This book packs into one slender volume a sweeping tale of fire, and humanity’s interactions with fire, from prehistory to the dawn of the twenty-first century.

Jonathan Woolley borrows the folkloristic, East Anglia figure of Black Shuck, a devilish hound, and connects it to a narrative of the Anthropocene based on the notions of inescapable mortality, deep time, and responsibility.

Considering Caroline Wendling’s living artwork White Wood (2014) in northeast Scotland, the author examines the relationship between deep time, ecology, and enchantment.

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.

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.

Manifesto for Living in the Anthropocene argues that the current climate crisis calls for new ways of thinking and producing knowledge, suggesting that our collective inclination has been to go on in an experimental and exploratory mode, in which we refuse to foreclose on options or jump too quickly to “solutions.”

Vital Reenchantments takes up E. O. Wilson’s Biophilia (1984), James Lovelock’s Gaia (1979), and Carl Sagan’s Cosmos (1980), to show how each work fleshes out scientific concepts with attention to “affective wonder.”

Contributing authors examine what happens when we cease to assume that only humans exert agency, by considering animals and vegetables as agents rather than mere objects.