are at a loss of words when imaging the experience of the phenomenon that biologists in fields such as environmental signaling, plant physiology, and agrotechnology would describe as anatomical plasticity in the outer layers of a root: the epidermis, exodermis, and cortex (Calvo-Polancoet et  al.

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2021: 2295; Karlova et al. 2021: 1061). Biologists are only starting to understand now the acclimation processes in the epidermis and exodermis, that can regulate plant’s water uptake by coating their cell-walls with a deposition of water-repellent suberin, the main component of cork (Karlova et  al. 2021: 1061; Shoaib et al. 2022: 7). Plasticity describes the ability of plants to intelligently read their environment and respond to the environment within their own lifecycle to ensure survival and lower metabolic cost (Shoaib et al. 2022: 4). Plant physiologists describe how the stress of drought induces the plant to release abscisic acid (ABA), a plant hormone that signals environmental stresses like drought, instigating the sealing of the outer layer of the root, so that the water and nutrients inside the root remain protected and do not permeate back into the drying earth (Karlova et  al. 2021: 1058, 1061). As environmental conditions are increasingly unpredictable and with droughts on the rise, scientists express an increased urgency to understand how plants survive in uncertain environmental conditions (Colombi et  al. 2019: 2049; Karlova et al. 2021: 1057; Siddiqui et al. 2020: 1007). While uncertainty becomes increasingly a strategic research interest in the current political-environmental climate, it has always been part of life for organisms. As Italian ecologist Almo Farina puts it in Ecosemiotic Landscapes (2021): Uncertainty is a common experience of the environment for species, caused by the unpredictability of external events or produced by internal processes. For every species, reducing uncertainty is strategic for maintaining the ability to adapt and thus reducing the risk of extinction. (6)

To Farina, with such uncertainty, information is “the currency exchanged between the system and organisms” (Farina 2021: 9). In plant biology these signaling capabilities are mostly understood as “brainless” chemical reactions that simply follow given triggers. This however, does not turn it into a simple process. To plant biologists, the multitude of triggers overlaid with previously learned knowledge build intricate and complex networks, just like the chemical reactions in the brain. Besides being admirable responsive entities from a biologist’s point of view, other realms of inquiry allow for different perspectives. For example, the artistic practice of Liene Kazaka and Abla el Bahrawy, allows to understand the plant bodies they are working with as knowledgeable informants of the environments they epistemically inhabit. Biochemical insights into how plants process and respond to environmental signals, also invites us—from a humanities perspective—to ask philosophical questions about meaning: Can we understand a plant’s signaling activity as one specific instantiation of a process of ecological semiosis, where biochemical information exchange is about meaning making? And how does the recognition that plants read and respond to their

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environment, provide a new perspective on human processes of meaning making, including what we have proposed as ecoliteracy so far? In the remainder of this chapter, we will show how thinking about ecoliteracy through the meaning making of plants allows to further develop the concept of ecoliteracy from the perspective of more-than-human alterity. For this purpose, we will first show how plasticity is a semiotic process as it involves a partial representation of the world that is meaningful by virtue of its embodiment. This embodiment, we will further show, allows for sensing cues across species while simultaneously preventing perfect translation of information, thus always maintaining an element of otherness. Placing more-than-human otherness at the core of ecoliteracy is relevant because it counters the historically objectifying tendency of Greek alphabetic literacy and cautions against instrumentalizing appropriations of the concept in favor of more open-ended practices of listening. The concept of ecoliteracy presents an effort to recover important aspects of knowing and relating to the world that were lost with the emergence of a specific kind of symbolic literacy,—a development US-American cultural ecologist and philosopher David Abram observes with the Greek alphabet as it evolved from Semitic annotation systems. Abram notes that the Greek alphabet no longer contains a pictorial or phonetic relation to the world it represents—which he connects to the moment when philosophy became more concerned with stable truths, truths that would hold regardless of context as first manifest in the legacy of Socrates ([1996] 2012: 102, 111–112). That is, Abram sees a relation between the disassociation of the written letter and the world and the disassociation of ideas from the narrator and the specific context in which they were iterated ([1996] 2012: 109–115). This disassociation continues to reverberate through much of the philosophy that is often referred to as “Western thinking,” which is a way of referring to a body of thought that is neither original nor uniform, that, however may serve as a shorthand to refer to a dominant school of thought that pushed animistic and vitalist cosmologies to the peripheries of valuable knowledge ([1996] 2012: 93–95). As Indian writer Ghosh instructs us, a similar point has been made by Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa. The “white people” as may be read in Kopenawa’s biography co-authored with the French anthropologist Bruce Albert “never stop setting their eyes on the drawings of their speech, which they circulate among themselves pasted on paper skins” (Kopenawa qtd. in Ghosh 2022: 210). Kopenawa posits that the “paper skins” of white people “do not speak and do not think” (Kopenawa qtd. in Ghosh 2022: 210). Following this line of argument, there is something anti-ecological about Greek alphabetic literacy and the written word: it privileges context-independent ideas, and it defies material relations with the world, even as the impact of these new literacies were only possible because of “the enmeshment of literacy in historical processes” as Ghosh notes (211).

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As the plasticity in roots clearly cannot be understood as a literacy modeled on Greek alphabetic literacy, it presents a case that challenges the preeminence of symbolic representation as a model for thinking. Canada-based anthropologist Eduardo Kohn notes in How Forests Think (2013), that symbolic representation, is only one aspect of semiosis. Building on the work of US-American Philosopher of Science Charles Sanders Peirce, Kohn shows how semiosis also occurs through other modalities such as icons (“involving signs that share likeness with the things they represent”) or indexes (“involving signs that are in some way affected by or otherwise correlated with those things they represent”) (2013: 8). More generally, all living creatures use signs to partially represent the world to ourselves (8). Abla el Bahrawy’s papyrus leaves tell life stories in texture, volume, and color. Similarly, what happens when a root plastically acclimates to its environment, is more than a biochemical reaction. It is also a semiotic process of representation. The sealing of the outer layers that prevents the outward stream of nutritious fluids is a response to the changing milieu around the plant, which is hardened through drought (Karlova et al. 2021: 1057). Therefore, a less permeable outer layer that serves self-protection, within a semiotics vocabulary, may be thought of as an indexical representation of the environment in which the plant is growing. The meaning of representation that inheres the root’s acclimation to its environment, is not so much by virtue of being a representation, but rather, because this representation is embodied and meaningful for the “self” of the plant. Viewing information as a “currency,” as Farina does, risks detaching information from embodiment (2021: 2). Here, the account of metabolism by Jewish German-American philosopher Hans Jonas (1985) provides a useful perspective: Embodiment is meaningful, as metabolic existence is about being in a continuous exchange with the world, an encounter that “harbors the supreme concern of [the] organism with its own being and continuation in being” ([1985] 2001: 84). It is an exchange, during which “the uninvited presence of the other summons interest” which Jonas also describes as an intimate “communication” that is “selective” and “informed” (85). That is, biochemical embodiment of metabolizing entities, produces meaning because it is about the organism’s appetite and desire to stay alive, the failure of which produces negative sensations, such as the stress hormone ABA building up in plant roots. Thus, the root’s partial representation of the world is not only meaningful as it provides an accurate “reading” of its environment. It is meaningful to the plant, as it is generated through the embodied sensation of stress and by providing an adequate preparation and adjustment to the impeding environmental hardship and difficulties to metabolize. While Jonas developed the meaning of metabolism in relation to the “self” of the metabolizing entity, from a more ecological perspective, metabolic meaning also arises in relation to a community of species that are in contact

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with each other. The recognition that community and communication are important aspects of vegetal life is something that can be traced in animistic cosmologies where plants whisper, murmur, or communicate otherwise. Nowadays, the sciences are more and more capable of partially telling the empirical story of this communication. For example, trees of the same species can coordinate their defense against environmental threats and cooperate on the distribution of nutrients through metabolic exchange mediated by mycorrhizal networks, volatile molecules, and chemical, electrical, and possibly (while also fiercely contested) acoustic signals communicated through the tips of the roots (as popularized by, e.g., Kimmerer 2013 and Wohlleben 2016: 1–18). The modes of “tree communication” that require mycorrhizal networks, as British biologist and writer Merlin Sheldrake points out, are in fact more enmeshed than the communication between plants of the same species, because it happens through mycorrhizal networks, having interests of their own (2021: 177). As such, meaningful metabolic communication is a multispecies affair. Another way to think about this is provided by North-American biochemist Howitz and Australian-American biologist Sinclair who propose that an adequate environmental reading and responding of one plant, such as strawberry, to the environmental condition of drought may index a warning of imminent calamity that activates a defensive response in the consuming body as to prepare the organism for challenging times in addition to also making the fruit taste more delicious. (Howitz and Sinclair 2008; Hooper et al. 2020: 162). Howitz and Sinclair propose the concept of Xenohormesis to explain this particular signaling property of plant matter, a theory that has been taken up by researchers in the biomedical field (e.g. Bucciantini et al. 2022; Hooper et al. 2010; Surh 2011), yet remain relatively marginal. In its peripherality, it opens up (provocative) ways to rethink metabolic processes from a semiotic perspective. Hormesis, in toxicology, denotes the “health benefits provided by mild biological stress, such as cellular damage or a lack of nutrition” (Howitz and Sinclair 2008: 388). When our bodies benefit from the biological stress of a strawberry, the hormesis is brought by a xenos, a stranger, or with British North-American based environmental literary scholar Timothy Morton, a “strange stranger” that is “familiar” and “strange” at the same time (2010: 277). When eating a strawberry, the hormesis results not from our own experience of stress, but from processing the cues of another body's stress response. Such a dynamic is not about the intentionality of the messenger but rather is the result of “evolutionary adaptive modulation of the enzymes and receptors of stress-response pathways” (Howitz and Sinclair 2008: 389). This immediately draws attention to the ecological nature of meaning making when digesting plant matter. Meaning cannot be isolated from the environment in

