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Haraway, Donna J.. Staying with the Trouble : Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uow/detail.action?docID=4649739. Created from uow on 2022-06-04 11:12:10.

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Staying with the Trouble

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Experimental Future s: Technolo gical lives, scientific

arts, anthropolo gical voices

A series edited by Michael M. J. Fischer and Joseph Dumit

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d u k e u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s d u r h a m a n d l o n d o n 2 0 1 6

Staying with Troublethe

Making Kin in the Chthulucene

D o n n a J. H a r a w a y

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Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper ∞

Typeset in Chaparral Pro by Copperline

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-

Publication Data. Names: Haraway,

Donna Jeanne, author. Title: Staying

with the trouble : making kin in the

Chthulucene / Donna J. Haraway.

Description: Durham : Duke University

Press, 2016. | Series: Experimental

futures: technological lives, scientific

arts, anthropological voices | Includes

bibliographical references and index. |

Description based on print version re-

cord and cip data provided by publisher;

resource not viewed. Identifiers: lccn

2016019477 (print) | lccn 2016018395

(ebook) |isbn 9780822362142 (hardcover :

alk. paper) |isbn 9780822362241 (pbk. :

alk. paper) |isbn 9780822373780

(e-book) |Subjects: lcsh: Human-animal

relationships. | Human-plant relation-

ships. | Human ecology. | Nature—

Effect of human beings on. Classification:

lcc ql85 (print) |

lcc ql85 .h369 2016 (ebook) |

ddc 599.9/5—dc23. lc record available

at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016019477

Chapter 1 appeared as “Jeux de ficelles avecs

des espèces compagnes: Rester avec le trou-

ble,” in Les animaux: deux ou trois choses que

nous savons d’eux, ed. Vinciane Despret and

Raphaël Larrère (Paris: Hermann, 2014),

23–59. © Éditions Hermann. Translated by

Vinciane Despret.

Chapter 4 is lightly revised from “Anthropo-

cene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthu-

lucene: Making Kin,” which was originally

published in Environmental Humanities, vol. 6,

under Creative Commons license cc by-nc-nd

3.0. © Donna Haraway.

Chapter 5 is reprinted from wsq: Women’s

Studies Quarterly 40, nos. 3/4 (spring/sum-

Feminist Press at the City University of New

York. Used by permission of The Permissions

Company, Inc., on behalf of the publishers,

Chapter 6 is reprinted from Beyond the Cyborg:

Adventures with Donna Haraway, ed. Margaret

Grebowicz and Helen Merrick, 137–46, 173–75.

Chapter 7 is reprinted from Angelaki 20, no. 2

(2015): 5–14. Reprinted by permission of the

publisher. © Taylor and Francis Ltd., tandfon-

line.com.

Figure 3.1, “Endosymbiosis: Homage to

Lynn Margulis.” © Shoshanah Dubiner,

www.cybermuse.com.

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https://lccn.loc.gov/2016019477

http://www.cybermuse.com

http://tandfonline.com.

http://www.eministpress.org

F O R K I N M A K E R S O F A L L T H E O D D K I N

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Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 1

1. Playing String Figures with Companion Species 9

2. Tentacular Thinking 30 Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene

3. Sympoiesis 58 Symbiogenesis and the Lively Arts

of Staying with the Trouble

4. Making Kin 99 Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene,

Chthulucene

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5. Awash in Urine 104 DES and Premarin in Multispecies Response-ability

6. Sowing Worlds 117 A Seed Bag for Terraforming with Earth Others

7. A Curious Practice 126

8. The Camille Stories 134 Children of Compost

Notes 169

Bibliography 229

Index 265

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Illustrations

Figure 1.1 Multispecies Cat’s Cradle. Drawing by Nasser Mufti, 2011 9

Figure 1.2. Ma’ii Ats’áá’ Yílwoí (Coyotes running opposite ways) 14

Figure 1.3. Bird Man of the Mission, mural by Daniel Doherty, 2006 17

Figure 1.4. The PigeonBlog Team of human beings, pigeons, and

electronic technologies 23

Figure 1.5. Capsule, designed by Matali Crasset, 2003 26

Figure 1.6. Pigeon loft in Batman Park, Melbourne 28

Figure 2.1. Pimoa cthulhu 32

Figure 2.2. Cat’s Cradle / String Theory, Baila Goldenthal, 2008 35

Figure 2.3. Icon for the Anthropocene: Flaming Forests 45

Figure 2.4. Icon for the Capitalocene: Sea Ice Clearing from the

Northwest Passage 48

Figure 2.5. Octopi Wall Street. Art by Marley Jarvis, Laurel Hiebert, Kira

Treibergs, 2011 51

Figure 2.6. Icon for the Chthulucene: Potnia Theron with a Gorgon

Face 53

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x i l l u s t r a t i o n s

Figure 2.7. Day octopus, Octopus cyanea 57

Figure 3.1. Endosymbiosis: Homage to Lynn Margulis, Shoshanah

Dubiner, 2012 59

Figure 3.2. Bee orchid 70

Figure 3.3. Beaded jellyfish made by Vonda N. McIntyre 77

Figure 3.4. Green turtles (Chelonia mydas) 80

Figure 3.5. Page from Tik-Tik the Ringtailed Lemur / Tikitiki Ilay

Maky 81

Figure 3.6. Painting for Tsambiki Ilamba Fotsy / Bounce the White

Sifaka 84

Figure 3.7. Cover image for Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna) 86

Figure 3.8. Navajo rug, Two Gray Hills 90

Figure 6.1. An ant of the species Rhytidoponera metallica in western

Australia, holding a seed of Acacia neurophylla by the elaiosome during

seed transport 121

Figure 8.1. Mariposa mask, Guerrero, Mexico, ubc Museum of

Anthropology 135

Figure 8.2. Make Kin Not Babies sticker 139

Figure 8.3. Monarch butterfly caterpillar Danaus plexippus on a

milkweed pod 145

Figure 8.4. Monarch butterfly resting on fennel in the Pismo Butterfly

Grove, 2008 153

Figure 8.5. Mural in La Hormiga, Putumayo, Colombia, depicting

landscapes before and after aerial fumigation during the

U.S.-Colombia “War on Drugs” 158

Figure 8.6. Kenojuak Ashevak, Animals of Land and Sea, 1991 161

Figure 8.7. Monarch butterfly infected with the protozoan parasite

Ophryocystis elektroscirrha, stuck to the chrysalis, with paper wasp 163

Figure 8.8. Make Kin Not Babies 164

Figure 8.9. Monarch butterfly caterpillar sharing milkweed food plant

with oleander aphids (Aphis nerii ) 167

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Acknowledgments

Cooking over many years, the compost pile of colleagues, students,

and friends who have made this book possible is promiscuous, layered,

and hot. While the holobiome that makes up this book is full of hu-

man and nonhuman critters to think and feel with, I especially need

to thank Rusten Hogness, Susan Harding, Anna Tsing, Scott Gilbert,

Vinciane Despret, Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour, Marilyn Strathern,

John Law, Jim Clifford, Katie King, Chris Connery, Lisa Rofel, Dai Jin-

hua, Carla Freccero, Marisol de la Cadena, Jenny Reardon, Beth Ste-

phens, Annie Sprinkle, Helene Moglen, Sheila Namir, Gildas Hamel,

Martha Kenney, Karen DeVries, Natasha Myers, Maria Puig de la Bel-

lacasa, Megan Moodie, Margaret Wertheim, Christine Wertheim, Val

Hartouni, Michael Hadfield, Margaret McFall-Ngai, Deborah Gordon,

Carolyn Hadfield, Thelma Rowell, Sarah Franklin, Marc Bekoff, Rosi

Braidotti, Allison Jolly, Adele Clarke, Colin Dayan, Cary Wolfe, Joanne

Barker, Kim TallBear, Thom van Dooren, Hugh Raffles, Michael Fischer,

Emily Martin, Rayna Rapp, Shelly Errington, Jennifer Gonzalez, War-

ren Sack, Jason Moore, Faye Ginsberg, Holly Hughes, Thyrza Goodeve,

Eduardo Kohn, Beatriz da Costa, Eva Hayward, Harlan Weaver, Sandra

Azeredo, Eric Stanley, Eben Kirksey, Lindsay Kelley, Scout Calvert, Kris

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xii A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

Weller, Ron Eglash, Deborah Rose, Karen Barad, Marcia Ochoa, Lisbeth

Haas, Eileen Crist, Stefan Helmreich, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Sha-

ron Ghamari, Allison Athens, Bettina Stoetzer, Juno Parreñas, Danny

Solomon, Raissa DeSmet, Mark Diekhans, Andrew Matthews, Jake

Metcalf, Lisette Olivares, Kami Chisholm, and Lucien Gomoll. Every

one of these companions has given me something special for this book;

there are so many more I should name.

My home at the University of California at Santa Cruz nurtures vital

research groups and centers that are stem cells in the marrow of my

bones. Both visitors and ucsc people of the Center for Cultural Stud-

ies, the Science and Justice Research Network, the Center for Emerging

Worlds, the Research Cluster on Crisis in the Cultures of Capitalism,

the Institute of Arts and Sciences, and the History of Consciousness

Department shape Staying with the Trouble profoundly.

Many of the chapters began as lectures and workshops, and the peo-

ple who participated infuse my thinking in obvious and subtle ways.

I especially want to thank Kavita Philip, Gabriele Schwab, the Critical

Theory Institute at uc Irvine, and Jennifer Crewe of Columbia Univer-

sity Press for the opportunity to deliver the Wellek Lectures in 2011.

Over four years, I participated in a writing workshop on Worlding, in

which both the writing and the generous critical comments on my own

scribblings by Susan Harding, Anna Tsing, Katie Stewart, Lesley Stern,

Allen Shelton, Stephen Muecke, and Lauren Berlant remolded the fig-

ures, voice, stories, and textures of this book.

Vinciane Despret invited me to Cerisy in Normandy in 2010 to take

part in a week-long colloquium asking how we know with other animals.

When meals were announced, the staff called our gaggle at the chateau

“les animaux” to distinguish us from the more strictly humanistic schol-

ars that summer, and we felt proud. Isabelle Stengers invited me back to

Cerisy in the summer of 2013 for her weeklong colloquium called “Gestes

spéculatifs,” an extraordinary affair marked for me by afternoons in the

speculative narration workshop. People I worked and played with at Ce-

risy inhabit every chapter of Staying with the Trouble. I can’t name every-

body, but want especially to thank Jocelyn Porcher, Benedikte Zitouni,

Fabrizio Terranova, Raphaël Larrère, Didier Debaise, Lucienne Strivay,

Émelie Hache, and Marcelle Stroobants.

Growing partly out of discussions at Cerisy, the Thousand Names

of Gaia / Os Mil Nomes de Gaia in Rio de Janeiro in 2014 refocused my

thinking about the geographies, temporalities, and human and nonhu-

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A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s xiii

man peoples of our epoch. Thanks especially to Eduardo Viveiros de

Castro, Déborah Danowski, and Juliana Fausto.

Marisol de la Cadena invited me to participate twice in her amazing

Indigenous Cosmopolitics Sawyer Seminars at uc Davis in 2012. I am

grateful for the chance to make string figures with her and her colleagues

and students, and with Marilyn Strathern and Isabelle Stengers. I have

special debts to Joe Dumit, Kim Stanley Robinson, James Griesemer,

and Kristina Lyons from these events.

Both at ucsc and in Denmark, my work has been shaped by the

ferment of aura (Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene),

organized by Anna Tsing with a core group of researchers in biology

and anthropology. My thanks go especially to Nils Bubandt and Peter

Funch, along with Elaine Gan, Heather Swanson, Rachel Cypher, and

Katy Overstreet.

The graduate students and faculty in science studies at uc San Diego

entered my book at a special time in 2013, and I want particularly to

thank Monica Hoffman and Val Hartouni.

Multispecies studies have surged in many forms around the world,

and I owe a special debt to the people of British, Australian, New Zea-

land, South African, and U.S. animal studies and environmental humani-

ties. Perhaps the fact that all of us inherit the trouble of colonialism

and imperialism in densely related, mostly white, Anglophone webs

makes us need each other even more as we learn to rethink and refeel

with situated earth critters and their people. Invited twice to address

the gatherings of the British Animal Studies Network, including the

gang assembling for Cosmopolitical Animals, I want to thank especially

Erica Fudge, Donna Landry, Garry Marvin, Kaori Nagai, John Lock, and

Lynda Birke. Annie Potts, Thom van Dooren, Deborah Bird Rose, Lesley

Green, Anthony Collins, and others make me remember that thinking

about these matters from the “global South” can help undo some of the

arrogance of the “global North.” And then I remember too that this prob-

lematic “North” is the “South” for the decolonial struggles of humans

and nonhumans of the indigenous circumpolar North, a perspective I

owe especially to Susan Harding.

sf people are crucial to this book, both as writers and as colleagues,

especially Ursula K. Le Guin, Kim Stanley Robinson, Octavia Butler,

Vonda McIntyre, Gweneth Jones, Julie Czerneda, Sheryl Vint, Mar-

leen Barr, Sha La Bare, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Helen Merrick, Margaret

Grebowicz, and, always, Samuel R. Delany.

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xiv A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

Colleagues in Sweden, Norway, and the Netherlands contributed richly

to this book with their generous responses to my lectures and seminars,

as well as by their own research. Thanks especially to Rosi Braidotti, Piet

van de Kar, Iris van der Tuin, Tora Holmberg, Cecelia Åsberg, Ulrike Dahl,

Marianne Lien, Britta Brena, Kristin Asdal, and Ingunn Moser.

The think tank on Methodologies and Ecologies on Research-Creation

in 2014 at the University of Alberta in Edmonton helped me rethink a

chapter at a critical time. I am in debt to Natalie Loveless and her ex-

traordinary colleagues and students. I also want to thank the people

at the Institute for Humanities Research at Arizona State University

in 2013, as well as Laura Hobgood-Oster and her colleagues at the 2011

meetings of the American Academy of Religion for their innovative

thinking about humans and other animals.

The Children of Compost in this book owe a great deal to the gath-

ering of the American Association for Literature and the Environment

in June 2015, with the theme Notes from Underground: The Depths

of Environmental Arts, Culture and Justice. Thanks especially to Anna

Tsing, my partner in tunneling, and Cate Sandilands, Giovanna Di Chiro,

T. V. Reed, Noël Sturgeon, and Sandra Koelle.

I heartily thank the smart, skilled, and generous people of Duke Uni-

versity Press, especially Ken Wissoker and Elizabeth Ault. Their warmth

as well as their intelligence sustained me in making this book. Saving

me from some real bloopers, the astute blind reviewers made me less

blinkered. Without the extensive and mostly invisible work of such re-

viewers, scholarship would come undone.

Publication Histories

Chapter 1, “Playing String Figures with Companion Species,” is lightly

revised from “Jeux de ficelles avecs des espèces compagnes: Rester avec

le trouble,” in Les animaux: Deux ou trois choses que nous savons d’eux, ed-

ited by Vinciane Despret and Raphaël Larrère (Paris: Hermann, 2014),

23–59, translated by Vinciane Despret. Chapter 2, “Tentacular Thinking:

Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene,” is significantly revised from

“Staying with the Trouble: Sympoièse, figures de ficelle, embrouilles

multispécifiques,” in Gestes spéculatifs, edited and translated by Isabelle

Stengers (Paris: Les presses du réel, 2015). A greatly abbreviated version

of chapter 3, “Sympoiesis: Symbiogenesis and the Lively Arts of Stay-

ing with the Trouble,” will appear in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet:

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A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s xv

Stories from the Anthropocene, edited by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Nils

Bubandt, Elaine Gan, and Heather Swanson, forthcoming from Univer-

sity of Minnesota Press. Chapter 4, “Making Kin: Anthropocene, Capitalo-

cene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene,” is lightly revised from Environmen-

tal Humanities 6 (2015). Chapter 5, “Awash in Urine: des and Premarin®

in Multispecies Response-ability,” is lightly revised from wsq: Women’s

Studies Quarterly 40, nos. 3/4 (spring/summer 2012): 301–16. Copyright

by permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of the pub-

A Seed Bag for Terraforming with Earth Others,” is lightly revised from

Beyond the Cyborg: Adventures with Donna Haraway, edited by Margaret

University Press, 2013. Chapter 7, “A Curious Practice,” is lightly revised

from Angelaki 20, no. 2 (2015): 5–14, reprinted by permission of the pub-

lisher (Taylor and Francis Ltd., tandfonline.com). Chapter 8, “The Camille

Stories,” is published for the first time in this volume.

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http://tandfonline.com

http://www.eministpress.org

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Introduction

Trouble is an interesting word. It derives from a thirteenth-century

French verb meaning “to stir up,” “to make cloudy,” “to disturb.” We—all

of us on Terra—live in disturbing times, mixed-up times, troubling and

turbid times. The task is to become capable, with each other in all of

our bumptious kinds, of response. Mixed-up times are overflowing with

both pain and joy—with vastly unjust patterns of pain and joy, with

unnecessary killing of ongoingness but also with necessary resurgence.

The task is to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of

learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present. Our task

is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events,

as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places. In urgent

times, many of us are tempted to address trouble in terms of making

an imagined future safe, of stopping something from happening that

looms in the future, of clearing away the present and the past in order

to make futures for coming generations. Staying with the trouble does

not require such a relationship to times called the future. In fact, staying

with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing

pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures,

but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of

places, times, matters, meanings.1

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2 I n t r o d u c t i o n

Chthulucene is a simple word.2 It is a compound of two Greek roots

(khthôn and kainos) that together name a kind of timeplace for learn-

ing to stay with the trouble of living and dying in response-ability on a

damaged earth. Kainos means now, a time of beginnings, a time for on-

going, for freshness. Nothing in kainos must mean conventional pasts,

presents, or futures. There is nothing in times of beginnings that insists

on wiping out what has come before, or, indeed, wiping out what comes

after. Kainos can be full of inheritances, of remembering, and full of

comings, of nurturing what might still be. I hear kainos in the sense of

thick, ongoing presence, with hyphae infusing all sorts of temporalities

and materialities.

Chthonic ones are beings of the earth, both ancient and up-to-the-

minute. I imagine chthonic ones as replete with tentacles, feelers, dig-

its, cords, whiptails, spider legs, and very unruly hair. Chthonic ones

romp in multicritter humus but have no truck with sky-gazing Homo.

Chthonic ones are monsters in the best sense; they demonstrate and

perform the material meaningfulness of earth processes and critters.

They also demonstrate and perform consequences. Chthonic ones are

not safe; they have no truck with ideologues; they belong to no one;

they writhe and luxuriate in manifold forms and manifold names in

all the airs, waters, and places of earth. They make and unmake; they

are made and unmade. They are who are. No wonder the world’s great

monotheisms in both religious and secular guises have tried again and

again to exterminate the chthonic ones. The scandals of times called the

Anthropocene and the Capitalocene are the latest and most dangerous

of these exterminating forces. Living-with and dying-with each other

potently in the Chthulucene can be a fierce reply to the dictates of both

Anthropos and Capital.

Kin is a wild category that all sorts of people do their best to domesti-

cate. Making kin as oddkin rather than, or at least in addition to, godkin

and genealogical and biogenetic family troubles important matters, like

to whom one is actually responsible. Who lives and who dies, and how, in

this kinship rather than that one? What shape is this kinship, where and

whom do its lines connect and disconnect, and so what? What must be

cut and what must be tied if multispecies flourishing on earth, including

human and other-than-human beings in kinship, are to have a chance?

An ubiquitous figure in this book is sf: science fiction, speculative

fabulation, string figures, speculative feminism, science fact, so far. This

reiterated list whirls and loops throughout the coming pages, in words

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I n t r o d u c t i o n 3

and in visual pictures, braiding me and my readers into beings and pat-

terns at stake. Science fact and speculative fabulation need each other,

and both need speculative feminism. I think of sf and string figures in a

triple sense of figuring. First, promiscuously plucking out fibers in clot-

ted and dense events and practices, I try to follow the threads where they

lead in order to track them and find their tangles and patterns crucial

for staying with the trouble in real and particular places and times. In

that sense, sf is a method of tracing, of following a thread in the dark,

in a dangerous true tale of adventure, where who lives and who dies and

how might become clearer for the cultivating of multispecies justice.

Second, the string figure is not the tracking, but rather the actual thing,

the pattern and assembly that solicits response, the thing that is not

oneself but with which one must go on. Third, string figuring is passing

on and receiving, making and unmaking, picking up threads and drop-

ping them. sf is practice and process; it is becoming-with each other in

surprising relays; it is a figure for ongoingness in the Chthulucene.

The book and the idea of “staying with the trouble” are especially im-

patient with two responses that I hear all too frequently to the horrors of

the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene. The first is easy to describe and,

I think, dismiss, namely, a comic faith in technofixes, whether secular or

religious: technology will somehow come to the rescue of its naughty but

very clever children, or what amounts to the same thing, God will come

to the rescue of his disobedient but ever hopeful children. In the face

of such touching silliness about technofixes (or techno-apocalypses),

sometimes it is hard to remember that it remains important to embrace

situated technical projects and their people. They are not the enemy;

they can do many important things for staying with the trouble and for

making generative oddkin.

The second response, harder to dismiss, is probably even more de-

structive: namely, a position that the game is over, it’s too late, there’s no

sense trying to make anything any better, or at least no sense having any

active trust in each other in working and playing for a resurgent world.

Some scientists I know express this kind of bitter cynicism, even as they

actually work very hard to make a positive difference for both people and

other critters. Some people who describe themselves as critical cultural

theorists or political progressives express these ideas too. I think the

odd coupling of actually working and playing for multispecies flourish-

ing with tenacious energy and skill, while expressing an explicit “game

over” attitude that can and does discourage others, including students,

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4 I n t r o d u c t i o n

is facilitated by various kinds of futurisms. One kind seems to imagine

that only if things work do they matter—or, worse, only if what I and

my fellow experts do works to fix things does anything matter. More

generously, sometimes scientists and others who think, read, study, agi-

tate, and care know too much, and it is too heavy. Or, at least we think

we know enough to reach the conclusion that life on earth that includes

human people in any tolerable way really is over, that the apocalypse

really is nigh.

That attitude makes a great deal of sense in the midst of the earth’s

sixth great extinction event and in the midst of engulfing wars, ex-

tractions, and immiserations of billions of people and other critters for

something called “profit” or “power”—or, for that matter, called “God.”

A game-over attitude imposes itself in the gale-force winds of feeling,

not just knowing, that human numbers are almost certain to reach more

than 11 billion people by 2100. This figure represents a 9-billion-person

increase over 150 years from 1950 to 2100, with vastly unequal con-

sequences for the poor and the rich—not to mention vastly unequal

burdens imposed on the earth by the rich compared to the poor—and

even worse consequences for nonhumans almost everywhere. There are

many other examples of dire realities; the Great Accelerations of the

post–World War II era gouge their marks in earth’s rocks, waters, airs,

and critters. There is a fine line between acknowledging the extent and

seriousness of the troubles and succumbing to abstract futurism and its

affects of sublime despair and its politics of sublime indifference.

This book argues and tries to perform that, eschewing futurism, stay-

ing with the trouble is both more serious and more lively. Staying with

the trouble requires making oddkin; that is, we require each other in

unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles. We

become-with each other or not at all. That kind of material semiotics

is always situated, someplace and not noplace, entangled and worldly.

Alone, in our separate kinds of expertise and experience, we know both

too much and too little, and so we succumb to despair or to hope, and

neither is a sensible attitude. Neither despair nor hope is tuned to the

senses, to mindful matter, to material semiotics, to mortal earthlings

in thick copresence. Neither hope nor despair knows how to teach us to

“play string figures with companion species,” the title of the first chapter

of this book.

Three long chapters open Staying with the Trouble. Each chapter tracks

stories and figures for making kin in the Chthulucene in order to cut

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the bonds of the Anthropocene and Capitalocene. Pigeons in all their

worldly diversity—from creatures of empire, to working men’s racing

birds, to spies in war, to scientific research partners, to collaborators in

art activisms on three continents, to urban companions and pests—are

the guides in chapter 1.

In their homely histories, pigeons lead into a practice of “tentacular

thinking,” the title of the second chapter. Here, I expand the argument

that bounded individualism in its many flavors in science, politics, and

philosophy has finally become unavailable to think with, truly no longer

thinkable, technically or any other way. Sympoiesis—making-with—is a

keyword throughout the chapter, as I explore the gifts for needed think-

ing offered by theorists and storytellers. My partners in science studies,

anthropology, and storytelling—Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour, Thom

van Dooren, Anna Tsing, Marilyn Strathern, Hannah Arendt, Ursula Le

Guin, and others—are my companions throughout tentacular think-

ing. With their help, I introduce the three timescapes of the book: the

Anthropocene, the Capitalocene, and the Chthulucene. Allied with the

Pacific day octopus, Medusa, the only mortal Gorgon, figured as the Mis-

tress of the Animals, saves the day and ends the chapter.

“Symbiogenesis and the Lively Arts of Staying with the Trouble,”

chapter 3, spins out the threads of sympoiesis in ecological evolutionary

developmental biology and in art/science activisms committed to four

iconic troubled places: coral reef holobiomes, Black Mesa coal country

in Navajo and Hopi lands and other fossil fuel extraction zones impact-

ing especially ferociously on indigenous peoples, complex lemur forest

habitats in Madagascar, and North American circumpolar lands and

seas subject to new and old colonialisms in the grip of rapidly melting

ice. This chapter makes string figures with the threads of reciprocating

energies of biologies, arts, and activisms for multispecies resurgence.

Navajo-Churro sheep, orchids, extinct bees, lemurs, jellyfish, coral pol-

yps, seals, and microbes play leading roles with their artists, biologists,

and activists throughout the chapter. Here and throughout the book,

the sustaining creativity of people who care and act animates the ac-

tion. Not surprisingly, contemporary indigenous people and peoples, in

conflict and collaboration with many sorts of partners, make a sensible

difference. Biologists, beginning with the incomparable Lynn Margulis,

infuse the thinking and playing of this chapter.

“Making Kin,” chapter 4, is both a reprise of the timescapes of An-

thropocene, Capitalocene, and Chthulucene, and a plea to “Make Kin

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6 I n t r o d u c t i o n

Not Babies.” Antiracist, anticolonial, anticapitalist, proqueer feminists

of every color and from every people have long been leaders in the move-

ment for sexual and reproductive freedom and rights, with particular

attention to the violence of reproductive and sexual orders for poor

and marginalized people. Feminists have been leaders in arguing that

sexual and reproductive freedom means being able to bring children,

whether one’s own or those of others, to robust adulthood in health

and safety in intact communities. Feminists have also been historically

unique in insisting on the power and right of every woman, young or

old, to choose not to have a child. Cognizant of how easily such a posi-

tion repeats the arrogances of imperialism, feminists of my persuasion

insist that motherhood is not the telos of women and that a woman’s

reproductive freedom trumps the demands of patriarchy or any other

system. Food, jobs, housing, education, the possibility of travel, com-

munity, peace, control of one’s body and one’s intimacies, health care,

usable and woman-friendly contraception, the last word on whether or

not a child will be born, joy: these and more are sexual and reproductive

rights. Their absence around the world is stunning. For excellent rea-

sons, the feminists I know have resisted the languages and policies of

population control because they demonstrably often have the interests

of biopolitical states more in view than the well-being of women and

their people, old and young. Resulting scandals in population control

practices are not hard to find. But, in my experience, feminists, includ-

ing science studies and anthropological feminists, have not been willing

seriously to address the Great Acceleration of human numbers, fearing

that to do so would be to slide once again into the muck of racism, clas-

sism, nationalism, modernism, and imperialism.

But that fear is not good enough. Avoidance of the urgency of almost

incomprehensible increases in human numbers since 1950 can slip into

something akin to the way some Christians avoid the urgency of cli-

mate change because it touches too closely on the marrow of one’s faith.

How to address the urgency is the question that must burn for staying

with the trouble. What is decolonial feminist reproductive freedom in a

dangerously troubled multispecies world? It cannot be just a humanist

affair, no matter how anti-imperialist, antiracist, anticlassist, and pro-

woman. It also cannot be a “futurist” affair, attending mainly to abstract

numbers and big data, but not to the differentiated and layered lives

and deaths of actual people. Still, a 9 billion increase of human beings

over 150 years, to a level of 11 billion by 2100 if we are lucky, is not just

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I n t r o d u c t i o n 7

a number; and it cannot be explained away by blaming Capitalism or

any other word starting with a capital letter. The need is stark to think

together anew across differences of historical position and of kinds of

knowledge and expertise.

“Awash in Urine,” chapter 5, begins with personal and intimate rela-

tions, luxuriating in the consequences of following estrogens that con-

nect an aging woman and her elder dog, specifically, me and my com-

panion and research associate Cayenne. Before the threads of the string

figure have been tracked far, remembering their cyborg littermates,

woman and dog find themselves in histories of veterinary research, Big

Pharma, horse farming for estrogen, zoos, des feminist activism, in-

terrelated animal rights and women’s health actions, and much more.

Intensely inhabiting specific bodies and places as the means to cultivate

the capacity to respond to worldly urgencies with each other is the core

theme.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, and ants and acacia seeds populate

chapter 6, “Sowing Worlds.” The task is to tell an sf adventure story

with acacias and their associates as the protagonists. It turns out that

Le Guin’s carrier bag theory of narrative comes to the rescue, along with

biologist Deborah Gordon’s theories about ant interactions and colony

behavior, to elaborate the possibilities of ecological evolutionary devel-

opmental biology and nonhierarchical systems theories for shaping the

best stories. Science fiction and science fact cohabit happily in this tale.

With Le Guin as their scribe, the prose of acacia seeds and the lyrics of

lichens give way to the mute poetics of rocks in the final passages.

“A Curious Practice,” chapter 7, draws close to the philosopher, psy-

chologist, animal-human student, and cultural theorist Vinciane De-

spret because of her incomparable ability to think-with other beings,

human or not. Despret’s work on attunement and on critters rendering

each other capable of unexpected feats in actual encounters is necessary

to staying with the trouble. She attends not to what critters are sup-

posed to be able to do, by nature or education, but to what beings evoke

from and with each other that was truly not there before, in nature or

culture. Her kind of thinking enlarges the capacities of all the players;

that is her worlding practice. The urgencies of the Anthropocene, Capita-

locene, and Chthulucene demand that kind of thinking beyond inherited

categories and capacities, in homely and concrete ways, like the sorts

of things Arabian babblers and their scientists get up to in the Negev

desert. Despret teaches how to be curious, as well as how to mourn by

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8 I n t r o d u c t i o n

bringing the dead into active presence; and I needed her touch before

writing the concluding stories of Staying with the Trouble. Her curious

practice prepared me to write about the Communities of Compost and

the tasks of speakers for the dead, as they work for earthly multispecies

recuperation and resurgence.

“The Camille Stories: Children of Compost” closes this book. This in-

vitation to a collective speculative fabulation follows five generations of

a symbiogenetic join of a human child and monarch butterflies along the

many lines and nodes of these insects’ migrations between Mexico and

the United States and Canada. These lines trace socialities and materiali-

ties crucial to living and dying with critters on the edge of disappearance

so that they might go on. Committed to nurturing capacities to respond,

cultivating ways to render each other capable, the Communities of Com-

post appeared all over the world in the early twenty-first century on

ruined lands and waters. These communities committed to help radi-

cally reduce human numbers over a few hundred years while developing

practices of multispecies environmental justice of myriad kinds. Every

new child had at least three human parents; and the pregnant parent

exercised reproductive freedom in the choice of an animal symbiont for

the child, a choice that ramified across the generations of all the species.

The relations of symbiogenetic people and unjoined humans brought

many surprises, some of them deadly, but perhaps the deepest surprises

emerged from the relations of the living and the dead, in symanimagenic

complexity, across the holobiomes of earth.

Lots of trouble, lots of kin to be going on with.

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C H A P T E R 1

Playing String Figures

with Companion Species

In honor of G. Evelyn Hutchinson (1903–91)

and Beatriz da Costa (1974–2012).

Hutchinson, my PhD adviser, wrote a biographical

memoir called The Kindly Fruits of the Earth, a title that

enfolds all the “reliable voyageurs” of this chapter.

1.1. Multispecies Cat’s Cradle. Drawing by Nasser Mufti, 2011.

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10 c h a p t e r o n e

Multispecies Storytelling and the

Practices of Companions

String figures are like stories; they propose and enact patterns for par-

ticipants to inhabit, somehow, on a vulnerable and wounded earth.1 My

multispecies storytelling is about recuperation in complex histories that

are as full of dying as living, as full of endings, even genocides, as begin-

nings. In the face of unrelenting historically specific surplus suffering

in companion species knottings, I am not interested in reconciliation or

restoration, but I am deeply committed to the more modest possibilities

of partial recuperation and getting on together. Call that staying with

the trouble. And so I look for real stories that are also speculative fabu-

lations and speculative realisms. These are stories in which multispe-

cies players, who are enmeshed in partial and flawed translations across

difference, redo ways of living and dying attuned to still possible finite

flourishing, still possible recuperation.

sf is a sign for science fiction, speculative feminism, science fantasy,

speculative fabulation, science fact, and also, string figures. Playing

games of string figures is about giving and receiving patterns, dropping

threads and failing but sometimes finding something that works, some-

thing consequential and maybe even beautiful, that wasn’t there before,

of relaying connections that matter, of telling stories in hand upon hand,

digit upon digit, attachment site upon attachment site, to craft condi-

tions for finite flourishing on terra, on earth. String figures require hold-

ing still in order to receive and pass on. String figures can be played

by many, on all sorts of limbs, as long as the rhythm of accepting and

giving is sustained. Scholarship and politics are like that too—passing

on in twists and skeins that require passion and action, holding still and

moving, anchoring and launching.

Racing pigeons in Southern California, along with their diverse peo-

ple, geographies, other critters, technologies, and knowledges, shape

practices of living and dying in rich worldings that I think of as string

figure games. This chapter, enabled by diverse actual pigeons and their

rich tracings, is the opening pattern of a cluster of knots. The critters of all my stories inhabit an n-dimensional niche space called Terrapo-

lis. My fabulated multiple integral equation for Terrapolis is at once

a story, a speculative fabulation, and a string figure for multispecies

worlding.

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P l a y i n g S F w i t h C o m p a n i o n S p e c i e s 11

∫ Terra[x]n = ∫∫∫∫ . . . ∫∫Terra(x1,x2,x3,x4, . . . ,xn,t) dx1 dx2 dx3 dx4 . . . dxndt = Terrapolis

x1 = stuff/physis, x2 = capacity, x3 = sociality, x4 = materiality, xn =

dimensions-yet-to-come

(alpha) = EcologicalEvolutionaryDevelopmental Biology’s multi-

species epigenesis

Ω (omega) = recuperating terra’s pluriverse

t = worlding time, not container time, entangled times of past/present/

yet to come

Terrapolis is a fictional integral equation, a speculative fabulation.

Terrapolis is n-dimensional niche space for multispecies becoming-

with.

Terrapolis is open, worldly, indeterminate, and polytemporal.

Terrapolis is a chimera of materials, languages, histories.

Terrapolis is for companion species, cum panis, with bread, at table

together—not “posthuman” but “com-post.”

Terrapolis is in place; Terrapolis makes space for unexpected companions.

Terrapolis is an equation for guman, for humus, for soil, for ongoing

risky infection, for epidemics of promising trouble, for permaculture.

Terrapolis is the sf game of response-ability.2

Companion species are engaged in the old art of terraforming; they

are the players in the sf equation that describes Terrapolis. Finished

once and for all with Kantian globalizing cosmopolitics and grumpy

human-exceptionalist Heideggerian worlding, Terrapolis is a mongrel

word composted with a mycorrhiza of Greek and Latin rootlets and

their symbionts. Never poor in world, Terrapolis exists in the sf web of

always-too-much connection, where response-ability must be cobbled

together, not in the existentialist and bond-less, lonely, Man-making gap

theorized by Heidegger and his followers. Terrapolis is rich in world, in-

oculated against posthumanism but rich in com-post, inoculated against

human exceptionalism but rich in humus, ripe for multispecies story-

telling. This Terrapolis is not the home world for the human as Homo,

that ever parabolic, re- and de-tumescing, phallic self-image of the same;

but for the human that is transmogrified in etymological Indo-European

sleight of tongue into guman, that worker of and in the soil.3 My sf crit-

ters are beings of the mud more than the sky, but the stars too shine in

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12 c h a p t e r o n e

Terrapolis. In Terrapolis, shed of masculinist universals and their politics

of inclusion, guman are full of indeterminate genders and genres, full of

kinds-in-the-making, full of significant otherness. My scholar-friends in

linguistics and ancient civilizations tell me that this guman is adama/

adam, composted from all available genders and genres and competent

to make a home world for staying with the trouble. This Terrapolis has

kin-making, string figure, sf relations with Isabelle Stengers’s kind of

fleshy cosmopolitics and sf writers’ practices of worlding.

The British social anthropologist Marilyn Strathern, who wrote The

Gender of the Gift based on her ethnographic work in highland Papua

New Guinea (Mt. Hagen), taught me that “it matters what ideas we use

to think other ideas (with).”4 Strathern is an ethnographer of thinking

practices. She embodies for me the arts of feminist speculative fabula-

tion in the scholarly mode. It matters what matters we use to think other

matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with;

it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what

descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what

stories make worlds, what worlds make stories. Strathern wrote about

accepting the risk of relentless contingency; she thinks about anthro-

pology as the knowledge practice that studies relations with relations,

that puts relations at risk with other relations, from unexpected other

worlds. In 1933, Alfred North Whitehead, the American mathemati-

cian and process philosopher who infuses my sense of worlding, wrote

The Adventures of Ideas.5 sf is precisely full of such adventures. Isabelle

Stengers, a chemist, scholar of Whitehead and Gilles Deleuze, radical

thinker about materiality in sciences, and an unruly feminist philos-

opher, gives me “speculative thinking” in abundance. With Isabelle

Stengers we cannot denounce the world in the name of an ideal world.

In the spirit of feminist communitarian anarchism and the idiom of

Whitehead’s philosophy, she maintains that decisions must take place

somehow in the presence of those who will bear their consequences.

That is what she means by cosmopolitics.6

In relay and return, sf morphs in my writing and research into

speculative fabulation and string figures. Relays, string figures, pass-

ing patterns back and forth, giving and receiving, patterning, holding

the unasked-for pattern in one’s hands, response-ability; that is core to

what I mean by staying with the trouble in serious multispecies worlds.

Becoming-with, not becoming, is the name of the game; becoming-with

is how partners are, in Vinciane Despret’s terms, rendered capable.7 On-

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P l a y i n g S F w i t h C o m p a n i o n S p e c i e s 13

tologically heterogeneous partners become who and what they are in

relational material-semiotic worlding. Natures, cultures, subjects, and

objects do not preexist their intertwined worldings.

Companion species are relentlessly becoming-with. The category

companion species helps me refuse human exceptionalism without

invoking posthumanism. Companion species play string figure games

where who is/are to be in/of the world is constituted in intra-and inter-

action.8 The partners do not precede the knotting; species of all kinds are

consequent upon worldly subject- and object-shaping entanglements.

In human-animal worlds, companion species are ordinary beings-in-

encounter in the house, lab, field, zoo, park, truck, office, prison, ranch,

arena, village, human hospital, forest, slaughterhouse, estuary, vet clinic,

lake, stadium, barn, wildlife preserve, farm, ocean canyon, city streets,

factory, and more.

Although they are among humanity’s oldest games, string figures are

not everywhere the same game. Like all offspring of colonizing and im-

perial histories, I—we—have to relearn how to conjugate worlds with

partial connections and not universals and particulars. In the late nine-

teenth and early twentieth centuries, European and Euro-American

ethnologists collected string figure games from all over the world; these

discipline-making travelers were surprised that when they showed the

string figure games they had learned as children at home, their hosts al-

ready knew such games and often in greater variety. String figure games

came late to Europe, probably from Asian trade routes. All of the episte-

mological desires and fables of this period of the history of comparative

anthropology were ignited by the similarities and differences, with their

undecidably independent inventions or cultural diffusions, tied together

by the threads of hand and brain, making and thinking, in the relays of

patterning in “Native” and “Western” string figure games.9 In compara-

tive tension, the figures were both the same and not the same at all; sf is

still a risky game of worlding and storying; it is staying with the trouble.

Figure 1.2 shows the hands of the science writer and natural history

radio producer Rusten Hogness10 learning a Navajo string figure called

Ma’ii Ats’áá’ Yílwoí (in English “Coyotes Running Opposite Ways”). Coy-

ote is the trickster who constantly scatters the dust of disorder into the

orderly star patterns made by the Fire God, setting up the noninnocent

world-making performances of disorder and order that shape the lives of

terran critters. In the Navajo language, string games are called na’atl’o’.

Navajo string games will reappear in my multispecies storytelling about

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14 c h a p t e r o n e

Navajo-Churro sheep and the women and men who wove and weave

lives with and from them, but these games are needed in this chapter

too, for thinking with pigeons in Los Angeles and beyond. Cat’s cradle

and jeux de ficelle are not enough; the knots must ramify and double

back in many attachment sites in Terrapolis. Navajo string games are

one form of “continuous weaving,” practices for telling the stories of the

constellations, of the emergence of the People, of the Diné.11

These string figures are thinking as well as making practices, peda-

gogical practices and cosmological performances. Some Navajo thinkers

describe string games as one kind of patterning for restoring hózhó, a

term imperfectly translated into English as “harmony,” “beauty,” “order,”

and “right relations of the world,” including right relations of humans

and nonhumans. Not in the world, but of the world; that crucial differ-

ence in English prepositions is what leads me to weave Navajo string

figures, na’atl’o’, into the web of sf worlding. The worlds of sf are not

containers; they are patternings, risky comakings, speculative fabula-

tions. In sf on Terrapolis, recuperation is in partial connection to hózhó.

It matters which ideas we think other ideas with; my thinking or mak-

ing cat’s cradle with na’atl’o’ is not an innocent universal gesture, but

1.2. Ma’ii Ats’áá’ Yílwoí (Coyotes Running Opposite Ways).

Photograph by Donna Haraway.

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P l a y i n g S F w i t h C o m p a n i o n S p e c i e s 15

a risky proposition in relentless historical relational contingency. And

these contingencies include abundant histories of conquest, resistance,

recuperation, and resurgence. Telling stories together with historically

situated critters is fraught with the risks and joys of composing a more

livable cosmopolitics.

Pigeons will be my first guides. Citizens of Terrapolis, pigeons are

members of opportunistic social species who can and do live in a myr-

iad of times and places. Highly diverse, they occupy many categories in

many languages, sorted in English terms into wild and domestic worlds,

but those particular oppositions are not general or universal, even in

the so-called West. The varied and proliferating specificities of pigeons

are astonishing. Codomesticated with their people, these other-than-

human critters nurture the kind of trouble important to me. Pigeons

have very old histories of becoming-with human beings. These birds tie

their people into knots of class, gender, race, nation, colony, postcolony,

and—just maybe—recuperating terra-yet-to-come.

Pigeons are also “creatures of empire”—that is, animals who went

with European colonists and conquerors all over the world, including

places where other varieties of their kind were already well established,

transforming ecologies and politics for everybody in ways that still

ramify through multispecies flesh and contested landscapes.12 Hardly

always colonists, pigeons belong to kinds and breeds indigenous to many

places, in uncounted configurations of living and dying. Building nat-

uralcultural economies and lives for thousands of years, these critters

are also infamous for ecological damage and biosocial upheaval. They

are treasured kin and despised pests, subjects of rescue and of invec-

tive, bearers of rights and components of the animal-machine, food and

neighbor, targets of extermination and of biotechnological breeding and

multiplication, companions in work and play and carriers of disease,

contested subjects and objects of “modern progress” and “backward tra-

dition.” Besides all that, kinds of pigeons vary, and vary, and then vary

some more, with kinds for nearly every spot on terra.

Becoming-with people for several thousand years, domestic pigeons

(Columba livia domestica) emerged from birds native to western and

southern Europe, North Africa, and western and southern Asia. Rock

doves came with Europeans to the Americas, entering North America

through Port Royal in Nova Scotia in 1606. Everywhere they have gone,

these cosmopolitical pigeons occupy cities with gusto, where they in-

cite human love and hatred in extravagant measure. Called “rats with

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16 c h a p t e r o n e

wings,” feral pigeons are subjects of vituperation and extermination, but

they also become cherished opportunistic companions who are fed and

watched avidly all over the world. Domestic rock doves have worked as

spies carrying messages, racing birds, fancy pigeons at fairs and bird

markets, food for working families, psychological test subjects, Dar-

win’s interlocutors on the power of artificial selection, and more. Feral

pigeons are a favorite food for urban raptors, like peregrine falcons, who,

after recovering from near extermination from ddt-thinned eggshells,

have taken up life on bridges and ledges of city skyscrapers.

Pigeons are competent agents—in the double sense of both dele-

gates and actors—who render each other and human beings capable

of situated social, ecological, behavioral, and cognitive practices. Their

worlding is expansive, and the sf games in this chapter do not touch

very many, much less all, of the threads tied with and by these birds.13

My sf game tracks modest, daring, contemporary, risk-filled projects

for recuperation, in which people and animals tangle together in inno-

vative ways that might, just barely possibly, render each other capable

of a finite flourishing—now and yet to come. The collaborations among

differently situated people—and peoples—are as crucial as, and enabled

by, those between the humans and animals. Pigeons fly us not into col-

laborations in general, but into specific crossings from familiar worlds

into uncomfortable and unfamiliar ones to weave something that might

come unraveled, but might also nurture living and dying in beauty in the

n-dimensional niche space of Terrapolis. My hope is that these knots

propose promising patterns for multispecies response-ability inside on-

going trouble.

California Racing Pigeons and Their People:

Collaborating Arts for Worldly Flourishing

Becoming-With; Rendering-Capable

The capabilities of pigeons surprise and impress human beings, who

often forget how they themselves are rendered capable by and with both

things and living beings. Shaping response-abilities, things and living

beings can be inside and outside human and nonhuman bodies, at dif-

ferent scales of time and space. All together the players evoke, trigger,

and call forth what—and who—exists. Together, becoming-with and

rendering-capable invent n-dimensional niche space and its inhabitants.

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1.3. Bird Man of the Mission, mural of a homeless mentally ill man called Lone Star

Swan and some of the urban pigeons who have been his friends and companions

on the street in San Francisco’s Mission District. Painted by Daniel Doherty in

2006 within the Clarion Alley Mural Project, this work was heavily tagged and

finally painted over in 2013. Written for the Street Art SF team by Jane Bregman

and posted on October 7, 2014, the story of The Bird Man of the Mission is on the

Doherty and the Clarion Alley Mural Project.

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18 c h a p t e r o n e

What results is often called nature. Pigeon natures in these coproduced

senses matter to my sf story.

Pigeons released in unfamiliar places find their way back to their home

lofts from thousands of kilometers away even on cloudy days.14 Pigeons

have the map sense and compass sense that have endeared them to pi-

geon fanciers who race them for sport, scientists who study them for the

behavioral neurobiology of orientation and navigation, spies who wish

to send messages across enemy territory, and writers of mystery novels

who call on a good pigeon to carry secrets.15 Almost always men and

boys, racing enthusiasts around the world—with perhaps the hottest

spots of the sport on the rooftops of cities like Cairo and Istanbul and

of immigrant Muslim neighborhoods in European cities like Berlin—

selectively breed and elaborately nurture their talented birds to special-

ize in fast and accurate homing from release points. Ordinary feral pi-

geons are no slouches at getting home either.

Pigeons will use familiar landmarks to find their way, and they are

very good at recognizing and discriminating objects and masses below

them during flight. In Project Sea Hunt in the 1970s and ’80s, the U.S.

Coast Guard worked with pigeons, who were better at spotting men and

equipment in open water than human beings.16 Indeed, pigeons were

accurate 93 percent of the time, compared to human accuracy in similar

problems of 38 percent. The pigeons perched in an observation bubble

on the underside of a helicopter, where they pecked keys to indicate

their finds. When they worked with their people instead of in isolation,

pigeons were nearly 100 percent accurate. Clearly, the pigeons and Coast

Guard personnel had to learn how to communicate with each other, and

the pigeons had to learn what their humans were interested in seeing.

In nonmimetic ways, people and birds had to invent pedagogical and

technological ways to render each other capable in problems novel to all

of them. The pigeons never graduated to jobs to save real shipwreck vic-

tims, however, because in 1983, after two helicopters crashed and federal

money was cut for the research, the project was ended.

Not very many kinds of other-than-human critters have convinced hu-

man skeptics that the animals recognize themselves in a mirror—a talent

made known to scientists by such actions as picking at paint spots or

other marks on one’s body that are visible only in a mirror. Pigeons share

this capacity with, at least, human children over two years old, rhesus ma-

caques, chimpanzees, magpies, dolphins, and elephants.17 So-called self-

recognition carries great weight in Western-influenced psychology and

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P l a y i n g S F w i t h C o m p a n i o n S p e c i e s 19

philosophy, besotted by individualism in theory and method, as these

fields have been. Devising tests to show who can and can’t do it is some-

thing of a competitive epistemological sport. Pigeons passed their first

mirror tests in the laboratories of B. F. Skinner in 1981.18 In 2008, Science

News reported that Keio University researchers showed that, even with

five- to seven-second time delays, pigeons did better at self-recognition

tests with both mirrors and live video images of themselves than three-

year-old human children.19 Pigeons pick out different people in photo-

graphs very well too, and in Professor Shigeru Watanabe’s Laboratory of

Comparative Cognitive Neuroscience at Keio University, pigeons could

tell the difference between paintings by Monet or Picasso, and even gen-

eralize to discriminate unfamiliar paintings from different styles and

schools by various painters.20 It would be a mistake to start building the

predictable arguments along the lines of “my bird-brain cognition is bet-

ter than or equal to your ape-brain cognition.” What is happening seems

to me to be more interesting than that, and more pregnant with conse-

quences for getting on well with each other, for caring in both emergent

similarity and difference. Pigeons, people, and apparatus have teamed

up to make each other capable of something new in the world of multi-

species relationships.

It is all very well to offer proof of becoming a self-recognizing self

in certain kinds of setups, but it is surely as critical to be able to recog-

nize one another and other beings in ways that make sense to the sorts

of lives the critters will lead, whether in racing-pigeon lofts or urban

squares. Scientists do very interesting research on these topics, but here

I want instead to tune in to the online Racing Pigeon Post essays by Tanya

Berokoff. A teacher in speech communication and lifelong companion

with other animals, she is a member of the Palomar Racing Pigeon Club

in California with her husband, John Berokoff, who races the birds with

mostly other men. Drawing on her social science knowledge and on

American popular culture, Tanya Berokoff explicitly uses psychologist

John Bowlby’s attachment theory and Tina Turner’s lyrics for “What’s

Love Got to Do with It?” to talk about how fanciers assist pigeon parents

to raise their youngsters and help them feel competent and safe as they

mature into calm, confident, reliable, socially competent, home-seeking

racers.21 She describes pigeon people’s obligation to put themselves in

the place of the pigeons to understand their ways of knowing and their

social practices, and the idiom Berokoff uses for knowledge is love, in-

cluding but not only instrumental love. The actors are both pigeons and

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people, in inter- and intraspecies relatings. She describes the details

of the gestures and postures of pigeons with each other, the time they

spend with each other, and what they do to fill that time. She concludes,

“It would seem that our pigeons do quite a good job of exhibiting an

agape type of love toward each other . . . Our pigeons are actually doing

the work of real love.” For her, the “work of real love” is “not about an

emotional need to fall in love but to be genuinely loved by another.”22

Meeting that need for their columbine social partners, she says, is what

the pigeons seem to do, and that is also what their people owe the pi-

geons. Berokoff uses Bowlby’s attachment theory in detail to describe

the needs of young pigeons as they mature, and their partners are both

other pigeons and human beings response-able with them. The scene

she describes is not all rosy. Pigeon bullying, the taxing labor of racing

for birds and people, competition for attention and love—and recipes

for cooking some of the pigeons—are all in these posts. My point is not

that this discourse or this sport is innocent, but that here is a scene of

great relational complexity, a vigorous multispecies sf practice.

PigeonBlog

Recuperation and staying with the trouble are the themes of my sf

practice. It is all too possible to address these questions through human

brutality toward pigeons, or indeed through pigeon damage to other

species or to human-built structures. Instead, I want to turn to the dif-

ferential burdens of urban air pollution that contribute to different rates

of human (and other-than-human, but that is not rated) mortality and

illness, often distributed by race and class. Working pigeons will be our

companions in projects of environmental justice in California that seek

to repair both blighted neighborhoods and social relations. We will stay

with the trouble in the tissues of an art activism project called Pigeon-

Blog. This was a project by artist-researcher Beatriz da Costa with her

students Cina Hazegh and Kevin Ponto; they tied sf patterns with many

human, animal, and cyborg coshapers.

In August 2006, racing pigeons flew as participants in three public

social experiments that intimately joined communication technolo-

gies with city people and urban sporting birds. The pigeons flew once

as part of a Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory at the University

of California at Irvine and twice for the festival called Seven Days of

Art and Interconnectivity of the Inter-Society for Electronic Arts in

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P l a y i n g S F w i t h C o m p a n i o n S p e c i e s 21

San Jose, California.23 PigeonBlog required extensive collaboration be-

tween “homing pigeons, artists, engineers, and pigeon fanciers engaged

in a grass-roots scientific data gathering initiative designed to collect

and distribute information about air quality conditions to the general

public.”24 Worldwide, racing pigeons are no strangers to alliances with

working-class people in relations of competitive masculine sport and

profound cross-species affection, and their historical capabilities in sur-

veillance and communication technologies and networks are very old

and very important. These pigeons have been workers and subjects in or-

nithology and psychology research labs for many decades. But sporting

homing pigeons had not, before PigeonBlog, been invited to join all of

that heritage together with another set of players, namely, art activists.

The project sought to join savvy, inexpensive, do-it-yourself electron-

ics with citizen science and interspecies coproduced art and knowledge

“in the pursuit of resistant action.”25 The data were intended to pro-

voke, motivate, amplify, inspire, and illustrate, not to substitute for or

surpass professional air pollution science and monitoring. These were

data produced to generate further imaginative and knowing action in

many domains of practice. Da Costa set out not to become an air pollu-

tion scientist, but to spark collaboration in something quite different:

multispecies art in action for mundane worlds in need of—and capable

of—recuperation across consequential differences.

Air pollution is legendary in Southern California, especially Los An-

geles County, and it impacts the health of people and other critters es-

pecially fiercely near highways, power plants, and refineries. These sites

often cluster in and near the neighborhoods of working-class people,

people of color, and immigrants—hardly mutually exclusive categories.

Official government air pollution monitoring devices in Southern Cali-

fornia are placed at fixed points away from high-traffic areas and known

pollution sources and at altitudes higher than the zones in which people

and lots of other plants and animals breathe. Each monitoring device

costs many thousands of dollars and can only measure gases in its im-

mediate vicinity, relying on various models to extrapolate to the volume

of the air basin. Properly equipped racing pigeons can gather continuous

real-time air pollution data while moving through the air at key heights

not accessible to the official instruments, as well as from the ground

where they are released for their homing flights. These data could also

be streamed in real time to the public via the Internet. What would it

take to enlist the cooperation of such birds and their people, and what

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22 c h a p t e r o n e

kind of caring and response-ability could such a collaboration evoke?

Who would render whom capable of what?

Da Costa explained the equipment: “The pigeon ‘backpack’ developed

for this project consisted of a combined gps (latitude, longitude, alti-

tude) / gsm (cell phone tower communication) unit and corresponding

antennas, a dual automotive co/nox pollution sensor, a temperature

sensor, a Subscriber Identity Module (sim) card interface, a micro-

controller and standard supporting electronic components. Designed

in this manner, we essentially ended up developing an open-platform

Short Message Service (sms) enabled cell phone, ready to be rebuilt and

repurposed by anyone who is interested in doing so.”26 The researcher-

artist-engineers took about three months to design the basic technol-

ogy, but making the pack small, comfortable, and safe enough for the

pigeons took almost a year of building hands-on multispecies trust and

knowledge essential to joining the birds, technology, and people. No one

wanted an overloaded homing pigeon plucked from the air by an oppor-

tunistic falcon that was not a member of the project! Nobody, least of

all the men who bred, raised, handled, and loved their racing pigeons,

would tolerate anxious and unhappy birds lumbering home under du-

ress. The artist-researchers and the pigeon fanciers had to render each

other capable of mutual trust so that they could ask the birds for their

confidence and skill. That meant lots of fitting sessions and pigeon bal-

ance training in lofts and lots of learning to learn with a generous and

knowledgeable pigeon fancier, Bob Matsuyama, who was also a middle

school shop and science teacher, and his talented and educated fliers.

The pigeons were not sim cards; they were living coproducers, and the

artist-researchers and pigeons had to learn to interact and to train to-

gether with the mentoring of the men of the pigeon fancy. All the players

rendered each other capable; they “became-with” each other in specula-

tive fabulation. Many trials and test flights later, the multispecies team

was ready to trace the air in string figure patterns of electronic tracks.27

There were many press reports and reactions to the 2006 perfor-

mances and to the PigeonBlog website. Da Costa reported that an en-

gineer from Texas contacted her about coauthoring a grant proposal to

the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to collaborate in

the development of small autonomous aerial surveillance vehicles de-

signed around the aerodynamics of birds. If only that had been a joke!

But the long military use of other-than-human animals as weapons and

spy systems has only become fancier and more “techy” in the twenty-

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P l a y i n g S F w i t h C o m p a n i o n S p e c i e s 23

first century.28 In another vein, People for the Ethical Treatment of An-

imals (peta) tried to shut PigeonBlog down as abuse of animals. peta

issued a public statement calling on the administration of the University

of California at Irvine, where da Costa was a faculty member, to take

action. The rationale was fascinating: PigeonBlog was not justified in

its use of nonhuman animals because it was not even conducting sci-

entifically grounded experiments, to which peta might also object, but

less so because that at least would have teleological, functional reason

(cure disease, map genomes, etc.) on its side. Art was trivial, mere play

compared to the serious work of expanding subjects of rights or advanc-

ing science. Da Costa took seriously questions about the cosmopolitics

and material-semiotics of collaboration for animals in art, politics, or

science. Who renders whom capable of what, and at what price, borne by

whom? But, she asked, “Is human-animal work as part of political [and

art] action less legitimate than the same type of activity when framed

under the umbrella of science?”29 Perhaps it is precisely in the realm

of play, outside the dictates of teleology, settled categories, and func-

1.4. The PigeonBlog team of human beings, pigeons, and

electronic technologies. Photograph by Deborah Forster for

PigeonBlog. Courtesy of Robert Niediffer, artistic executor

for Beatriz da Costa.

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24 c h a p t e r o n e

tion, that serious worldliness and recuperation become possible. That is

surely the premise of sf.

Well before peta noticed da Costa’s art research, racing-pigeon men’s

fear of the kind of controversy and attack that some (not all) parts of

the animal rights movement bring to many organized working/playing

human-animal relationships, including becoming-with pigeons in com-

petitive sport, almost stopped PigeonBlog before it got started.30 In the

early stages of her project, da Costa contacted the American Racing Pi-

geon Union in an effort to meet pigeon fanciers to see if they and their

pigeons would participate. The first contact person was interested but

frankly afraid of animal rights people and tactics. He referred da Costa

to Bob Matsuyama, who worked with the project extensively and also

helped the art researchers meet pigeon fanciers in San Jose, relaying

earned trust. When PigeonBlog was finished, the American Racing Pi-

geon Union gave da Costa a formal “Certificate of Appreciation” for the

work she did for the birds and their people by showing a wider public the

accomplishments and capabilities of racing pigeons.

There are lots of fans of PigeonBlog, including green and environ-

mental activists, but one response in particular made da Costa feel that

the racing pigeons of California had flown well, opening up something

promising in the world across species. The Cornell University Labora-

tory of Ornithology asked da Costa to serve on its board for “Urban Bird

Gardens” as part of the lab’s citizen science initiative. Data collected by

ordinary people, from elderly walkers to schoolchildren, could and did

become part of databases bringing together university research and the

affections and questions of citizens. Consider a closely related Cornell-

linked citizen science initiative, Project PigeonWatch, which surveys re-

gional differences in color types in different populations of common fe-

ral pigeons. One PigeonWatch project is in Washington, DC, and enlists

city school groups to observe and record urban pigeons. Many things

happen in this work in Terrapolis. City kids, overwhelmingly from “mi-

nority” groups, learn to see despised birds as valuable and interesting

city residents, as worth notice. Neither the kids nor the pigeons are

urban “wildlife”; both sets of beings are civic subjects and objects in

intra-action. But I cannot and will not forget that these pigeons and

black kids in DC both carry the marks of U.S. racist iconography as un-

ruly, dirty, out of place, feral. The actual kids move from seeing pigeons

as “rats with wings” to sociable birds with lives and deaths. The kids

transmute from bird hecklers and sometimes physical abusers to astute

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observers and advocates of beings whom they had not known how to

see or respect. The schoolchildren became response-able. Perhaps, be-

cause pigeons have long histories of affective and cognitive relations

with people, the pigeons looked back at the kids too, and at least the

birds were not heckled. I know this account is a story, an invitation as

much as an accomplishment, but the space for recuperation across de-

spised cross-species categories of city dwellers deserves to be widened,

not shut down.31

Writing of another art project joining homing pigeons and their

people in collaboration in the face of the danger of the loss of the very

community of pigeon fanciers (colombophiles) that nurtures them both,

Vinciane Despret asked what the pigeon loft (pigeonnier) designed by

the artist Matali Crasset at Chaudry, France, in 2003 commemorates:

But without the lover of pigeons (pigeon fancier), without the knowl-

edge and know-how of men and birds, without selection, apprentice-

ship, without transmission of practices, what then would remain

would be pigeons, but not homing pigeons, not voyageurs. What is

commemorated, then, is not the animal alone, nor the practice alone,

but the activation of two “becomings-with” that are written explic-

itly into the origin of the project. Otherwise said, what is brought

into existence are the relations by which pigeons transform men into

talented pigeon fanciers and by which the fanciers transform the pi-

geons into reliable racing pigeons. This is how the work commemo-

rates. It tasks itself with crafting a memory in the sense of prolonging

the achievement into the present. This is a kind of “reprise.”32

To re-member, to com-memorate, is actively to reprise, revive, retake,

recuperate. Committed to the multispecies, sf, string figure worlding

of becoming-with, da Costa and Despret are companion species. They

remember; they entice and prolong into the fleshly present what would

disappear without the active reciprocity of partners. Homing or racing

pigeons and feral pigeons call both their emergent and traditional peo-

ples to response-ability, and vice versa. City dwellers and rural people of

different species and modes of living and dying make each other colom-

bophiles talentueux in company with voyageurs fiables.

Despret and da Costa are playing string figure games with Matali

Crasset, relaying knotted patterns and possibilities in Terrapolis. Cras-

set is an industrial designer, a profession that requires listening to and

collaborating with partners in ways fine artists need not engage, but

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which da Costa also practices in her work and play as artist researcher

and multispecies art activist. The pigeon loft Crasset proposed was com-

missioned by La Défense, the association of pigeon fanciers in Beauvois

en Cambresis, and by La Base de Loisirs de Caudry (the leisure park

of Caudry). The interior space of the capsule is functionally organized

like a tree, a kind of axis of the world, and the exterior shape echoes

old Egyptian designs for pigeon lofts. Historical, mythical, and material

worlds are in play here, in this home for birds commissioned by those

who breed, raise, fly, and become-with them.

Another pigeon loft in the shape of a tower imposes itself on my

memory; another proposal for multispecies recuperation for creatures of

empire is held out to those of whatever species who might grasp it. This

time we are in Melbourne in Australia, in Batman Park along the Yarra

River, part of the Wurundjeri people’s territory prior to European settle-

ment. This colonized area along the Yarra became a wasteland, sewage

dump, and site for cargo and rail transport, destroying the wetlands (An-

glo scientific term) and destroying country (Anglo-Aboriginal term for

multidimensional and storied place). Wetlands and country are as alike

and as different as cat’s cradle, jeux de ficelle, na’atl’o’, and matjka-wuma;

1.5. Capsule, designed by Matali Crasset, 2003, for the project of La Fondation

de France. Les nouveaux commanditaires. Médiation-Production: artconnexion.

Lille, France. © André Morin.

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for staying with the trouble, the names and patterns are necessary to

each other, but they are not isomorphic.33 They inhabit linked, split, and

tangled histories.

The small Batman Park was established in 1982 along a disused freight

train rail yard, and the pigeon loft was built in the 1990s to encourage

pigeons to roost away from city buildings and streets. The loft is a tower

structure built as part of the city’s management plan for feral pigeons.

