Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-9962838
Soledad Altrudi, C. Kelty
Multispecies entanglement has been a major research focus in environmental humanities, aiming to rethink ontological and ethical possibilities, especially in urban settings, by attending to speculative other-than-human futures. This article dwells on already existing entanglements of multiple species of animals in Los Angeles, using empirical data (conversations from the social media platform Nextdoor) to describe these entanglements according to a fourfold framework—spatial, emotional, behavioral, and political. Drawing on the political philosophy of nondomination, it argues that existing entanglements are primarily arbitrary in a political sense, and that moving beyond them will require reducing this arbitrariness, even it if it means restricting human freedom or introducing new forms of control over animals, for a more-than-human city to be just.
{"title":"Animals, Angelenos, and the Arbitrary","authors":"Soledad Altrudi, C. Kelty","doi":"10.1215/22011919-9962838","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9962838","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Multispecies entanglement has been a major research focus in environmental humanities, aiming to rethink ontological and ethical possibilities, especially in urban settings, by attending to speculative other-than-human futures. This article dwells on already existing entanglements of multiple species of animals in Los Angeles, using empirical data (conversations from the social media platform Nextdoor) to describe these entanglements according to a fourfold framework—spatial, emotional, behavioral, and political. Drawing on the political philosophy of nondomination, it argues that existing entanglements are primarily arbitrary in a political sense, and that moving beyond them will require reducing this arbitrariness, even it if it means restricting human freedom or introducing new forms of control over animals, for a more-than-human city to be just.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49043389","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-9962915
Sarah Bezan, Ina Linge
{"title":"A Critical Introduction to Sex and Nature in the Anthropocene.","authors":"Sarah Bezan, Ina Linge","doi":"10.1215/22011919-9962915","DOIUrl":"10.1215/22011919-9962915","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7613926/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10367689","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-9712379
Aaron Bradshaw
The emergence of Ideonella sakaiensis, a microorganism with the capacity to metabolize the widely used plastic polyethylene terephthalate (PET), raises important questions about how human and nonhuman agency are related in responding to pressing environmental issues. The article explores how the agency and expertise of I. sakaiensis is a constitutive but often overlooked collaborator in scientific research into plastic biodegradation, and it attempts to develop a methodology for enrolling microorganisms as active research participants from the outset. Knowledge coproduced with microbial others, and specifically those microbes with the capacity to detoxify anthropogenic pollutants, may inform and enact inclusive and prescient responses to ongoing environmental degradation. Accordingly, drawing from theoretical orientations in more-than-human participatory research and animals’ geographies, the article asks how microorganisms might express their own directives, preferences, and constraints on the research process, and how, in turn, we might listen and be directed by them. Although the ontological and ethical commitments of the environmental humanities are well suited for welcoming microbes as partners in deliberative processes, the challenges of communicating with them across vast scalar and bodily differences suggests a need to engage with techniques traditionally considered the disciplinary property of the natural sciences. Some of these concepts are contextualized with respect to a research project currently being undertaken at the River Lea in East London and the attempt to enroll I. sakaiensis as a collaborator in responding to plastic pollution in the river.
{"title":"Can Microbes Be Active Participants in Research? Developing a Methodology for Collaborating with Plastic-Eating Microbes","authors":"Aaron Bradshaw","doi":"10.1215/22011919-9712379","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9712379","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The emergence of Ideonella sakaiensis, a microorganism with the capacity to metabolize the widely used plastic polyethylene terephthalate (PET), raises important questions about how human and nonhuman agency are related in responding to pressing environmental issues. The article explores how the agency and expertise of I. sakaiensis is a constitutive but often overlooked collaborator in scientific research into plastic biodegradation, and it attempts to develop a methodology for enrolling microorganisms as active research participants from the outset. Knowledge coproduced with microbial others, and specifically those microbes with the capacity to detoxify anthropogenic pollutants, may inform and enact inclusive and prescient responses to ongoing environmental degradation. Accordingly, drawing from theoretical orientations in more-than-human participatory research and animals’ geographies, the article asks how microorganisms might express their own directives, preferences, and constraints on the research process, and how, in turn, we might listen and be directed by them. Although the ontological and ethical commitments of the environmental humanities are well suited for welcoming microbes as partners in deliberative processes, the challenges of communicating with them across vast scalar and bodily differences suggests a need to engage with techniques traditionally considered the disciplinary property of the natural sciences. Some of these concepts are contextualized with respect to a research project currently being undertaken at the River Lea in East London and the attempt to enroll I. sakaiensis as a collaborator in responding to plastic pollution in the river.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41480636","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-9712412
Ilenia Iengo
This toxic autobiography seeks to open the conversation around the intersecting injustices marking the epistemological, material, political, and porous entanglements between endometriosis, the bodily inflammatory chronic condition the author is affected by, and the toxic waste fires raging in the territory known as the Land of Fires, between the provinces of Naples and Caserta, in southern Italy. Thinking with the sprouting intersection of environmental humanities and disability justice, while rooted in a critical environmental justice and transfeminist standpoint, the article uncovers the toxic embodiment where bodies and places are enmeshed. Although a growing body of literature acknowledges the role of chemical buildup and endocrine-disrupting toxins in the occurrence of endometriosis, the author delineates the epistemic injustices that keep this relationship silent in mainstream medical discourses. Through the blend of environmental memoir, embodied knowledge, activist campaigns, and medical literature, the article exposes the accumulation of environmental, medical, ableist, misogynist, and capitalist slow violence that living with endometriosis brings about. While emerging from the materiality of experiencing trauma and pain, the article reclaims the emancipatory possibilities that can be articulated. From the politicization of an “invisible” illness standpoint, the article proposes a toxic autobiography in which transfeminist, environmental, and disability justice politics are collectively affirmed through situated ecopolitics of response-ability that accounts for interdependence and self-determination of marginal bodies and territories.