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which it emerged. Meaning is lost when the metabolic system is activated for adversity while the fridge at home is filled all year around and irrigation and temperature are controlled in the greenhouse. Yet, while metabolic attunement of organisms refers to a past, it is still able to point to processes of sense-making that are capable of meaningfully situating our human bodies in an environment by virtue of the literacy of our metabolic system. It is a literacy that bypasses conscious cognition or immediate “apprehension” to say it with Nixon's words as it takes place on minute scales. Without consciously registering, we are chewing on knowing fruits that fuse into our metabolic systems as their message from elsewhere becomes familiarly entangled with us. Once more, being materially immersed in a field of forces that unfolds on more-than-human scales does not make the epistemic exchange less intimate. In such a way, a more-than-human understanding of ecoliteracy is not about transferring qualities previously thought to be unique to humans also to other beings. It alters the breadth of human ways of knowing and representing by understanding literacy as a mode of epistemically inhabiting ecologies across bodies. Understanding ecoliteracy from a more-than-human perspective provides an ‘alienating’ perspective on what literacy might mean. Put differently, understanding literacy from a more-than-human perspective renders otherness—a kind of unreadabilty—an important part of literacy. Rooting ecoliteracy in untranslatable plant semiosis is an invitation to listen to languages we do not fully understand. Citizen of the Potawatomi Nation, environmental and forest biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer describes how she goes outside to listen to the voices of nature (2013: 48). It is in this way that she receives important “teachings” from plants, which, to her is about “listening and translating the knowledge of other beings” (2013: 158). Yet, to her, it is clear that we are far from deciphering all this knowledge. As she puts it: “Tree conversations are still far above our heads” (2013: 20). This failure of translation is not an inconvenience, in fact, it is also what gives meaning to the encounter with the more-than-human world. In Abram’s terminology we might describe this as the process of “hunting the meaning, which would be the meeting with the Other” ([1996] 2012: 96), that is, an encounter that always remains a searching, a literacy that cherishes a literariness at its heart. To conclude this section, placing an element of alterity at the heart of ecoliteracy is about the fundamental recognition that while we are implicated in a literate ecology, the chorus of life is not on our terms, not within rhythms that neatly fit our metric systems. A more-than-human ecoliteracy invites us to listen attentively. The inherent foreignness of more-than-human forms of representation should also serve as a caution against instrumentalizing approaches. Ecolitracy is not the next “nature-based solution” that can be mastered by some and exported to others. At best, it can be a multisensory

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invitation to pay attention with humility to the ways we are part of a multilingual multimodal literate systems that are full of partial representations of each other communicating across bodies, evoking material and affective responses. As such, ecoliteracy—different than symbolic literacy—is a practice-oriented process of relational meaning making, all about association whether consciously or not.

LITERARY LITERACY Ecoliteracy as a literacy beyond the alphabet and across different bodies is a concept that stands at the intersection of different knowledge paradigms. Intervening in the tension between scientific paradigms and vernacular practice, ecoliteracy brings into focus the intimate material knowledge of crafts(wo)man with their material or the knowledge of plants. Ecoliteracy works through immersive, haptic, and tacit practices of reading environmental narratives, and it names the unique forms of anticipation that come from embedded culture in media res. It concerns processes of apprehension unfolding on more-than-human scales; it denotes the intimate encounter with the personalities of materials and vital communication in and as metabolic relation. And so, ecoliteracy expands the notion of literacy beyond having knowledge “about” a certain thing, an epistemic situation in which subject and object are separated. Besides that, ecoliteracy proposes that literacy is an ecological phenomenon that occurs in a community of species through various knowledge practices that are simultaneously reflexive and tacitly directed toward an outside, whether in the lab, studio, or field. As a form of vernacular knowledge, ecoliteracy is built through a sustained and intimate proximity within a field and community of observation. In this proximity, situated environmental rhythms become apprehensible, although not fully codifiable for an “outsider.” Stressing the tension between legibility and interpretation, our understanding of ecoliteracy acknowledges the alterity of more-than-human knowledge practices and the impossibility to fully “arrest” environmental semiosis, a literariness that escapes total capture, even with attention. This acknowledgment allows to eschew possible epistemic, corporate, or legal instrumentalization of the ecoliteracy concept. It is then in the literariness of literacy that the ethical orientation of ecoliteracy lies.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many thanks go to the interdisciplinary Netherlands-based Plasticity Research Group with which two of the authors are affiliated. We particularly thank

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Finnish plant biologist Kaisa Kajala for introducing us to the world of root plasticity and her pointed edits. From the same plasticity group, we would like to thank Israeli and thoroughly interdisciplinary scholar Yaron Caspi, who brought this group together and whose dedicated comments are always so thought-provoking. Moreover, we would like to thank British cultural analyst Niall Martin for sharing his inspiring course manual on “Literacy Matters” with us, as well as Liene Kazaka, Abla el Bahrawry, and the members of the Linen Project for many inspiring material conversations. Lastly, we would like to thank German PhD candidate Jonny Grünsch for sharing literature and thoughts on how to use different kinds of knowledges within one chapter.

NOTES 1. See, for instance, Natalie Loveless, How to Make Art at the End of the World (Duke University Press, 2019). 2. See Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (Oxford University Press, 1948); Alice dos Reis, Under Current/Sub-corrente (Fundação de Serralves, 2019); Michelle Murphy, “Afterlife and Decolonial Chemical Relations,” Cultural Anthropology 32.4 (2017): 494–503. 3. Papyrus craft in Egypt is a highly gendered activity (El Bahrawy, personal conversation with the author, October 17, 2022). 4. The majority of papyrus used or grown today in Egypt is originally produced in China (El Bahrawy, personal conversation with the author, October 17, 2022). 5. The authors tried to imagine what plasticity might feel like from the perspective of a plant.

REFERENCES Abram, David. “Animism and the Alphabet.” In The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 93–135. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1996. Braidotti, Rosi, and Maria Hlavajova. Posthuman Glossary. Theory Series. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. Bucciantini, Monica, Manuela Leri, Maria Scuto, Marialaura Ontario, Angela Trovato Salinaro, Edward J. Calabrese, Vittorio Calabrese, and Massimo Stefani. “Xenohormesis Underlyes the Anti-Aging and Healthy Properties of Olive Polyphenols.” Mechanisms of Ageing and Development 202 (March 1, 2022): 111620. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mad.2022.111620. Callison, Candis. How Climate Change Comes to Matter. Duke University Press, 2014. Calvo-Polanco, Monica, Zoe Ribeyre, Myriam Dauzat, Guilhem Reyt, Christopher Hidalgo-Shrestha, Patrick Diehl, Marc Frenger, et  al. “Physiological Roles of

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Casparian Strips and Suberin in the Transport of Water and Solutes.” New Phytologist 232, no. 6 (2021): 2295–2307. https://doi.org/10.1111/nph.17765. Dooren, Thom van, Eben Kirksey, and Ursula Münster. “Multispecies Studies.” Environmental Humanities 8, no. 1 (2016): 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919 -3527695. Farina, Almo. Ecosemiotic Landscape: A Novel Perspective for the Toolbox of Environmental Humanities. Cambridge University Press, 2021. ‘Future Materials Bank.’ n.d. www.futurematerialsbank.com. Ghosh, Amitav. The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. John Murray Press, 2022. Haraway, Donna Jeanne. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Paradigm 8. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. ———. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Experimental Futures: Technological Lives, Scientific Arts, Anthropological Voices. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Hooper, Philip L., Paul L. Hooper, Michael Tytell, and Lászlo Vígh. “Xenohormesis: Health Benefits from an Eon of Plant Stress Response Evolution.” Cell Stress and Chaperones 15, no. 6 (November 1, 2010): 761–770. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s12192-010-0206-x. Howitz, Konrad T., and David A. Sinclair. “Xenohormesis: Sensing the Chemical Cues of Other Species.” Cell 133, no. 3 (May 2, 2008): 387–391. https://doi.org/10 .1016/j.cell.2008.04.019. Ingold, Tim. “Bringing Things to Life: Creative Entanglements in a World of Materials.” ESRC National Centre for Research Methods, NCRM Working Paper Series, July. ———. “Weaving a Basket.” In The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2011. Jasanoff, Sheila, ed. States of Knowledge. Routledge, 2004. Jonas, Hans. The Phenomenon of Life: Towards a Philosophical Biology. Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. Eavanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001. Karlova, Rumyana, Damian Boer, Scott Hayes, and Christa Testerink. “Root Plasticity under Abiotic Stress.” Plant Physiology 187, no. 3 (November 1, 2021): 1057–1070. https://doi.org/10.1093/plphys/kiab392. Kazaka, Liene. “Future Materials Encounter #6: Blue Elf Cup.” Jan van Eyck Academie, June 25, 2022. Kimmerer, Robin. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions, 2013. Kirksey, S. Eben, and Stefan Helmreich. “THE EMERGENCE OF MULTISPECIES ETHNOGRAPHY.” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 4 (2010): 545–576. https://doi .org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2010.01069.x. Kohn, Eduardo. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. University of California Press, 2013.

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Myers, Natasha. “Conversations on Plant Sensing: Notes from the Field.” NatureCulture, 2015. http://topologicalmedialab.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/MyersCo nversationsOnPlantSensingAugust31Distribution1.pdf. Morton, T. Guest Column: Queer Ecology. PMLA, 125, no. 2 (2010): 273–282. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011. Puig de la Bellacasa, María. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds. Posthumanities 41. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Sheldrake, M. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures. Random House Publishing Group, 2021 Shoaib, Mirza, Bikram P. Banerjee, Matthew Hayden, and Surya Kant. “Roots’ Drought Adaptive Traits in Crop Improvement.” Plants (Basel, Switzerland) 11, no. 17 (August 30, 2022): 2256. https://doi.org/10.3390/plants11172256. Siddiqui, Md Nurealam, Jens Léon, Ali A. Naz, and Agim Ballvora. “Genetics and Genomics of Root System Variation in Adaptation to Drought Stress in Cereal Crops.” Journal of Experimental Botany 72, no. 4 (October 23, 2020): 1007–1019. https://doi.org/10.1093/jxb/eraa487. Surh, Young-Joon. “Xenohormesis Mechanisms Underlying Chemopreventive Effects of Some Dietary Phytochemicals.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1229, no. 1 (2011): 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2011.06097.x. ‘The Linen Project.’ n.d. https://thelinenproject.online/about/. ———. n.d. https://thelinenproject.online/flaxicon/. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, ed. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2017. ———. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. New paperback printing. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2021. Wohlleben, Peter. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate. HarperCollins UK, 2016.

