As we begin to pick up the scattered pieces of our lives upended by a global pandemic, there is still little clarity about what comes next; and yet it has been laid perfectly bare that mothering is both essential and chronically undervalued. For the two editors of this special issue, we are among millions who are raising kin (human and nonhuman alike) in the Anthropocene. Who both worry desperately for what the future will look like, and who practice love and care in the face of crisis, extinction, contamination, aggression, and more. We are interested in taking seriously mothering and other forms of caregiving as radical acts of ecosurvival, and so we invited human animal collaborators to this special issue to help us collectively think through the ways in which love, intimacy, mothering, caregiving, and/or kinmaking are practices of resistance, solidarity, or world-making. The response to our invitation – in both scope and depth – was immense. Scholars and poets and artists everywhere have already been imagining – and witnessing – a new world being born and broadened to allow new stories of survival and kinship to take hold.
Imagining More-Than-Human Care: From Multispecies Mothering to Caring Relations in Finding the Mother Tree
Author(s): Joshua Trey Barnett / Language(s): English
/ Issue: 1/2023
Keywords: Ethics of Care; Mothering; Multispecies Studies; Suzanne Simard; Finding the Mother Tree;
In the Western imaginary, care has long been pictured as a distinctly human activity—an activity undertaken primarily by women—and the paradigmatic image of caregiving has been that of a mother tending to her child. Increasingly, though, both the matricentricity and the anthropocentricity of care are being scrutinized as scholars advocate for more egalitarian and, in a few cases, more ecological conceptions of care. Examples of more-than-human care have been sparse, however, which hampers our collective capacity to imagine care beyond the human. Thus, in this essay I look for imaginative resources in forest ecologist Suzanne Simard’s (2021) New York Times bestselling book Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. This encounter reveals two connected concepts—multispecies mothering and caring relations—and opens onto an ecological ethic of care rooted in a commitment to care for caring relations, to sustain the conditions of possibility for the care that we all need to survive and flourish.
This essay introduces the figure of Victorian “plant mother” whose houseplant amities provide an alternative model of motherhood within nineteenth-century colonial archives. I argue that compiling instances of her dispersed presences across archival documents reveals a flexible avatar of motherhood who restores maternity’s embodied and emotional dimensions. Not simply an agent of colonialism, the plant mother and her plants provide moments of transformation that coax out of colonial archival structures more inclusive models of domesticity, family, and belonging. To access these moments, I build a framework for interpreting nineteenth-century archival materials that braids feminist and critical plant studies perspectives that share commitments to expanding understandings of archives in their theoretical and material forms. This essay reconstructs the lives of Victorian plant mothers from plant births to deaths. Through these archival reconstructions, I insist that Victorian houseplant mothers show us how to locate nodes of loving resistance within colonial archival structures.
Herbalists and plants have healing relationships that shape cultures throughout collapse and regeneration. Indeed, the herbalist was once a highly esteemed role in communities, thinking-with plants to facilitate relational care and healing of human and non-human kin alike. This article explores the ethics of mothering and kinship, as experienced through the lens of a herbalist, by disrupting standardized notions of mothering as a human-to-human biological reality and embracing an understanding of mothering as an interspecies and multi-generational practice. To do so, we engage in an animist and ecofeminist auto-ethnographic process of thinking-with Mugwort (Artemisia Vulgaris) to re-story our own relationships with mothering without biologically being mothers and how this shapes our relationships with grief, loss, and love in contemporary times. We look to Mugwort as an important ancestral ‘plant mother’ in each of our cultural lineages and draw on herbal folklore and practices to think through the complexities of more-than-human care. We argue that mothering is a subjective and contextual practice of kin-making, and how herbalists have ritually engaged in this since time immemorial. Herbalism can thus be framed as an ecological praxis that takes seriously multispecies mothering and gestures toward future(s) where mutual flourishing can be enacted in plural forms.