These are not the beloved sporting pigeons of fanciers or colombophiles,

but the urban “rats of the sky” we met a few paragraphs ago in a Washing-

ton, DC, city parks program tied to the internationally eminent Cornell

University Laboratory of Ornithology. Melbourne’s pigeons came with

Europeans and thrived in the ecosystems and worlds that replaced the

Yarra River wetlands and dispossessed most of the Aboriginal traditional

owners of the land responsible for taking care of country. In 1985, the

Wurundjeri Tribe Land Compensation and Cultural Heritage Council was

established partly to develop awareness of Wurundjeri culture and his-

tory within contemporary Australia. I do not know if this council played

any role in the partial recuperation of the land of Batman Park; I do know

that sites along the Yarra River were places of significance to the Wurund-

jeri. In 1835, businessman and explorer John Batman signed a document

with a group of Wurundjeri elders for the purchase of land in the first and

only documented time that Europeans “negotiated their presence and oc-

cupation of Aboriginal lands directly with the traditional owners . . . For

600,000 acres of Melbourne, including most of the land now within the

suburban area, John Batman paid 40 pairs of blankets, 42 tomahawks,

130 knives, 62 pairs scissors, 40 looking glasses, 250 handkerchiefs,

18 shirts, 4 flannel jackets, 4 suits of clothes and 150 lb. of flour.”34 The

British governor of New South Wales repudiated this impudent treaty for

its trespass on the rights of the Crown. Somehow, this fraught history

must be inherited, must be re-membered, in that little park strip of re-

claimed urban land with its striking pigeon tower.

Batman Park’s pigeon loft is not art research for citizen science or

industrial design commissioned by the racing-pigeon community, but

a birth control—or, better, hatching control—technology crucial to

multispecies urban flourishing. Feral pigeon fecundity is itself a mate-

rial urban force, and also a potent signifier of the overfilling of the land

with settlers and immigrants and depriving the land of endemic wet-

land birds and Aboriginal peoples. Staying with the trouble, the task is

multispecies recuperation and somehow, in that suggestive Australian

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28 c h a p t e r o n e

idiom, “getting on together” with less denial and more experimental

justice. I want to see the pigeon loft as a small, practical enactment and

a reminder to further opening to the response-ability of staying with the

trouble. Response-ability is about both absence and presence, killing and

nurturing, living and dying—and remembering who lives and who dies

and how in the string figures of naturalcultural history. The loft has two

hundred nesting boxes for pigeons, inviting them to lay their eggs. Peo-

ple come from below and replace their eggs with artificial ones to brood.

People are allowed—encouraged—to feed pigeons near the loft but not

elsewhere. Pitchfork, a blog dedicated to writing about “projects to do

with permaculture, education, and growing food,” took note of the Bat-

man Park loft not just for its efforts to deal with pigeon-human conflict

in innovative ways, but also for a rich product of concentrated roosting

birds—compostable droppings. The blogger noted suggestively, “The

easiest way to get pigeon manure into your food system is to get the pi-

geons to fly it in for you.”35 In a park that was a sewage dump not so long

ago, this suggestion from the permaculture world has a definite charm.

This pigeon loft is not a prolife project; in my view, no serious animal-

human becoming-with can be a prolife project in the chilling American

1.6. Pigeon loft in Batman Park, Melbourne. Photograph by Nick Carson, 2008.

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sense of that term. And the municipal pigeon tower certainly cannot

undo unequal treaties, conquest, and wetlands destruction; but it is

nonetheless a possible thread in a pattern for ongoing, noninnocent,

interrogative, multispecies getting on together.

Reliable Voyageurs

Companion species infect each other all the time. Pigeons are world

travelers, and such beings are vectors and carry many more, for good

and for ill. Bodily ethical and political obligations are infectious, or they

should be. Cum panis, companion species, at table together. Why tell sto-

ries like my pigeon tales, when there are only more and more openings

and no bottom lines? Because there are quite definite response-abilities

that are strengthened in such stories.

The details matter. The details link actual beings to actual response-

abilities. As spies, racers, messengers, urban neighbors, iridescent sex-

ual exhibitionists, avian parents, gender assistants for people, scientific

subjects and objects, art-engineering environmental reporters, search-

and-rescue workers at sea, imperialist invaders, discriminators of paint-

ing styles, native species, pets, and more, around the earth pigeons and

their partners of many kinds, including people, make history. Each time

a story helps me remember what I thought I knew, or introduces me to

new knowledge, a muscle critical for caring about flourishing gets some

aerobic exercise. Such exercise enhances collective thinking and move-

ment in complexity. Each time I trace a tangle and add a few threads that

at first seemed whimsical but turned out to be essential to the fabric,

I get a bit straighter that staying with the trouble of complex world-

ing is the name of the game of living and dying well together on terra,

in Terrapolis. We are all responsible to and for shaping conditions for

multispecies flourishing in the face of terrible histories, and sometimes

joyful histories too, but we are not all response-able in the same ways.

The differences matter—in ecologies, economies, species, lives.

If only we could all be so lucky as to have a savvy artist design our

lofts, our homes, our messaging packs! If only we all had the map sense

to navigate in the troubled times and places!

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C H A P T E R 2

Tentacular Thinking Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene

We are all lichens.

—Scott Gilbert, “We Are All Lichens Now”

Think we must. We must think.

—Stengers and Despret, Women Who Make a Fuss

What happens when human exceptionalism and bounded individualism,

those old saws of Western philosophy and political economics, become

unthinkable in the best sciences, whether natural or social? Seriously

unthinkable: not available to think with. Biological sciences have been

especially potent in fermenting notions about all the mortal inhabi-

tants of the earth since the imperializing eighteenth century. Homo

sapiens—the Human as species, the Anthropos as the human species,

Modern Man—was a chief product of these knowledge practices. What

happens when the best biologies of the twenty-first century cannot do

their job with bounded individuals plus contexts, when organisms plus

environments, or genes plus whatever they need, no longer sustain the

overflowing richness of biological knowledges, if they ever did? What

happens when organisms plus environments can hardly be remembered

for the same reasons that even Western-indebted people can no longer

figure themselves as individuals and societies of individuals in human-

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only histories? Surely such a transformative time on earth must not be

named the Anthropocene!

In this chapter, with all the unfaithful offspring of the sky gods, with

my littermates who find a rich wallow in multispecies muddles, I want

to make a critical and joyful fuss about these matters. I want to stay

with the trouble, and the only way I know to do that is in generative joy,

terror, and collective thinking.

My first demon familiar in this task will be a spider, Pimoa cthulhu,

who lives under stumps in the redwood forests of Sonoma and Men-

docino Counties, near where I live in North Central California.1 Nobody

lives everywhere; everybody lives somewhere. Nothing is connected to

everything; everything is connected to something.2 This spider is in

place, has a place, and yet is named for intriguing travels elsewhere. This

spider will help me with returns, and with roots and routes.3 The eight-

legged tentacular arachnid that I appeal to gets her generic name from

the language of the Goshute people of Utah and her specific name from

denizens of the depths, from the abyssal and elemental entities, called

chthonic.4 The chthonic powers of Terra infuse its tissues everywhere,

despite the civilizing efforts of the agents of sky gods to astralize them

and set up chief Singletons and their tame committees of multiples or

subgods, the One and the Many. Making a small change in the biolo-

gist’s taxonomic spelling, from cthulhu to chthulu, with renamed Pimoa

chthulu I propose a name for an elsewhere and elsewhen that was, still is,

and might yet be: the Chthulucene. I remember that tentacle comes from

the Latin tentaculum, meaning “feeler,” and tentare, meaning “to feel”

and “to try”; and I know that my leggy spider has many-armed allies.

Myriad tentacles will be needed to tell the story of the Chthulucene.5

The tentacular ones tangle me in sf. Their many appendages make

string figures; they entwine me in the poiesis—the making—of specula-

tive fabulation, science fiction, science fact, speculative feminism, soin de

ficelle, so far. The tentacular ones make attachments and detachments;

they ake cuts and knots; they make a difference; they weave paths and

consequences but not determinisms; they are both open and knotted

in some ways and not others.6 sf is storytelling and fact telling; it is

the patterning of possible worlds and possible times, material-semiotic

worlds, gone, here, and yet to come. I work with string figures as a theo-

retical trope, a way to think-with a host of companions in sympoietic

threading, felting, tangling, tracking, and sorting. I work with and in

sf as material-semiotic composting, as theory in the mud, as muddle.7

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The tentacular are not disembodied figures; they are cnidarians, spiders,

fingery beings like humans and raccoons, squid, jellyfish, neural extrava-

ganzas, fibrous entities, flagellated beings, myofibril braids, matted and

felted microbial and fungal tangles, probing creepers, swelling roots,

reaching and climbing tendrilled ones. The tentacular are also nets and

networks, it critters, in and out of clouds. Tentacularity is about life

lived along lines—and such a wealth of lines—not at points, not in

spheres. “The inhabitants of the world, creatures of all kinds, human

and non-human, are wayfarers”; generations are like “a series of inter-

laced trails.”8 String figures all.

All the tentacular stringy ones have made me unhappy with post-

humanism, even as I am nourished by much generative work done un-

der that sign. My partner Rusten Hogness suggested compost instead

of posthuman(ism), as well as humusities instead of humanities, and

I jumped into that wormy pile.9 Human as humus has potential, if we

could chop and shred human as Homo, the detumescing project of a

self-making and planet-destroying ceo. Imagine a conference not on

the Future of the Humanities in the Capitalist Restructuring University,

but instead on the Power of the Humusities for a Habitable Multispecies

Muddle! Ecosexual artists Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle made a

bumper sticker for me, for us, for sf: “Composting is so hot!”10

2.1. Pimoa cthulhu. Photograph by Gustavo Hormiga.

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The earth of the ongoing Chthulucene is sympoietic, not autopoietic.

Mortal Worlds (Terra, Earth, Gaia, Chthulu, the myriad names and pow-

ers that are not Greek, Latin, or Indo-European at all)11 do not make

themselves, no matter how complex and multileveled the systems, no

matter how much order out of disorder might be produced in generative

autopoietic system breakdowns and relaunchings at higher levels of or-

der. Autopoietic systems are hugely interesting—witness the history of

cybernetics and information sciences; but they are not good models for

living and dying worlds and their critters. Autopoietic systems are not

closed, spherical, deterministic, or teleological; but they are not quite

good enough models for the mortal sf world. Poiesis is symchthonic,

sympoietic, always partnered all the way down, with no starting and

subsequently interacting “units.”12 The Chthulucene does not close in

on itself; it does not round off; its contact zones are ubiquitous and

continuously spin out loopy tendrils. Spider is a much better figure for

sympoiesis than any inadequately leggy vertebrate of whatever pan-

theon. Tentacularity is symchthonic, wound with abyssal and dreadful

graspings, frayings, and weavings, passing relays again and again, in the

generative recursions that make up living and dying.

After I used the term sympoiesis in a grasp for something other than

the lures of autopoiesis, Katie King told me about M. Beth Dempster’s

Master of Environmental Studies thesis written in 1998, in which she

suggested the term sympoiesis for “collectively-producing systems that

do not have self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries. Information

and control are distributed among components. The systems are evo-

lutionary and have the potential for surprising change.” By contrast,

autopoietic systems are “self-producing” autonomous units “with self

defined spatial or temporal boundaries that tend to be centrally con-

trolled, homeostatic, and predictable.”13 Dempster argued that many

systems are mistaken for autopoietic that are really sympoietic. I think

this point is important for thinking about rehabilitation (making liva-

ble again) and sustainability amid the porous tissues and open edges

of damaged but still ongoing living worlds, like the planet earth and its

denizens in current times being called the Anthropocene. If it is true

that neither biology nor philosophy any longer supports the notion

of independent organisms in environments, that is, interacting units

plus contexts/rules, then sympoiesis is the name of the game in spades.

Bounded (or neoliberal) individualism amended by autopoiesis is not

good enough figurally or scientifically; it misleads us down deadly paths.

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Barad’s agential realism and intra-action become common sense, and

perhaps a lifeline for Terran wayfarers.

sf, string figuring, is sympoietic. Thinking-with my work on cat’s cra-

dle, as well as with the work of another of her companions in thinking,

Félix Guattari, Isabelle Stengers relayed back to me how players pass

back and forth to each other the patterns-at-stake, sometimes conserv-

ing, sometimes proposing and inventing.

More precisely, com-menting, if it means thinking-with, that is

becoming-with, is in itself a way of relaying . . . But knowing that what

you take has been held out entails a particular thinking “between.”

It does not demand fidelity, still less fealty, rather a particular kind

of loyalty, the answer to the trust of the held out hand. Even if this

trust is not in “you” but in “creative uncertainty,” even if the conse-

quences and meaning of what has been done, thought or written, do

not belong to you anymore than they belonged to the one you take

the relay from, one way or another the relay is now in your hands,

together with the demand that you do not proceed with “mechanical

confidence.” [In cat’s cradling, at least] two pairs of hands are needed,

and in each successive step, one is “passive,” offering the result of its

previous operation, a string entanglement, for the other to operate,

only to become active again at the next step, when the other presents

the new entanglement. But it can also be said that each time the “pas-

sive” pair is the one that holds, and is held by the entanglement, only

to “let it go” when the other one takes the relay.14

In passion and action, detachment and attachment, this is what I call

cultivating response-ability; that is also collective knowing and doing,

an ecology of practices. Whether we asked for it or not, the pattern is in

our hands. The answer to the trust of the held-out hand: think we must.

Marilyn Strathern is an ethnographer of thinking practices. She de-

fines anthropology as studying relations with relations—a hugely con-

sequential, mind- and body-altering sort of commitment.15 Nourished

by her lifelong work in highland Papua New Guinea (Mt. Hagen), Strath-

ern writes about accepting the risk of relentless contingency, of putting

relations at risk with other relations, from unexpected worlds. Embody-

ing the practice of feminist speculative fabulation in the scholarly mode,

Strathern taught me—taught us—a simple but game-changing thing:

“It matters what ideas we use to think other ideas.”16 I compost my soul

in this hot pile. The worms are not human; their undulating bodies in-

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gest and reach, and their feces fertilize worlds. Their tentacles make

string figures.

It matters what thoughts think thoughts. It matters what knowl-

edges know knowledges. It matters what relations relate relations. It

matters what worlds world worlds. It matters what stories tell stories.

Paintings by Baila Goldenthal are eloquent testimony to this mattering.17

What is it to surrender the capacity to think? These times called the

Anthropocene are times of multispecies, including human, urgency: of

great mass death and extinction; of onrushing disasters, whose unpre-

dictable specificities are foolishly taken as unknowability itself; of refus-

ing to know and to cultivate the capacity of response-ability; of refusing

to be present in and to onrushing catastrophe in time; of unprecedented

looking away. Surely, to say “unprecedented” in view of the realities of

the last centuries is to say something almost unimaginable. How can we

think in times of urgencies without the self-indulgent and self-fulfilling

myths of apocalypse, when every fiber of our being is interlaced, even

complicit, in the webs of processes that must somehow be engaged and

repatterned? Recursively, whether we asked for it or not, the pattern

2.2. Cat’s Cradle / String Theory, Baila Goldenthal, 2008. Oil on canvas, 36 48 in.

Courtesy of Maurya Simon and Tamara Ambroson.

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is in our hands. The answer to the trust of the held-out hand: think

we must.

Instructed by Valerie Hartouni, I turn to Hannah Arendt’s analysis

of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann’s inability to think. In that

surrender of thinking lay the “banality of evil” of the particular sort

that could make the disaster of the Anthropocene, with its ramped-up

genocides and speciescides, come true.18 This outcome is still at stake;

think we must; we must think! In Hartouni’s reading, Arendt insisted

that thought was profoundly different from what we might call disci-

plinary knowledge or science rooted in evidence, or the sorting of truth

and belief or fact and opinion or good and bad. Thinking, in Arendt’s

sense, is not a process for evaluating information and argument, for

being right or wrong, for judging oneself or others to be in truth or error.

All of that is important, but not what Arendt had to say about the evil

of thoughtlessness that I want to bring into the question of the geohis-

torical conjuncture being called the Anthropocene.

Arendt witnessed in Eichmann not an incomprehensible monster, but

something much more terrifying—she saw commonplace thoughtless-

ness. That is, here was a human being unable to make present to himself

what was absent, what was not himself, what the world in its sheer not-

one-selfness is and what claims-to-be inhere in not-oneself. Here was

someone who could not be a wayfarer, could not entangle, could not

track the lines of living and dying, could not cultivate response-ability,

could not make present to itself what it is doing, could not live in con-

sequences or with consequence, could not compost. Function mattered,

duty mattered, but the world did not matter for Eichmann. The world

does not matter in ordinary thoughtlessness. The hollowed-out spaces

are all filled with assessing information, determining friends and ene-

mies, and doing busy jobs; negativity, the hollowing out of such positiv-

ity, is missed, an astonishing abandonment of thinking.19 This quality

was not an emotional lack, a lack of compassion, although surely that

was true of Eichmann, but a deeper surrender to what I would call imma-

teriality, inconsequentiality, or, in Arendt’s and also my idiom, thought-

lessness. Eichmann was astralized right out of the muddle of thinking

into the practice of business as usual no matter what. There was no way

the world could become for Eichmann and his heirs—us?—a “matter of

care.”20 The result was active participation in genocide.

The anthropologist, feminist, cultural theorist, storyteller, and con-

noisseur of the tissues of heterogeneous capitalism, globalism, travel-

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ing worlds, and local places Anna Tsing examines the “arts of living on

a damaged planet,”21 or, in the subtitle of her book, “the possibility of

life in Capitalist ruins.” She performs thinking of a kind that must be

cultivated in the all-too-ordinary urgencies of onrushing multispecies

extinctions, genocides, immiserations, and exterminations. I name these

things urgencies rather than emergencies because the latter word con-

notes something approaching apocalypse and its mythologies. Urgen-

cies have other temporalities, and these times are ours. These are the

times we must think; these are the times of urgencies that need stories.

Following matsutake mushrooms in their fulminating assemblages of

Japanese, Americans, Chinese, Koreans, Hmong, Lao, Mexicans, fungal

spores and mats, oak and pine trees, mycorrhizal symbioses, pickers,

buyers, shippers, restaurateurs, diners, businessmen, scientists, forest-

ers, dna sequencers and their changing species, and much more, Tsing

practices sympoietics in edgy times. Refusing either to look away or to

reduce the earth’s urgency to an abstract system of causative destruction,

such as a Human Species Act or undifferentiated Capitalism, Tsing ar-

gues that precarity—failure of the lying promises of Modern Progress—

characterizes the lives and deaths of all terran critters in these times.

She looks for the eruptions of unexpected liveliness and the contami-

nated and nondeterministic, unfinished, ongoing practices of living in

the ruins. She performs the force of stories; she shows in the flesh how

it matters which stories tell stories as a practice of caring and thinking.

“If a rush of troubled stories is the best way to tell contaminated diver-

sity, then it’s time to make that rush part of our knowledge practices . . .

Matsutake’s willingness to emerge in blasted landscapes allows us to

explore the ruins that have become our collective home. To follow mat-

sutake guides us to possibilities of coexistence within environmental

disturbance. This is not an excuse for further human damage. Still, mat-

sutake show one kind of collaborative survival.”

Driven by radical curiosity, Tsing does the ethnography of “salvage ac-

cumulation” and “patchy capitalism,” the kind that can no longer prom-

ise progress but can and does extend devastation and make precarity

the name of our systematicity. There is no simple ethical, political, or

theoretical point to take from Tsing’s work; there is instead the force

of engaging the world in the kind of thinking practices impossible for

Eichmann’s heirs. “Matsutake tell us about surviving collaboratively

in disturbance and contamination. We need this skill for living in ru-

ins.”22 This is not a longing for salvation or some other sort of optimistic

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politics; neither is it a cynical quietism in the face of the depth of the

trouble. Rather, Tsing proposes a commitment to living and dying with

response-ability in unexpected company. Such living and dying have the

best chance of cultivating conditions for ongoingness.

The ecological philosopher and multispecies ethnographer Thom van

Dooren also inhabits the layered complexities of living in times of ex-

tinction, extermination, and partial recuperation; he deepens our con-

sideration of what thinking means, of what not becoming thoughtless

exacts from all of us. In his extraordinary book Flight Ways, van Dooren

accompanies situated bird species living on the extended edge of extinc-

tion, asking what it means to hold open space for another.23 Such hold-

ing open is far from an innocent or obvious material or ethical practice;

even when successful, it exacts tolls of suffering as well as surviving

as individuals and as kinds. In his examination of the practices of the

North American whooping crane species survival plan, for example, van

Dooren details multiple kinds of hard multispecies captivities and labors,

forced life, surrogate reproductive labor, and substitute dying—none

of which should be forgotten, especially in successful projects. Holding

open space might—or might not—delay extinction in ways that make

possible composing or recomposing flourishing naturalcultural assem-

blages. Flight Ways shows how extinction is not a point, not a single

event, but more like an extended edge or a widened ledge. Extinction is

a protracted slow death that unravels great tissues of ways of going on

in the world for many species, including historically situated people.24

Van Dooren proposes that mourning is intrinsic to cultivating

response-ability. In his chapter on conservation efforts for Hawaiian

crows (‘Alalā for Hawaiians, Corvus hawaiiensis for Linneans), whose forest homes and foods as well as friends, chicks, and mates have largely

disappeared, van Dooren argues that it is not just human people who

mourn the loss of loved ones, of place, of lifeways; other beings mourn

as well. Corvids grieve loss. The point rests on biobehavioral studies as

well as intimate natural history; neither the capacity nor the practice of

mourning is a human specialty. Outside the dubious privileges of human

exceptionalism, thinking people must learn to grieve-with.

Mourning is about dwelling with a loss and so coming to appreciate

what it means, how the world has changed, and how we must ourselves

change and renew our relationships if we are to move forward from

here. In this context, genuine mourning should open us into an aware-

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ness of our dependence on and relationships with those countless oth-

ers being driven over the edge of extinction . . . The reality, however, is

that there is no avoiding the necessity of the difficult cultural work of

reflection and mourning. This work is not opposed to practical action,

rather it is the foundation of any sustainable and informed response.

Grief is a path to understanding entangled shared living and dying;

human beings must grieve with, because we are in and of this fabric of

undoing. Without sustained remembrance, we cannot learn to live with

ghosts and so cannot think. Like the crows and with the crows, living

and dead “we are at stake in each other’s company.”25

At least one more sf thread is crucial to the practice of thinking, which

must be thinking-with: storytelling. It matters what thoughts think

thoughts; it matters what stories tell stories. “Urban Penguins: Stories

for Lost Places,” van Dooren’s chapter on Sydney Harbor’s Little Penguins

(Eudyptula minor), succeeds in crafting a nonanthropomorphic, nonan-

thropocentric sense of storied place. In their resolutely “philopatric”

(home loving) nesting and other life practices, these urban penguins—

real, particular birds—story place, this place, not just any place. Es-

tablishing the reality and vivid specificity of penguin-storied place is a

major material-semiotic accomplishment. Storying cannot any longer

be put into the box of human exceptionalism. Without deserting the

terrain of behavioral ecology and natural history, this writing achieves

powerful attunement to storying in penguin multimodal semiotics.26

Ursula Le Guin taught me the carrier bag theory of storytelling and

of naturalcultural history. Her theories, her stories, are capacious bags

for collecting, carrying, and telling the stuff of living. “A leaf a gourd a

shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder.

A recipient.”27 So much of earth history has been told in the thrall of the

fantasy of the first beautiful words and weapons, of the first beautiful

weapons as words and vice versa. Tool, weapon, word: that is the word

made flesh in the image of the sky god; that is the Anthropos. In a tragic

story with only one real actor, one real world-maker, the hero, this is

the Man-making tale of the hunter on a quest to kill and bring back the

terrible bounty. This is the cutting, sharp, combative tale of action that

defers the suffering of glutinous, earth-rotted passivity beyond bearing.

All others in the prick tale are props, ground, plot space, or prey. They

don’t matter; their job is to be in the way, to be overcome, to be the

road, the conduit, but not the traveler, not the begetter. The last thing

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the hero wants to know is that his beautiful words and weapons will be

worthless without a bag, a container, a net.

Nonetheless, no adventurer should leave home without a sack. How

did a sling, a pot, a bottle suddenly get in the story? How do such lowly

things keep the story going? Or maybe even worse for the hero, how

do those concave, hollowed-out things, those holes in Being, from the

get-go generate richer, quirkier, fuller, unfitting, ongoing stories, stories

with room for the hunter but which weren’t and aren’t about him, the

self-making human, the human-making machine of history? The slight

curve of the shell that holds just a little water, just a few seeds to give

away and to receive, suggests stories of becoming-with, of reciprocal

induction, of companion species whose job in living and dying is not

to end the storying, the worlding. With a shell and a net, becoming hu-

man, becoming humus, becoming terran, has another shape—that is,

the side-winding, snaky shape of becoming-with. To think-with is to

stay with the naturalcultural multispecies trouble on earth. There are no

guarantees, no arrow of time, no Law of History or Science or Nature in

such struggles. There is only the relentlessly contingent sf worlding of

living and dying, of becoming-with and unbecoming-with, of sympoie-

sis, and so, just possibly, of multispecies flourishing on earth.

Like Le Guin, Bruno Latour passionately understands the need to

change the story, to learn somehow to narrate—to think—outside the

prick tale of Humans in History, when the knowledge of how to murder

each other—and along with each other, uncountable multitudes of the

living earth—is not scarce. Think we must; we must think. That means,

simply, we must change the story; the story must change. Le Guin writes,

“Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, sub-

ject, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.”28 In this

terrible time called the Anthropocene, Latour argues that the funda-

mentals of geopolitics have been blasted open. None of the parties in

crisis can call on Providence, History, Science, Progress, or any other

god trick outside the common fray to resolve the troubles.29 A common

livable world must be composed, bit by bit, or not at all. What used to

be called nature has erupted into ordinary human affairs, and vice versa,

in such a way and with such permanence as to change fundamentally

means and prospects for going on, including going on at all. Searching

for compositionist practices capable of building effective new collectives,

Latour argues that we must learn to tell “Gaïa stories.” If that word is

too hard, then we can call our narrations “geostories,” in which “all the

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former props and passive agents have become active without, for that,

being part of a giant plot written by some overseeing entity.”30 Those

who tell Gaia stories or geostories are the “Earthbound,” those who es-

chew the dubious pleasures of transcendent plots of modernity and the

purifying division of society and nature. Latour argues that we face a

stark divide: “Some are readying themselves to live as Earthbound in the

Anthropocene; others decided to remain as Humans in the Holocene.”31

In much of his writing, Latour develops the language and imagery of

trials of strength; and in thinking about the Anthropocene and the Earth-

bound, he extends that metaphor to develop the difference between a

police action, where peace is restored by an already existing order, and

war or politics, where real enemies must be overcome to establish what

will be. Latour is determined to avoid the idols of a ready-to-hand fix,

such as Laws of History, Modernity, the State, God, Progress, Reason,

Decadence, Nature, Technology, or Science, as well as the debilitating

disrespect for difference and shared finitude inherent in those who al-

ready know the answers toward those who only need to learn them—by

force, faith, or self-certain pedagogy. Those who “believe” they have the

answers to the present urgencies are terribly dangerous. Those who re-

fuse to be for some ways of living and dying and not others are equally

dangerous. Matters of fact, matters of concern,32 and matters of care are

knotted in string figures, in sf.

Latour embraces sciences, not Science. In geopolitics, “the important

point here is to realize that the facts of the matter cannot be delegated to

a higher unified authority that would have done the choice in our stead.

Controversies—no matter how spurious they might be—are no excuse

to delay the decision about which side represents our world better.”33 La-

tour aligns himself with the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on

Climate Change (ipcc); he does not believe its assessments and reports;

he decides what is strong and trustworthy and what is not. He casts his

lot with some worlds and worldings and not others. One need not hear

Latour’s “decision” discourse with an individualist ear; he is a composi-

tionist intent on understanding how a common world, how collectives,

are built-with each other, where all the builders are not human beings.

This is neither relativism nor rationalism; it is sf, which Latour would

call both sciences and scientifiction and I would call both sciences and

speculative fabulation—all of which are political sciences, in our aligned

approaches.

“Alignment” is a rich metaphor for wayfarers, for the Earthbound,

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and does not as easily as “decision” carry the tones of modernist liberal

choice discourse, at least in the United States. Further, the refusal of the

modernist category of belief is also crucial to my effort to persuade us

to take up the Chthulucene and its tentacular tasks.34 Like Stengers and

like myself, Latour is a thoroughgoing materialist committed to an ecol-

ogy of practices, to the mundane articulating of assemblages through

situated work and play in the muddle of messy living and dying. Actual

players, articulating with varied allies of all ontological sorts (molecules,

colleagues, and much more), must compose and sustain what is and will

be. Alignment in tentacular worlding must be a seriously tangled affair!

Intent on the crucial refusal of self-certainty and preexisting god

tricks, which I passionately share, Latour turns to a resource—relentless

reliance on the material-semiotic trope of trials of strength—that, I

think, makes it unnecessarily hard to tell his and our needed new story.

He defines war as the absence of a referee so that trials of strength must

determine the legitimate authority. Humans in History and the Earth-

bound in the Anthropocene are engaged in trials of strength where there

is no Referee who/which can establish what is/was/will be. History ver-

sus Gaia stories are at stake. Those trials—the war of the Earthbound

with the Humans—would not be conducted with rockets and bombs;

they would be conducted with every other imaginable resource and with

no god trick from above to decide life and death, truth and error. But

still, we are in the story of the hero and the first beautiful words and

weapons, not in the story of the carrier bag. Anything not decided in the

presence of the Authority is war; Science (singular and capitalized) is the

Authority; the Authority conducts police actions. In contrast, sciences

(always rooted in practices) are war. Therefore, in Latour’s passionate

speculative fabulation, such war is our only hope for real politics. The

past is as much the contested zone as the present or future.

Latour’s thinking and stories need a specific kind of enemies. He

draws on Carl Schmitt’s “political theology,” which is a theory of peace

through war, with the enemy as hostis, with all its tones of host, hos-

tage, guest, and worthy enemy. Only with such an enemy, Schmitt and

Latour hold, is there respect and a chance to be less, not more, deadly

in conflict. Those who operate within the categories of Authority and of

belief are notoriously prone to exterminationist and genocidal combat

(it’s hard to deny that!). They are lost without a pre-established Ref-

eree. The hostis demands much better. But all the action remains within

the narrative vise of trials of strength, of mortal combat, within which

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the knowledge of how to murder each other remains well entrenched.

Latour makes clear that he does not want this story, but he does not

propose another. The only real possibility for peace lies in the tale of

the respected enemy, the hostis, and trials of strength. “But when you

are at war, it is only through the throes of the encounters that the au-

thority you have or don’t have will be decided depending whether you win

or lose.”35

Schmitt’s enemies do not allow the story to change in its marrow; the

Earthbound need a more tentacular, less binary life story. Latour’s Gaia

stories deserve better companions in storytelling than Schmitt. The

question of whom to think-with is immensely material. I do not think

Latour’s dilemma can be resolved in the terms of the Anthropocene. His

Earthbound will have to trek into the Chthulucene to entangle with the

ongoing, snaky, unheroic, tentacular, dreadful ones, the ones which/who

craft material-semiotic netbags of little use in trials of strength but of

great use in bringing home and sharing the means of living and dying

well, perhaps even the means of ecological recuperation for human and

more-than-human critters alike.

Shaping her thinking about the times called Anthropocene and

“multi-faced Gaïa” (Stengers’s term) in companionable friction with

Latour, Isabelle Stengers does not ask that we recompose ourselves to

become able, perhaps, to “face Gaïa.” But like Latour and even more like

Le Guin, one of her most generative sf writers, Stengers is adamant

about changing the story. Focusing on intrusion rather than composi-

tion, Stengers calls Gaia a fearful and devastating power that intrudes on

our categories of thought, that intrudes on thinking itself.36 Earth/Gaia

is maker and destroyer, not resource to be exploited or ward to be pro-

tected or nursing mother promising nourishment. Gaia is not a person

but complex systemic phenomena that compose a living planet. Gaia’s

intrusion into our affairs is a radically materialist event that collects up

multitudes. This intrusion threatens not life on earth itself—microbes

will adapt, to put it mildly—but threatens the livability of earth for vast

kinds, species, assemblages, and individuals in an “event” already under

way called the Sixth Great Extinction.37

Stengers, like Latour, evokes the name of Gaia in the way James

Lovelock and Lynn Margulis did, to name complex nonlinear couplings

between processes that compose and sustain entwined but nonadditive

subsystems as a partially cohering systemic whole.38 In this hypothesis,

Gaia is autopoietic—self-forming, boundary maintaining, contingent,

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dynamic, and stable under some conditions but not others. Gaia is not

reducible to the sum of its parts, but achieves finite systemic coherence

in the face of perturbations within parameters that are themselves re-

sponsive to dynamic systemic processes. Gaia does not and could not

care about human or other biological beings’ intentions or desires or

needs, but Gaia puts into question our very existence, we who have pro-

voked its brutal mutation that threatens both human and nonhuman

livable presents and futures. Gaia is not about a list of questions waiting

for rational policies;39 Gaia is an intrusive event that undoes thinking as

usual. “She is what specifically questions the tales and refrains of mod-

ern history. There is only one real mystery at stake, here: it is the answer

we, meaning those who belong to this history, may be able to create as

we face the consequences of what we have provoked.”40

Anthropocene

So, what have we provoked? Writing in the midst of California’s historic

multiyear drought and the explosive fire season of 2015, I need the pho-

tograph of a fire set deliberately in June 2009 by Sustainable Resource

Alberta near the Saskatchewan River Crossing on the Icefields Parkway

in order to stem the spread of mountain pine beetles, to create a fire

barrier to future fires, and to enhance biodiversity. The hope is that this

fire acts as an ally for resurgence. The devastating spread of the pine

beetle across the North American West is a major chapter of climate

change in the Anthropocene. So too are the predicted megadroughts and

the extreme and extended fire seasons. Fire in the North American West

has a complicated multispecies history; fire is an essential element for

ongoing, as well as an agent of double death, the killing of ongoingness.

The material semiotics of fire in our times are at stake.

Thus it is past time to turn directly to the time-space-global thing

called Anthropocene.41 The term seems to have been coined in the early

1980s by University of Michigan ecologist Eugene Stoermer (d. 2012),

an expert in freshwater diatoms. He introduced the term to refer to

growing evidence for the transformative effects of human activities on

the earth. The name Anthropocene made a dramatic star appearance

in globalizing discourses in 2000 when the Dutch Nobel Prize–winning

atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen joined Stoermer to propose that hu-

man activities had been of such a kind and magnitude as to merit the

use of a new geological term for a new epoch, superseding the Holocene,

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which dated from the end of the last ice age, or the end of the Pleisto-

cene, about twelve thousand years ago. Anthropogenic changes signaled

by the mid-eighteenth-century steam engine and the planet-changing

exploding use of coal were evident in the airs, waters, and rocks.42 Evi-

dence was mounting that the acidification and warming of the oceans

are rapidly decomposing coral reef ecosystems, resulting in huge ghostly

white skeletons of bleached and dead or dying coral. That a symbiotic

system—coral, with its watery world-making associations of cnidarians

and zooanthellae with many other critters too—indicated such a global

transformation will come back into our story.

But for now, notice that the Anthropocene obtained purchase in pop-

ular and scientific discourse in the context of ubiquitous urgent efforts

to find ways of talking about, theorizing, modeling, and managing a

Big Thing called Globalization. Climate-change modeling is a powerful

positive feedback loop provoking change-of-state in systems of political

and ecological discourses.43 That Paul Crutzen was both a Nobel laureate

and an atmospheric chemist mattered. By 2008, many scientists around

the world had adopted the not-yet-official but increasingly indispens-

able term;44 and myriad research projects, performances, installations,

and conferences in the arts, social sciences, and humanities found the

2.3. Icon for the Anthropocene: Flaming Forests. From Rocky Mountain House,

Alberta, Canada, June 2, 2009. Photograph by Cameron Strandberg.

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term mandatory in their naming and thinking, not least for facing both

accelerating extinctions across all biological taxa and also multispecies,

including human, immiseration across the expanse of Terra. Fossil-

burning human beings seem intent on making as many new fossils as

possible as fast as possible. They will be read in the strata of the rocks

on the land and under the waters by the geologists of the very near fu-

ture, if not already. Perhaps, instead of the fiery forest, the icon for the

Anthropocene should be Burning Man!45

The scale of burning ambitions of fossil-making man—of this An-

thropos whose hot projects for accelerating extinctions merits a name

for a geological epoch—is hard to comprehend. Leaving aside all the

other accelerating extractions of minerals, plant and animal flesh, hu-

man homelands, and so on, surely, we want to say, the pace of develop-

ment of renewable energy technologies and of political and technical

carbon pollution-abatement measures, in the face of palpable and costly

ecosystem collapses and spreading political disorders, will mitigate, if

not eliminate, the burden of planet-warming excess carbon from burn-

ing still more fossil fuels. Or, maybe the financial troubles of the global

coal and oil industries by 2015 would stop the madness. Not so. Even

casual acquaintance with the daily news erodes such hopes, but the trou-

ble is worse than what even a close reader of ipcc documents and the

press will find. In “The Third Carbon Age,” Michael Klare, a professor of

Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College, lays out strong

evidence against the idea that the old age of coal, replaced by the recent

age of oil, will be replaced by the age of renewables.46 He details the large

and growing global national and corporate investments in renewables;

clearly, there are big profit and power advantages to be had in this sector.

And at the same time, every imaginable, and many unimaginable, tech-

nologies and strategic measures are being pursued by all the big global

players to extract every last calorie of fossil carbon, at whatever depth

and in whatever formations of sand, mud, or rock, and with whatever

horrors of travel to distribution and use points, to burn before someone

else gets at that calorie and burns it first in the great prick story of the

first and the last beautiful words and weapons.47 In what he calls the Age

of Unconventional Oil and Gas, hydro-fracking is the tip of the (melting)

iceberg. Melting of the polar seas, terrible for polar bears and for coastal

peoples, is very good for big competitive military, exploration, drilling,

and tanker shipping across the northern passages. Who needs an ice-

breaker when you can count on melting ice?48

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A complex systems engineer named Brad Werner addressed a session

at the meetings of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco

in 2012. His point was quite simple: scientifically speaking, global capi-

talism “has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient and

barrier-free that ‘earth-human systems’ are becoming dangerously un-

stable in response.” Therefore, he argued, the only scientific thing to do

is revolt! Movements, not just individuals, are critical. What is required

is action and thinking that do not fit within the dominant capitalist cul-

ture; and, said Werner, this is a matter not of opinion, but of geophysical

dynamics. The reporter who covered this session summed up Werner’s

address: “He is saying that his research shows that our entire economic

paradigm is a threat to ecological stability.”49 Werner is not the first or

the last researcher and maker of matters of concern to argue this point,

but his clarity at a scientific meeting is bracing. Revolt! Think we must;

we must think. Actually think, not like Eichmann the Thoughtless. Of

course, the devil is in the details—how to revolt? How to matter and not

just want to matter?

Capitalocene

But at least one thing is crystal clear. No matter how much he might be

caught in the generic masculine universal and how much he only looks

up, the Anthropos did not do this fracking thing and he should not name

this double-death-loving epoch. The Anthropos is not Burning Man af-

ter all. But because the word is already well entrenched and seems less

controversial to many important players compared to the Capitalocene,

I know that we will continue to need the term Anthropocene. I will use it

too, sparingly; what and whom the Anthropocene collects in its refur-

bished netbag might prove potent for living in the ruins and even for

modest terran recuperation.

Still, if we could only have one word for these sf times, surely it must

be the Capitalocene.50 Species Man did not shape the conditions for the

Third Carbon Age or the Nuclear Age. The story of Species Man as the

agent of the Anthropocene is an almost laughable rerun of the great

phallic humanizing and modernizing Adventure, where man, made in

the image of a vanished god, takes on superpowers in his secular-sacred

ascent, only to end in tragic detumescence, once again. Autopoietic, self-

making man came down once again, this time in tragic system failure,

turning biodiverse ecosystems into flipped-out deserts of slimy mats

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and stinging jellyfish. Neither did technological determinism produce

the Third Carbon Age. Coal and the steam engine did not determine

the story, and besides the dates are all wrong, not because one has to go

back to the last ice age, but because one has to at least include the great

market and commodity reworldings of the long sixteenth and seven-

teenth centuries of the current era, even if we think (wrongly) that we

can remain Euro-centered in thinking about “globalizing” transforma-

tions shaping the Capitalocene.51 One must surely tell of the networks of

sugar, precious metals, plantations, indigenous genocides, and slavery,

with their labor innovations and relocations and recompositions of crit-

ters and things sweeping up both human and nonhuman workers of all

kinds. The infectious industrial revolution of England mattered hugely,

but it is only one player in planet-transforming, historically situated,

new enough, worlding relations. The relocation of peoples, plants, and

animals; the leveling of vast forests; and the violent mining of metals

preceded the steam engine; but that is not a warrant for wringing one’s

hands about the perfidy of the Anthropos, or of Species Man, or of Man

the Hunter.

2.4. Icon for the Capitalocene: Sea Ice Clearing from the Northwest Passage,

Data 2012. NASA Visible Earth image by Jesse Allen, 2015, using data from

the Land Atmosphere Near Real-Time Capability for EOS (LANCE). National Snow

and Ice Data Center.

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The systemic stories of the linked metabolisms, articulations, or

coproductions (pick your metaphor) of economies and ecologies, of

histories and human and nonhuman critters, must be relentlessly op-

portunistic and contingent. They must also be relentlessly relational,

sympoietic, and consequential.52 They are terran, not cosmic or blissed

or cursed into outer space. The Capitalocene is terran; it does not have

to be the last biodiverse geological epoch that includes our species too.

There are so many good stories yet to tell, so many netbags yet to string,

and not just by human beings.

As a provocation, let me summarize my objections to the Anthropo-

cene as a tool, story, or epoch to think with: (1) The myth system asso-

ciated with the Anthropos is a setup, and the stories end badly. More to

the point, they end in double death; they are not about ongoingness. It

is hard to tell a good story with such a bad actor. Bad actors need a story,

but not the whole story. (2) Species Man does not make history. (3) Man

plus Tool does not make history. That is the story of History human

exceptionalists tell. (4) That History must give way to geostories, to Gaia

stories, to symchthonic stories; terrans do webbed, braided, and tentac-

ular living and dying in sympoietic multispecies string figures; they do

not do History. (5) The human social apparatus of the Anthropocene

tends to be top-heavy and bureaucracy prone. Revolt needs other forms

of action and other stories for solace, inspiration, and effectiveness. (6)

Despite its reliance on agile computer modeling and autopoietic systems

theories, the Anthropocene relies too much on what should be an “un-

thinkable” theory of relations, namely the old one of bounded utilitarian

individualism—preexisting units in competition relations that take up

all the air in the atmosphere (except, apparently, carbon dioxide). (7)

The sciences of the Anthropocene are too much contained within re-

strictive systems theories and within evolutionary theories called the

Modern Synthesis, which for all their extraordinary importance have

proven unable to think well about sympoiesis, symbiosis, symbiogene-

sis, development, webbed ecologies, and microbes. That’s a lot of trouble

for adequate evolutionary theory. (8) Anthropocene is a term most easily

meaningful and usable by intellectuals in wealthy classes and regions; it

is not an idiomatic term for climate, weather, land, care of country, or

much else in great swathes of the world, especially but not only among

indigenous peoples.

I am aligned with feminist environmentalist Eileen Crist when she

writes against the managerial, technocratic, market-and-profit besotted,

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modernizing, and human-exceptionalist business-as-usual commitments

of so much Anthropocene discourse. This discourse is not simply wrong-

headed and wrong-hearted in itself; it also saps our capacity for imagin-

ing and caring for other worlds, both those that exist precariously now

(including those called wilderness, for all the contaminated history of

that term in racist settler colonialism) and those we need to bring into

being in alliance with other critters, for still possible recuperating pasts,

presents, and futures. “Scarcity’s deepening persistence, and the suffer-

ing it is auguring for all life, is an artifact of human exceptionalism at

every level.” Instead, a humanity with more earthly integrity “invites the

priority of our pulling back and scaling down, of welcoming limitations

of our numbers, economies, and habitats for the sake of a higher, more

inclusive freedom and quality of life.”53

If Humans live in History and the Earthbound take up their task

within the Anthropocene, too many Posthumans (and posthumanists,

another gathering altogether) seem to have emigrated to the Anthro-

pocene for my taste. Perhaps my human and nonhuman people are the

dreadful Chthonic ones who snake within the tissues of Terrapolis.

Note that insofar as the Capitalocene is told in the idiom of funda-

mentalist Marxism, with all its trappings of Modernity, Progress, and

History, that term is subject to the same or fiercer criticisms. The stories

of both the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene teeter constantly on the

brink of becoming much Too Big. Marx did better than that, as did Dar-

win. We can inherit their bravery and capacity to tell big-enough stories

without determinism, teleology, and plan.54

Historically situated relational worldings make a mockery both of the

binary division of nature and society and of our enslavement to Prog-

ress and its evil twin, Modernization. The Capitalocene was relation-

ally made, and not by a secular godlike anthropos, a law of history, the

machine itself, or a demon called Modernity. The Capitalocene must

be relationally unmade in order to compose in material-semiotic sf pat-

terns and stories something more livable, something Ursula K. Le Guin

could be proud of. Shocked anew by our—billions of earth habitants’,

including your and my—ongoing daily assent in practice to this thing

called capitalism, Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers note that de-

nunciation has been singularly ineffective, or capitalism would have long

ago vanished from the earth. A dark bewitched commitment to the lure

of Progress (and its polar opposite) lashes us to endless infernal alter-

natives, as if we had no other ways to reworld, reimagine, relive, and

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reconnect with each other, in multispecies well-being. This explication

does not excuse us from doing many important things better; quite the

opposite. Pignarre and Stengers affirm on-the-ground collectives capa-

ble of inventing new practices of imagination, resistance, revolt, repair,

and mourning, and of living and dying well. They remind us that the

established disorder is not necessary; another world is not only urgently

needed, it is possible, but not if we are ensorcelled in despair, cynicism,

or optimism, and the belief/disbelief discourse of Progress.55 Many

Marxist critical and cultural theorists, at their best, would agree.56 So

would the tentacular ones.57

Chthulucene

Reaching back to generative complex systems approaches by Lovelock

and Margulis, Gaia figures the Anthropocene for many contemporary

Western thinkers. But an unfurling Gaia is better situated in the Chthu-

lucene, an ongoing temporality that resists figuration and dating and

demands myriad names. Arising from Chaos,58 Gaia was and is a power-

2.5. Octopi Wall Street: Symchthonic revolt. Art by Marley Jarvis, Laurel Hiebert,

Kira Treibergs, 2011. Oregon Institute of Marine Biology.

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ful intrusive force, in no one’s pocket, no one’s hope for salvation, capa-

ble of provoking the late twentieth century’s best autopoietic complex

systems thinking that led to recognizing the devastation caused by an-

thropogenic processes of the last few centuries, a necessary counter to

the Euclidean figures and stories of Man.59 Brazilian anthropologists and

philosophers Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Déborah Danowski exor-

cise lingering notions that Gaia is confined to the ancient Greeks and

subsequent Eurocultures in their refiguring the urgencies of our times

in the post-Eurocentric conference “The Thousand Names of Gaia.”60

Names, not faces, not morphs of the same, something else, a thousand

somethings else, still telling of linked ongoing generative and destruc-

tive worlding and reworlding in this age of the earth. We need another

figure, a thousand names of something else, to erupt out of the Anthro-

pocene into another, big-enough story. Bitten in a California redwood

forest by spidery Pimoa chthulhu, I want to propose snaky Medusa and

the many unfinished worldings of her antecedents, affiliates, and de-

scendants. Perhaps Medusa, the only mortal Gorgon, can bring us into

the holobiomes of Terrapolis and heighten our chances for dashing the

twenty-first-century ships of the Heroes on a living coral reef instead

of allowing them to suck the last drop of fossil flesh out of dead rock.

The terra-cotta figure of Potnia Theron, the Mistress of the Animals,

depicts a winged goddess wearing a split skirt and touching a bird with

each hand.61 She is a vivid reminder of the breadth, width, and temporal

reach into pasts and futures of chthonic powers in Mediterranean and

Near Eastern worlds and beyond.62 Potnia Theron is rooted in Minoan

and then Mycenean cultures and infuses Greek stories of the Gorgons

(especially the only mortal Gorgon, Medusa) and of Artemis. A kind of

far-traveling Ur-Medusa, the Lady of the Beasts is a potent link between

Crete and India. The winged figure is also called Potnia Melissa, Mistress

of the Bees, draped with all their buzzing-stinging-honeyed gifts. Note

the acoustic, tactile, and gustatory senses elicited by the Mistress and

her sympoietic, more-than-human flesh. The snakes and bees are more

like stinging tentacular feelers than like binocular eyes, although these

critters see too, in compound-eyed insectile and many-armed optics.

In many incarnations around the world, the winged bee goddesses

are very old, and they are much needed now.63 Potnia Theron/Melissa’s

snaky locks and Gorgon face tangle her with a diverse kinship of chthonic

earthly forces that travel richly in space and time. The Greek word Gorgon

translates as dreadful, but perhaps that is an astralized, patriarchal hear-

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ing of much more awe-ful stories and enactments of generation, destruc-

tion, and tenacious, ongoing terran finitude. Potnia Theron/Melissa/

Medusa give faciality a profound makeover, and that is a blow to mod-

ern humanist (including technohumanist) figurations of the forward-

looking, sky-gazing Anthropos. Recall that the Greek chthonios means

“of, in, or under the earth and the seas”—a rich terran muddle for sf,

science fact, science fiction, speculative feminism, and speculative fab-

ulation. The chthonic ones are precisely not sky gods, not a foundation

for the Olympiad, not friends to the Anthropocene or Capitalocene,

and definitely not finished. The Earthbound can take heart—as well

as action.

The Gorgons are powerful winged chthonic entities without a proper

genealogy; their reach is lateral and tentacular; they have no settled line-

age and no reliable kind (genre, gender), although they are figured and

2.6. Icon for the Chthulucene. Potnia Theron with a Gorgon Face. Type of Potnia

Theron, Kameiros, Rhodes, circa 600 BCE, terracotta, 13 in. diameter, British

Museum, excavated by Auguste Salzmann and Sir Alfred Bilotti; purchased 1860.

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storied as female. In old versions, the Gorgons twine with the Erinyes

(Furies), chthonic underworld powers who avenge crimes against the

natural order. In the winged domains, the bird-bodied Harpies carry out

these vital functions.64 Now, look again at the birds of Potnia Theron and

ask what they do. Are the Harpies their cousins? Around 700 bce Hesiod

imagined the Gorgons as sea demons and gave them sea deities for par-

ents. I read Hesiod’s Theogony as laboring to stabilize a very bumptious

queer family. The Gorgons erupt more than emerge; they are intrusive

in a sense akin to what Stengers understands by Gaia.

The Gorgons turned men who looked into their living, venomous,

snake-encrusted faces into stone. I wonder what might have happened if

those men had known how to politely greet the dreadful chthonic ones.

I wonder if such manners can still be learned, if there is time to learn

now, or if the stratigraphy of the rocks will only register the ends and

end of a stony Anthropos.65

Because the deities of the Olympiad identified her as a particularly

dangerous enemy to the sky gods’ succession and authority, mortal

Medusa is especially interesting for my efforts to propose the Chthu-

lucene as one of the big-enough stories in the netbag for staying with

the trouble of our ongoing epoch. I resignify and twist the stories, but

no more than the Greeks themselves constantly did.66 The hero Perseus

was dispatched to kill Medusa; and with the help of Athena, head-born

favorite daughter of Zeus, he cut off the Gorgon’s head and gave it to his

accomplice, this virgin goddess of wisdom and war. Putting Medusa’s

severed head face-forward on her shield, the Aegis, Athena, as usual,

played traitor to the Earthbound; we expect no better from motherless

mind children. But great good came of this murder-for-hire, for from

Medusa’s dead body came the winged horse Pegasus. Feminists have a

special friendship with horses. Who says these stories do not still move

us materially?67 And from the blood dripping from Medusa’s severed

head came the rocky corals of the western seas, remembered today in

the taxonomic names of the Gorgonians, the coral-like sea fans and sea

whips, composed in symbioses of tentacular animal cnidarians and pho-

tosynthetic algal-like beings called zooanthellae.68

With the corals, we turn definitively away from heady facial repre-

sentations, no matter how snaky. Even Potnia Theron, Potnia Melissa,

and Medusa cannot alone spin out the needed tentacularities. In the

tasks of thinking, figuring, and storytelling, the spider of my first pages,

Pimoa chthulhu, allies with the decidedly nonvertebrate critters of the

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seas. Corals align with octopuses, squids, and cuttlefish. Octopuses are

called spiders of the seas, not only for their tentacularity, but also for

their predatory habits. The tentacular chthonic ones have to eat; they

are at table, cum panis, companion species of terra. They are good figures

for the luring, beckoning, gorgeous, finite, dangerous precarities of the

Chthulucene. This Chthulucene is neither sacred nor secular; this earthly

worlding is thoroughly terran, muddled, and mortal—and at stake now.

Mobile, many-armed predators, pulsating through and over the coral

reefs, octopuses are called spiders of the sea. And so Pimoa chthulhu and

Octopus cyanea meet in the webbed tales of the Chthulucene.69

All of these stories are a lure to proposing the Chthulucene as a needed

third story, a third netbag for collecting up what is crucial for ongoing,

for staying with the trouble.70 The chthonic ones are not confined to a

vanished past. They are a buzzing, stinging, sucking swarm now, and hu-

man beings are not in a separate compost pile. We are humus, not Homo,

not anthropos; we are compost, not posthuman. As a suffix, the word ka-

inos, “-cene,” signals new, recently made, fresh epochs of the thick pres-

ent. To renew the biodiverse powers of terra is the sympoietic work and

play of the Chthulucene. Specifically, unlike either the Anthropocene or

the Capitalocene, the Chthulucene is made up of ongoing multispecies

stories and practices of becoming-with in times that remain at stake, in

precarious times, in which the world is not finished and the sky has not

fallen—yet. We are at stake to each other. Unlike the dominant dramas

of Anthropocene and Capitalocene discourse, human beings are not the

only important actors in the Chthulucene, with all other beings able

simply to react. The order is reknitted: human beings are with and of the

earth, and the biotic and abiotic powers of this earth are the main story.

However, the doings of situated, actual human beings matter. It mat-

ters with which ways of living and dying we cast our lot rather than oth-

ers. It matters not just to human beings, but also to those many critters

across taxa which and whom we have subjected to exterminations, ex-

tinctions, genocides, and prospects of futurelessness. Like it or not, we

are in the string figure game of caring for and with precarious worldings

made terribly more precarious by fossil-burning man making new fossils

as rapidly as possible in orgies of the Anthropocene and Capitalocene.

Diverse human and nonhuman players are necessary in every fiber of

the tissues of the urgently needed Chthulucene story. The chief actors

are not restricted to the too-big players in the too-big stories of Capital-

ism and the Anthropos, both of which invite odd apocalyptic panics and

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56 c h a p t e r t w o

even odder disengaged denunciations rather than attentive practices of

thought, love, rage, and care.

Both the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene lend themselves too

readily to cynicism, defeatism, and self-certain and self-fulfilling predic-

tions, like the “game over, too late” discourse I hear all around me these

days, in both expert and popular discourses, in which both technotheo-

cratic geoengineering fixes and wallowing in despair seem to coinfect any

possible common imagination. Encountering the sheer not-us, more-

than-human worlding of the coral reefs, with their requirements for on-

going living and dying of their myriad critters, is also to encounter the

knowledge that at least 250 million human beings today depend directly

on the ongoing integrity of these holobiomes for their own ongoing liv-

ing and dying well. Diverse corals and diverse people and peoples are at

stake to and with each other. Flourishing will be cultivated as a multi-

species response-ability without the arrogance of the sky gods and their

minions, or else biodiverse terra will flip out into something very slimy,

like any overstressed complex adaptive system at the end of its abilities

to absorb insult after insult.

Corals helped bring the Earthbound into consciousness of the Anthro-

pocene in the first place. From the start, uses of the term Anthropocene

emphasized human-induced warming and acidification of the oceans

from fossil-fuel-generated co2 emissions. Warming and acidification are

known stressors that sicken and bleach coral reefs, killing the photo-

synthesizing zooanthellae and so ultimately their cnidarian symbionts

and all of the other critters belonging to myriad taxa whose worlding

depends on intact reef systems. Corals of the seas and lichens of the land

also bring us into consciousness of the Capitalocene, in which deep-sea

mining and drilling in oceans and fracking and pipeline construction

across delicate lichen-covered northern landscapes are fundamental to

accelerating nationalist, transnationalist, and corporate unworlding.

But coral and lichen symbionts also bring us richly into the storied tis-

sues of the thickly present Chthulucene, where it remains possible—just

barely—to play a much better sf game, in nonarrogant collaboration

with all those in the muddle. We are all lichens; so we can be scraped

off the rocks by the Furies, who still erupt to avenge crimes against the

earth. Alternatively, we can join in the metabolic transformations be-

tween and among rocks and critters for living and dying well. “‘Do you

realize,’ the phytolinguist will say to the aesthetic critic, ‘that [once upon

a time] they couldn’t even read Eggplant?’ And they will smile at our

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ignorance, as they pick up their rucksacks and hike on up to read the

newly deciphered lyrics of the lichen on the north face of Pike’s Peak.’”71

Attending to these ongoing matters returns me to the question that

began this chapter. What happens when human exceptionalism and

the utilitarian individualism of classical political economics become un-

thinkable in the best sciences across the disciplines and interdisciplines?

Seriously unthinkable: not available to think with. Why is it that the

epochal name of the Anthropos imposed itself at just the time when un-

derstandings and knowledge practices about and within symbiogenesis

and sympoietics are wildly and wonderfully available and generative in

all the humusities, including noncolonizing arts, sciences, and politics?

What if the doleful doings of the Anthropocene and the unworldings of

the Capitalocene are the last gasps of the sky gods, not guarantors of the

finished future, game over? It matters which thoughts think thoughts.

We must think!

The unfinished Chthulucene must collect up the trash of the Anthro-

pocene, the exterminism of the Capitalocene, and chipping and shred-

ding and layering like a mad gardener, make a much hotter compost pile

for still possible pasts, presents, and futures.

2.7. Day octopus, Octopus cyanea, in the water near Lanai, Hawaii.

Photograph by David Fleethham. © OceanwideImages.com.

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C H A P T E R 3

Sympoiesis Symbiogenesis and the Lively Arts

of Staying with the Trouble

Symbiogenesis

Sympoiesis is a simple word; it means “making-with.” Nothing makes

itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing. In the words of

the Inupiat computer “world game,” earthlings are never alone.1 That

is the radical implication of sympoiesis. Sympoiesis is a word proper to

complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems. It is a word

for worlding-with, in company. Sympoiesis enfolds autopoiesis and gen-

eratively unfurls and extends it.

The vivid four-by-six-foot painting called Endosymbiosis hangs in the

hallway joining the Departments of Geosciences and Biology at UMass

Amherst, near the Life and Earth Café, surely a spatial clue to how crit-

ters become-with each other.2 Perhaps as sensual molecular curiosity

and definitely as insatiable hunger, irresistible attraction toward enfold-

ing each other is the vital motor of living and dying on earth. Critters

interpenetrate one another, loop around and through one another, eat

each another, get indigestion, and partially digest and partially assimi-

late one another, and thereby establish sympoietic arrangements that

are otherwise known as cells, organisms, and ecological assemblages.

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3.1. Endosymbiosis: Homage to Lynn Margulis, Shoshanah Dubiner, 2012.

www.cybermuse.com.

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60 c h a p t e r t h r e e

Another word for these sympoietic entities is holobionts, or, etymologi-

cally, “entire beings” or “safe and sound beings.”3

That is decidedly not the same thing as One and Individual. Rather,

in polytemporal, polyspatial knottings, holobionts hold together con-

tingently and dynamically, engaging other holobionts in complex pat-

ternings. Critters do not precede their relatings; they make each other

through semiotic material involution, out of the beings of previous such

entanglements. Lynn Margulis knew a great deal about “the intimacy

of strangers,” a phrase she proposed to describe the most fundamental

practices of critters becoming-with each other at every node of intra-

action in earth history. I propose holoents as a general term to replace

“units” or “beings.”

Like Margulis, I use holobiont to mean symbiotic assemblages, at

whatever scale of space or time, which are more like knots of diverse

intra-active relatings in dynamic complex systems, than like the entities

of a biology made up of preexisting bounded units (genes, cells, organ-

isms, etc.) in interactions that can only be conceived as competitive or

cooperative. Like hers, my use of holobiont does not designate host +

symbionts because all of the players are symbionts to each other, in di-

verse kinds of relationalities and with varying degrees of openness to

attachments and assemblages with other holobionts. Symbiosis is not a

synonym for “mutually beneficial.” The array of names needed to desig-

nate the heterogeneous webbed patterns and processes of situated and

dynamic dilemmas and advantages for the symbionts/holobionts is only

beginning to surface as biologists let go of the dictates of possessive

individualism and zero-sum games as the template for explanation.

An adept in the study of microbes, cell biology, chemistry, geology,

and paleogeography, as well as a lover of languages, arts, stories, systems

theories, and alarmingly generative critters, including human beings,

Margulis was a radical evolutionary theorist. Her first and most intense

loves were the bacteria and archaea of Terra and all their bumptious

doings. The core of Margulis’s view of life was that new kinds of cells,

tissues, organs, and species evolve primarily through the long-lasting

intimacy of strangers. The fusion of genomes in symbioses, followed

by natural selection—with a very modest role for mutation as a motor

of system level change—leads to increasingly complex levels of good-

enough quasi-individuality to get through the day, or the aeon. Margulis

called this basic and mortal life-making process symbiogenesis.

Bacteria and archaea did it first. My sense is that in her heart of hearts

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Margulis felt that bacteria and archaea did it all, and there wasn’t much

left for so-called higher-order biological entities to do or invent. Even-

tually, however, by fusing with each other in stabilized, ongoing ways,

archaea and bacteria invented the modern complex cell, with its nucleus

full of ropy chromosomes made of dna and proteins, and diverse other

sorts of extranuclear organelles, from undulating whips and spinning

blades for locomotion to specialized vesicles and tubules for a zillion

functions that work better kept a bit separate from each other.4 Because

she was a founder of Gaia theory with James Lovelock and a student

of interlocked and multileveled systemic processes of nonreductionist

organization and maintenance that make earth itself and earth’s living

beings unique, Margulis called these processes autopoietic.5 Perhaps she

would have chosen the term sympoietic, but the word and concept had

not yet surfaced.6 As long as autopoiesis does not mean self-sufficient

“self making,” autopoiesis and sympoiesis, foregrounding and back-

grounding different aspects of systemic complexity, are in generative

friction, or generative enfolding, rather than opposition.

In 1998, a Canadian environmental studies graduate student named

M. Beth Dempster suggested the term sympoiesis for “collectively-

producing systems that do not have self-defined spatial or temporal

boundaries. Information and control are distributed among compo-

nents. The systems are evolutionary and have the potential for surpris-

ing change.” By contrast, autopoietic systems are “self-producing” au-

tonomous units “with self defined spatial or temporal boundaries that

tend to be centrally controlled, homeostatic, and predictable.”7 Symbio-

sis makes trouble for autopoiesis, and symbiogenesis is an even bigger

troublemaker for self-organizing individual units. The more ubiquitous

symbiogenesis seems to be in living beings’ dynamic organizing pro-

cesses, the more looped, braided, outreaching, involuted, and sympoietic

is terran worlding.

Mixotricha paradoxa is everyone’s favorite critter for explaining com-

plex “individuality,” symbiogenesis, and symbiosis. Margulis described

this critter that is/are made up of at least five different taxonomic kinds

of cells with their genomes this way:

Under low magnification, M. paradoxa looks like a single-celled swim-

ming ciliate. With the electron microscope, however, it is seen to con-

sist of five distinct kinds of creatures. Externally, it is most obviously

the kind of one-celled organism that is classified as a protist. But in-

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side each nucleated cell, where one would expect to find mitochon-

dria, are many spherical bacteria. On the surface, where cilia should

be, are some 250,000 hairlike Treponema spirochetes (resembling the

type that causes syphilis), as well as a contingent of large rod bac-

teria that is also 250,000 strong. In addition, we have redescribed

200 spirochetes of a larger type and named them Canaleparolina

darwiniensis.8

Leaving out viruses, each M. paradoxa is not one, not five, not sev-

eral hundred thousand, but a poster critter for holobionts. This holobi-

ont lives in the gut of an Australian termite, Mastotermes darwiniensis,

which has its own sf stories to tell about ones and manys, or holoents.

Termite symbioses, including their doings with people, not to mention

mushrooms, are the stuff of legends—and cuisine. Check out the holo-

biomes of Macrotermes natalensis and its cultivated fungus Termitomyces,

recently in the science news.9 M. paradoxa and their ilk have been my

companions in writing and thinking for decades.