Chapter 9

Our Classroom Reflections on Teaching Global Environmental Justice Art in the Venice Lagoon Jennifer Garcia Peacock

“A library, a classroom, and the world” was co-curated with Subhankar Banerjee as part of the European Cultural Centre’s exhibit “Personal Structures.” The exhibit ran from April 23, 2022, through November 27, 2022, and was viewed by an estimated 520,000 people. As the largest contingent show during the Venice Biennale 2022, “Personal Structures” featured 191 projects from 51 countries. This large-scale project was displayed across three major venues, reflecting the scale and ambition of the project: Palazzo Bembo (overlooking the Grand Canal near the Rialto Bridge), Palazzo Mora (along the main pedestrian thoroughfare Strada Nova), and Giardini della Marinaressa (two adjacent gardens located on the Venice waterfront between Arsenale and Giardini Biennale). In this chapter, I explore how our contribution to the ECC-sponsored “Personal Structures” exhibit at the Venice Biennale 2022 was conceptualized, fabricated, staged, and utilized, a period of activity that lasted over two years and dramatically shaped our teaching, research, and creative practices. The Venice Biennale is the world’s oldest, largest, and most prestigious art exhibition in the world, running every two years since its inception in 1895, disrupted only by World War I, World War II, and COVID-19. This resilience has helped make the Venice Biennale a durable symbol of global collaboration, and we were honored to be included in the ECC-sponsored exhibition. Our project included a unique format, comprising two key elements: an indoor exhibit in Palazzo Bembo, featuring research-based visual material related to global biodiversity issues, and an outdoor classroom, inspired by pandemic-era research and teaching experiences. The work was developed 131

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by a large group of collaborators, including visual artists, scholars, digital graphic designers, printmakers, activists, a landscape gardening expert, and a retired architect, reflecting our commitment to collaborative models of visual production. Our multicultural and multigenerational group, as I detail, worked together to bring our exhibit and outdoor classroom concept into reality, culminating in a one-week site visit, allowing several students and colleagues to engage in an experiential way with the images, text, and sites that we had produced. In this chapter, I show how this collaboration was conceptualized amid the COVID-19 pandemic, requiring our team to work with compassion and courage to realize each element of the project. Ultimately, I show through close readings of my teaching practice that the most important dimension of our work in this period was maintaining meaningful connections with each other, a process that affirmed my commitment to a teaching practice rooted in creative collaboration and experiential and experimental learning. I began my teaching career at Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina, in August 2017. Based in the Department of Environmental Studies, I have developed a discussion-based pedagogy shaped by collaborative modes of interdisciplinary environmental justice praxis. While trained in historical and visual analysis—where lecture-based instruction tends to dominate the undergraduate classroom—I established an interactive style of teaching in my classroom that took the lecture as a point of departure to provide context for the creative mapping activities that I lead to gain a more nuanced understanding of how key concepts have changed over time and how they exist in a complex web of relations. In my commitment to exposing students to a wide range of scholarly and creative perspectives, I draw in equal measure from established and cutting-edge material in assembling the reading and viewing for each class session, aiming to strike a meaningful balance between innovation and tradition. This “curatorial” approach to the selection, arrangement, and engagement of diverse perspectives in my course materials has become a defining element of my teaching practice, and my environmental justice curriculum is aimed at providing students with unique opportunities to cultivate collaboration and develop advanced research skills. My goal as an instructor has been to provide inspiration and guidance for Davidson students to pursue ambitious and large-scale work of their own, manifesting in a wide range of student-driven projects, including murals, art exhibits and digital catalogs, a cookbook, a community garden, a children’s book, archival internships, and artist residencies. Teaching has always been important to my larger scholarly practice and placing an emphasis on shared learning experiences has allowed students to develop a complex portrait of the past, present, and future of environmental issues. The use of visual material in my work as an educator has helped make environmental justice issues more visible and more resonant in the Davidson

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classroom: through hearing the stories behind the pictures—and working together to make a visual map of these complex connections—students create long-lasting images of environmental justice issues. These courses—and my emphasis on collaboration in discussion activities and in shared assignments—have allowed me to introduce students to important issues in contemporary environmental justice research such as biodiversity, multispecies justice, racial capitalism, and food sovereignty. While some students have had exposure to these issues prior to their time at Davidson, our department curriculum is often the first time they have encountered these concepts, and I have taken time and care in introducing these complex concepts to our students. Developing a visual mapping tool for use in our discussion sessions has helped students gain exposure and confidence in working with these politically and socially sensitive topics. During my first several years of teaching, these exercises were conducted in 100- and 200-level courses, allowing to help students develop a set of analytical tools appropriate for beginner and intermediate topics in class sizes ranging from twelve to thirty students each. However, by my fifth year, I was eager to develop an advanced seminar that would allow me to work closely with students deeply interested in advanced environmental justice research methods and practices. In consultation with my department chair and mentors, I began developing a 300-level group investigation course, a mechanism we have in our department to provide environmental humanities students with specialized training in advanced research methods. While the practical impact is to satisfy major and minor requirements, the course has become a unique opportunity for students to develop topics of their own selection and develop their expertise in experiential and experimental ways. For example, during a recent version of the course taught by Dr. Annie Merrill, the class focused on contemporary directions in the field of botanical humanities and culminated in a class visit to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., to conduct archival research. In my version of the course, I drew upon my interests and expertise in environmental justice art, aiming to expose students to place my interests in a Latinx environmental justice in a global context given the interconnected issues facing local communities in the twenty-first century. My first iteration of the course was offered in spring 2021 and focused on digital research methods to accommodate the hybrid format of the course. But, seeing how previous students flourished in their research at the Library of Congress, I was eager to include a site visit to my course as soon as COVID19 travel recommendations improved. The spring 2022 version of the course imagined the Venice Lagoon as our classroom, in conjunction with our ECCsponsored exhibit we had begun working on in 2021. While travel was not certain—neither by the exhibit organizers nor by the students—Davidson College generously made funding available for the six students enrolled in

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the course to travel to Venice in May 2022 to view our exhibit, contribute to the postcard activity, utilize the outdoor classroom, and visit the visual work related to the Biennale should that be possible. So, with an optimistic lens we proceeded with our plans to complete the exhibit, remaining hopeful that many people, including our students would be able to view it in person. In this course, I designed the following four learning outcomes: (1) produce, through individual and group exercises, an advanced understanding of environmental justice art; (2) explore advanced environmental humanities methods, including archival research and visual analysis; (3) read and view a wide range of visual material and expand culturally appropriate interpretive tools through selected case studies; and (4) cultivate intellectual curiosity, creativity, and rigor. Assessment was focused on attendance and active engagement in the discussion sessions, a self-designed midterm assignment that demonstrated expertise in the course reading material, an individual research project focusing on artists featured in the Venice Biennale (including an exhibit catalog, resource guide, and teaching module), and a self-designed collaborative project related to our visit to Venice. In our first week of class in late January 2022, we held two Zoom sessions aimed at cultivating our group dynamic. We would be spending a lot of time together during the semester—and potentially traveling together at the end to view the Venice project—so it was critical to establish a positive and productive working relationship early on. I also held individual consultations during this time to ascertain their facility with the first set of reading and viewing, as well as provide important one-on-one time to discuss course logistics, including the logistics timeline near the end of the semester should the situation improve, and we receive authorization to travel. This would be the first time traveling internationally for some students, and I wanted to provide them with the resources they needed to submit their passport applications and internal travel authorization materials. For our first in-person session on February 2, 2022, session we discussed a selection of reading and viewing material related to contemporary art, visual culture, and climate change, providing us with an opportunity to collectively produce our first visualization of course material. As an opening activity, I provided a brief overview of the emerging field of environmental humanities, allowing me to provide a quick review of its historiography and key methods for students, as well as make note of the ways that adjacent and overlapping fields such as art and ecology and critical landscape studies have made important interventions that we likely will consider in our course analysis. These mini lectures have allowed me to provide important critical and historical context for the subsequent discussion by introducing pedologically relevant concepts for consideration at the beginning of the session and creating opportunities for inclusion in the discussion and visualization activities.

