"Ecological Community, the Sense of the World, and Senseless Extinction"
Mick Smith examines how a posthumanist notion of ecological community might attempt to address questions concerning extinction.
Mick Smith examines how a posthumanist notion of ecological community might attempt to address questions concerning extinction.
What does the possibility of an early end to human existence as part of a more general biotic extinction mean for the latter day writing of history?
In this Special Commentary Section titled “Replies to An Ecomodernist Manifesto,” edited by Eileen Crist and Thom Van Dooren, Eileen Crist considers the Manifesto’s point as view as one of humanism and freedom.
In the special section titled “Living Lexicon for the Environmental Section,” Simon Pooley reflects on the decisions and implications of conferring the status of “endangered species” on animals.
In the “Living Lexicon for the Environmental Section” of Environmental Humanities, Maan Barua reveals encounters as spatializing and “ecologizing” politics in ways that are vital for the environmental humanities’ efforts to redistribute powers to act and to flourish.
In this introduction to the special issue on Multispecies Studies, Thom van Dooren, Eben Kirksey, and Ursula Münster provide an overview of the emerging field of multispecies studies. Unsettling given notions of species, the article explores a broad terrain of possible modes of classifying, categorizing, and paying attention to the diverse ways of life that constitute worlds.
In this special issue on Multispecies Studies, Celia Lowe and Ursula Münster present three open-ended stories of elephant care in times of death and loss: at places of confinement and elephant suffering like the zoos in Seattle and Zürich as well as in the conflict-ridden landscapes of South India, where the country’s last free-ranging elephants live. They call attention to the Asian elephant, a species that is currently facing extinction through the elephant endotheliotropic herpesvirus.
In looking back at Henri Bergson and Samuel Butler through contemporary art, Susan Ballard suggests that in the art gallery can provide an opportunity to locate ourselves in the place of others. She argues that sympathy read alongside machinic evolution can offer a new approach to the ecological disaster of species extinction.
Gordon M. Sayre explores the metaphor of a species as a book, represented in the Alexandrian library. He argues that this obscures the fact that the Alexandrian library consisted of manuscripts, not print books and that, in essence, species may be more like manuscripts than books after all.
This article addresses philosophies of becoming by reconsidering Thomas Nagel’s negative view on heterogeneity in his 1974 essay as a form of self-understanding in the context of a shared and heterogeneous world.