Since Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859, biological evolutionary

theory has become more and more essential to our ability to think, feel,

and act well; and the interlinked Darwinian sciences that came together

roughly between the 1930s and 1950s into “the Modern Synthesis” or

“New Synthesis” remain astonishing. How could one be a serious person

and not honor such works as Theodosius Dobzhansky’s Genetics and the

Origin of Species (1937), Ernst Mayr’s Systematics and the Origin of Species

(1942), George Gaylord Simpson’s Tempo and Mode in Evolution (1944),

and even Richard Dawkins’s later sociobiological formulations within

the Modern Synthesis, The Selfish Gene (1976)? However, bounded units

(code fragments, genes, cells, organisms, populations, species, ecosys-

tems) and relations described mathematically in competition equations

are virtually the only actors and story formats of the Modern Synthe-

sis. Evolutionary momentum, always verging on modernist notions of

progress, is a constant theme, although teleology in the strict sense is

not. Even as these sciences lay the groundwork for scientific conceptu-

alization of the Anthropocene, they are undone in the very thinking of

Anthropocene systems that require enfolded autopoietic and sympoietic

analysis.

Rooted in units and relations, especially competitive relations, the

sciences of the Modern Synthesis, for example, population genetics,

have a hard time with four key biological domains: embryology and de-

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velopment, symbiosis and collaborative entanglements of holobionts

and holobiomes, the vast worldings of microbes, and exuberant critter

biobehavioral inter- and intra-actions.10 Approaches tuned to “multi-

species becoming-with” better sustain us in staying with the trouble on

terra. An emerging “New New Synthesis”—an extended synthesis—in

transdisciplinary biologies and arts proposes string figures tying to-

gether human and nonhuman ecologies, evolution, development, his-

tory, affects, performances, technologies, and more.

Indebted first to Margulis, I can only sketch a few aspects of the “Ex-

tended Evolutionary Synthesis” unfolding in the early twenty-first cen-

tury.11 Forming part of her cosmopolitan heritage, formulations of sym-

biogenesis predate Margulis in the early twentieth-century work of the

Russian Konstantin Mereschkowsky and others.12 However, Margulis,

her successors, and her colleagues bring together symbiogenetic imagi-

nations and materialities with all of the powerful cyborg tools of the late

twentieth-century molecular and ultrastructural biological revolutions,

including electron microscopes, nucleic acid sequencers, immunoassay

techniques, immense and comparative genomic and proteomic data-

bases, and more. The strength of the Extended Synthesis is precisely in

the intellectual, cultural, and technical convergence that makes it pos-

sible to develop new model systems, concrete experimental practices,

research collaborations, and both verbal and mathematical explanatory

instruments. Such a convergence was materially impossible before the

1970s and after.

A model is a work object; a model is not the same kind of thing as a

metaphor or analogy. A model is worked, and it does work. A model is

like a miniature cosmos, in which a biologically curious Alice in Won-

derland can have tea with the Red Queen and ask how this world works,

even as she is worked by the complex-enough, simple-enough world.

Models in biological research are stabilized systems that can be shared

among colleagues to investigate questions experimentally and theoret-

ically. Traditionally, biology has had a small set of hard-working living

models, each shaped in knots and layers of practice to be apt for some

kinds of questions and not others. Listing seven basic model systems

of developmental biology (namely, fruit flies Drosophila melanogaster; a

nematode, Caenorhabditis elegans; the mouse Mus musculis; a frog, Xeno-

pus laevis; the zebrafish Danio rerio; the chicken Gallus gallus; and the

mustard Arabidopsis thaliana), Scott Gilbert wrote,

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The recognition that one’s organism is a model system provides a

platform upon which one can apply for funds, and it assures one of

a community of like-minded researchers who have identified prob-

lems that the community thinks are important. There has been much

lobbying for the status of a model system and the fear is that if your

organism is not a recognized model, you will be relegated to the back-

waters of research. Thus, “model organisms” have become the center

for both scientific and political discussions in contemporary develop-

mental biology.13

Excellent for studying how parts (genes, cells, tissues, etc.) of well-

defined entities fit together into cooperating and/or competing units, all

seven of these individuated systems fail the researcher studying webbed

inter- and intra-actions of symbiosis and sympoiesis, in heterogeneous

temporalities and spatialities. Holobionts require models tuned to an ex-

pandable number of quasi-collective/quasi-individual partners in consti-

tutive relatings; these relationalities are the objects of study. The partners

do not precede the relatings. Such models are emerging for the transfor-

mative processes of EcologicalEvolutionaryDevelopmental biology.

Margulis gave us dynamic multipartnered entities like Mixotricha

paradoxa to study the evolutionary invention of complex cells from the

intra- and interactions of bacteria and archaea. I will briefly introduce

two more models, each proposed and elaborated in the laboratory to

study a transformation of organizational patterning in the living world:

(1) a choanoflagellate-bacteria model for the invention of animal multi-

cellularity, and (2) a squid-bacteria model for the elaboration of develop-

mental symbioses between and among critters necessary to each other’s

becoming. A third symbiogenetic model for the formation of complex

ecosystems immediately suggests itself in the holobiomes of coral reefs,

and I will approach this model through science art worldings rather than

the experimental laboratory.

Although multicellular plants appeared on earth half a million years

earlier, because of its robustness and sympoietic richness, I focus on a

proposed model system for the emergence of animal multicellularity. Ev-

ery living thing has emerged and persevered (or not) bathed and swad-

dled in bacteria and archaea. Truly nothing is sterile; and that reality

is a terrific danger, basic fact of life, and critter-making opportunity.

Using molecular and comparative genomic approaches and proposing

infectious—symbiogenetic—processes, Nicole King’s laboratory at the

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University of California, Berkeley, works to reconstruct possible origins

and development of animal multicellularity.14 These scientists show

that interspecies—really, interkingdom—meetings and enfoldings can

produce entities that hold together, develop, communicate, and form

layered tissues like animals do.

As Alegado and King put it,

Comparisons among modern animals and their closest living rela-

tives, the choanoflagellates, suggest that the first animals used flagel-

lated collar cells to capture bacterial prey. The cell biology of prey

capture, such as cell adhesion between predator and prey, involves

mechanisms that may have been co-opted to mediate intercellular in-

teractions during the evolution of animal multicellularity. Moreover,

a history of bacterivory may have influenced the evolution of animal

genomes by driving the evolution of genetic pathways for immunity

and facilitating lateral gene transfer. Understanding the interactions

between bacteria and the progenitors of animals may help to explain

the myriad ways in which bacteria shape the biology of modern ani-

mals, including ourselves.15

In Marilyn Strathern’s sense, partial connections abound. Getting hun-

gry, eating, and partially digesting, partially assimilating, and partially

transforming: these are the actions of companion species.

King’s ambitious program is crafting a stabilized and genomically

well-characterized model system of cultures of choanoflagellates (Salp-

ingoeca rosetta) and bacteria from the genus Algoriphagus to investigate

critical aspects of the formation of multicellular animals. Choanoflagel-

lates can live as either single cells or multicellular colonies; what de-

termines the transitions? The close evolutionary relationship between

choanoflagellates and animals lends strength to the model.16 The sym-

biogenetic theory of origins of multicellularity is contested; there are

attractive alternate explanations. What distinguishes King’s lab is its

production of a model system that is experimentally tractable, trans-

ferable in principle to other sites, and generative of testable questions

at the heart of being animal. To be animal is to become-with bacteria

(and, no doubt, viruses and many other sorts of critters; a basic aspect

of sympoiesis is its expandable set of players). No wonder the best sci-

ence writers bring Nicole King’s lab into my dinner conversations on a

regular basis.17

Next, I hold out a tasty model system for studying developmental

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symbioses. The question here is not how animals hold themselves to-

gether at all, but rather, how they craft developmental patternings that

take them through time in astonishing morphogeneses. My favorite

model is the diminutive Hawaiian bobtail squid, Euprymna scolopes, and

its bacterial symbionts, Vibrio fischeri, which are essential for the squid’s

constructing its ventral pouch that houses luminescing bacteria, so that

the hunting squid can look like a starry sky to its prey below on dark

nights, or appear not to cast a shadow on moonlit nights. The squid-

bacterial symbiosis has proven remarkably generative for many kinds

of studies, “from ecology and evolution of a symbiotic system to the un-

derlying molecular mechanisms of partner interactions that lead to es-

tablishment, development, and long-term-persistence of the alliance.”18

Unless the juvenile squid are infected in the right spot, at the right

time, by the right bacteria, they do not develop their own structures

for housing bacteria when they are hunting adults. The bacteria are

fully part of the squid’s developmental biology. In addition, the bacte-

ria produce signals that regulate the adult squids’ circadian rhythms.

The squid regulate bacterial numbers, exclude unwanted associates, and

provide inviting surfaces for setting up vibrio homes. Herself trained in

marine invertebrate field biology, biochemistry, and biophysics, McFall-

Ngai began work on the naturally occurring squid-bacteria holobiont

in 1988, when she started to collaborate with Edward (Ned) Ruby, a

microbiologist also interested in symbiosis. Remembering that other

vibrio bacteria are responsible for the pathogenic communication that

is cholera, I was not surprised to learn what multitalented communica-

tors these sorts of bacteria are. As McFall-Ngai put it, “The Vibrionaceae

are a group of bacteria whose members often have broad physiological

scope and multiple ecological niches.”19 Material semiotics is exuberantly

chemical; the roots of language across taxa, with all its understandings

and misunderstandings, lie in such attachments.

The sympoietic collaborations of squid and bacteria are matched by

the sympoietic string figures across disciplines and methodologies, in-

cluding genome sequencing, myriad imaging technologies, functional

genomics, and field biology, which make symbiogenesis such a powerful

framework for twenty-first-century biology. Working on pea aphid sym-

biosis with Buchnera, Nancy Moran emphasizes this point: “The primary

reason that symbiosis research is suddenly active, after decades at the

margins of mainstream biology, is that dna technology and genomics

give us enormous new ability to discover symbiont diversity, and more

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significantly, to reveal how microbial metabolic capabilities contribute

to the functioning of hosts and biological communities.”20 I would add

the necessity of asking how the multicellular partners in the symbioses

affect the microbial symbionts. “Host-symbiont” seems an odd locution

for what is happening; at whatever size, all the partners making up ho-

lobionts are symbionts to each other.

Two transformative papers embody for me the profound scientific

changes afoot.21 Subtitling their paper “We Have Never Been Individu-

als,” Gilbert, Sapp, and Tauber argue for holobionts and a symbiotic view

of life by summarizing the evidence against bounded units from anat-

omy, physiology, genetics, evolution, immunology, and development. In

“Animals in a Bacterial World: A New Imperative for the Life Sciences,”

the twenty-six coauthors present the growing knowledge of a vast range

of animal-bacterial interactions at both ecosystem and intimate sym-

biosis scales. They argue that this evidence should profoundly alter ap-

proaches to five questions: “how have bacteria facilitated the origin and

evolution of animals; how do animals and bacteria affect each other’s

genomes; how does normal animal development depend on bacterial

partners; how is homeostasis maintained between animals and their

symbionts; and how can ecological approaches deepen our understand-

ing of the multiple levels of animal-bacterial interaction.”22

Stories about worried colleagues at conferences, uncomprehend-

ing reviewers unused to so much evidential and disciplinary boundary

crossing in one paper, or initially enthusiastic editors getting cold feet

surround these papers. Such stories normally surround risky and gen-

erative syntheses and propositions. The critics are a crucial part of the

holobiome of making science, and I am not a disinterested observer.23

Nonetheless, I think it matters that both of these papers were published

in prominent places at a critical inflection point in the curve of research

on, and explanation of, complex biological systems in the urgent times

called the Anthropocene, when the arts for living on a damaged planet

demand sympoietic thinking and action.

Interlacing Sciences and Arts with Involutionary Momentum

I am committed to art science worldings as sympoietic practices for liv-

ing on a damaged planet. Carla Hustak and Natasha Myers gave all of us

a beautiful paper titled “Involutionary Momentum” that is a hinge for

me between symbiogenesis and the science art worldings I present in the

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third section of this chapter. These authors reread Darwin’s own sensu-

ous writing about his exquisite attention to absurdly sexual orchids and

their pollinating insects; Hustak and Myers also themselves attend to

the many enfoldings and communications among bees, wasps, orchids,

and scientists. The authors suggest that “involution” powers the “evo-

lution” of living and dying on earth. Rolling inward enables rolling out-

ward; the shape of life’s motion traces a hyperbolic space, swooping and

fluting like the folds of a frilled lettuce, coral reef, or bit of crocheting.

Like the biologists of the previous section, Hustak and Myers argue that

a zero-sum game based on competing methodological individualists is a

caricature of the sensuous, juicy, chemical, biological, material-semiotic,

and science-making world. Counting “articulate plants and other loqua-

cious organisms” among their number, living critters love the floridly

repetitive mathematics of the pushes and pulls of hyperbolic geometry,

not the accountant’s hell of a zero-sum game.24

Rather, the orchid and its bee-pollinators are mutually constituted

through a reciprocal capture from which neither plant nor insect can

be disentangled . . . It is in encounters among orchids, insects, and

scientists that we find openings for an ecology of interspecies intima-

cies and subtle propositions. What is at stake in this involutionary

approach is a theory of ecological relationality that takes seriously

organisms’ practices, their inventions, and experiments crafting in-

terspecies lives and worlds. This is an ecology inspired by a feminist

ethic of “response-ability” . . . in which questions of species difference

are always conjugated with attentions to affect, entanglement, and

rupture; an affective ecology in which creativity and curiosity charac-

terize the experimental forms of life of all kinds of practitioners, not

only the humans.25

Orchids are famous for their flowers looking like the genitals of the fe-

male insects of the particular species needed to pollinate them. The right

sort of males seeking females of their own kind are drawn to the color,

shape, and alluring insectlike pheromones of a particular species of or-

chid. These interactions have been explained (away) in neo-Darwinian

orthodoxy as nothing but biological deception and exploitation of the

insect by the flower—in other words, an excellent example of the selfish

gene in action. Hustak and Myers instead read aslant neo-Darwinism,

even in this hard case of strong asymmetry of “costs and benefits,” to

find other necessary models for a science of plant ecology. The stories

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of mutation, adaptation, and natural selection are not silenced; but

they are not turned up so loud as to deafen scientists, as if the evidence

demanded it, when increasingly something more complex is audible in

research across fields. “This requires reading with our senses attuned to

stories told in otherwise muted registers. Working athwart the reduc-

tive, mechanistic, and adaptationist logics that ground the ecological

sciences, we offer a reading that amplifies accounts of the creative, im-

provisational, and fleeting practices through which plants and insects

involve themselves in one another’s lives.”26

But what happens when a partner involved critically in the life of ano-

ther disappears from the earth? What happens when holobionts break

apart? What happens when entire holobiomes crumble into the rubble

of broken symbionts? This kind of question has to be asked in the urgen-

cies of the Anthropocene and Capitalocene if we are to nurture arts for

living on a damaged planet. In his science fiction novel The Speaker for

the Dead Orson Scott Card explored how a young boy who had excelled in

exterminationist technoscience in a cross-species war with an insectoid

hive species later in life took up responsibility for the dead, for collecting

up the stories for those left behind when a being, or a way of being, dies.

The man had to do what the boy, immersed only in cyber-realities and

deadly virtual war, was never allowed to do; the man had to visit, to live

with, to face the dead and the living in all of their materialities. The task

of the Speaker for the Dead is to bring the dead into the present, so as to

make more response-able living and dying possible in times yet to come.

My hinge to science art worldings turns on the ongoing performance of

memory by an orchid for its extinct bee.

In xkcd’s cartoon “Bee Orchid,” we know a vanished insect once ex-

isted because a living flower still looks like the erotic organs of the avid

female bee hungry for copulation. But the cartoon does something very

special; it does not mistake lures for identity; it does not say the flower

is exactly like the extinct insect’s genitals. Instead, the flower collects

up the presence of the bee aslant, in desire and mortality. The shape

of the flower is “an idea of what the female bee looked like to the male

bee . . . as interpreted by a plant . . . the only memory of the bee is a

painting by a dying flower.”27 Once embraced by living buzzing bees, the

flower is a speaker for the dead. A stick figure promises to remember

the bee flower when it comes time. The practice of the arts of mem-

ory enfold all terran critters. That must be part of any possibility for

resurgence!

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3.2. “Bee Orchid.” © xkcd.com (Randall Munroe).

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http://xkcd.com

S y m p o i e s i s 71

Science Art Worldings for Staying with the Trouble

I end this chapter with four engaged science art activist worldings com-

mitted to partial healing, modest rehabilitation, and still possible resur-

gence in the hard times of the imperial Anthropocene and Capitalocene.

I think of these worldings as stinger-endowed, unfurling, grasping ten-

tacles of the ink-spurting, disguise-artist, hunting critters of an ongoing

past, present, and future called the Chthulucene.28 Speaking resurgence

to despair, the Chthulucene is the timespace of the symchthonic ones,

the symbiogenetic and sympoietic earthly ones, those now submerged

and squashed in the tunnels, caves, remnants, edges, and crevices of

damaged waters, airs, and lands. The chthonic ones are those indigenous

to the earth in myriad languages and stories; and decolonial indigenous

peoples and projects are central to my stories of alliance.

Each of the science art worldings cultivates robust response-ability

for powerful and threatened places and beings. Each is a model system

for sympoietic, multiplayer, multispecies thinking and action located

in a particularly sensitive place: (1) the Great Barrier Reef and all the

world’s coral reefs, with the Crochet Coral Reef project, initiated and

coordinated by the Institute for Figuring in Los Angeles; (2) the island

Republic of Madagascar, with the Malagasy-English children’s natural

history book series called the Ako Project, made possible by multina-

tional friendships among scientists and artists; (3) the circumpolar

northern lands of the Inupiat in Alaska, site of the Never Alone computer

game project, centered in story-making practices among the Inupiat29

and brought into being by the sympoiesis of E-Line Media and the Cook

Inlet Tribal Council; and, my most developed case, (4) Black Mesa and

the Navajo and Hopi lands enmeshed in Arizona, site of many-threaded

coalitional work including Black Mesa Indigenous Support, Black Mesa

Trust (Hopi), the scientists and indigenous herding people committed to

Navajo-Churro sheep, Black Mesa Weavers for Life and Land, the mostly

Diné activists of the Black Mesa Water Coalition, and the people and

sheep of Diné be’iiná / The Navajo Lifeway.30

Each of these projects is a case of noninnocent, risky, committed “be-

coming involved in one another’s lives.”31 Making-with and tangled-with

the tentacular ones, which are gripping and stinging for an ongoing gen-

erative Chthulucene, each is a sf string figure of multispecies becoming-

with. These science art worldings are holobiomes, or holoents, in which

scientists, artists, ordinary members of communities, and nonhuman

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beings become enfolded in each other’s projects, in each other’s lives;

they come to need each other in diverse, passionate, corporeal, mean-

ingful ways. Each is an animating project in deadly times. They are sym-

poietic, symbiogenetic, and symanimagenic.

Four Critical Zones

Bathed in hot and acid oceans that are becoming more acidic and hotter

by the decade, coral holobiomes everywhere are threatened. Coral reefs

have the highest biodiversity of any kind of marine ecosystem. The sym-

biosis of cnidarian polyps, photosynthesizing dinoflagellates called zoo-

anthellae living in the coral tissue, and a horde of microbes and viruses

make up the keystone of the coral holobiome, which is home to multi-

tudes of other critters. Hundreds of millions of human beings, many of

them very poor, depend directly on healthy coral ecosystems for their

livelihoods.32 Such sentences hugely understate coral interdependence

with human and nonhuman critters. Recognition of dying coral reef eco-

systems in warming and acidifying seas was at the heart of advancing

the very term Anthropocene in 2000. Coral, along with lichens, are also

the earliest instances of symbiosis recognized by biologists; these are the

critters that taught biologists to understand the parochialism of their

own ideas of individuals and collectives. These critters taught people

like me that we are all lichens, all coral. In addition, deepwater reefs in

some locations seem to be able to function as refugia for replenishing

damaged corals in shallower waters.33 Coral reefs are the forests of the

sea, like Anna Tsing’s forest refugia of the land. Besides all of this, coral

reef worlds are achingly beautiful. I cannot imagine it is only human

people who know this beauty in their flesh.

A large island nation off the east coast of Africa, the Republic of Mad-

agascar is home to complex, layered tapestries of historically situated

peoples and other critters, including lemurs, close relatives of monkeys

and apes. Nine out of ten kinds of Madagascar’s nonhuman critters,

including all species of lemurs, live nowhere else on earth. The rate of

extinction and destruction of the many kinds of Madagascar’s forests

and watersheds vital for rural people (the large majority of Madagascar’s

human citizens), urban and town residents, and myriad nonhumans is

almost beyond imagination, except that it is well advanced—but not

uncontested locally and translocally. Evidence from photography indi-

cates that 40 to 50 percent of the forests of Madagascar that were still

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thriving in 1950 are gone now, along with their critters, including their

people, who for centuries harvested (and cultivated) woodland bounty

for their lives. Forest well-being is one of the most urgent priorities for

flourishing—indeed, survival—all over the earth. The contestations

must matter; it’s not a choice, it’s a necessity.34

The circumpolar North bears the brunt of the Anthropocene and Cap-

italocene. The Arctic is warming at almost twice the rate of the global

average. Sea ice, glaciers, and permafrost melt; people, animals, mi-

crobes, and plants can no longer rely on the seasons, nor indeed on the

temporally punctuated solid or liquid forms of matter crucial to their

perceptions and ways of getting on in life. Eating each other properly

requires meeting each other properly, and that requires good-enough

synchronicity. Synchronicity is exactly one of the system properties

flipping out all over earth. Change on earth is not the problem; rates

and distributions of change are very much the problem. In addition,

consumption-obsessed imperial circumpolar nations vie with each other

in increasingly militarized seas to claim and extract the huge reserves of

carbonized fossils encased in the far North, promising a further release

of greenhouse gases on a scale that simply cannot be allowed to hap-

pen. A geophysical, geopolitical storm of unprecedented proportions is

changing practices of living and dying across the North. The coalitions

of peoples and critters facing this storm are critical to the possibilities

of earth’s powers of resurgence.

Located on the four-thousand-square-mile Colorado Plateau, Black

Mesa, or Big Mountain, is ancestral land for both Hopi and Diné peoples.

Black Mesa is also a contemporary place needed by both Navajo and

Hopi families for income, food, water, sociality, and ceremony. The Black

Mesa coalfield, once a huge Pleistocene lake, is the largest coal deposit in

the United States. Beginning in 1968, this colonizing capitalist extractive

nation hosted the largest strip-mining operation in North America, run

by the Peabody Western Coal Company, part of Peabody Energy, the

world’s largest private-sector coal company. For forty years, coal from

the Black Mesa strip mine was pulverized, mixed with immense quanti-

ties of pristine water from the irreplaceable Navajo aquifer, and carried

in a giant slurry pipeline (owned by Southern Pacific) 273 miles to the

heavily polluting coal-fired Mohave Generating Station in Nevada, built

by the Bechtel Corporation. This plant provided energy for the bloom-

ing toxic cities in the desert Southwest, including Los Angeles. People

living on Black Mesa to this day have neither assured clean water nor

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reliable electricity, and many of their wells failed as the Navajo aquifer

was depleted. Sheep that drink from sulfate-rich toxic waste ponds die,

and groundwater is polluted.

First the slurry pipe, then the Black Mesa mine, and finally the Mo-

have Generating Station were closed down in 2005 through the concerted

work of both indigenous and settler environmentalists.35 Attempting to

combine operations with its nearby Kayenta site under a single renewal

permit running to 2026, Peabody currently has plans to reopen and ex-

pand the Black Mesa mine, targeting still more land needed by sheep and

people, not to mention other critters. The expanded operation would

wash coal with water from the Coconino Aquifer.

Coal from the Kayenta strip mine is shipped ninety-seven miles to

the Navajo Generating Station (ngs) on the Arizona-Utah border, near

Glen Canyon Dam; the ngs is the largest power-generating plant in the

U.S. West.36 The irony of the power station’s name should escape no

one, since half of Navajo homes do not have electricity and the Navajo

Nation does not own the plant. Even setting aside the long-term well-

being of people, other critters, land, and water, without a serious share

in the profits made from coal and affordable energy for local residents,

dependence on coal-related jobs keeps the Navajo Nation, as well as the

Hopi, in a vise grip. Unemployment in the Navajo Nation runs around 45

percent, and both Hopi and Diné are among the poorest citizens of the

United States. When built by Bechtel in the 1970s on land leased from

the Navajo Nation, this plant was the second-largest utility in the United

States. The largest owner of the Navajo Generating Station is the federal

government’s Bureau of Reclamation in the Department of the Interior;

the Bureau of Indian Affairs, also in the Department of the Interior, is

charged with protecting Native lands and resources. Coyote is well and

truly in the sheep corral in that arrangement. In 2010 Peabody’s Kayenta

mine was listed among the most dangerous in the United States and

targeted for increased scrutiny by the federal Mine Safety and Health

Administration.37 This plant powers the pumping stations that transfer

the waters of the Colorado River through a 336-mile-long aqueduct to

the always fast-growing cities of Tucson and Phoenix. Amid ongoing

struggles over both the plant’s effect on air quality and access to water

in the desert, in 2014 the ngs obtained a permit to continue operation

as a conventional coal-fired plant until December 2044.38

Hopi ancestors dug coal for their fires out of seams in Black Mesa’s

sandstone for centuries. Despite a destructive meme to the contrary—a

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very useful meme for the fossil fuel extraction industry—Diné and Hopi

agriculturalists and herders lived adjacent to and among each other in

mixed amity and competition until the advent of industrial-scale coal

mining on Black Mesa, which engineered intense conflict conveniently

misread as timeless tribal feuds. In 1966, transnational corporations

obtained leases signed by both tribal councils, without discussion or

consent by the great majority of tribal members or collective bodies

(kivas, chapters). The terms of bargaining for these leases were both

inherently asymmetrical and enabled by ethically compromised legal

processes, epitomized by a lawyer and bishop of the Mormon church

named John Boyden, who, without the Hopi’s knowledge, worked simul-

taneously for Peabody and selected Hopi leaders. Thousands of Navajo

lived on Black Mesa, including some of the most traditional among the

Diné. The Navajo tribal council initially refused to work with Boyden,

so he cultivated Hopi whose leaders were bitterly factionalized between

so-called traditionalists and progressives, beginning at a time when the

Hopi had no overall governing council. Boyden worked effectively over

a long period to craft legislation to clear the land of Navajo sheep people

and to shift legal control to the Hopi, who did not live on the land that

would be strip-mined. Traditional Hopi fiercely opposed Boyden, but to

no avail. Well connected in Washington, Boyden was crucial to crafting

the legal, political, and economic strategy to exploit Black Mesa’s coal

bounty. A Freedom of Information Act suit filed by the Native American

Rights Fund ascertained that out of funds held in a federal trust for the

Hopi, over thirty years Boyden was paid $2.7 million for his “pro bono”

services to the tribe.39

In 1974, the U.S. Congress passed a bill introduced by Arizona sena-

tor John McCain, a man with close personal and family ties to mining

and energy industries, called the Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act. The

act has resulted in the forced removal of up to fifteen thousand Diné

without serious provision of anywhere for people and animals to go,

even if ties to specific places were irrelevant. But both sheep and people

know and care a great deal where they come from, where they are, and

where they go.40 In 1980 the federal government purchased a uranium-

contaminated site near Chambers, Arizona, as new lands for the evicted

Diné. In 1996, McCain, then chairman of the Senate Committee on In-

dian Affairs, authored a second forced relocation act. The Navajo turned

to the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights. The strug-

gle continues, with extraordinary efforts by young activists to heal the

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coal-scarred wounds dividing Hopi and Navajo. In 2005, 75 percent of

overall annual Hopi income and 40 percent of Navajo income derived

ultimately from Black Mesa mining operations. The struggle is daunt-

ingly complex.41

The stories I will tell about Black Mesa are about resurgence in the

face of genocide and extermination, about sheep and weaving, about

art science activist worldings, about coalitions in struggle for what the

Navajo call hózhó—balance, harmony, beauty, right relations of land and

people—in this troubled world on the Colorado Plateau.

And so these are four critical zones of the tussle between the Anthro-

pocene and Capitalocene, on the one hand, and the Chthulucene, on the

other: coral forests of the oceans, diverse tropical forests of an island

nation and ecosystem, rapidly melting arctic lands and seas, and coal

seams and aquifers of indigenous lands linked in a global chain of on-

going colonial anthropogenic devastation. It is time to turn to sympoi-

etic worldings, to vital models crafted in sf patterns in each zone, where

ordinary stories, ordinary becoming “involved in each other’s lives,” pro-

pose ways to stay with the trouble in order to nurture well-being on a

damaged planet. Symchthonic stories are not the tales of heroes; they

are the tales of the ongoing.

Resurgence in Four Parts

The Crochet Coral Reef

In 1997, Daina Taimina, a Latvian mathematician at Cornell University,

“finally worked out how to make a physical model of hyperbolic space

that allows us to feel, and to tacitly explore the properties of this unique

geometry. The method she used was crochet.”42 With this tie between

math and fiber arts in mind, in 2005, after reading an article on coral

bleaching, Christine Wertheim, a crafter and poet, suggested to her twin

sister Margaret, a mathematician and artist, “We should crochet a coral

reef.”43 We can fight for the coral reefs that way, implied this odd impera-

tive. The sisters were watching an episode of Xena Warrior Princess, and

Xena’s and her sidekick Gabrielle’s fabulous fighting action—or maybe

just the incomparable Lucy Lawless and Renee O’Connor—inspired

them.44 The consequences have been utterly out of proportion to what

the twin sisters in Los Angeles imagined that first night. So far, about

eight thousand people, mostly women, in twenty-seven countries—

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3.3. Beaded jellyfish made by Vonda N. McIntyre for the Crochet Coral Reef.

From the collection of the Institute for Figuring (IFF). Photograph © IFF.

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from Ireland, Latvia, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, the United

States, the UK, Croatia, and more—have come together to crochet in

wool, cotton, plastic bags, discarded reel-to-reel tape, vinyl jelly yarn,

Saran wrap, and just about anything else that can be induced to loop and

whirl in the codes of crocheting.

The code is so simple: crocheted models of hyperbolic planes achieve

their ruffled forms by progressively increasing the number of stitches in

each row. The emergent vitalities of this wooly experimental life-form

take diverse corporeal shape as crafters increase the numbers from row

to row irregularly, oddly, whimsically, or strictly to see what forms they

could make—not just any forms, but crenulated beings that take life

as marine critters of the vulnerable reefs.45 “Every woolen form has

its fibrous dna.”46 But wool is hardly the only material. Plastic bottle

anemone trees with trash tendrils and anemones made from New York

Times blue plastic wrappers find their reef habitats. Making fabulated,

rarely mimetic, but achingly evocative models of coral reef ecosystems,

or maybe of just a few critters, the Crochet Coral Reef has morphed into

what is probably the world’s largest collaborative art project.

The involutionary momentum of the crochet coral reef powers the

sympoietic knotting of mathematics, marine biology, environmental

activism, ecological consciousness raising, women’s handicrafts, fiber

arts, museum display, and community art practices. A kind of hyperbolic

embodied knowledge, the crochet reef lives enfolded in the materialities

of global warming and toxic pollution; and the makers of the reef prac-

tice multispecies becoming-with to cultivate the capacity to respond,

response-ability.47 The crochet reef is the fruit of “algorithmic code, im-

provisational creativity, and community engagement.”48 The reef works

not by mimicry, but by open-ended, exploratory process. “Iterate, de-

viate, elaborate” are the principles of the process.49 dna could not have

said it better.

The Crochet Coral Reef has a core set of reefs made for exhibitions,

like the first ones at the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and the Chi-

cago Cultural Center, both in 2007, to the Coral Forest exhibited in Abu

Dhabi in 2014 and beyond. The morphing assemblages are kept at the

Los Angeles Institute for Figuring (iff), and they fill the Wertheims’

home. The iff is the Wertheims’ nonprofit organization in LA, founded

in 2003 and dedicated to “the aesthetic dimensions of mathematics,

science, and engineering.”50 The core concept is material play, and the

iff proposes and enacts not think tanks or work tanks, but play tanks,

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which I understand as arts for living on a damaged planet. The iff and

the Crochet Coral Reef are art-science-activist worldings, bringing peo-

ple together to do string figures with math, sciences, and arts in order

to make active attachments that might matter to resurgence in the An-

thropocene and Capitalocene—that is, to make string figures tangled

in the Chthulucene. There are incarnations of a “biodiverse reef,” “toxic

reef,” “bleached reef,” “coral forest,” “plastic midden,” “white spire gar-

den,” “bleached bone reef,” “beaded coral garden,” “coral forest medusa,”

and more, along with the many satellite reefs made by collectives of

crafters that come together all over the world to mount local exhibits.

Crafters make fabulated healthy reefs, but my sense is that most of the

reefs show the stigmata of plastic trash, bleaching, and toxic pollution.

Crocheting with this trash feels to me like the looping of love and rage.

The skills and sensibilities of Margaret and Christine Wertheim, who

were born in Brisbane near the Great Barrier Reef, are fundamental,

along with the skills and concerns of the thousands of reef crafters. With

degrees in mathematics and physics, Margaret Wertheim is a science

writer, curator, and artist. She has written extensively on the cultural

history of theoretical physics. Her 2009 ted talk “The Beautiful Math

of Coral” has been watched by over a million people.51 With two books

written in feminine feminist materialist poetics, Christine Wertheim is a

poet, performer, artist, critic, curator, crafter, and teacher. She aptly de-

scribes her work as “infesting fertile zones between cunning linguistics,

psychoanalysis, poetry and gender studies.”52 Clearly, these twin sisters

were primed for sympoietic sf.

Infecting each other and anyone who comes into contact with their

fibrous critters, the thousands of crafters crochet psychological, mate-

rial, and social attachments to biological reefs in the oceans, but not by

practicing marine field biology or by diving among the reefs or making

some other direct contact. Rather, the crafters stitch “intimacy with-

out proximity,” a presence without disturbing the critters that animate

the project, but with the potential for being part of work and play for

confronting the exterminationist, trashy, greedy practices of global in-

dustrial economies and cultures.53 Intimacy without proximity is not

“virtual” presence; it is “real” presence, but in loopy materialities. The

abstractions of the mathematics of crocheting are a kind of lure to an

affective cognitive ecology stitched in fiber arts. The crochet reef is a

practice of caring without the neediness of touching by camera or hand

in yet another voyage of discovery. Material play builds caring publics.

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The result is another strong thread in the holobiome of the reef: we are

all corals now.

Returning to the birth tendrils of the Wertheim sisters in coral reef

worlds, I close this little section on the Crochet Coral Reef with a gor-

geous photo of green sea turtles coming out of the ocean onto the beach

to lay their eggs. Laying their eggs in more than eighty countries and

endangered or threatened everywhere, green turtles are globally dis-

tributed across the tropical and subtropical belt of earth. A portrait of

another green turtle flying in the ocean over the Great Barrier Reef in

Australia advertises the Regional Chamber of the Rights of Nature Tri-

bunal held in Far North Queensland in 2015.54 About eighteen thousand

female turtles nest each season on Raine Island in the Great Barrier

Reef; this population is one of only two large nesting groups on the earth

today.55 The tribunal collected statements from Aboriginal witnesses

about proper governance of the reef to present at the International Tri-

bunal for the Rights of Nature during the Climate Change summit in

Paris in December 2015. Sea turtles, corals, Aboriginal witnesses on the

care of decolonizing Country, the holobiomes of scientists, denizens of

3.4. Green turtles (Chelonia mydas) crawling out of the ocean onto the beach to lay

their eggs. Credit: Mark Sullivan, NOAA, Permit #10137-07.

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the Chthulucene, diverse environmental justice activists, and interna-

tional art science crafters come together in sf, in speculative fabulation

for flourishing.

The Madagascar Ako Project

As a Yale graduate student studying lemur behavior in 1962 in what is

now the Berenty Primate Reserve, Alison Jolly fell into noninnocent

love and knowledge in her first encounter with female-led, swaggering,

opportunistic ring-tailed lemurs in the spiny forest and dry gallery for-

est of the south of the island. Simply and transformatively, this young

six-foot-tall American white woman became a lover and seeker of knowl-

edge and well-being with and for the beings of Madagascar, especially

the astonishing species of lemurs, the radically different forest ecosys-

tems the length and breadth of the island, and the land’s complex people

and peoples. Author of many books and scientific papers and participant

in numerous study and conservation teams, Jolly died in 2014. Her con-

tributions to primatology, biodiversity conservation, and historically

informed, passionate analyses of conservation conflicts and necessities

were legion. But Jolly herself seemed especially to prize the sympoietic

3.5. Page from Tik-Tik the Ringtailed Lemur / Tikitiki Ilay Maky. UNICEF

Madagascar and the Lemur Conservation Foundation. Text by Alison Jolly and

Hanta Rasamimanana. Art by Deborah Ross. Courtesy of Margaretta Jolly.

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gift she helped craft, the Ako Project,56 which is tuned to practices for

resurgence in vulnerable Malagasy worlds. This is the part of her work

I most love.57

In the marrow of her bones, Jolly understood the terrible contradic-

tions and frictions in her embrace of both the rural people, who cut and

burn the forests to make small agricultural plots called tavy, and her

beloved prosimians with all their forest partners.58 Of course, she knew

she was not Malagasy, but at best a guest who might reciprocate appro-

priately, and at worst another in a long line of colonizers, always taking

land and giving advice for the best reasons. Aware of the controversies

over whether shifting cultivators destroyed or nurtured and managed

the forest, she learned a great deal about what made contemporary, es-

calating tavy burnings lethal to the future of the forests and of all their

critters, including the people who need them not just for their products

(including lemurs for food), but to sustain fertility in phosphorous-poor

tropical soils. She knew that making tavy had been part of the cycle

of forest succession and biodiversity maintenance, with evidence in old

stands in Ranomafana Park. But, she argued, not anymore. Nothing

has time to regenerate anymore. Jolly knew in detail what the press of

rapidly increasing human numbers means to the forests in the situated

history of multiple land dispossessions, relocations, violent suppres-

sions, imposition of regimes of private property, insecure markets, a

succession of failed national governments, huge solicited and imposed

national debt, and broken development promises. She wrote vividly

about local people’s accurate assessment of the effects of generations

of visiting experts, while the experts and visiting research scientists of-

ten knew little or nothing about the terrible history of land seizures,

colonial and postcolonial search-and-destroy operations, rapacious ex-

traction schemes, and the impact on villagers of the failed projects of

usually well intentioned but often ignorant foreign scientists and both

local and foreign ngos. She also knew what sustained committed work

of real colleagues and friends could accomplish in Madagascar against

the odds and across differences of all sorts. There are many possible

examples and many important people, but I want to tell about one little

project that might be considered a model system for sympoiesis.

Written in both English and Malagasy, each book in the Ako Project

vividly narrates the adventures of a young Malagasy lemur from one

of six species, from the tiny mouse lemur or ny tsididy, to the queer-

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fingered aye-aye or ny aiay, to singing Indri or ilay babakoto. The stories

are fleshed-out natural histories, full of the empirical sensuous curios-

ity of that genre; and they are bumptious adventures of gutsy young

lemurs living the joys and dangers of their habitats and of their groups’

social arrangements. Surrounding each lemur species with diverse plant

and animal critters proper to their habitats, the project provides both

teachers’ guides in Malagasy and beautifully crafted posters showing the

unique regions of Madagascar where the stories take place. The books

are not textbooks; they are stories, feasts for mind, heart, and body for

children (and adults) who have no access to storybooks or to the critters

of their own nation or even region. Most Malagasy never see a lemur on

the land, on television, or in a book. Those privileged enough to go to a

school with books saw pictures of French rabbits, a fact Alison Jolly told

me with disgust in the 1980s when I interviewed her for Primate Visions.

Many villages are still without schools; and the formal curriculum for

children, whether modeled on the older French system or newer learner-

centered approaches, is irrelevant to most of the population. State fi-

nancing for rural schools is extremely paltry, and most rural children are

taught by community teachers with no teacher training and no income

except from fees paid by very poor families. Teaching about local critters

or ecologies rarely happens.

The Ako Project did an end run around the starved schools and unre-

sponsive bureaucracies. After Jolly saw the alluring watercolors of fauna

and flora by Deborah Ross, she asked the artist if she would illustrate her

children’s books about lemurs. Ross said yes; Jolly then contacted her

old friend, the lemur biologist Hantanirina Rasamimanana. They raised

money; the project was off and running.59 In exciting, beautiful, funny,

and scary stories, distributed outside the school bureaucracies, the Ako

Project nurtures empathy and knowledge about the extraordinary bio-

diversity of Madagascar for the Malagasy.

The Ako Project is the generative fruit of a colleagueship and friend-

ship over decades.60 In 1983 Alison Jolly met Hanta Rasamimanana, a

scientist seventeen years her junior. They bonded as mothers doing

fieldwork in challenging conditions, primatologists riveted by ring-

tailed lemurs, lovers of Malagasy people and nature, and participants

in global and local politics, with differently situated vulnerability and

authority. Born in the capital city and part of the generation sponsored

by the Soviet Union under Didier Ratsiraka’s socialism, Rasamimanana

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3.6. Painting for Tsambiki Ilamba Fotsy / Bounce the White Sifaka. UNICEF

Madagascar and the Lemur Conservation Foundation. Text by Alison Jolly and

Hanta Rasamimanana. Art by Deborah Ross. Courtesy of Margaretta Jolly

and Deborah Ross.

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trained in animal husbandry at the Veterinary Academy in Moscow. She

earned a PhD at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, and

she has a master’s in primate conservation. She is professor of zoology

and scientific education at l’École Normale Supérieure of Antananarivo.

Studying ringtails, Rasamimanana has published on feeding behavior,

energy expenditure, and lemur female precedence and supreme author-

ity in their societies (“dominance”). Her responsibilities in the scientific

academy of Madagascar have been multiple, and she initiated a master’s

degree in primate conservation run in Mahajanga and the Comoros. An

adviser on the Madagascar National Curriculum, she heads the Ako Proj-

ect teacher support program and wrote the Malagasy teacher’s guides

based on workshops she ran in rural areas.61

In the summer of 2013, Rasamimanana was the program chair for

the Fifth International Prosimian Congress, held at the Centre ValBio

Research Campus in Ranomafana National Park, where Alison Jolly’s

friend and colleague Patricia Wright and so many others had worked for

decades to strengthen biodiversity and primate research in Madagascar

and by Malagasy scientists.62 Eighty of the two hundred participants in

2013 were from Madagascar. Half of the two hundred present were stu-

dents, the core of the next generation of scientists dedicated to holding

open space and time for lemurs and their associates in vulnerable for-

est webs. Writing in her conservation diaries shortly before her death,

Jolly celebrated what this congress meant: “The big change is that most

papers are by Malagasy speaking on their own biodiversity, eager to ad-

vance their own careers in conservation. A contrast to the continuing

bewilderment of so many other Malagasy as to why anyone would want

to visit forests! And a huge swing from all the meetings in the past domi-

nated by foreigners.”63

In all their attachments, working with book and poster artists, to-

gether the scientists and storytellers Jolly and Rasamimanana brought

the Ako Project into the world. In this project and in their work and

play across many crises in Madagascar and its conservation history, they

have nurtured new generations of Malagasy naturalists and scientists,

including small children, field station guides, and school and university

students. Without innocence and with relentless commitment, Jolly and

Rasamimanana have practiced, in solidarity, the arts of living on a dam-

aged planet; it matters.

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86 c h a p t e r t h r e e

Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna)

My third example of science art worlding for living on a damaged planet

is making “world games.” World games are made with and from indig-

enous peoples’ stories and practices. “But what good are old stories if

the wisdom they contain is not shared?”64 These games both remember

and create worlds in dangerous times; they are worlding practices. In-

digenous peoples around the earth have a particular angle on the dis-

courses of coming extinctions and exterminations of the Anthropocene

and Capitalocene.65 The idea that disaster will come is not new; disaster,

indeed genocide and devastated home places, has already come, decades

and centuries ago, and it has not stopped. The resurgence of peoples

and of places is nurtured with ragged vitality in the teeth of such loss,

mourning, memory, resilience, reinvention of what it means to be na-

tive, refusal to deny irreversible destruction, and refusal to disengage

from living and dying well in presents and futures. World games require

inventive, sympoietic collaborations that bring together such things as

computer game platforms and their designers, indigenous storytellers,

visual artists, carvers and puppet makers, digital-savvy youngsters, and

community activists. The set of computer world games at the moment

3.7. Cover image for Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna). Courtesy of E-line Media,

in collaboration with Upper One Games, and the Cook Inlet Tribal Council.

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I write this sentence is small; there is one. Others, however, are in the

collaboration and design phase.66

However, even though the models of sympoiesis are expandable, it is

critical not to once again raid situated indigenous stories as resources

for the woes of colonizing projects and peoples, entities that seem per-

manently undead. Never Alone is not a New Age game for universal

oneness, a posthumanist solution to epistemological crises, a general

model for collaboration, or a way to finesse the Anthropocene with Na-

tive Climate Wisdom. Nor is Never Alone a primer for the Chthulucene.

If Inupiat “Sila” meets in sf games with the tentacular Chthulucene, it

will be a risk-taking proposition, not an innocent translation.67 Never

Alone requires a different sort of attention; and perhaps the fact that I

continue to die early and often playing the game is less a reflection of my

poor gaming skills than a proper reminder that a world game is situated

indigenous storytelling in specific histories. The fact that the game is

narrated in Inupiaq, with English subtitles, is another reminder where

worlding authority lies here. Stories, even stories offered for sale on the

Internet, belong to storytellers, who share them, or not, in practices of

situated worlding. The conditions for sharing stories must not be set

by raiders, academic or otherwise.68 That does not mean the game is re-

stricted to native commentators in native places for native audiences in

a perverse caricature of a reservation. It does mean the terms of telling,

listening, and playing have been relocated decisively.

“Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna) is the first game developed in col-

laboration with the Inupiat, an Alaska Native people. Play as a young

Inupiat girl and an arctic fox as they set out to find the source of the

eternal blizzard which threatens the survival of everything they have

ever known.”69 No one acts alone; connections and corridors are practical

and material, even if also fabulous, located in what Anglophones tend to

dismiss as the spirit world. The girl Nuna’s personal courage and skills

are also fundamental. These are the arts of living on a damaged planet

(Anna Tsing’s term). Never Alone might be played in a string figure pat-

tern with Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home.

Game makers define the new genre “world games” as taking place

inside ongoing indigenous stories. Makers of Never Alone (Kisima In-

gitchuna) include Gloria O’Neill, the president and chief executive of the

Cook Inlet Tribal Council; dozens of advisers and elders from the Alaska

Native community; Alan Gershenfeld, cofounder of E-line Media; E-Line

creative director Sean Vesce; the design team’s studio in Seattle; young

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88 c h a p t e r t h r e e

and old people playing the game; and a shared sense of contemporary ur-

gency for the lands and waters with their human and other-than-human

beings. “O’Neill said she loved the chance to participate in the video

game because the council could be a codeveloper in the process—and

because no Native American group had ever played such a role in the

history of the video game industry.”70

The sympoiesis of Never Alone has many threads, and one of them is

hard for most modernist people, namely the symanimagenic richness of

the stories and the game. The girl Nuna and her arctic fox companion go

from the home village to face the unprecedented blizzard, find what is

causing it, and save the people and the land. Helping each other, girl and

fox learn to traverse many obstacles, and even to swim in the belly of a

whale, finally escaping into the sky through the blowhole. Those kinds of

sym linkages and fabled travels are not an ontological or epistemological

problem, or at least not much of one. But the presence and agency of

multiple spirit helpers are absolutely central to this worlding, to these

stories, and to this sympoiesis in the Arctic of the Anthropocene. Digital

information system ontologies, spirit helpers, and biocultural girls and

foxes have to play an agile string figure game seriously for “never alone”

to have its full meaning.

Working with Brazilian Amerindian hunters, with whom he learned

to theorize the radical conceptual realignment he called multinaturalism

and perspectivism, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro wrote, “Animism is the

only sensible version of materialism.”71 I am not talking about people like

me—or kids like Nuna—“believing” in the spirit world. Belief is nei-

ther an indigenous nor a “chthulucenean” category. Relentlessly mired

in both internecine and colonizing disputes of Christianity, including

its scholarly and civic secular forms, the category of belief is tied to doc-

trine, profession, confession, and taxonomies of errors. That is, believ-

ing is not sensible.72 I am talking about material semiotics, about prac-

tices of worlding, about sympoiesis that is not only symbiogenetic, but

is always a sensible materialism. The sensible materialisms of involution-

ary momentum are much more innovative than secular modernisms will

allow. Stories for living in the Chthulucene demand a certain suspension

of ontologies and epistemologies, holding them lightly, in favor of more

venturesome, experimental natural histories. Without inhabiting sym-

animagenic sensible materialism, with all its pushes, pulls, affects, and

attachments, one cannot play Never Alone; and the resurgence of this

and other worlds might depend on learning to play.

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S y m p o i e s i s 89

But, continuing to die early and often in Never Alone, I have not for-

gotten that spirit helpers favor their kin. Animism cannot be donned

like a magic cape by visitors. Making kin in the ongoing Chthulucene will

be more difficult than that, and even the unwilling heirs of colonizers are

poorly qualified to set conditions for recognition of kinship. Plus, many

contemporary Inuit, including those committed to cultural renewal, are

wary of animism in their own heritage. Staying with the trouble, yearn-

ing toward resurgence, requires inheriting hard histories, for everybody,

but not equally and not in the same ways.

Navajo Weaving: Cosmological Performance,

Mathematical Rhythm, Navajo-Churro Sheep, Hózhó

Black Mesa, on it life.

There will be life again, this is what they say.

For this reason they are weaving.73

For my last model system for sympoiesis, in risky propositions I return

to fibers, linking the Crochet Coral Reef to Navajo weaving. Navajo weav-

ing is practiced all over the Navajo Nation, but I will emphasize the weav-

ers of Black Mesa, their sheep, and their alliances.74 It would be a serious

category mistake to call Navajo weaving “art science activism,” which

was a comfortable enough name for the Crochet Coral Reef. Besides by-

passing robust and precise Diné namings, both the categories “art” and

“science” continue to do colonizing work in this context. However, it

would also be a serious category error to fence Navajo weaving off from

ongoing mathematical, cosmological, and creative practice that never

fit ongoing colonial definitions of “traditional.” Like the Crochet Coral

Reef, Navajo weaving, especially with the wool of Churro sheep, ties peo-

ple to animals through patterns of care and response-ability in blasted

places of excess death and threatened ongoingness. As in the Crochet

Coral Reef, the play of collective making and personal invention is every-

where in Navajo fiber work. Both the Crochet Coral Reef and Navajo

weaving exist in a modernizing ecology of gendered and commodifying

structures that elevate ”art” over “craft.” Both the Crochet Coral Reef

and Navajo weaving are done mainly by women, but men also figure in

the webs of thinkers/makers.75 Both the Crochet Coral Reef and Navajo

weaving perform worlds with mathematical vitality that remains invisi-

ble in the doxa of scholarship on women’s fiber practices in both settler

and colonized indigenous production. Finally, attuned to a sympoiesis

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of practical coalitions, both the Crochet Coral Reef and Navajo weaving

are at the heart of thinking/making for more livable politics and ecol-

ogies in the times of burning and extraction called the Anthropocene

and Capitalocene. In face-to-face and hand-to-hand entanglements, the

Great Barrier Reef and Black Mesa are crocheted and woven together in

cosmological performances to animate the tentacular Chthulucene of a

Thousand Names.

A refrain from Navajo prayers often accompanies a weaver’s work:

“With me there is beauty” (shil hózhó); “in me there is beauty” (shii’

hózhó); “from me beauty radiates” (shits’ áá d óó hózhó).76 Hózhó is a cen-

tral concept in Navajo cosmology and daily practice. Usual translations

into English are “beauty,” “harmony,” and “order”; but I think a better

3.8. Navajo rug, Two Gray Hills. Weaver unknown.

Photograph by Donna Haraway. Purchased by Rusten

Hogness’s father, John Hogness, in the Navajo Nation

in the 1960s.

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translation would emphasize right relations of the world, including hu-

man and nonhuman beings, who are of the world as its storied and dy-

namic substance, not in the world as a container. Disorder, often figured

in the doings of Coyote, disrupts right relations, which must be restored

in ceremony and daily life for proper living to be again possible, for the

person to be restored in hózhó to the People. For the Diné, greed is the

greatest source of disorder; it destroys right relations at their root.

Weaving is a useful practice, to be sure, and an economic one; but,

fundamentally, weaving is also cosmological performance, knotting

proper relationality and connectedness into the warp and weft of the

fabric.77 The geometric patterns of repetition and invention in weaving

are performances of Diné stories and knowledge; the patterns propose

and embody world-making and world-sustaining relations. The dynamic

patterning continues in contemporary weavings, many of which explore

new as well as inherited themes, colors, stories, and fibers.78 Weavings

are individual; they are made by a particular woman and embody her

style and sensibility, recognizable by knowledgeable members of the

community.79 Names of weavers and weavers’ lineages matter, but

weavings are not made to be possessed as property. Neither that nor

the entanglement of the creative personal and the cosmological is a con-

tradiction. The sensible order inherent in the storied cosmos of Changing

Woman, the Holy Twins, Spider Woman, and the other world-making

Holy People is the pattern for right living. Weaving is neither secular nor

religious; it is sensible. It performs and manifests the meaningful lived

connections for sustaining kinship, behavior, relational action—for

hózhó—for humans and nonhumans. Situated worlding is ongoing, nei-

ther traditional nor modern.

Navajo weaving relied especially on the so-called rough sheep brought

to the Americas by the Spanish in the sixteenth century and developed

by Navajo herders over a long time as a distinct kind of sheep, named

T’aa Dibei or Navajo-Churro sheep, who are particularly well adapted to

the lands of Diné bikéyah on the Colorado Plateau.80 In Western histori-

cal temporalities, Navajo matrifocal pastoralism and farming developed

in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with sheep as core compan-

ions for living and dying in hózhó. The art of weaving and care of Churro

sheep reciprocally enact Diné relations of natural and cosmic order.

The Diné endured two intense periods of efforts by U.S. officials to

exterminate their Churro sheep. The first such genocide, called Hwéeldi

and effected in 1863 under Kit Carson for the U.S. War Department,

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was the Long Walk of all the People who could be forcibly rounded up

from Dinetah and marched for hundreds of miles to Bosque Redondo

in New Mexico. The Hwéeldi followed a scorched-earth campaign led by

Carson against the Navajo. Killing of Navajo animals was a central act of

the removal. From the beginning, across the Southwest and West U.S.

modernizers saw Spanish-introduced stock as rough and unimproved.

Exterminating flocks, cutting down peach orchards, and forcing the re-

moval of people to Fort Sumner/Bosque Redondo were, in effect, normal

actions of U.S. colonizing officials pacifying and civilizing an unruly mo-

bile population. The correct name is attempted genocide. Full of suffer-

ing and death, this forced march was followed by four years in a prison

camp and then the walk back to their lands. The Hwéeldi is remembered

in the flesh of land and people; it is an “originary” trauma, of the kind

Toni Morrison understood in her novel Paradise.81

The Diné returned to the Navajo reservation on the Colorado Pla-

teau. Churro sheep had been carefully tended by people who escaped

Kit Carson’s soldiers in the deep canyons and remote areas of Dinetah,

including Big Mountain / Dzil ni Staa / Black Mesa. The boundaries of

the reservation extended gradually until the 1930s; and, despite the fail-

ure of the U.S. government after the Diné return from Bosque Redondo

to provide promised stock, sheep flocks grew much faster than the hu-

man population. This growth was partly driven by the trading post sys-

tem, which turned wool into blankets to realize value and bought these

blankets by the pound in a system of perpetual indebtedness. To obtain

basic necessities in this system of debt, the Navajo were forced to pro-

duce more and more wool from more and more sheep. The traders sold

the weavings in the art and tourist market, but purchased the women’s

weavings as if they were low-value raw wool. Despite the efforts of fede-

ral agents, most of the Diné continued to prefer multipurpose, hardy

Churro sheep to merinos and other “improved” breeds. Sheep, goats,

horses, and cattle were all part of the pattern of Navajo pastoralism,

ordered by complex clan and gender relationships. The animals and the

people made kin together.82 Sheep and goats were especially crucial for

women’s abilities to feed and provision their families, as well as to their

authority in the clans.

With intensifying erosion, severe grazing, and sustained drought,

by the 1930s the system was increasingly out of harmony, a condition

recognized by both whites and Navajos. The second intense efforts of

the U.S. government to exterminate Navajo-Churro sheep occurred in

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this context; like the first originary trauma, this lethal event can be nei-

ther forgotten nor effectively mourned. It bears evil fruit to this day.

Restoring the land, animals, and people to hózhó is an ongoing process

that continues to require continuous weaving. The colonial and capital-

ist structures of both exterminations have not been dismantled. The

first Churro sheep extermination was conducted by U.S. military men;

the second was also conducted by force, this time by U.S. progressive

agricultural authorities within the ideology and apparatus of the New

Deal. These officials worked within the ecological concept of carrying

capacity, the patriarchal colonial concepts of male-headed households,

and the modernizers’ concepts of progress. Without asking how colonial

economic structures like the unequal wool trade might be a significant

cause of both poverty and ecological damage and judging the erosion of

Navajo lands to be due to overstocking as a biological sort of fact, U.S.

government scientists in the Department of Agriculture and others in

1934 killed most of the women’s goats, the primary source of subsis-

tence meat for families. White-settler divisions of the world into nature

and culture split Navajo lifeways into colonial apparatuses of ecology

and economics, practiced by different sorts of scientific specialists who

could not systematically think even with each other, much less with

Navajo herders and weavers. In 1935, officials killed vast numbers of

sheep. Churro sheep, many known individually by their people, were

preferentially killed, often in front of their human families. Evident in

photographs, piles of bones from these animal murders were still prom-

inent in the 1970s; and people still dramatically narrated the trauma,

even describing particular animals in their flocks.

Following the killing of about a million sheep and goats (without sig-

nificant compensation to this day), stocking quotas were imposed, and

collective ownership of land was not recognized. The census by which

stock quotas and permits were allocated recognized only heads of house-

holds, who could not be married women, which was a major blow to Diné

matrifocal ways of ordering their relations with land, animals, and each

other. Transhumance was disrupted as land boundaries were redrawn

into Land Management Units, exacerbating erosion as both seasonal

and dynamic rain-pattern-sensitive movements for grazing became

difficult across such boundaries. Besides an act of scientific colonial

arrogance and culpable ignorance, the animal exterminations of the

1930s effected a profound decapitalization of the whole people, whose

existing poverty, itself linked to the consequences of the first Hwéeldi,

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was structurally intensified. With the failure to restore the health of

lands, waters, animals, and people in hózhó, balanced pastoralism was

not reconstructed; resurgence on the Colorado Plateau was wounded.

Stock levels and erosion remain a major problem, intensified by deep re-

sentment of forced controls, including colonial conceptual apparatuses

within the Navajo Nation.

In a crisis of drought and multispecies lifeways out of balance in the

1930s, the opportunity was missed to bring scientific ecological ideas like

carrying capacity into difficult but necessary conversation with Navajo

concepts and practices of hózhó. Neither carrying capacity nor hózhó is

a fixed, deterministic concept; both are relational, contextual, tuned to

some ways of living and dying and not others. It matters what concepts

think concepts, and vice versa; but in this case, colonial structures as-

sured that the important concepts would not be allowed to think each

other, would not be allowed perhaps to issue in something that did not

yet exist in thought for either people, but might be needed by both.

When one system of thinking and practice can only disparage and nul-

lify another in colonial recursions, there can be no sympoiesis and no

hózhó. The consequences of the failure to invent the needed decolonial

conversations ramifies into the present. Since this period, pastoralism

has not been able to support the Diné; and poverty is perpetuated by

the post–World War II wage-based economy in the context of extreme

under- and unemployment, federal subsidies, tourism, and income from

uranium and coal mining.83

However, there is also an extraordinary story of resurgence and par-

tial healing to be told, one that belongs to the Diné and their allies in

the ongoing Chthulucene and the ongoing Diné Bahane’ / Story of the

People / Navajo Creation Story. By 1970, only about 430 Navajo-Churro

sheep survived, scattered across the reservation. The traditional Diné

of Black Mesa and others had protected what sheep they could in re-

mote places. Other Churro sheep survived from a research population

studied from 1934 to 1967 at the Southwest Range and Sheep Breeding

Laboratory at Fort Wingate, New Mexico. When the research project

shut down, 165 Churro sheep were auctioned off in 1967 to a rancher

in Gonzales, California, who used them in a shoot-in-a-barrel safari en-

terprise for Hollywood notables. Besides their double coat, long fibers,

high-lanolin wool, ability to survive on scrubby pasture, and excellent

mothering skills by the ewes, Churro rams frequently have a double set

of horns that incite hunting fantasists to pay to turn them into tro-

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phies. The story of Navajo-Churro resurgence—with Navajo herders

and weavers; an Anglo scientist committed to Churro sheep and their

people; Navajo and Anglo students; Hispanic and Anglo ranchers; Tara-

humara/Rarámuri Indians of the Sierra Madre Occidental of northern

Mexico, who interbred Churro from the Navajo Sheep Project with their

own rough sheep to recover genetic diversity; activists on Black Mesa;

and more—begins at these crossroads. Over decades Diné herders nur-

tured remnant flocks in spite of the odds, and Buster Naegle, who had

taken over the ranch in Gonzales in 1970 to raise paint horses, donated

six ewes and two four-horned rams to Lyle McNeal, an animal scientist

then at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, as seed animals. In ensuing lifelong

coalitional work, McNeal founded the Navajo Sheep Project in 1977.84

The story of Navajo-Churro restoration is complexly tentacular and

fibrous, braided by many actors and full of obstacles as well as successes.

Collecting sheep on the reservation from Diné cooperating to help re-

build the flocks, Lyle McNeal donated some of the first rams born from

his seed flock in the 1980s to Women in Resistance on Black Mesa. Keep-

ing his nucleus flock and operations alive involved thirteen moves in

four states over twenty-five years with many adventures with the law,

especially private property law. With Diné Churro sheep herders and

weavers including Glenna Begay, Lena Nez, and others, Carol Halber-

stadt, a poet, activist, and lover of wool from Massachusetts, cofounded

Black Mesa Weavers for Life and Land as a fair trade cooperative as-

sociation to better the economic and social conditions of Black Mesa

Diné through supporting sheep herding, wool buys, and weaving.85 A

Navajo-Churro flock has been established at the Diné College in Tsaile,

Arizona, for teaching. Diné be’iína / The Navajo Lifeway was founded

in 1991 to nurture community-based partnerships to restore economy

and culture. The college hosts the Dibé be’iína / Sheep Is Life celebration

every summer.86 Churro are central to cultural renewal through weaving

and taking care of sheep. Reconnecting generations broken by board-

ing schools and forced stock exterminations and encouraging Navajo

language use among the young are also tied to these sheep.87 Kosher

Navajo-Churro sheep jerky, guard llamas, the American Livestock Breeds

Conservancy, the Navajo-Churro Sheep Association, the Agricultural Re-

search Service National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation, the

Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity, Two Grey Hills Trading Post,

the Teec Nos Pos Chapter and its regional wool-processing facility, the

Ganados del Valle Hispanic agricultural development corporation, Tierra

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Wool and Los Ojos Handweavers, the Crownpoint Auction, and Heifer

International are all involved in diverse configurations.88

Not least, the sheep themselves are active participants in the inter-

laced relational worlds. Like all sheep, they recognize hundreds of faces;

they know their people and their land.89 Weaving is cosmological perfor-

mance, relational worlding, with human and nonhuman fibers from the

Holy People, ordinary human beings, plants, soils, waters, and sheep.

The critters are critical to taking care of country, to environmental jus-

tice, to robust ecosystems for humans and nonhumans, to hózhó. It mat-

ters which beings recognize beings.

So the sheep lead back to Black Mesa and to a concluding sympoiesis

with the activists—the thinkers/makers—of the Black Mesa Water Coa-

lition (bmwc). Supporting the weavers, herders, and sheep of the region,

bmwc partners with Diné be’iína and holds wool buys; they even part-

ner with a sheep-farming outfit in Maine called Peace Fleece.90 bmwc is

thoroughly entangled with sheep and their people across damaged lands

and blasted histories. But my reason for tying the threads of cosmologi-

cal performance and continuous weaving together through bmwc is

grounded in coal, water, indigenous environmental justice movements,

and surging coalitions for Just Transition toward still possible worlds in

urgent times. Probably still possible. Barely still possible. Still possible if

we render each other capable of worlding and reworlding for flourishing.

I want to propose the Black Mesa Water Coalition as a sympoietic model

for learning to stay with the trouble together, for hózhó.