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A key feature of these activities is a method of visualizing concepts I refer to in class as “idea maps.” Imagined as an ecosystem of thought, I invite students to delve into the important connections between concepts, supplementing their context with relevant cultural, environmental, and historical contexts. Our remaining sessions in February 2022 were devoted to these activities and built into a satisfying foundation to our semester: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at noon, you could find us in the center of campus, enjoying the shade provided by the lush canopy as the dry erase board we were working on were filled with an astounding level of detail. This visual pedagogy emerged from my training in the field of American studies, which is influenced deeply by the field of cultural studies, particularly Raymond Williams and his use of keywords (Williams, Keywords). To ensure that we build a strong foundation in this type of interdisciplinary cultural analysis, I asked students in this first in-person session on February 2 to gather in pairs to discuss which elements of the session’s reading and viewing resonated with them most and to work together with their partner to compile a list of specific quotes, images, and personal connections to share with the large group. During my time at Davidson, I have found that our students flourish in this moment of creative and critical engagement: given a specific task, students are able to view the course content holistically, identifying the ways that the key concepts expanding their understanding of environmental justice issues and moments for critical reflections with their peers about connections they experience to other parts of their academic training and personal experience. Together, in a large group, I had us gather facing the dry erase board to begin construction on our idea map. At the center of the visualization, I place the publication information for the primary reading, including the title of the volume, the author information, and the date of publication. I find establishing—and centralizing this information—is helpful both in the moment of production to anchor our thoughts in a specific text as well as establishing good citation practices for students as they learn the skills of research-based analysis they will utilize in subsequent course discussions and assignments. For this specific idea map focusing on how visual artists have responded to climate change, I asked students to share the key insights from their work in pairs, allowing us to create a framework for the conversation. Layer One, as I have come to imagine this phase of the idea maps, was thus populated with a robust set of concepts: the important distinctions (and overlap) between the traditional field of art history and the emerging field of visual culture, the utility and challenges related to Anthropocene studies (including the sub-fields of the capitialocene and chthulucene), and the interrelated areas of climate studies including climate justice, climate violence, and climate change. This preliminary mapping thus provides a student-generated set of concepts that,

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in turn, allow me to enhance them with additional critical and historical context and direct us into a second small group conversation. To generate content for Layer Two of the idea map, I thus asked students to gather in new pairs, allowing students to expand their perspectives with a new partner and utilize the entire classroom space by gathering away from the dry erase board for a more intimate conversation. To encourage critical and creative thinking skills, I asked the new set of pairs to work with their partner to provide specific examples of how these larger categories of analysis we mapped in Layer One relate to the material environment in the age of climate change. Given the wide range of expertise and interests the students were creating in their coursework in the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, and visual and performing arts, I aimed to capture some of the unique ways they were seeing and experiencing this topic. After several minutes, we reconvened back at the large dry erase board to build out Layer Two of the idea map. Here, students provided a wealth of place-based examples of climate change from the reading and related course work: deforestation, habitat loss, fire, flood, drought, ice melt, and rising sea levels, expressing in the process the affective qualities they experience in their everyday lives related to climate anxiety and climate trauma. As young people, living in a time of such global strife and uncertainty, they expressed an interest in locating moments of hope, resistance, and possibility to these processes. To capture this rich set of observations, I transitioned seamlessly into Layer Three of the idea map as a continuation of the large group discussion, asking students to identify areas of climate justice art, activism, and research that they feel optimistic about, as well as areas where they feel more pessimistic or uncertain. Overwhelmingly, students articulated an interest in examining identity as a category of environmental justice analysis and felt that climate-focused work held tremendous promise based on the ways that they see local communities making their long-established cultural traditions in a changing landscape visible to a wide audience. Here, the collaboration between Chicanx visual artist Zeke Peña developed with community group La Semilla in southern New Mexico to address food sovereignty issues resonated as an important way for artists, activists, policy makers, and an intergenerational group of community members to make meaningful changes to their local food system, despite challenges presented in a rapidly changing environment (Peña 2021). To conclude the session and bring us to both a meaning synthesis for the discussion and a transition to the interrelated set of reading and viewing for the next meeting, I asked students in the large group format to identify a few “lessons” from the conversation that we would like to carry into our subsequent work. This work, to affirm their analysis for them and inspire them to take hold of their most meaningful large-scale analysis produced delightful

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results: the refrain “words matter!” quickly emerged as the primary lesson, a call of sorts to honor the potential of the larger field of the environmental humanities to mobilize textual analysis for social change. Images—particularly in the digital age—also matter, we agreed, and we spoke for a long period about the ways that visual art—particularly in accessible forms such as murals, poster art, and zines—can help people see and feel these complex climate justice issues more clearly, offering potential for alternative solutions. Students also agreed that they seek more visual “voices” during our work together, in the form of both in-class visual analysis exercises and creativebased assignments. As the class continued to meet in March 2022, we benefited from the arrival of fine weather in North Carolina, allowing us to move our in-person sessions from our assigned space in the science building to an outdoor space (Figure 9.1). On any given Monday, Wednesday, or Friday at noon, you

Figure 9.1 Photograph by Jennifer Garcia Peacock.

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could find us there, in the center of campus discussing environmental justice art and activism. In response to the popularity of outdoor instruction during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic, Davidson College set up several semi-permanent outdoor classrooms, providing double-sided erase boards and chalkboards, moveable outdoor furniture, and a selection of dry erase markers, chalk, and erasers. As spring took hold and temperatures rose, we benefited from the large canopy of leaves that emerged above, allowing us to remain outdoors each hour-long session. Idea maps allowed us to delve deeper into the ideas as a group—like our online and indoor discussions—but these outdoor sessions allowed us the unintended but useful effect of presenting our perspectives to the entire campus given the centrality of the location. Our conversations thus stretched far beyond the designated class period and opened thoughtful conversations with colleagues, staff, and campus visitors, including prospective students, a form of public engagement that would prepare us well for utilizing the outdoor classroom we installed in Venice. On April 1, 2022, we visited the outdoor classroom to visualize our Venice Biennale reading, assess the situation of the individual artist research, and provide time for our initial logistics meeting since it looked promising to try for a May 2022 site visit. I was traveling with special authorization in March and April to install the exhibit and outdoor classroom and attend the opening, but if numbers improved, we could all travel in May, and it was imperative that everyone was clear about the requirements and process should that authorization be granted in the coming weeks. The success of our presence in our tri-weekly sessions on the main campus allowed us to work successfully with Davidson College to build a higher-production-value outdoor classroom at the edge of campus, allowing us more space and privacy to discuss culturally sensitive research and enjoy the full benefits of outdoor education. In the planning phase of the project, my co-curator Subhankar Banerjee had considered developing an outdoor classroom space that reimagined the classrooms we had seen during a biodiversity research trip in January 2020 to Santiniketan, the site of Bengali intellectual and cultural producer Rabindranath Tagore. His seminal essay “My Classroom,” detailing his experience teaching outdoors at his school in Santiniketan, encouraged us to think deeply about the role of creativity in our work as environmental justice advocates. While those plans did not materialize in the Venice project, we were deeply moved by the concept and were very pleased to honor it in Davidson, North Carolina, with the construction of an outdoor classroom at the edge of campus. Our first visit to this classroom, after its installation in late March 2022 was incredibly emotional for me as an educator as I had just returned from installing the Venice exhibit and classroom and was preparing to return briefly for the exhibit opening on April 23, 2023. To commemorate this work, I brought lunch from Pickled Peach, our favorite café on Main Street and we enjoyed

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a long conversation about the Venice-related reading and viewing material. To showcase the students’ growth in the course, I set my stopwatch for 10 minutes, asking them to offer a visual summary of this material, a midterm of sorts, that utilized the session’s material in relation to all the work we had done to that point and imagine paths forward for the remainder of the course. What the six students produced was astounding, confirming the promise and potential for the viability of small-scale outdoor learning at Davidson College: starting with “VENICE” and “EJ art” as their initial keyword selections, they wrote quietly and in swift precision together, offering an intricate and sweeping view of the past, present, and future of socially driven works of visual art displayed—paradoxically—in one of the most “unnatural” cities in the world. Race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, age, and geography emerged as guiding categories of analysis, with temporally specific examples from the course material forming an interlocking set of relations. With generosity, they referenced observations from peers that were evocative to them this semester, making important connections to creative and scholarly work. The role of visual resistance became a central theme, lessons that would frame their research for the final project they would collectively design, including facilitating a discussion session in our outdoor classroom in Venice. Notably, the students spoke at length over lunch about how the field of critical environmental justice studies has played a role in shaping their understanding of contemporary social and environmental issues. This field has emerged in recent years to thoroughly interrogate the ways that ability, class, gender, race, and sexuality shape environmental experience globally. Increasingly interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and transdisciplinary, Critical EJ studies aims to build on earlier environmental justice foundations to offer a dynamic analysis of the biological and climate crises underway in the twenty-first century. The students spoke about how our exploration of these concepts, in conjunction with visual art, helped them “see” these issues in more critical and nuanced ways. This visual archive of Critical EJ studies, then, allowed them to look back over time and place to understand how art and activism have been utilized to offer alternative histories and possibilities to these issues. Two works held particular significance in this process: What Is Critical Environmental Justice? (2018) by David Naguib Pellow and Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger (2020) by Julie Sze. In Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger (2020), American Studies scholar Julie Sze explores the relation between environmental injustice and political activism, and students were moved by the incisive map she provided showing how social justice advocacy for environmental issues has changed over time. Why they had examined some of the case studies she references, such as the Dakota Access

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Pipeline and farmworker advocacy in California’s Central Valley, they had not yet considered this activism in a historical context. As an American studies scholar Sze also utilizes the “keywords” framework of the field, and her synthesis of the most salient research in contemporary environmental justice studies was helpful to the students, showing how interrelated issues such as immigration, climate change, and police violence have grown to become key elements in recent community-based advocacy work. Students spoke about the ways that her approach allowed them to better understand the theoretical underpinning of the idea maps we were utilizing in class discussion, enhancing their ability to develop strong conceptual tools in cultural analysis. This was important to the students because issues such as immigration, indigeneity, gender, capitalism, solidarity, optimism, and storytelling are complex, and having a visual framework to unpack the relation of these processes helped them reveal the ways that ideology and hegemony guide these structural injustices in specific and material ways. Understanding—and reimaging—the past, present, and future of environmental advocacy then became more conceptually nuanced for the students during the course of the semester, proving a path forward to examine the role visual culture can play in making environmental justice issues visible to a wider audience and creating a sense of anticipation in applying this knowledge to artwork presented in the Venice Biennale 2022. At the end of the semester, we received authorization from Davidson College to travel internationally, and on May 16, 2022, we departed from Charlotte International Airport to Venice, Italy. Arriving by way of a connection in Madrid, Spain, we arrived in the late morning and boarded the Ali Laguna water taxi from Marco Polo Airport. Students gasped at delight as we splashed through the Venice Lagoon, first encircling the drop-off docks along Murano Island and then weaving through the Grand Canal of the main island of Venice. Getting off at Rialto, we were directly facing Palazzo Bembo’s weathered peach façade, stopping briefly for a group photograph under the ECC placard, a glimmering rainbow logo. After Dr. Annie Merrill and I got the students checked into their hotel, debriefing over lunch at Farini—one of our favorite spots for quick and well-priced local fare—we set the students into their self-curated itinerary and headed to our outdoor classroom at Giardini Marinaressa to meet with my exhibit co-curator Subhankar Banerjee, who had traveled to Venice from biodiversity field work he was conducting in India’s Sunderbans mangrove forest. This approach, to allow students discretionary time in the evening to explore their own arts and culture interests in the city, was designed to cultivate their sense of curiosity and confidence, two skills that were in peril during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. This approach also provided ample time for us as the trip facilitators to fine-tune lesson plans, troubleshoot logistics, and recharge in preparation for the next day’s activities.

