In this introduction to a special issue on human-nature interactions through a multispecies lens, the authors focus on the notion of “multispecies assemblages” and their role in conservation theory and practice at the intersection between ecology, history, and society.
Drawing on Continental theory and various cultural objects, On an Ungrounded Earth constructs an eclectic geosophy describing Earth as a dynamic engine materially invading and upsetting our attempts to reduce it to merely the ground beneath our feet.
This collection of essays maps the heterogeneous and asymmetrical ecologies within which we are enmeshed, a material world that makes the human possible but also offers difficulties and resistance.
Bradley M. Jones explores the cultivation of life in ruins, through a multi-species ecological ethic revealed in the life and labor of a permaculture farmer in the Appalachian foothills.
Through an ethnographic account about the use of an electromagnetic water system in the Amish community, Nicole Welk-Joerger explores the conceptual meeting ground between sacred and secular worldviews in efforts that address the Anthropocene.
Triangulating narratives from a prospective mining site in northern Norway, Hugo Reinert works to identify (and render graspable) a particular effect of retroactive shock—tracing its resonance through experiences of chemical exposure, colonial racism, cultural erasure, and destruction of the built environment.
In this article, Sasha Litvintseva examines the history and materiality of asbestos to theorize toxic embodiment through the mutuality of the haptic sense and the breaching of boundaries of inside and outside. She develops this through an analysis of her own film project Asbestos (2016), shot at the mining town of Asbestos, Quebec.
In this selection of poems, Adam Dickinson focuses on the “outside” that is the “inside,” thereby drawing attention to the coextensive and intra-active nature of the body with its environment and the consequent implications for linking the human to the nonhuman and the personal to the global in environmental ethics.