The bmwc was founded in 2001 by a group of young intertribal, inter-

ethnic people, mostly students at the time, committed to addressing

water depletion, natural resource exploitation, and health in Navajo

and Hopi communities.91 Quickly focusing on Peabody Energy, they

were central to the actions that closed down the Black Mesa Mine and

Mohave Generating Station in 2006. But that was the beginning, not

the end. The coalition sees Black Mesa as a critical place for learning

to transition out of coal-based economies and ecologies and into abun-

dant solar and other renewable power, situated on damaged lands, as a

needed practice for multispecies environmental justice. Black Mesa itself

is not just any place; within Navajo cosmology Black Mesa is the mother

encircled by the four sacred mountains. The waters are the mother’s

blood, and coal is her liver. That condensed Diné geo-anatomy is only an

indication of the corporeal relational cosmology of place that is utterly

illegible to Peabody Energy—and to settler colonialism more broadly,

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to this day. My colleague Anna Tsing talks about “worlds worth fighting

for”; Black Mesa is such a world.92

The bmwc’s Just Transition Initiative, beginning in 2005, is a com-

prehensive vision and practice for building on the strengths of local

people, culture, and land, in alliance with many partners, to make re-

surgence on Black Mesa and beyond a reality. Pilot projects for restoring

regional watersheds and for economic development, the vision and work

toward a Black Mesa Solar Project, the Food Security Project, the Navajo

Wool Market Project, the Green Economy Project, and the Climate Jus-

tice Solutions Project are all part of the bmwc’s work. These activists

aim to develop a strong regional, integrated environmental and social

justice movement led by indigenous communities and organizations, as

well as to ally with the worldwide Climate Justice Alliance.93 These are

big, important ideas and actions; these kinds of continuous weaving are

at the heart of staying with the trouble in a damaged world. Continuing

to be led by young adults within a multigenerational web, the bmwc

proposes the sort of resurgence that can face the originary, repeating

traumas of history without denial and without cynicism or despair. In

my idiom, the Black Mesa Water Coalition is a strong tentacle in the

surging Chthulucene.

Conclusion: Tying Off the Threads

We relate, know, think, world, and tell stories through and with other

stories, worlds, knowledges, thinkings, yearnings. So do all the other

critters of Terra, in all our bumptious diversity and category-breaking

speciations and knottings. Other words for this might be materialism,

evolution, ecology, sympoiesis, history, situated knowledges, cosmolog-

ical performance, science art worldings, or animism, complete with all

the contaminations and infections conjured by each of these terms. Crit-

ters are at stake in each other in every mixing and turning of the terran

compost pile. We are compost, not posthuman; we inhabit the humus-

ities, not the humanities. Philosophically and materially, I am a com-

postist, not a posthumanist. Critters—human and not—become-with

each other, compose and decompose each other, in every scale and reg-

ister of time and stuff in sympoietic tangling, in ecological evolutionary

developmental earthly worlding and unworlding.

This chapter began with Lynn Margulis’s proposition of symbiogene-

sis and segued into the biologies that make an extended evolutionary

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synthesis necessary to thinking well about multispecies living and dying

on earth at every scale of time and space. The involutionary momentum

of a vanishing bee and its faithful orchid enfolded the EcoEvoDevo biolo-

gies into four naturalsocial ecologies of a damaged planet. Actual places,

these are worlds worth fighting for; and each has nourished brave, smart,

generative coalitions of artists/scientists/activists across dangerous his-

torical divisions. The biologies, arts, and politics need each other; with

involutionary momentum, they entice each other to thinking/making in

sympoiesis for more livable worlds that I call the Chthulucene.94

Isabelle Stengers’s sense of cosmopolitics gives me courage.95 Includ-

ing human people, critters are in each other’s presence, or better, in-

side each other’s tubes, folds, and crevices, insides and outsides, and

not quite either. The decisions and transformations so urgent in our

times for learning again, or for the first time, how to become less deadly,

more response-able, more attuned, more capable of surprise, more able

to practice the arts of living and dying well in multispecies symbiosis,

sympoiesis, and symanimagenesis on a damaged planet, must be made

without guarantees or the expectation of harmony with those who are

not oneself—and not safely other, either. Neither One nor Other, that

is who we all are and always have been. All of us must become more on-

tologically inventive and sensible within the bumptious holobiome that

earth turns out to be, whether called Gaia or a Thousand Other Names.

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C H A P T E R 4

Making Kin Anthropocene, Capitalocene,

Plantationocene, Chthulucene

There is no question that anthropogenic processes have had planetary

effects, in inter/intra-action with other processes and species, for as

long as our species can be identified (a few tens of thousand years); and

agriculture has been huge (a few thousand years). Of course, from the

start the greatest planetary terraformers (and reformers) of all have

been and still are bacteria and their kin, also in inter/intra-action of

myriad kinds (including with people and their practices, technological

and otherwise).1 The spread of seed-dispersing plants millions of years

before human agriculture was a planet-changing development, and so

were many other revolutionary evolutionary ecological developmental

historical events.

People joined the bumptious fray early and dynamically, even before

they/we were critters who were later named Homo sapiens. But I think

the issues about naming relevant to the Anthropocene, Plantationocene,

or Capitalocene have to do with scale, rate/speed, synchronicity, and

complexity. The constant questions when considering systemic phe-

nomena have to be, When do changes in degree become changes in kind?

and What are the effects of bioculturally, biotechnically, biopolitically,

historically situated people (not Man) relative to, and combined with,

the effects of other species assemblages and other biotic/abiotic forces?

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No species, not even our own arrogant one pretending to be good indi-

viduals in so-called modern Western scripts, acts alone; assemblages of

organic species and of abiotic actors make history, the evolutionary kind

and the other kinds too.

But is there an inflection point of consequence that changes the name

of the “game” of life on earth for everybody and everything? It’s more

than climate change; it’s also extraordinary burdens of toxic chemistry,

mining, nuclear pollution, depletion of lakes and rivers under and above

ground, ecosystem simplification, vast genocides of people and other

critters, et cetera, et cetera, in systemically linked patterns that threaten

major system collapse after major system collapse after major system

collapse. Recursion can be a drag.

Anna Tsing in a recent paper called “Feral Biologies” suggests that the

inflection point between the Holocene and the Anthropocene might be

the wiping out of most of the refugia from which diverse species assem-

blages (with or without people) can be reconstituted after major events

(like desertification, or clear cutting, or, or, . . . ).2 This is kin to the

World-Ecology Research Network coordinator Jason Moore’s arguments

that cheap nature is at an end; cheapening nature cannot work much

longer to sustain extraction and production in and of the contempo-

rary world because most of the reserves of the earth have been drained,

burned, depleted, poisoned, exterminated, and otherwise exhausted.3

Vast investments and hugely creative and destructive technology can

drive back the reckoning, but cheap nature really is over. Anna Tsing

argues that the Holocene was the long period when refugia, places of

refuge, still existed, even abounded, to sustain reworlding in rich cul-

tural and biological diversity. Perhaps the outrage meriting a name like

Anthropocene is about the destruction of places and times of refuge for

people and other critters. I along with others think the Anthropocene is

more a boundary event than an epoch, like the K-Pg boundary between

the Cretaceous and the Paleogene.4 The Anthropocene marks severe dis-

continuities; what comes after will not be like what came before. I think

our job is to make the Anthropocene as short/thin as possible and to

cultivate with each other in every way imaginable epochs to come that

can replenish refuge.

Right now, the earth is full of refugees, human and not, without

refuge.

So I think a big new name, actually more than one name, is war-

ranted—hence Anthropocene, Plantationocene,5 and Capitalocene (An-

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M a k i n g K i n 101

dreas Malm’s and Jason Moore’s term before it was mine).6 I also insist

that we need a name for the dynamic ongoing symchthonic forces and

powers of which people are a part, within which ongoingness is at stake.

Maybe, but only maybe, and only with intense commitment and collabo-

rative work and play with other terrans, flourishing for rich multispecies

assemblages that include people will be possible. I am calling all this the

Chthulucene—past, present, and to come.7 These real and possible time-

spaces are not named after sf writer H. P. Lovecraft’s misogynist racial-

nightmare monster Cthulhu (note spelling difference), but rather after

the diverse earthwide tentacular powers and forces and collected things

with names like Naga, Gaia, Tangaroa (burst from water-full Papa), Terra,

Haniyasu-hime, Spider Woman, Pachamama, Oya, Gorgo, Raven, A’aku-

luujjusi, and many many more. “My” Chthulucene, even burdened with

its problematic Greek-ish rootlets, entangles myriad temporalities and

spatialities and myriad intra-active entities-in-assemblages—including

the more-than-human, other-than-human, inhuman, and human-as-

humus. Even rendered in an American English-language text like this

one, Naga, Gaia, Tangaroa, Medusa, Spider Woman, and all their kin are

some of the many thousand names proper to a vein of sf that Lovecraft

could not have imagined or embraced—namely, the webs of speculative

fabulation, speculative feminism, science fiction, and scientific fact.8 It

matters which stories tell stories, which concepts think concepts. Math-

ematically, visually, and narratively, it matters which figures figure fig-

ures, which systems systematize systems.

All the thousand names are too big and too small; all the stories are

too big and too small. As Jim Clifford taught me, we need stories (and

theories) that are just big enough to gather up the complexities and keep

the edges open and greedy for surprising new and old connections.9

One way to live and die well as mortal critters in the Chthulucene

is to join forces to reconstitute refuges, to make possible partial and

robust biological-cultural-political-technological recuperation and re-

composition, which must include mourning irreversible losses. Thom

van Dooren and Vinciane Despret taught me that.10 There are so many

losses already, and there will be many more. Renewed generative flour-

ishing cannot grow from myths of immortality or failure to become-with

the dead and the extinct. There is a lot of work for Orson Scott Card’s

Speaker for the Dead.11 And even more for Ursula Le Guin’s worlding in

Always Coming Home.

I am a compostist, not a posthumanist: we are all compost, not post-

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human. The boundary that is the Anthropocene/Capitalocene means

many things, including that immense irreversible destruction is really

in train, not only for the 11 billion or so people who will be on earth near

the end of the twenty-first century, but for myriads of other critters too.

(The incomprehensible but sober number of around 11 billion will only

hold if current worldwide birth rates of human babies remain low; if

they rise again, all bets are off.) The edge of extinction is not just a meta-

phor; system collapse is not a thriller. Ask any refugee of any species.

The Chthulucene needs at least one slogan (of course, more than one);

still shouting “Cyborgs for Earthly Survival,” “Run Fast, Bite Hard,” and

“Shut Up and Train,” I propose “Make Kin Not Babies!” Making—and

recognizing—kin is perhaps the hardest and most urgent part.12 Femi-

nists of our time have been leaders in unraveling the supposed natural

necessity of ties between sex and gender, race and sex, race and nation,

class and race, gender and morphology, sex and reproduction, and re-

production and composing persons (our debts here are due especially to

Melanesians, in alliance with Marilyn Strathern and her ethnographer

kin).13 If there is to be multispecies ecojustice, which can also embrace

diverse human people, it is high time that feminists exercise leadership

in imagination, theory, and action to unravel the ties of both genealogy

and kin, and kin and species.

Bacteria and fungi abound to give us metaphors; but, metaphors

aside (good luck with that!), we have a mammalian job to do, with our

biotic and abiotic sympoietic collaborators, colaborers. We need to make

kin symchthonically, sympoetically. Who and whatever we are, we need

to make-with—become-with, compose-with—the earth-bound (thanks

for that term, Bruno Latour–in-Anglophone-mode).14

We, human people everywhere, must address intense, systemic ur-

gencies; yet so far, as Kim Stanley Robinson put it in 2312, we are living

in times of “The Dithering” (in this sf narrative, lasting from 2005 to

2060—too optimistic?), a “state of indecisive agitation.”15 Perhaps the

Dithering is a more apt name than either the Anthropocene or Capita-

locene! The Dithering will be written into earth’s rocky strata, indeed al-

ready is written into earth’s mineralized layers. Symchthonic ones don’t

dither; they compose and decompose, which are both dangerous and

promising practices. To say the least, human hegemony is not a sym-

chthonic affair. As ecosexual artists Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle

say on a sticker they had made for me, composting is so hot!

My purpose is to make “kin” mean something other/more than en-

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tities tied by ancestry or genealogy. The gently defamiliarizing move

might seem for a while to be just a mistake, but then (with luck) appear

as correct all along. Kin making is making persons, not necessarily as in-

dividuals or as humans. I was moved in college by Shakespeare’s punning

between kin and kind—the kindest were not necessarily kin as family;

making kin and making kind (as category, care, relatives without ties

by birth, lateral relatives, lots of other echoes) stretch the imagination

and can change the story. Marilyn Strathern taught me that “relatives”

in British English were originally “logical relations” and only became

“family members” in the seventeenth century—this is definitely among

the factoids I love.16 Go outside English, and the wild multiplies.

I think that the stretch and recomposition of kin are allowed by the

fact that all earthlings are kin in the deepest sense, and it is past time to

practice better care of kinds-as-assemblages (not species one at a time).

Kin is an assembling sort of word. All critters share a common “flesh,”

laterally, semiotically, and genealogically. Ancestors turn out to be very

interesting strangers; kin are unfamiliar (outside what we thought was

family or gens), uncanny, haunting, active.17

Too much for a tiny slogan, I know! Still, try. Over a couple hundred

years from now, maybe the human people of this planet can again be

numbered 2 or 3 billion or so, while all along the way being part of in-

creasing well-being for diverse human beings and other critters as means

and not just ends.

So, make kin, not babies! It matters how kin generate kin.18

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C H A P T E R 5

Awash in Urine DES and Premarin

in Multispecies Response-ability

Cyborg Littermates

Cyborgs are kin, whelped in the litter of post–World War II informa-

tion technologies and globalized digital bodies, politics, and cultures

of human and not-human sorts. Cyborgs are not machines in just any

sense, nor are they machine-organism hybrids. In fact, they are not hy-

brids at all. They are, rather, imploded entities, dense material semiotic

“things”—articulated string figures of ontologically heterogeneous, his-

torically situated, materially rich, virally proliferating relatings of partic-

ular sorts, not all the time everywhere, but here, there, and in between,

with consequences. Particular sorts of historically situated machines

signaled by the words information and system play their part in cyborg

living and dying. Particular sorts of historically situated organisms, sig-

naled by the idioms of labor systems, energetics, and communication,

play their part. Finally, particular sorts of historically situated human

beings, becoming-with the practices and artifacts of technoscience, play

their part. Characterized by partial connections, the parts do not add up

to any whole; but they do add up to worlds of nonoptional, stratified,

webbed, and unfinished living and dying, appearing and disappearing.

Cyborgs are constitutively full of multiscalar, multitemporal, multima-

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A w a s h i n U r i n e 105

terial critters of both living and nonliving persuasions.1 Cyborgs matter

in terran worlding.

But cyborgs are critters in a queer litter, not the Chief Figure of Our

Times. Queer here means not committed to reproduction of kind and

having bumptious relations with futurities. Irreducible to cyborgs, the

litter interests me, the particular kin and kind nursed on the fluid and

solid effluvia of terra in the late twentieth and early twenty-first cen-

turies. I return to “my” cyborg in this litter in order to relay the string

figures—the speculative fabulations, the scientific facts, the science fic-

tions, and the speculative feminisms—to whatever sorts of tentacular

grippers will receive the pattern to keep living and dying well possible

in “our times.” Made up of an aging California dog, pregnant mares on

the western Canadian prairies, human women who came to be known

as des daughters, lots of menopausal U.S. women, and assorted other

players in the story of “synthetic” and “natural” estrogens, the litter

for this chapter is decanted from bodies awash in a particular pungent

fluid—urine. Waste and resource, out-of-place urine from particular

female bodies is the salty ocean needed for my tale. Leaks and eddies

are everywhere. These leaks and eddies might help open passages for a

praxis of care and response—response-ability—in ongoing multispecies

worlding on a wounded terra.

DES for Hot Peppers

In October 2011 my twelve-year-old canine friend and lifelong sports

partner Cayenne, aka Hot Pepper, started taking a notorious, industri-

ally produced, nonsteroidal, synthetic estrogen called des (diethylstil-

besterol) to deal with urinary leakage.2 Perhaps I should not write she

“started taking,” but, rather, “I started feeding her as an occasional late-

night treat, following her last pee, a luscious, slippery, Earth Balance®

margarine-coated capsule of des.” Plato gave us the tones in the inex-

tricable ambiguities of his pharmakon: cure and poison; care, curare;

remedy, toxin; treat, threat. Aging spayed bitches like Cayenne and post-

menopausal women like me often could use a hormonal tightening of

slack smooth muscles in the urethra to keep socially unacceptable leaks

plugged up. The term estrogen deficiency is a tough one for feminists

like me, marinated at a young age in the women’s health movements

and feminist science studies, to pronounce. But the fact is that a few

extra dabs of estrogens do some handy jobs in aging mammalian female

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bodies—at a price, of course, in many currencies of living and dying.

Granted, the adrenal glands still secrete some estrogens for those of us

with missing or dried-up ovaries, but output is pretty low and smooth

muscle can get pretty flaccid.

But giving this beloved, elder, nonreproducing dog to whom I am re-

sponsible even very low-dose and infrequent diethylstilbesterol caused

acute des Anxiety Syndrome in me. My blood pressure rose higher than

the high canine blood pressure that motivated changing urine-plugging

drugs for Cayenne in the first place. Even if I could keep my critique of

biocapital in a sealed flask, my feminist biopolitical juices started oozing

from every pore, leaking all over my obligations to our dog. Rusten, my

male human spouse, was drawn deeply into this mammalian female well

of worry, and not just because neither one of us much wanted to sleep

in the urinary wet spot if estrogen-deprived urethral smooth muscle

were left unattended in the nocturnal hours in our species-queer con-

nubial bed. Cross-species kinship has consequences. Our now shared

des Anxiety Syndrome had to be treated immediately by our excellent

primary care veterinarian, who did the service of presenting us with sci-

entific studies and her own history of practice with low-dose, minimum-

frequency des for elder dogs; this was the “talking cure” we needed—a

high dose of reason, evidence, and story, taken weekly with uncanny

and unruly molecules. Still, my vet herself is too young to have been

infected with my kind of terror of des. Besides, she can’t possibly be

the daughter of a woman who took des sometime between 1940 and

1971, when a report in the New England Journal of Medicine tied des to a

nasty vaginal clear cell adenocarcinoma in girls and young women who

had been exposed to this drug in utero. Otherwise, my vet would surely

do more than remember what I am afraid of. A talking cure might not

be enough.

Even though a double-blind study done at the University of Chicago

in the early 1950s showed no benefit from des for sustaining pregnan-

cies in women, and even though by the late 1960s six of seven leading

human gynecological textbooks stated that des did not prevent mis-

carriages, the drug continued to be prescribed frequently over three

decades for averting miscarriage and also for an almost comical (except

it was not funny) host of other “indications,” both on and off label. Ul-

timately, probably 2 million women in the United States alone took des

during pregnancy. Probably every reader of this chapter knows some

of the offspring of these pregnancies, but may or may not know their

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often hidden suffering. I do—both people and their suffering, or a little

bit of it—and the extraordinary psychologist-scholar-friend who told

me about her des history when I told her about Cayenne performed

just the generative acts of “becoming-with” that have occupied my soul

since writing When Species Meet, or really since the “Cyborg Manifesto.”

My human friend, this human des daughter, was already an avid, if dog-

allergic, admirer of Cayenne; she is one of the humans who, when she

visits, induces enthusiastic canine play-solicitation performances from

my very nonpromiscuous dog. But suddenly and oddly, their unexpected

des kinship threw them transversally, not genealogically, into a litter

together differently. Separated by allergies, they were joined in the flesh

by a disreputable nonsteroidal estrogen. It is clear to me that human

Sheila has assigned herself to keep a baleful queer sisterly eye on those

gelcaps I give dog Cayenne. That kindly critical lateral eye will comple-

ment the regular blood tests Cayenne will now have to endure to keep

track of the health of her blood-forming cells and immune functions.3 A

good sphincter can be hard to find.

For very good reasons tied to the history of the women’s health move-

ments and to action, finally, by agencies like the U.S. Food and Drug Ad-

ministration, these days des is a controlled substance you can get only

(or mainly) for nonhumans. In the 1990s, the only approved indication

for des in human beings was treatment of advanced prostate cancer

in men and of advanced breast cancer in postmenopausal women, and

that use has been superseded. The last U.S. manufacturer of des, Eli

Lilly, stopped making and marketing the no-longer-profitable drug in

1997. That’s why Cayenne and I found ourselves at a homeopathic and

compounding pharmacy in 2011.4

Diethylstilbesterol was first synthesized in 1938 in a laboratory of the

Oxford University in the waning heroic days of the history of endocri-

nology. Those were the days when one might still find eminent biochem-

ists prowling around nonhuman animal slaughter floors collecting many

pounds of ovaries, pancreas, testes, adrenal glands, kidneys, pituitaries

(try collecting pounds or kilograms of pituitary gland!), and other organs

and tissues from many species to ferret back to the lab to extract and

then chemically and physiologically characterize the first few precious

micrograms of natural steroids or other potent hormones. Stalking the

newly dead in graves of the European Renaissance for human bodies to

dissect has a long uncanny laboratory history into the present. Current-

day laboratory mice and their archived and curated parts would probably

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be our best informants for today’s stories of organs without bodies and

life after death. The 1930s were still the days when biochemical labora-

tories were accustomed to distilling tiny amounts of chemical gold from

the dross of vats of urine and other bodily fluids, human and not.

des did not come from these material sources, but it inhabits the

same cross-hatched histories, where what counts as natural or artificial

was (and is) constantly morphing in the study and production of things

called “sex hormones.” No wonder biologist feminists like me find our

politics and psyches relentlessly and variously material in ways that Fou-

cault hardly dreamed of. It’s those laboratory wet spots in nighttime

knowledge making that get feminists roused.

So in my town, you purchase the expensive, carcinogenic, immune-

suppressing, anemia-inducing, smooth muscle–plumping molecules

known as des in snowy powder form in gelcaps from a homeopathic and

compounding pharmacy, Lauden Integrative Pharmacy. “Compounding

pharmacy” sounds so early twentieth-century to my ear, but I can see

that when Big Pharma no longer makes or sells a still useful molecule, one

that is no better than she should be, the up-to-the-minute, seemingly

old-fashioned drugstore gets the leavings. Lauden Integrative Pharmacy

sells lots of homeopathic substances for both human and more-than-

human animals. I paid for Cayenne’s des capsules at a counter draped

in the colors, posters, and icons of “Western” and “Eastern” alternative

medicine, both ancient and modern.

To say this scene is emblematic of the mixed structures and affects

of biomedical technoscience is an understatement. Lauden formulates

many of the chemotherapeutic and other drugs prescribed by the vete-

rinary specialist clinic where Cayenne and I were under the care of a fine

consulting internist and cardiac specialist for her early mitral valve dis-

ease (mvd). mvd is the reason my fast and sporty Hot Pepper’s mode-

rately high blood pressure was not acceptable, and so a new diagnosis of

mvd is the reason we changed prescriptions from a drug she had gob-

bled happily for a few years, called Propolin® (ppa or phenylpropanola-

mine, “for oral use in dogs only”), to des. ppa does a fine job pumping

up urethral smooth muscle and keeping urine in its hygienic reservoirs

for properly timed release in assigned places. But unfortunately ppa is

indiscriminate and tightens arterial smooth muscle too, thereby raising

blood pressure—not a good idea in dogs with early heart disease. For

better and for worse, estrogens are more discriminating in the tissues

they home in on. Anyone with breasts—or breast cancer—knows this.

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But it’s the multispecies business in the compounding pharmacy that

really drew my attention. When I get an anxiety syndrome, I am thrown

into compulsive scholarly antics, and des Anxiety Syndrome was no ex-

ception. Urine, urethras, damaged heart valves, “abnormal pregnancy

outcomes,” and cancer-ravaged breasts and uteruses have provided the

cross-species organic stuff of the story. So far, my tale has emphasized

a litter of critters made up of dogs, humans, and slaughtered animals,

mainly pigs, sheep, and cows. It’s that last category that will take me

into the last stanza of the des recitative and plump out the litter a bit

before we get to my next starring estrogen molecules for remaking kin

and kind.

des was the molecule used in the first experimental, scientific demon-

stration of successful hormonal growth promotion in cattle in the his-

tory of those animal-human relations called agriculture.5 Although in

1947 researchers at Purdue University demonstrated des-induced growth

promotion in heifers, Purdue did not pursue patent protection for the

cattle and sheep work that its investigators carried out. These agricul-

tural scientists used des because implants had already been formulated

for use in poultry, those feathered workhorses in so much of the his-

tory of factory farming. The fda banned des for growth promotion in

chickens and lambs in 1959 and in all animal feed in 1979. But from 1954

to the early 1970s des was used widely as a growth promoter in the

beef industry. Agricultural industry and university agricultural science

(especially Iowa State College) were close partners in research for this

use. The agricultural-industrial complex was in its postwar adolescent

growth spurt. Iowa State and W. Burroughs filed for a patent on oral

des for cattle in 1953, granted in 1956. In 1972 the fda removed oral des

from the market for use in cattle (1973 for implants). des residues found

in bovine livers and human des daughters converged to take the drug off

the legal agricultural market, although stories of illegal use still surface.

But the core story here is not des as such; the big story is the relentless

rise of hormonal growth promoters of the next molecular generations

that are integral to the ecosystem-destroying, human and animal labor-

transforming, multispecies soul-mutilating, epidemic-friendly, corn

monocrop-promoting, cross-species heartbreaking, feedlot cattle indus-

tries. All of a sudden, I cannot forget that in 1947 heifers too became des

daughters, and the bovine sons followed in droves. Cyborg’s enhanced

litter is outsized. Daughter of a dog family known for prowess in cattle

herding before the times of des, my dog dribbling urine spots leads in-

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exorably to feedlots, slaughterhouses, and unmet agricultural animal,

human, and ecological well-being and advocacy obligations around the

world. Response-ability yet to come, again. In companion species world-

ing, becoming-with makes strong demands on the littermates.

Conjugating Kin with Premarin

Conjugating is about yoking together; conjugal love is yoked love; con-

jugated chemical compounds join together two or more constituents.

People conjugate in public spaces; they yoke themselves together trans-

versally and across time and space to make significant things happen.

Students conjugate verbs to explore the yoked inflections of person,

number, gender, kind, voice, mood, position, tense, and aspect in a field

of material-semiotic meaning making. To learn about recursive yoking,

conjugate “to conjugate.” Now, do that with estrogens. Conjunctivitis is

an irritation of the mucous membrane lining the inner surface of the

eyelid. What might conjunctivitis mean in the odoriferous fluid mixtures

of conjugated estrogens, such as the motley of naturally occurring but

nonhuman estrogens purified from pregnant mare’s urine to make very

profitable pills for Big Pharma? And also to give lots of human women

the means to decide whether or not they will bear children, endure hot

flashes, lose bone mass, or add to or subtract from their risk of cancer

or heart disease? Or, to find that “our bodies ourselves” includes mares

and their foals (and a few stallions), with all the political and ethical con-

sequences of that conjugation? Conjugated estrogens are about yoking

molecules and species to each other in consequential ways. In the Moby

Thesaurus, one mouth-watering synonym of conjugate is conglobulate;

that is what I will try to do with horses, humans, urine, and hearts con-

jugated with Premarin.

Once upon a time, when I thought I needed estrogen during meno-

pause—to stave off familial heart disease, of all things—I relied on the

animal-industrial complex, repeated pregnancies and long-term con-

finement of mares, and natural conjugated estrogens called Premarin

(compounded with a progestin into hrt, Hormone Replacement Ther-

apy) extracted from equine urine.6 Now I give my dog a synthetic es-

trogen with a terrible human and bovine history to control her urinary

incontinence, for the sake of her heart—and her indoor way of life. (It

works.) Oh, Cayenne, dog of my heart, a human taste for irony will not

get us through these companion species relationships, these meals of

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situated molecules and required response-ability yet to come. Somehow,

a feminist science studies scholar and lifelong animal lover, my meno-

pausal self failed to know much about the pregnant mares and their

disposable foals.

Did I forget, never know, not look—or just not care? What kind of

conjunctivitis was that? Social movements for animal flourishing had

noticed those horses and made a very effective fuss about it, and these

movements were full of feminist women and men. Why not me too? Was

it only after it turned out that hrt probably harmed my heart rather

than guarded it that the horses came into my ken? I don’t remember.

Marx understood all about how privileged positions block knowledge

of the conditions of one’s privilege. So did the innovators of feminist

standpoint theory, the founders of the women’s health movements, and

the thinkers and activists shaping movements for animal flourishing—

that is, my friends, comrades, and colleagues—well before I was in

menopause. Still, I managed not to know about the conditions of work

for those adult horses for a very long time, much less know about the

fate of the excess foals. I ate equine conjugated estrogens; I drank pooled

mares’ urine, literally; but I did not conjugate well with the horses

themselves. Shame is a prod to lifelong rethinking and recrafting one’s

accountabilities!

A collaboration between a Canadian pharmaceutical company and

an endocrinologist at McGill University led to the development in 1930

of the first orally active, water-soluble, conjugated estrogen, called Em-

menin®.7 Emmenin® was extracted from the urine of Canadian women

in late stages of their pregnancies, but supply considerations set the

researchers and company to looking for a more copious and available

mammalian source. Even if they were paid and desperate, pregnant

women would not stay attached to collection bags for long, nor did

they pee nearly enough to supply their sisters with hormones. German

researchers at the time were studying water-soluble estrogens in the

urine of pregnant zebras and horses in the Berlin zoo, and by 1939 the

pharmaceutical company Ayerst had established a method to get a sta-

ble concentrate from pregnant mares’ urine. The result of an extraction

and concentration process with more than one hundred steps, Premarin

was ready to be marketed in Canada in 1941. The horses, confined in

stalls for months at a time attached to collection bags, were originally

contract workers on Quebec farms, and the product was manufactured

in Montreal. Eventually, high demand issuing from the growing practice

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of prescribing hormones for menopause, coupled with the history of

successive buyouts among the pharmaceutical companies, resulted in

production moving to the expansive Canadian western prairies, with a

new processing plant in Manitoba.

About a decade after I started menopause in the late 1980s, by 1997

Premarin became the number-one prescribed drug in the United States,

reaching the sales figure of $2 billion by 2002.8 Used in over three thou-

sand scientific investigations by 2011, this drug complex remains the

most studied estrogen therapy in the world. Definitively by 2002, strong

data gathered in the context of the Women’s Health Initiative showed

that not only did estrogens not prevent heart disease; they were also

positively correlated with increased incidences of blood clots, strokes,

heart attack, and breast cancer. Sales of Premarin dropped fast—by a

lot. Redundant equine workers went to slaughter—lots of them. Depen-

dent contract farmers were put out of business. Drug companies scram-

bled. Women worried; I know.

However reduced in volume, harvesting of pregnant mare urine re-

mains a worldwide business, and Premarin remains a much-prescribed

and profitable product. Today Pfizer, which bought out Wyeth-Ayerest

in 2009, contracts with about two dozen horse ranches, mainly in west-

ern Canada. In 2003, there were over four hundred Wyeth-Ayerest con-

tracted pmu farms in Manitoba. With industry reorganization in the

wake of the crisis in Premarin prescriptions after 2002, profit per pmu

mare went up between 2003 and 2007—a lot. The North American

Equine Ranching Information Council (naeric) is a committed, sophis-

ticated industry group that presents in its best light the history and

contemporary practices of pmu farming.9 The naeric website includes

a “four seasons” description, with beautiful pictures, of the annual life

cycle of the horses on idyllic-looking farms said to be thoroughly regu-

lated and inspected for animal welfare. This site narrates that, from au-

tumn through early spring, mares are confined in their own “comfort-

able” stalls attached to a “lightweight, flexible pouch that is suspended

from the ceiling by rubber suspension lines” that allow a full range of

motion, including lying down. Horses have access to sufficient water—

a major change from the period before reform, when the demand for

concentrated urine trumped equine thirst, with predictable medical

consequences for the horses. Put together by international veterinary

and welfare groups which inspect equine ranches, and available online

from the naeric site, the “Equine Veterinarians’ Consensus Report on

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the Care of Horses on pmu Ranches” concluded that numerous reforms

after an investigation in 1995 led to major improvements in the lives of

the horses. “The public should be assured that the care and welfare of

the horses involved in the production of an estrogen replacement medi-

cation is good, and is closely monitored.”10

Onsite analysis on several farms by HorseAid in 1999 found condi-

tions much less satisfactory than naeric claims, even if one grants that

the guidelines, which leave the question of exercise to the discretion of

pressed farmers with no indoor exercise facilities in a northern plains

winter, are good enough for horses.11 Confined mares stand around too

much, eat too much, get fat, and develop bad feet—sounds like a lot of

working females across species to me. With very little room to make

costly changes in care practices, contract farmers are at the low end of

the financial food chain generated by pregnant mares’ urine, just as they

are for broiler chickens or other animal industrial products.

By 2011, about 2000 naeric foals per year were born on twenty-six

pmu farms, including draft, light horse, and sport breeds. The foals

were sold mostly to families and show barns. About forty-nine thousand

horses have been registered with naeric since 1998. Better-bred foals

are more profitable, so fewer are slaughtered or enter the rescue and

adoption apparatus. These days, ranchers collecting pregnant mares’

urine “rely on selling foals as much as they rely upon the urine collected

from the pregnant mares. Many of these farms utilize websites and

forms of promotion identical to non-Premarin-related horse breeders,

and, in nearly all ways, are indistinguishable from the average breeder

of equines.”12

The reforms promoted by naeric came into being because of activist

animal rights, women’s health, and horse advocacy groups. Beginning

with a hands-on, on-site study in 1986, HorseAid was the first animal

rights organization to investigate conditions on pmu farms and the risks

to women from hrt medication, publishing its damning results first in

print in 1988 and then in 1994 on the Internet, with graphic images and

details about farm and industry practices and human medical data.13

In 1995, seven years after HorseAid’s 1988 report, naeric formed to

advocate for reform and humane treatment of pmu horses. But reform

was not and is not the ultimate goal for HorseAid or organizations like

the International Fund for Horses. Both groups continue to argue for

shutting down all pmu farming, where months-long confinement of

pregnant horses, however “comfortable” (i.e., in a box 8 feet wide by 3.5

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feet wide by 5 feet high for six months), and slaughtering mares who

fail to become pregnant, continue.14 The availability of a wider range of

laboratory-synthesized and plant-derived hormones makes arguments

to end pmu production harder to evade. Taking account of all pmu farms

in 2002, HorseAid estimated that about fifteen thousand “excess” foals

went to slaughter. Reflecting Premarin sales declines since 2002, cuts

in contracts to farms, and a more market-oriented foal production, the

number now is much lower, but could be zero.15

HorseAid was always clear about its advocacy both for women’s

health and the well-being of horses, and its reports also paid attention to

the difficulties of farms and farmers in an agribusiness system in which

making a living by farming has become brutal.That fact, of course, does

not address what would make raising horses on the northern prairies

viable for economic and ecological human-animal well-being, and that

should not be an idle goal.

Viral Response-ability

There is no innocence in these kin stories, and the accountabilities are

extensive and permanently unfinished. Indeed, responsibility in and for

the worldings in play in these stories requires the cultivation of viral

response-abilities, carrying meanings and materials across kinds in or-

der to infect processes and practices that might yet ignite epidemics of

multispecies recuperation and maybe even flourishing on terra in ordi-

nary times and places. Call that utopia; call that inhabiting the despised

places; call that touch; call that the rapidly mutating virus of hope, or

the less rapidly changing commitment to staying with the trouble. My

slogan from the 1980s, “Cyborgs for Earthly Survival,” still resonates, in

a cacophony of sound and fury emanating from a very big litter whelped

in shared but nonmimetic suffering and issuing in movements for flour-

ishing yet to come.

In my des story, tracking Cayenne’s urine spots to out-of-the-way

places brought us into a still-expanding conglobulation of interlinked

research, marketing, medical and veterinary, activist, agricultural, and

scholarly body- and subject-making apparatuses. Digital and molecular

species vied for attention with urethras and vaginas. Females in trouble

seemed to luxuriate everywhere; even the industrially synthesized mole-

cules seemed to respond to the lure of (always nonreproductive, in this

story) sexual tropisms, despite decades of astute feminist wariness of

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so-called sex hormones. Cyborgs laughed. Do cyborgs get mitral valve

disease or go through menopause? Of course they do, just like their kin.

The relations of intimate care yoking together one woman and one dog

rampaged virally into all sorts of publics. Sheer contagion. Companion

species infect each other all the time. Bodily ethical and political obliga-

tions are infectious, or they should be. Before my dog and I could get out

of the story, we were in the nonoptional company of—and accountable

to—heifers in labs, beef cattle in feedlots, pregnant women in all sorts

of places, daughters and sons and granddaughters and grandsons of

once pregnant women, angry and well-informed women’s health move-

ment activists, dogs with heart disease, and bevies of other spayed leaky

bitches and their people in vet clinics and on beds.

In my Premarin story, all the players seemed to be marinating in vats

of Canadian equine urine, the only thing that seemed to hold together

the virally exploding, vulnerable species of the tale. One registered

trademark’s travels through bodies brought together, in the need to craft

response-ability, quite a motley of mortal beings: fetal calves stripped

of amniotic fluid, urinating pregnant Canadian women, pregnant mares

and their foals and consorts in Manitoba and beyond, activists in horse

rescue and women’s health, economically strapped contract farmers, a

California menopausal woman worried about familial heart disease in

the company of a lucrative market-ready crowd of other menopausal

Americans, and German zebras in zoos in the 1930s. Big Pharma, Big

Agribusiness, and Big Science provided drama and villains aplenty, but

also plenty of reason to damp down the certainty of villainy and explore

the complexities of cyborg worlding.

Each diner exposed to high risks of familial heart failure, eating dan-

gerous and notorious estrogens in later life seems, finally, to be what

here, in this tale, conjugates—yokes together—the cyborg author and

the dog of her heart. Cum panis, companion species, females of two spe-

cies (along with their microbiomes with species in the zillions) at table

together, in different decades, slurping drafts of dubious estrogens in

self-care and care of the other. Why tell stories like this, when there are

only more and more openings and no bottom lines? Because there are

quite definite response-abilities that are strengthened in such stories.

It is no longer news that corporations, farms, clinics, labs, homes,

sciences, technologies, and multispecies lives are entangled in multi-

scalar, multitemporal, multimaterial worlding; but the details matter.

The details link actual beings to actual response-abilities. Each time a

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story helps me remember what I thought I knew, or introduces me to

new knowledge, a muscle critical for caring about flourishing gets some

aerobic exercise. Such exercise enhances collective thinking and move-

ment too. Each time I trace a tangle and add a few threads that first

seemed whimsical but turned out to be essential to the fabric, I get a

bit straighter that staying with the trouble of complex worlding is the

name of the game of living and dying well together on terra. Having

eaten Premarin makes me more accountable to the well-being of ranch-

ers, northern prairie ecologies, horses, activists, scientists, and women

with breast cancer than I would otherwise be. Giving my dog des makes

me accountable to histories and ongoing possibilities differently than

if we never shaped kinships with the attachment sites of this molecule.

Perhaps reading this chapter has consequences for response-ability too.

We are all responsible to and for shaping conditions for multispecies

flourishing in the face of terrible histories, but not in the same ways. The

differences matter—in ecologies, economies, species, lives.

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C H A P T E R 6

Sowing Worlds A Seed Bag for Terraforming

with Earth Others

“Do you realize,” the phytolinguist will say to the aesthetic critic, “that they

couldn’t even read Eggplant?” And they will smile at our ignorance, as they

pick up their rucksacks and hike on up to read the newly deciphered lyrics of

the lichen on the north face of Pike’s Peak.

—Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Author of the Acacia Seeds”

The political slogan I wore in the Reagan Star Wars era of the 1980s

read, “Cyborgs for Earthly Survival!” The terrifying times of George

H. W. Bush and the secondary Bushes made me switch to slogans pur-

loined from tough schutzhund dog trainers, “Run Fast, Bite Hard!” and

“Shut Up and Train!” Today my slogan reads, “Stay with the Trouble!”

But in all these knots and especially now, wherewhenever that potent

and capacious placetime is—we need a hardy, soiled kind of wisdom.

Instructed by companion species of the myriad terran kingdoms in all

their placetimes, we need to reseed our souls and our home worlds in or-

der to flourish—again, or maybe just for the first time—on a vulnerable

planet that is not yet murdered.1 We need not just reseeding, but also re-

inoculating with all the fermenting, fomenting, and nutrient-fixing as-

sociates that seeds need to thrive. Recuperation is still possible, but only

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in multispecies alliance, across the killing divisions of nature, culture,

and technology and of organism, language, and machine.2 The feminist

cyborg taught me that; the humanimal worlds of dogs, chickens, turtles,

and wolves taught me that; and in fugal, fungal, microbial, symbioge-

netic counterpoint, the acacia trees of Africa, the Americas, Australia,

and the Pacific Islands, with their congeries of associates reaching across

taxa, teach me that. Sowing worlds is about opening up the story of

companion species to more of its relentless diversity and urgent trouble.

To study the kind of situated, mortal, germinal wisdom we need, I

turn to Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia Butler.3 It matters what stories we

tell to tell other stories with; it matters what concepts we think to think

other concepts with. It matters wherehow Ouroboros swallows its tale,

again. That’s how worlding gets on with itself in dragon time. These are

such simple and difficult koans; let us see what kind of get they spawn.

A careful student of dragons, Le Guin taught me the carrier bag theory

of fiction and of naturalcultural history.4 Her theories, her stories, are

capacious bags for collecting, carrying, and telling the stuff of living. “A

leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a con-

tainer. A holder. A recipient.”5

So much of earth history has been told in the thrall of the fantasy of

the first beautiful words and weapons, of the first beautiful weapons as

words and vice versa. Tool, weapon, word: that is the word made flesh in

the image of the sky god. In a tragic story with only one real actor, one

real world-maker, the hero, this is the Man-making tale of the hunter

on a quest to kill and bring back the terrible bounty. This is the cutting,

sharp, combative tale of action that defers the suffering of glutinous,

earth-rotted passivity beyond bearing. All others in the prick tale are

props, ground, plot space, or prey. They don’t matter; their job is to be in

the way, to be overcome, to be the road, the conduit, but not the traveler,

not the begetter. The last thing the hero wants to know is that his beauti-

ful words and weapons will be worthless without a bag, a container, a net.

Nonetheless, no adventurer should leave home without a sack. How

did a sling, a pot, a bottle suddenly get in the story? How do such lowly

things keep the story going? Or maybe even worse for the hero, how

do those concave, hollowed-out things, those holes in Being, from the

get-go generate richer, quirkier, fuller, unfitting, ongoing stories, stories

with room for the hunter but which weren’t and aren’t about him, the

self-making Human, the human-making machine of history? The slight

curve of the shell that holds just a little water, just a few seeds to give

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away and to receive, suggests stories of becoming-with, of reciprocal in-

duction, of companion species whose job in living and dying is not to end

the storying, the worlding. With a shell and a net, becoming human, be-

coming humus, becoming terran, has another shape—the side-winding,

snaky shape of becoming-with.

Le Guin quickly assures all of us who are wary of evasive, sentimental

holisms and organicisms: “Not, let it be said at once, [am I] an unaggres-

sive or uncombative human being. I am an aging, angry woman laying

about me with my handbag, fighting hoodlums off . . . It’s just one of

those damned things you have to do in order to go on gathering wild oats

and telling stories.”6 There is room for conflict in Le Guin’s story, but her

carrier bag narratives are full of much else in wonderful, messy tales to

use for retelling, or reseeding, possibilities for getting on now, as well as

in deep earth history. “It sometimes seems that that [heroic] story is ap-

proaching its end. Lest there be no more telling of stories at all, some of us

out here in the wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we’d better start tell-

ing another one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one’s

finished . . . Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the

nature, subject, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.”7

Octavia Butler knows all about the untold stories, the ones that need

a restitched seedbag and a traveling sower to hollow out a place to flour-

ish after the catastrophes of that Sharp Story. In Parable of the Sower,

the U.S. teenage hyperempath Lauren Oya Olamina grows up in a gated

community in Los Angeles. Important in New World Santeria and in

Catholic cults of the Virgin Mary, in Yoruba Oya, mother of nine, is the

Orisha of the Niger River, with its nine tributaries, its nine tentacles

gripping the living and the dead. She is among the chthonic entities of a

thousand names, generators of persisting times called the Chthulucene.

Wind, creation, and death are Oya’s attributes and powers for worlding.

Olamina’s gift and curse were her inescapable abilities to feel the pain of

all living beings, a result of a drug taken by her addicted mother during

pregnancy. After the murder of her family, the young woman traveled

from a devastated and dying society with a motley band of survivors to

sow a new community rooted in a religion called Earthseed. In the story

arc of what was to be a trilogy (Parable of the Trickster was not completed

before her death), Butler’s sf worlding imagined Earthseed ultimately

flourishing on a new home world among the stars. But Olamina started

the first Earthseed community in Northern California, and it is there

and at other sites on Terra where my own explorations for reseeding our

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home world must stay. This home is where Butler’s lessons apply with

special ferocity.

In the Parable novels, “God is change,” and Earthseed teaches that the

seeds of life on earth can be transplanted and can adapt and flourish in all

sorts of unexpected and always dangerous places and times. Note “can,”

not necessarily “may” or “should.” Butler’s entire work as an sf writer

is riveted on the problem of destruction and wounded flourishing—

not simply survival—in exile, diaspora, abduction, and transportation—

the earthly gift-burden of the descendants of slaves, refugees, immi-

grants, travelers, and of the indigenous too. It is not a burden that stops

with settlement. In the sf mode,8 my own writing works and plays only

on earth, in the mud of cyborgs, dogs, acacia trees, ants, microbes, fungi,

and all their kin and get. With the twist in the belly that etymology

brings, I remember too that kin, with the g-k exchange of Indo-European

cousins, becomes gen on the way to get. Terran spawn all, we are side-

winding as well as arboreal kindred—blown get—in infected and seedy

generation after generation, blowsy kind after blowsy kind.

Planting seeds requires medium, soil, matter, mutter, mother. These

words interest me greatly for and in the sf terraforming mode of atten-

tion. In the feminist sf mode, matter is never “mere” medium to the

“informing” seed; rather, mixed in terra’s carrier bag, kin and get have a

much richer congress for worlding. Matter is a powerful, mindfully bod-

ied word, the matrix and generatrix of things, kin to the riverine gener-

atrix Oya. It doesn’t take much digging or swimming to get to matter as

source, ground, flux, reason, and consequential stuff—the matter of the

thing, the generatrix that is simultaneously fluid and solid, mathemati-

cal and fleshly—and by that etymological route to one tone of matter as

timber, as hard inner wood (in Portuguese, madeira). Matter as timber

brings me to Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest, published in 1976

as part of her Hainish fabulations for dispersed native and colonial be-

ings locked in struggle over imperialist exploitation and the chances for

multispecies flourishing. That story took place on another planet and

is very like the tale of colonial oppression in the name of pacification

and resource extraction that takes place on Pandora in James Came-

ron’s 2009 blockbuster film Avatar. Except one particular detail is very

different; Le Guin’s Forest does not feature a repentant and redeemed

“white” colonial hero. Her story has the shape of a carrier bag that is

disdained by heroes. Also, even as they condemn their chief oppressor

to live, rather than killing him after their victory, for Le Guin’s “natives”

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the consequences of the freedom struggle bring the lasting knowledge

of how to murder each other, not just the invader, as well as how to recol-

lect and perhaps relearn to flourish in the face of this history. There is

no status quo ante, no salvation tale, like that on Pandora. Instructed

by the struggle on Forest’s planet of Athshea, I will stay on Terra and

imagine that Le Guin’s Hainish species have not all been of the hom-

inid lineage or web, no matter how dispersed. Matter, mater, mutter

make me—make us, that collective gathered in the narrative bag of the

Chthulucene—stay with the naturalcultural multispecies trouble on

earth, strengthened by the freedom struggle for a postcolonial world on

Le Guin’s planet of Athshea. It is time to return to the question of find-

ing seeds for terraforming for a recuperating earthly world of difference,

wherewhen the knowledge of how to murder is not scarce.

My carrier bag for terraforming is full of acacia seeds, but as we shall

see, that collection brings its full share of trouble too. I begin with the

decapitated corpse of an ant found by scientist-explorers next to Seed 31

in a row of degerminated acacia seeds at the end of an ant-colony tunnel

in Le Guin’s story “‘The Author of the Acacia Seeds’ and Other Extracts

from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics.” The therolinguists

were perplexed in their reading of the touch-gland exudate script that

the ant seemed to have written in her biochemical ink on the aligned

seeds. The scientists were uncertain both about how to interpret the

script and about who the ant was—an intruder killed by the colony’s

soldiers? A resident rebel writing seditious messages about the queen

6.1. An ant of the species Rhytidoponera metallica in western

Australia holding a seed of Acacia neurophylla by the elaiosome

during seed transport. © Benoit Guenard, 2007.

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122 c h a p t e r s i x

and her eggs? A myrmexian tragic poet?9 The therolinguists could not

apply rules from human languages to their task, and their grasp of ani-

mal communication was (is) still raggedly fragmentary, full of guesses

across profound naturalcultural difference. From the scientific and her-

meneutic study of other animal languages recorded in difficult expedi-

tions of discovery, therolinguists held that “language is communication”

and that many animals use an active collective kinesthetic semiotics,

as well as chemosensory, visual, and tactile language. They might have

been troubled about their reading of this unexpected ant’s exudate text,

but they felt confident that at least they were engaging therolingistic

acts and would someday learn to read them.

Plants, however, they speculated, “do not communicate” and so have

no language. Something else is going on in the vegetative world, perhaps

something that should be called art.10 Phytolinguistics pursued along

these lines by the scientists and explorers was just beginning and would

surely require entirely new modes of attention, field methodology, and

conceptual invention. The president of the Therolinguists Association

waxed lyrical: “If a noncommunicative, vegetative art exists, we must

re-think the very elements of our science, and learn a whole new set of

techniques. For it is simply not possible to bring the critical and techni-

cal skills appropriate to the study of weasel murder-mysteries, or Battra-

chian erotica, or the tunnel-sagas of the earthworm, to bear on the art

of the redwood or the zucchini.”11

In my view, the president got it right about the need to question the

tissues of one’s knowings and ways of knowing in order to respond to

nonanthropocentric difference. But a closer look at that decapitated ant

and the degerminated acacia seeds should have told those still zoocentric

scientists that their sublime aestheticization of plants led them astray

about earth-making companion species. Plants are consummate com-

municators in a vast terran array of modalities, making and exchanging

meanings among and between an astonishing galaxy of associates across

the taxa of living beings. Plants, along with bacteria and fungi, are also

animals’ lifelines to communication with the abiotic world, from sun to

gas to rock. To pursue this matter, I need to leave Le Guin’s story for now

and instead draw on the stories told by students of symbiosis, symbio-

genesis, and ecological evolutionary developmental biology.12

Acacias and ants can do almost all of the work for me. With fifteen

hundred species (about a thousand of which are indigenous to Austra-

lia), the genus Acacia is one of the largest genera of trees and shrubs on

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earth. Different acacias flourish in temperate, tropical, and desert cli-

mates across oceans and continents. They are crucial species maintaining

the healthy biodiversity of complex ecologies, housing many lodgers, and

nourishing a motley guest list of diners. Relocated from wherever they

originated, acacias were the darlings of human colonial foresters and still

are the stock-in-trade of landscapers and plant breeders. In those histo-

ries, some acacias become the overgrowing destroyers of endemic ecolo-

gies that are the special responsibility of restoration biologists and just

plain citizens of recuperating places.13 In part and in whole, acacias show

up in the most unexpected places. They give the bounty of the gorgeous

hardwoods like Hawaiian koa, which are cut down in greedy, exterminat-

ing, global-capitalist excess. Acacias also make the humble polysaccharide

gums, including gum arabic from Acacia senegal, which show up in hu-

man industrial products like ice cream, hand lotion, beer, ink, jelly beans,

and old-fashioned postage stamps. Those same gum exudates are the

immune system of the acacias themselves, helping to seal wounds and

discourage opportunistic fungi and bacteria. Bees make a prized honey

from acacia flowers, among the few honeys that will not crystallize. Many

animals, including moths, human beings, and the only known vegetarian

spider, use acacias for food. People rely on acacias for seed pastes, fritters

made from pods, curries, shoots, toasted seeds, and root beer.

Acacias are members of the vast family of legumes. That means that,

among their many talents, in association with fungal mycorrhizal sym-

bionts (which host their own bacterial endosymbionts), many acacias fix

the nitrogen crucial to soil fertility, plant growth, and animal existence.14

In defending themselves from grazers and pests, acacias are veritable al-

kaloid chemical factories, making many compounds that are psychoactive

in animals like me. I can only imagine with my hominid brain what these

compounds feel like to critters like insects. From giraffes’ points of view,

acacias sport lovely leafy salads on their crowns, and the acacias respond

to assiduous giraffe pruning by producing the picturesque African savan-

nah flattop tree landscape prized by human photographers and tourist

enterprises, not to mention life-saving shade and rest for many critters.

Supported within this big narrative netbag, I am ready to add a few

details of my own to Le Guin’s ongoing carrier bag story of the decapi-

tated ant and her acacia-seed writing tablet. The therolinguists were

worried about the message they tried to decipher in the writing, but I am

riveted by what drew ant and acacia seed together in the first place. How

did they know each other? How did they communicate? Why did the ant

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124 c h a p t e r s i x

paint her message on that shiny surface? The degerminated seed is the

clue. Acacia verticulata, an Australian shrub related to the coastal wattle

so worrisome to Southern Californian ecologists, makes seeds that are

dispersed by ants. The wily acacias draw the ants’ attention with a showy

attachment stalk coiled around every seed. The ants carry the decorated

seeds to their nests, where they consume the fat-rich attachment stalks,

called elaisosomes, at their leisure. In time, the seeds germinate out of

the nice womb provided by the ant tunnels, and the ants have the nu-

tritious, calorie-dense food they need to fuel all those stories of their

hard-working habits. In evolutionary-ecological terms, these ants and

acacias are necessary to each other’s reproductive business.

Some ant-acacia associations are much more elaborate than that,

reaching into the internal tissues of each participant, shaping genomes

and developmental patterning of the structures and functions of both

companion species. Several Central American acacias make large, hol-

low thornlike structures called stipules that provide shelter for several

species of Pseudomyrmex ants. “The ants feed on a secretion of sap on

the leaf-stalk and small, lipid-rich [and protein-rich] food-bodies at the

tips of the leaflets called Beltian bodies. In return, the ants add protec-

tion to the plant against herbivores.”15 There is nothing like a dedicated

bevy of angry, biting ants to make a day’s foraging uncomfortable and

the leaf-grazer of whatever species move on to less infested pantries. In

the 2005 bbc Science and Nature five-part special with David Attenbor-

ough, in the episode called “Intimate Relations,” we see these matters

in exquisite, sensuous detail. We also witness that “some ants ‘farm’ the

trees that give them shelter, creating areas known as ‘Devil’s gardens.’ To

make sure these grow without competition, they kill off other seedlings

in the surrounding vegetation.”16 The ants accomplish this task by gnaw-

ing methodically through branches and shoots and then injecting formic

acid into the conductive tissue of the offending plants. Similar ant-acacia

mutualisms occur in Africa. For example, the Whistling Thorn acacias

in Kenya provide shelter for ants in the thorns and nectar in extrafloral

nectaries for their symbiotic ants, such as Crematogaster mimosae. In

turn, the ants protect the plant by attacking large mammalian herbi-

vores and stem-boring beetles that damage the plant. The more one

looks, the more the name of the game of living and dying on earth is a

convoluted multispecies affair that goes by the name of symbiosis, the

yoking together of companion species, at table together.

Ants and acacias are both highly diverse, well-populated groups. They

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are sometimes world travelers and sometimes homebodies that cannot

flourish away from natal countries and natal neighbors. Homebody or

traveler, their ways of living and dying have consequences for terrrafor-

ming, past and present. Ants and acacias are avid for association with

critters of all sorts of sizes and scales, and they are opportunistic in their

approaches to living and dying in both evolutionary and organismic or

whole group timeplaces. These species in all their complexities and on-

goingness both do great harm and sustain whole worlds, sometimes in

association with human people, sometimes not. The devil is truly in the

details of response-able naturecultures inhabited by accountable compan-

ion species. They—we—are here to live and die with, not just think and

write with. But also that, also here to sow worlds with, to write in ant

exudates on acacia seeds to keep the stories going. No more than Le Guin’s

carrier bag story—with the crusty elderly lady ready to use her purse to

whack evildoers and the author avid for the mess as well as the order of

her bumptious critters, human and not—is my story of these worldly wise

symbionts a tale of rectitude and final peace. With Le Guin, I am commit-

ted to the finicky, disruptive details of good stories that don’t know how to

finish. Good stories reach into rich pasts to sustain thick presents to keep

the story going for those who come after.17 Emma Goldman’s understand-

ing of anarchist love and rage make sense in the worlds of ants and acacias.

These companion species are a prompt to shaggy dog stories—growls,

bites, whelps, games, snufflings, and all. Symbiogenesis is not a synonym

for the good, but for becoming-with each other in response-ability.

Finally, and not a moment too soon, sympoesis enlarges and displaces

autopoesis and all other self-forming and self-sustaining system fanta-

sies. Sympoesis is a carrier bag for ongoingness, a yoke for becoming-

with, for staying with the trouble of inheriting the damages and achieve-

ments of colonial and postcolonial naturalcultural histories in telling the

tale of still possible recuperation. Le Guin’s therolinguists, even bound in

their animal hides, had the vision of these scary and inspiring possibili-

ties: “And with them, or after them, may there not come that even bolder

adventurer—the first geolinguist, who, ignoring the delicate, transient

lyrics of the lichen, will read beneath it the still less communicative, still

more passive, wholly atemporal, cold, volcanic, poetry of the rocks; each

one a word spoken, how long ago, by the earth itself, in the immense sol-

itude, the immenser community, of space.”18 Communicative and mute,

the old lady and her purse will be found in Earthseed communities on

terra and throughout timespace. Mutter, matter, mother.

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C H A P T E R 7

A Curious Practice

Interesting research is research conducted

under conditions that make beings interesting.

—Vinciane Despret

To think with an enlarged mentality means that one trains

one’s imagination to go visiting.

—Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy

Vinciane Despret thinks-with other beings, human and not. That is a rare

and precious vocation. Vocation: calling, calling with, called by, calling as

if the world mattered, calling out, going too far, going visiting. Despret

listened to a singing blackbird one morning—a living blackbird outside

her particular window—and that way learned what importance sounds

like. She thinks in attunement with those she thinks with—recursively,

inventively, relentlessly—with joy and verve. She studies how beings

render each other capable in actual encounters, and she theorizes—

makes cogently available—that kind of theory and method. Despret is

not interested in thinking by discovering the stupidities of others, or

by reducing the field of attention to prove a point. Her kind of thinking

enlarges, even invents, the competencies of all the players, including

herself, such that the domain of ways of being and knowing dilates, ex-

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A C u r i o u s P r a c t i c e 127

pands, adds both ontological and epistemological possibilities, proposes

and enacts what was not there before. That is her worlding practice.

She is a philosopher and a scientist who is allergic to denunciation and

hungry for discovery, needy for what must be known and built together,

with and for earthly beings, living, dead, and yet to come.

Referring both to her own practice for observing scientists and also to

the practices of ethologist Thelma Rowell observing her Soay sheep, De-

spret affirmed “a particular epistemological position to which I am com-

mitted, one that I call a virtue: the virtue of politeness.”1 In every sense,

Despret’s cultivation of politeness is a curious practice. She trains her

whole being, not just her imagination, in Arendt’s words, “to go visiting.”

Visiting is not an easy practice; it demands the ability to find others ac-

tively interesting, even or especially others most people already claim to

know all too completely, to ask questions that one’s interlocutors truly

find interesting, to cultivate the wild virtue of curiosity, to retune one’s

ability to sense and respond—and to do all this politely! What is this

sort of politeness? It sounds more than a little risky. Curiosity always

leads its practitioners a bit too far off the path, and that way lie stories.

The first and most important thing at risk in Despret’s practice is an

approach that assumes that beings have pre-established natures and abili-

ties that are simply put into play in an encounter. Rather, Despret’s sort

of politeness does the energetic work of holding open the possibility that

surprises are in store, that something interesting is about to happen, but

only if one cultivates the virtue of letting those one visits intra-actively

shape what occurs. They are not who/what we expected to visit, and

we are not who/what were anticipated either. Visiting is a subject- and

object-making dance, and the choreographer is a trickster. Asking ques-

tions comes to mean both asking what another finds intriguing and also

how learning to engage that changes everybody in unforeseeable ways.

Good questions come only to a polite inquirer, especially a polite inquirer

provoked by a singing blackbird. With good questions, even or especially

mistakes and misunderstandings can become interesting. This is not so

much a question of manners, but of epistemology and ontology, and of

method alert to off-the-beaten-path practices. At the least, this sort of

politeness is not what Miss Manners purveys in her advice column.

There are so many examples of Despret learning and teaching polite

inquiry. Perhaps the most famous is her visit to the Negev desert field

site of the Israeli ornithologist Amotz Zahavi, where she encountered

Arabian babblers who defied orthodox accounts of what birds should

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be doing, even as the scientists also acted off-script scientifically. Specif-

ically, Zahavi asked in excruciating detail, what matters to babblers? He

could not do good science otherwise. The babblers’ practices of altru-

ism were off the charts, and they seemed to do it, according to Zahavi,

for reasons of competitive prestige not well accounted for by theories

like kin selection. Zahavi let the babblers be interesting; he asked them

interesting questions; he saw them dance. “Not only were these birds

described as dancing together in the morning sunrise, not only were they

eager to offer presents to one another, not only would they take pride in

caring for each other’s nestlings or in defending an endangered comrade,

but also, according to Zahavi’s depiction, their relations relied on trust.”2

What Despret tells us she came to know is that the specific practices

of observation, narration, and the liveliness of the birds were far from

independent of each other. This was not just a question of worldviews

and related theories shaping research design and interpretations, or

of any other purely discursive effect. What scientists actually do in the

field affects the ways “animals see their scientists seeing them” and

therefore how the animals respond.3 In a strong sense, observers and

birds rendered each other capable in ways not written into preexisting

scripts, but invented or provoked, more than simply shown, in practi-

cal research. Birds and scientists were in dynamic, moving relations of

attunement. The behavior of birds and their observers were made, but

not made up. Stories are essential, but are never “mere” stories. Zahavi

seemed intent on making experiments with rather than on babblers. He

was trying to look at the world with the babblers rather than at them, a

very demanding practice. And the same demands were made of Despret,

who came to watch scientists but ended up in a much more complex

tangle of practices. Birds and scientists do something, and they do it

together. They become-with each other.

The world in the southern Israeli desert was composed by adding

competencies to engage competencies, adding perspectives to engage

perspectives, adding subjectivities to engage subjectivities, adding ver-

sions to understand versions. In short, this science worked by addition,

not subtraction. Worlds enlarged; the babblers and the scientists—

Despret included—inhabited a world of propositions not available be-

fore. “Both humans and babblers create narratives, rather than just

telling them. They create/disclose new scripts.”4 Good questions were

posed; surprising answers made the world richer. Visiting might be

risky, but it is definitely not boring.

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Despret’s work is full of literal collaborations, with people and with

animals, not simply metaphors of thinking with each other. I admit I am

drawn most by the collaborations that entangle people, critters, and

apparatuses. No wonder that Despret’s work with sociologist Jocelyne

Porcher and the farmers, pigs, and cows in their care sustains me. De-

spret and Porcher visited cow and pig breeders on nonindustrial French

farms, where the humans and animals lived in daily interaction that

led sober, nonromantic, working breeders to say such things as, “We

don’t stop talking with our animals.”5 The question that led Despret and

Porcher to the farmers circled around their efforts to think through what

it means to claim that these domestic food-producing animals are work-

ing, and working with their people. The first difficulty, not surprisingly,

was to figure out how to ask questions that interested the breeders, that

engaged them in their conversations and labors with their animals. It

was decidedly not interesting to the breeders to ask how animals and

people are the same or different in general. These are people who make

particular animals live and die and who live, and die, by them. The task

was to engage these breeders in constructing the questions that mat-

tered to them. The breeders incessantly “uprooted” the researchers’ ques-

tions to address the queries that concerned them in their work.

The story has many turns, but what interested me most was the in-

sistence of the breeders that their animals “know what we want, but we,

we don’t know what they want.”6 Figuring out what their animals want,

so that people and cows could together accomplish successful breeding,

was the fundamental conjoined work of the farm. Farmers bad at lis-

tening to their animals, bad at talking to them, and bad at responding

were not good farmers in their peers’ estimation. The animals paid at-

tention to their farmers; paying equally effective attention to the cows

and pigs was the job of good breeders. This is an extension of subjectiv-

ities for both people and critters, “becoming what the other suggests to

you, accepting a proposal of subjectivity, acting in the manner in which

the other addresses you, actualizing and verifying this proposal, in the

sense of rendering it true.”7 The result is bringing into being animals

that nourish humans, and humans that nourish animals. Living and dy-

ing are both in play. “Working together” in this kind of daily interaction

of labor, conversation, and attention seems to me to be the right idiom.

