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 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.

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.

Petra Tjitske Kalshoven combines ethnographic studies with ornithological testimonies to present the re-creation and reenactment of the extinct great auk, or garefowl. The author aims to achieve contiguity with lost species through expressions and shaping of human perceptions and imaginations of past, and eventually future, environmental disasters.