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Accordingly, we met the students bright and early the next morning at Palazzo Bembo, a short walk from their hotel yet a delightful challenge to find amid the maze of pathways, canals, and bridges in the Rialto area. After a quick check-in, we headed upstairs to our exhibit, allowing students the entire morning to engage with the exhibit. Although they had previously viewed photographs of the space when I returned to Davidson after the installation in March 2022, they were awed in person by the expansiveness of the setup. The library contained several unique elements, including a traditional exhibition work by four visual artists (mixed-media artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, illustrator Zeke Peña, illustrator Alexandria Zuniga de Dóchas, and photographer Subhankar Banerjee), several research-based elements produced in collaboration with two historians (Finis Dunaway and Jennifer Garcia Peacock) and two art historians (Susanne Anderson-Riedel and Jackson Larson), and expansive wall text incorporating visual material in large-scale decals by the co-curators (Banerjee and Garcia Peacock). The postcards and the wall text were designed by David Mendez, who tragically and suddenly passed away in Albuquerque on March 18, 2022, as Banerjee and I were in Venice finalizing the installation, including the elegant final decal proofs he had completed just days before. Situated in the gallery space on the third floor of Palazzo Bembo, the library occupied a corner room of floor-to-ceiling windows, looking down onto the Grand Canal, an intricate web of waterways that connects the city to in the expansive ecosystem of the Venice Lagoon. The color scheme thus held special resonance: aquamarine and terracotta dominated the view from the window, and we installed a small desk in the corner for writing, viewing, and contemplation. At all hours, there is also a lovely buzz to the neighborhood’s soundscape: early morning delivery service, the bustle of tourists gathering at the Rialto Bridge, long apertivo hours in the cafes that extend into dinner, and evening strolls along the canal. The ECC staff arrived early and left late during those final days prior to the exhibit opening, and we watched from the cafes below as work continued long after our daily exhibit installation tasks had been completed. A large vaporetto stop is below—one of several platforms providing public water taxi service across the city, and part of some of our most valuable observations came in these moments as we watched the waves churn in their arrival and departure. These water taxis provide an important link to Venice Lagoon, a set of over 118 islands in the upper bay of the Adriatic Sea. During the Biennale, vaporettos are plastered with exhibition announcements, gigantic visual announcements sponsored by the event organizers or the multitude of cultural organizations that have affiliated exhibitions and programming, producing a palpable sense of excitement for residents and tourists alike. An important element of the library we designed is an homage to the original library, the Bembo Library, established in the fifteenth century by

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Bernanrdo Bembo and notably expanded by his son Pietro Bembo. An important intellectual and public figure of his time, Pietro Bembo made extensive contributions to the cultural and literary traditions in the region, including the “octavo,” or eight-page booklet, and the Bembo style font, both of which were major innovations in mass printing and popular culture at the time and were reimagined for our exhibit. Another important influence in the curation of the Palazzo Bembo space and display objects was the four dwarf shelves that frame the interior portion of the exhibit, serving as a place for the artwork to be read and, in turn, encouraging the viewer to also become a reader of both the visual material on the shelves and of the extensive text on the walls, all printed in Bembo font. Our research for the exhibit inspired us to reproduce the last two surviving dwarf bookcases in the Old Library at St. John’s College, University of Cambridge, created in the seventeenth century and now iconic through their use in the Harry Potter films. This allowed us to honor the historic significance of the St. John’s reading room while also producing a whimsical air to space through the popularity of the children’s series. The shorter height and slanted top surfaces were important in the design process because they enabled visitors to read while standing in front of one of these shelves, or, as we encouraged viewers across the exhibit: slow down, there is no rush. Take a closer look. This resonated with students because they had been in Venice for twenty-four hours by the end of our session in the classroom, and they palpably sensed that this space was to be savored. This provided a seamless transition into our afternoon work, allowing us to debrief about our exhibit over lunch before viewing the second set of material installed by the ECC at Palazzo Mora. Over lunch, students spoke to their interest in the multitude of scenes depicted in the postcard element of the exhibit, noting the wide range of sites covered: Albuquerque, Yellowstone National Park, Grand Teton National Park, Sunderbans, Tamil Nadu, Siberia, Olympic National Park, and Alaska. They were also moved by the richness of the cultural landscapes presented in Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s codex, articulating a multispecies justice point of view in borderlands relations, and the political incisiveness of Zeke Peña’s visual history of agribusiness in the Americas. Students also enjoyed seeing this work that we had studied all semester in context as the ECC-sponsored work elsewhere in Palazzo Bembo such as the Afrofuturism show, the Latinx art show, and a large-scale work by Atlanta-based artist Shanequa Gay spoke to interests that students were exploring in their coursework at Davidson, as well as their own creative and activist work. This dynamic and thought-provoking set of displays is no accident: the European Cultural Centre (ECC) was founded in 2002 by artist René Rietmeyer to cultivate intellectual and cultural work, hosting a wide range of exhibits, publications, digital media, and educational programming. The

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Venice activity—like the Biennale itself—is the first and largest of the ECC sites and is led by a dynamic staff dedicated to supporting internationally significant visual artists [ECC website; print out #1]. We were invited by the ECC Italy to participate in the “Personal Structures” exhibit, the largest of the 202 collateral shows in the Venice Biennale 2022. The show was focused on the theme “reflections” to capture work produced during—and in response to—the COVID-19 pandemic [Venice news website; printouts 1–2]. Lucia Pedrana, Lorenzo Basadonna Scarpa, Giovanna D’Albertis, Nicola Pavan, Matteo Paoletti, Miguel Núñez, and Marco Lupieri of the European Cultural Centre—made invaluable contributions in helping our team realize the Library and the Classroom, which included building the dwarf shelves, and the furniture and flower beds, and assisting with complex logistics, installation, and graphic design, and it was important to us to provide time and space to detail these connections ahead of the Palazzo Mora visit. The Giardini Marinaressa is located between Arsenale and the Giardini Biennale, a softly windswept space amid the frenzy of the art tourism landscape. The space also retains its military legacy: tall, thick brick walls that offer a sturdy structure for the pedestrian walkways and rare green space. This is no surprise given Venice’s strategic location as a military and economic powerhouse. For centuries, it has served as a global crossroads, a modestly sized city built into a lush waterscape. The classroom itself was built into the park to honor the Venice residents and provide a meaningful place to safely gather outdoors. Retired architect Julian Sayers and master gardener Karen Sayers helped Banerjee and I design the outdoor classroom in the Giardini della Marinaressa and the flower garden that frames it during the year leading up to the exhibition, a complex process involving our partners at the ECC and City of Venice. The fish-shaped classroom design we installed in Giardini della Marinaressa along the waterfront of the Venice Lagoon was framed by flower beds that follow the contours of the angled trunks of three Pino marittimo (Maritime pine) trees, producing the shape of Venice one would see on a map or in an aerial photograph (Figure 9.2). Residents of the city may wish to gather in the classroom to discuss the bellicose past and the precarious present, to shape a more just future for Venice. During the late fifteenth century, while Pietro Bembo was expanding the collection in his library, a short distance away warships were being built on the waterfront. Today, while Venice is celebrated for its art and architecture, many are not aware of its ecological vitality. The Lagoon of Venice provides habitats for numerous species of bird, fish, and invertebrates. One small portion of the lagoon, Valle Averto, is a UNESCO-designated Ramsar wetland site. Additionally, two flowering plants (Ceratostigma and Loropetalums) and two grasses (Festuca and Miscanthus) have been planted in the flower beds

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Figure 9.2

Jennifer Garcia Peacock

Photograph by Jennifer Garcia Peacock.

of the Marinaressa Classroom. Collectively, those four plants will offer, with flowers and foliage, a purple-pink and blue color theme that will be resonant with the orange and blue color theme used in the library, and the flowers and seeds will feed bees, birds, and butterflies. By mid-summer, the grasses are expected to be nearly five feet tall and will create a more intimate enclosure for the classroom. The three entrances to the Marinaressa Classroom are named after the three inlets that connect the lagoon to the Adriatic Sea: Lido, Malamocco, and Chioggia. The Venice-within-Venice Classroom is a portal to the world, across time. Given the collaborative nature of the project, the placards in the garden were not marked in the traditional way with the curators’ names but instead with our institutions—Davidson College and the University of New Mexico—as well as the ECC and community collaborators. This site served as an anchor to us over the next four days as we engaged in a thorough tour of the Venice Biennale exhibition. Through their self-designed final project for the course, the students designed an itinerary of artist works they wanted to visit, focusing their attention on environmental justice-themed material. In the “Milk of Dreams” group show, curated by Cecelia Alemani and displayed across the Arsenale and Giardini Biennale sites, the students stood in awe as they viewed monumental works by Simone Leigh, Sonia Boyce, Firelei Báez, Shuvinai Ashoona, Cecelia Vicuña, and Ruth Asawa (Alemani). The works in this component of the exhibition were produced nearly all by women and paid close attention to the ways that our changing environment held potential for social justice. Students were also captivated by the sense of grandeur expressed in the National Pavillions, twenty-nine

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of which are housed in the original Giardini Biennale space and nearly 100 located in spaces across the city, including Arsenale. Among these installations, our group spent extensive time with first-time exhibitors Bolivia and Uganda, examining the mixed media natural history display at the Bangladesh pavilion, and the art and science immersive space created by Uzbekistan. The culmination of this experience came on our final morning, as we convened in our outdoor classroom for the student-led discussion. The session centered on their interest in indigenous perspectives on environmental justice artwork, and they selected readings and viewings for us to reflect on. Two students began the exercise by having us open our notebooks, beautiful handprinted pieces Banerjee had brought us from India, providing a moment for critical individual reflection. Then, as we were invited to share our reflections in the large group, the student facilitators directed us in a collaborative idea map, creatively arranging our journals together in a way that would allow us to each take a piece of the knowledge we created with us when the exercise—and larger experience—were over. For hours we sat and discussed what we have learned, both in Davidson and Venice, and the group concluded that the most valuable element in a time of uncertainty was the gift of collaboration. Through our small and large group exercises we engaged in for over four months, we expanded our sense of purpose and possibility, providing invaluable lessons for us each to carry forward into our work as environmental advocates.