Continually hungry for more of Despret’s visiting with critters, their

people, and their apparatuses—hungry for more of her elucidations

of “anthropo-zoo-genesis”8—I have a hard time feeling satisfied with

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only human people on the menu. That prejudice took a tumble when I

read Women Who Make a Fuss: The Unfaithful Daughters of Virginia Woolf,

which Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret wrote together with an

extraordinary collective of bumptious women.9 “Think we must!” cries

this book, in concert with the famous line from Virginia Woolf ’s Three

Guineas. In Western worlds, and elsewhere too, women have hardly

been included in the patrilines of thinking, most certainly including the

patrilines making decisions for (yet another) war. Why should Virginia

Woolf, or any other woman, or men for that matter, be faithful to such

patrilines and their demands for sacrifice? Infidelity seems the least we

should demand of ourselves!

This all matters, but the question in this book is not precisely that,

but rather what thinking can possibly mean in the civilization in which

we find ourselves. “But how do we take back up a collective adventure

that is multiple and ceaselessly reinvented, not on an individual basis,

but in a way that passes the baton, that is to say, affirms new givens and

new unknowns?”10 We must somehow make the relay, inherit the trou-

ble, and reinvent the conditions for multispecies flourishing, not just in

a time of ceaseless human wars and genocides, but in a time of human-

propelled mass extinctions and multispecies genocides that sweep peo-

ple and critters into the vortex. We must “dare ‘to make’ the relay; that

is to create, to fabulate, in order not to despair. In order to induce a

transformation, perhaps, but without the artificial loyalty that would

resemble ‘in the name of a cause,’ no matter how noble it might be.”11

Hannah Arendt and Virginia Woolf both understood the high stakes

of training the mind and imagination to go visiting, to venture off the

beaten path to meet unexpected, non-natal kin, and to strike up con-

versations, to pose and respond to interesting questions, to propose to-

gether something unanticipated, to take up the unasked-for obligations

of having met. This is what I have called cultivating response-ability.

Visiting is not a heroic practice; making a fuss is not the Revolution;

thinking with each other is not Thought. Opening up versions so stories

can be ongoing is so mundane, so earth-bound. That is precisely the

point. The blackbird sings its importance; the babblers dance their shin-

ing prestige; the storytellers crack the established disorder. That is what

“going too far” means, and this curious practice is not safe. Like Arendt

and Woolf, Despret and her collaborators understand that we are dealing

with “the idea of a world that could be habitable.”12 “The very strength

of women who make a fuss is not to represent the True, rather to be

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witnesses for the possibility of other ways of doing what would perhaps

be ‘better.’ The fuss is not the heroic statement of a grand cause . . . It

instead affirms the need to resist the stifling impotence created by the

‘no possibility to do otherwise, whether we want it or not,’ which now

reigns everywhere.”13 It is past time to make such a fuss.

Despret’s curious practice has no truck with loyalty to a cause or doc-

trine; but it draws deeply from another virtue that is sometimes con-

fused with loyalty, namely, “thinking from” a heritage. She is tuned to

the obligations that inhere in starting from situated histories, situated

stories. She retells the parable of the twelve camels in order to tease out

what it means to “start from,” that is, to “remain obligated with respect

to that from which we speak, think, or act. It means to let ourselves learn

from the event and to create from it.” In a sort of cat’s cradle with power-

ful fables, Despret received the parable from Isabelle Stengers, and then

she relayed it to me in early 2013. I relay it back to her here. To inherit is

an act “which demands thought and commitment. An act that calls for

our transformation by the very deed of inheriting.”14

In his will, the father in this story left his three quarrelsome sons

a seemingly impossible inheritance: eleven camels to be divided in a

precise way, half to the eldest son, a quarter to the second son, and a

sixth to the third. The perverse requirements of the legacy provoked

the confused sons, who were on the verge of failing to fulfill the terms

of the will, to visit an old man living in the village. His savvy kindness in

giving the sons a twelfth camel allowed the heirs to create a solution to

their difficult heritage; they could make their inheritance active, alive,

generative. With twelve camels, the fractions worked, and there was one

camel left over to give back to the old man.

Despret notes that the tale she read left actual camels out of the en-

largement and creativity of finding what it means to “start from.” Those

storied camels were conventional, discursive, figural beasts, whose only

function was to give occasion for the problematic sons to grow in pa-

triarchal understanding, recapitulating more than a little the history

of philosophy that Despret—and I—inherited. But by listening, tell-

ing, and activating that particular story her way, she makes something

that was absent present. She made an interesting, curious fuss without

denouncing anybody. Therefore, another heritage emerges and makes

claims on anyone listening, anyone attuned. It isn’t just philosophy that

has to change; the mortal world shifts. Long-legged, big-lipped, humped

camels shake the dust from their hot, hard-worked hides and nuzzle the

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132 c h a p t e r s e v e n

storyteller for a scratch behind the ears. Despret, and because of her, we,

inherit camels now, camels with their people, in their markets and places

of travel and labor, in their living and dying in worlds-at-stake, like the

contemporary Gobi Desert.15 We start from what is henceforth a dilated

story that makes unexpected demands to cultivate response-ability. If

we are to remain faithful to starting from the transformed story, we

can no longer not know or not care that camels and people are at stake

to each other—across regions, genders, races, species, practices. From

now on, call that philosophy, a game of cat’s cradle, not a lineage. We

are obligated to speak from situated worlds, but we no longer need start

from a humanist patriline and its breath-taking erasures and high-wire

acts. The risk of listening to a story is that it can obligate us in ramifying

webs that cannot be known in advance of venturing among their myriad

threads. In a world of anthropozoogenesis, the figural is more likely than

not to grow teeth and bite us in the bum.

Despret’s philosophical ethology starts from the dead and missing as

well as from the living and visible. She has studied situated human beings’

mourning practices for their dead in ways strongly akin to her practice of

philosophical ethology; in both domains, she attends to how—in prac-

tice—people can and do solicit the absent into vivid copresence, in many

kinds of temporality and materiality. She attends to how practices—

activated storytelling—can be on the side of what I call “ongoingness”:

that is, nurturing, or inventing, or discovering, or somehow cobbling

together ways for living and dying well with each other in the tissues of

an earth whose very habitability is threatened.16 Many kinds of failure of

ongoingness crumble lifeways in our times of onrushing extinctions, ex-

terminations, wars, extractions, and genocides. Many kinds of absence,

or threatened absence, must be brought into ongoing response-ability,

not in the abstract but in homely storied cultivated practice.

To my initial surprise, this matter brought Despret and me together

with racing pigeons, also called carrier pigeons (in French voyageurs) and

with their avid fanciers (in French colombophiles, lovers of pigeons). I

wrote an essay for Despret after an extraordinary week with her and

her colleagues in the chateau at Cerisy in July 2010, in which I proposed

playing string figure games with companion species for cultivating mul-

tispecies response-ability.17 I sent Despret a draft containing my discus-

sion of the wonderful art-technology-environmental-activist project by

Beatriz da Costa called PigeonBlog, as well as a discussion of the com-

munities of racing pigeons and their fanciers in Southern California.

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Pigeon racing is a working-class men’s sport around the world, one made

immensely difficult in conditions of urban war (Baghdad, Damascus),

racial and economic injustice (New York, Berlin), and displaced labor and

play of many kinds across regions (France, Iran, California).

I care about art-design-activist practices that join diverse people and

varied critters in shared, often vexed public spaces. “Starting from” this

caring, not from some delusional caring in general, landed me in inno-

vative pigeon lofts, where, it turned out, Despret, attuned to practices

of commemoration, had already begun to roost. In particular, by leading

me to Matali Crasset’s Capsule, built in 2003 in the leisure park of Cau-

dry, she shared her understanding of the power of holding open actual

space for ongoing living and working in the face of threatened absence as

a potent practice of commemoration.18 The Beauvois association of car-

rier pigeon fanciers asked Crasset, an artist and industrial designer, to

build a prototype pigeon loft that would combine beauty, functionality

for people and birds, and a pedagogic lure to draw future practitioners

into learning demanding skills. Actual pigeons had to thrive inhabiting

this loft; actual colombophiles had to experience the loft working; and

actual visitors to the ecological park, which was rehabilitating exhausted

farmland into a variegated nature reserve for recuperating critters and

people, had to be infected with the desire for a life transformed with

avian voyageurs. Despret understood that the prototype, the memorial,

had to be for both the carrier pigeons and their people—past, present

and yet to come.19

Neither the critters nor the people could have existed or could endure

without each other in ongoing, curious practices. Attached to ongoing

pasts, they bring each other forward in thick presents and still possible

futures; they stay with the trouble in speculative fabulation.

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C H A P T E R 8

The Camille Stories Children of Compost

And then Camille came into our lives, rendering present the cross-

stitched generations of the not-yet-born and not-yet-hatched of vul-

nerable, coevolving species. Proposing a relay into uncertain futures, I

end Staying with the Trouble with a story, a speculative fabulation, which

starts from a writing workshop at Cerisy in summer 2013, part of Isa-

belle Stengers’s colloquium on gestes spéculatifs. Gestated in sf writing

practices, Camille is a keeper of memories in the flesh of worlds that may

become habitable again. Camille is one of the children of compost who

ripen in the earth to say no to the posthuman of every time.

I signed up for the afternoon workshop at Cerisy called Narration

Spéculative. The first day the organizers broke us down into writing

groups of two or three participants and gave us a task. We were asked

to fabulate a baby, and somehow to bring the infant through five hu-

man generations. In our times of surplus death of both individuals and

of kinds, a mere five human generations can seem impossibly long to

imagine flourishing with and for a renewed multispecies world. Over

the week, the groups wrote many kinds of possible futures in a ram-

bunctious play of literary forms. Versions abounded. Besides myself,

the members of my group were the filmmaker Fabrizio Terranova and

psychologist, philosopher, and ethologist Vinciane Despret. The version

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8.1. Mariposa mask, Guerrero, Mexico, 62 cm 72.5 cm 12.5 cm, before

1990, Samuel Frid Collection, UBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver.

Installation view, The Marvellous Real: Art from Mexico, 1926–2011 exhibition

(October 2013—March 2014), UBC Museum of Anthropology. Curator Nicola

Levell. Photograph by Jim Clifford.

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I tell here is itself a speculative gesture, both a memory and a lure for a

“we” that came into being by fabulating a story together one summer

in Normandy. I cannot tell exactly the same story that my cowriters

would propose or remember. My story here is an ongoing speculative

fabulation, not a conference report for the archives. We started writ-

ing together, and we have since written Camille stories individually,

sometimes passing them back to the original writers for elaboration,

sometimes not; and we have encountered Camille and the Children of

Compost in other writing collaborations too.1 All the versions are nec-

essary to Camille. My memoir for that workshop is an active casting of

threads from and for ongoing, shared stories. Camille, Donna, Vinciane,

and Fabrizio brought each other into copresence; we render each other

capable.

The Children of Compost insist that we need to write stories and live

lives for flourishing and for abundance, especially in the teeth of ram-

paging destruction and impoverization. Anna Tsing urges us to cobble

together the “arts of living on a damaged planet”; and among those arts

are cultivating the capacity to reimagine wealth, learn practical healing

rather than wholeness, and stitch together improbable collaborations

without worrying overmuch about conventional ontological kinds.2 The

Camille Stories are invitations to participate in a kind of genre fiction

committed to strengthening ways to propose near futures, possible fu-

tures, and implausible but real nows. Every Camille Story that I write

will make terrible political and ecological mistakes; and every story asks

readers to practice generous suspicion by joining in the fray of inventing

a bumptious crop of Children of Compost.3 Readers of science fiction are

accustomed to the lively and irreverent arts of fan fiction. Story arcs and

worlds are fodder for mutant transformations or for loving but perverse

extensions. The Children of Compost invite not so much fan fiction as

sym fiction, the genre of sympoiesis and symchthonia—the coming to-

gether of earthly ones. The Children of Compost want the Camille Sto-

ries to be a pilot project, a model, a work and play object, for composing

collective projects, not just in the imagination but also in actual story

writing. And on and under the ground.

Vinciane, Fabrizio, and I felt a vital pressure to provide our baby with

a name and a pathway into what was not yet but might be. We also felt

a vital pressure to ask our baby to be part of learning, over five gener-

ations, to radically reduce the pressure of human numbers on earth,

currently set on a course to climb to more than 11 billion by the end of

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t h e c a m i l l e s t o r i e s 137

the twenty-first century ce. We could hardly approach the five genera-

tions through a story of heteronormative reproduction (to use the ugly

but apt American feminist idiom)! More than a year later, I realized that

Camille taught me how to say, “Make Kin Not Babies.”4

Immediately, however, as soon as we proposed the name of Camille to

each other, we realized that we were now holding a squirming child who

had no truck with conventional genders or with human exceptionalism.

This was a child born for sympoiesis—for becoming-with and making-

with a motley clutch of earth others.5

Imagining the World of the Camilles

Luckily, Camille came into being at a moment of an unexpected but pow-

erful, interlaced, planetwide eruption of numerous communities of a

few hundred people each, who felt moved to migrate to ruined places

and work with human and nonhuman partners to heal these places,

building networks, pathways, nodes, and webs of and for a newly hab-

itable world.6

Only a portion of the earthwide, astonishing, and infectious action

for well-being came from intentional, migratory communities like Ca-

mille’s. Drawing from long histories of creative resistance and genera-

tive living in even the worst circumstances, people everywhere found

themselves profoundly tired of waiting for external, never materializing

solutions to local and systemic problems. Both large and small individ-

uals, organizations, and communities joined with each other, and with

migrant communities like Camille’s, to reshape terran life for an epoch

that could follow the deadly discontinuities of the Anthropocene, Capi-

talocene, and Plantationocene. In system-changing simultaneous waves

and pulses, diverse indigenous peoples and all sorts of other laboring

women, men, and children—who had been long subjected to devas-

tating conditions of extraction and production in their lands, waters,

homes, and travels—innovated and strengthened coalitions to recraft

conditions of living and dying to enable flourishing in the present and

in times to come. These eruptions of healing energy and activism were

ignited by love of earth and its human and nonhuman beings and by

rage at the rate and scope of extinctions, exterminations, genocides,

and immiserations in enforced patterns of multispecies living and dying

that threatened ongoingness for everybody. Love and rage contained

the germs of partial healing even in the face of onrushing destruction.

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138 c h a p t e r e i g h t

None of the Communities of Compost could imagine that they inhab-

ited or moved to “empty land.” Such still powerful, destructive fictions of

settler colonialism and religious revivalism, secular or not, were fiercely

resisted. The Communities of Compost worked and played hard to un-

derstand how to inherit the layers upon layers of living and dying that

infuse every place and every corridor. Unlike inhabitants in many other

utopian movements, stories, or literatures in the history of the earth, the

Children of Compost knew they could not deceive themselves that they

could start from scratch. Precisely the opposite insight moved them;

they asked and responded to the question of how to live in the ruins

that were still inhabited, with ghosts and with the living too. Coming

from every economic class, color, caste, religion, secularism, and region,

members of the emerging diverse settlements around the earth lived by

a few simple but transformative practices, which in turn lured—became

vitally infectious for—many other peoples and communities, both mi-

gratory and stable. The communities diverged in their development with

sympoietic creativity, but they remained tied together by sticky threads.

The linking practices grew from the sense that healing and ongoing-

ness in ruined places requires making kin in innovative ways. In the

infectious new settlements, every new child must have at least three

parents, who may or may not practice new or old genders. Corporeal dif-

ferences, along with their fraught histories, are cherished. New children

must be rare and precious, and they must have the robust company of

other young and old ones of many kinds. Kin relations can be formed

at any time in life, and so parents and other sorts of relatives can be

added or invented at significant points of transition. Such relationships

enact strong lifelong commitments and obligations of diverse kinds. Kin

making as a means of reducing human numbers and demands on the

earth, while simultaneously increasing human and other critters’ flour-

ishing, engaged intense energies and passions in the dispersed emerging

worlds. But kin making and rebalancing human numbers had to happen

in risky embodied connections to places, corridors, histories, and on-

going decolonial and postcolonial struggles, and not in the abstract and

not by external fiat. Many failed models of population control provided

strong cautionary tales.

Thus the work of these communities was and is intentional kin

making across deep damage and significant difference. By the early

twenty-first century, historical social action and cultural and scientific

knowledges—much of it activated by anticolonial, antiracist, proqueer

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t h e c a m i l l e s t o r i e s 139

feminist movement—had seriously unraveled the once-imagined natu-

ral bonds of sex and gender and race and nation, but undoing the wide-

spread destructive commitment to the still-conceived natural necessity

of the tie between kin making and a treelike biogenetic reproductive

genealogy became a key task for the Children of Compost.

The decision to bring a new human infant into being is strongly struc-

tured to be a collective one for the emerging communities. Further, no

one can be coerced to bear a child or punished for birthing one outside

community auspices.7 The Children of Compost nurture the born ones

every way they can, even as they work and play to mutate the appara-

tuses of kin making and to reduce radically the burdens of human num-

bers across the earth. Although discouraged in the form of individual

decisions to make a new baby, reproductive freedom of the person is

actively cherished.

This freedom’s most treasured power is the right and obligation of

the human person, of whatever gender, who is carrying a pregnancy to

choose an animal symbiont for the new child.8 All new human members

of the group who are born in the context of community decision making

come into being as symbionts with critters of actively threatened spe-

8.2. Make Kin Not Babies. Sticker, 2 3 in., made by Kern Toy, Beth Stephens,

Annie Sprinkle, and Donna Haraway.

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140 c h a p t e r e i g h t

cies, and therefore with the whole patterned fabric of living and dying

of those particular beings and all their associates, for whom the possi-

bility of a future is very fragile. Human babies born through individual

reproductive choice do not become biological symbionts, but they do

live in many other kinds of sympoiesis with human and nonhuman crit-

ters. Over the generations, the Communities of Compost experienced

complex difficulties with hierarchical caste formations and sometimes

violent clashes between children born as symbionts and those born as

more conventional human individuals. Syms and non-syms, sometimes

literally, did not see eye to eye easily.

The animal symbionts are generally members of migratory species,

which critically shapes the lines of visiting, working, and playing for all

the partners of the symbiosis. The members of the symbioses of the

Children of Compost, human and nonhuman, travel or depend on asso-

ciates that travel; corridors are essential to their being. The restoration

and care of corridors, of connection, is a central task of the communities;

it is how they imagine and practice repair of ruined lands and waters and

their critters, human and not.9 The Children of Compost came to see

their shared kind as humus, rather than as human or nonhuman. The

core of each new child’s education is learning how to live in symbiosis so

as to nurture the animal symbiont, and all the other beings the symbiont

requires, into ongoingness for at least five human generations. Nurtur-

ing the animal symbiont also means being nurtured in turn, as well as

inventing practices of care of the ramifying symbiotic selves. The human

and animal symbionts keep the relays of mortal life going, both inher-

iting and inventing practices of recuperation, survival, and flourishing.

Because the animal partners in the symbiosis are migratory, each

human child learns and lives in nodes and pathways, with other peo-

ple and their symbionts, in the alliances and collaborations needed to

make ongoingness possible. Literally and figurally, training the mind

to go visiting is a lifelong pedagogical practice in these communities.

Together and separately, the sciences and arts are passionately practiced

and enlarged as means to attune rapidly evolving ecological naturalcul-

tural communities, including people, to live and die well throughout the

dangerous centuries of irreversible climate change and continuing high

rates of extinction and other troubles.

A treasured power of individual freedom for the new child is to choose

a gender—or not—when and if the patterns of living and dying evoke

that desire. Bodily modifications are normal among Camille’s people;

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t h e c a m i l l e s t o r i e s 141

and at birth a few genes and a few microorganisms from the animal

symbiont are added to the symchild’s bodily heritage, so that sensitivity

and response to the world as experienced by the animal critter can be

more vivid and precise for the human member of the team. The animal

partners are not modified in these ways, although the ongoing relation-

ships with lands, waters, people and peoples, critters, and apparatuses

render them newly capable in surprising ways too, including ongoing

EcoEvoDevo biological changes.10 Throughout life, the human person

may adopt further bodily modifications for pleasure and aesthetics or

for work, as long as the modifications tend to both symbionts’ well-

being in the humus of sympoiesis.

Camille’s people moved to southern West Virginia in the Appalachian

Mountains on a site along the Kanawha River near Gauley Mountain,

which had been devastated by mountaintop removal coal mining. The

river and tributary creeks were toxic, the valleys filled with mine debris,

the people used and abandoned by the coal companies. Camille’s people

allied themselves with struggling multispecies communities in the rug-

ged mountains and valleys, both the local people and the other critters.11

Most of the Communities of Compost that became most closely linked

to Camille’s gathering lived in places ravaged by fossil fuel extraction

or by mining of gold, uranium, or other metals. Places eviscerated by

deforestation or agriculture practiced as water and nutrient mining and

monocropping also figured large in Camille’s extended world.

Monarch butterflies frequent Camille’s West Virginia community

in the summers, and they undertake a many-thousand-mile migration

south to overwinter in a few specific forests of pine and oyamel fir in

central Mexico, along the border of the states of Michoacán and Méx-

ico.12 In the twentieth century, the monarch was declared the state insect

of West Virginia; and the Sanctuarío de la Biosfera Mariposa Monarca

(Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve), a unesco World Heritage Site

after 2008, was established in the ecoregion along the Trans-Mexican

Volcanic Belt of surviving woodlands.

Throughout their complex migrations, the monarchs must eat, breed,

and rest in cities, ejidos, indigenous lands, farms, forests, and grasslands

of a vast and damaged landscape, populated by people and peoples living

and dying in many sorts of contested ecologies and economies. The lar-

vae of the leap-frogging spring eastern monarch migrations from south

to north face the consequences of genetic and chemical technologies of

mass industrial agriculture that make their indispensable food—the

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leaves of native, local milkweeds—unavailable along most of the routes.

Not just the presence of any milkweed, but the seasonal appearance of lo-

cal milkweed varieties from Mexico to Canada, is syncopated in the flesh

of monarch caterpillars. Some milkweed species flourish in disturbed

land; they are good pioneer plants. The common milkweed of central

and eastern North America, Asclepias syriaca, is such an early successional

plant. Milkweeds thrive on roadsides and between crop furrows, and

these are the milkweeds that are especially susceptible to herbicides like

Monsanto’s glyphosphate-containing herbicide, Roundup. Another milk-

weed is also important to the eastern migration of monarchs, namely the

climax prairie species native to grasslands in later successional stages.

With the nearly complete destruction of climax prairies across North

America, this milkweed, Asclepias meadii, is fiercely endangered.13

Throughout the spring, summer, and fall, a large variety of early,

midseason, and late flowering plants, including milkweed blossoms,

produce the nectar sucked greedily by monarch adults. On the southern

journey to Mexico, the future of the North American eastern migration

is threatened by loss of the habitats of nectar-producing plants to feed

the nonbreeding adults flying to overwinter in their favorite roosting

trees in mountain woodlands. These woodlands in turn face natural-

cultural degradation in complex histories of ongoing state, class, and

ethnic oppression of campesinos and indigenous peoples in the region,

for example, the Mazahuas and Otomi.14

Unhinged in space and time and stripped of food in both directions,

larvae starve and hungry adults grow sluggish and fail to reach their

winter homes. Migrations fail across the Americas. The trees in cen-

tral Mexico mourn the loss of their winter shimmying clusters, and the

meadows, farms, and town gardens of the United States and southern

Canada are desolate in summer without the flitting shimmer of orange

and black.

For the child’s symbionts, Camille 1’s birthing parent chose monarch

butterflies of North America, in two magnificent but severely damaged

streams, from Canada to Mexico, and from the state of Washington,

along California, and across the Rocky Mountains. Camille’s gestational

parent exercised reproductive freedom with wild hope, choosing to bond

the soon-to-be-born fetus with both the western and eastern currents

of this braid of butterfly motion. That meant that Camille of the first

generation, and further Camilles for four more human generations at

least, would grow in knowledge and know-how committed to the on-

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goingness of these gorgeous and threatened insects and their human

and nonhuman communities all along the pathways and nodes of their

migrations and residencies in these places and corridors, not all the time

everywhere. Camille’s community understood that monarchs as a wide-

spread global species are not threatened; but two grand currents of a

continental migration, a vast connected sweep of myriad critters living

and dying together, were on the brink of perishing.

The child-bearing parent who chose the monarch butterfly as Camille’s

symbiont was a single person with the response-ability to exercise potent,

noninnocent, generative freedom that was pregnant with consequences

for ramifying worlds across five generations. That irreducible singular-

ity, that particular exercise of reproductive choice, set in train a several-

hundred-year effort, involving many actors, to keep alive practices of mi-

gration across and along continents for all the migrations’ critters. The

Communities of Compost did not align their children to “endangered

species” as that term had been developed in conservation organizations

in the twentieth century. Rather, the Communities of Compost under-

stood their task to be to cultivate and invent the arts of living with and

for damaged worlds in place, not as an abstraction or a type, but as and

for those living and dying in ruined places. All the Camilles grew rich

in worldly communities throughout life, as work and play with and for

the butterflies made for intense residencies and active migrations with

a host of people and other critters. As one Camille approached death, a

new Camille would be born to the community in time so that the elder,

as mentor in symbiosis, could teach the younger to be ready.15

The Camilles knew the work could fail at any time. The dangers

remained intense. As a legacy of centuries of economic, cultural, and

ecological exploitation both of people and other beings, excess extinc-

tions and exterminations continued to stalk the earth. Still, successfully

holding open space for other critters and their committed people also

flourished, and multispecies partnerships of many kinds contributed to

building a habitable earth in sustained troubled times.

The Camille Stories

The story I tell below tracks the five Camilles along only a few threads and knots

of their lifeways, between the birth of Camille 1 in 2025 and the death of Camille 5

in 2425. The story I tell here cries out for collaborative and divergent story-making

practices, in narrative, audio, and visual performances and texts in materialities

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from digital to sculptural to everything practicable. My stories are suggestive

string figures at best; they long for a fuller weave that still keeps the patterns

open, with ramifying attachment sites for storytellers yet to come. I hope readers

change parts of the story and take them elsewhere, enlarge, object, flesh out, and

reimagine the lifeways of the Camilles.

The Camille Stories reach only to five generations, not yet able to fulfill the

obligations that the Haudenosaunee Confederacy imposed on themselves and so

on anyone who has been touched by the account, even in acts of unacknowledged

appropriation, namely, to act so as to be response-able to and for those in the

seventh generation to come.16 The Children of Compost beyond the reach of the

Camille Stories might become capable of that kind of worlding, which somehow

once seemed possible, before the Great Acceleration of the Capitalocene and the

Great Dithering.

Over the five generations of the Camilles, the total number of human beings

on earth, including persons in symbiosis with vulnerable animals chosen by their

birth parent (syms) and those not in such symbioses (non-syms), declined from

the high point of 10 billion in 2100 to a stable level of 3 billion by 2400. If the

Communities of Compost had not proved from their earliest years so successful

and so infectious among other human people and peoples, the earth’s population

would have reached more than 11 billion by 2100. The breathing room provided by

that difference of a billion human people opened up possibilities for ongoingness

for many threatened ways of living and dying for both human and nonhuman

beings.17

C A M I L L E 1

Born 2025. Human numbers are 8 billion.

Died 2100. Human numbers are 10 billion.

In 2020, about three hundred people with diverse class, racial, religious,

and regional heritages, including two hundred adults of the four major

genders practiced at the time18 and one hundred children under the age

of eighteen, built a town where the New River and Gauley River flowed

together to form the Kanawha River in West Virginia. They named the

settlement New Gauley to honor the lands and waters devastated by

mountaintop removal coal mining. Historians of this time have sug-

gested that the period between about 2000 and 2050 on earth should

be called the Great Dithering.19 The Great Dithering was a time of inef-

fective and widespread anxiety about environmental destruction, un-

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mistakable evidence of accelerating mass extinctions, violent climate

change, social disintegration, widening wars, ongoing human popula-

tion increase due to the large numbers of already-born youngsters (even

though birth rates most places had fallen below replacement rate), and

vast migrations of human and nonhuman refugees without refuges.

During this terrible period, when it was nonetheless still possible for

concerted action to make a difference, numerous communities emerged

across the earth. The English-language name for these gatherings was

the Communities of Compost; the people called themselves compostists.

Many other names in many languages also proposed the string figure

game of collective resurgence. These communities understood that the

Great Dithering could end in terminal crises; or radical collective action

could ferment a turbulent but generative time of reversals, revolt, revo-

lution, and resurgence.

For the first few years, the adults of New Gauley did not birth any

new children, but concentrated on building culture, economy, rituals,

and politics in which oddkin would be abundant, and children would

be rare but precious.20 The kin-making work and play of the commu-

nity built capacities critical for resurgence and multispecies flourishing.

In particular, friendship as a kin-making practice throughout life was

8.3. Monarch butterfly caterpillar Danaus plexippus on a milkweed pod.

Photograph by Singer S. Ron, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

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elaborated and celebrated. In 2025, the community felt ready to birth

their first new babies to be bonded with animal symbionts. The adults

judged that most of their already-born children, who had helped found

the community, were ready and eager to be older siblings to the coming

symbiont youngsters. Everybody believed that this kind of sympoiesis

had not been practiced anywhere on earth before. People knew it would

not be simple to learn to live collectively in intimate and worldly care-

taking symbiosis with another animal as a practice of repairing damaged

places and making flourishing multispecies futures.

Camille 1 was born among a small group of five children, and per21 was

the only youngster linked to an insect. Other children in this first co-

hort became symbionts with fish (American eel, Anguilla rostrata), birds

(American kestrel, Falco sparverius), crustaceans (the Big Sandy crayfish,

Cambarus veteranus), and amphibians (streamside salamander, Ambys-

toma barbouri).22 Beginning with vulnerable bats, mammal symbioses

were undertaken in the second wave of births about five years later. It

was often easier to identify migratory threatened insects, fish, mammals,

and birds as potential symbionts for new children than reptiles, amphibi-

ans, and crustaceans. The preference for migratory symbionts was often

relaxed, especially since corridor conservation of all kinds was ever more

urgent as rising temperatures due to climate change forced many usu-

ally nonmigratory species outside their previous ranges. Although their

first loves remained traveling critters and far-flung pathways—mostly

because their own small human communities were made geographically

and culturally more worldly through cultivating the linkages required to

take care of their partners in symbiosis—some members of the Com-

munities of Compost committed themselves to critters in tiny remnant

habitats, as well as to those whose finicky ecological requirements and

love of home tied them tightly to particular places only.23

Over the first hundred years, New Gauley welcomed 100 new births

with babies joined to animal symbionts, 10 births to single parents or

couples who declined the three-parent model and whose offspring did

not receive these sorts of symbionts, 200 deaths, 175 in-migrants, and

50 out-migrants. The scientists of the Communities of Compost found it

impossible to establish successful animal-human symbioses with adults;

the critical receptive times for humans were fetal development, nursing,

and adolescence. During the times that they contributed cellular or mo-

lecular materials for modifying the human partner, the animal partners

also had to be in a period of transformation, such as hatching, larval

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ecdysis, or metamorphosis. The animals themselves were not modified

with human material; their roles in the symbioses were to teach and to

flourish in every way possible in dangerous and damaged times.

Almost everywhere, the Communities of Compost committed them-

selves to maintaining their size or to growing through immigration,

while keeping their own new births at a level compatible with the earth’s

overall human numbers eventually declining by two-thirds. If new in-

migrants accepted the basic practices of the Communities of Compost,

upon request they received permanent residency and citizenship rights

as compostists in inventive and usually raucous kin-making ceremonies.

Nonresident visitors were always welcome; hospitality was regarded as

both a basic obligation and source of mutual renewal. Visitors’ lengths

of stay could become a contentious matter and was even known to break

up kin affiliations and sometimes entire compostist communities.

If many more in-migrants wanted to join Communities of Compost

than were possible to accommodate, new settlements formed with men-

tors from the seed towns. In-migrants in the early centuries often came

from ruined areas elsewhere, and their seeking both refuge and belong-

ing in the Communities of Compost—themselves committed to the arts

of living in damaged places—was an act of both desperation and faith.

The original founders of the Communities of Compost quickly realized

that in-migrants from desperate situations brought with them not only

trauma, but also extraordinary insight and skill for the work to be done.

Resettlement in still other ruined sites and establishment of alliances

and collaborations with people and other critters in those areas required

the best abilities of the mentors and the in-migrants. Plant symbionts

were not joined to babies in the Communities of Compost for several gen-

erations, although recognizing profuse sympoiesis—world making—

with plants was fundamental for all compostists.

New Gauley decided to emphasize in-migration of people over new

births for the first three generations, and after that time there was both

more flexibility and the need to recalibrate births and deaths. In- and

out-migration tended to equalize as more places on earth restored con-

ditions for modest resurgence and reasons for seeking new homes rested

much less on war, exploitation, genocide, and ecological devastation,

and much more on adventure, curiosity, desire for new kinds of abun-

dance and skill, and the old habits of human beings to move, including

hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, and farm-and-town-living people. Oppor-

tunistic social species tend to move around a lot; human beings outside

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captivity have always been extraordinary ecosocial opportunists, travel-

ers, and path makers. Added to that, by 2300, more than a billion human

beings on earth had themselves been born into new kinds of symbiotic

relationships with other critters, in addition to the much older multispe-

cies associations that characterized human people as well as every other

sort of living being throughout ecological, evolutionary, developmental,

historical, and technological histories.

Before birth, Camille 1 was given a suite of pattern-forming genes ex-

pressed on monarch surfaces over their transformations from caterpillar

to winged adult. Camille 1 also received genes allowing per to taste in

the wind the dilute chemical signals crucial to adult monarchs selecting

diverse nectar-rich flowers and the best milkweed leaves for depositing

their eggs. Camille 1’s gut and mouth microbiomes were enhanced to

allow per to safely savor milkweed plants containing the toxic alkaloids

that the monarchs accumulate in their flesh to deter predators. As an

infant, Camille 1’s oral satisfactions with fragrant mammalian milk were

laced with the bitter tastes of cardiac glycosides, tastes that the human

parent nursing per dared not share. In per’s maturing mindful body, Ca-

mille 1 had to learn to become in symbiosis with an insect composed as

five caterpillar instars before metamorphosis into a flying adult, which

in turn experienced seasonally alternating sexually excited phases and

sexually quiet diapause. The symbiogenetic join of Camille and mon-

archs also had to accommodate the diverse parasitic and beneficial asso-

ciates of the butterfly holobiont, as well as pay attention to the genetics

of the migrating populations.24

The compostists did not attempt to introduce into Camille 1’s already

complicated symbiotic reformatting any of the genes and timing pat-

terns that the butterflies use to utterly disassemble and recompose their

entire being in the chrysalis before emerging as winged imagos. Nor

did the parents attempt to alter Camille’s visual capacities and neural

arrangements to perceive physically in the butterfly color spectrum, or

to see as if Camille had the compound eyes of an insect. Mimesis was

not the point of the alterations, but fleshly suggestions braided through

innovative pedagogical practices of naturalsocial becoming-with that

could help the symbiosis thrive through five human generations com-

mitted to healing damaged human and nonhuman lives and places. In

its most reductive expression, the point was to give the butterflies and

their people—to give the Migrations—a chance to have a future in a

time of mass extinctions.

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By five years of age, Camille 1’s skin was brilliantly banded and col-

ored in yellow and black like a late-stage monarch caterpillar, increasing

in intensity until age ten. But by initiation into adult responsibilities

at age fifteen, Camille 1’s skin had the muted tones and patterns of the

monarch chrysalis. As an adult, Camille 1 gradually acquired the pattern

and coloration of a vibrant orange and black adult butterfly. Camille 1’s

adult body was more androgynous in appearance than that of sexually

dimorphic monarch adults.

All of the symbiont children developed both visible traits and sub-

tle sensory similarities to their animal partners in early childhood. Al-

though they should not have been surprised, the consequences of this

developmental fact blindsided the adult compostists, as the first serious

conflicts in New Gauley erupted in the learning groups of the young.

Five youngsters who were bonded to animal symbionts, two children

born to dissenting parents, and so not bonded with such symbionts, and

five in-migrant children without symbionts made up the first cohort of

little ones. The symbiotic young were struggling to integrate mindful

bodies unimaginable to their parents. In addition, each symbiosis was

the only one of its kind in these early generations.

Camille 1 formed fierce friendships, especially with Kess, the young-

ster bonded with the American kestrels; but each symbiotic child was

acutely aware of their irreducible difference. Kess and Camille gravitated

to each other partly because they knew kestrels ate butterflies, and both

of their threatened animal symbionts flourished best in fields, meadows,

roadsides, pastures, and mixed woodlands full of a myriad of flowering

plants. From the beginning, the symbiont children developed a com-

plex subjectivity composed of loneliness, intense sociality, intimacy with

nonhuman others, specialness, lack of choice, fullness of meaning, and

sureness of future purpose. This landscape of converging and diverg-

ing feelings tended to grade into arrogance and exceptionalism toward

the nonsymbiotic children, and even toward their parents and other

nonsymbiotic adults of New Gauley. Because symbionts were still rare

in the overall population of an area in the initial generations after the

first Communities of Compost were established, in vulnerable moments

nonsymbiotic children and adults could and did feel the symbionts were

freaks, both more-than- and other-than-human, and seriously threat-

ening. Remembering that humanity meant humus, and not Anthro-

pos or Homo, did not come easily in the webs of Western cultures that

predominated in New Gauley. Determined to help youngsters through

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the mazes of self-preoccupation, social enthusiasm, playfulness, pride

in each other, fear, competition, and bullying that they had known in

school, the New Gauley adults and their young were faced with quite

another challenge in the emerging community of both symbiotic and

nonsymbiotic children.

New Gauley compostists soon found that storytelling was the most

powerful practice for comforting, inspiring, remembering, warning, nur-

turing compassion, mourning, and becoming-with each other in their

differences, hopes, and terrors. Of course, the Communities of Compost

emphasized a deep and wide range of approaches to educating both

young and old, and the sciences and arts were especially elaborated and

cherished. For youngsters and adults of most species in the communi-

ties, play was the most powerful and diverse activity for rearranging old

things and proposing new things, new patterns of feeling and action,

and for crafting safe enough ways to tangle with each other in conflict

and collaboration.25 The practice of friendship and the practice of play,

both ritualized and celebrated in small and large ways, were the core

kin-forming apparatuses. Libraries in many formats and materialities

abounded to evoke curiosities and sustain knowledge projects for learn-

ing to live and die well in the work of healing damaged places, selves,

and other beings. Decolonial multispecies studies (including diverse

and multimodal human and nonhuman languages) and an indefinitely

expandable transknowledging approach called EcoEvoDevoHistoEthno-

TechnoPsycho (Ecological Evolutionary Developmental Historical Eth-

nographic Technological Psychological studies) were essential layered

and knotted inquiries for compostists.26

Compostists eagerly found out everything they could about experi-

mental, intentional, utopian, dystopian, and revolutionary communities

and movements across times and places. One of their great disappoint-

ments in these accounts was that so many started from the premises of

starting over and beginning anew, instead of learning to inherit without

denial and stay with the trouble of damaged worlds. Although hardly

free of the sterilizing narrative of wiping the world clean by apoca-

lypse or salvation, the richest humus for their inquiries turned out to

be sf—science fiction and fantasy, speculative fabulation, speculative

feminism, and string figures. Blocking the foreclosures of utopias, sf

kept politics alive.

So storytelling was the seed bag for flourishing for compostists, and

Camille 1 was fed on stories. Because the brave young princess loved the

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toxic forest beings, especially the despised and feared insects called the

Ohmu, Camille’s favorite story was Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Like

a turbo butterfly, Nausicaä could fly over the forest, fields, and towns on

her agile personal jet-powered glider. The young Camille 1 could never

resist that vivid sensation. Hayao Miyazaki’s manga and anime story is

set on a postapocalyptic earth menaced by the toxic forest’s critters, who

were defending themselves and taking revenge for the natural world’s

relentless destruction at the hands of militarized, power-mad, techno-

logical humans. Evil rulers continued to promise ultimate destruction

in their drive to exterminate the toxic forest and extract the last drams

of resources for the walled cities of privilege and exception. Through

her study of the forest’s ecology, understanding of the physiology of

the mushroomlike infected poisonous trees, and love for the danger-

ous mutant giant insects and their larvae, Nausicaä triumphed in her

efforts to save both the people and the forest. She discovered that the

trees purified the toxins and drop by drop were forming a vast under-

ground aquifer of pure water that could regenerate the biodiverse earth.

Attuned to the languages of the plants, fungi, and animals, Nausicaä

could calm the incomprehension and fear of the people who were poi-

soned by the toxic emanations of the disturbed forest. She could propose

peace between humans and other-than-humans because she befriended

the toxic forest, a practice that reached deep into the young Camille 1’s

psyche. In the dramatic concluding scenes of the story, at great risk to

herself, Nausicaä rescued a threatened larval Ohmu and so stopped the

stampede of its giant adult conspecifics in their rage at the humans’

capturing and wounding of the youngster.

Camille 1 learned that there were many inspirations for Miyazaki’s

story,27 including a Phaecian princess from Homer’s Odyssey named

Nausicaä, who loved nature and music, cultivated a fervid imagination,

and disdained possessions. Along with European medieval accounts of

witches’ mastery of the winds, Master Windkey from Ursula Le Guin’s

Earthsea also infused the Nausicaä tale. The adult Camille 1 thought that

the most generative inspiration, however, was a Japanese story from

the Heian period, called “The Princess Who Loved Insects.”28 The prin-

cess did not beautify herself by blackening her teeth or plucking her

eyebrows, and she scorned the idea of a husband. All her passions were

for the caterpillars and creeping crawling critters disdained by others.29

Nausicaä had a companion animal, really a symbiont, a fierce and

gentle little fox squirrel. In per’s memoir, the elder Camille 1 described

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Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind as a fable of great danger and great

companionship. Unlike conventional heroes, Nausicaä accompanied by

animals, is a girl child and healer, whose courage matures in thick con-

nection with many others and many kinds of others. Nausicaä cannot

act alone, and also her personal response-ability and actions have great

consequences for herself and for myriad human and nonhuman beings.

Nausicaä’s connections and corridors are practical and material, as well

as fabulous and enspirited in bumptious animist fashion. Hers are the

arts of living on a damaged planet. This twentieth-century Japanese

anime child sustained Camille 1 in symbiosis with the monarchs for a

lifetime.

C A M I L L E 2

Born in 2085. Human numbers are 9.5 billion.

Died in 2185. Human numbers are 8 billion.

At initiation at age fifteen, as a coming-of-age gift the second Camille

decided to ask for chin implants of butterfly antennae, a kind of tentac-

ular beard, so that more vivid tasting of the flying insects’ worlds could

become the heritage of the human partner too, helping in the work and

adding to the corporeal pleasures of becoming-with.30 Proud of this vi-

brant sign of the lived symbiosis now in its second generation, once the

procedures were complete the adolescent Camille 2 undertook a trip to

the overwintering habitat of the eastern migration to meet with indig-

enous people and campesinos who were rehabilitating damaged lands

and waters along the transvolcanic belt between the states of México

and Michoacán.

Camille 1 had been Camille 2’s mentor, and over the first fifteen years

of the new child’s life Camille 1 tried to prepare the second-generation

New Gauley human-butterfly symbiont for sustained visiting as the

guest of the diverse communities of Michoacán. But Camille 1’s life-

work had been almost entirely along the corridors and in the towns,

fields, mines, woods, coasts, mountains, deserts, and cities of the great

eastern and western monarch migrations that are north of Mexico, into

southern Canada on the east and into Washington and the Northern

Rockies on the west. Camille 1 worked, played, and struggled primarily

with midwestern and southern farmers, agribusiness scientists, energy

companies and their ruthless lawyers, mine workers, unemployed peo-

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ple, nature lovers, gardeners, corridor ecologists, insect specialists, and

climate scientists, as well as artists performing with and for nonhuman

critters. Although based in New Gauley and attuned especially to the

ravaged landscapes and peoples of coal country there and across the

continent,31 Camille 1 also sojourned with the insects and their people in

the winter homes of the western migration of the monarchs, especially

along the Monterey Bay of Central California. So per understood the

biological, cultural, historical worlds of these clusters of monarchs cling-

ing to their local Monterey pines and crucial (if never really accepted by

ecological nativists) Australian gum trees.

Both sym and non-sym people across this vast expanse of land expe-

rienced the sympoieses of the Children of Compost primarily through

their biological semiotic materialities. Of course, as an important compo-

nent of per’s education and working alliances as both child and adult, Ca-

mille 1 had studied with Native American, First Nation, and Métis teach-

ers, who explained and performed diverse practices and knowledges for

conjoined human and other-than-human becoming and exchange. But

8.4. Monarch butterfly resting on fennel in the Pismo Butterfly Grove near the

entrance to Pismo Beach State Park, November 15, 2008. Photograph

by docentjoyce / Wikimedia Commons.

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Camille 1 had never deeply questioned the settler practices or catego-

ries of nature, culture, and biology that made per’s own transformative

sympoiesis with monarchs comprehensible to perself. For practical and

political, as well as ontological and epistemological, reasons, Camille 1

recognized the urgent need both to deepen and to change the terms

of the exchanges and collaborations with people, peoples, and other-

than-human critters in the southern migrations and residencies of the

monarchs in Mexico.

And so, although well read in decolonial and postcolonial literatures

and engaged in lifelong correspondence with Mexican comrades, several

of whom had personally made the journey to New Gauley and to Cali-

fornia’s Santa Cruz to meet with the Communities of Compost there,

Camille 1 died before encountering monarch sympoiesis in material se-

miotic forms other than symbiogenesis. Then, on the first Día de los

Muertos of per’s first sojourn in Mexico after coming of age, Camille 2

was introduced to the Monarcas returning to their winter mountain

home in November as the souls of the Mazahua dead. The Monarcas

did not represent the souls of the dead; they were syms of the living but-

terflies and the human dead, in multinaturalist worldings that Camille

2 had studied but could barely recognize and did not know how to greet.

There were Communities of Compost in Michoacán and all over Mex-

ico that had birthed symbiogenetic children for the work of rehabilitat-

ing ruined lands and waters through the coming generations. Mexicans

were as much at home in the extended apparatuses of naturalcultural,

biological knowledges and practices as their northern comrades. But

none of the Mexican Communities of Compost, no matter their set-

tler, mixed, or native heritages, had joined a human baby to migrating

endangered critters that were themselves the visiting ancestors. The

consequences of Camille 2’s powerful introduction to the Monarca sym-

poiesis that joined the overwintering winged insects and the visiting

ancestors reshaped the fabric of work for ecojustice that joined New

Gauley and the communities of the transvolcanic belt for the coming

three hundred years. Searching for a term they could share, Camille 2

and per’s Mazahua hosts decided to name this kind of becoming-with

“symanimagenesis.” The corridors, migrations, and contact zones of the

monarchs collect up many ways of living and dying across the Americas!

Thus the Mazahuas of central Mexico (México, Michoacán, and Que-

retaro) became vital to Camille’s story from the second generation on.

Decolonial work on all sides of the border had to be intrinsic to every

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form of sympoiesis with the monarchs.32 Struggling with the conse-

quences for the Communities of Compost of practices of conservation

and restoration inherited from Anglo and Spanish settler colonialism

and of both the Mexican and U.S. states’ ongoing suppression of and

extraction from indigenous peoples, Camille 2 no longer could not know

about the Mazahuas’ land and water struggles, migrations to near and

distant cities for ill-paid work, customary and illegal forest cutting, char-

coal making, history of acting to preserve the trees and woodlands be-

fore the butterfly migration became an international issue, history also

of old and new indigenous and outsider exploitation of the forest and

the watershed, and resistance to U.S. and other foreign scientists and

Mexican state regulations and bureaucrats that criminalize local subsis-

tence practices in the butterfly preserve that became a World Heritage

Site.

In Camille 2’s first weeks in Mazahua monarch country, the women of

the communities in and around the butterfly reserve took per in hand.33

When the young sym arrived in autumn of 2100, the radical Mazahua

women were celebrating the ninety-sixth anniversary of the founding

of their movement. In 2004, “symbolically armed with farming tools

and wooden rifles, they formed el Ejército de Mujeres Zapatistas en De-

fensa del Agua and pledged a strategy of non-violence.”34 The Zapatista

movement had begun with a transformative armed uprising in Chiapas

on January 1, 1994, but the Zapatistas’ most important contribution to

the ongoing strategies of the Mazahuan communities was their develop-

ment of vigorous nonviolence in a broad, multigenerational opposition

front.35 Communities of Compost all over the world studied Zapatista-

held municipalities called caracoles (snail shells).

Initiating the visiting New Gauley sym into intense relationships

with the living dead was the Mazahua women’s first priority. Politely

resisting the temptation to thread their fingers continuously though

the sensitive tentacular organs of their oddly bearded visitor, they were

charmed by the butterfly antennae on Camille 2’s chin and by per’s viv-

idly colored adult skin patterns that had gradually replaced the dramatic

caterpillar skin banding of the younger child. The Mazahuas were confi-

dent that these markings signified that the adolescent would become an

apt student of their own human-butterfly worldings, and so a useful ally.

To join in the work of human and other-than-human rehabilitation and

multispecies environmental justice in indigenous territory, which had

been dominated and drained for centuries by the state and other outside

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forces, Camille 2 had to study the resurgence of peoples that ignited in

the early years of the twenty-first century.

On the night the monarchas returned in November 2100, the women

taught Camille 2 a poem, “Soy Mazahua,” composed by Julio Garduño

Cervantes, which remained vital to their work for the dead and the liv-

ing. The beautifully dressed people at the fiesta were singing the poem in

the midst of extravagant fireworks, feasting, and greeting returning kin.

The poem commemorated a Mazahua leader who had been murdered

in 1980 on the way home from a cemetery on el Día de los Muertos.

All over Mexico, this killing outraged indigenous pueblos and ignited a

movement that was stronger than ever by the time Camille 2 visited. The

women of El Ejército de Mujeres Zapatistas en Defensa del Agua taught

that butterflies drank the tears of those who mourned the murdered,

raped, and disappeared ones of every land.36

I A M M A Z A H UA

You have wanted to deny my existence

But I do not deny yours.

But I exist. I am Mazahua.

. . .

I am made of this land, the air, water and sun.

And together we repeat, We are Mazahuas

. . .

You have enslaved my ancestors and stolen their lands. You have

murdered them.

. . .

I build the house but you live in it.

You are the criminal but I am in prison.

We made the revolution but you took advantage of it.

My voice rises and joins with a thousand others.

And together we repeat, We are Mazahuas

Our hands sowed for everyone.

Our hands will struggle for everyone.

I am Mazahua.

—Julio Garduño Cervantes

Camille 2 found it difficult at first to grasp how active the dead were

across this region and how critical to the work of compostists to restore

damaged land and its human and nonhuman beings.37 Camille 2 had to

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learn to let go of colonialist notions of religion and secularism to begin

to appreciate the sheer semiotic materiality of those who came before.

Until sympoiesis with the dead could be acknowledged, sympoiesis with

the living was radically incomplete. Visiting urbanites from Mexico City

were no better at seriously engaging the epistemological, ontological,

and practical demands of this aspect of indigenous cosmopolitics than

Camille 2 was. Modernity and its category work proved terribly durable

for hundreds of years after the withering critique conducted in the late

twentieth and early twenty-first centuries had made explicit adherence

to the tenets of philosophical and political modernity unthinkable for

serious people, including scientists and artists. Modernity was driven

underground, but remained undead. Making peace with this vampire

ancestor was an urgent task for the Communities of Compost.38

In the early weeks of Camille 2’s sojourn, the teenage Mazahua women

of El Ejército de Mujeres Zapatistas en Defensa del Agua undertook the

task of teaching the sym about the struggle for water and forest eco-

justice in the region. Throughout the late twentieth and twenty-first

centuries, in immense water transfer projects, Mexico City drew this

precious fluid from the lakes, rivers, and aquifers that reached across

the mountains and into the basins occupied by indigenous peoples and

other critters to the north and west.39 This practice was immensely de-

structive, a fact highlighted in a 2015 report of the Union of Scientists

Committed to Society, which argued, “Transferring water, moving large

volumes from one basin to another, is not only unsustainable and affects

the environment in the medium and long term, but also causes forced

displacements that destroy towns and communities and marginalize

people, who are obliged to move to the poverty belts of the large cities.”40

By the time of the birth of Camille 1, the Cutzamala System already

pumped 127 billion gallons per year to Mexico City and its twenty-seven

municipalities, while the Mazahua communities did not have potable

water. El Ejército de Mujeres Zapatistas en Defensa del Agua carried

out relentless demonstrations and actions in Mexico City and elsewhere

and won many partial victories. The struggle continued throughout

Camille 2’s lifetime and after. In sympoiesis, the monarch critters, hu-

man and other-than-human, drank from the healing tears of the living

and the dead.41

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8.5. Mural painted by youth in La Hormiga, Putumayo, in southwestern

Colombia depicting landscapes before and after aerial fumigation during the

U.S.-Colombia “War on Drugs.” Photograph by Kristina Lyons.

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C A M I L L E 3

Born in 2170; human numbers are 8.5 billion.

Died in 2270; human numbers are 6 billion.

By this generation, two-thirds of the residents of the Communities of

Compost around the world were symbionts engaged in intense work

and play for sustaining vulnerable beings across the hardest centuries

of planetary crisis and widespread human and other-than-human suf-

fering. A significant number of syms had decided to leave their com-

postist communities, surrendering residency rights for citizenship in

other political formations. Some humans, both in-migrants and non-

sym offspring born in the new towns, became solid compostists without

ever wanting to engage personally in symbiogenetic kin making. Allied

with diverse non-sym peoples, compostist practices of living and dying

flourished everywhere, and the people in the emerging epoch of par-

tial healing felt deeply entangled with the ongoing tentacular Chthu-

lucene. There had been great losses of kinds of living beings, as rapid

climate change and interlocked ecosystem collapses swept the earth; and

the mass extinction event of the Capitalocene and Anthropocene was

not over.

Still, by the time Camille 3 was fifty years old, it was clear that hu-

man numbers, while still too heavy in most places for the damaged

natural, social, and technical systems of earth to sustain, were declin-

ing within a deliberate pattern of heightened environmental justice.

That pattern emphasized a preference for the poor among humans, a

preference for biodiverse naturalsocial ecosystems, and a preference

for the most vulnerable among other critters and their habitats. Much

of the most inventive work over the 150 years since the first compos-

tist communities appeared was developing the linkages of this pattern.

That work required both powerful recognition and strengthening of

inherited Chthulucene practices that had not been fully obliterated in

the Capitalocene and Anthropocene, and also newly invented ways of

linking the three critical preferences to each other. The wealthiest and

highest-consuming human populations reduced new births the most,

with the support of the Communities of Compost; but human births

everywhere were deliberately below replacement rates, so as to slowly

and effectively reach levels that made sense for distributed and diverse

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humanity as humus, rather than as end points of nature and culture.

Practices of making kin, not babies, had taken hold inside and outside

the Communities of Compost.

Against all expectations in the early twenty-first century, after only

150 years sympoieses, both symbiogenetic and symanimagenic, seemed

to be making a difference in holding open time and space for many of

earth’s most vulnerable, including the monarch migrations and their

diverse human people and peoples. Forests in the transvolcanic belt of

Mexico were resurgent, and water had been restored to the pillaged aqui-

fers. People had worked out robust peace with the critters and scientists

of the Biosphere Reserve, as greater control was relocated to campes-

ino and indigenous organizations for environmental justice. Migrations

north of Mexico now could count on larval and adult food as nonmono-

cropping organic agriculture, ubiquitous gardens, and species-rich road-

side verges filled the landscape. Devastation of habitats for people and

other critters caused by Big Energy and Big Capital was not finished, but

the tide had definitively turned.

Humus-friendly technological innovation, creative rituals and cele-

brations, profound economic restructuring, reconfiguration of political

control, demilitarization, and sustained work for connecting corridors

and for ecological, cultural, and political restoration had all made an

impact and were growing in force. While Camille 3 could not forget the

monarchs, per’s attention was turned to the fact that syms needed to

take stock of themselves collectively in unprecedented ways.

The major events of Camille 3’s life were travels to gatherings around

the world of sym and non-sym humans in the face of general recognition

that both humanity and animality had been fundamentally transformed

by compostist practices. Of course, many peoples of earth had never di-

vided living beings into human and animal; nonetheless, they had all or-

dered things differently from what was plainly happening everywhere by

2200. It was also inescapably clear by 2200 that the changes were not the

same everywhere. Sym worlding was not one thing, and it was diverg-

ing and adapting exuberantly in EcoEvoDevoHistoTechnoEthnoPsycho

fashion. The recognition was turbulent, exhilarating, and dangerous.

The crises of bullying among the children in Camille 1’s generation were

nothing to the terrors of transition in the third generation of the Com-

munities of Compost, who would in a few more generations become the

majority of people on earth. Inventing earthwide cosmopolitics between

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and among syms and non-syms was the daunting task of Camille 3’s

generation.

Peoples from every fold of earth had long been both generated and

nourished by stories, myths, performances, powers, and embodiments

of entities not divided into categories recognizable to most conventional

Western philosophy and politics. Such stories and embodiments were

also deeply embedded in the practices and accounts of both recent and

long-established peoples living throughout what was once called the

West. Camille 3’s generation found biologies and storytelling to be the

richest veins for weaving the needed fabrics to bind syms and non-syms

together.

Coming-of-age stories in sf, from Joanna Russ’s Alyx in The Adven-

tures of Alyx to Julie Czerneda’s decidedly nonhumanoid young female

entity Esen-alit-Quar in her Web Shifters series, entranced many in Ca-

mille 3’s generation, and these tales had been carefully maintained in the

8.6. Kenojuak Ashevak, Animals of Land and Sea, 1991, stonecut with stencil,

25 30 in. (paper). Courtesy of Dorset Fine Arts.

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compostist archives. Camille 3 was especially drawn to Philip Pullman’s

twentieth-century stories about the young girl Lyra Belacqua and her

daemon, Pantalaimon.42 The animal daemons of human beings were ca-

pable of multiple transformations until the time of human adolescence,

when the animal stabilized into a single morph. Pullman imagined the

daemons as expressions of a tripartite human person, rather than as a

distinct beings; but compostist syms had other and better resources for

understanding the join, which did not rely on the trinary soul/body/

mind heritage that Pullman used in his war against both monotheism

and the Authority. Compostists understood the daemons in less onto-

logically purified ways, more entangled with situated animisms in di-

verse modern and traditional, past and present worlds. The bonds be-

tween human and daemon were very close to the symbiogenetic linkages

forged for the young in compostist communities. Severing such bonds

threatened persons at the deepest core of their being. Living-with was

the only possible way to live-well. Heartened by these stories between

and during endless meetings among quibbling and not infrequently

fearful syms and non-syms, the critters of earth were forging planetwide

ontological revolutions for making kin.

C A M I L L E 4

Born in 2255. Human numbers are 6.5 billion.

Died in 2355. Human numbers are 3.5 billion.

After decades of heartening progress, new viral diseases afflicting soil-

based fungal symbionts of food plants needed by many species in the

subfamily Danainae to fight off their own protozoan parasites emerged

earthwide too quickly for response.43 The monarchs joined the myriad

kinds of beings that disappeared in the ongoing great extinctions

that had been unloosed by the Plantationocene, Anthropocene and

Capitalocene. Near the end of life, witnessing the loss of the great

monarch migrations across the Americas, and with them the loss of

the patterns of living and dying they sustained, Camille 4 knew that

mentoring Camille 5 would take other paths than those that had guided

Camille 3’s teaching of Camille 4.

In a diary archived by the compostists, Camille 4 wrote about per’s

wrenching feelings in 2340 at the age of eighty-five, while watching the

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celebrations for fifteen-year-old Camille 5’s initiation into full sym re-

sponsibilities. Involved for decades in research on the ecologies of the

insects in their human and nonhuman holobiomes, Camille 4 had been

studying the reports from all over the earth about the rapid population

crashes of moths and butterflies, especially among the Danainae. Al-

though widespread and diverse, monarchs would be among the first to

disappear; and no one yet knew why. It was not clear that total extinc-

tion would result, but it was clear the migrations were doomed. Holding

open space would involve much different work for Camille 5 than for the

previous generations, and it was Camille 4’s hard task to take the young

sym through another sort of initiation before dying in 2355. Of course,

Camille 4 had a great deal of experience to draw from with other syms

who had lost their critters.

8.7. The relations of infectious disease and parasitism are not the enemies of

earth’s critters; the killing of ongoingness—double death—is the crime. “When

monarch butterflies are heavily infected with the protozoan parasite Ophryocystis

elektroscirrha, they can sometimes get stuck to their chrysalis. In this case, a paper

wasp takes advantage of the situation.” Photograph and description by Jaap de

Roode, Emory University.

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There were thousands of Speakers for the Dead around the earth

by 2300, each tasked with bringing critters who had been irretrievably

lost into potent presence for giving knowledge and heart to all of those

continuing to work for the still diverse earth’s robust and partial re-

cuperation.44 Over three hundred years, the Communities of Compost

had built a potent earthwide network of refugia and foci of resurgent

naturalcultural diversity. The Speakers for the Dead teach practices of

remembering and mourning that enlist extinct human and nonhuman

critters in the ongoing work of cutting the shackles of Double Death,

which strangled a vast proportion of ways of living and dying in the

Plantationocene, Anthropocene and Capitalocene.45

For help in preparing Camille 5 to take up the tasks of a Speaker for

the Dead, Camille 4 turned to the Canadian-Nunavut, nontraditional,

young Inuk woman throat singer Tanya Tagaq and her 2014 album

Animism, which had been so powerful in strengthening Inuit and also

other situated resurgence in the twenty-first century. Tagaq practiced

what a twenty-first-century anthropologist, Susan Harding, tentatively

called “experimental animism.”46 In Animism, Tagaq and her partners,

8.8. Make Kin Not Babies. Design by Elaine Gan for the

exhibit dump! at Kunsthal Aarhus, 2015.

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violinist Jesse Zubot and drummers Jean Martin and DZ Michael Red,

performed a musical argument for and about continuities, transforma-

tions, contradictions, and sf visual and acoustic kinetic interconver-

sions of human and animal beings in situated worlds. Hunting, eating,

living-with, dying-with, and moving-with in the turbulent folds and ed-

dies of a situated earth: these were the affirmations and controversies

of Tagaq’s singing and website texts and interviews. Tagaq embraced

oppositions and conflicts, not to purify them, but to live inside com-

plexities of shared flesh, casting herself for some worlds and not others.

At her Polaris Music Prize performance in September 2014, the names

of murdered and missing Aboriginal women scrolled behind Tagaq. The

last track of Animism was titled “Fracking”; the first was “Caribou.” She

wore seal fur cuffs during her Polaris performance; she affirmed the

natural world and hunting by her people. Her risk-taking animism per-

formed materialist worlds—gone, here, and to come. Proclaiming, “I

want to live in worlds that are not supposed to be,” she affirmed that

such worlds already are, have been, and will be.47 The music was utterly

contemporary, and many mobile identities were in play and at risk. The

work reached out to unexpected techniques and audiences; and it was

unapologetically rooted in specific places, peoples, and critters.

Tagaq’s practices of transforming sound, flesh, and kind were animist

in old and new Inuit terms and in the related sense proposed by the

anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Viveiros de Castro studied

with Brazilian Amerindians, with whom he learned to theorize the rad-

ical conceptual realignment he called multinaturalism and perspectiv-

ism. “Animism is the only sensible version of materialism.”48 It matters

which concepts conceptualize concepts. Materialist, experimental ani-

mism is not a New Age wish nor a neocolonial fantasy, but a powerful

proposition for rethinking relationality, perspective, process, and reality

without the dubious comforts of the oppositional categories of modern/

traditional or religious/secular. Human-animal knots do something dif-

ferent in this world.

It matters which worlds world worlds. It matters who eats whom

and how. It remains a material question for cosmopolitical critters in

the Communities of Compost. For these reasons, Camille 4 invoked

Tanya Tagaq to share her power more than two hundred years after her

death.

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C A M I L L E 5

Born 2340. Human numbers are 4 billion.

Died in 2425. Human numbers are 3 billion.

One billion human-critter symbionts inhabit the earth in 2425.

Two billion humans are not syms.

Over 50 percent of all critter species living in 2015

have vanished by 2425.

Millions of kinds of critters are syms with humans.

The animal sym partners remain unaltered by human genes.

The human syms take on ever more properties

of their animal partners.

Many humans are syms with extinct partners.

S TA R H AW K ’ S S O N G , TAU G H T BY T H E S P E A K E R S F O R T H E D E A D

Breathe deep.

Feel the pain

where it lives deep in us

for we live, still,

in the raw wounds

and pain is salt in us, burning.

Flush it out.

Let the pain become a sound,

a living river on the breath.

Raise your voice.

Cry out. Scream. Wail.

Keen and mourn

for the dismembering of the world.49

And so the fifth Camille inherited a powerful task from per’s mentor—to

become a Speaker for the Dead, to bring into ongoing presence, through

active memory, the lost lifeways, so that other symbiotic and sympoie-

tic commitments would not lose heart. Crucial to the work was not to

forget the stink in the air from the burning of the witches, not to forget

the murders of human and nonhuman beings in the Great Catastrophes

named the Plantationocene, Anthropocene, Capitalocene, to “keen and

mourn for the dismembering of the world.” Moving through mourning

to represencing, to the practice of vital memory, was the work of the

Speakers for the Dead. Their task was to strengthen the healing that was

gaining momentum across the earth. The fourth and fifth Camilles both

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traveled widely, drawing from their heritage of monarch symbioses, to

teach and learn how to practice healing and ongoingness in the cyclones

of continuing damage and partial resurgence.

