The authors introduce a special section of Environmental Humanities on manifestations of deep time through places, objects, and practices, focusing on three modes through which it is encountered: enchantment, violence, and haunting.
Content Index
The authors detail their experience of Puchuncavi, the largest, oldest, and most polluting industrial area in Chile. They approach it from a multidisciplinary viewpoint as an experience of the Anthropocene and advocate for an enhanced pedagogy of care born of our inherited pasts and of engagement, interest, and becoming as response-ability.
Patrick Bresnihan reveals how John Clare’s poetry challenged the naturalization of scarcity, instead describing the different natures which unfold through ongoing, negotiated, and changing relations between people and things.
Sarah Besky explores the interactions of workers, students, and city residents with environmental events, crumbling infrastructure, and wildlife in Darjeeling, with a focus on the role of the district as a site of extraction.
Matthew Schneider-Mayerson investigates the impact of climate fiction on American readers through a qualitative survey, and assesses the results based on concepts borrowed from ecocriticism, environmental psychology, and environmental communication.
In the context of current concerns within the environmental humanities to challenge the idea that humans are somehow irreducible to nature, the authors in this article take up the much-neglected history of the idea of human exceptionality itself, arguing that this form of humanist discourse often forgets its own contingencies and instabilities, and its comprehensively violent inheritances.
Sophie Chao delves into an unexplored dimension of the agribusiness nexus—the affective attachments of corporate actors to oil palm seeds. Drawing from fieldwork in an oil palm concession in Riau, Sumatra, she highlights the conflicting nature of caring for palm oil seeds.
João Afonso Baptista uses an ethnographic approach to analyze ecological knowledge in Angolan forests as shaped by local dwellers and represented by (neo)colonial processes of distinction and separation, namely the external knower and the object known.
The authors analyze the portrayal in popular conservation discourse of the flowering plant Rhododendron ponticum as an invasive species in the British countryside, especially Scotland. They explore how its invasiveness is materially produced via the cultural and socioeconomic as well as vegetal relations within which it is entangled.
Eileen Crist argues that the discourse of the Anthropocene refuses to challenge human dominion, proposing instead technological and managerial approaches that would make human dominion sustainable.