Through an ethnographic account about the use of an electromagnetic water system in the Amish community, Nicole Welk-Joerger explores the conceptual meeting ground between sacred and secular worldviews in efforts that address the Anthropocene.

In this special commentary section titled “Replies to An Ecomodernist Manifesto,” edited by Eileen Crist and Thom Van Dooren, Clive Hamilton examines Erle Ellis’ ‘good Anthropocene,’ an unlikely juxtaposition which has now been amplified into the idea of the “great Anthropocene” and set out in An Ecomodernist Manifesto.

With a focus on global cancer epidemics, Nina Lykke discusses biopolitics in the Anthropocene against the background of a notion of dual governmentality, implying that efforts to make populations live and tendencies to let them die are intertwined.

Andrew Whitehouse considers the semiotics of listening to birds in the Anthropocene by drawing on Kohn’s recent arguments on the semiotics of more-than-human relations and Ingold’s understanding of the world as a meshwork, and comparing the work of Bernie Krause with responses to the the Listening to Birds project.