REFERENCES Alemani, Cecelia. 2022. “Artist Statement.” Accessed July 1, 2022. https://www .labiennale.org/en/art/2022/statement-cecilia-alemani European Cultural Centre. 2022. “Personal Structures” exhibition website. Accessed July 1, 2022. https://personalstructures.com Pellow, David. 2018. What Is Critical Environmental Justice? Cambridge: Polity Press. Peña, Zeke. 2021. Food, Land, Us. Anthony, NM: La Semilla Foods. Pulido, Laura. 2019. “Foreword.” In Latinx Envronmentalisms: Place, Justice, and the Decolonial, edited by Sarah D. Wald, David J. Vázquez, Priscilla Solis Ybarra, and Sarah Jaquette Ray. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Schlosburg, David. 2016. Defining Environmental Justice: Theories, Movements, and Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sze, Julie. 2020. Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Tagore, Rabindranath. 2014. “My School.” In The Essential Tagore, edited by Fakrul Alam and Radha Chakravarty. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 54–57. Williams, Raymond. 1985. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Revised Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Index

Note: Page locators followed by ‘n’ refer to notes. abolitionism, 34 Abram, David, 18, 23–24, 123, 126 abscisic acid (ABA), 122, 124 activism, 11, 136, 138–40 adaptation, 14, 57, 71, 75, 87, 121 Aesop’s fable, 71 Against the Grain, 102, 109 agriculture, 99, 102–4, 117, 121 Ahmed, Sarah, 39 Albert, Bruce, 123 Alexander the Great, 37 alterity, 21, 26–27, 60, 90, 114, 123, 126–27 Anamalai Tiger Reserve, 48 Anand, Nikhil, 36 Anderson-Riedel, Sussane, 141 animal allegories, 59 animal crossing sign, 49 Anthropocene, 7, 10, 20, 31, 73–74, 90, 99, 135 anti-colonial, 44 apocalypse, 7, 67 apocalyptic, 7, 12, 19, 32, 47, 66 Archimedean, 31, 38–39 Arctic, 1, 44, 46, 65 Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, 44, 52 Aristotle, 46 Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, 27

Asawa, Ruth, 144 Ashoona, Shuvinai, 144 Asiatic cheetah, 45 assemblage, 26, 34, 76, 80 Báez, Firelei, 144 Bahrawy, Alba el, 119–20, 122, 124, 128nn3–4 Baluška, František, 75 Banerjee, Subhankar, 7, 53n2, 131, 138, 140–41, 143, 145 Barad, Karen, 18, 25–28 Baulia, Rupali, 50–51 Bauman, Zygmunt, 101 Bear by the Window, 47 Beck, Ulrich, 11 becoming, 3, 7, 10, 14, 17–23, 38, 70, 75–76, 87; entangled becoming, 17–18, 25, 27–28 Bergson, Henri, 26 Berlant, Lauren, 37 Bhabha, Homi K., 18–20; The Location of Culture, 18 bildung, 114 biodiversity, 7, 12, 42, 47, 53n2, 73, 75, 80, 97–98, 131, 133, 138, 140 bio-egalitarianism, 1 biological annihilation, 43 147

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Index

biomimicry, 77 Bletsoe, Elisabeth, 74, 84–88; “Stinging Nettle (Urticus dioica), Castle Hill, Stowey”, 84–85, 88 botanical, 7, 73–77, 83–84, 86, 88, 90, 113–15, 120, 133 botanical futures, 75 boundary, 18–19, 21–22, 28, 42 Bouteau, François, 77 Boyce, Sonia, 144 Braddock, Alan, 46 Brown, Gladys, 86 Bryant, William Cullen, 74; “To the Fringed Gentian”, 74 Callison, Candis, 116–17 cancer, 38–39 Capgras syndrome, 60 capitalism, 19, 21–22, 28–29, 32, 97– 98, 101, 133, 140 capitalocene, 31 carboliberalism, 35 Carbon Black, 114 carbon democracy, 5, 35 care, 9–10, 40, 49, 59, 64, 66, 90, 119, 121, 133. See also multispecies caretaking Carson, Rachel, 116–17; Silent Spring, 117 Chlorociboria aeruginascens, 119 Choudhury, Khaled, 43, 45 civilisation, 2, 7–8, 33, 97–99, 101–6, 108–9, 114 Clare, John, 74 classroom, 8, 42, 53n2, 131–34, 136, 138–40, 142–45 climate anxiety, 136 climate change, 3, 6, 12–15, 37, 47, 59, 97–98, 100, 103, 113–14, 116–17, 134–36, 140 climate justice, 135–37 climate trauma, 136 climate violence, 135 Cody, Radmilla, 44 coexistence, 5, 20, 22–23, 43–45, 52, 73

cohabitation, 5, 7, 11, 22, 90 Colebrook, Claire, 1 colonial, 32, 34, 37, 42–45, 114 colonization, 34, 79, 100 Columbus, 34 consumerism, 20, 98 cooperation, 8–9 Covid-19, 57, 131–33, 138, 140, 143 creekside sign, 49 cruel optimism, 37 cyborgs, 60 Cyclone Amphan, 52 Da Cunha, Dilip, 36 damaged planet, 22, 25, 118 dark ecology, 21–22 Darwin, Erasmus, 74, 87; The Botanic Garden, 87 Darwinian, 22, 70 Dawn of Everything, The, 104, 108–9 decarbonization, 100 decompositional politics, 32, 36, 39 degrowth, 100 Denetdale, Jennifer, 44 derangement, 1–6, 9–15 Despret, Vinciane, 23–24; Autobiography of an Octopus, 24 De Valdes, Diego, 46 Devi, Mahasweta, 43–45; ͧΏά΃ҝΏ ͧΛ·͵ΚΏ (Aranyer Adhikar), 43–45 Dunaway, Finis, 45, 53n2, 141 Durkheim, Emily, 39 dwelling, 19, 21, 52 dystopian, 13 earthlings, 19, 90 ecocidal, 11, 19, 23, 29, 32, 36, 38 ecodesign, 117 ecofascism, 8, 36 ecoliberal, 32, 36 ecoliteracy, 8, 113–16, 118, 120–21, 123, 126–27 ecology, 11, 13, 21–22, 26, 28, 31, 42, 74, 81–83, 108, 114–15, 119, 126, 134

Index

ecomodernist, 100 ecomysticism, 14 ecophobia, 6 ecopoetics, 75 ectomycorrhizal, 83 EJ art, 139 elan vital, 26 endomycorrhizal, 83 endosphere, 79–80, 87–90 endospheric poetics, 73, 87, 89 energy, 3, 35, 37, 70, 79, 98–100, 102, 108, 121 Enlightenment, 13, 39, 104, 106, 108–9 entanglement, 7, 12, 17–18, 20–22, 24–25, 27, 115 environmental humanities, 57, 113–14, 117, 133–34, 137 Ernaux, Annie, 21; Passion Simple, 21 Essen, Carl Von, 14 Estes, Nick, 44 European Cultural Centre (ECC), 131, 140–44 extinct, 9, 45, 70 extinction, 3, 6, 10, 19, 32, 43, 58–60, 66–68, 70–71, 75, 98–99, 122 extractivism, 8, 32, 36 extractivist, 19, 34–35 Farina, Almo, 122 fauna, 75, 77, 79 flora, 7, 46, 73–79, 83, 85–89 foliar anatomy, 85 forest memory, 79 forests, 13, 52, 74, 79 fortress conservation, 7, 42–43, 52, 53n2 fossil energy, 98, 100, 102 fossil fuel, 31–32, 35, 98 Fowler, Karen Joy, 59–60, 64–66; We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, 59, 64–65 fragility, 1, 103, 120 Freud, Sigmund, 5 fungi, 22, 75, 79–80, 82–84, 87–88, 119 Future Materials Banks, 117, 119 Future Materials program, 118

149

Gaia, 20, 22, 26, 31 Gay, Shanequa, 142 Gebreyesus, Tedros, 57 Genesis, 2 Gennep, Anthony Van, 18 Gerard, John, 86 Ghosh, Amitav, 3–6, 123; The Great Derangement, 3–5 Ghosh, Ranjan, 11 Gilbert, Scott, 22 Global North, 32, 36, 97, 99 Global South, 42–43 Glück, Louise, 81–83, 88; “The Wild Iris”, 81–82, 88 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 74, 84; The Metamorphosis of Plants, 84 Graeber, David, 98, 101, 104–9n3 grasslands, 74 Great Chain of Being, The, 46 Gwich’in community, 44 Haitian Revolution, 34 haptic, 86, 88, 115, 120–21, 127 Haraway, Donna, 18, 25–26, 31–32, 34, 57, 60, 73, 90 Harvey, David, 58 Hayles, Katherine, 76 Heidegger, Martin, 3, 10, 18; “Building, Dwelling, Thinking”, 18 Heise, Ursula, 68; Imagining Extinction, 68 Hemingway, Ernest, 59 Hillman, Brenda, 81, 83; “To Mycorrhizae Under Our Mother’s Garden”, 81, 83 Hiltner, Lorenz, 79 Hoffmeyer, Jesper, 80 hormesis, 125 Hornborg, Alf, 109n1; The Magic of Technology, 109n1 horrifice, 64–66 horror, 62–69 Houston, 36–38; Art Storey, 38; flood in, 37–38; rain garden, 37–38; rainwater, 38

