Aesthetics in a Changing World—Reflecting the Anthropocene Condition through the Works of Jason deCaires Taylor and Robert Smithson

This article focuses on an important aspect of aesthetics in the context of the Anthropocene: the situatedness of aesthetic techniques and operations within earth’s (changing) materiality. Aesthetics is not only a way of making sensible but also contributes ontologically to the world it makes sensible. In this view aesthetics does not rely on a subject’s capacity to apprehend the world as a perceptually objectifiable entity. Focusing on works by Jason deCaires Taylor (Anthropocene and La Gardinera de la Esperanza) and Robert Smithson (Spiral Jetty), the authors interrogate how artistic engagements with anthropocenic materiality and temporality have the potential to articulate a double bind between aesthetics and ontology. Both artists not only allow recipients to be confronted with complex earthly entanglements but also have a material and aesthetic impact on their respective sites. Discussing deCaires Taylor’s and Smithson’s works, the authors argue that the artists’ aesthetics is not only a way of granting experiential access to an earth that resists objectification but also a manifestation of the processes through which earth’s materiality transforms throughout time.

The Less Selfish Gene

Why have millions of readers and viewers become magnetized by the hitherto arcane field of plant communication? The article argues that the contemporary appeal of plant communication is rooted in a quest for alternative modes of being to neoliberalism, modes more accommodating of the coexistence of cooperation and competition in human and more-than-human communities. This ascendant understanding of plant communication and forest dynamics offers a counternarrative of flourishing, a model of what George Monbiot has called, in another context, “private sufficiency and public wealth.”

Defining Energy in Nineteenth-Century Native American Literature

Native American authors in the first half of the nineteenth century—the dawn of the Anthropocene in some accounts—were witness to the rapid expansion of settler-colonialism powered by new ideologies of energy and fueled by fossil capitalism. These authors, though, resisted extractive metaphors for energy and fuel, offering more organic and intimate visions of energy instead. Using energy humanities theories developed by Warren Cariou (Métis) and Bob Johnson, among others, this article will analyze Mary Jemison’s (Seneca) autobiography; Jane Johnston Schoolcraft’s (Ojibwe) poem, “On the Doric Rock, Lake Superior”; and John Rollin Ridge’s (Cherokee) novel, The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta. These works show how Native American authors defined energy as cyclical and intimate in contrast to the growing settler society’s vision of linear, unending extraction. This article argues that nineteenth-century Native American Anglophone literatures expand the scope of the energy humanities by describing energy intimacy while also extending the histories of Indigenous resistance to settler energy imaginaries. Nineteenth-century Native American literatures can make important contributions to the scope of the energy humanities and need to be integrated into the field to grasp the full scale of current environmental crises.

The Inclusive Philosophy of Michel Serres for Our Time of Crisis

Michel Serres’s philosophy is scantly known outside France. In this review essay the author takes up three books that Serres published late on in his life and that engage in different ways with the environmental emergency. These short eminently readable books appeal to a wide audience and at the same time draw together major concerns and approaches from his life’s work. In each of the three books, Serres explores the preconditions for, and the emerging sense of, a contract between humans and the rest of the natural world.

Making the Environmental Humanities Consequential in “The Age of Consequences”

This article suggests that global environmental assessments (GEAs) may be a potent means for making the environmental humanities more consequential outside universities. So far most GEAs have been led by geoscientists, with mainstream social science in support. However, there is no reason why the concept of assessment cannot be elasticated to include the concerns of interpretive social science and the humanities. Building on the forty-year history and authority of GEAs as a means to bridging the gap between the research world and the wider world, this article identifies the potential that reformatted assessments hold for more impactful work by environmental humanists. It suggests some next steps for rethinking the means and ends of assessment toward a new paradigm that bridges geoscience, mainstream social science, and humanistic thinking about the nonhuman world. This paradigm would explore the human dimensions of environmental change fully. The timing is propitious: independently GEAs are undergoing change at the very moment that the “What next?” question is being asked by many environmental humanists. This article is intended to inspire debate and, ultimately, action. It both makes the case for more humanistic GEAs and offers examples of potential work packages.

Shakespeare’s Starlings

Scientists, environmentalists, and nature writers often report that all common starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) in North America descend from a flock released in New York City in 1890 by Eugene Schieffelin, a man obsessed with importing all the birds mentioned by Shakespeare. This article uses the methods of literary history to investigate this popular anecdote. Today starlings are much despised as an invasive species that displaces native birds and does almost a billion dollars worth of damage to agriculture annually. Because of the starling’s pest status, the Schieffelin story is considered a cautionary tale about the dangers of ecological ignorance. Diving into the history of the Schieffelin story reveals, however, that it is almost entirely fictional. Tracing how its elements emerged and changed over a century of retelling clarifies how the story came to shore up uncertainties in the bird’s environmental history and to distract from the lack of data supporting the starling’s supposedly disastrous impacts. In explaining how a fiction repeated over time attained the status of fact in debates about invasive species, this literary history suggests humanistic methods can serve as useful tools for understanding the value-laden narratives underpinning environmental attitudes and practices today.

The Apocalyptic Herbarium

Anselm Kiefer’s monumental Secret of the Ferns (2007) redirects the artist’s apocalyptic sensibility, honed in response to the Holocaust, to the slow violence of extinction. The installation adopts a foundational practice of early modern natural history: the herbarium’s preservation and presentation of dried, pressed plant specimens. It also mobilizes the symbolic associations of ferns, which Kiefer calls “the first plants” but which are reimagined in the gallery space as the last plants in a postapocalyptic future. The framed specimens hang in a massive hall, with two abandoned concrete bunkers spewing out coal in the center—an allusion to ferns as the source of fossil fuels. Coal appears again in the enigmatic charcoal inscriptions on the frames that allude to ferns’ rich associations with rituals of magic and transformation. The overall mood is of a temporality at the end of time, a proleptic elegy that anticipates the extinction of even the most common and resilient plants, and the human cultures associated with them. Transmuted from mnemonic device to vehicle of commemoration, Kiefer’s apocalyptic herbarium elicits grief and mourning—but also, perhaps, what Judith Butler has called “the transformative effect of loss.”

Becoming Without

The Aedes aegypti mosquito, known as the vector for Zika, dengue, chikungunya, and yellow fever viruses, has historically been targeted by public health campaigns as an enemy to be eliminated. However, new strategies, such as the transgenic approach, biologically modify the A. aegypti so that they can be deployed to control their own population—here, mosquito breeding and mating is operationalized as an insecticide. In this case, the insect must be simultaneously a friend and an enemy, cared for and killed, and it must establish encounters and nonencounters. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at a “biofactory” in the northeast of Brazil dedicated to mass-producing these transgenic mosquitoes, this article investigates the new forms of labor and value produced through these contrasting human-mosquito relations. The author also examines how the project is implemented within broader geopolitics of experimentation and more-than-human gendered conceptions. Analyzing the multispecies relationships engendered under the premise that it is possible to produce nonencounters, she identifies the historical conditions and promissory claims of transforming the A. aegypti ’s reproductive capacity into labor for killing. Such recasting yields what the author calls the “nonencounter value” within the scientific remaking of mosquitoes, their becoming and being.