Before taking up the tasks of the Speaker for the Dead, remembering

the bonds formed more than two hundred years earlier, Camille 5 again

sought help from the evolving, historically situated, symanimagenic kin-

making practices of twenty-fourth-century Mazahuas. Camille 5 began

per’s work with a year-long residence in Michoacán studying with the over-

lapping indigenous-scientific-activist communities that continued to heal

damaged lives and lands there. The Mazahuas also mourned the loss of

the living monarchs, and they were deeply worried how this extinction

would reshape their own symanimagenic relations with their dead. By

Camille 5’s generation, there were millions of vanished species, vanished

kinds of critters both human and other-than-human, and so much for

the Speakers for the Dead to do to replenish heart and mind for and

with those who continue to stay with the trouble. And to stay with the

ragged joy of ordinary living and dying, up to and beyond the year 2400.

The monarchs’ people decided that this Speaker for the Dead should

itself be a new kind of sym, joining the symbiogenetic Camille 5 with

symanimagenic persons from the transvolcanic belt. Such persons had

8.9. Monarch butterfly caterpillars regularly have to share

their milkweed food plants with oleander aphids (Aphis nerii ).

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been friends and coworkers before; now they were to undertake another

experimental and risky sympoiesis for unfurling times.

The Speakers for the Dead are also tasked with bringing into mind

and heart the new things of earth, not only the symbionts and sym-

animants and their communities and corridors, but also the emerging

kinds of beings and ways of life of an always evolving home world. The

Speakers for the Dead seek and release the energies of the past, pres-

ent, and future Chthulucene, with its myriad tentacles of opportunistic,

dangerous, and generative sympoiesis. The Children of Compost would

not cease the layered, curious practice of becoming-with others for a

habitable, flourishing world.

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Notes

Introduction

1 Critters is an American everyday idiom for varmints of all sorts. Scientists talk of

their “critters” all the time; and so do ordinary people all over the U.S., but perhaps

especially in the South. The taint of “creatures” and “creation” does not stick to

“critters”; if you see such a semiotic barnacle, scrape it off. In this book, “critters”

refers promiscuously to microbes, plants, animals, humans and nonhumans, and

sometimes even to machines.

2 Less simple was deciding how to spell Chthulucene so that it led to diverse and

bumptious chthonic dividuals and powers and not to Chthulhu, Cthulhu, or any

other singleton monster or deity. A fastidious Greek speller might insist on the “h”

between the last “l” and “u”; but both for English pronunciation and for avoiding

the grasp of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu, I dropped that “h.” This is a metaplasm.

Chapter 1: Playing String Figures with Companion Species

1 In languages attuned to partial translation, in U.S. English string figures are called

cat’s cradle; in French, jeux de ficelle; in Navajo, na’atl’o’. See Haraway, “sf: Science

Fiction, Speculative Fabulation, String Figures, So Far.”

2 For a mathematical joke-exposition of Terrapolis, see Haraway, sf: Speculative Fab-

ulation and String Figures.

3 From Proto-Germanic and Old English, guman later became human, but both come

soiled with the earth and its critters, rich in humus, humaine, earthly beings as

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opposed to the gods. In Hebrew, Adam is from adamah or “ground.” The historical

linguistic gender tone of guman, like human and man, is masculine/universal; but

in sf worlding adam, guman, adamah become more a microbiome of fermenting

critters of many genders and kinds, i.e., companion species, at table together, eat-

ing and being eaten, messmates, compost. Puig de la Bellacasa, “Ethical Doings in

Naturecultures,” discusses a transformational biopolitics, care of the earth and

its many species, including people, through care of the soil in the permaculture

movement.

4 Strathern, Reproducing the Future, 10; Strathern, The Gender of the Gift.

5 Whitehead, Adventures.

6 Stengers, Cosmopolitics I and II.

7 Despret, “The Body We Care For”; Despret, “The Becoming of Subjectivity in An-

imal Worlds.” Despret gave me “rendering capable” and much more. “Becoming-

with” is developed in Haraway, When Species Meet, 16–17, 287.

8 On agential realism and intra-action, see Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway.

9 For the old-style ethnology, see Jayne, String Figures.

10 Hogness, “California Bird Talk.”

11 Naabeehó Bináhásdzo (the Navajo Nation, the legal geographically defined terri-

tory for the semi-autonomous nation), or Diné Bikéyah (the People’s name for Na-

vajoland), is located in the Four Corners area of the southwestern United States,

surrounded by Colorado, Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico. For Navajo scholarship

on their history, written in the web of Diné creation stories and the discipline of

academic history, see Denetdale, Reclaiming Diné History. There are several Inter-

net sources for Navajo string games and string figures, with varied stories and

names, e.g., “Diné String Games” and the large “Library of Navajo String Games.”

For an extraordinary video of an elder Navajo woman, Margaret Ray Bochinclonny,

playing string games, see “Navajo String Games by Grandma Margaret.” Margaret

Ray’s grandson, Terry Teller, explains Navajo string figure star constellations at

“So Naal Kaah, Navajo Astronomy.” Navajo string games are played mainly in win-

ter, Spider Woman’s storytelling season.

12 Anderson, Creatures of Empire.

13 Rock doves have probably been in relations of codomestication with people for

about ten thousand years, and they are recorded five thousand years ago in Mes-

opotamia on cuneiform tablets. Throughout this chapter, I will use the common

term pigeons and rock doves interchangeably unless otherwise noted. There are

several dozens of living and fossil species in the Columbidae family that includes

C. livia domestica, including over thirty living Old World pigeon or dove species.

Some Columbidae species have expansive natural ranges, and others have special-

ized needs met only in small ranges. The greatest variety of the family is in the

Indomalaya and Australasian ecozones. Domestic pigeons have diversified into

many dozens of formal and informal kinds and breeds, as well as the ubiquitous

feral pigeons making a living from Istanbul to Tokyo to London to Los Angeles

to Berlin to Cairo to Cape Town to Buenos Aires. For an updated “List of Pigeon

Breeds,” see the Wikipedia entry in the bibliography. A Google images search for

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pigeon breeds yields a visual feast. Domestic breeds are thought to have originated

in the Middle East and Central Asia. For some of the breeds from this region, in-

cluding tumblers, spinners, and rollers, see “Turkish Tumblers.com.” The bbc did

a show about how the pigeon fanciers of Baghdad kept their birds and their sport

alive after 2003 during the Iraq war; the detailed corporeal practices of love and

care of the men for their pigeons are palpable. See Muir, “The Pigeon Fanciers of

Baghdad.” For sociological ethnography of racing-pigeon worlds, see Jerolmack,

“Primary Groups and Cosmopolitan Ties”; Jerolmack, “Animal Practices, Ethnic-

ity and Community”; Jerolmack, The Global Pigeon. For centuries Iran has been a

passionate center of pigeon racing, a practice that continues today despite being

illegal (but tolerated) under the current regime because racing events are occasions

for gambling. For the Persian/French bilingual ethnographic treatment of this fas-

cinating story, see Goushegir, Le combat du colombophile. See also “World Market

in Pigeons.” For an extraordinary index to articles and other information relating

to racing pigeons written mainly by fanciers, see “Racing Pigeon-Post.”

14 For research on how pigeons do these things, see Walcott, “Pigeon Homing.”

15 For a crime thriller set in the racing-pigeon world, check out Scottoline, The Ven-

detta Defense. Working-class New York dockworkers, who are racing-pigeon men,

feature prominently in the famous 1954 film starring Marlon Brando, On the Wa-

terfront. See Elizabeth Jones, Night Flyers, for a moving historical mystery thriller

for girls that tells the story of a twelve-year-old farm girl in North Carolina in

World War I who loves, protects, and raises homing pigeons. She agrees to train

night flyers for the U.S. Army message service. The birds themselves are vivid, fully

fleshed out, relational players in the narrative.

16 U.S. Coast Guard, “Pigeon Search and Rescue Project.”

17 For example, see Prior, Schwarz, and Güntürkün, “Mirror-Induced Behavior in the

Magpie.” The mirror test was developed in 1970 by Gordon Gallop Jr.

18 Epstein, Lanza, and Skinner, “‘Self-awareness’ in the Pigeon”; Allen, DeLabar, and

Drossel, “Mirror Use in Pigeons.”

19 See Keio University, “Pigeons Show Superior Self-recognition Abilities”; Toda and

Watanabe, “Discrimination of Moving Video Images of Self by Pigeons.” 20 Watanabe, Sakamoto, and Wakita, “Pigeons’ Discrimination of Paintings by Monet

and Picasso.”

21 Berokoff, “Attachment” and “Love.” In a post called “Let’s Hear,” providing a fas-

cinating window into structures of gender in marriage in these worlds, Berokoff

surveyed other wives of pigeon racers from several continents about how they felt

about the sport, the pigeons, their husbands, time, and the labor and pleasure of

care for the birds.

22 Berokoff, “Love.”

23 Beatriz da Costa died on December 27, 2012. For access to her work, including

PigeonBlog, see “Beatriz da Costa’s Blog and Project Hub.” See also da Costa, “In-

terspecies Coproduction.” For a discussion of da Costa’s work, especially her last

project, Dying for the Other, see Haraway, Lord, and Juhasz, “Feminism, Technol-

ogy, Transformation.” See da Costa, Dying for the Other.

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172 N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 1

24 Da Costa, “PigeonBlog,” 31. All quotes are from this essay. Giving a sense of the

skills needed for this collective project, human team members included: Beatriz

da Costa (artist, researcher), Richard Desroisiers (pigeon owner), Rufus Edwards

(scientific consultant), Cina Hazegh (artist, researcher), Kevin Ponto (artist, re-

searcher), Bob Matsuyama (pigeon owner), Robert Nideffer (copyeditor), Peter

Osterholm (pigeon owner), Jamie Schulte (electronics consultant and dear friend),

Ward Smith (videographer). See also da Costa and Philips, Tactical Biopolitics. The

wonderful sf writer Gwyneth Jones also has an essay in this book that inspires

my own storytelling, “True Life Science Fiction.”

25 Da Costa, “PigeonBlog,” 32.

26 Da Costa, “PigeonBlog,” 35.

27 I am so greedy for stories of critters and their people collaborating in work and play

that I do not always see the rough edges and ongoing troubles. One PigeonBlog

team member informally told me that he sometimes found it hard to watch the

pigeons learning to fly with the packs and ruffling their feathers in annoyance

while they were fitted. He hoped they took pride in their part; but he reminded

me that work and play, whether for art, science, or politics—or for all three—are

not innocent activities and the burdens rarely fall symmetrically.

28 For a recent pigeon spy report from Iran, see Hambling, “Spy Pigeons Circle the

World.” Hambling’s speculation about ties of Beatriz da Costa’s PigeonBlog project

to avian spies at Iran’s nuclear facilities is ironic, to say the least. But it does seem

that the United States might be losing both high-tech robotic remote-controlled

spy drones and well-equipped spy pigeons over Iran. It’s enough to make the mul-

lahs suspicious. Me too. See also Denega, The Cold War Pigeon Patrols.

29 Da Costa, “PigeonBlog,” 36.

30 It is too easy to write as if struggles and positions separating animal rights people

from other advocates for animals and animal-human worlding were straightfor-

ward and closed; they are not. For one discussion of this issue between differing

animal-loving feminists, see Potts and Haraway, “Kiwi Chicken Advocate Talks

with Californian Dog Companion.”

31 Cornell’s Margaret Barker, who ran workshops for Washington, DC, school groups

in the late 1990s, provided these optimistic reports. See Youth, “Pigeons.”

32 “Mais sans colombophile, sans savoir et savoir-faire des hommes et des oiseaux,

sans sélection, sans apprentissage, sans transmission des usages, quand bien même

resterait-il des pigeons, plus aucun ne sera voyageur. Ce qu’il s’agit de commémorer

n’est donc pas un animal seul, ni une pratique seule, mais bien un agencement de

deux ‘devenirs avec’ qui s’inscrit, explicitement, à l’origine du projet. Autant dire,

ce qu’il s’agit de faire exister, ce sont des relations par lesquelles des pigeons trans-

forment des hommes en colombophiles talentueux et par lesquelles ces derniers

transforment des pigeons en voyageurs fiables. C’est cela que l’oeuvre commémore.

Elle se charge de faire mémoire au sens de prolonger activement. Il y a ‘reprise.’” De-

spret, “Ceux qui insistent.” Translation by Donna Haraway. See Crasset, “Capsule,”

for the story and a picture of the pigeon loft that Matali Crasset designed.

33 Australia was the first continent where Europeans recorded string figures. There

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are many names in many Aboriginal languages, for example, matjka-wuma in Yirr-

kala. See Davidson, “Aboriginal Australian String Figures.” See also “Survival and

Revival of the String Figures of Yirrkala.”

34 “Batman’s Treaty,” “Batman Park,” and “Wurundjeri,” Wikipedia. I leave the Wikipe-

dia references unadorned partly to mark my own ignorance, partly in appreciation

of a flawed but remarkable tool.

35 Downing, “Wild Harvest—Bird Poo.”

Chapter 2: Tentacular Thinking

Epigraph 1: Scott Gilbert, “We Are All Lichens Now.” See Gilbert, Sapp, and Tauber,

“A Symbiotic View of Life.” Gilbert has erased the “now” from his rallying cry; we

have always been symbionts—genetically, developmentally, anatomically, physi-

ologically, neurologically, ecologically.

Epigraph 2: These sentences are on the rear cover of Stengers and Despret, Women

Who Make a Fuss. From Virginia Woolf ’s Three Guineas, “think we must” is the

urgency relayed to feminist collective thinking-with in Women Who Make a Fuss

through Puig de la Bellacasa, Penser nous devons.

1 Hormiga, “A Revision and Cladistic Analysis of the Spider Family Pimoidae.” See

“Pimoa cthulhu,” Wikipedia; “Hormiga Laboratory.”

2 “The brand of holist ecological philosophy that emphasizes that ‘everything is

connected to everything,’ will not help us here. Rather, everything is connected

to something, which is connected to something else. While we may all ultimately be

connected to one another, the specificity and proximity of connections matters—

who we are bound up with and in what ways. Life and death happen inside these rela-

tionships. And so, we need to understand how particular human communities, as

well as those of other living beings, are entangled, and how these entanglements

are implicated in the production of both extinctions and their accompanying pat-

terns of amplified death” (Van Dooren, Flight Ways, 60).

3 Two indispensable books by my colleague-sibling from thirty-plus years in the

History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz,

guide my writing. Clifford, Routes and Returns.

4 Chthonic derives from ancient Greek khthonios, of the earth, and from khthōn, earth.

Greek mythology depicts the chthonic as the underworld, beneath the earth; but

the chthonic ones are much older (and younger) than those Greeks. Sumeria is a

riverine civilizational scene of emergence of great chthonic tales, including possi-

bly the great circular snake eating its own tail, the polysemous Ouroboros (figure

of the continuity of life, an Egyptian figure as early as 1600 bce; Sumerian sf

worlding dates to 3500 bce or before). The chthonic will accrue many resonances

throughout my chapter. See Jacobsen, The Treasures of Darkness. In lectures, con-

versations, and e-mails, the scholar of ancient Middle Eastern worlds at uc Santa

Cruz, Gildas Hamel, gave me “the abyssal and elemental forces before they were

astralized by chief gods and their tame committees” (personal communication,

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June 12, 2014). Cthulhu (note spelling), luxuriating in the science fiction of H. P.

Lovecraft, plays no role for me, although it/he did play a role for Gustavo Hormiga,

the scientist who named my spider demon familiar. For the monstrous male elder

god (Cthulhu), see Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu.

I take the liberty of rescuing my spider from Lovecraft for other stories, and

mark the liberation with the more common spelling of chthonic ones. Lovecraft’s

dreadful underworld chthonic serpents were terrible only in the patriarchal mode.

The Chthulucene has other terrors—more dangerous and generative in worlds

where such gender does not reign. Undulating with slippery eros and gravid chaos,

tangled snakes and ongoing tentacular forces coil through the twenty-first century

ce. Consider: Old English oearth, German Erde, Greek Gaïa, Roman terra, Dutch

aarde; Old English w(e)oruld (“affairs of life,” “a long period of time,” “the known

life,” or “life on earth” as opposed to the “afterlife”), from a Germanic compound

meaning “age of the human race” (wer); Old Norse heimr, literally “abode.” Then

consider Turkish dünya and go to dunyā (the temporal world), an Arabic word

that was passed to many other languages, such as Persian, Dari, Pashto, Bengali,

Punjabi, Urdu, Hindi, Kurdish, Nepali, Turkish, Arumanian, and North Caucasian

languages. Dunyā is also a loanword in Malay and Indonesian, as well as in Greek

δουνιας—so many words, so many roots, so many pathways, so many mycorrhizal symbioses, even if we restrict ourselves only to Indo-European tangles. There are

so many kin who might better have named this time of the Anthropocene that is

at stake now. The anthropos is too much of a parochial fellow; he is both too big

and too small for most of the needed stories.

5 Eva Hayward proposes the term tentacularity; her trans-thinking and -doing in

spidery and coralline worlds entwine with my writing in sf patterns. See Hayward,

“FingeryEyes”; “SpiderCitySex”; and “Sensational Jellyfish.” See Morgan, “Sticky

Tales.” UK experimental artist Eleanor Morgan’s spider silk art spins many threads

resonating with this chapter, tuned to the interactions of animals (especially

arachnids and sponges) and humans. Morgan, “Website.”

6 Katie King aligns Hayward’s “fingery eyes” and “tentacularity” with “networked

reenactments” or “transknowledges.” “Working out in a multiverse of articulating

disciplines, interdisciplines, and multidisciplinarities, such transdisciplinary in-

spection actually enjoys the many flavors of details, offerings, passions, languages,

things . . . One index for the evaluation of transdisciplinary work is how well it

learns and models how to be affected or moved, how well it opens up unexpected

elements of one’s own embodiments in lively and re-sensitizing worlds.” King,

Networked Reenactments, 19. See also King, “A Naturalcultural Collection of Affec-

tions.” Think we must.

7 Muddle, Old Dutch for muddying the waters. I use muddle as a theoretical trope

and soothing wallow to trouble the trope of visual clarity as the only sense and

affect for mortal thinking. Muddles team with company. Empty spaces and clear

vision are bad fictions for thinking, not worthy of sf or of contemporary biology.

My speculative feminist courage has been fed by Puig de la Bellacasa, “Touching

Technologies, Touching Visions.”

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For a gorgeous animated model of a densely packed living neuron, where pro-

teins muddle on their herky-jerky way to making cells work, see “Protein Packing:

Inner Life of a Cell” and Zimmer, “Watch Proteins Do the Jitterbug.”

8 Ingold, Lines, 116–19.

9 The pile was made irresistible by Puig de la Bellacasa, “Encountering Bioinfrastruc-

ture.”

10 Art science activism infuses this book. In the struggle for multispecies environ-

mental justice in the face of coal company mountaintop removal in her homeworld

in West Virginia, with her wife Annie Sprinkle (environmental activist, radical

adult film director and performer, former sex worker), uc Santa Cruz artist Beth

Stephens made the “sexiest nature documentary ever,” Goodbye Gauley Mountain:

An Ecosexual Love Story. The quote is from a review by Russ McSpadden, “Eco-

sexuals of the World Unite!” In love and rage (Emma Goldman), think we must

(Virginia Woolf) for a habitable planet.

11 Throughout this essay I use the Latinate words terran and terra, even while I swim

in Greek names and stories, including the material-semiotic story of Gaia and

Bruno Latour’s “Gaia stories/geostories.” Terra is especially legible in sf, but Gaia

is important in sf too. My favorite is John Varley’s Gaea Trilogy, Titan (1979), Wiz-

ard (1980), and Demon (1984). Varley’s Gaea is an old woman, who/which is a liv-

ing being in the shape of a 1,300-kilometer-diameter Stanford torus, inhabited by

many different species, in orbit around the planet Saturn. For a fan site, see “Gaea,

the Mad Titan.” Latour’s Earthbound (“Terriens” in his French) and Stengers’s

intrusive Gaia would recognize Varley’s irascible, unpredictable Gaea. Gaia is more

legible in systems theories than Terra, as well as in “New Age” cultures. Gaia comes

into her/its own in the Anthropocene, but Terra sounds a more earthy tone for me.

However, Terra and Gaia are not in opposition, nor are the Earthbound, who are

given to us in loving, risk-taking, powerful writing by Bruno Latour, in opposition

to Terrans. Rather, Gaians and Terrans are in a queer planetwide litter of chthonic

ones who must be re-membered urgently. It is in that sense that I hear together

Isabelle Stengers’s “cosmopolitics” and my verbally miscegenated “Terrapolis.” We

are making string figures together.

12 Allied to this kind of argument is Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway. Outside

(and inside) the odd thing named the West, there are myriad histories, philoso-

phies, and practices—some civilizational, some urban, some neither—that pro-

pose living and dying in other knots and patterns that do not presume isolated,

much less binary, unities and polarities that then need to be brought into connec-

tion. Variously and dangerously configured relationality is just what is. Flawed but

powerful systems theories are the best technoscientific models we have so far for

many Gaian relationalities.

An American evolutionary biologist, David Barash, writes compellingly about

convergences (not identities and not resources that can be hijacked to cure West-

ern ills) between ecological sciences and various Buddhist streams, schools, and

traditions that emphasize connectedness. Barash emphasizes that ways of living,

dying, acting, and nurturing response-ability are embedded in these matters (Bud-

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dhist Biology). What if Western evolutionary and ecological sciences had been de-

veloped from the start within Buddhist instead of Protestant ways of worlding?

Why do I find it so jarring that David Barash is a committed neo-Darwinian in

evolutionary theory? See Barash, Natural Selections. The need for complexity the-

ories tuned to paradox is obvious!

Based on his extensive study of Chinese knowledges and sciences, Joseph Need-

ham asked a similar question to Barash’s many years ago about embryology and

biochemistry in The Grand Titration: Science and Society in East and West. Need-

ham’s organicism and Marxism are both crucial for this story, something to re-

member in thinking about how to configure what I will explore in this chapter

under the sign Capitalocene. On Needham, see Haraway, Crystals, Fabrics, and

Fields. What happens if we cultivate response-ability for the Capitalocene inside

the netbags of sympoiesis, Buddhism, ecological evolutionary developmental bi-

ology (EcoEvoDevo), Marxism, Stengersian cosmopolitics, and other strong pulls

against the modernizing foolishness of some analyses of capitalism? What hap-

pens if the relentless zero-sum games of neo-Darwinism give way to an extended

evolutionary synthesis?

13 Dempster, “A Self-Organizing Systems Perspective on Planning for Sustainability.”

See 27–32 for a concise comparison of autopoietic and sympoietic systems. Table 1,

p. 30, juxtaposes defining characteristics for autopoietic and sympoietic systems,

such as: self-produced boundaries/lacking boundaries; organizationally closed/

organizationally ajar; external structural coupling/internal and external struc-

tural coupling; autonomous units/complex amorphous entities; central control/

distributed control; evolution between systems/evolution within systems; growth

and development orientation/evolutionary orientation; steady state/potentially

dramatic, surprising change; predictable/unpredictable.

Katie King told me about the Dempster thesis as we tried to sort out our over-

lapping but not identical pleasures and resistances to autopoiesis and sympoiesis.

See King, “Toward a Feminist Boundary Object-Oriented Ontology . . . or Should

It Be a Boundary Object-Oriented Feminism?”

14 Stengers, “Relaying a War Machine?,” 134.

15 Strathern, The Relation; Partial Connections; and Kinship, Law and the Unexpected.

16 Strathern, Reproducing the Future, 10.

17 Baila Goldenthal (1925–2011) painted an extraordinary series of four Cat’s Cradle-

titled oil-on-wood panels in 1995–96 and an oil-on-canvas in 2008. For her and

for me, cat’s cradle is an open-ended practice of continuous weaving (see her

Weavers Series, 1989–94). “The techniques of under-painting and glazing invoke

historical time; the enigma of the game itself reflects the complexity of human

relationships.” Goldenthal, “Painting/Cats Cradle.” Goldenthal relates to cat’s cra-

dle games as a metaphor for the game of life, and the intensely present, moving

hands invite kinship with other tentacular beings. Her 2008 Cat’s Cradle/String

Theory is the cover image for Nuclear Abolition Forum, no. 2 (2013), an issue titled

“Moving beyond Nuclear Deterrence to a Nuclear Weapons Free World.” Metamor-

phosis, fragility, temporality, disintegration, revelation—these are everywhere

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in her work. A student of the Kabbalah and of South Asian Indian culture and

philosophy, Goldenthal worked in oils, bronze, leaded glass, paper, photography,

printmaking, film, and ceramics. She accomplished powerful work in sculpture

and in two-dimensional formats. Goldenthal, “Resumé.” Among my favorites is

her Desert Walls of the mid-1980s, where she worked in photography and collage

with tile, brick, straw, plaster, metal, and glass to evoke the visual enigmas of cliffs

and rock walls of the U.S. desert Southwest.

18 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem; Hartouni, Visualizing Atrocity, especially chapter 3,

“Thoughtlessness and Evil.” I set aside the strict humanism and the specific kind

of thinking subject of Arendt’s project, as well as her insistence on the essential

solitude of thinking. Thinking-with in the sf compost pile of this essay is not an

enemy to the profound secular self-examination of Arendt’s historically situated

human figure, but that is an argument for another day.

19 Arendt characterized thinking as “training one’s mind to going visiting.” “This

distancing of some things and bridging of others is part of the dialogue of under-

standing, for whose purposes direct experience establishes too close contact and

mere knowledge erects artificial barriers.” Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” 241, quoted

in Hartouni, Visualizing Atrocity, 75.

20 Puig de la Bellacasa, “Matters of Care in Technoscience”; Puig de la Bellacasa, Mat-

ters of Care.

21 Title of a conference that Anna Tsing and coworkers organized at the University

of California, Santa Cruz, May 8–10, 2014: “Anthropocene: Arts of Living on a

Damaged Planet.”

22 All quotations are from Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 34, 2, 4.

23 Van Dooren, Flight Ways.

24 Van Dooren’s colleague Deborah Bird Rose is everywhere in this thinking, espe-

cially in her treatment of the undoing of the tissues of ongoingness, the killing

of generations, which she called “double death” in Reports from a Wild Country:

Ethics for Decolonisation. See also van Dooren and Rose, “Unloved Others”; van

Dooren and Rose, “Storied-Places in a Multispecies City.” The Extinction Studies

Working Group, anchored in Australia, is a rich sympoietic gathering. See also

Environmental Humanities South, anchored in Cape Town, South Africa.

25 Van Dooren, “Keeping Faith with Death”; Flight Ways, chapter 5, “Mourning Crows:

Grief in a Shared World.” This writing is in sf exchange with Vinciane Despret’s

thinking about learning to be affected. See Despret, “The Body We Care For.”

26 Van Dooren, Flight Ways, 63–86. Also crucial to grasping thinking and semiotics

outside the premises of modernist humanist doctrines, see Kohn, How Forests

Think.

27 Le Guin, “The Carrier Bag Theory,” 166. Le Guin’s essay (1986) shaped my thinking

about narrative in evolutionary theory and of the figure of woman the gatherer

in Primate Visions. Le Guin learned about the Carrier Bag Theory of Evolution

from Elizabeth Fisher, Women’s Creation, in that period of large, brave, specula-

tive, worldly stories that burned in feminist theory in the 1970s and 1980s. Like

speculative fabulation, speculative feminism was, and is, an sf practice. For a fuller

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sf game with both Le Guin and Octavia Butler, see chapter 6, “Sowing Worlds: A

Seed Bag for Terraforming with Earth Others.” First published in Grebowicz and

Merrick, Beyond the Cyborg.

28 Le Guin, “The Carrier Bag Theory,” 169.

29 For introduction and elucidation of the “god trick” in science and politics, see

Haraway, “Situated Knowledges.”

30 Latour, Gifford Lectures, Lecture 3, “The Puzzling Face of a Secular Gaïa.” Quota-

tion from lecture manuscript.

31 Latour, “War and Peace in an Age of Ecological Conflicts.” Quotation from lecture

manuscript. Latour’s proportionality in this lecture is bracing:

Humans : business as usual :: the Earthbound : total subversion.

In “Feral Biologies,” Anna Tsing uses the word Holocene to mean something radi-

cally different from Latour; but their basic arguments rub against each other in of-

ten edgy agreement, generating some interesting friction. Tsing refers to the Holo-

cene as the timeplaces of possible resurgence after disturbance; the Anthropocene

is the timeplace of radical reduction, radical simplification, radical obliteration of

the refugia of the Holocene, from which resurgence of species assemblages could

occur. Latour’s and Tsing’s different uses of the same important words illustrate

how polysemous possibilities lurk even in closely scrutinized linguistic precincts.

Unnecessary oppositions can be easily spun from such different elaborations of

words, and the expertise of geologists only adds to language’s generativity. I think

some of Latour’s and Tsing’s hot friction comes from his reliance on Carl Schmitt

and her love of Ursula K. Le Guin.

32 Latour’s “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters

of Concern” is a major landmark in our collective understanding of the corro-

sive, self-certain, and self-contained traps of nothing-but-critique. Cultivating

response-ability requires much more from us. It requires the risk of being for

some worlds rather than others and helping to compose those worlds with oth-

ers. In multistranded sf worlding, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa recomposts Latour’s

“matters of concern” to ferment an even richer soil in her “Matters of Care in

Technoscience.”

33 Latour, “War and Peace in an Age of Ecological Conflicts,” lecture manuscript.

34 To understand how the modernizing category of “belief ” works in the United

States in law, politics, and pedagogy, including religion and social science, see

Harding, “Secular Trouble.” The figure of the never properly belonging, always

leaving and returning “Prodigal Daughter” further unpacks the enabling and dis-

abling operations of “belief ” in deVries, “Prodigal Knowledge.” Tying knowledge

practices to professions of belief in both religion and science is perhaps the single

most difficult habit of thought to dislodge for Moderns, at least in the United

States. Where belief is exacted, the Inquisition is never far behind. sf in the mud-

dle of Terra/Gaia cannot exact belief, but can shape committed thinking com-

panions. The figure for thinking-with in this ecology of practices is not so much

“decision” as sympoietic “care” and “discernment.” The Prodigal Daughter remains

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a wayfarer, much more promising for pathways in troubled times than the paved

road toward the feast prepared for the returning, forever-after obedient Prodigal

Son and legitimate heir.

35 Latour, “War and Peace in an Age of Ecological Conflicts,” lecture manuscript;

Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth. For a full exposition of his reliance on Schmitt’s

hostis and political theology, see Latour, Gifford Lectures, Lecture 5, “War of Hu-

mans and Earthbound”: “If Humans are at war with It [Gaia], what about those

whom I have proposed to call the Earthbound? Can they be ‘artisans of peace’?”

(unpublished lecture manuscript). Such artisans are what Latour works to nourish

here and elsewhere.

His question deserves more space, but a few words about hostis are necessary.

Latour and I both ate the “host” in the sacrificial Eucharistic feast, and so we know

what it means to be in the material-semiotic world where sign and signifier have

imploded in meaningful flesh. Neither of us fits very well in secular Protestant se-

miotics, dominant in the university and in science, and that shapes our approaches

to science studies and much else. But note that the “host” that we ate—our

communion—is firmly ensconced in the story of the acceptable sacrifice to the

Father. Latour and I ate too much and too little when we consumed this host and

refused (and still refuse) to disavow it. I have a case of permanent raging indi-

gestion, even as I hold fast to the joy and the implosion of metaphor and world.

I need to know more about Latour’s digestive comforts and discomforts because

I suspect they are at the root of our different lures for changing the story for

the Earthbound. In the sacrificial Eucharistic worlding, there are strong kin ties,

etymologically and historically, to the host of Schmitt, where we find the guest,

hostage, one held in surety for another, generator and collector of debt, host as the

one who feeds the traveler as guest, stranger to be respected even if killed, hostiles,

host as an array armed for combat in the field of battle (a trial of strength). Not

vermin, not trash, not inimicus, but those coproducing the engagement of war and

so perhaps a new peace rather than extermination. But host has other tones too,

ones that lead a little way to the chthonic and tentacular ones in the carrier bag

story, where Latour and I may yet luckily be gathered and transformed by some

old hag collecting dinner. We might be allowed to stay as guests, as companion

species, especially if we are on the menu. The host is the habitat for the parasite,

the condition of life and ongoingness for the parasite; this host is in the danger-

ous world-making contact zones of symbiogenesis and sympoiesis, where newly

cobbled together, good-enough orders may or may not emerge from the ever so

promiscuous and opportunistic associations of host and parasite. Perhaps Gaia’s

unchristian abyssal gut, habitat for chthonic powers, is the muddle for sf, where

ongoingness remains at stake. This is the world that evokes this chapter’s epi-

graph, “We are all lichens.” (On the difficulty of becoming unchristian, see Anidjar,

Blood. Anidjar also does very interesting things with Schmitt.)

But not so fast, my lichen selves and affiliates! First we have to wrestle with

the ill-named Anthropocene. I am not against all trials of strength; after all, I love

women’s basketball. I just think trials of strength are the old story. Overvalued,

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they are a bit like the never-ending task of cleaning the toilet—necessary but

radically insufficient. On the other hand, there are excellent composting toilets . . .

We can outsource some trials of strength to the ever-eager microbes to make more

time and space for sf in other muddles.

36. Stengers, Au temps des catastrophes. Gaia intrudes in this text from p. 48 on.

Stengers discusses the “intrusion of Gaïa” in numerous interviews, essays, and

lectures. Discomfort with the ever more inescapable label of the Anthropocene, in

and out of sciences, politics, and culture, pervades Stengers’s thinking, as well as

that of many other engaged writers, including Latour, even as we struggle for an-

other word. See Stengers in conversation with Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin,

“Matters of Cosmopolitics.”

Stengers’s thinking about Gaia and the Lovelock-Margulis development of the

Gaia hypothesis was from the start entwined with her work with Ilya Prigogine,

which understood that strong linear coupling in complex systems theory entailed

the possibility of radical global system change, including collapse. Prigogine and

Stengers, Order Out of Chaos. The relation of Gaia to Chaos is an old one in science

and philosophy. What I want to do is knot that emergence sympoietically into a

worlding of ongoing chthonic powers, which is the material-semiotic time-space

of the Chthulucene rather than Anthropocene or Capitalocene. This is part of what

Stengers means when she says that her intrusive Gaia was “ticklish” from the start.

“Her ‘autopoietic’ functioning is not her truth but what ‘we’ [human beings] have

to face, and are able to read from our computer models, the face she turns on ‘us’”

(e-mail from Stengers to Haraway, May 9, 2014).

37 Scientists estimate that this extinction “event,” the first to occur during the time

of our species, could, as previous great extinction events have, but much more

rapidly, eliminate 50 to 95 percent of existing biodiversity. Sober estimates an-

ticipate half of existing species of birds could disappear by 2100. By any measure,

that is a lot of double death. For a popular exposition, see Voices for Biodiversity,

“The Sixth Great Extinction.” For a report by an award-winning science writer, see

Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction. Reports from The Convention on Biological Diver-

sity are more cautious about predictions and discuss the practical and theoretical

difficulties of obtaining reliable knowledge, but they are not less sobering. For

a disturbing report from summer 2015, see Ceballos et al., “Accelerated Modern

Human-Induced Species Losses.”

38 Lovelock, “Gaia as Seen through the Atmosphere”; Lovelock and Margulis, “At-

mospheric Homeostasis by and for the Biosphere.” For a video of a lecture to

employees at the National Aeronautic and Space Agency in 1984, go to Margulis,

“Gaia Hypothesis.” Autopoiesis was crucial to Margulis’s transformative theory

of symbiogenesis, but I think if she were alive to take up the question, Margulis

would often prefer the terminology and figural-conceptual powers of sympoiesis.

I suggest that Gaia is a system mistaken for autopoietic that is really sympoietic.

See chapter 3, “Sympoiesis.” Gaia’s story needs an intrusive makeover to knot with

a host of other promising sympoietic tentacular ones for making rich compost, for

going on. Gaia or Ge is much older and wilder than Hesiod (Greek poet around the

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time of Homer, circa 750 to 650 bce), but Hesiod cleaned her/it up in the Theog-

ony in his story-setting way: after Chaos, “wide-bosomed” Gaia (Earth) arose to

be the everlasting seat of the immortals who possess Olympus above (Theogony,

116–18, translated by Glenn W. Most, Loeb Classical Library), and the depths of

Tartarus below (Theogony, 119). The chthonic ones reply, Nonsense! Gaia is one of

theirs, an ongoing tentacular threat to the astralized ones of the Olympiad, not

their ground and foundation, with their ensuing generations of gods all arrayed

in proper genealogies. Hesiod’s is the old prick tale, already setting up canons in

the eighth century bce.

39 Although I cannot help but think more rational environmental and socialnatural

policies of all sorts would help!

40 Isabelle Stengers, from English compilation on Gaia sent by e-mail January 14,

2014.

41 I use “thing” in two senses that rub against each other: (1) the collection of en-

tities brought together in the Parliament of Things that Bruno Latour called our

attention to, and (2) something hard to classify, unsortable, and probably with a

bad smell. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern.

42 Crutzen and Stoermer, “The ‘Anthropocene’”; Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind”;

Zalasiewicz et al., “Are We Now Living in the Anthropocene?” Much earlier dates

for the emergence of the Anthropocene are sometimes proposed, but most scien-

tists and environmentalists tend to emphasize global anthropogenic effects from

the late eighteenth century on. A more profound human exceptionalism (the

deepest divide of nature and culture) accompanies proposals of the earliest dates,

coextensive with Homo sapiens on the planet hunting big now-extinct prey and

then inventing agriculture and domestication of animals. A compelling case for

dating the Anthropocene from the multiple “great accelerations,” in earth system

indicators and in social change indicators, from about 1950 on, first marked by

atmospheric nuclear bomb explosions, is made by Steffen et al., “The Trajectory of

the Anthropocene.” Zalasiewicz et al. argue that adoption of the term Anthropocene

as a geological epoch by the relevant national and international scientific bodies

will turn on stratigraphic signatures. Perhaps, but the resonances of the Anthropo-

cene are much more disseminated than that. One of my favorite art investigations

of the stigmata of the Anthropocene is Ryan Dewey’s “Virtual Places: Core Logging

the Anthropocene in Real-Time,” in which he composes “core samples of the ad hoc

geology of retail shelves.”

43 For a powerful ethnographic encounter in the 1990s with climate-change model-

ing, see Tsing, Friction, “Natural Universals and the Global Scale,” 88–112, especially

“Global Climate as a Model,” 101–6. Tsing asks, “What makes global knowledge

possible?” She replies, “Erasing collaborations.” But Tsing does not stop with this

historically situated critique. Instead she, like Latour and Stengers, takes us to the

really important question: “Might it be possible to attend to nature’s collaborative

origins without losing the advantages of its global reach?” (95). “How might schol-

ars take on the challenge of freeing critical imaginations from the specter of neolib-

eral conquest—singular, universal, global? Attention to the frictions of contingent

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articulation can help us describe the effectiveness, and the fragility, of emergent

capitalist—and globalist—forms. In this shifting heterogeneity there are new

sources of hope, and, of course, new nightmares” (77). At her first climate-modeling

conference in 1995, Tsing had an epiphany: “The global scale takes precedence—

because it is the scale of the model” (103, italics in original). But this and related prop-

erties have a particular effect: they bring negotiators to an international, heteroge-

neous table, maybe not heterogeneous enough, but far from full of identical units

and players. “The embedding of smaller scales into the global; the enlargement

of models to include everything; the policy-driven construction of the models:

Together these features make it possible for the models to bring diplomats to the

negotiating table” (105). That is not to be despised.

The reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (ipcc) are nec-

essary documents and excellent illustrations of Tsing’s accounts: Climate Change

2014: Mitigation of Climate Change and Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation,

and Vulnerability.

Tsing’s stakes in her intimate tracking of the relentless ethnographic specific-

ities of far-flung chains of intimate dealings and livings are to hold in productive,

nonutopian friction the scale-making power of the things climate-change models

do with the life-and-death messiness of place- and travel-based worldings that

always make even our best and most necessary universals very lumpy. She seeks

and describes multiple situated worldings and multiple sorts of translations to en-

gage globalism. “Attention to friction opens up the possibility of an ethnographic

account of global interconnection” (6). Appreciation of what she calls “weediness”

is indispensable: “To be aware of the necessity for careful coalitions with those

whose knowledges and pleasures come from other sources is the beginning of

nonimperialist environmentalism” (170). The hostis will not make an appearance

in this string figuring, but mushrooms as guides for living in the ruins most cer-

tainly will. See Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World.

44 The Anthropocene Working Group, which was established in 2008 to report to the

International Union of Geological Sciences and the International Commission on

Stratigraphy on whether to name a new epoch in the geological timeline, aimed

to issue its final report in 2016. See Newsletter of the Anthropocene Working Group,

volumes 4 and 5.

45 For a photo gallery of fiery images of the Man burning at the end of the festival,

see “Burning Man Festival 2012.” Attended by tens of thousands of human people

(and an unknown number of dogs), Burning Man is an annual week-long festival

of art and (commercial) anarchism held in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada since

1990 and on San Francisco’s Baker Beach from 1986 to 1990. The event’s origins

tie to San Francisco artists’ celebrations of the summer solstice. “The event is

described as an experiment in community, art, radical self-expression, and radical

self-reliance” (“Burning Man,” Wikipedia). The globalizing extravaganzas of the

Anthropocene are not the drug- and art-laced worlding of Burning Man, but the

iconography of the immense fiery “Man” ignited during the festival is irresist-

ible. The first burning effigies on the beach in San Francisco were of a 9-foot-tall

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wooden Man and a smaller wooden dog. By 1988 the Man was 40 feet tall and

dogless. Relocated to a dry lakebed in Nevada, the Man topped out in 2011 at 104

feet. This is America; supersized is the name of the game, a fitting habitat for the

Anthropos.

“Anthropos” (ἄνθρωπος) is an ambiguous word with contested etymologies. What Anthropos never figures is the rich generative home of a multispecies earth.

The Online Etymology Dictionary states that it comes from the Greek aner, “man,”

“as opposed to a woman, a god, or a boy.” Just what I suspected! Or, “Anthropos

sometimes is explained as a compound of aner and ops (genitive opos) ‘eye, face’;

so literally ‘he who has the face of a man.’” Or, sometimes, the shape of a man.

Biblical scholars find it hard to make the Greek ανθρωπος include women, and it complicates translations in fascinating ways: see http://www.bible-researcher.

com/anthropos.html (accessed August 7, 2015). Other sources give the meaning

of the compound as “that which is below, hence earthly, human,” or, the “up-

ward looking one,” and so below, lamentably on earth. Unlike the animals, man

as anthropos “looks up at what he sees”: http://www.science-bbs.com/114-lang

/0e74f4484bff3fe0.htm (accessed August 7, 2015). The Anthropos is not Latour’s

Earthbound.

It is safe to say that Eugene Stoermer and Paul Crutzen were not much vexed

by these ambiguities. Still, thank the heavens, looking up, their human eyes were

firmly on the earth’s atmospheric carbon burden. Or, also, swimming in too hot

seas with the tentacular ones, their eyes were the optic-haptic fingery eyes of ma-

rine critters in diseased and dying coral symbioses. See Hayward, “FingeryEyes.”

46 Klare, “The Third Carbon Age,” writes, “According to the International Energy

Agency (iea), an inter-governmental research organization based in Paris, cumu-

lative worldwide investment in new fossil-fuel extraction and processing will total

an estimated $22.87 trillion between 2012 and 2035, while investment in renew-

ables, hydropower, and nuclear energy will amount to only $7.32 trillion.” Nuclear,

after Fukushima! Not to mention that none of these calculations prioritize a much

lighter, smaller, more modest human presence on earth, with all its critters. Even

in its “sustainability” discourses, the Capitalocene cannot tolerate a multispecies

world of the Earthbound. For the switch in Big Energy’s growth strategies to na-

tions with the weakest environmental controls, see Klare, “What’s Big Energy

Smoking?” See also Klare, The Race for What’s Left.

47 Heavy tar sand pollution must break the hearts and shatter the gills of every Ter-

ran, Gaian, and Earthbound critter. The toxic lakes of wastewater from tar sand oil

extraction in northern Alberta, Canada, shape a kind of new Great Lakes region,

with more giant “ponds” added daily. Current area covered by these lakes is about

50 percent greater than the area covered by the world city of Vancouver. Tar sands

operations return almost none of the vast quantities of water they use to natural

cycles. Earthbound peoples trying to establish growing things at the edges of these

alarmingly colored waters filled with extraction tailings say that successional pro-

cesses for re-establishing sympoietic biodiverse ecosystems, if they prove possible

at all, will be an affair of decades and centuries. See Pembina Institute, “Alberta’s

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184 N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 2

Oil Sands,” and Weber, “Rebuilding Land Destroyed by Oil Sands May Not Restore

It.” Only Venezuela and Saudi Arabia have more oil reserves than Alberta. All that

said, the Earthbound, the Terrans, do not cede either the present or the future; the

sky is lowering, but has not fallen, yet. Pembina Institute, “Oil Sands Solutions.”

First Nation, Métis, and Aboriginal peoples are crucial players in every aspect of

this unfinished story. See the website for the Tar Sands Solutions Network. For

melting sea ice in the Arctic, see figure 2.4, p. 48.

48 Photograph from nasa Earth Observatory, 2015 (public domain). If flame is the

icon for the Anthropocene, I use the missing ice and the unblocked Northwest Pas-

sage to figure the Capitalocene. The Soufan Group provides strategic security intel-

ligence services to governments and multinational organizations. Its report “tsg

IntelBrief: Geostrategic Competition in the Arctic” includes the following quotes:

“The Guardian estimates that the Arctic contains 30 percent of the world’s undis-

covered natural gas and 15 percent of its oil.” “In late February, Russia announced

it would form a strategic military command to protect its Arctic interests.” “Russia,

Canada, Norway, Denmark, and the US all make some claim to international waters

and the continental shelf in the Arctic Ocean.” “[A Northwest Passage] route could

provide the Russians with a great deal of leverage on the international stage over

China or any other nation dependent on sea commerce between Asia and Europe.”

The province of Alberta in Canada ranks third in the world after Saudi Arabia

and Venezuela for proven global crude reserves. Almost all of Alberta’s oil is in

the tar sands in the north of the province, site of the great new petrotoxic lakes

of North America. See Alberta Energy, “Facts and Statistics.” The Capitalocene in

action! See the Indigenous Environmental Network, “Canadian Indigenous Tar

Sands Campaign.” Over twenty corporations operate in the tar sands in the home

area of many indigenous peoples, including the First Nation Mikisew Cree, Atha-

basca Chipewyan, Fort McMurray, Fort McKay Cree, Beaver Lake Cree, Chipewyan

Prairie, and also the Métis.

49 Klein, “How Science Is Telling Us All to Revolt”; Klein, The Shock Doctrine.

50 Capitalocene is one of those words like sympoiesis; if you think you invented it, just

look around and notice how many other people are inventing the term at the same

time. That certainly happened to me, and after I got over a small fit of individualist

pique at being asked whom I got the term Capitalocene from—hadn’t I coined the

word? (“Coin”!) And why do other scholars almost always ask women which male

writers their ideas are indebted to?—I recognized that not only was I part of a

cat’s cradle game of invention, as always, but that Jason Moore had already writ-

ten compelling arguments to think with, and my interlocutor both knew Moore’s

work and was relaying it to me. Moore himself first heard the term Capitalocene in

2009 in a seminar in Lund, Sweden, when then graduate student Andreas Malm

proposed it. In an urgent historical conjuncture, words-to-think-with pop out

all at once from many bubbling cauldrons because we all feel the need for better

netbags to collect up the stuff crying out for attention. Despite its problems, the

term Anthropocene was and is embraced because it collects up many matters of

fact, concern, and care; and I hope Capitalocene will roll off myriad tongues soon.

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In particular, see the work of Jason Moore, a creative Marxist sociologist at Bing-

hamton University in New York. Moore is coordinator of the World-Ecology Re-

search Network. For his first Capitalocene argument, see Moore, “Anthropocene,

Capitalocene, and the Myth of Industrialization.” See Moore, Capitalism and the

Web of Life.

51 To get over Eurocentrism while thinking about the history of pathways and centers

of globalization over the last few centuries, see Flynn and Giráldez, China and the

Birth of Globalisation in the 16th Century. For analysis attentive to the differences

and frictions among colonialisms, imperialisms, globalizing trade formations, and

capitalism, see Ho, “Empire through Diasporic Eyes” and The Graves of Tarem.

52 In “Anthropocene or Capitalocene, Part III,” Jason Moore puts it this way: “This

means that capital and power—and countless other strategic relations—do not

act upon nature but develop through the web of life. ‘Nature’ is here offered as

the relation of the whole. Humans live as a specifically endowed (but not special)

environment-making species within Nature. Second, capitalism in 1800 was no

Athena, bursting forth, fully grown and armed, from the head of a carboniferous

Zeus. Civilizations do not form through Big Bang events. They emerge through

cascading transformations and bifurcations of human activity in the web of life . . .

[For example,] the long seventeenth century forest clearances of the Vistula Basin

and Brazil’s Atlantic Rainforest occurred on a scale, and at a speed, between five

and ten times greater than anything seen in medieval Europe.”

53 Crist, “On the Poverty of Our Nomenclature,” 144. Crist does superb critique of

the traps of Anthropocene discourse, as well as gives us propositions for more

imaginative worlding and ways to stay with the trouble. For entangled, dissenting

papers that both refuse and take up the name Anthropocene, see videos from the

conference “Anthropocene Feminism.” For rich interdisciplinary research, orga-

nized by Anna Tsing and Nils Ole Bubandt, that brings together anthropologists,

biologists, and artists under the sign of the Anthropocene, see aura: Aarhus Uni-

versity Research on the Anthropocene.

54 I owe the insistence on “big-enough stories” to Clifford, Returns: “I think of these

as ‘big enough’ histories, able to account for a lot, but not for everything—and

without guarantees of political virtue” (201). Rejecting one big synthetic account

or theory, Clifford works to craft a realism that “works with open-ended (because

their linear historical time is ontologically unfinished) ‘big-enough stories,’ sites

of contact, struggle, and dialogue” (85–86).

55 Pignarre and Stengers, La sorcellerie capitaliste. Latour and Stengers are deeply

allied in their fierce rejection of discourses of denunciation. They have both pa-

tiently taught me to understand and relearn in this matter. I love a good denunci-

ation! It is a hard habit to unlearn.

56 It is possible to read Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlight-

enment as an allied critique of Progress and Modernization, even though their

resolute secularism gets in their own way. It is very hard for a secularist to really

listen to the squid, bacteria, and angry old women of Terra/Gaia. The most likely

Western Marxist allies, besides Marx, for nurturing the Chthulucene in the belly

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of the Capitalocene are Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, and

Stuart Hall. Hall’s immensely generative essays extend from the 1960s through the

1990s. See, for example, Morley and Chen, Stuart Hall.

57 See Gilson, “Octopi Wall Street!” for the fascinating history of cephalopods fig-

uring the depredations of Big Capital in the United States (for example, the early

twentieth-century John D. Rockefeller/Standard Oil octopus strangling workers,

farmers, and citizens in general with its many huge tentacles). Resignification of

octopuses and squids as chthonic allies is excellent news. May they squirt inky

night into the visualizing apparatuses of the technoid sky gods.

58 Hesiod’s Theogony in achingly beautiful language tells of Gaia/Earth arising out

of Chaos to be the seat of the Olympian immortals above and of Tartarus in the

depths below. She/it is very old and polymorphic and exceeds Greek tellings, but

just how remains controversial and speculative. At the very least, Gaia is not re-

stricted to the job of holding up the Olympians! The important and unorthodox

scholar-archaeologist Marija Gimbutas claims that Gaia as Mother Earth is a later

form of a pre–Indo-European, Neolithic Great Mother. In 2004, filmmaker Donna

Reed and neopagan author and activist Starhawk released a collaborative docu-

mentary film about the life and work of Gimbutas, Signs out of Time. See Belili

Productions, “About Signs out of Time”; Gimbutas, The Living Goddesses.

59 To understand what is at stake in “non-Euclidean” storytelling, go to Le Guin,

Always Coming Home and “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place

to Be.”

60 “The Thousand Names of Gaia: From the Anthropocene to the Age of the Earth,”

International Colloquium, Rio de Janeiro, September 15–19, 2014.

61 The bee was one of Potnia Theron’s emblems, and she is also called Potnia Melissa,

Mistress of the Bees. Modern Wiccans re-member these chthonic beings in ritual

and poetry. If fire figured the Anthropocene, and ice marked the Capitalocene, it

pleases me to use red clay pottery for the Chthulucene, a time of fire, water, and

earth, tuned to the touch of its critters, including its people. With her PhD writing

on the riverine goddess Ratu Kidul and her dances now performed on Bali, Raissa

DeSmet (Trumbull) introduced me to the web of far-traveling chthonic tentacular

ones emerging from the Hindu serpentine Nagas and moving through the waters

of Southeast Asia. DeSmet, A Liquid World.

62 Links between Potnia Theron and the Gorgon/Medusa continued in temple ar-

chitecture and building adornment well after 600 bce, giving evidence of the

tenacious hold of the chthonic powers in practice, imagination, and ritual, for

example, from the fifth through the third centuries bce on the Italian peninsula.

The dread-full Gorgon figure faces outward, defending against exterior dangers,

and the no less awe-full Potnia Theron faces inward, nurturing the webs of living.

See Busby, The Temple Terracottas of Etruscan Orvieto. The Christian Mary, Virgin

Mother of God, who herself erupted in the Near East and Mediterranean worlds,

took on attributes of these and other chthonic powers in her travels around the

world. Unfortunately, Mary’s iconography shows her ringed by stars and crushing

the head of the snake (for example, in the Miraculous Medal dating from an early

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nineteenth-century apparition of the Virgin), more than allying herself with earth

powers. The “lady surrounded by stars” is a Christian scriptural apocalyptic figure

for the end of time. That is a bad idea. Throughout my childhood, I wore a gold

chain with the Miraculous Medal. Finally and luckily, it was her residual chthonic

infections that took hold in me, turning me from both the secular and also the

sacred, and toward humus and compost.

63 The Hebrew word Deborah means “bee,” and she was the only female judge men-

tioned in the Bible. She was a warrior and counselor in premonarchic Israel. The

Song of Deborah may date to the twelfth century bce. Deborah was a military hero

and ally of Jael, one of the 4Js in Joanna Russ’s formative feminist science fiction

novel The Female Man.

In April 2014, the Reverend Billy Talen and the Church of Stop Shopping exor-

cised the robobee from the Micro Robotics Laboratories at Harvard. The robobee

is a high-tech drone bee that is intended to replace overworked and poisoned

biological pollinating bees as they become more and more diseased and endan-

gered. Honeybeealujah, old stories live! See Talen, “Beware of the Robobee,” and

Finnegan, “Protestors Sing Honeybeelujahs against Robobees.” Or, as Brad Wer-

ner put it at the American Geophysical Union Meetings, Revolt! Do we hear the

buzzing yet? It is time to sting. It is time for a chthonic swarm. It is time to take

care of the bees.

64 “Erinyes 1.”

65 Martha Kenney pointed out to me that the story of the Ood, in the long-running

British science fiction tv series Doctor Who, shows how the squid-faced ones be-

came deadly to humanity only after they were mutilated, cut off from their symch-

thonic hive mind, and enslaved. The humanoid empathic Ood have sinuous ten-

tacles over the lower portion of their multifolded alien faces; and in their proper

bodies they carry their hindbrains in their hands, communicating with each other

telepathically through these vulnerable, living, exterior organs (organons). Hu-

mans (definitely not the Earthbound) cut off the hindbrains and replaced them

with a technological communication-translator sphere, so that the isolated Ood

could only communicate through their enslavers, who forced them into hostilities.

I resist thinking the Ood techno-communicators are a future release of the iPhone,

but it is tempting when I watch the faces of twenty-first-century humans on the

streets, or even at the dinner table, apparently connected only to their devices. I

am saved from this ungenerous fantasy by the sf fact that in the episode “Planet of

the Ood,” the tentacular ones were freed by the actions of Ood Sigma and restored

to their nonsingular selves. Doctor Who is a much better story cycle for going-on-

with than Star Trek.

For the importance of reworking fables in sciences and other knowledge prac-

tices, see Kenney, “Fables of Attention.” Kenney explores different genres of fable,

which situate what she calls unstable “wild facts” in relation to proposing and

testing the strength of knowledge claims. She investigates strategies for navigat-

ing uncertain terrain, where the productive tensions between fact and fiction in

actual practices are necessary.

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66 “Medousa and Gorgones.”

67 Suzy McKee Charnas’s Holdfast Chronicles, beginning in 1974 with Walk to the End

of the World, is great sf for thinking about feminists and their horses. The sex is

exciting if very incorrect, and the politics are bracing.

68 Eva Hayward first drew my attention to the emergence of Pegasus from Medusa’s

body and of coral from drops of her blood. Hayward, “The Crochet Coral Reef

Project,” writes: “If coral teaches us about the reciprocal nature of life, then how

do we stay obligated to environments—many of which we made unlivable—that

now sicken us? . . . Perhaps Earth will follow Venus, becoming uninhabitable due

to rampaging greenhouse effect. Or, maybe, we will rebuild reefs or construct al-

ternate homes for the oceans’ refugees. Whatever the conditions of our future, we

remain obligate partners with oceans.” See Wertheim and Wertheim, Crochet Coral

Reef.

69 I am inspired by the 2014–15 Monterey Bay Aquarium exhibition Tentacles: The

Astounding Lives of Octopuses, Squids, and Cuttlefish. See Detienne and Vernant,

Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, with thanks to Chris Connery

for this reference in which cuttlefish, octopuses, and squid play a large role. Poly-

morphy, the capacity to make a net or mesh of bonds, and cunning intelligence

are the traits the Greek writers foregrounded. “Cuttlefish and octopuses are pure

áporai and the impenetrable pathless night they secrete is the most perfect image

of their metis” (38). Chapter 5, “The Orphic Metis and the Cuttle-Fish of Thetis,”

is the most interesting for the Chthulucene’s own themes of ongoing looping,

becoming-with, and polymorphism. “The suppleness of molluscs, which appear as

a mass of tentacles (polúplokoi), makes their bodies an interlaced network, a living

knot of mobile animated bonds” (159). For Detienne and Vernant’s Greeks, the

polymorphic and supple cuttlefish are close to the primordial multisexual deities

of the sea—ambiguous, mobile and ever changing, sinuous and undulating, pre-

siding over coming-to-be, pulsating with waves of intense color, cryptic, secreting

clouds of darkness, adept at getting out of difficulties, and having tentacles where

proper men would have beards.

70 See Haraway and Kenney, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene.”

71 Le Guin, “‘The Author of Acacia Seeds’ and Other Extracts from the Journal of the

Association of Therolinguistics,” 175.

Chapter 3: Sympoiesis

This chapter is written in honor of Lynn Margulis (1938–2011) and Alison Jolly

(1937–2014).

1 See Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna).

2 The large high-resolution giclée reproduction was printed on canvas with non-

fading inks. Inspired by Margulis and Sagan, Dazzle Gradually, Dubiner’s original

gouache painting was 23 by 35 inches. Dubiner wrote, “The large red protozoan is

Urostyla grandis based on a 1959 drawing by Stein in Leipzig. The purple protozoan

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with 2 rows of cilia is Didinium . . . The blue feathered dragon-like creature at the

center was inspired by a microscope image of a phospholipid cylinder by David

Deamer . . . I wanted individual organisms to be accurate enough so a biologist

would recognize them, but I allowed the overall painting to be a totally imaginary

bioscape” (Dubiner, “New Painting”). For her blog writing on the painting, see

Dubiner, “‘Endosymbiosis.’” John Feldman is making a documentary film titled

Symbiotic Earth: How Lynn Margulis Rocked the Boat and Started a Scientific Revo-

lution. Born in 1938, Margulis died in 2011. On her UMass Amherst website, she

described herself as a professor of microbial evolution and organelle heredity. See

Mazur, “Intimacy of Strangers and Natural Selection”; Margulis, Symbiotic Planet;

Margulis and Sagan, Microcosmos; Margulis and Sagan, Acquiring Genomes. See

Hird, The Origins of Sociable Life, an important work rooted in ethnographic so-

ciology in Margulis’s laboratory.

3 In 1991, “Margulis proposed any physical association between individuals of differ-

ent species for significant portions of their lifetime constitutes a ‘symbiosis’ and

that all participants are bionts, such that the resulting association is a holobiont”

(Walters, “Holobionts and the Hologenome Theory”). See Margulis, “Symbiogene-

sis and Symbionticism.” In 1992 the term holobiont was used by Mindell, “Phyloge-

netic Consequences of Symbioses,” to describe a host and its primary symbiont. In

the same issue of this journal, see Margulis, “Biodiversity.” Subsequently, Rohwer

et al., “Diversity and Distribution of Coral-Associated Bacteria,” used holobiont to

mean the host plus all of its symbiotic microorganisms, including viruses. For an

excellent recent summary of principles for holobionts and hologenomes, which

nonetheless cannot evade the language of “host plus the rest,” see Bordenstein and

Theis, “Host Biology in Light of the Microbiome.” “Safe and sound” as a meaning

for holo- is from the Online Etymology Dictionary, accessed March 17, 2016.

4 Margulis, then publishing as Lynn Sagan, published her radical theory of the origin

of the nucleated cell in 1967. Like many revolutionary contributions in science,

such as Raymond Lindeman’s paradigm-resetting “Trophic-Dynamic Aspect of

Ecology,” Margulis’s 1967 paper was rejected many times before being accepted

for publication. See Sagan, “On the Origin of Mitosing Cells”; Margulis, “Archaeal-

Eubacterial Mergers in the Origin of Eukarya.” For an explication of Margulis’s

autopoiesis and strong argument for continued use of the concept for Margulis’s

essential work on second-order Gaian systems theory, see Clarke, “Autopoiesis and

the Planet.”

5 Lovelock, “Gaia as Seen through the Atmosphere”; Lovelock and Margulis, “Atmo-

spheric Homeostasis by and for the Biosphere.”

6 Autopoietic systems theory and the figure of Gaia proved crucial to formulating

the concept of the Anthropocene. Not a nurturing mother, Gaia can flip out, in sys-

tem collapse after system collapse; there are limits to the power of systemic pro-

cesses of homeostasis and reformulating order out of chaos at ever more complex

levels. Complexity can unravel; earth can die. It matters to become response-able.

7 Dempster, “A Self-Organizing Systems Perspective on Planning for Sustainabil-

ity.” In 1998 Dempster thought that biology supported the conceptualization of

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organisms as units, and only ecosystems and cultures are sympoietic. I argue, on

biological grounds, that we can no longer think like that.

8 Margulis and Sagan, “The Beast with Five Genomes.”

9 Poulsen et al., “Complementary Symbiont Contributions to Plant Decomposition

in a Fungus Farming Termite.” On these termite-bacterial-fungal symbioses, see

the superb science writer Yong, “The Guts That Scrape the Skies.”

10 For a closely argued analysis of the dead ends of competition/cooperation bina-

ries and the relentless assumption that explanation in the last instance in biology

must be competitive and individualistic, as well as for a fleshed-out description

of more adequate explanatory practices, which are more and more in play among

venturesome evolutionary, ecological, and behavioral biologists, see van Dooren

and Despret, “Evolution.”

11 Gilbert and Epel (Ecological Developmental Biology) document the evidence for what

the authors call an “extended evolutionary synthesis,” encompassing the modern

synthesis, eco-devo, and eco-evo-devo.

12 Mereschkowsky, “Theorie der zwei Plasmaarten als Grundlage der Symbiogene-

sis.” See also Anonymous, “History.”

13 Gilbert, “The Adequacy of Model Systems for Evo-Devo,” 57. See Black, Models

and Metaphors; Frigg and Hartman, “Models in Science”; Haraway, Crystals, Fab-

rics, and Fields.

14 “King Lab: Choanoflagellates and the Origin of Animals.”

15 Alegado and King, “Bacterial Influences on Animal Origins.”

16 Choanoflagellates and their bacterial associates make an attractive model partly

because sponges, long held to be the “most primitive” critters most closely re-

lated to animals, have choanoflagellate-like cells in their bodies that do things

like capture their prey (bacteria and detritus). However, recent work argues that

ctenophores (comb jellies) are genetically more closely related to animals than

sponges are. Halanych, “The Ctenophore Lineage Is Older Than Sponges?” See

Ed Yong’s beautifully written science news story “Consider the Sponge.” I do not

know of any work exploring ctenophore-bacteria interactions, although, manag-

ing infections and responding to biofilm formations, ctenophores are tuned to

bacteria and archaea, as are we all. In any case, phylogenetic relationships are not

the only criteria of a good model. Up to 60 percent of the biomass of sponges is

microbes. See Hill, Lopez, and Harriott, “Sponge-Specific Bacterial Symbionts in

the Caribbean Sponge.” What a gold mine for the study of holobionts! No wonder

Nicole King started looking into all those attachment sites and signaling activities

that might tie choanoflagellate-like cells in sponges to her free-living choanoflagel-

lates, their eating, their infections, and their rosette clumping habits. If anything

is, eating—not fundamentalist neo-Darwinian selfishness—is “evolutionary ex-

planation in the last instance”; and eating is definitely both infectious and social!

