This paper argues for a broader understanding of the multidimensionality of environmental problems.

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.

Inspired by Francis Bacon’s ant, spider, and bee as models of collecting, processing, and transforming knowledge, Kimberly Coulter, Wilko Graf von Hardenberg, and Finn Arne Jørgensen founded the blog Ant Spider Bee to reflect on ways technology was transforming the epistemologies, methods, and dissemination of environmental humanities research. A kind of time capsule with essays and embedded media by thirty authors, this e-book presents snapshots of transformations in knowledge practices during a period of rapid change.