What does it entail to foreground water flourishing as a stance toward the Anthropocene? During an exercise at the Anthropocene Campus Melbourne, about twenty participants individually drew images of ‘water flourishing’ leading, with only one or two exceptions of Edenic representations, to a wall of images depicting no humans. That small experience reproduced a larger cultural and environmental management configuration: people-less water flourishing. If we face such constraints in imagining, representing, and enacting hydro-flourishing, we remain stuck in familiar loops either (...) of: 1) elemental thinking that excludes the human; or 2) anthropocenic thinking that too often addresses the human primarily as destroyer. How do we imagine our being with water in different ways? How do we move away from pervasive narratives of water crisis without, at the same time, romancing water? Feminist, decolonial, and Indigenous approaches to water and its cultural politics ask us to consider the elemental not only in substance, but also in rights regimes and in the project of flourishing. In this paper, we present examples of water flourishing projects and impasses from three sites: Kathmandu, Nepal; Perth, Australia; and the Florida Everglades, United States. All show both the problems and the promise of co-centering the human and nonhuman in their interdependent relations when it comes to water flourishing. (shrink)

This paper troubles positivist and pathological discourses surrounding youth suicide through critical engagement with young adult fiction: Skim and 13 Reasons Why. These texts offer opportunities for readers to dwell on and question youth suicide prevention and intervention through an engagement with affect, gender, queerness, and race. Skim and 13 Reasons Why counter ‘it gets better’ stories: they interrogate the inevitability of bullying, question the predictable approaches that schools take in their response to violence, and assert that the issue at (...) hand is more systematic. Together, these analytics query youth suicide by asking: how does the biopolitics of livability fit into popularized understandings of youth suicide? Read together, Skim and 13 Reasons Why provide opportunities to meaningfully question livability through the characters of Skim and Courtney—two Asian girls who bear the brunt of racist and sexist violence. Skim becomes a ‘project’ of white girls’ anti-suicide campaign and Courtney is barely living as she attempts to secure the plaform of ‘model minority.’ Both girls are queer, too. In its entirety, this paper arguse that popularized models of suicide intervention continue to ignore the pressing needs of queer Asian girls—such as Skim and Courtney. (shrink)

The concept of the Anthropocene confounds Eurocentric distinctions of natural and human history, as Dipesh Chakrabarty observes. But who are ‘we’ in the Anthropocene, how do notions of our shared humanity contend with the cascading global inequalities of place, race, class and gender. Oceania is often said to have contributed the least and suffered the most from climate change. Pacific women, and especially those living on low lying atolls, have been portrayed as the most vulnerable to the disastrous consequences of (...) climate change. This focuses on sea level rise and the toxic mixing, the elemental confusion of salt and fresh water caused by atmospheric changes and global warming. While not negating the gravity of present and future scenarios, how can we move beyond the pervasive fatalism of foreign framings and seemingly opposed clichéd evocations of ‘resilience’? The moniker of the Pacific Climate Warriors 350.org ‘We are not drowning, we are fighting’ evokes a contrary trope of resistance and resonates with Oceanic activism in politics and the creative arts.[i] Tracing such a genealogy of resistance might start with a greater respect for Indigenous knowledges and embodied practices in contemporary understandings of ‘climate cultures’ in Oceania which do not routinely distinguish between natural and human history.[ii]. (shrink)

Thinking at the scale of the Anthropocene highlights the significant burden on all life imposed by the residues of industrialization as well as continued pollution. But it also risks a disconnect between the functioning of planetary atmospheres and the functioning of local airs. In this thought-piece, we consider together the potato chip bag, the asthma inhaler, and climate positive building design as scalar practices of Anthropocene air. By figuring Anthropocene air as an interscalar vehicle, we show connections between matter and (...) relations that seem distant and disconnected. We do this by honing in on respiration as a transformative atmospheric process that has been designed in advanced capitalism to extend life for some, while denying life for others. We point to seconds, hours, days, weeks, and seasons to highlight how containment technologies and respiratory processes function in the Anthropocene to remake air. These technologies and practices, which all too often go unnoticed in consumption landscapes, demonstrate that despite Anthropocene air’s tendency to exceed human agency, it is liable to engineering. Doing this offers insight into where different scales of action can be mobilized. (shrink)

An introduction to An Elemental Anthropocene.