{"title":"Endometriosis and Environmental Violence","authors":"Ilenia Iengo","doi":"10.1215/22011919-9712412","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9712412","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This toxic autobiography seeks to open the conversation around the intersecting injustices marking the epistemological, material, political, and porous entanglements between endometriosis, the bodily inflammatory chronic condition the author is affected by, and the toxic waste fires raging in the territory known as the Land of Fires, between the provinces of Naples and Caserta, in southern Italy. Thinking with the sprouting intersection of environmental humanities and disability justice, while rooted in a critical environmental justice and transfeminist standpoint, the article uncovers the toxic embodiment where bodies and places are enmeshed. Although a growing body of literature acknowledges the role of chemical buildup and endocrine-disrupting toxins in the occurrence of endometriosis, the author delineates the epistemic injustices that keep this relationship silent in mainstream medical discourses. Through the blend of environmental memoir, embodied knowledge, activist campaigns, and medical literature, the article exposes the accumulation of environmental, medical, ableist, misogynist, and capitalist slow violence that living with endometriosis brings about. While emerging from the materiality of experiencing trauma and pain, the article reclaims the emancipatory possibilities that can be articulated. From the politicization of an “invisible” illness standpoint, the article proposes a toxic autobiography in which transfeminist, environmental, and disability justice politics are collectively affirmed through situated ecopolitics of response-ability that accounts for interdependence and self-determination of marginal bodies and territories.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42560795","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-9712357
Jared D. Margulies
How does attention to exertion and absence of care illuminate possibilities for avoiding extinction amid global biodiversity declines? This article brings together feminist technoscience and more-than-human theory on care with Lacanian psychoanalytic theories of anxiety and desire. It does so to diagnose the threat of extinction anxieties and consider their material and political consequences for impedances to caring for nonhuman life and their flourishing. The article is developed through the empirical case of Arrojadoa marylanae, an endangered species of cactus in Bahia, Brazil, as a political ecology of desire. In bringing psychoanalytic thought into conversation with care, it considers how desire sits at the heart of more-than-human care and yet may be thwarted by anxiety. Contending with his own extinction anxieties as they became focused through an endangered cactus on a mountain destined for mining, the author excavates routes toward flourishing geographies: geographies of care-full interspecies alliances composed against Anthropocenic thinking. In concluding, the author urges for greater attention to the work of desire in studies of environmental change and the wider environmental humanities.
{"title":"A Political Ecology of Desire","authors":"Jared D. Margulies","doi":"10.1215/22011919-9712357","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9712357","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 How does attention to exertion and absence of care illuminate possibilities for avoiding extinction amid global biodiversity declines? This article brings together feminist technoscience and more-than-human theory on care with Lacanian psychoanalytic theories of anxiety and desire. It does so to diagnose the threat of extinction anxieties and consider their material and political consequences for impedances to caring for nonhuman life and their flourishing. The article is developed through the empirical case of Arrojadoa marylanae, an endangered species of cactus in Bahia, Brazil, as a political ecology of desire. In bringing psychoanalytic thought into conversation with care, it considers how desire sits at the heart of more-than-human care and yet may be thwarted by anxiety. Contending with his own extinction anxieties as they became focused through an endangered cactus on a mountain destined for mining, the author excavates routes toward flourishing geographies: geographies of care-full interspecies alliances composed against Anthropocenic thinking. In concluding, the author urges for greater attention to the work of desire in studies of environmental change and the wider environmental humanities.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42737872","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-9712401
David Rojas
What does it mean to resort to neoliberal environmental approaches to heal the socio-ecological devastation wrought by fascistic forces? In Brazil extremist right-wing efforts to impose sovereign state rule over Amazonia have resulted in rampant deforestation, violence against forest peoples, and a catastrophic COVID-19 pandemic. Some environmentalists suggest that escaping such devastation means returning to previous neoliberal policies such as “climate-smart agriculture” (CSA) that were promoted as a way to open a future of endless economic expansion and forest preservation. Rejecting the choice between fascistic and neoliberal environmental approaches, this article examines the future-oriented work of Amazonian environmentalists who grapple with “disjointed times” in which economic and ecological trends resist harmonization. Attentive to multispecies and multi-temporal dynamics, they suggest ways to avoid a temporal trap wherein the catastrophic failure of anthropocentric future-making projects always calls for yet another anthropocentric future-making project.
