As each decade wraps up (at least of this century so far), it’s become my custom to review the books that have been published in the previous ten years that have contributed most to theorizing the relationship between culture and ecology. I’ve shared a list of “books of the decade in ecocultural theory” at my blog Immanence. (It’s a very personal list, with the top ten ranked. Top of the list, for those too curious to wait, is Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World.)
Here I am sharing the brief summary of the three most important “streams” of thinking indicated in that larger list…
How, then, to characterize the past decade? In the territory covered by the term “ecocultural theory” — in which I include the “environmental humanities” and the numerous fields inhabited by ecocritical approaches to recognizing the scope and scale of our ecological situation, but also the fields that aim to understand how human cultural practices intersect with and mutually affect the “more than human” world of ecological systems and biological relations (anthropology, geography, some kinds of philosophy) — this decade has been shaped by three main threads of thinking and creative practice:
1. Attempts to grasp the world-encompassing totality of the climate and extinction crises: This includes debates over the naming of the “Anthropocene,” the place of capitalism and neoliberalism within it, and articulations of the “deep time” of human relations with the geological, earthly, and chthonic beyond that preceded us and will outlast us. Here we find efforts to scope out what it means to live at, or even after, the “end of the world” (note how the phrase repeats itself in the book list below), in a time of epistemic violence, great derangement, species loss, deaths of civilization and even of the “posthuman,” and all the loss, grief, mourning, rage, and other emotions conjured up at the intersections of geology, history, and the colonial and capitalist petrocultures, militarisms, and technofutures that collectively mark the world today.
2. Debates over the ontological nature of the multiplicity of the human, and the need to decolonize our understandings of that multiplicity: Sparked in part by the previous decade’s calls for an “ontological turn,” and connected intimately to the decolonial thread in all its forms — Indigenous, anti-racist, Black, women of color, global South, transnational, et al. — that has come to define so much of the current moment, these debates have involved the recognition of differences that are not merely “cultural,” but are now taken to be something more like differences of “world” or reality itself. They are differences of “world-making” and of the “cosmopolitics” by which multiple worlds clash and intersect, not merely as subjects (agents) and objects (victims) of the present global conjuncture, but as co-agents of deeper historical entanglements with ecology, materiality, biology, and cosmology in its political, affective, and imaginal contours.
3. Finally, on the more hopeful side, there have been the richly empirical and ethnographic efforts to map out the “multispecies” “entanglements” of the cultural and natural, material and discursive, as they connect, disconnect, and reconnect: Many of these efforts have engaged with the so-called “new materialist” turn in its speculative, relational, object-oriented, animist, enactive/affective, and other forms, while others have intersected with the “posthuman” turn in both its “more-than-human” and “transhuman” varieties. Others are simply part of the long tradition by which artists and philosophers continually rediscover the sheer delight of life in its biological, animated (and animist) exuberance. The animal, viral, fungal, microbial, vegetal, bodily, crystalline, watery, oceanic, elemental, and darkly and brightly ecological — all of these and more provoke creative engagements that continue to challenge our thinking about what constitutes the world and our many possible placings within it.