Views of fire in the contemporary physical sciences arguably accord with Heraclitus’ proposal that ‘all things are an exchange for fire, and fire for all things, as goods for gold and gold for goods.’ Fire is a media, as John Durham Peters has stated, a species of transformative biochemical reactions between the flammable gases found in air, such as oxygen, and those found in fuels, such as plants. Inspired by an ignition source, these materials react and transform themselves and their (...) surrounds into light and heat energy, carbon dioxide, water vapour, char and much else besides. Fire is conjunctural, durational and transformative. Fire is a dialectician, at once consuming living and dead organic matter and providing both the space and ingredients for new and renewed organic life. In this article, we draw upon our experience of combustible contexts—Australia, Canada and the Philippines—to consider the diverse ways in which fire is today framed as a social problem, an ecological process, an ancient tool, a natural disaster, a source of economic wealth and much more. In this way, we seek to explore the value and limits of ‘elemental thinking’ in relation to the planetary predicaments described by ‘the Anthropocene’. (shrink)

In 2013, the Singapore government announced a plan to build the Cross Island Line, the country’s eighth Mass Rapid Transit train line. Since its release, the proposal has caused ongoing heated debate as it involves going underneath Singapore’s largest remaining reserve: the Central Catchment Nature Reserve. Following extended discussions with environmental groups, the transport authority later stated that they would now consider two route options: a direct alignment running underneath the Central Reserve, and an alternative route that skirts the reserve (...) boundary. The authority warned that the skirting option could increase the construction cost significantly and cost commuters an extra few minutes of travel time. Intriguingly, in contrast to the underground rail project that threatens to further fragment the Central Reserve, another, more visible, repair work is taking place at the edge of the same reserve, aiming to reconnect fragmented habitat through an eco-bridge. Through these two seemingly contrasting yet intimately related case studies in a highly developed city-state, this article explores the complexity and ambivalence of urban movement and its entanglement with development, techonology and urban natures. How are the discourses of urban mobility directed by the desire for ‘velocity’, the politics of invisibility, and a fixation on certainty? What might it mean to reconfigure contemporary practices and ethics towards multispecies movements in an increasingly urbanised environment? Amid the growing expansions of infrastructure and public transportation in Singapore and around the world, often in the name of sustainability and liveability, this article unsettles some taken-for-granted, velocity-charged and human-centred approaches to urban movement and explores the serious need to craft new possibilities for a more inclusive and flourishing urban movement. (shrink)

Extinction challenges our thinking and writing. Such overwhelming disappearance of ways of being, experiencing and making meaning in the world disrupts familiar categories and demands new modes of response. It requires that we trace multiple forms of both countable and intangible loss, the unravelling of social and ecological communities as a result of colonialism and capture, development and defaunation and other destructive processes. It brings forth new modes of commemoration and mourning, and new practices of archiving and survival. It calls (...) for action in the absence of hope, and for the recognition and nourishment of new generativities: new modes of assemblage and attachment, resurgence and reworlding, commoning, composting and caring for country. (shrink)

In 1972 Lake Pedder in south-west Tasmania was submerged under 15 metres of water as a result of the Tasmanian State Government’s Middle Gordon Hydro-electric Power Scheme. The lake was subsumed into a much larger artificial impoundment formed by three rockfill dams, making it the largest freshwater lake in Australia. The Tasmanian government transferred the name Lake Pedder to the new impoundment. Three species endemic to the original Lake Pedder were recorded as extinct as a consequence of the lake’s flooding. (...) The Lake Pedder planarian, a species of carnivorous flatworm, the Lake Pedder earthworm, and the Pedder galaxias, a small freshwater fish, disappeared from the lake area after the inundation of this unique habitat, the site of a number of ecologically valuable faunal communities. The divergent fates of these animals, their status as lost species and their significance as creatures both meaningful and meaning-making, marks out an extinction matrix suggesting that the absence of specific animals and specific experiences and ways of life matter more than others, that specific deaths can be more readily incorporated into stories of loss and restoration, and that the perceived malleability of habitats invariably involves death inscribed as sacrifice or justifiable casualties. This paper seeks to retrieve some of the perspectives and experiences forgotten or written over in the lake’s stories of flooding and redemption. (shrink)

