animals

This collection brings a Canadian perspective to the growing field of animal history, ranging across species and cities, from the beavers who engineered Stanley Park to the carthorses who shaped the city of Montreal. Some essays consider animals as spectacle, while others examine the bodily intimacies of shared urban spaces.

In this introduction to the special issue on Multispecies Studies, Thom van Dooren, Eben Kirksey, and Ursula Münster provide an overview of the emerging field of multispecies studies. Unsettling given notions of species, the article explores a broad terrain of possible modes of classifying, categorizing, and paying attention to the diverse ways of life that constitute worlds.

In this special issue on Multispecies Studies, Thom van Dooren and Deborah Bird Rose attempt to dwell with the kinds of writing and thinking practices that we have been developing in their research in Hawai’i over the past seven years. Their aim is to develop “lively ethographies”: a mode of knowing, engaging, and storytelling that recognizes the meaningful lives of others and that, in so doing, enlivens our capacity to respond to them by singing up their character or ethos.

In this special issue on Multispecies Studies, Cary Wolfe and Maria Whiteman discuss the changing notions of landscape and nature at work in the video installation Mountain Pine Beetle and explores some of the forces that eventuated in the devastated landscapes of the Rocky Mountain West brought on by the infestation of the mountain pine beetle beginning in the early 2000s—an infestation caused, in no small part, by what some scientists have called a perfect storm of circumstances created by global warming.

In the special section titled “Living Lexicon for the Environmental Section,” Simon Pooley reflects on the decisions and implications of conferring the status of “endangered species” on animals.

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.

Hugo Reinert uses the highly endangered Lesser White-fronted Goose to develop an argument about a certain “biopolitics of the wild”—a particular mode of governing nonhuman life, rooted in certain conditions of visibility and engagement.

This Spring 1994 issue of Entmoot! encourages environmental activists to take direct action about issues such as the eradication of wild salmon and the reintroduction of wolves.