150

Index

Hout, der Van Sanne, 8 Hughes, Ted, 74, 84–85, 87; “Fern”, 84–86 human and animal, 34–35, 66, 68 human and more-than-human, 27 human and nonhuman, 20, 32, 43–45, 61, 116 human and plant, 7 human-fauna-flora relations, 75 human-flora, 76 human-material relations, 120 Humboldt, Alexander von, 74 Hurricane Harvey, 37 Hustak, Carla, 18, 26–27 hybridity, 19–20 hydraulic citizenship, 34 idea maps, 135–36, 138, 140, 145 iep jƗltok, 86 Illich, Ivan, 97, 99–100 Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), 43 indigenous, 42–44, 46, 52, 89, 98, 105–7, 145 Indigenous Knowledges Conference, 44 Industrial Revolution, 108 Indus Valley, 106 Ingold, Tim, 118, 120 interconnected, 73, 116, 133 interkingdom, 79 intermediation, 76, 78 interspecies, 4, 7, 15, 26, 57 intra-actions, 27 involution, 26–27 Irigaray, Luce, 21 Jacobs, Joela, 75 Jan van Eyck Academie, 117–18 Jasanoff, Sheila, 116 Jaspers, Karl, 107 Jetnil-Kijiner, Kathy, 84, 86–87; “Basket”, 84, 86 Jonas, Hans, 124 Jonson, Ben, 85 justice, 7–8, 35, 44–46, 49, 51–53n2, 68–69, 76, 98–99, 117, 132–40, 142,

144–45; environmental justice, 8, 44, 117, 132–36, 138–40, 144–45; multispecies justice, 7, 45, 49, 51–53, 68–69, 133, 142. See also multispecies Kandiaronk, 107 Kant, Immanuel, 34 Kazaka, Liene, 119, 122, 128 Kaziranga National Park, 47 Keller, Catherine, 18, 25, 28 Kimmerer, Robin Wall, 126 kin, 7, 24, 32, 35, 44, 46–47, 52, 73, 75–76, 78, 86–87, 90 Kinsella, John, 81–83; “Exposing the ‘Rhizanthella Gardneri’ Orchid”, 81–82 kinship, 7, 24, 45–47, 52, 73, 77, 90 Kirkman, Robert, 2 Kngwarreye, Emily Kame, 76 Kohn, Eduardo, 124; How Forests Think, 124 Kopenawa, Davi, 123 Kureethadam, Joshtrom Isaac, 2 Lacan, Jacques, 10–11 language propagation, 74 Larcher, Walter, 78 Larson, Jackson, 141 Latour, Bruno, 23, 26, 31; Facing Gaia, 26 Lawrence, D.H., 74 Le Guin, Ursula K., 23–24, 26; “The Marrow”, 24 Leigh, Simone, 144 Levinas, Emmanuel, 61, 72n4 liberalism, 32–39 library, 53n2, 131, 133, 141–44 lifedeath, 38–39 Lilley, Deborah, 15 liminality, 7, 17–21 limitrophy, 19 Linen Project, The, 121, 128 Locke, John, 32–34 London, Jack, 59 Lotman, Yuri, 80

Index

Lovelock, James, 22 Lynn, White, Jr, 2 Mancuso, Stefano, 75 mangroves, 42, 53n1, 74, 140 Marder, Michael, 77 Margulis, Lynn, 22, 25–26 Marsh, James, 72n5; Project Nim, 72n5 Marx, Karl, 35, 57–58 mass extinction, 19, 59–60, 70 Mathur, Anuradha, 36 matsutake, 22 McAfee, Kathleen, 13 McClure, Michael, 87–89; “Point Lobos: Animism”, 87–89 Melville, Herman, 59 memory, 4, 6, 11, 64–65, 79–82, 86 mesh, 29 Mesopotamia, 102, 104, 106–8 metafictional, 66–67 metaxy, 20 microbial diversity, 79 Microcosms, 87, 89–90 microorganism, 57, 78–79, 81, 84, 87 Millet, Lydia, 59, 61–64; “Chomsky, Rodents”, 63; “Edison and Golakov”, 61–63; Love in Infant Monkeys, 59, 61 Minecraft, 33–34 Mitchell, Tim, 35 modern civilization, 7, 97–98, 101, 109 modernity, 25, 32, 36, 97–100, 108 Moe, Aaron, 75 molecular vocabulary, 79 money, 35, 45, 49, 71, 98–99, 103, 106–8, 109n4 Montesquieu, 34 more-than-human, 7, 18, 21, 23–28, 117–18, 120–21, 123, 126–27 Morton, Timothy, 8, 21, 31, 38, 125 mourning, 6, 11–12, 68 Muir, Sharona, 69–71; Invisible Beasts, 69–70 multispecies, 7, 18, 22–24, 43, 45–47, 49, 51–53, 57–59, 63, 68–69, 71, 77, 114, 120, 125, 133, 142

151

multispecies caretaking, 7, 45, 47, 49, 52 multispecies rebellion, 7, 43, 45–46, 52–53 Munda, Birsa, 44–45 mushroom, 22–23, 28, 32, 119 mycorrhizal, 79, 82–83, 125 Myers, Natasha, 18, 26–27, 118–19 naturalist, 20, 59, 69 natureculture, 8, 11–12, 19, 31–32, 38 neoliberal, 20, 97 Neruda, Pablo, 74 Nixon, Rob, 41, 115, 117–18, 126; Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, 41 noble savage, 106, 109 nonhuman, 1, 4, 6–7, 9, 12, 20–23, 31–32, 36, 42–46, 51–52, 60–61, 66, 68, 71, 99, 116, 119 Nunez, Sigrid, 59–60, 66–67; The Friend, 59, 66–68 oikeios, 11 Oliver, Mary, 74 Oswald, Alice, 74, 76 outdoor classroom, 131–32, 134, 138– 40, 143, 145 Paine, Thomas, 34 pandemic, 52, 57, 131–32, 138, 140, 143 panenthesism, 14 papyrus, 120, 124, 128nn3–4 Parambikulum Tiger Reserve, 48 pathogen, 78 Peacock, Jennifer Garcia, 8, 53n2 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 124 Pellow, David Naguib, 139; What is Critical Environmental Justice?, 139 Peña, Zeke, 136, 141–42 petroculture, 37–38 petrofascism, 8, 36 petroliberalism, 35–36 Pflugheber, Jill, 89 phyllosphere, 79–80, 84–86, 90

152

phyllospheric poetics, 73, 84 phytopoems, 73, 76, 81, 83–84 phytopoetics, 7, 73–78, 80–83, 88, 90 phytosphere, 7, 73–74, 77, 81, 85 planetarity, 8–9 planetary, 1–3, 5, 7–8, 18 plantation, 34–35 plantationocene, 32, 34 plant blindness, 77 plant extinction, 75 plant kinship, 77 plant life, 42, 74, 76 plastic, 35, 48, 63, 66 plasticity, 117, 121–24, 127–28, 128n5 Plato, 20, 46 polar bear, 6, 47 Pootoogook, Annie, 47 population, 43, 58, 79, 99–100, 102–3, 105, 108 postcolonialism, 18 postfeminism, 18 posthuman, 18, 60, 66 postmodernism, 18–20, 67, 97 postracial, 60 Powers, Richard, 24, 59–60, 65–67; The Echo Maker, 59–60, 65; The Overstory, 24 psilocybin, 23 Radical Mycology Convergence, The, 22 Rangarajan, Mahesh, 45 recognition, 3–5, 9–10, 12, 60, 75, 101, 122, 125, 126 recompositional politics, 32 renewable energy, 98, 100 reproduction, 36, 58 resilience, 10, 14, 44, 86, 90, 131 resistance, 29, 35, 43, 78, 136, 139 revolutionary infrastructure, 8, 36, 38 rhizosphere, 79–84, 90 rhizospheric poetics, 73, 81–82 Rietmeyer, Rene, 142 Robinson, Kim Stanley, 100 Rousseau, 34

Index

Roy, Arnab, 42 Ruskin, John, 74 Ryan, John Charles, 7, 88–89; “Rock Orchid Hyphae”, 87–89 Sahlins, Marshall, 106 Samshernagar, 50 Santiniketan, 138 Sapp, Jan, 22 Saro-Wiwa, Ken, 41; A Month and a Day, 41 Schumacher, Ernst F., 97, 99 Schussler, Elisabeth, 77 science fiction, 100 Scott, James C., 98, 101–5, 107–9 secular, 2–5, 11–13 sedentary settlement, 102 Sen, Sudakshina, 47 sensorium, 60–61, 64, 69, 87, 119 Shakespeare, William, 85 Sheldrake, Merlin, 18, 22–23, 125; Entangled Life, 22–23 Simard, Suzzane, 79 slavery, 34, 37, 104–5, 107–8 Sloterdijk, Peter, 8 Smith, Adam, 34 Smith, Jaune Quick-to-See, 141–42 Socrates, 123 species-being, 57–59, 71 species dialectic, 61, 64, 68 species fiction, 7, 58–60, 62, 64, 67 species loneliness, 60, 67 speculative story, 24 Spheres Trilogy, 8 State of Art Report on Biodiversity in Indian Sundarbans, 41–43 Stengers, Isabelle, 20, 25, 27, 31 subscendence, 8, 38–39 Sundarban, 5, 42–43, 49–52, 53n1 Sunderban, 140, 142 sustainability, 11, 43, 98, 100 Svoboda, Josef, 73, 78–79 sweetgrass, 89 Swyngedouw, Erik, 11–12 symbiogenesis, 22, 25

