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.
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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.
Susie Hatmaker investigates the largest flood of coal ash in United States history in 2008 as an event at once monumental and insignificant.
William Major examines the need to understand pacifism and environmentalism as essentially consonant philosophies and practices.
Vicki Powys, Hollis Taylor and Carol Probets discuss the sonic achievements of Lyrebirds through concepts of memory and narrativity.
Within a vegetarian ecofeminist framework, Pilgrim analyses three popular nonfiction books that construct narratives around the story of meat.
Greaves responds to J. Baird Callicott’s “A NeoPresocratic Manifesto” with an alterative conception of the project of the Presocratics, inspired by the Heraclitean notion of unity in oppostion.