When my family started stewarding eight acres in British Columbia, Canada, we encountered a pervasive pioneer species or “weed”—quackgrass—that grows long roots and chokes out other plants. This paper counterposes the behaviour of these competitive and embinding roots with the cooperative mutual interrelation of forest root systems. Using these two roots as metaphors for the pleasures and pitfalls of family, I make an argument for family farming that both honours and resists the tangle of rootedness that is embodied in the symbiotic relationship of mother and sons. I paint a picture of a political project of regeneration and flourishing that is founded on deep love and affinity for the land and for each other. While I critique the constraints of family, the mother-son relationship emerges in this essay as a historically embedded and potentially generative form of community.
This paper analyzes W.G. Sebald’s novel The Rings of Saturn as a literary exploration of ecology and post-historicity. By examining Sebald’s narrative through Timothy Morton’s revision of Hegelian art history as “Asymmetricity,” a prolonged period of post-human Romanticism, Sebald’s vision of history is positioned after the end of a sense of historical progress, a period of ruin and decline where nature begins to reclaim the landscape and history itself. This condition, I argue, is one instance in an ever-repeating cycle of historical and ecological “ends,” whose foil is the concept of ecological melancholy. Ultimately this analysis is a case study in how literature of the Anthropocene so preoccupied with the notion of the “end” encourages narrative estrangement from the world, an estrangement I seek to suture – though not entirely heal – through the recognition of a new historical teleology of engagement with the ecological melancholy’s potential for rebuilding.
Clarke, Bruce. (2020). Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene
Author(s): Noel Gough / Language(s): English
/ Issue: 1/2023
Keywords: Bruce Clark; Anthropocene; Neocybernetics; Gaian Systems;
Review of:
Clarke, Bruce. (2020). Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene. University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-1517909123
This brief essay engages with environmental stewardship and scale in the Anthropocene. Taking inspiration from Kees Boeke’s illustrated children’s book Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps and Charles and Ray Eames’s Powers of Ten—a short film based on Boeke’s book—this photo essay illustrates how, through the production of eco-art, the practice of macro photography can suggest the presence of worlds within one’s world. Creative engagements are offered so that children and adults, who must all live through and contend with the Anthropocene, might appreciate notions of environmental scale, particularly in relation to our ecological footprints over time. In so doing, visual media such as illustrated books, films, and macro photography encourage sustainability on a larger scale than humanity has yet to imagine.
Discussions and practices for biodiversity and the environment are associated predominantly with duty ethics, which spell out the do’s and don’ts of good behavior. Virtue ethics offer an alternative that is much more inspirational, provided we do not reduce it to a mere enumeration of environmental virtues. Moreover, a virtue ethic is truly humanistic, in that it builds on inborn human capacities rather than on external sources of morality. Grounded in the classic Greek account of virtue ethics and in interaction with medieval and modern visions, this paper articulates a virtue ethic for the Earth. Accessible to a broad audience, we address the foundational concepts of nature-inclusive telos, eudaimonia, virtues and friendship, and connect these with social-scientific research findings. This elucidates how the virtues, sometimes supported by moral exemplars, work in lives that include nature in their flourishing. A virtue ethic for the Earth, we think, can be helpful for policy making but most of all act as a platform for people to become more inspired, courageous and effective friends of nature and the planet as a whole.
What connects a pathography (an illness narrative) with the school of ecopoetics is poiesis: the Greek for “the act of creation”. Pathographical ecopoetics is “creation-with” the natural surroundings during illness. As opposed to Thoreau’s Walden where we find an autobiographical account of one’s relationship with nature, in pathographical ecopoetics the same relationship is unfolded through pathos (the Greek for “pain”) and disease. Illness as a method helps in bracketing out our pre-reflective involvement with the natural surroundings and paves the way for newer ways of understanding nature. As opposed to various other intersections between medicine and ecology, like ecopsychology, ecotherapy or green cure, there is a sense of Keatsian spontaneity and aesthetic wonder in pathographical ecopoetics. Elizabeth Tova Bailey’s The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating (2010) is one such account. Her debilitating illness, with “severe neurological symptoms”, brings her close to an unremarkable wild snail. Her world starts to get entwined with the world of the snail. The work is a curious admixture of illness memoir, biology, art, environmentalism, and more importantly a deep sense of compassion and empathy for the natural surroundings. The paper will explore the concept of ecopoetics with the help of Bailey’s pathographical account. The Sound of the Wild Snail Eating as a pathographical ecopoetics is away from the techno-scientific gaze of not only modern medicine but modernity in general. Bailey’s world of illness finds effortless connections with the world of the wild snail: her spatial and temporal confinement is attuned to that of the spatio-temporality of the snail. Both the worlds posit a challenge to the speed and “homogeneous, empty time” of modernity. Both the worlds keep the enchantment and mysteriousness of the natural world alive. In general, the work provides an alternative space in the metanarrative of 21st century modernity and techno-capitalism.