{"title":"Disjointed Times in “Climate-Smart” Amazonia","authors":"David Rojas","doi":"10.1215/22011919-9712401","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9712401","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 What does it mean to resort to neoliberal environmental approaches to heal the socio-ecological devastation wrought by fascistic forces? In Brazil extremist right-wing efforts to impose sovereign state rule over Amazonia have resulted in rampant deforestation, violence against forest peoples, and a catastrophic COVID-19 pandemic. Some environmentalists suggest that escaping such devastation means returning to previous neoliberal policies such as “climate-smart agriculture” (CSA) that were promoted as a way to open a future of endless economic expansion and forest preservation. Rejecting the choice between fascistic and neoliberal environmental approaches, this article examines the future-oriented work of Amazonian environmentalists who grapple with “disjointed times” in which economic and ecological trends resist harmonization. Attentive to multispecies and multi-temporal dynamics, they suggest ways to avoid a temporal trap wherein the catastrophic failure of anthropocentric future-making projects always calls for yet another anthropocentric future-making project.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46175989","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-9712368
Kelly Donati
For millennia, gastronomy has concerned itself with the deceptively simple question of how best to eat and live. This article proposes gastronomy as a fertile discourse, practice, and site of scholarly inquiry for thinking about the social and sensual pleasures of eating and living well across species difference. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with a cheesemaker in southern Australia, this article asks what it means to take seriously goats as gastronomic subjects and to consider what a ruminant gastronomy might look like within the web of creaturely relations that make cheese possible. The article highlights the cultivation of practices of attentiveness, focusing on the use of Obsalim, a system for managing ruminant health by interpreting the “language of the rumen.” Thinking about and responding to the rumen’s microbial communities offers productive possibilities for understanding how goats bring their evaluations to bear on the quality of their nourishment. This counternarrative to Western gastronomy’s humanist orientations proposes a re-imagination of the multi-species liveliness on which the practices and politics of eating well depend.
{"title":"Toward a Ruminant Gastronomy","authors":"Kelly Donati","doi":"10.1215/22011919-9712368","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9712368","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 For millennia, gastronomy has concerned itself with the deceptively simple question of how best to eat and live. This article proposes gastronomy as a fertile discourse, practice, and site of scholarly inquiry for thinking about the social and sensual pleasures of eating and living well across species difference. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with a cheesemaker in southern Australia, this article asks what it means to take seriously goats as gastronomic subjects and to consider what a ruminant gastronomy might look like within the web of creaturely relations that make cheese possible. The article highlights the cultivation of practices of attentiveness, focusing on the use of Obsalim, a system for managing ruminant health by interpreting the “language of the rumen.” Thinking about and responding to the rumen’s microbial communities offers productive possibilities for understanding how goats bring their evaluations to bear on the quality of their nourishment. This counternarrative to Western gastronomy’s humanist orientations proposes a re-imagination of the multi-species liveliness on which the practices and politics of eating well depend.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48072897","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-9712522
Cecilie Rubow
Contrary to the taken-for-granted dictum in nature politics and in public media that “loving nature prompts care,” this article considers less intuitive relations between love and ethics. Through the analysis of different enactments of natures in Denmark and a reading of Jane Bennett’s Enchantment of Modern Life, the article captures how sensibilities and moralities swing from anethical moments to affective forms of responsibility. By comparing walks at a recreational beach with activists’ campaigns at a peri-urban commons and a climate activist march in the capital center, Cecilie Rubow proposes, inspired by Bennett, to think of a variation of chords of wonder and ethics. Dissonantly, the chords of the enchanted ecologies range from magical moments in remote nature to love and respect for co-living plants and animals, and to the perplexing and motivational awareness of one’s entwinement with the whole planet. This reconceptualization of enchantment speaks to the depth of the ecological crises.
{"title":"The Indoor People’s Enchanted Ecologies","authors":"Cecilie Rubow","doi":"10.1215/22011919-9712522","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9712522","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Contrary to the taken-for-granted dictum in nature politics and in public media that “loving nature prompts care,” this article considers less intuitive relations between love and ethics. Through the analysis of different enactments of natures in Denmark and a reading of Jane Bennett’s Enchantment of Modern Life, the article captures how sensibilities and moralities swing from anethical moments to affective forms of responsibility. By comparing walks at a recreational beach with activists’ campaigns at a peri-urban commons and a climate activist march in the capital center, Cecilie Rubow proposes, inspired by Bennett, to think of a variation of chords of wonder and ethics. Dissonantly, the chords of the enchanted ecologies range from magical moments in remote nature to love and respect for co-living plants and animals, and to the perplexing and motivational awareness of one’s entwinement with the whole planet. This reconceptualization of enchantment speaks to the depth of the ecological crises.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42065926","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：