Whether stuffed remains in a museum case, inscribed tombstone, or stone wall perched on a cliff, memorials to extinct animals are timestamps representing human-animal relationships at particular moments in time. This essay analyzes the rhetoric and imagery of historical extinctions as seen in these memorials to understand the ways people struggled to understand the loss. Through examination of memorials to extinct species in U.S. museums, parks, and zoos my research has revealed a continuous struggle to identify the personhood of animals, (...) define human-animal interactions, and locate human responsibility for environmental change. While each memorial mimics remembrance practices used for humans and human events, they differ in their acknowledgement of the individuality and the agency of its extinction which, in turn, often denies agency to the animal. Steeped as they are in Romantic-era notions of wildness, these memorials can be read as parables of environmentalism, but in their conceptualization of the animal, they instruct us in the varieties of human-animal interactions and representations within the environmental movement at different times and places, making them more complex spaces than their simplicity suggests. While memorials present only a slice of the story, the memories they create and reinforce become part of the cultural ways of dealing with extinction that is often more popular and more poignant than historical narratives documenting their declines. At its core, my research adds to the literature on constructions of Nature in American culture by connecting 19th-century declension narratives with 20th-century extinctions, and problematizes the American ideology of abundance. (shrink)

In this paper I consider whether, and if so how artistic creative uncertainty can facilitate processes of imagining new relationships between Indigenous peoples and settlers. Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s model of reconciliation seems to promise improved Indigenous/settler relationships, yet many Indigenous scholars and allies question the efficacy of it as an approach to expedite relationship-building. For that reason, Indigenous critics like David Garneau suggest that alternate methods be deployed such as ‘decolonial aesthetic activism’ in order to build relationships that (...) exceed the limits of reconciliation. Within this model, ambiguous, discordant, and indigestible artworks operate as one method by which we/settlers can become aware of how we are implicated in the structures of settler colonialism. I apply Garneau’s theory by conducting a close reading of the performative self-portraits by Meryl McMaster. My analysis reveals that art can put forward critiques of settler colonialism that unsettle assumptions, thereby creating new spaces for us to imagine worlds otherwise. Accordingly, I argue that McMaster’s art does have the potential to exceed the limits of reconciliation and conclude that critical engagement with her photographs is an important first step in the process that is decolonization, a process that exceeds the limits of reconciliation. (shrink)

A Meditation upon Homecoming in Buffalo Country.

‘Putting the right species back in the right place’: expressed in the words of Bruce Pavlik, the Head of Restoration Ecology at the Millennium Seed Bank at Kew Gardens in a fundraising clip for the Breathing Planet Campaign, the work of biodiversity repositories seems straightforward. A simple matter of renewing the colonial and capitalistic capture of nature by exhausting its diversity in collecting, and then of reinserting species, suspended in the form of genetic information, into the neat spaces their disappearance (...) or almost-dispappearance has left in their original ecosystems, the redemptive value of biodiversity repositories seems unquestionable. ‘There is no technological reason why any species should go extinct’, the clip goes on. The cryopreservation of genetic material in seed banks and ‘frozen zoos’ is often and justifiably understood as genetic-fetishistic suspension, several times removed from animal lives in actual habitats; I propose however to read them as world-making devices in their own right too, more entangled and entangling than they might present themselves to be. Collecting and saving are two mandates that have effects both on the species whose genetic information is banked and on the natures that are made possible or impossible through the projects delineated by biodiversity repositories; but they have also been implicated in a third such mandate, the assisted adaptation of species to anthropogenic climate change. How are biodiversity repositories an active intervention into the shaping of natures both inside and outside, and what are the consequences of what happens within the apparatus of these repositories for wider understandings of landscapes and species under threat? How linked is the suspension of metabolic processes and evolutionary potential and the understanding of Earth as manageable, perhaps even terraformable? What do they contribute to conservation biology’s biopolitical and cultural shaping of individuals, species, ecosystems suspended and remade through the different uses for which biodiversity repositories can be put to work? (shrink)

To what extent do our narratives support the work of ecological care? While working in anti-extinction conservation requires paying careful attention to the realities of precarity and ambiguity, this is not necessarily reflected in our public narratives of such work. Instead, as is typified in Jean Giono’s 1953 short story ‘The man who planted trees’, many conservation narratives are pitched in heroic modes, framing conservation labour as working to secure an obvious ‘good’ in perpetuity. In this paper, I think with (...) practicing Buddhist and volunteer tree planter, Errol Greaves, and his work organising and working with dedicated humans helping to regenerate native forest on Te Ahumairangi Hill at the edge of Wellington City. Aiming to create a flourishing native habitat to support the endangered kākā, Errol’s work is largely in line with mainstream anti-extinction conservation goals in Aoteaora/New Zealand. However, his labour is framed by distinctly non-heroic narratives emphasising cooperation, ambiguity and precarity—emphases more closely related to the comedic, a mode of narration which Joseph Meeker identifies as better allowing for both ecological accommodation and responsiveness. In this paper, I consider the resources offered by various relational ontologies and non-heroic narratives for both responding well to ecological realities and sustaining work for a flourishing world, particularly in our current times of radically apparent precarity. (shrink)

