Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet

Living on a damaged planet challenges who we are and where we live. This timely anthology calls on twenty eminent humanists and scientists to revitalize curiosity, observation, and transdisciplinary conversation about life on earth. As human-induced environmental change threatens multispecies livability, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet puts forward a bold proposal: entangled histories, situated narratives, and thick descriptions offer urgent “arts of living.” Included are essays by scholars in anthropology, ecology, science studies, art, literature, and bioinformatics who posit critical and creative tools for collaborative survival in a more-than-human Anthropocene. The essays are organized around two key figures that also serve as the publication’s two openings: Ghosts, or landscapes haunted by the violences of modernity; and Monsters, or interspecies and intraspecies sociality. Ghosts and Monsters are tentacular, windy, and arboreal arts that invite readers to encounter ants, lichen, rocks, electrons, flying foxes, salmon, chestnut trees, mud volcanoes, border zones, graves, radioactive waste-in short, the wonders and terrors of an unintended epoch. Contributors: Karen Barad, U of California, Santa Cruz; Kate Brown, U of Maryland, Baltimore; Carla Freccero, U of California, Santa Cruz; Peter Funch, Aarhus U; Scott F. Gilbert, Swarthmore College; Deborah M. Gordon, Stanford U; Donna J. Haraway, U of California, Santa Cruz; Andreas Hejnol, U of Bergen, Norway; Ursula K. Le Guin; Marianne Elisabeth Lien, U of Oslo; Andrew Mathews, U of California, Santa Cruz; Margaret McFall-Ngai, U of Hawaii, Manoa; Ingrid M. Parker, U of California, Santa Cruz; Mary Louise Pratt, NYU; Anne Pringle, U of Wisconsin, Madison; Deborah Bird Rose, U of New South Wales, Sydney; Dorion Sagan; Lesley Stern, U of California, San Diego; Jens-Christian Svenning, Aarhus U.

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Niels Bohr Professor at Aarhus University in Denmark, where she codirects Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene (AURA).  Heather Swanson is assistant professor of anthropology at Aarhus University.  Elaine Gan is art director of AURA and postdoctoral fellow at Aarhus University.  Nils Bubandt is professor of anthropology at Aarhus University, where he codirects AURA.

Contents Ghosts on a Damaged Planet Introduction: Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene Elaine Gan, Nils Bubandt, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, and Heather Anne Swanson 1. A Garden or a Grave?: The Canyonic Landscape of the Tijuana-San Diego Region Lesley Stern In the Midst of Damage 2. Marie Curie's Fingerprint: Nuclear Spelunking in the Chernobyl Zone Kate Brown 3. Shimmer: When All You Love Is Being Trashed Deborah Bird Rose Footprints of the Dead 4. Future Megafaunas: A Historical Perspective on the Scope for a Wilder Anthropocene Jens-Christian Svenning 5. Ladders, Trees, Complexity, and Other Metaphors in Evolutionary Thinking Andreas Hejnol 6. No Small Matter: Mushroom Clouds, Ecologies of Nothingness, and Strange Topologies of Spacetimemattering Karen Barad 7. Haunted Geologies: Spirits, Stones, and the Necropolitics of the Anthropocene Nils Bubandt What Remains 8. Ghostly Forms and Forest Histories Andrew S. Mathews 9. Establishing New Worlds: The Lichens of Petersham Anne Pringle Coda: Concept and Chronotope Mary Louise Pratt Contributors Index Contents Monsters and the Arts of Living Acknowledgments Introduction: Bodies Tumbled into Bodies Heather Anne Swanson, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Nils Bubandt, and Elaine Gan 1. Deep in Admiration Ursula K. Le Guin Inhabiting Multispecies Bodies 2. Symbiogenesis, Sympoiesis, and Art Science Activisms for Staying with the Trouble Donna Haraway 3. Noticing Microbial Worlds: The Post Modern Synthesis in Biology Margaret McFall-Ngai Beyond Individuals 4. Holobiont by Birth: Multilineage Individuals as the Concretion of Cooperative Processes Scott F. Gilbert 5. Wolf, or Homo Homini Lupus Carla Freccero 6. Unruly Appetites: Salmon Domestication “All the Way Down” Marianne Elisabeth Lien 7. Without Planning: The Evolution of Collective Behavior in Ant Colonies Deborah M. Gordon At the Edge of Extinction 8. Synchronies at Risk: The Intertwined Lives of Horseshoe Crabs and Red Knot Birds Peter Funch 9. Remembering in Our Amnesia, Seeing in Our Blindness Ingrid M. Parker Coda. Beautiful Monsters: Terra in the Cyanocene Dorion Sagan Contributors Index