Biologically, eating trumps sex for innovative power; and eating is what made sex

possible in the first place.

17 McGowan, “Where Animals Come From”; Yong, “Bacteria Transform the Closest

Living Relatives of Animals from Single Cells into Colonies.”

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18 McFall-Ngai, “Divining the Essence of Symbiosis,” 2. See McFall-Ngai’s website

from the University of Wisconsin. She has since moved to the Pacific Biosciences

Research Center at the University of Hawaii. Other emerging model systems for

symbiosis tuned to EcoEvoDevo include mouse gut development with bacterial

symbionts (Jeffrey Gordon’s lab at Washington University in St. Louis) and mouse

brain development as well as immune system development tuned to signals from

specific gut bacteria (Sarkis Mazmanian’s lab at CalTech). See also EcoEvoDevo

research with spadefoot toads (David Pfennig’s lab at unc Chapel Hill). Working

on pea aphid symbiosis with Buchnera, Nancy Moran’s lab at the University of

Texas has done wonderful work on the coevolution of aphids and symbionts, but

they have not emphasized development. Thanks to Scott Gilbert, personal com-

munication, June 10, 2015.

The inaugural meeting of the Pan-American Society for Evolutionary Develop-

mental Biology was held August 5–9, 2015, on the campus of University of Califor-

nia, Berkeley. Out of three hundred EvoDevo scientists who indicated an interest

in attending, the ten organizers invited twenty-five attendees from a broad range

of scientific backgrounds and approaches and set up an online portal for other

EvoDevo participants. The European Society for Evolutionary Developmental Bi-

ology was founded in Prague in 2006. The international research community in

EcoDevo and EvoDevo, as well as EcoEvoDevo, is both sizable and growing. Rudolf

Raff edits the journal Evolution and Development, founded in 2011. See Abouheif

et al., “Eco-Evo-Devo.” A strong Russian tradition established by late nineteenth-

and early twentieth-century workers contributed prominently to the conceptual

formation of what became EvoDevo and EcoDevo. See Olsson, Levit, and Hossfeld,

“Evolutionary Developmental Biology.” See also Tauber, “Reframing Developmen-

tal Biology and Building Evolutionary Theory’s New Synthesis.”

19 McFall-Ngai, “Divining the Essence of Symbiosis.”

20 Moran, “Research in the Moran Lab,” website for “Nancy Moran’s Lab.”

21 See Gilbert, Sapp, and Tauber, “A Symbiotic View of Life”; McFall-Ngai et al., “An-

imals in a Bacterial World.” This multiauthored paper is the result of a workshop

supported by the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (nesc). Michael Had-

field first introduced me to Margaret McFall-Ngai in Hawaii in 2010, and their col-

laborative thinking and publishing deeply informs mine. Asking Sapp (a historian

of biology who writes on evolutionary biology beyond the neo-Darwinian frame-

work) and Tauber (biochemist, philosopher, and historian of science who writes

on immunology) to join him, Gilbert (developmental biologist and historian of

biology) cowrote a separate paper because of unresolved disagreement at the nesc

workshop over the extent of deviation from neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory

(“competition in the last instance” and the power of cheaters in evolutionary game

theory) that is in Gilbert’s theory of the holobiont as a unit of selection. Gilbert

thinks immune systems are very good at managing a dialogue with (not extermi-

nating) cooperation-destroying cheaters in holobionts. Gilbert et al., “Symbiosis

as a Source of Selectable Epigenetic Variation.” Gilbert emphasizes that we have

always been lichens. See also Guerrero, Margulis, and Berlanga, “Symbiogenesis.”

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22 McFall-Ngai et al., “Animals in a Bacterial World,” 3229.

23 At Hadfield and McFall-Ngai’s request, I provided minor help in revising the in-

troduction and conclusion to McFall-Ngai et al., “Animals in a Bacterial World.”

Hadfield began teaching me about invertebrate marine developmental and ecolog-

ical biology in the early 1970s when we were in a commune together in Honolulu.

Gilbert and I have been close friends and colleagues exchanging papers and ideas

since he was a PhD biology student at the Johns Hopkins University, and I was an

assistant professor in the History of Science Department and Gilbert’s advisor for

his simultaneous ma in history of science.

24 Wertheim, A Field Guide to Hyperbolic Space. Hyperbolic space might be defined as

“an excess of surface,” the title of the first section of Wertheim’s book. The very

existence of such a thing seemed frankly pathological to Euclidean thinkers until

the curves of worlding became undeniable to mathematicians. Such crenellated

realities had long been in the repertoire of other critters, including a proud woman

of the silk-weaving families in nineteenth-century Spitalfields, as she crocheted a

nice ruffle onto the edges of a milk jug cover while she listened to Darwin talking

about fancy racing pigeons with her husband and sons.

25 Hustak and Myers, “Involutionary Momentum,” 79, 97, 106.

26 Hustak and Myers, “Involutionary Momentum,” 77.

27 xkcd, Bee Orchid, https://xkcd.com/1259/, accessed August 10, 2015. Although

gone from everywhere but one region, the not-quite-extinct solitary bee is from

the genus Eucera. The orchid is Ophrys apifera. See “Bee Orchid.”

28 On resurgence, see Tsing, “A Threat to Holocene Resurgence Is a Threat to Livabil-

ity.” Tsing argues that the Holocene was, and still is in some places, the long period

when refugia, places of refuge, still existed, even abounded, to sustain reworlding

in rich cultural and biological diversity after tremendous disturbance. Perhaps the

outrage meriting a name like Anthropocene is about the destruction of places and

times of refuge for people and other critters. My Chthulucene, even burdened with

its problematic Greek-ish tendrils, entangles myriad temporalities and spatiali-

ties and diverse intra-active entities-in-assemblages—including the more-than-

human, other-than-human, inhuman, and human-as-humus. The symchthonic

ones are not extinct, but they are mortal. One way to live and die well as mortal

critters in the Chthulucene is to join forces to reconstitute refuges, to make possi-

ble partial and robust biological-cultural-political-technological recuperation and

recomposition, which must include mourning irreversible losses.

29 Meaning “real or genuine person,” Inupiaq refers both to the person and to the

language, which is closely related to Canadian Inuit and Greenlandic dialects and

is distinct from the Yupik of western Alaska. Referring to the people collectively,

Inupiat is the plural of Inupiaq. See University of Alaska Fairbanks, “Alaska Native

Language Center.”

30 “Crochet Coral Reef ”; “Ako Project”; “Never Alone”; “Black Mesa Water Coalition”;

“Black Mesa Trust” (founded by Hopi activists); “Black Mesa Weavers for Life and

Land”; “Navajo Sheep Project”; “Diné be’iiná/The Navajo Lifeway”; “Black Mesa

Indigenous Support.”

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31 Hustak and Myers, “Involutionary Momentum,” 77.

32 In “Welcome to a New Planet,” Michael Klare cites the figure from the World Wild-

life Fund report in September 2015 of 850 million people depending on coral reef

ecologies for food security. The same report notes that 85 percent of the reefs are

listed officially as “threatened” in the so-called coral triangle, which encompasses

the waters of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Solomon

Islands, and Timor Leste, including Raja Ampat off the coast of West Papua, con-

sidered the global epicenter of marine biodiversity. Irreversible failure of the reefs,

a real possibility by as early as 2050, could set off human misery and mass mi-

grations of unprecedented proportions, not to mention nonhuman misery and

double death. Climate justice and environmental justice are truly multispecies

affairs. Raja Ampat is also the epicenter of ongoing innovative coalitional work

for resurgence. See World Wildlife Fund, “Living Blue Planet.”

33 The deepwater coral refugia hypothesis is difficult to test, but see Greenwood,

“Hope from the Deep.”

34 “The regrowing forest is an example of what I am calling resurgence. The cross-

species relations that make forests possible are renewed in the regrowing forest.

Resurgence is the work of many organisms, negotiating across differences, to forge

assemblages of multispecies livability in the midst of disturbance. Humans cannot

continue their livelihoods without it” (Tsing, “A Threat to Holocene Resurgence Is

a Threat to Livability”). Not all reforestation is equal, not everything that grows

on disturbed land constitutes resurgence. Reforestation in Madagascar with native

species is very difficult because the soils of deforested areas are severely damaged.

Reforestation with exotic species, some of which become invasive, is practiced

with eucalyptus, pine, silver wattle (an acacia), silky oak, and paperbark. See “De-

forestation in Madagascar.” Plantation system “reforestation,” for example, with

oil palms, has not been common until recently in Madagascar.

35 For an example of Navajo, Hopi, and settler environmental alliance, see “Sierra

Club Sponsors ‘Water Is Life’ Forum with Tribal Partners.” The Sierra Club was

a major ally with Black Mesa Navajo and Hopi activists who shut down the Mo-

have Generating Station and the Black Mesa mine in 2005. See Francis, Voices from

Dzil’íjiin (Black Mesa). The Sierra Club was founded in the late nineteenth century

as a white settler colony institution joining the category of nature to conservation,

eugenics, and native exclusion from land. The Sierra Club’s current efforts to learn

to be a decolonial ally with indigenous peoples is heartening.

36 Lustgarten, “End of the Miracle Machines.” Lustgarten’s twelve-part series from

ProPublica, “Killing the Colorado,” is indispensable reading for thinking about how

to nurture the Chthulucene in the midst of the Anthropocene’s practices of fossil

making by ceaseless fossil burning.

37 The website of Peabody Energy insists on a very different picture, one filled with

restored native plants, productive revitalized grasslands, prize-winning safety re-

cords, economic benefits for everybody, and happy people. In 2006, “Peabody’s

environmental and community practices on Black Mesa were recognized as a

world model for sustainability at the Energy Globe Awards in Brussels, Belgium”

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(Peabody Energy, “Powder River Basin and Southwest”); see also Peabody Energy,

“Factsheet: Kayenta.”

In the early 1990s Fred Palmer, Peabody’s main lobbyist in 2015 for govern-

ment affairs, founded the Greening Earth Society, which actively promoted the

idea that climate change is beneficial to plants and public health. Peabody Energy

led the charge against President Obama’s efforts at the end of his second term to

regulate coal emissions more forcefully through the epa. In the 2000s, as its chief

environmental officer, Peabody hired Craig Idso, cofounder and former president

of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, a think tank

dedicated to attacking mainstream climate science. Greg Boyce, Peabody’s ceo in

2015, regularly criticizes “flawed computer models” as the basis of “climate theory.”

See Goldenberg, “The Truth behind Peabody Energy’s Campaign to Rebrand Coal

as a Poverty Cure.” Critical to the industry’s attempt to rebrand coal-generated

electricity as the solution for the world’s poor, Peabody is a major force behind Ad-

vanced Energy for Life. “Advanced Energy for Life” produces a slick procoal website

that argues that more not less investment in coal, coupled to ever more elaborate

and expensive technologies, is critical to global well-being. Peabody Energy is the

only non-China-based partner in the Shenhua Coal Group. See Peabody Energy,

“Peabody in China.” Nonetheless, Peabody is facing serious economic losses as the

global coal industry becomes less and less sustainable in the face of competition

from fracking-related natural gas abundance. Including the People’s Climate Move-

ment and the Indigenous Environmental Movement, among others, the growing

global movement to leave fossil fuels in the ground could have profound effects.

“Leave It in the Ground,” http://leave-it-in-the-ground.org/, accessed March 17,

2016. Peabody Energy declared bankruptcy in 2016.

38 For pictures of the Navajo Generating Station and much more, see Friberg, “Pic-

turing the Drought.” For the Black Mesa mine site, see the photos by Minkler in

“Paatuaqatsi/Water Is Life.”

39 For Navajo-Hopi-Peabody issues on Black Mesa, see Nies, “The Black Mesa Syn-

drome: Indian Lands, Black Gold.” This is my source for the $2.7 million payout

to Boyden. See Nies, Unreal City; Ali, Mining, the Environment, and Indigenous De-

velopment Conflicts, 77–85. For Navajo voices, see Benally, Bitter Water.

40 See the Academy Award–winning documentary film (1986) by Floria and Mudd,

Broken Rainbow, on the scandal of coal extraction and the relocation of Navajo

from Black Mesa, beginning in 1864, to aid mining speculation.

41 I am indebted to many activist sources for my condensed synopsis of Black Mesa

issues: Lacerenza, “An Historical Overview of the Navajo Relocation”; “Short His-

tory of Big Mountain–Black Mesa”; Begaye, “The Black Mesa Controversy”; Rowe,

“Coal Mining on Navajo Nation in Arizona Takes Heavy Toll”; Black Mesa Water

Coalition, “Our Work.”

42 Wertheim, A Field Guide to Hyperbolic Space, 35.

43 Wertheim and Wertheim, Crochet Coral Reef, 17. This is a two-hundred-plus-page

book of sumptuous photographs and astute essays, plus the names of everybody

who crocheted for this experimental art science model ecosystem.

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44 New Zealand tv series, 1995–2001. “Dreamworker” was an episode of series 1, in

September 1995, when I imagine Christine and Margaret glued to the screen, con-

cocting their own material dream passage. “Gabrielle is kidnapped to become the

bride of Morpheus, the god of dream, so Xena has to go through her Dreamscape

Passage to save her friend.” See Xena Warrior Princess, “Dreamworker.”

45 On the crochet coral reefs as experimental life-forms, in some ways analogous to

ALife worlds, but with very different narrative, material, political, and human and

nonhuman social ecologies, see Roosth, “Evolutionary Yarns in Seahorse Valley.”

46 Wertheim and Wertheim, Crochet Coral Reef, 21.

47 See Hayward, “The Crochet Coral Reef Project.”

48 Wertheim and Wertheim, Crochet Coral Reef, 23.

49 Wertheim and Wertheim, Crochet Coral Reef, 17.

50 Wertheim and Wertheim, Crochet Coral Reef, 202.

51 Margaret Wertheim, “The Beautiful Math of Coral.”

52 Christine Wertheim, “CalArts Faculty Staff Directory.”

53 Metcalf, “Intimacy without Proximity.”

54 See the Australian Earth Laws Alliance website. This uncredited photo appears on

http://www.earthlaws.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/turtle-and-reef.jpg,

as well as many other places on the Internet, always uncredited. Accessed August

11, 2015. The geo-eco-techno materiality of visual cultures matters to holding open

space for critters in place.

55 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “Green Turtles.”

56 See “Ako Project: The Books,” written by Alison Jolly, illustrated by Deborah Ross,

Malagasy text by Hantanirina Rasamimanana, 2005–12. The Lemur Conserva-

tion Foundation publishes the books in the United States and Canada. The books

are published by unicef in Madagascar (fifteen thousand of each book and six

thousand of each poster). Outside Madagascar, unilingual books are available in

English and Chinese, with more translations planned. Each book features a differ-

ent lemur species in a different kind of habitat, including the aye-aye, ring-tailed

lemurs, sifaka, indri, red ruffed lemurs, and mouse lemurs.

57 See Jolly, Thank You, Madagascar, for a funny, astute, quirky, informed, gorgeously

written, often tragic account of major tangles in the history of Malagasy-Western

conservation encounters and projects over the late twentieth and early twenty-

first centuries, all of which Jolly participated in. I am grateful to Jolly’s daughter

Margaretta Jolly for copies of documents and correspondence on the Ako Project.

58 Patricia Wright, a friend and colleague of Alison’s, must also be foregrounded for

her extraordinary knowledge and work; Wright plays a large role in Thank You,

Madagascar. Without her, Ranomafana National Park, with its projects for Mala-

gasy and foreign scientists, wildlife, and local people, would not exist. See “Centre

ValBio: Ranomafana National Park”; “Patricia Wright”; and Wright and Andriami-

haja, “Making a Rain Forest National Park Work in Madagascar.” None of that

stops me—or Jolly or Wright—from recording that many local people around the

park consider that their land, including graves of their ancestors, was illegitimately

taken from them to make the park and its kind of boundaries in ongoing scientific

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196 N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 3

and state colonial practices. Similarly, none of that stops informed players in this

region from judging that the trees and critters of this specific area would now

be gone if the park had failed; there is no innocent or simple way to stay with all

the faces of the trouble; that is precisely why we must do so. See Jolly, Thank You,

Madagascar, 214–28.

Shifting cultivators like the Malagasy, who clear small hillside plots and also use

irrigated paddies for rice, are conventionally accused of destroying land and its fu-

ture productivity; the truth has often been the opposite. The issue is controversial,

but see Survival International, “Shifting Cultivation,” and Cairns, Shifting Cultiva-

tion and Environmental Change. Kull, Isle of Fire, is the harshest critic of the history

of conservation through fire suppression in Madagascar. He argues for community-

based fire management rather than ongoing—and ineffective—criminalization of

burning. Regeneration from plots used by shifting cultivators and then left fallow

has been critical to forest species diversity and abundance in most tropical areas for

a long time—unless fallow times are too short and pressure for new croplands too

heavy. Private property regimes and their state apparatuses have a hard time with

shifting cultivators (and with pastoralists called nomads). To put it mildly, the state

wants people to settle down with definite property boundaries.

In solidarity with other pastoral/mobile peoples pressed by centralizing,

resource-extracting, national governments, on July 13, 2015, the Black Mesa Water

Coalition (bmwc) posted on its Facebook page a New York Times article on the cur-

rent Chinese government’s efforts to settle, forcibly if necessary, the “nomads” of

its tribal western regions. The relation of the stepped-up efforts of sedentarization

are hardly independent of intensified coal and other energy and mineral extraction

in western China, and similar forces on Black Mesa on Navajo and Hopi lands

since the mid-nineteenth century. See Jacobs, “China Fences in Its Nomads.” The

poster for bmwc commented, “This story sounds very familiar doesn’t it? It’s like

what bia has been doing to Diné people and it continues to happen today on npl

and hpl.” npl, Navajo Partition Lands; hpl, Hopi Partition Lands. https://www.

facebook.com/blackmesawc?fref=ts. Accessed August 9, 2015. See the last section

of this chapter, “Navajo Weaving.”

A recent study in Madagascar attempted to quantify whether and how much

fallow times have decreased in shifting cultivation/tavy land use in one rain forest

corridor region of eastern Madagascar. The study claims to have instigated meth-

ods to ensure taking the knowledge systems and statements of both agricultural

experts and local farmers equally seriously. See the conclusion in Styger et al.,

“Influence of Slash-and-Burn Farming Practices on Fallow Succession and Land

Degradation in the Rainforest Region of Madagascar,” 257: “Over the last 30 years,

fallow periods decreased from 8–15 years to 3–5 years. Hence, fallow vegetation is

changing within 5–7 fallow/cropping cycles after deforestation from tree (Trema

orientalis) to shrub (Psiadia altissima, Rubus moluccanus, Lantana camara) to herba-

ceous fallows (Imperata cylindrical and ferns) and grasslands (Aristida sp.), when

land falls out of crop production. This sequence is 5–12 times faster than previ-

ously reported. The frequent use of fire is replacing native species with exotic, ag-

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gressive ones and favors grasses over woody species, creating treeless landscapes

that are of minimal productive and ecological value.” The study highlights that the

local people, the Betsimisaraka, have rich knowledge of fallowing and regeneration

but are pressed by multiple forces in a spiraling process of land degradation. Eco-

logical, ethnic, social hierarchal, populational, regional, national, international,

and economic pressures tangle to strangle biodiversity and diverse livelihoods for

people and other critters.

Typically, shifting cultivators have not traditionally wanted large families and

have used many means to limit births. Why demographic spirals and land pressure

have developed as they have since the mid-twentieth century in the upland rice

plots and forests of Madagascar is not simple; but private property, nation state,

and colonial apparatuses bear much of the responsibility, but not all the respon-

sibility; the heavy toll of human numbers on today’s earth cannot be addressed

by laying all the responsibility on someone else’s plate (or womb). Population in

Madagascar is hard to estimate in part because no census has been taken since

1993; the first census was taken in 1975. The “method” for the following statements

is inference: “According to the 2010 revision of the World Population Prospects the

total population was 20,714,000 in 2010, compared to only 4,084,000 in 1950 . . .

un projections give about 50 million by 2050. Birthrates have fallen in both urban

and rural areas, more in urban. 70 percent of population is rural/subsistence farm-

ing” (United Nations, “World Population Prospects”).

59 Deborah Ross is a book artist with work in major magazines and in zoos and

botanical gardens. She has run watercolor workshops for Walt Disney Studios,

DreamWorks, Pixar, and Cal Arts. Most significant for the Ako Project have been

her rural art workshops for the Malagasy villagers of Kirindy and Tampolo. See

Ross, “Deborah Ross Arts.” With degrees in scientific illustration and ecology

and environment, Janet Mary Robinson is the poster artist for the Ako Project.

Thanks to Margaretta Jolly for information on the origin of the project; e-mail

from Jolly to Haraway, June 28, 2015.

60 Jolly, “Alison Jolly and Hantanirina Rasamimanana,” 45. For the story of her first

meeting and then working with Rasamimanana, see Jolly, Lords and Lemurs. For a

taste of Rasamimanana and Jolly thinking with each other as scientists, see Jolly

et al., “Territory as Bet-Hedging.”

61 Without giving up, Jolly laments that even Rasamimanana’s promotion of teach-

ing and research related to the Ako books has not yet been able to overcome the

reticence of many teachers to use such unorthodox materials. Jolly, Thank You,

Madagascar, 51. In “Conservation Education in Madagascar,” Dolins et al. argue

“that while nongovernmental organizational efforts are and will be very import-

ant, the Ministry of Education urgently needs to incorporate biodiversity educa-

tion in the curriculum at all levels, from primary school to university” (abstract).

62 Fifth International Prosimian Congress, website; Durrell Wildlife Conservation,

“World Primate Experts Focus on Madagascar.” For a list of related publications,

see ValBio, “icte-Centre ValBio Publications.”

63 Jolly, Thank You, Madagascar, 362.

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64 The quotation is the English subtitle on a screen shot in Never Alone, Announce-

ment Trailer, showing Nuna, the arctic fox, and a spirit helper. For extracts from

an interview with Amy Fredeen of the Cook Inlet Tribal Council and Sean Vesce

of E-Line Media for National Public Radio, see Demby, “Updating Centuries-Old

Folktales with Puzzles and Power-Ups.” From the interview: “The last living person

to tell the story was a master storyteller named Robert Cleveland. Amy and her

team did an amazing job, and they located the oldest living offspring of Robert—a

woman named Minnie Gray, who is in her 80s, I believe. They discovered that Min-

nie lived just a few blocks from the Cook Inlet Tribal Council headquarters. And we

brought her in and we were able to start a series of conversations with her. We in-

troduced her to the team and what we wanted to do. And we were delighted when

she really was encouraging us not only to use her father’s story for inspiration, but

to adapt it and evolve it for the game context. One of the things she taught us was

that storytelling is not a fixed act.” The process of making the game is described

in detail. One consequential decision: “We made the creative decision to keep the

only [spoken] audio in the game in Inupiaq, and it’s presented in 10 languages for

subtitles. What we were looking to do was re-create the experience of being told

a story by an elder in their own language. It’s hard to describe that sense, but we

wanted to try to re-create that for players so they got a sense of how powerful it

would have been to hear one of these stories back then.” In the interview, Amy

Fredeen quotes Daniel Starkey, an American Indian game reviewer on Eurogamer.

net, who writes, “Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna in Inupiaq) is different. Its very

existence challenges me. Instead of eliciting self-pity, it stands in absolute defiance

of everything that I’ve grown to be, not only telling me to be better, but showing

me how” (Starkey, “Never Alone Review”).

About forty members of the Inupiat community supported the project in var-

ious ways throughout its making, and many more at key points. Making sure the

game was grounded in Inupiat environmental conditions, experience, and ideas

was a central concern of the indigenous collaborators, including the kids who

helped by playing early versions. The npr interview described the kids who were

very engaged in deciding which animal—fox? owl? wolf?—should be the human

girl Nuna’s companion character.

65 Never Alone tells a story about an endless storm that threatens the people. Con-

temporary arctic peoples have well-developed accounts of climate alterations and

of the changes in their environments, but the relevant idiom is not the Anthropo-

cene. For example, see the website for the isuma film, Inuit Knowledge and Climate

Change, which states, “Nunavut-based director Zacharias Kunuk (Atanarjuat The

Fast Runner) and researcher and filmmaker Dr. Ian Mauro (Seeds of Change) have

teamed up with Inuit communities to document their knowledge and experience

regarding climate change. This new documentary, the world’s first Inuktitut lan-

guage film on the topic, takes the viewer ‘on the land’ with elders and hunters to

explore the social and ecological impacts of a warming Arctic. This unforgettable

film helps us to appreciate Inuit culture and expertise regarding environmental

change and indigenous ways of adapting to it.”

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See Callison, How Climate Change Comes to Matter, for fieldwork exploring the

vernaculars in which one group of Alaskan Inuit address climate change.

66 Situated in complex histories and politics, there are many formats besides com-

puter games to consider when thinking about indigenous digital cultures. There

are also computer games designed with indigenous cultural material, but not like

Never Alone. See Ginsberg, “Rethinking the Digital Age”; Ginsberg, Abu-Lughod,

and Larkin, Media Worlds; Lewis, Navajo Talking Picture.

67 The notion of “Sila” is explained in a “Cultural Insight” that has to be earned by

players of Never Alone. I always die before I get that far in the game, but it is pos-

sible to cheat on YouTube. See “Never Alone Cultural Insights—Sila Has a Soul,”

in which Fannie Kuutuuq and others discuss Sila. A pan-Inuit term, Sila means

something like “the weather” to Anglophone southerners, but only if the weather

means the sky and the air, breath-soul, the element that enfolds the world and

invests beings with life, as well as the environment from the earth to the moon,

with its dynamic changes and powers. See Merker, “Breath Soul and Wind Owner.”

The concept of climate change will not engulf Sila, nor vice versa; but these ideas/

work objects have met each other. There will be consequences for what counts as

agencies, temporalities, and response-abilities. It matters what thoughts think

thoughts, what stories tell stories, what knowledges know knowledges.

68 I am in agreement with William Elliott on these cautions and with his engage-

ments with native stories and thinkers, including new approaches to located an-

imisms. He generously shared two manuscripts with me: Elliott, “Ravens’ World:

Environmental Elegy and Beyond in a Changing North,” and Elliott, “Never Alone:

Alaska Native Storytelling, Digital Media, and Premodern Posthumanisms.” In an

npr interview, speaking of the collaboration with E-Line Media, Cook Inlet Tribal

Council member Amy Fredeen noted, “I know this may come across a little strong,

but when we talked about creating the first indigenous video game company, we

wanted to set the bar high. And we wanted to own this space around telling tra-

ditional cultural stories through video games” (Demby, “Updating Centuries-Old

Folktales”). Fredeen is clear that sharing indigenous stories outside the usual terms

of colonizing appropriation depends on owning the stories and the storytelling

apparatus.

69 Quotation from Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna) website.

70 Takahashi, “After Never Alone, E-Line Media and Alaska Native Group See Big Op-

portunity in ‘World Games.’” Takahashi continues: “[The game] got more than 700

reviews in a wide array of publications (including GamesBeat), and it has been dis-

cussed around the world. It was on more than fifty ‘best of 2014’ awards. YouTube

and Twitch player videos have drawn millions of views.” Thanks to Marco Harding

for the reference and for teaching me how to play the game.

71 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, personal communication, October 2, 2014.

72 That is one of the reasons that “belief ” has nothing to do with the practices of the

sciences. Sciences are sensible practices, in all their material semiotic workings,

including mathematics and physics. Isabelle Stengers has been relentlessly cogent

on this point; her love for Galileo’s inclined planes depends on understanding

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that science is sensible. Asking if one “believes” in evolution or climate change is

a Christian question, in both religious and secular formats, for which only a con-

fessional reply is accepted. In such worlds, Science and Religion reign, and there

it is impossible to play Never Alone. Harding, “Secular Trouble,” is my guide to the

history of the category of belief, especially in Protestant colonizing cultures. See

Harvey, The Handbook of Contemporary Animism.

73 “Dzit Yíjiin bikáa’gi iiná náánásdláadóó ha’níigo biniiyé da’jitt’ó,” translated by Mae

Washington. See Black Mesa Weavers for Life and Land, “Black Mesa Weavers and

Wool.”

74 Continuous weaving is a material-semiotic practice in my idiom. The Black Mesa

Water Coalition posts pictures of wonderful contemporary blankets for sale and

of the weavers, including children learning the skill, as well as pictures of blankets

in process, on its Facebook page.

Black Mesa Weavers for Life and Land commissioned three limited editions of

Black Mesa Blankets. A sympoietic work, these blankets were designed by Diné

shepherds and weavers, spun from Navajo-Churro fleece, produced in collabora-

tion with the Black Mesa Weavers for Life and Land, the San Jose Museum of

Quilts and Textiles, the Christensen Fund, and the Pendleton Woolen Mills. For

a picture of the Black Mesa Blanket, see San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles,

“Black Mesa Blanket.”

A late nineteenth-century giant in wool blankets targeting the Indian trade,

Pendleton Woolen Mills played a large role in the history of harsh conditions for

Navajo weaving. The “major blanket manufacturers usurped the Native American

market and also appropriated a large portion of the Anglo market” (M’Closkey,

Swept under the Rug, 87). Today, Pendleton’s American Indian College Fund blan-

kets provide scholarships for indigenous students, and Navajo families often trea-

sure their own Pendleton blankets as well as Navajo weaving.

75 “Thinker/maker” is a way of designating those engaged in the inextricable thinking/

making practices called art that I learned from Loveless, “Acts of Pedagogy.”

76 Willink and Zolbrod, Weaving a World, 8. This volume is based on extensive discus-

sions in the 1990s of weavings and weaving with more than sixty elders from the

eastern part of the Navajo Nation in and around Crownpoint, New Mexico. The

beginnings of the Crownpoint Navajo Rug Auction in 1968 and the founding of the

Crownpoint Rug Weavers Association, composed of Navajo weavers throughout

the Southwest, mark critical junctions in strengthening weavers’ well-being and

control of their markets, designs, and stories. Buyers from all over the world pur-

chase directly from the weavers, who run the auction. See “Crownpoint Navajo Rug

Auction” and Iverson, Diné, 268. However, most weavers still get much too little for

the work, much less everything else that goes into making a blanket. The Crown-

point Auction experienced lethal financial problems in 2014 and reorganized as

the new Crownpoint Rug Auction.

By 1996 Willink and Zolbrod had worked together for more than twenty-five

years. A member of the faculty at the University of New Mexico, Roseann Willink

is a member of the Mexican Clan and was born for the Towering House Clan.

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Arguing that Navajo poetics and stories are intimately enfolded into the conduct

of daily life, tying together relations among persons of the community with the

cosmos, Paul Zolbrod published Diné bahane’: The Navajo Creation Story, the most

complete version in English. See Denetdale, Reclaiming Diné History, 23–26.

For Navajo artisans’ stories of economic and cultural survival through the art

of weaving, see the film written and directed by Bennie Klain, Weaving Worlds.

77 M’Closkey, Swept under the Rug, 17–23, 205–52, argues persuasively for Navajo

weaving as cosmological performance. She draws from her own work with weav-

ers, as well as from previous scholarship, especially Witherspoon and Peterson,

Dynamic Symmetry and Holistic Asymmetry, as well as Willink and Zolbrod, Weaving

a World. Because of the long history of Navajo weavers selling their blankets un-

der highly unequal terms to traders, as well as working with patterns, fibers, and

dyes dictated by the art and tourist markets, most scholars and museologists have

treated Navajo weaving as a commodity or an art product, but not as indigenous

cosmological performance essential to maintaining hózhó. Among other things,

that has meant no legal copyright protection for Navajo patterns and reproduction

of cheap knock-offs in places like Oaxaca and Pakistan under all-too-imaginable

conditions of labor. See M’Closkey and Halberstadt, “The Fleecing of Navajo

Weavers.”

Both the number and quality of contemporary Navajo weavings are extraor-

dinary; and contemporary weavers have to compete in a market crowded both

by copies produced abroad and by older exquisite and authentic Navajo blankets,

which were sold from the late nineteenth century until the 1960s by the pound at

reservation trading posts to get credit to buy necessities. These heritage blankets

sometimes sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars today in an art market that

returns none of that money to the families of the original weavers, while blankets

of similar or better quality, using both old and new designs, sell at auction to in-

dividual buyers as well as to craft market buyers at better prices than in the past,

but still at rates that cannot sustain most of the weavers and their families. See

M’Closkey, Swept under the Rug, for detailed analysis of the exploitation of Navajo

weavers and weavings. Much of M’Closkey’s information comes from archives of

the Hubbell Trading Post, which became a National Historic Site in 1967. See Hub-

bell Trading Post, “History and Culture.”

Chapter 1, “Playing String Figures with Companion Species,” argued that Na-

vajo na’atl’o’, string figure games, are tied to the creation stories and performances

of Spider Woman and the Holy Twins. Na’atl’o’ is also called “continuous weaving.”

78 See Begay, “Shi’Sha’Hane (My Story),” 13–27. For an exhibit of the innovative

fourth-generation weaver D. Y. Begay’s tapestries at uc Davis’s Gorman Museum

in 2013, see Dave Jones, “Navajo Tapestries Capture the Soul of Her Land.” See also

the “Weaving in Beauty” website and Monument Valley High School, “Ndahoo’aah

Relearning/New Learning Navajo Crafts/Computer Design.” Ndahoo’aah is a sum-

mer program in design, computer programming, mathematics, and traditional

Navajo crafts held every summer at Monument Valley High School. The website

states, “Ndahoo’aah teaches some of the Navajo crafts that are still practiced on

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the Reservation . . . At the same time, Ndahoo’aah teaches logo graphics pro-

gramming, focusing on mathematics (especially geometry). Graphics tools are

then used to produce traditional designs and colorations.” For stories by weavers

and other thinkers/makers, click on the “Stories” button of the Ndahoo’aah web-

site. See also Eglash, “Native American Cybernetics.” Learning with young people

from Black Mesa as well as the Diné College, and with weavers who helped the

visitors understand their algorithms, Eglash and his coworkers link the robustness

of such knowledge worlds to what he and his collaborators call “generative justice.”

The point of such an approach is not mixing Indigenous and Western knowledge

practices and stirring, but rather exploring the fraught possibility of generative

contact zones without denying long histories of violence. E-mail from Ron Eglash

to Donna Haraway, March 2, 2016.

79 “Inherent in the beauty of rug weaving is the artistic achievement reflecting every

weaver’s frame of mind, creating designs of continual mathematical movement

and regeneration of symbolism acknowledged for the Diné” (Clinton, “The Corn

Pollen Path of Diné Rug Weaving”). In her book-in-progress, “Attaching, for Cli-

mate Change: A Sympoiesis of Media,” Katie King proposes khipu, Inca knotted

strings, as a model for, but also a performance of, complex systems, media, and

geo-change as “transcontextual transdisciplinary tangles.” King writes, “Fiber

arts and ethnomathematics are necessarily transdisciplinary resources for the

kind of scholarship being continually re-created [in khipu worlds] in a zone of

unusual cultural continuity even after conquest. The Andes are a multitemporal

geo-political zone for caring for object/ecology” (draft book proposal, 2015). See

King, “In Knots.”

Coral reefs, forests in Madagascar, the Inuit Arctic, and the Navajo-Hopi Black

Mesa are also “multi-temporal geo-political zones for caring for object/ecology

even after conquest” (King, draft proposal, 2015). In particular, continuous weav-

ing, cosmological performance, world games, and “writing without words” in

khipu, Never Alone, Navajo weaving, and the Crochet Coral Reef form complex

string figures of thinking/making/acting. Again in King’s borrowings, these are

“reciprocities made visible.” Boone and Mignolo, Writing without Words. For “reci-

procities made visible,” see Salomon, The Cord Keepers, 279. Thanks to Katie King

for these references.

80 When I was researching Spanish rough sheep (Churro sheep) in the U.S. desert

Southwest, I stumbled onto one of my favorite indigenous media projects—a

Shoshoni Claymation video. The Gosiute of eastern Nevada and western Utah

are Shoshone peoples. Like all peoples of the U.S. Southwest, the Gosiute are em-

broiled in the ecologies, economies, and politics of nuclear mining, war, waste

processing, and storage. Their relatives have lived in these deserts for more

than a thousand years; and, living and dead, they are indigenous to the ongoing

Chthulucene, tangled in the grip of the colonial and imperial Anthropocene and

Capitalocene. A sort of audio collage, the sound track for the Claymation video

Frog Races Coyote/Itsappeh wa’ai Wako was constructed from the archives of several

Shoshone-language storytellers by the Gosiute/Shoshoni Project of the University

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of Utah. Frogs think-with frogs; frog wins the race against coyote around the lake.

Collective action can defeat the wiliest opponent.

The Frog and Coyote story is taught today in the Utah Indian Curriculum

Guide, “The Goshutes.” Listening to and learning a Shoshoni language today in

public schools and on the Internet is part of indigenous America not disappearing,

but traveling in tongues to unexpected places to reopen questions for ongoing-

ness, accountability, and lived storying.

On the importance of fostering actual indigenous language use, in all its “emer-

gent vitalities,” among the young who are no longer fluent native speakers, see

Perley, “Zombie Linguistics.”

81 See Denetdale, Reclaiming Diné History, 62–86; Johnson, Navajo Stories of the Long

Walk Period; Morrison, Paradise. The twentieth-century Navajo-Hopi reservation

land partition laws and forced removal of thousands of Navajo from Black Mesa/

Big Mountain/Dzil ni Staa to make way for industrial coal mining are sometimes

called the second great Hwéeldi. Beginning in 1977, Pauline Whitesinger, her clan

allies, and other Diné elders started a resistance that has not ceased. “By 1980,

Big Mountain Dineh resisters and their few but growing non-Native allies began

network strategies that reached as far as Washington State, Southern California,

and the east coast. Non-Native support collectives began bringing themselves and

logistics out to the now restricted zones. Both the indigenous community and

non-Natives shared the need to document the deliberate violations of human

rights, to stop forcible occupation to extract fossil fuel, to halt the desecration of

human religions, and to let the world know that the U.S. is committing genocide”

(NaBahe [Bahe] Keediniihii [Katenay],“The Big Mountain Dineh Resistance”).

Efforts to relocate sheep-herding Navajo and their animals intensified again in

2014, with strong bia and tribal police efforts to break the bond between Diné

and non-Native allies. See the Black Mesa Indigenous Support website. Black Mesa

Indigenous Support runs Big Mountain spring training camps for activists. I owe

“originally trauma” to Kami Chisholm.

82 For a rich argument about Native Americans making kin with each other and

with plants and animals—processes disrupted by forced commodity relations and

Christian kinship systems—see Kim TallBear, “Failed Settler Kinship, Truth and

Reconciliation, and Science.” TallBear drew from Dakota histories for this blog

post. TallBear is a leader in thinking about the “making of love and relations be-

yond settler sexualities.”

83 Several sources inform my sketch of the near extermination of Navajo-Churro

sheep in the 1930s, but especially the thoroughly researched book by Weisiger,

Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country. See also Weisiger, “Gendered Injustice”; the

website of the Navajo Sheep Project; White, The Roots of Dependency; Johnson and

Roessel, Navajo Livestock Reduction; and McPherson, “Navajo Livestock Reduction

in Southeastern Utah, 1933–46.” In A Plague of Sheep, Melville argues that Spanish

sheep were devastatingly effective colonizers, creatures of empire, which forever

altered the ecology and native society of highland central Mexico in favor of the

conquerors. The same could be said of sheep in the U.S. Southwest. True enough,

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but origins are not closed destinies; and sheep and indigenous and allied peoples of

these lands have forged remarkably durable multispecies ways of living and dying

with each other on the Colorado Plateau, in complex resistance to ongoing colonial

practices.

84 Horoshko, “Rare Breed,” and Navajo Sheep Project, “History.”

85 See Black Mesa Weavers for Life and Land, “Diné Navajo Weavers and Wool,” and

Halberstadt, “Black Mesa Weavers for Life and Land.”

86 Diné be’iína/The Navajo Lifeway, “Dibé be’iína/Sheep Is Life.”

87 Strawn and Littrel, “Returning Navajo-Churro Sheep for Weaving.”

88 For a story about Roy Kady, one of the Navajo Nation’s best-known male weavers,

who has dedicated his life to the well-being of Navajo-Churro sheep, see Kiefel,

“Heifer Helps Navajos Bolster Sheep Herd.” Blystone and Chanler, A Gift from

Talking God, is a moving dvd produced in 2009, narrated by Jack Loeffler, fea-

turing Roy Kady, Jay Begay, Lyle McNeal, and Gary Paul Nabhan. See also Kraker,

“The Real Sheep,” and Cannon, “Sacred Sheep Revive Navajo Tradition, for Now.”

89. “Behavioural studies in our laboratory using choice mazes and operant discrim-

ination tasks have revealed quite remarkable face-recognition abilities in sheep,

similar to those found in humans . . . These experiments showed that sheep could

discriminate between sheep and human faces, between different breeds of sheep

and between sexes in the same breed” (Tate et al., “Behavioural and Neurophysio-

logical Evidence for Face Identity and Face Emotion Processing in Animals,” 2155).

90 Says cofounder Peter Hagerty, a sheep and horse farmer who bought wool in 1985

from the Soviet Union to somehow unknot the Cold War, “I used to describe Peace

Fleece as an international yarn company doing business with historic enemies like

Palestinians and Israelis and Russians and Americans. Today that description still

holds true but recently I have grown to see it more as a place where very normal

people come together on a regular basis to help each other get through the day”

(Peace Fleece, “The Story”). See Peace Fleece, “Irene Bennalley.” On Irene Bennal-

ley, see Benanav, “The Sheep Are Like Our Parents.”

91 Black Mesa Water Coalition, “About.” On the founding and goals of bmwc, see

Paget-Clarke, “An Interview with Wahleah Johns and Lilian Hill.” Johns is Diné

from Forest Lake, a community on Black Mesa (Johns, website). Working out of

the San Francisco Bay Area beginning in 2013, Johns was the Solar Project Coordi-

nator of the bmwc. Hill is from Kykotsmovi, Tobacco clan. Living in Kykotsmovi,

she is a Certified Permaculture Designer and Natural Builder (Hill, “Hopi Tutskwa

Permaculture”). bmwc activists were active at cop21 in Paris in 2015 in the Peoples

Climate Justice Summit/Indigenous Rising. Executive Directior of bmwc Jihan

Gearon testified on September 23, 2015, at the Peoples Tribunal. For an audio re-

cording, go to Gearon, Peoples Tribunal.

92 Haraway and Tsing, “Tunneling in the Chthulucene.” For thinking with another

people of the Southwest, see Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places.

93 bmwc, “Our Work”; Communities United for a Just Transition, “Our Power Con-

vening.” See bmwc, “10th Anniversary Video,” narrated by Executive Director

Jihan Gearon. For a video of codirectors of bmwc in 2009, see Johns and Begay,

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Speech at Power Shift ’09. See also bmwc, “Green Economy Project.” For a pow-

erful reflection in 2015 on how to continue working together across time and dif-

ference, see Gearon, “Strategies for Healing Our Movements.” Tódích’ií’nii (Bitter

Water) clan and African American, Gearon earned a bs from Stanford in earth sys-

tems, focusing on energy science and technology. See Afro-Native Narratives, “Ji-

han Gearon, Indigenous People’s Rights Advocate.” In her generation, the urgent

conversation between needed concepts and practices is more possible—politically,

culturally, spiritually, scientifically. Gearon made Grist magazine’s “Grist 50: The

50 People You’ll Be Talking About in 2016,” https://grist.org/grist-50/profile/jihan

-gearon/, accessed March 17, 2016.

94 Giovanna Di Chiro, professor of environmental studies at Swarthmore College, has

for many years been my guide to bringing together the feminist movement, multi-

ethnic and antiracist environmental justice, critters of the seas and inland waters,

urban antitoxic coalitions, and action research. We are also linked by research

on symbiosis and evolutionary relationships. String figures linking women—and

men—through friendship, mentoring, and research projects in all these worlds

have shaped the pattern. See DiChiro, “Cosmopolitics of a Seaweed Sisterhood,”

“A New Spelling of Sustainability,” “Acting Globally,” and “Beyond Ecoliberal ‘Com-

mon Futures.’” Part of a sympoietic seaweed sisterhood that shaped her life, in

1979 Giovanna was an undergraduate at uc Santa Cruz working with phycologist

Linda Goff. Giovanna was a collector for the team at the Oahu, Hawaii, coral reef

research site off Coconut Island that characterized Prochloron didemni, the cya-

nobacterial symbiont living in the gut of its ascidian partner. The molecular and

ultrastructural analysis provided evidence of an evolutionary relationship between

Prochloron and eukaryotic chloroplasts of green plants. See Giddings, Withers, and

Staehlin, “Supramolecular Structure of Stacked and Unstacked Regions of the Pho-

tosynthetic Membranes of Prochloron.” A few years before, teaching biology and

the history of science at the University of Hawaii on Oahu, I had written chapters

of my PhD thesis on organismic metaphors that shape embryos in developmental

biology while living on Coconut Island in a commune that included Michael Had-

field, an important marine developmental and ecological biologist in the current

flowering of EcoEvoDevo, discussed in the first part of this chapter. See Haraway,

Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields. I was Giovanna’s PhD adviser in History of Conscious-

ness at ucsc; her degree was awarded in 1995. Cat’s cradle, indeed.

95 Stengers, Cosmopolitics I and Cosmopolitics II; Stengers, “The Cosmopolitical

Proposal.”

Chapter 4: Making Kin

1 Intra-action is a concept given us by Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway. I

keep using interaction too in order to remain legible to audiences who do not yet

understand the radical change Barad’s analysis demands, but probably out of my

linguistically promiscuous habits, as well.

2 Tsing, “Feral Biologies.”

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206 N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 4

3 Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life.

4 I owe Scott Gilbert for pointing out, during the Ethnos conversation and other

interactions at Aarhus University in October 2014, that the Anthropocene (and

Plantationocene) should be considered a boundary event like the K-Pg boundary,

not an epoch.

5 In a recorded conversation for Ethnos at the University of Aarhus in October 2014,

the participants collectively generated the name Plantationocene for the devastat-

ing transformation of diverse kinds of human-tended farms, pastures, and forests

into extractive and enclosed plantations, relying on slave labor and other forms of

exploited, alienated, and usually spatially transported labor. See Tsing et al., “An-

thropologists Are Talking about the Anthropocene.” See aura, website. Scholars

have long understood that the slave plantation system was the model and motor

for the carbon-greedy machine-based factory system that is often cited as an in-

flection point for the Anthropocene. Nurtured in even the harshest circumstances,

slave gardens not only provided crucial human food, but also refuges for biodiverse

plants, animals, fungi, and soils. Slave gardens are an underexplored world, espe-

cially compared to imperial botanical gardens, for the travels and propagations of

myriad critters. Moving material semiotic generativity around the world for cap-

ital accumulation and profit—the rapid displacement and reformulation of germ

plasm, genomes, cuttings, and all other names and forms of part organisms and of

deracinated plants, animals, and people—is one defining operation of the Planta-

tionocene, Capitalocene, and Anthropocene taken together. The Plantationocene

continues with ever greater ferocity in globalized factory meat production, mono-

crop agribusiness, and immense substitutions of crops like oil palm for multispecies

forests and their products that sustain human and nonhuman critters alike. The

participants in the Ethnos conversation included Noboru Ishikawa, Anthropology,

Center for South East Asian Studies, Kyoto University; Anna Tsing, Anthropology,

University of California at Santa Cruz; Donna Haraway, History of Consciousness,

University of California at Santa Cruz; Scott F. Gilbert, Biology, Swarthmore; Nils

Bubandt, Department of Culture and Society, Aarhus University; and Kenneth Ol-

wig, Landscape Architecture, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. Gilbert

adopted the term Plantationocene for key arguments in the coda to the second edi-

tion of his widely used textbook, Gilbert and Epel, Ecological Developmental Biology.

6 According to personal e-mail communications from both Jason Moore and Alf

Hornborg in late 2014, Malm proposed the term Capitalocene in a seminar in Lund,

Sweden, in 2009, when he was still a graduate student. I first used the term inde-

pendently in public lectures starting in 2012. Moore edited a book titled Anthro-

pocene or Capitalocene? (pm Press, 2016), which has essays by Moore, myself, and

others. Our collaborative webs thicken.

7 The suffix -cene proliferates! I risk this overabundance because I am in the thrall

of the root meanings of -cene/kainos, namely, the temporality of the thick, fibrous,

and lumpy “now,” which is ancient and not.

8 Os Mil Nomes de Gaia/The Thousand Names of Gaia was the generative interna-

tional conference organized by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Déborah Danowski,

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and their collaborators in September 2014 in Rio de Janeiro. See The Thousand

Names of Gaia, “Videos,” and Haraway, “Entrevista.”

9 Clifford, Returns, 8, 64, 201, 212.

10 Van Dooren, Flight Ways; Despret, “Ceux qui insistent.” For a wealth of Despret’s

important essays translated into English, see Buchanan, Bussolini, and Chrulew,

“Philosophical Ethology II: Vinciane Despret.”

11 Card, Speaker for the Dead.

12 Making kin must be done with respect for historically situated, diverse kinships

that should not be either generalized or appropriated in the interest of a too-

quick common humanity, multispecies collective, or similar category. Kinships

exclude as well as include, and they should do that. Alliances must be attentive

to that matter. The sorry spectacle of many white liberals in the U.S., in the wake

of African American and allied organizing against police murders of Black people

and other outrages, resisting #BlackLivesMatter by insisting that #AllLivesMatter

is instructive. Making alliances requires recognizing specificities, priorities, and

urgencies. Alicia Garza, who created #Black Lives Matter with Patrisse Cullors and

Opal Tometi as a call to action, wrote a powerful history of the hashtag and subse-

quent movement and efforts to delegitimize it with a false universal kinship rather

than accountable alliances in the celebration and humanization of Black lives. See

Garza, “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement.” As she argues, when

Black people get free, everybody gets free, but that requires central focus on Black

lives because their ongoing degradation is fundamental to U.S. society.

Similar issues attach to the core relation of BlackLivesMatter and environmen-

tal justice, a topic explored in a series of astute posts on Grist by the justice editor,

Brentin Mock, https://grist.org/author/brentin-mock/, accessed March 17, 2016.

On many levels, making kin is not separate from these topics.

Similar questions also apply to the too-easy term reconciliation, which is used

as a nation- and kin-making term. Intending to make kin while not seeing both

past and ongoing colonial and other policies for extermination and/or assimilation

augurs for very dysfunctional “families,” to say the least. Kim TallBear and Erica

Lee are doing fundamental work in this area, within a generative explosion of fem-

inist indigenous public thinking, acting, and scholarship. Here is where common

worlds—cosmopolitics—to go on with might have a chance to be constructed.

See TallBear, “Failed Settler Kinship, Truth and Reconciliation, and Science,” and

Lee, “Reconciling in the Apocalypse.” I am informed by TallBear’s critique of settler

sexualities and arguments for both inherited and yet-to-be-invented practices of

kinship, infused with situated, historically attentive, ongoing, and experimental

indigenous worldings. Listen to TallBear, “Making Love and Relations Beyond Set-

tler Sexualities.” IdleNoMore, like BlackLivesMatter, taps the roots of any possible

multicritter multipeople mycorrhizal “holoent” on a damaged planet.

13 Strathern, The Gender of the Gift.

14 Latour, “Facing Gaïa.”

15 Robinson, 2312. This extraordinary sf narrative won the Nebula Award for best

novel.

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16 Strathern, “Shifting Relations.” Making kin is a surging popular practice, and new

names are also proliferating. See Skurnick, That Should Be a Word, for kinnovator,

a person who makes family in nonconventional ways, to which I add kinnovation.

Skurnick also proposes clanarchist. These are not just words; they are clues and

prods to earthquakes in kin making that is not limited to Western family appara-

tuses, heteronormative or not. I think babies should be rare, nurtured, and pre-

cious; and kin should be abundant, unexpected, enduring, and precious.

17 Gens is another word, patriarchal by origin, with which feminists are playing. Ori-

gins and ends do not determine each other. Kin and gens are littermates in the his-

tory of Indo-European languages. In hopeful intra-actional communist moments,

see Bear et al., “Gens.” The writing is perhaps too dry (although the summary bul-

let points help), and there are no juicy examples to make this Manifesto seduce the

spoiled reader; but the references give huge resources to do all that, most the fruit

of long-term, intimately engaged, deeply theorized ethnographies. See especially

Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World. The precision of the methodological

approach in “Gens” is in its address to those would-be Marxists or other theorists

who resist feminism, and who therefore don’t engage the heterogeneity of real life

worlds but stay with categories like Markets, the Economy, and Financialization

(or, I would add, Reproduction, Production, and Population—in short, the sup-

posedly adequate categories of standard liberal and nonfeminist socialist political

economy). Go, Honolulu’s Revolution Books and all your kin!

18 My experience is that those I hold dear as “our people,” on the Left or whatever

name we can still use without apoplexy, hear neo-imperialism, neoliberalism, mi-

sogyny, and racism (who can blame them?) in the “Not Babies” part of “Make

Kin Not Babies.” We imagine that the “Make Kin” part is easier and ethically and

politically on firmer ground. Not true! “Make Kin” and “Not Babies” are both hard;

they both demand our best emotional, intellectual, artistic, and political creativity,

individually and collectively, across ideological and regional differences, among

other differences. My sense is that “our people” can be partially compared to some

Christian climate-change deniers: beliefs and commitments are too deep to allow

rethinking and refeeling. For our people to revisit what has been owned by the

Right and by development professionals as the “population explosion” can feel like

going over to the dark side.

But denial will not serve us. I know “population” is a state-making category,

the sort of “abstraction” and “discourse” that remake reality for everybody, but

not for everybody’s benefit. I also think that evidence of many kinds, epistemo-

logically and affectively comparable to the varied evidence for rapid anthropogenic

climate change, shows that 7–11 billion human beings make demands that cannot

be borne without immense damage to human and nonhuman beings across the

earth. This is not a simple causal affair; ecojustice has no allowable one-variable

approach to the cascading exterminations, immiserations, and extinctions on to-

day’s earth. But blaming Capitalism, Imperialism, Neoliberalism, Modernization,

or some other “not us” for ongoing destruction webbed with human numbers will

not work either. These issues demand difficult, unrelenting work; but they also

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demand joy, play, and response-ability to engage with unexpected others. All parts

of these issues are much too important for Terra to hand them over to the Right or

to development professionals or to anybody else in the business-as-usual camps.

Here’s to Oddkin—non-natalist and off-category!

We must find ways to celebrate low birth rates and personal, intimate deci-

sions to make flourishing and generous lives (including innovating enduring kin—

kinnovating) without making more babies—urgently and especially, but not only,

in wealthy high-consumption and misery-exporting regions, nations, commu-

nities, families, and social classes. We need to encourage population and other

policies that engage scary demographic issues by proliferating other-than-natal

kin—including nonracist immigration, environmental and social support policies

for new comers and “native-born” alike (education, housing, health, gender and

sexual creativity, agriculture, pedagogies for nurturing other-than-human critters,

technologies and social innovations to keep older people healthy and productive,

etc., etc.).

The inalienable personal “right” (what a word for such a mindful bodily mat-

ter!) to birth or not to birth a new baby is not in question for me; coercion is wrong

at every imaginable level in this matter, and it tends to backfire in any case, even

if one can stomach coercive law or custom (I cannot). On the other hand, what if

the new normal were to become a cultural expectation that every new child have at

least three lifetime committed parents (who are not necessarily each other’s lovers

and who would birth no more new babies after that, although they might live in

multichild, multigenerational households)? What if serious adoption practices for

and by the elderly became common? What if nations that are worried about low

birth rates (Denmark, Germany, Japan, Russia, Singapore, Taiwan, white America,

more) acknowledged that fear of immigrants is a big problem and that racial purity

projects and fantasies drive resurgent pronatalism? What if people everywhere

looked for non-natalist kinnovations to individuals and collectives in queer, deco-

lonial, and indigenous worlds, instead of to European, Euro-American, Chinese,

or Indian rich and wealth-extracting sectors?

As a reminder that racial purity fantasies and refusal to accept immigrants as

full citizens actually drive policy now in the “progressive” “developed” world, see

Hakim, “Sex Education in Europe Turns to Urging More Births.” In response to

this piece, science writer Rusten Hogness posted on his Facebook page on April 9,

2015, “What is wrong with our imaginations and with our ability to look out for

one another (human and non-human alike) if we can’t find ways to address issues

raised by changing age distributions without making ever more human babies? We

need to find ways to celebrate young folks who decide not to have kids, not add

nationalism to the already potent mix of pro-natalist pressures on them”(https://

www.facebook.com/rusten.hogness?fref=ts, accessed March 17, 2016).

Pronatalism in all its powerful guises ought to be in question almost every-

where. I keep “almost” as a reminder about the consequences of genocide and

displacement for peoples—an ongoing scandal. The “almost” is also a prod to re-

member contemporary sterilization abuse, shockingly inappropriate and unusable

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means of contraception, reduction of women and men to ciphers in old and new

population control policies, and other misogynist, patriarchal, and ethnicist/racist

practices built into business as usual around the world. For example, see Wilson,

“The ‘New’ Global Population Control Policies.”

For an indispensable critical analysis of geopolitics and global intellectual his-

tory of population control discourse, see Bashford, Global Population. For a focused

critical study of the oppressive social life of numbers in Guatemala, see Nelson,

Who Counts? Such studies show why reemphasizing the burden of growing human

numbers, especially as a global demographic abstraction, can be so dangerous.

Thanks to Michelle Murphy for the references and the resistance to my argu-

ments, no matter how well intended. I still think they are necessary. See Murphy,

“Thinking against Population and with Distributed Futures.”

We need each others’ risk-taking support, in conflict and collaboration, big

time on all these matters.

Chapter 5: Awash in Urine

1 Cyborgs might be considered to be “holoents” in the sense developed in chapter 3.

2 “Diethylstilbesterol,” Wikipedia. This Wikipedia article is a first stop with a use-

ful bibliography, but is worse than worthless for tracking feminist and women’s

health activist connections to des. See Bell, des Daughters, Embodied Knowledge,

and the Transformation of Women’s Health Politics in the Late Twentieth Century.

Barbara Seaman, who died in 2008, is one of my heroes in this story; her work was

crucial to persuading the U.S. federal government to convene a task force on des.

In 1975, she cofounded the National Women’s Health Network. For a bit of the

history and tributes to Seaman, see Editors, “A Tribute to Barbara Seaman,” and

Seaman, “Health Activism, American Feminist.” Jewish women have been central

in the history of feminist women’s health activism. Another hero who recently

died, Pat Cody, also worked effectively to change a personal tragedy caused by des

into a global feminist health movement. See Rosen, “Pat Cody.” For innovative

and standard-setting feminist science studies, see Oodshourn, Beyond the Natural

Body.

First-generation users of des have increased incidence of and mortality rates

from breast cancer. Second-generation offspring, “des daughters,” develop dan-

gerous vaginal and breast cancers, as well as other problems like infertility and “ab-

normal pregnancy outcomes.” That means damaged or dead children. des is the

only transplacental carcinogen known in our species. What a distinction! It is also

a teratogen; see “abnormal pregnancy outcome.” des sons have nasty effects too.

3 From Forney, “Diethylstilbesterol for Veterinary Use”: “The most-serious side-

effect of estrogen therapy [in dogs] is bone-marrow suppression and toxicity that

may progress to a fatal aplastic-anemia . . . Side effects are more common in older

animals.”

4 See Brooks, “Diethylstilbesterol”: “As the uses of des dwindled to a few veteri-

nary uses, its manufacturer found it unprofitable to continue production and des

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went off the market in the late 1990s. Fortunately for the numerous incontinent

female dogs hoping to lead indoor lives, the human carcinogenicity issues have not

crossed over into the canine health arena. The low doses and infrequent dosing

schedule has [sic] positioned des as a medication of unparalleled safety and con-

venience in the treatment of canine incontinence. Compounding pharmacies now

make this medication readily available to patients who need it on a prescription

basis.” An important player in companion animal consumer marketing, Foster and

Smith, “Diethylstilbesterol,” tells us that prolonged use in pets can cause ovarian

cancer.

5 Raun and Preston, “History of Diethylstilbestrol Use in Cattle.”

6 Popular sites on estrogens in and for women include “Estrogen,” Healthy Women.

org, and “Estrogen,” Midlife-Passages.com. Premarin® is a mix of conjugated estro-

gens branded with a registered trademark. These equine estrogens are chemically

different from those made in the human body; i.e., they are not bioidentical, but

they are bioactive across species. Ethinyl estradiol is the artificial estrogen com-

monly found in contemporary birth control pills and, like des, is manufactured in

the laboratory. Nomenclatures for hormones around terms like natural, synthetic,

biomimetic, bioidentical, and artificial can be confusing, biologically and politically.

For example, soy-derived estrogens often are called natural, but not because they

are chemically identical to naturally occurring human estrogens. “Natural” is about

branded biovalue in many contested senses. Cenestin is a conjugated estrogen

marketed by Duramed Pharmaceuticals. Made from plant sources, Cenestin is

called “natural,” but it is a conjugated mix that is chemically a copy of Premarin, so

neither is bioidentical to human estrogens. Because it is derived from horses, Pre-

marin gets called synthetic, although it is heavily processed but not synthesized

in the laboratory. See Petras, “Making Sense of hrt.” Substituting a plant source

for horse urine, Cenestin is a the kind of work-around that becomes cost effective

when the biopolitical/bioethical cost of a technoscientific product gets too high in

a particular naturalcultural ecology. Duramed calls its conjugated estrogens “syn-

thetic” and an “advanced form of Premarin,” emphasizing that “Cenestin does not

contain any hormone synthesized by the horse.” So Cenestin is at once natural,

synthetic, mimetic, and advanced, while Premarin’s relation to horses forbids the

label natural. Keeping corporate lawyers busy, the patenting fur has flown thickly

over the naming rights for these drugs.

7 Hormone Health Network, “Emminen.” The first hormonal treatment for symp-

toms of human menopause in the United States, in 1929, was with a derivative of

calf amniotic fluid. Emmenin, from Canadian pregnant women’s urine, was first

marketed in the United States in 1933. In 1939 des was marketed as a more potent

estrogen than Emmenin. An obvious cyborg cocktail, the mix of historically situ-

ated organic and technological species, both human and not-human, could hardly

be missed.

8 Women’s Health Initiative, “Risks and Benefits of Estrogen Plus Progestin in

Healthy Postmenopausal Women”; Vance, “Premarin.” See also Wilks, “The Com-

parative Potencies of Birth Control and Menopausal Hormone Drug Use.”

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9 North American Equine Ranching Information Council, “About the Equine Ranch-

ing Industry.”

10 North American Equine Ranching Information Council, “Equine Veterinarians’

Consensus Report on the Care of Horses on pmu Ranches.”

11 HorseAid, “What Are the Living Conditions of the Mares?”

12 “Premarin Controversy,” Wikipedia; Horse Fund, “Fact Sheet”; HorseAid website;

Hall, “The Bright Side of pmu.”

13 HorseAid Report, “PREgnant MARes’ urINe, Curse or Cure?”

14 Horse Fund, “Fact Sheet.” The horsefund.org fact sheet paints a very different pic-

ture than the naeric website. HorseAid has been more careful in its descriptions

and dates than the International Fund for Horses, which continued to publish as if

they were current, as late as 2011, conditions originally described in the 1980s and

1990s, but also printed an interesting and damning timeline on Premarin and its

checkered corporate and medical history on http://www.horsefund.org/premarin

-timeline.php, online in November 2011, but unavailable in August 2015. For data

on Premarin sales and pmu farm numbers from 1965 to 2010, see Allin, “Wyeth

Wins, Horses Lose.” In 2010 Allin was a research analyst with the International

Fund for Horses. Pfizer will increase pmu collection in 2016–17.

15 Working in Manitoba for about nine years, Equine Angels Rescue Sanctuary

narrated a story from October 2011 about helping pmu farmers get out of the

breeding business. The plan attended to the needs of farmers, foals, mares, and

stallions. The note on the website on February 3, 2015, updated progress on the

project. See Weller, Equine Angels. There were several other pmu horse rescue sites

active in 2011. The last time I checked the unfinished story was August 13, 2015; see

Equine Advocates, “pmu Industry.” Reflecting the sharp decline in farm numbers

since 2002, rescue operations now attend more to out-of-work pmu horses than

to overproduced foals, but pregnant mare’s urine is still produced and still used in

Premarin-containing products.