The article describes an experiment in captive-bred supplementation of a highly endangered wild bird species that took place in the Norwegian Arctic a few years ago. Following the fate of a single bird, over the course of two years, the argument lays out some of the powerful conceptual, political and affective stakes involved in the experiment. The brief life of the bird, named A16, was contained almost entirely within an unresolved tension between salvific urgency and a purist biopolitics, deeply committed (...) to the preservation of vanishing forms. Behind the scenes of the experiment, ornithological factions clashed over issues like genetic purity, the integrity of migration routes and the potential for behavioral contamination. Laying out the stakes of this, the argument begins to develop an account of salvific violence in conservation work—a framework for questioning the affective investments that drive purificatory biopolitics, especially during a time of planetary turmoil. What stands to be saved, what must be destroyed? What is a species, exactly, such that it can be saved in certain ways? What was A16? (shrink)

This essay discusses how coral is becoming a kind of charismatic megafauna and a cultural icon for extinction in the Anthropocene. Until recently, most of the cultural associations around coral emphasized the strangeness and exotic qualities of coral that combines animal, mineral, and vegetable bodies. Darwin studied coral as a robust maker of atolls, while Melville wrote about coral stringing the Pacific Islands as ‘marine gardens.’ More recent theorizing on coral from Eva Hayward and Stefan Helmreich has been keen to (...) emphasize how coral is transbiological and queer in the multi-species kinships it enables. However, in recent decades, as evidence of bleaching and mass coral die-offs have been registered by marine scientists, coral is also fast becoming a barometer for the sixth mass extinction. I look at how contemporary cultural representations of coral are straining to reconfigure the life of coral as caught between associations of fragility and resilience, seeing coral as capable of supporting indigenous island civilizations while not being able to survive ocean warming of less than one degree Celsius. I examine the work of recent artists whose coral-themed work combines science and spectacle. These artists return to older visions of coral figured fantastically as both living and dead, yet updating this view for today, as we find coral to be a primary figure for life and death in the Anthropocene. I finish with a discussion of the recent documentary film Chasing Coral as negotiating multiple simultaneous visual tropes and coral conditions. This film aims to provide viewers with a sense of time constraints for scientists, filmmakers, and for coral reef colonies under extreme stress in areas including the Great Barrier Reef. The film tries to articulate a pathway between scientific documentation, environmental activism, and visual drama, ultimately composing these perspectives into a work that suggests that the imbalance and overlap of these ways of engaging with coral will provide a model for how to form a global coral culture movement. (shrink)

Drawing on the work of Albert Camus this paper offers a critique of certain discourses around ‘novel ecosystems’. These new species ‘assemblages’ are frequently defended, or even celebrated, as exemplifying resilience and adaptability to the environmental repercussions of a global situation inaccurately glossed as ‘The Anthropocene’. Here the increasing prevalence of economically generated changes, including the accelerating translocations of species, are set against earlier conservation values emphasizing protection of ‘natural’ and ‘native’ ecologies. The proliferation of novel ecosystems, together with an (...) instrumental emphasis on their functional, ‘pragmatic’, and economic benefits, appears to make environmentalists’ ethical concerns about the loss of endangered others seem ‘absurd’ and frames conservation as a Sisyphean task. Yet Camus early work provides arguments for ethical / political resistance in just such absurd and extreme circumstances. (shrink)

In September 2011, a delicate cargo of 24 Nihoa Millerbirds was carefully loaded by conservationists onto a ship for a three-day voyage to Laysan Island in the remote Northwest Hawaiian Islands. The goal of this effort was to establish a second population of this endangered species, an “insurance population” in the face of the mounting pressures of climate change and potential new biotic arrivals. But the millerbird, or ulūlu in Hawaiian, is just one of the many avian species to become (...) the subject of this kind of “assisted colonisation.” In Hawai'i, and around the world, recent years have seen a broad range of efforts to safeguard species by finding them homes in new places. Thinking through the ulūlu project, this article explores the challenges and possibilities of assisted colonisation in this colonised land. What does it mean to move birds in the context of the long, and ongoing, history of dispossession of the Kānaka Maoli, the Native Hawaiian people? How are distinct but entangled process of colonisation, of unworlding, at work in the lives of both people and birds? Ultimately, this article explores how these diverse colonisations might be understood and told responsibly in an era of escalating loss and extinction. (shrink)