As both a novel (VanderMeer, 2014) and cinematic adaptation (Garland, 2018), Annihilation has engaged posthumanist and ecocritical scholars seeking to answer to the demand for art forms to participate in the renegotiation of the grand narratives feeding the ongoing environmental crisis and chipping away at the liveability of Planet Earth. In my reading of Alex Garland’s film, I discuss how its depiction of death adds to these discussions by challenging the human exceptionalism built into meaning-making processes, which have situated humans as above “nature,” including death, by defining human life as more valuable than all other life. As an umbrella term covering these varied processes, I discuss biopower, which seeks to regulate life by forbidding death in humans and denying life to other kind of life forms. I locate Annihilation within films that make use of the cinematic mode of ecohorror, exploring human fears and anxieties relating to death and “monstrous nature” with an ecocritical twist. I employ film analysis and draw theoretically on thanatological and posthumanist discussions, as I reflect on the kind of understanding of death that arises in Annihilation and centre on the discussion of self-destruction and suicide in discussing the human character Josie’s death in relation to the film’s non-human actant, The Shimmer.
The Thermo-Entropic Limits of Security in Capital’s Militaristic Death Drive: A Note on Robert Biel’s Entropy of Capitalism
Author(s): Robert Drury King / Language(s): English
/ Issue: 2/2023
Keywords: Capitalism; entropy; security; development; systems theory; low-input alternatives;
This commentary to Robert Biel’s book, The Entropy of Capitalism, defines the tasks of international security on the terms of a systems theory that asks how the system reproduces itself. The matter, energy, and information that go into its successful reproduction are also ecological challenges to this very system because the processes that generate the order of the system are the same processes that generate an entropy for the system that it must confront. The system confronts its own waste and the manner in which it does so, on Biel’s account, establishes its pathways of future development, including the ways in which the system is constrained. The commentary reaches beyond Biel’s framework by deepening his understanding of the structural embeddedness of capitalist development, including its surveillance stage, but it ends by defending Biel against his critics. Critics of Biel’s preference for low-input strategies of future development run astray, I suggest, in their neglect of Biel’s core insights into how an analysis of entropy is so essential to an understanding how the capitalist system works.
DiMarco, D. and Ruppert, T. (Eds.). (2022). Avian Aesthetics in Literature and Culture: Birds and Humans in the Popular Imagination.
Author(s): Endre Harvold Kvangraven / Language(s): English
/ Issue: 2/2023
Keywords: Book Review; DiMarco
Review of:
DiMarco, D. and Ruppert, T. (Eds.). (2022). Avian Aesthetics in Literature and Culture: Birds and Humans in the Popular Imagination. Lexington Books. 262 pages. ISBN: 9781666901825 (e-book) ISBN: 9781666901818 (hardback)
This review critically examines Lisa E. Bloom's Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics (2022) by studying the book’s key methodological and analytical approaches to contemporary visual art on the poles. I locate Bloom's work as part of a larger discourse on Ice Humanities and highlight her own contribution to the field by focusing on the book's reconfiguration of critical environmentalism through intersectional feminist, indigenous, and transnational frameworks. The review also discusses the dual role of aesthetics in both shaping hegemonic perceptions of the poles and in articulating strategies for their subversion.
The monograph We Have Always Been Cyborgs: Digital Data, Gene Technologies, and an Ethics of Transhumanism by Stefan Lorenz Sorgner aims to explain the most critical issues the Transhumanistic field has been dealing with, including gene technologies, cyborg technologies, gene-motivational technics, gene ethics, mind uploading, policy-making, the image and identity of the Transhuman community.
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