Index

symbiosis, 23, 75 sympoiesis, 25, 73, 90 sympoietic, 18, 25–26, 31 Sze, Julie, 139–40; Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger, 139 Szerszynski, Bronislaw, 15 Tagore, Rabindranath, 138 Tauber, Alfred, 22 technology, 3, 13–14, 32–33, 38, 61, 63–64, 89, 99–101, 107–8, 115–16, 120–21 technopolitics, 37–38 terra nullius, 33, 39 terran worlding, 25 Thoreau, Henry David, 4, 84; Walden, 4 tiger, 42, 45, 48–52, 53n2 Times of India, The, 50 togetherness, 6–7, 22–23, 57 Tondeur, Anaïs, 114 Trewavas, Anthony, 77 tribal, 8, 43–45, 52, 105 Trouillot, Rolph, 34, 36 Tsing, Anna L., 22–23, 32, 34, 67, 118, 120 Turner, Victor, 18 Ulgulan, 45 uncanny, 5–6, 21 Untitled (Composition with Taleelayu), 46–47 urbanism, 103–5 vaporettos, 141 vegetal, 24, 73, 75–77, 79–82, 84–85, 87–88, 90, 118, 120–21, 125 vegetal cognition, 75 vegetal silence, 85

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Venice Biennale, 53n2, 131, 134, 138, 140, 143–44 vernacular, 114–19, 127 Vernadsky, Vladimir, 80 Vicuña, Cecelia, 144 visual culture, 45, 49, 52, 134–35, 140 visual pedagogy, 135 Voeglin, Eric, 20; Order and History, 20 Wampole, Christy, 81 Wandersee, James, 77 War of the Worlds, 39 waste, 1, 3, 13, 33, 57, 70 Water Protectors, 44 Wengrow, David, 99, 101, 104–9n3 Western Ghats, 47–48 wetlands, 23, 37, 74, 81, 102, 144 White, Steven F., 89 Whitehead, Alfred North, 25 Whitman, Walt, 81; “Calamus”, 81; Leaves of Grass, 81 Whyte, Kyle Powys, 32 Wildlife Conservation Society, 42 Wood, David, 8–9 wooded web, 79 Woolf, Virginia, 17, 59; the Waves, 17 World Health Organisation, 57 worlding, 7, 18, 25, 31, 73 World Wide Fund (WWF), 42, 99 Wright, Judith, 74 Xenohormesis, 125 Yazzie, Melanie, 44 Yellowstone National Park, 42, 142 Zizek, Slavoj, 11–12 zoopoetics, 75 Zuniga de Dochas, Alexandria, 141

About the Contributors

Kaushani Mondal is an assistant professor at the Department of English, University of North Bengal. Her work purveys into the fields of ecocritical theory, environmental humanities, and other allied areas. She is working on her next book on waste ecology. Subhankar Banerjee is a professor of art and ecology and the founding director of the Center for Environmental Arts and Humanities at the University of New Mexico. Coeditor (with T J Demos and Emily Eliza Scott) of the Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change (2021), Banerjee most recently served as the director and cocurator (with Jennifer Garcia Peacock) of “a Library, a Classroom, and the World” project for the 2022 Venice Biennial Art exhibition Personal Structures, which was organized by the European Cultural Centre in Venice, Italy, and won the 2022 ECC Award for University and Research Project. Banerjee is currently writing a book on shorebirds titled Birds of Wind, and cowriting (with Finis Dunaway) a book provisionally titled Beyond Fortress Conservation: A Visual History of Biodiversity and Justice. Giulia Bellinetti is a researcher and cultural programmer. Her interests lie in the political ecologies of contemporary art institutions, in particular with regard to processes of knowledge production. She investigates this subject in her doctorate at the University of Amsterdam and in her institutional practice at the Jan van Eyck Academie (Netherlands). Here she runs the Nature Research Department and coordinates the Future Materials program, a multidisciplinary platform aimed at promoting and disseminating knowledge on sustainable materials for art and design practices. Previously, Giulia was

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About the Contributors

Head of the Production Department at M HKA, Museum of Contemporary Art of Antwerp, Belgium. Dominic Boyer is an anthropologist, media maker, and environmental researcher who teaches at Rice University, where he served as Founding Director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences (2013–2019). His most recent books are Energopolitics (2019), which analyzes the politics of wind power development in Southern Mexico, and Hyposubjects (2021), an experimental collaboration with Timothy Morton concerning politics in the Anthropocene. With Cymene Howe, he made a documentary film about Iceland’s first major glacier (Okjökull) lost to climate change, Not Ok: A Little Movie about a Small Glacier at the End of the World (2018). In August 2019, together with Icelandic collaborators they installed a memorial to Okjökull’s passing, an event that attracted media attention from around the world and which caused The Economist to create their first-ever obituary for a nonhuman. During 2021–22 he held an artist residency at The Factory in Djúpavík, Iceland, and was a Berggruen Institute Fellow in Los Angeles, working on a project “Electric Futures.” His next book is titled No More Fossils (2023), a discussion of fossil fuel fossils and what is to be done about them. Jeff Diamanti is an assistant professor of environmental humanities (cultural analysis and philosophy) at the University of Amsterdam. His first book, Climate and Capital in the Age of Petroleum: Locating Terminal Landscapes (Bloomsbury 2021), tracks the political and media ecology of fossil fuels across the extractive and logistical spaces that connect remote territories like Greenland to the economies of North America and Western Europe. His new research, Bloom Ecologies, details the return to natural philosophy in the marine and atmospheric sciences studying the interactive dynamics of the cryosphere and hydrosphere in the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans. Forthcoming editorial work includes the Elemental Solarities book collection (Punctum Press) with Cymene Howe and Amelia Moore, and a special issue of Postmodern Culture on “Field Theory.” He co-directs the ASCA Political Ecologies Seminar with Joost de Bloois, and with Amanda Boetzkes, he co-organizes “At the Moraine,” an ongoing research project on the political ecology of glacial retreat in the Arctic. With Fred Carter, he co-directs the FieldARTS residency in Amsterdam, NL. Tamalone van den Eijnden (she/her) is a Dutch-German PhD candidate at the Section of Knowledge, Transformation & Society (KiTeS), University of Twente, the Netherlands. Here, she is part of the European research collaboration BioTraCes. Within this framework, she examines processes of

About the Contributors

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transformative change from a bottom-up, activist, and creative perspective that aim at more just societies where biodiversity flourishes. She is also affiliated to the Plasticity research group that brings interdisciplinary Netherlandsbased researchers together to think about the phenomenon of plasticity within plants and humans. Before starting her PhD, she has been teaching and researching in the fields of media and culture with a focus on environmental humanities and sustainable imaginaries at Utrecht University and the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Alf Hornborg is an anthropologist and Professor Emeritus of Human Ecology at Lund University, Sweden. His research interests include the roles of money, technology, and ecologically unequal exchange in world-system history, focusing on how “development” and “progress” in some parts of the world may be contingent on the appropriation of human labor time and natural space from other parts. He is the author of The Power of the Machine (2001), Global Ecology and Unequal Exchange (2011), Global Magic (2016), Nature, Society, and Justice in the Anthropocene (2019), and The Magic of Technology (2023). Caren Irr is Kevy and Hortense Kaiserman Professor of Humanities at Brandeis University. She is the author of three monographs and editor of five volumes—most recently, Life in Plastic: Artistic Responses to Petromodernity ( 2021) and Environmental Futures: An International Literary Anthology (2024). Jennifer Garcia Peacock examines the ways that global cultural producers such as artists and activists have (re)shaped their cultural landscapes through vernacular visual products such as murals, poster art, pilgrimage, altars, gardens, and roadside shrines to raise awareness of issues related to biodiversity, climate justice, food sovereignty, and more just futures. More specifically, she specializes in twentieth-century U.S. and Latinx history, environmental history, and visual culture, and teaching and community-based learning are at the crux of her scholarly practice, and she takes great joy in exposing undergraduate students to these dynamic visual traditions and environmental advocacy work. John Charles Ryan is an adjunct associate professor at Southern Cross University, Australia; an adjunct senior research fellow at the Nulungu Institute, Notre Dame University, Australia; and an adjunct faculty member in Environmental Studies at Susquehanna University in the United States. His research focuses on Aboriginal Australian literature, Southeast Asian ecocriticism, the environmental humanities, ecopoetics, and transdisciplinary

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About the Contributors

plant studies. His recent publications include Global Perspectives on Nationalism (2022 co-edited); Postcolonial Literature of Climate Change (2022, co-edited); Environment, Media and Popular Culture in Southeast Asia (2022, co-edited); Introduction to the Environmental Humanities (2021, coauthored); and The Mind of Plants: Narratives of Vegetal Intelligence (2021, co-edited). His poetry collection, Seeing Trees: A Poetic Arboretum (2020, with G. Phillips), explores the idea of consciousness in plants. In 2023, he undertook visiting research fellowships at the University of Oulu, Finland, and Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China. Clara Soudan received her PhD in political and environmental philosophy from the University of Edinburgh. Her thesis, “Spells of Our Inhabiting: Transitioning from the Spectre of Gnostic Estrangement to a Philosophy of Entangled Overflowing,” analyzes the gnostic motive of a dualistic alienation from the world and how it infuses modern narratives of nature along with the way we inhabit the world. Her present research is drawn to questions of intimacy, liminality, and queerness in our relationship to more-than-human life. Delving into environmental philosophy’s fertile intersections with critical theory, plant studies, queer studies, process thought, and quantum physics, her work unfolds the implications of the contemporary ecological crisis and the rediscovery of our radical entanglement with more-than-humans for our regimes of thought.