Chapter 6: Sowing Worlds

1 In everything I write about companion species, I am instructed by Anna Tsing’s

“Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species.” Without the deceptive com-

forts of human exceptionalism, Tsing succeeds both in telling world history from

the point of view of fungal associates and also in rewriting Engels’s The Origin of

the Family, Private Property, and the State. Tsing’s is a tale of speculative fabulation,

an sf genre crucial to feminist theory. She and I are in a relation of reciprocal

induction, that fundamental evolutionary ecological developmental worlding pro-

cess that is basic to all becoming-with. See Gilbert and Epel, Ecological Developmen-

tal Biology.

2 Rose, Reports from a Wild Country, taught me that recuperation, not reconciliation

or restoration, is what is needed and maybe just possible. I find many of the words

that begin with re- useful, including resurgence and resilience. Post- is more of a

problem.

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N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 6 213

3 For Le Guin, see especially The Word for World Is Forest and “‘The Author of Acacia

Seeds’ and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics.”

“The Author of Acacia Seeds” was first published in 1974 in Fellowship of the Stars.

For Butler, see especially Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. Butler

inspired a new generation of “stories from social justice movements.” See Brown

and Imarisha, Octavia’s Brood. Le Guin’s work also pervades much writing for en-

vironmental justice and environmental resurgence.

4 Le Guin, “The Carrier Bag Theory,” shaped my thinking about narrative in evolu-

tionary theory and of the figure of woman the gatherer for Primate Visions. Le Guin

learned about the Carrier Bag Theory of Evolution from Fisher, Women’s Creation,

in that period of large, brave, speculative, worldly stories that burned in feminist

theory in the 1970s and 1980s. Like speculative fabulation, speculative feminism

was, and is, an sf practice.

5 Le Guin, “The Carrier Bag Theory,” 166.

6 Le Guin, “The Carrier Bag Theory,” 169.

7 Le Guin, “The Carrier Bag Theory,” 169.

8 My guide with and through sf, my “mystra,” here is LaBare, “Farfetchings.” (La-

Bare’s term mystra begins to accrue meanings on p. 17.) LaBare argues that sf is

not fundamentally a genre, even in the extended sense that includes film, com-

ics, and much else besides the printed book or magazine. The sf mode is, rather,

a mode of attention, a theory of history, and a practice of worlding. He writes,

“What I call the ‘sf mode’ offers one way of focusing that attention, of imagining

and designing alternatives to the world that is, alas, the case” (1). LaBare suggests

that the sf mode pays attention to the “conceivable, possible, inexorable, plausible,

and logical” (italics in original, 27). One of his principal mystras is Le Guin, espe-

cially in the lure of her understanding of “talking backwards” in the postapoca-

lyptic Northern Californian sf novel Always Coming Home. Reading Parable of the

Sower together with Always Coming Home is a good way for coastal travelers to fill

the carrier bag for recuperative terraforming before the apocalypse instead of just

afterward. Instructed in this sf mode, perhaps human people and earth others can

avert inexorable disaster and plant the conceivable germ of possibility for multi-

species, multiplacetime recuperation before it is too late.

9 Myrmex is the Greek word for ant, and one story has it that an Attic maiden named

Myrmex annoyed Athena by claiming the invention of the plow as the maiden’s

own and so was turned into an ant by the goddess. Me, judging from the tunnels

ants dig all over the world and comparing that to Athena’s more sky-looking and

heady credentials, I think Myrmex probably had the stronger claim to having au-

thored the plow. Breaking out of daddy’s brain is really not the same as tunneling

and runneling in the earth, whether one is goddess, woman, or ant. For actual ants,

one could not do better than Deborah Gordon, Ants at Work; Ant Encounters; and

“The Ecology of Collective Behavior.” For contrasting approaches to explanation,

see Hölldobler and Wilson, The Superorganism, and Hölldobler and Wilson, The

Ants. Based on her studies of developing behavior in harvester ant colonies in the

Arizona desert and evidence that individual ants switch tasks over their lifetimes,

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Gordon has been a critic of E. O. Wilson’s emphasis on rigidly determined ant

behavior. For me, Wilson is the heroic Athena to Gordon’s inventive Attic maid

Myrmex with a seedbag and a digging tool. To get started with acacias, go to Wiki-

pedia’s “Acacia” entry, and then to “Biology of Acacia,” a special issue of Australian

Systematic Botany (2003). Lest one think all the world-building action is an ant

story, check out Mann, “Termites Help Build Savannah Societies.”

10 Le Guin, “‘The Author of Acacia Seeds,’” 174.

11 Le Guin, “‘The Author of Acacia Seeds,’” 174.

12 See, for example, Gilbert and Epel, Ecological Developmental Biology; Gilbert et al.,

“Symbiosis as a Source of Selectable Epigenetic Variation”; McFall-Ngai, “The De- velopment of Cooperative Associations between Animals and Bacteria”; McFall-

Ngai, “Unseen Forces”; and Hird, The Origins of Sociable Life. On symbiogenesis as

the driver of evolutionary change, see Margulis and Sagan, Acquiring Genomes.

13 See the website of the Global Invasive Species Database for information about

troublesome Australian acacias in South America and South Africa. See also “Pa-

cific Islands Ecosystems at Risk” for information about Acacia mearnisii (black

wattle). Several acacia species, especially the coastal wattle Acacia cyclops, worry

conservationists in California. All of these disputed travelers teach us to stay with

the multispecies trouble that motivates most of my work and play these days.

14 See Bonfante and Anca, “Plants, Mycorrhizal Fungi, and Bacteria.” This article

draws our attention to the many-faceted practices of communication among

members of multispecies consortia. As the abstract summarizes, “Release of active

molecules, including volatiles, and physical contact among the partners seem im-

portant for the establishment of the bacteria/mycorrhizal fungus/plant network.

The potential involvement of quorum sensing and Type III secretion systems is

discussed, even if the exact nature of the complex interspecies/interphylum inter-

actions remains unclear.”

15 “Acacia,” Wikipedia; Heil et al., “Evolutionary Change from Induced to Constitutive

Expression of an Indirect Plant Resistance.”

16 Attenborough, “Intimate Relations”; A. Ross, “Devilish Ants Control the Garden.”

17 My debts to Deborah Bird Rose are obvious here and throughout this essay. See

especially her development of the idea of double death in “What If the Angel of

History Were a Dog?” Double death signifies the killing of ongoingness and the

blasting of generations. Rose teaches me about Aboriginal ways of crafting respon-

sibility, inhabiting time, and the need for recuperation in her Reports from a Wild

Country. See also the important open-access journal Environmental Humanities,

now under the protection of Duke University Press.

18 Le Guin, “‘The Author of Acacia Seeds,’” 175.

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Chapter 7: A Curious Practice

Epigraph 1: Vinciane Despret, personal communication.

Epigraph 2: Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 43.

1 Despret, “‘Sheep Do Have Opinions,’” 360.

2 Despret, “Domesticating Practices,” 24.

3 Despret, “Domesticating Practices,” 36.

4 Despret, “Domesticating Practices,” 31.

5 Despret, “The Becoming of Subjectivity in Animal Worlds,” 124. With courage

and precision, Porcher has also studied horrific industrial pig facilities that can

never be called farms. For her vision of what is possible, see Porcher, Vivre avec les

animaux.

6 Despret, “The Becoming of Subjectivity in Animal Worlds,” 133.

7 Despret, “The Becoming of Subjectivity in Animal Worlds,” 135.

8 Despret, “The Body We Care For.”

9 Stengers and Despret, Women Who Make a Fuss.

10 Stengers and Despret, Women Who Make a Fuss, 46.

11 Stengers and Despret, Women Who Make a Fuss, 47.

12 Stengers and Despret, Women Who Make a Fuss, 159.

13 Stengers and Despret, Women Who Make a Fuss, 162–63.

14 Quotations from draft sent to me in 2013, no pagination; subsequently published

as Despret, “Why ‘I Had Not Read Derrida.’”

15 For example, see the film written and directed by Davaa and Falorni, The Story of

the Weeping Camel.

16 See Despret, Au bonheur des morts.

17 Subsequently revised for chapter 1 of Staying with the Trouble, the Cerisy paper was

published in French as Haraway, “Jeux de ficelles avec les espèces compagnes.”

18 See Crasset, “Capsule,” and figure 1.5, p. 26.

19 Despret, “Ceux qui insistent.”

Chapter 8: The Camille Stories

1 Zoutini, Strivay, and Terranova, “Les enfants du compost, les enfants des

monarques.” Inspired by the unruly litter of the children of compost, Terranova

made a full length narrative film portrait, Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly

Survival.

2 “Anthropocene: Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet,” Santa Cruz, CA, May 8–10,

2014. Videos of presentations from the conference are available on the website.

Anna Tsing and colleagues organized this conference. See also Tsing et al., Arts of

Living on a Damaged Planet.

3 The “Make Kin Not Babies” and the “Children of Compost” projects will have a

collective digital world for story posting and gaming. Fragments, polished stories,

plot sketches, scientific speculations, drawings, plausible biological and technolog-

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ical mechanisms for the syms’ ongoing transformations, designs, images, anima-

tions, games, characters, pamphlets, manifestos, histories and critiques, bestiar-

ies, field guides, blogposts, slogans: all are welcome. Sym fiction can change plots,

introduce new characters and stories, play with media, argue, draw, speculate,

more. Stay tuned for the websites and blogs to come. See also the website for Sto-

ries for Change, an “online meeting place for digital story telling facilitators and

activists.”

4 This slogan joins a litter of symbiogenetic and sympoietic provocations that lure

my writing. In the 1980s, Elizabeth Bird, then a graduate student in History of

Consciousness, gave me “Cyborgs for Earthly Survival.” More recently, over break-

fast at home Rusten Hogness gave me “Not Posthuman but Compost!” as well

as humusities rather than humanities. Camille gives us “Make Kin Not Babies.”

Breaking the “necessity” of the tie between kin and reproduction is a crucial task

for feminists now. It is past time to make a fuss. Disloyal to patriarchal genealogy,

we have helped disable the sense of natural necessity of the ties of race and nation,

although that work is never done; and we have unraveled the bonds of sex and

gender, although we are not finished there either. Feminists have been powerful

players disabling the pretensions of human exceptionalism too. No wonder that

there is much more collaborative work to do strengthening webs, cutting some

ties and knotting others, to live and die well in a habitable world. Adele Clarke

and I organized a panel at the Denver meetings in November 2015 of the Society

for Social Studies of Science titled “Make Kin Not Babies,” arguing for innova-

tive antiracist, prowomen, prochildren, proindigenous, nonsettler, non-natalist

approaches. Besides Clarke and myself, panelists were Alondra Nelson, Michelle

Murphy, Kim TallBear, and Chia-Ling Wu.

Both inheriting and also reweaving ongoing webs of affective and material re-

lationships are the stakes; such webs are necessary for staying with the trouble. In

scholarly circles, ethnographers have understood best that making kin involves all

sorts of categories of players—including gods, technologies, critters, expected and

unexpected “relatives,” and more—and diverse processes, which taken together

make the characterization of “kinship” as relations formed solely by genealogi-

cal descent and reproduction, or alliance and lineage, unsustainable. There is an

immense literature on kinship and on the making of relationships that should

not be called genealogical and processes that should not be called reproduction.

The Camille Stories rely especially on ethnographies like those of Strathern (The

Gender of the Gift and The Relation), Goslinga (“Embodiment and the Metaphysics

of Virgin Birth in South India”), and Ramberg (“Troubling Kinship” and Given to

the Goddess). The word kin is too important to let the critics have it, and family

cannot do the work of kin and its routes/roots to kind, with all the multivalences of

that term. My sense of kin making requires not just situated deities and spirits—

still an unnerving act for so-called moderns—but also heterogeneous critters of

biological persuasions. In Camille’s world, kin making must be sensible in both

animist and biological registers. The important words must be resignified, repopu-

lated, and reinhabited. “Making Kin Not Babies” is about making oddkin, including

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reimagining worlding with the help of Daniel Heath Justice’s Kynship Chronicles

and website, “Justice, Imagine Otherwise.” sf is indispensable.

Marilyn Strathern, immersed in Melanesian worlds, proposed that “a person

is the form relationships take, a composite of relations rather than a proprietary

individual” (Ramberg, “Troubling Kinship,” 666; Strathern, The Gender of the Gift).

The Communities of Compost rely on this string figural approach to making more-

than-human persons.

5 Motley as a noun is a multihued fabric. Motely as an adjective is about incongruous

diversity. I need both tones.

6 Some of the other settlements and migrations of the Communities of Compost

focused on the consequences of mining include: (1) In China, on ruined lands

and villages near several coal-mining sites, led by older rural women and Chinese

Green movement activists. See “China and Coal.” Thanks to my colleagues Chris

Connery and Lisa Rofel and the invaluable Chinese Marxist feminist activist and

cultural critic Dai Jinhua for help. (2) In Alberta and Nunavut in Canada, linked

to resistance to tar sands extraction and other fossil fuel projects by indigenous

and southern coalitions. (3) In the Galilee Basin in Australia, in solidarity with

Wangan and Jagalingou peoples’ resistance to a Carmichael coal mine. See Palese,

“It’s Not Just Indigenous Australians v. Adani.” (4) In the Navajo and Hopi nations

on Black Mesa, in alliance with Anglo, Latino, and native activists. See chapter 3.

(5) In Peru and Bolivia in solidarity with antimining movements. See de la Cadena,

“Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes.” (6) In the Putumayo region of Colom-

bia, in resistance to its designation for mining and agro-industrial extraction. See

K. Lyons, “Soils and Peace” and “Soil Science, Development, and the ‘Elusive Na-

ture’ of Colombia’s Amazonian Plains”; and Forest Peoples Program, “Indigenous

Peoples of Putumayo Say No to Mining in Their Territories.”

7 What constitutes reproductive freedom remained a vexed question in the gather-

ings of the Children of Compost, especially in the first few generations, for which

the consequences of vast human numbers on earth were still intense. The Great

Acceleration of human numbers began after about 1950 and topped out by the

end of the twenty-first century, but the process of rebalancing and human reduc-

tion without exacerbating deep inequalities was difficult in every imaginable way

across the earth. Some of the communities worked to adapt rights approaches, lo-

cating decision making in the last instance in persons conceived as individuals. But

other communities inherited and invented very different ways of thinking about

and practicing making new persons and the ramifying obligations and powers of

other persons who were involved. Coercion to make or not to make a new child was

considered a crime and could result in banishment from the community, but some-

times violent conflict over bringing new babies into existence or over determining

who and what were kin did occur. The Communities of Compost insisted that kin

did not mean undifferentiated universal relatedness; exclusions and inclusions

remained the name of the game of kin, as it always had. Which exclusions and in-

clusions, and which expansions and contractions, underwent radical, often bumpy

change. The Children of Compost understood recrafting definitions and practices

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of reproductive freedom in symbiotic terms to be one of their chief obligations,

but it never stopped being necessary to oppose oppressive and totalitarian forces

in the intentional communities, just as it never ceased to be necessary to interro-

gate the discursive categories marked by “bio-” that informed symbiogenesis.

8 Symbiont and symbiote are synonyms; both refer to an organism living in a state

of symbiosis, whether beneficial to one or both (or more) or not. Thus, in our

stories, both the human and the nonhuman partner should be called a symbiont

or symbiote. Symbiogenesis refers to the cobbling together of living entities to

make something new in the biological, rather than digital or some other, mode.

Symbiogenesis results in novel sorts of organization, not just novel critters. Sym-

biogenesis opens up the palette (and palate) of possible collaborative living. Many

Communities of Compost decided to nurture symbiogenetic transformations with

fungal or plant symbionts as the principal partners for the human babies and

fetuses, and all the symbioses necessarily entailed intimate assemblages of bac-

teria, archaea, protists, viruses, and fungi. Camille’s community was more tightly

webbed with others whose children were bonded with animals as their principal

partners, but these distinctions weakened over the generations as multispecies

socialities of many previously unimagined kinds emerged.

9 For provocative thinking about corridors, see Hannibal, The Spine of the Continent;

Soulé and Terborgh, Continental Conservation; Hilty, Lidicker, and Merelender, Cor-

ridor Ecology; and Meloy, Eating Stone. The Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation

Initiative (see website) is inspiring and critical. I love these sciences and these

writings, even as I long for vigorous encounters with sophisticated, situated, mul-

tinatural, multilingual, multicultural scholarship—indeed, in a nonromantic, non-

dismissive, practical mode, with indigenous cosmopolitics and its diverse peoples.

For a positive example, see Koelle, “Rights of Way.” The ongoing separations and

misunderstandings between decolonial thinking and projects and biodiversity

thinking and projects is a tragedy for people, peoples, and other critters alike.

Practicing corridor thinking, the Communities of Compost do everything they can

to bring these disparate worlds into contact.

10 Ecological Evolutionary Developmental Biology, or EcoEvoDevo, is one of the

most important knowledge practices to reshape the sciences in the late twentieth

and early twenty-first centuries ce. See Gilbert and Epel, Ecological Developmental

Biology, especially the coda by Gilbert.

11 See “Mountaintop Removal Mining”; Stephens and Sprinkle, Goodbye Gauley Moun-

tain. I am placing Camille’s community in the area along the Kanawha River, where

artist Beth Stephens grew up and to which she and her spouse Annie Sprinkle

returned to make their film. Making kin, Annie and Beth married the mountain,

one of the many earthy spouses they have knitted together in their traveling eco-

sexual practices. The history and ongoing vitality of working-class culture and pol-

itics rooted in coal mining are fundamental to what Camille and per’s community

must keep learning. Historically, West Virginia was home and hunting territory to

Shawnee, Cherokee, Delaware, Seneca, Wyandot, Ottawa, Tuscarora, Susquehan-

nock, Huron, Sioux, Mingo, Iroquois, and other native peoples. As Scottish and

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Irish settlers pushed west from Virginia in the eighteenth century, many Native

Americans sought refuge in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The divergent racial class

histories of (1) the white settler and African American coal-mining families and

communities devastated by twentieth- and twenty-first-century mountaintop-

removal mining and by economic restructuring of the coal industry in West Vir-

ginia (King Coal), and (2) the adjacent Indian/Black Monacan people of Amherst,

Virginia, and elsewhere in the Southeast, who also crafted resurgent politics and

identities in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, were important for Ca-

mille’s community to know if they were to ally effectively with local people for

multispecies futures. See Cook, Monacans and Miners. For her account of growing

up and returning to West Virginia, see Stephens, “Goodbye Gauley Mountain.” The

violence wreaked on land and people by open pit mining is impossible to exagger-

ate. To compare Appalachia (coal) and Peru (copper), see Gallagher, “Peru,” and

“Mountain Justice Summer Convergence.” Surface mining is far from the whole

story, a fact made plain by the rapid increase in fracking for natural gas, including

in Appalachia; see Cocklin, “Southwestern Plans to Step on the Gas Pedal in Ap-

palachia Next Year.”

12 Oberhauser and Solensky, The Monarch Butterfly; Rea, Oberhauser, and Quinn,

Milkweed, Monarchs and More; Pyle, Chasing Monarchs; Kingsolver, Flight Behav-

ior. For controversy based on recent summer counts about whether the numbers

of North American monarchs are declining, or whether the migration, but not

population sizes, is declining, see Burnett, “Monarch Migration Rebounds” and

Kaplan, “Are Monarch Butterflies Really Being Massacred?” See also websites for

“Monarch Butterfly”; “Monarch Butterfly Conservation in California”; “Monarch

Butterfly Biosphere Reserve”; “West Virginia State Butterfly.” For a good map of

the migrations, see “Flight of the Butterflies.”

Western monarch butterflies overwinter in California, including my town of

Santa Cruz, where we avidly seek them out each year in eucalyptus and Monterey

pine and cypress groves at Natural Bridges State Park and Lighthouse Park. Mon-

archs in Santa Cruz numbered about 120,000 in 1997 but had plummeted to 1,300

by 2009, a few dozen in 2014, and maybe a couple hundred in winter 2015. See

Jepsen et al., “Western Monarchs at Risk.”

13 There are approximately 110 milkweed species in North American and about 3,000

species worldwide.

14 Tucker, “Community Institutions and Forest Management in Mexico’s Monarch

Butterfly Reserve”; Farfán et al., “Mazahua Ethnobotany and Subsistence in the

Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, Mexico”; Zebich-Knos, “A Good Neigh-

bor Policy?”; Vidal, López-Garcia, and Rendón-Salinas, “Trends in Deforestation

and Forest Degradation in the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in Mexico”;

Rendón-Salinas and Tavera-Alonso, “Forest Surface Occupied by Monarch Butter-

fly Hibernation Colonies in December 2013.”

See also “Mazahua People.” Arauho et al., “Zapatista Army of Mazahua Women

in Defense of Water,” write: “The Mazahuas are an indigenous people of Mexico,

inhabiting the north-western portion of the State of Mexico and north-eastern

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area of Michoacán, with a presence also in the Federal District owing to recent

migration. The largest concentration of Mazahua is found in the municipalities

of San Felipe del Progreso and San José del Rincón, both in Mexico state (Estado

de México), near Toluca. According to the 1990 Mexican census Mazahua speak-

ers numbered 127,826; the last census counted some 350,000 Mazahua. The word

Mazahua is of Nahuatl origin, meaning ‘the owners of deer,’ probably referring to

the rich fauna of the mountainous region inhabited by the Mazahua. However,

they refer to themselves as Hñatho.”

15 It was possible that no pregnant person in the following generations would choose

to continue the symbiotic bond of a new child with monarch butterflies, but in-

stead would let this symbiosis end in favor of initiating another. Such decisions

occurred, but most birth parents of the following generations felt intensely in both

flesh and spirit that the five-generational reproductive symbioses were vital for

them as well.

16 Born in 1930, Oren R. Lyons Jr., Turtle Clan, Seneca Nation, Haudenosaunee Con-

federacy, wrote: “We are looking ahead, as is one of the first mandates given us as

chiefs, to make sure and to make every decision that we make relate to the welfare

and well-being of the seventh generation to come” and “What about the seventh

generation? Where are you taking them? What will they have?” See O. Lyons, “An

Iroquois Perspective,” 173, 174. See also O. Lyons et al., Exiled in the Land of the Free.

“The Great Binding Law” reads: “In all of your deliberations in the Confederate

Council, in your efforts at law making, in all your official acts, self-interest shall

be cast into oblivion. Cast not over your shoulder behind you the warnings of the

nephews and nieces should they chide you for any error or wrong you may do, but

return to the way of the Great Law, which is just and right. Look and listen for the

welfare of the whole people and have always in view not only the present but also

the coming generations, even those whose faces are yet beneath the surface of the

ground—the unborn of the future Nation” (Constitution of the Iroquois Nations).

See also Barker, Native Acts and “Indigenous Feminisms.” For an introduction

to extraordinary thinking and research on indigeneity and technoscience, see Kim

TallBear website.

17 United Nations, “World Population Prospects.” Professional demographers, who

formulated their thinking within the category of “populations,” understood that

even extreme war and pandemic disease in the mid-twenty-first century would not

much affect the ultimate global burden of 11 billion or so by century’s end. Only a

radical one-child policy enforced across the earth could have done that. Aside from

being impossible to effect, the unequal, coercive, misogynist, racist, and political

implications of that approach were clear even to the most abstract thinkers. The

infectious rather than coercive practices of the Communities of Compost were

much more radical than a one-child policy, leading to a three-parent norm taking

hold rapidly, in a matrix of both traditional and newly invented nonbiogenetic

multichild and multigenerational living practices. The history of one-child policies

in the twentieth century showed them to be punitive and rooted in coercive and

unequal sacrifice. The three-parent approach, which had seemed merely utopian

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at first, proved otherwise, especially in concert with exuberant decolonial practices

nurtured by the Children of Compost. Three-or-more parent practices that were

developed over several decades by the Communities of Compost proved intensely

prochild, proparent, profriendship, and procommunity, for human people and

other critters alike. Historians look to this inventive period as a time of prolifera-

tion of rituals, ceremonies, and celebrations for making kin sympoietically rather

than biogenetically. One of the strongest results of this inventiveness was a resur-

gence of practices of both child and adult friendship across the earth.

See Murphy, “Thinking against Population and with Distributed Futures”;

Nelson, Who Counts?; Bashford, Global Population; and Crist, “Choosing a Planet

of Life.”

In “A Manifesto for Abundant Futures,” Collard, Dempsey, and Sundberg write:

“By abundance we mean more diverse and autonomous forms of life and ways of

living together. In considering how to enact multispecies worlds, we take inspira-

tion from Indigenous and peasant movements across the globe as well as decolo-

nial and postcolonial scholars” (322).

18 The four major genders available in the Western world by the early twenty-first

century were cis-female, cis-male, trans-female, and trans-male; but most knowl-

edgeable people considered this list to be misleading, geographically and histor-

ically restricted, and impoverished. The beauty of this naming system, however,

was its links with stereo-isomerism in chemistry and spatial sensibilities in tax-

onomizing across domains. Questions like how to be a good cis lover to a trans

partner were widely discussed in this early period of gender reformatting. Several

members of Camille 1’s settlement had been active in trans circles before joining a

Community of Compost. The historically anomalous extreme gender binarism of

the so-called Modern Period in the West continued to plague both perceptions and

naming practices well into the Late Dithering, by which time the Communities of

Compost were beginning to make a serious difference for multigender as well as

multispecies flourishing. See Weaver, “Trans Species” and “Becoming in Kind.”

19 Robinson, 2312. The dates of the Great Dithering in this sf novel are 2005–60,

followed by the Years of Crisis with multiple system failures, and then the bal-

kanization of earth into space, with earth left as a necessary but hopeless cesspool

of multispecies immiseration and relentless ineffective human action.

20 Oddkin was the colloquial term for other-than-conventional biogenetic relatives.

21 A note on English pronouns: per was the gender-neutral pronoun applying to

every person. Marge Piercy in Woman on the Edge of Time suggested this choice as

early as 1976. Whether or not a person decided in the course of a life to develop

the mindful bodily habitus of one or more genders, per remained the usual pro-

noun, although some persons preferred a gender descriptive pronoun. Having

the advantage of intelligibility in many languages, sym was frequently used as

the pronoun for the human and animal partners in a symbiosis or other kinds of

radical sympoiesis.

22 In 2012, more than five hundred rare, threatened, or endangered critters (insects,

arachnids, molluscs, fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds, mammals) were officially

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registered with the West Virginia Natural Heritage Program. See West Virginia

Department of Natural Resources, “Rare, Threatened, and Endangered Animals.”

The Appalachian region is a salamander biodiversity hotspot unique on the

earth, and mountaintop removal is a major threat through habitat destruction

and water pollution. Migratory salamanders that move between dry land and

their breeding pools are especially threatened by habitat fragmentation. Higher

temperatures from global warming will have major effects on salamander habitat,

and protecting corridors for their movement to cool enough habitats is crucial.

See Lanno, Amphibian Declines; “Appalachian Salamanders”; “Biodiversity of the

Southern Appalachians”; Conservation and Research Center of the Smithsonian

National Zoological Park, “Proceedings of the Appalachian Salamander Conserva-

tion Workshop, May 30–31, 2008”; iucn Red List of Threatened Species, “Ambys-

toma barbouri.”

For these wonderful catadromous fish that undergo myriad metamorphoses,

there is no more moving and informative account than Prosek, Eels. For official

dithering over their protection, see the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, “The Amer-

ican Eel.”

American kestrels were not officially threatened as a species in Camille 1’s time,

but they had declined precipitously in many parts of their range as agribusiness

progressively wiped out habitat they depended on. Earlier, kestrels had benefited

from less toxic and nonmonocrop agricultural practices, including pasturing

animals outdoors, because these raptors prefer open fields, meadows, pastures,

and roadside verges to forests for hunting. Also, reforestation in abandoned ag-

ricultural fields in the U.S. Northeast is a problem for kestrels. These lovely small

falcons prey on diminutive mammals such as voles and mice, small birds and rep-

tiles, and insects like grasshoppers, cicadas, beetles, dragonflies, butterflies, and

moths. Kestrel counts made at the Hawk Mountain raptor sanctuary in Penn-

sylvania showed that these winged predators increased from the 1930s through

mid-1970s, decreased in late 1970s and early 1980s, were relatively stable in late

1980s and early 1990s, and became uncommon by the early 2000s. West Nile virus

might have been a significant factor; 95 percent of tested birds had antibodies to

this virus by 2015. By the time Camille 1’s cohort was born in 2025, despite their

long history of coadapting well with people, American kestrels were in deep trou-

ble in many places.

Some kestrel populations stay in place year round; others migrate long dis-

tances north and south. Unique to the Americas, these kestrels make their living

from Tierra del Fuego to the boreal forests of Alaska and Canada. In New Gauley,

the best time to look for kestrels is mid-September through mid-October during

their migration. See Hawk Mountain, “American Kestrel,” and Hawk Mountain,

“Long-Term Study of American Kestrel Reproductive Ecology.”

In 2015, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service petitioned for official Endangered

Species Act (esa) status for two crayfish living in West Virginia. In both cases,

mountaintop-removal coal mining had devastated their waterways. These were

the first species of many, whose futures were blasted by mountaintop-removal

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mining, for which esa protection was sought. See the April 6, 2015, press release of

the Center for Biological Diversity, “Two Crayfishes Threatened by Mountain-Top

Removal Mining in West Virginia, Kentucky, Virginia Proposed for Endangered

Species Act Protection,” which states that crayfish “are considered to be a keystone

animal because the holes they dig create habitat used by other species including

fish. Crayfish keep streams cleaner by eating decaying plants and animals, and

they are eaten, in turn, by fish, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals, making

them an important link in the food web. The Big Sandy and Guyandotte River

crayfishes are sensitive to water pollution, making them indicator species of water

quality.”

23 Scientists called such requirements philopatry; noncompostist Anglophones spoke

of patriotism; compostists spoke of love and need for home, this home, not some

supposed equivalent. They learned to think that way from the Little Penguins of

Sydney Harbor, as they told their stories through van Dooren, Flight Ways.

24 For research into the ecology and evolution of parasites and their hosts as well as

the genetics of monarch butterfly migration, see the de Roode Lab website.

25 I learned to think and rethink with the locution “in conflict and collaboration”

from the University of California Santa Cruz Research Cluster of Women of Color

in Conflict and Collaboration, which was established during Angela Davis’s term

as uc Presidential Chair from 1995 to 1998.

26 An early twenty-first-century conference in Denmark that examined questions

in close relation to the ecological urgencies of the Anthropocene proved espe-

cially useful to compostists in New Gauley. From the conference announcement

of aura, “Postcolonial Natures”: “Three of the proposed start dates for the An-

thropocene directly link planetary change to colonial processes: The Columbian

Exchange, a product of Portuguese and Spanish Imperialism; nineteenth century

industrialism, an offspring of British colonial efforts; and the ‘Great Acceleration’

of the 1950s, profoundly tied to American imperialism and the forms of consumer

capitalism it brought into being . . . Centering questions of power, colonialism,

and capitalist relations, the conference aims to probe how histories of inequality

and oppression haunt landscapes and shape multispecies relations.” Note that the

“Great Acceleration” is precisely the time human numbers on the earth started

their devastating rate increases. The connections of human numbers with the

questions of this conference are multiple and close.

27 See the websites for “Nausicaä: Character” and “Nausicaä of the Valley of the

Wind.” The Japanese anime film was released in 1984. Thanks to Anna Tsing for

drawing my attention back to this amazing story.

28 In his Insectopedia (166–67) Hugh Raffles refers to the translation of the twelfth-

century Japanese story as “The Lady Who Loved Worms,” namely, the gorgeous

caterpillars of butterflies and moths. The story, “The Lady Who Loved Insects,”

is collected among the ten short stories of the Tsutsumi Chūnagon Monogatari,

authorship unknown.

29 In an interview in 1995, “The Finale of Nausicaä,” Miyazaki commented that he

wanted to create a heroine who was “not consummately normal.” In this same in-

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terview, Miyazaki described the Ohmu as larval throughout their lives, the young

as well as the adults. No wonder Camille 1 was charmed!

See Mirasol, “Commentary on Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind,” a YouTube

video by the Filipino film critic Michael Mirasol.

30 Scott Gilbert is my guide to imagining the developmental biological mechanisms

to give Camille 2 a beard of butterfly antennae (personal e-mail to the author,

April 7, 2015): “There could be several ways of grafting butterfly antennae to the

human jaw: One is to induce central tolerance. If the community knew that Ca-

mille would become affiliated with the monarch, they could inject [the newborn]

with the butterfly antennae extracts (presumably grown in culture or from dead

butterflies) as soon as [the child is] born. The immune system is still developing

and would be trained to recognize these substances as ‘self.’ If the decision comes

later in life, one could try inducing clonal anergy with the injection of butterfly

material in the absence of certain T-cells. This hasn’t been a great success story,

as peripheral tolerance hasn’t exactly cured our allergies yet. So, to the future . . .

One interesting way to do it would be to induce the neighboring tissue to be-

come placental! The placenta makes an environment that prevents the mother’s

immune system from destroying the fetus. Placentally derived factors appear to

make T-regulatory cells and limit T-helper formation (see Svenson-Arveland et al.,

‘The Human Fetal Placenta Promotes Tolerance against the Semiallogenic Fetus

by Producing Regulatory T Cells and Homeostatic M 2 Macrophages’ for a recent

article). Another sf way of doing it might be to have symbiotic bacteria express-

ing the butterfly antigens induce tolerance. This is being explored as a route to

prevent or ameliorate peanut allergies (Ren et al., ‘Modulation of Peanut-Induced

Allergic Immune Responses by Oral Lactic Acid Bacteria-Based Vaccines in Mice’)

and atopic dermatitis (Farid et al., ‘Effect of a New Synbiotic Mixture on Atopic

Dermatitis in Children’). Prolonged contact may induce the antigen-specific T-reg

cells. That would be interesting because it would involve a symbiosis to produce

the tolerance.”

So there were many options for New Gauley scientists to discuss with the

fifteen-year-old Camille 2. Camille 2 first tried the placentally derived factors, but

the initial efforts failed. Success was finally achieved by giving Camille 2 symbiotic

bacteria that expressed butterfly antennal antigens and induced tolerance for the

implants in the human host.

From “Butterfly Anatomy”: “The antennae of Monarchs Danaus plexippus are

covered in over 16,000 olfactory (scent detecting) sensors—some scale-like, oth-

ers in the form of hairs or olfactory pits. The scale-like sensors, which number

about 13,700, are sensitive to sexual pheromones, and to the honey odour, which

enables them to locate sources of nectar. Butterfly antennae, like those of ants and

bees, may also be used to communicate physically—e.g., it is common to see male

Small Tortoiseshells, Aglais urticae, drumming their antennae on the hindwings of

females during courtship, possibly to ‘taste’ pheromones on the female’s wings. . . .

Butterflies are often observed ‘antenna dipping’—dabbing the antennal tips onto

soil or leaves. In this case they are sampling the substrate to detect its chemical

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qualities. They do this to establish whether soil contains essential nutrients. Male

butterflies often drink mineralised moisture to obtain sodium, which they pass to

the females during copulation.”

31 In Appalachia coal was king, and the busted unions, blasted towns, ravaged human

lungs, resilient people, and disappeared mountains, waters, and critters were at

the heart of Camille 1’s heritage. Other key regions and peoples for New Gauley

and the Camilles were the many indigenous peoples of the Canadian tar sands and

the Diné and Hopi of the Black Mesa plateau in struggle with Peabody Energy’s

coal operations. See chapter 3. The Diné (Navajo) hold that the only true evil in

the world is greed.

The destruction of aquifers, creeks, lakes, seas, wetlands, and rivers through

fossil fuel extraction linked the Camilles to the peoples and other critters of the

transvolcanic belt in Mexico, winter home of monarch butterflies, where water was

diverted in vast transbasin projects across the mountains to Mexico City.

32 Decolonial approaches to multispecies worlding and rehabilitation that helped Ca-

mille 2 prepare for per’s sojourn in Mexico: Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places; Danowski

and Viveiros de Castro, “L’Arrêt du Monde,” 221–339; de la Cadena, Earth Beings;

Escobar, Territories of Difference; Green, Contested Ecologies; Hogan, Power; Kaiser,

“Who Is Marching for Pachamama?”; Kohn, How Forests Think; Laduke, All Our

Relations; Tsing, Friction; Weisiger, Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country.

Working for many years in the Putumayo region of Colombia, in “Can There Be

Peace with Poison?,” Kristina Lyons argues, “Rural communities articulate increas-

ingly ecological conceptions of territoriality in their struggles to defend not only

the possibility for human life, but also the relational existence of a continuum of

beings and elements (soils, forests, rivers, insects, animals, food crops, medicinal

plants, and humans) sharing the contingencies of life and labor under military

duress.” Lyons proposes the term selva as both a theoretical term and situated

naturalcultural places. Selva does not do the same colonial work as nature. The

compostists remember their heritage from the British anthropologist Marilyn

Strathern, who insisted it matters which ideas think other ideas. See also K. Lyons,

Fresh Leaves, and de la Cadena, “Uncommoning Nature.”

For a taste of the ambiguous, controversial, sometimes vital, sometimes shock-

ing work done by environmental organizations on many sides of “green” ques-

tions, see the recent essay by a founder of feminist political ecology, Dianne Ro-

cheleau, “Networked, Rooted and Territorial: Green Grabbing and Resistance in

Chiapas.” Birthplace of the Zapatista movements, Chiapas is part of the region

Camille 2 came to know well. See Harcourt and Nelson, Practicing Feminist Politi-

cal Ecologies. A geographer, Rocheleau changed my world from the moment Anna

Tsing first placed her writing in my hands in the first of the three graduate semi-

nars we cotaught at ucsc on geofeminisms (in 2002, 2007, and 2010): Rocheleau

and Edmunds, “Women, Men and Trees.”

33 For context for Mazahuan formations since 1968 in the setting of Mexican and

international indigenous movements, see Gallegos-Ruiz and Larsen, “Universidad

Intercultural.”

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34 Gómez Fuentes, Tire, and Kloster, “The Fight for the Right to Water.”

35 Molina, “Zapatistas’ First School Opens for Session.” The uprising of the Ejército

Zapatista de Liberación Nacional began in Chiapas in 1994.

36 For an eloquent story of Amazonian butterflies drinking turtle tears, see Main,

“Must See.”

37 Leaving out powerful lines, I take the epigraph above from sections of Gallegos-

Ruiz and Larsen, “Universidad Intercultural,” 24–25. In 1980 a small girl read the

poem in Mazahua and Spanish to the presidential candidate Miguel de la Madrid.

For the Spanish poem, see Garduño Cervantes, “Soy mazahua.” For a primary

school girl reciting the poem in Spanish in 2011, see Guadalupe, “Soy mazahua.”

On the danger of the extinction of the Mazahuan language, see Domínguez, “De

la extinción de su lengua mazahua.” I have not found a written or oral version of

the poem in Mazahua.

38 Remember, sciences are not Modern in the sense meant here; they are not Science.

The poverty of language defeats even avid compostists.

39 Camille had read about the extraordinarily destructive transbasin and panregional

water transfers of Colorado River water in the U.S. West in the twentieth and

twenty-first centuries. A borehole was drilled through the San Jacinto Mountains

in Arizona to deliver water to Southern California, and the river was pumped from

west to east through a vast trans-Rockies system of tunnels and aqueducts to

deliver water to Denver. Lustgarten, “End of the Miracle Machines.” See chapter 3

of Staying with the Trouble. For a pro-engineering approach, see the website of the

Colorado Water Users Association. Alliances of indigenous and other environmen-

tal groups were critical to shutting down these practices through sustained politics

and ecologies organized around environmental justice and just transition. See the

websites of the Just Transition Alliance and Indigenous Environmental Network.

40 Enciso L., “Mexico”; Geo-Mexico, “Where Does Mexico City Get Its Water?”; “Wa-

ter Management in Greater Mexico City,” Wikipedia.

In September 2004, Mazahuan women took decisive action. In “The Fight for

the Right to Water,” Gómez Fuentes, Tire, and Kloster write: “That was when we

said to ourselves: ‘They’re pulling the men’s legs and playing with them, because

we’re not seeing any action.’ ‘That was when we decided to gather our courage

and lead the struggle,’ says Rosalva Crisóstomo, from San Isidro . . . The affected

communities have finally managed to receive some compensation for their flooded

fields, the return of lands that were expropriated for the Cutzamala System but

never used, and drinking water for many communities, although some have been

excluded from these benefits. As part of their plan for the sustainable develop-

ment of the region, the communities themselves have begun the process of re-

forestation and wetland restoration. They have organized micro-enterprises and

cooperatives for the production and trade of agricultural products, which helps

prevent out-migration. But above and beyond all of this, the Mazahua communi-

ties have reaffirmed their culture, their identity, and their customs and traditions

as a people, as well as recapturing a pride in their language and clothing, especially

among the women.”

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In 2006 at the Fourth World Water Forum, including the Latin American Water

Tribunal, there were many alternative forums and demonstrations. The Mazahua

movement was strongly represented. See Trujillo, “The World Water Forum.” In

September 2010, Agustina Araujo, Guadalupe Acevedo, Ofelia Lorenzo, and Irma

Romero, comandantas of the Zapatista Army of Mazahua Women, gave testimony

before the First Symposium of Indigenous Women, who were leading the struggle

for resources and territorial control. See “Zapatista Army of Mazahua Women in

Defence of Water in the Cutzamala Region,” and Wickstrom, “Cultural Politics and

the Essence of Life.”

41 A Community of Compost in Amazonian Peru was especially attuned to the local

butterflies, who sip the tears of turtles for vital minerals. In this community, hu-

man babies were joined in symbiosis with vulnerable turtles and butterflies. From

“Mariposas que beben lágrimas de tortuga”: “Phil Torres, un científico del Centro

de Investigación de la Reserva Natural de Tambopata, en Perú, explicó reciente-

mente en la revista LiveScience que estos bonitos insectos alados absorben sodio

y otros nutrientes que necesitan de las saladas lágrimas de las tortugas que viven

en el Amazonas.” Thanks for this site, and for much else, to Marisol de la Cadena,

who teaches me about indigenous cosmopolitics.

42 Russ, Adventures of Alyx; Pullman, His Dark Materials; Czerneda, Beholder’s Eye.

43 Monarchs, their protozoan parasites (Ophryocystis elektroscirrha), milkweeds, and

arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi in the soil associated with the roots of milkweeds

constitute a string figural holobiome. The fungi can determine how much of the

toxins critical for monarchs to keep their parasites in check will be made by their

milkweed food plants. The effects will differ among the many milkweed species

and their situated ecologies. Diseases in the soil biota, such as my fabulated

twenty-fourth-century runaway viral infection of mycorrhizal fungi important

across the taxon of Danainae, can profoundly affect the interactions of other

members of the holobiome, such as monarchs and protozoans, resulting in such

diseased developmental phenomena as mass failed emergence of adults from the

chrysalis. That would be a short-term boon for such critters as paper wasps, which

select distressed emergent butterflies as sites to lay their eggs, so that the butterfly

corpse can provide food for their offspring. However, large-scale failure of fungal,

protozoan, plant, and butterfly holobiomes make wasp eggs fail too, in the end.

See Tao et al., “Disease Ecology across Soil Boundaries.”

44 Camille 4 drew insight from Dovey, Only the Animals. In a book review in The

Guardian, Romy Ash wrote, “Only the Animals is a story told by the souls of ten

dead animals. Each animal is caught up in a human conflict over the [twentieth]

century. They tell the stories of their deaths. A mussel speaks of its death in the

Pearl Harbour bombings, an elephant from the 1987 Mozambique Civil War, a bear

of its death during the Bosnia-Herzegovina conflict of 1992.”

45 The Communities of Compost were avid readers of sf, and they drew from Orson

Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead (1986), the sequel to Ender’s Game, winner of

both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. The story was rooted in Ender Wiggin’s un-

knowing but culpable militaristic, exterminating acts as a young boy against the

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Hive Queen and her species. Wiggin undertook lifelong atonement as Speaker for

the Dead, traveling to those unreconciled with each other and with the deceased,

collecting up and decomposing the trouble, and recomposing peace for the living

and the dead. The species of the Hive Queen was not totally extinct; Ender held

open space for resurgence of these sentient insectoid others that remained utterly

different from human beings. Communication was never simple, without ruptures

and failures; and it was therefore generative of possibilities.

Another approach to speakers for the dead is practiced in a contemporary doc-

umentary about the deliberately plowed-under nineteenth-century tombstones of

the forcibly removed and actively forgotten original black settlers of Princeville,

Ontario. See The Original People, “Speakers for the Dead.”

46 Harding, personal communication, October 7, 2014. See Tagaq, “Animism,” for

links to Tagaq’s work and for the tentacular design of the young woman entwined

with the two-headed wolf. For the music, go to Tagaq, “Polaris Prize Performance

and Introduction.” See also the website for the Animism album trailer.

47 Tagaq, “Tagaq Brings Animism to Studio Q.”

48 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, personal communication, October 2, 2014. See Harvey,

Handbook of Contemporary Animism.

49 This hymn of the Communities of Compost was sung in ceremonies for resurgence

attuned to the wounded earth. This song was inherited from the twentieth- and

twenty-first-century neopagan witch Starhawk (Truth or Dare, 30–31). Starhawk’s

song insists on the importance of feeling pain as an active historical sensibility, as

a practice in what Stengers calls an ecology of practices. Quoted also in Stengers,

in Hypnose entre magie et science. Precious as a word and a process, resurgence is a

gift from Tsing, “A Threat to Holocene Resurgence Is a Threat to Livability.”

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Index

Page numbers followed by f refer to

illustrations.

Aboriginal peoples, 27, 80, 165, 184n47,

214n17, 218n11; languages of, 26,

173n33. See also under names of specific

peoples

abundance: Children of Compost on, 136;

new kinds of, 147; of oddkin, 145; of

futures, 221n17

acacias: Acacia verticulata, 7, 123, 124,

214n13; ants and, 7, 122, 124, 125; Le

Guin’s story of, 121–24; types of, 118,

123

Adam/Adama, 12, 170n3

Advanced Energy for Life, 194n37

Aegis, 54

aerial surveillance vehicles, 22

Africa, 15, 72, 118, 123, 124; South, 177n24,

214n13. See also names of specific countries

African Americans, 24, 205n93, 207n12,

219n11. See also blacks

agential realism, 34

agriculture and agribusiness, 93, 99, 114,

181n42, 213n9, 222n22; Big, 115; in

Camille stories, 152; in Communities of

Compost, 141, 160; des and Premarin

and, 109, 115; shifting cultivation, 82,

196–97n58

air pollution, 20, 21, 74; PigeonBlog and,

20–24

Ako Project, 71, 81–85, 195n56

Alaska: native languages of, 192n29; Never

Alone and, 71, 87

Alberta, Canada, 44; tar sands oil ex-

traction in, 183–84n47, 184n48

alignment: as metaphor, 41–42

altruism, by babblers, 127–28

American Geophysical Union Meetings,

47, 187n63

American Racing Pigeon Union, 24

ancestors, 74, 103; in Communities of

Compost, 154, 156, 157

Anidjar, Gil, 179n35

animal, animals, 65–66, 108, 161f; abuse

of, 23; in art, 23; bacteria and, 67;

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animal, (continued)

becoming-with, 28; bonding with Chil-

dren of Compost, 218n8; breeders of,

113, 129; communication, 122, 129, 151;

as coshapers with humans and cyborgs,

20; as daemons, 162; domestication of,

181n42; flourishing of, 111; genomes of,

65; industrial production of, 113; key-

stone, 223n22; lovers of, 111; modern,

65; multicellularity of, 64–65; murder

of, 92, 93; partners and companions

with humans, 16, 23, 24, 89, 109–10,

114, 118, 129, 140–41, 146, 149, 151, 166,

221n21; rights of, 7, 24, 113, 172n30; self-

recognition of, 18; slaughter of, 109; as

symbionts, 8, 67, 139–41, 144, 146–47,

149; as weapons, 22. See also animism;

companion species; creatures; critters;

and under names of specific animals

“Animals in a Bacterial World,” 67, 191n21,

192n23

animism, 89, 97, 162, 199n68; Tagaq and

experimental practice of, 164, 165; sen-

sible materialism and, 88, 165

Anthropocene, 5, 44–47, 52, 72, 100, 174n4,

184n50, 198n65; Arctic warming in, 73,

88; as boundary event, 100, 102, 206n4;

burning and fire in, 44, 45f, 46, 90,

184n48, 186n61; conceptualization of,

62; etymology of, 44; human-induced

climate change in, 44, 45, 56; colonial

and imperial, 202n80; compared to

Capitalocene, 47, 55, 56; chthonic ones

and, 53; Chthulucene and, 55, 76; dying

coral reefs in, 56, 72; damaged worlds of,

33, 137; dating of, 181n42; destruction

of refuge in, 192n28; discomfort in,

180n36; discourse of, 185n53; Earth-

bound in, 50; effects of man on earth

during, 44, 47, 74; evolution in, 62; ex-

tinctions and exterminations of, 86; fos-

sil burning in, 55, 193n36; Gaia and, 51,

175n11, 189n6; game over in, 56; global-

izing extravaganza of, 45, 182n45; Holo-

cene vs., 100, 178n31; horrors of, 3, 36,

57; icon for, 45f; imperial, 71; inflection

point of, 100, 206n5; Latour on, 40–43;

naming of, 31, 36, 99, 179–80n35; Native

Climate Wisdom for, 87; objections to,

49–50; panics in, 55; recuperation in,

47; scandals of, 2; science art activism

in, 71, 79; Stengers on, 43; stories of, 49;

symbiogenesis in, 57; sympoiesis in, 57,

88; transformative time of, 31; trash of,

57; urgencies of, 7, 35, 67, 69, 223n26

Anthropocene Working Group, 182n44

Anthropogenic changes, 45, 52, 76, 99,

181n42, 208n18

Anthropos, 2, 39, 174n4; Children of Com-

post and, 149; epoch and, 47, 48, 55, 57;

as fossil-making man, 46; fracking and,

47; god-like, 50; meeting chthonic

ones, 54; myth system and, 49; not

humus, 149; sky-gazing, 53; as term,

30, 184n45

Anthropo-zoo-genesis, 127–29, 132

ants: acacias and, 7, 122, 124, 125; Le

Guin’s story of, 121–24; Myrmex and,

213–14n9; sf stories and, 120; species

of, 124

apocalypse, 3, 4, 55, 231n8; myths and nar-

rative of, 35, 37, 150

Appalachian region, 141, 221–23n22,

225n31. See also West Virginia

Arabian babblers, 7, 127–28, 130

archaea and bacteria, 61, 190n16; Margulis

on, 60–61, 64

Arctic, 198n65; resources and security in,

184n48; sympoiesis in, 88; warming of,

73, 76

arctic fox, in Never Alone, 87, 88, 198n64

Arendt, Hannah, 5, 36–37, 177n18; on visit-

ing, 127, 130, 177n19

Arizona, 71, 74–75, 95, 170n11, 213n9,

226n39. See also Black Mesa entries

art, 89; in action, 21; animals in, 23;

needed by biologies and politics, 98;

collaborative, 78; in Compost Com-

munities, 140, 150; da Costa’s research

and, 24; design-activist practices in, 133;

fan fiction as, 136; of fiber, 76, 78, 79;

markets for, 92, 201n77; Navajo weaving

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as, 89–91; Batman Park’s pigeon loft as,

25; research and, 24, 27; science world-

ings of, 64, 67, 69, 71–72, 86, 97; in sf,

81; of feminist speculative fabulation,

12; terraforming as, 11; thinking and,

200n75; vegetative, 122

Artemis, 52

art/science activism, 5, 175n10; art ac-

tivism and, 176–77n17; Crochet Coral

Reef as, 79; da Costa as, 26; PigeonBlog,

20–22, 132; pigeon loft as, 133; pigeons

as collaborators in, 5

“arts of living on a damaged planet,” 85,

87, 152; Tsing on, 37, 87, 136

Ashevak, Kenojuak: Animals of Land and

Sea, 161f

assemblages, 42, 43, 78, 103, 192n28,

218n8; ecological, 58; fungi and, 37;

multispecies, 101, 193n34; natural-

cultural, 38; of species, 99–100, 178n31;

symbiotic, 60

Athena, 54, 213–14n9

attachment sites, 10, 14, 116, 144, 190n16

attachment theory (Bowlby), 19, 20

attunement, 7, 10, 39, 98, 126, 128, 227n41,

228n49

Australia, 177n24, 217n6; Great Barrier

Reef, 71, 79, 80, 90; string figures in,

172–73n33

autopoiesis, autopoietic systems, 33, 43, 47,

49, 189n6; defined, 58; Margulis and, 61,

189n4; sympoiesis and, 176n13, 180n36,

180n38

Ayerest, 111

babies, 102, 208n16, 208–9n18, 217n7,

227n41; in Camille stories, 134, 136, 139,

140, 146, 147, 154. See also “Make Kin

Not Babies”

bacteria, 102, 185n56, 190n16; acacia

gum and, 123; animals and, 67; in

choanoflagellate-bacteria model, 64–65;

as communicators, 122; fungus and, 123;

as greatest terraformers, 99; Hawaiian

bobtail squid and symbiont, 66; Mar-

gulis and, 60–61; string figures and,

66; symbiotic, 224n30; symbiogenesis,

60–62. See also archaea and bacteria

“banality of evil” (Arendt), 36

Barad, Karen, 34; Meeting the Universe

Halfway, 175n12, 205n1

Barash, David, 175–76n12

Batman, John, 27

Batman Park: effort to deal with pigeon-

human conflict, 28; pigeon loft in, 26,

27, 28f

Bechtel Corporation, 73, 74

“becoming involved in one another’s lives,”

69, 71, 76

becoming-with, 11, 12, 25, 60, 78, 107, 119,

125, 212n1; animals and bacteria, 65;

Camille stories and, 137, 148, 150, 152,

168; in Chthulucene, 55, 188n69; com-

panion species and, 13, 110; Despret and,

12, 25; sf and, 3, 71; multispecies and, 63,

71, 78; necessity of, 4; pigeons and hu-

mans, 15–20, 22, 24, 28; stories of, 40,

119; symanimagenesis and, 154; techno-

science and, 104

bee, bees: acacias and, 123; communica-

tion and, 68; Deborah and, 187n63;

extinction of, 5, 98; orchids and, 69, 70f,

192n27; Potnia Melissa and, 52; Potnia

Theron and, 186n61; robo-, 187n67

“Bee Orchid,” 69, 70f

Begay, 192n2

Begay, D. Y., 201–2n78

Begay, Glenna, 95

Begay, Jay, 204n88

belief, 36, 42, 51, 88, 178n34, 199–200n72

Berenty Primate Reserve (Madagascar),

ring-tailed lemurs in, 81

Berokoff, Tanya, 19, 20

Betsimisaraka people, 197n58

Big Capital, 160, 186n57

Big Energy, 160, 183n46

big-enough stories (Clifford), 50, 52, 54,

101, 185n54

Big Mountain, 73, 92, 203n81. See also

Black Mesa; Dzil ni Staa

Big Pharma, 7, 108, 110, 115

biocapital, 106

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biodiversity, 44, 49, 82, 100, 218n9; acacias

and, 123; in Appalachians, 222–23n22;

of coral reefs, 72, 79; destruction of, 47,

180n37; education for, 197n61; loss of,

180n37, 197n58; in Madagascar, 82, 83,

85, 197n58; marine, 193n32; refuges for,

206n5; terra and, 55, 56

biologists, 5, 7, 60, 68, 72, 123, 185n53,

190n10

biology, 33, 62–63, 98, 154, 189n7, 190n10;

cell, 60, 65; contemporary, 174n7; devel-

opmental, 64, 66; domains of field, 66,

79; historians of, 191n21; marine, 66,

78, 79; models and, 63. See also EcoDev;

EcoEvoDevo; ecological evolutionary

developmental biology; EvoDevo

biopolitics, 6, 99, 106, 170n3, 211n6

Bird, Elizabeth, 216n4

birds, 39, 54, 127–28, 146, 222–23n22;

extinction of species of, 27, 180n37,

221n22. See also pigeons; and under spe-

cific names of other bird species

birth rates, 102, 145, 209n18

blackbird singing, 126, 127, 130

#Black Lives Matter, 207n12

Black Mesa, 73–76, 225n31; art/science

activisms in, 5, 95; forced removal from,

203n81; in Navajo cosmology, 96–97;

Navajo weaving and, 89; Peabody

Energy and, 73–76, 193–94n37; seden-

tarization and, 196n58; as world worth

fighting for, 97. See also Big Mountain;

Dzil ni Staa

Black Mesa Blankets, 200n74

Black Mesa coalitional work, 96, 97, 217n6;

mine closed by, 74, 193n35; non-Native

allies and, 203n81. See also under names

of specific organizations

Black Mesa Indigenous Support, 71,

192n30, 203n81

Black Mesa Trust (Hopi), 71, 192n30

Black Mesa Water Coalition (bmwc),

96–97, 192n30, 196n58, 200n74,

204n91

Black Mesa Weavers for Life and Land, 71,

95, 192n30, 200n74

blacks, 24, 207n12, 228n45. See also African

Americans

Blue Ridge Mountains, 219n11

bodily modifications, in Communities of

Compost, 140–41

boundary, boundaries, 33, 43, 61, 176n13,

195n58

boundary event, 100, 102, 206n4

bounded individualism, 5, 30, 33, 49

bounded units, 60, 62, 67

Bowlby, John, 19, 20

Boyden, John, 75, 194n39

Bubandt, Nils Ole, 185n53, 206n5

Buddhism, 175–76n12

bullying: in Camille stories, 150, 160, pi-

geons and, 20

Burning Man Festival, 182–83n45

Butler, Octavia, 7, 118–19; Parable novels

of, 119–20, 213n3, 213n8

butterflies drinking turtle tears, 156, 157,

227n41

California, 31, 44, 52, 94, 119, 213n8; mon-

arch butterflies in, 142, 153f, 153–54,

219n12

California, Southern, 20, 21, 124, 203n81,

219n12, 226n39; pigeon racing, 10,

16–20, 132–33; PigeonBlog, 20–24,

23f

camels, 131–32

Camille 1, 142–54; American kestrels and,

222n22; as charmed, 224n29; compostist

and, 148; gender and, 221n18; heritage

of, 225n31; Kess as friend, 149; nature

and, 153, 154; Nausicaä of the Valley of

the Wind, 151, 152; response-ability by

parent, 143; response-ability of, 152; as

symbiogenetic with Monarch butterfly,

142, 148, 154

Camille 2, 152–58, 225n32; chin implants

of, 152; cosmopolitics and, 157; educa-

tion by Mazahua activist women, 155,

156, 224n30; introduced to Monarcas,

154; “Soy Mazahua,” 156

Camille 3, 159–62; cosmopolitics and, 161;

teaches Camille 4, 162; travels of, 160

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Camille 4, 162–65, 227n44; mentoring Ca-

mille 5, 162–64

Camille 5, 143, 166–67; initiation of, 163;

mentored by Camille 4, 162–64; as

Speaker for the Dead, 164, 166

Camille stories, 134–68, 216–17n4, 218n8;

agribusiness and, 152; animisms in,

162; becoming-with and, 137, 148,

150, 152, 168; as a Child of Compost,

134, 136; rapid climate change in, 159;

collaborations in, 154; flourishing in,

168; holobionts in, 148; humanity as

humus in, 160; kin making in, 159,

160, 162, 216–17n4; knots and, 143;

Mazahua, 156, 157, 167; naturalsocial

becoming-with in, 148; non-symbionts

felt threatened in, 149; origin of, 136,

138; people move to West Virginia, 141;

relays of, 140; reproductive choice in,

142; resistance in, 137, 155; speculative

fabulation and, 8, 134, 136; stories of,

144–68; string figures and, 144; sympoi-

esis in, 155, 160; visiting in, 152; world

of, 137–43

Canada, 195n56, 222n22; Arctic and,

184n48; forest fires in, 45f; Inuit lan-

guage of, 192n29; monarch butterflies

in, 8, 142, 152; Premarin and, 111–12;

tar sands extraction in, 183n47, 184n48,

217n6, 225n31

cancer: adenocarcinoma, 106; breast, 107,

108, 109, 112, 210n2; ovarian, 211n4;

prostate, 107. See also carcinogens

capital, capitalism, 2, 7, 50, 73, 93, 176n12,

182n43, 185n52, 208n18; anti-, 6; Big

Capital and, 160, 186n57; consumer,

223n26; global, 47, 123, 206n5; hetero-

geneous, 36; nature and, 185n52; undif-

ferentiated, 37. See also Capitalocene

Capitalocene, 5, 47–51, 55, 99, 100, 102,

176n12, 180n36; Arctic in, 73; art ac-

tivism in, 71, 79; chthonic ones not

friends with, 53; Chthulucene and,

76, 185–86n56; colonial and imperial,

202n80; displacement in, 206n5; extinc-

tions in, 57, 86, 159, 162, 164; game over

in, 56, 57; globalization of, 48; Great

Acceleration of, 144; horrors of, 3; Icon

for the Capitalocene: Sea Ice Clearing

from the Northwest Passage, 48f;

response-ability in, 176n12; scandals of,

2; sustainability and, 183n46; as time

of burning, 90; urgencies of, 7, 69, 137;

unworldings during, 56, 57; as word,

184–85n50

Capsule (Crasset), 25, 26, 133

carbon: as burden, 183n45; from fossil

fuels, 46, 73; Third Age of, 47, 48

carcinogens, 108, 210n2, 211n4. See also

cancer

Card, Orson Scott: Ender’s Game, 227–28n45;

Speaker for the Dead, 69, 101, 227–28n45

care, caring: for animals, 111, 113, 129; for

country, 27, 49, 80, 96; Hawaiian bab-

blers and, 128; for kin, 103; lack of, 36;

material play and, 79; matters of, 36,

41; patterns of, 89; practices of, 56; and

nuturing of symbionts, 140, 146; rela-

tionships and, 19; response-ability and,

22, 105; for sheep, 91, 92, 95; storytelling

and, 37, 116; sympoietic, 178n34; for

other worldings, 50, 55

carrier bag narratives, 119–23, 125, 213n8;

Le Guin and theory of, 7, 39, 42, 118,

120, 125, 177n27, 213n4

Carson, Kit, 91–92

categories: of authority, 42; of art, 89; of

belief, 88; of city dwellers, 25; of finan-

cialization, 208n17; of human-animal

work, 23; of kin, 216n4; of modern/

traditional, 165; of nature, culture, and

biology of the Camille Stories, 154,

161; of people, 21; of pigeons, 15; of

religious/secular, 165; of science, 89; of

thought, 43

cat’s cradle, 205n94; games, 14, 26, 176n17,

184n50; multispecies, 9f, paintings of,

35, 35f, 176–77n17; parable of camels

and, 131; thinking-with, 34

cattle and cows, 92, 109, 115, 129

Cayenne (Hot Pepper), 7, 105–8, 110, 114,

115, 116

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cells: choanoflagellates as, 65; models of

evolution of, 64, 65, 190n16; health of,

107; in holobionts, 60, 62, 64; Margulis

on, 60, 61; nucleated, 189n4; sympoietic

arrangements of, 58

-cene, as suffix, 55, 206n7

Cenestin, 211n6

Cerisy colloquiae, 132, 134

Cervantes, Julio Garduño, 156

change, 176n13; Anthropogenic, 45; biolog-

ical, 141; collaborations and, 154; going

on and, 40; mutation as, 60; rates and

distributions of, 73, 99; stories and, 40,

43, 103, 144; in worlding, 160. See also

climate change

chaos, 174n4; Gaia and, 51, 180n36,

181n38; reformulating order out of,

189n6

Charnas, Suzy McKee, Holdfast Chroni-

cles, 188n67

chicken, chickens (Gallus gallus), 109, 113,

118; as biological model, 63

Children of Compost, 134–68; animals

bonding with, 218n8; biogenetic re-

production of, 139; Camille as, 134,

136; community creation of, 138; Eco-

EvoDevo biological changes in, 141;

gatherings of, 217–18n7; litter of, 215n1

(ch. 8); as pilot project, 136, 215–16n3;

rendering-capable and, 8, 136; reproduc-

tion of, 143; stories and, 136; stories of,

144–68; symbionts and, 139–41; sym-

poiesis in, 141, 153, 154

China, 184n48, 194n37, 196n58, 217n6;

Chinese language and, 195n56

Chisolm, Kami, 203n81

choanoflagellates, 64, 65, 190n16

Christianity, Christians: belief and, 88;

climate change and, 6, 200n72, 208n18;

kinship systems in, 203n82; Mary in,

186–87n62

chthonic ones, chthonic powers, 2, 53, 71,

173–74n4, 175n11; as allies, 186n57; as

dreadful, 50, 54; etymology of, 173n4;

Gaia and, 181n38; Gorgons as, 53, 54;

ongoing, 180n36; Potnia Theron as

reminder of, 52; of Terra, 31, 179n35,

186n62. See also symchthonic ones

Chthulu, 31, 33. See also Chthulucene;

Cthul(h)u

Chthulucene: 2, 5, 51–57, 71, 88, 98, 101,

192n28; becoming-with in, 55, 188n69;

Anthropocene/Capitalocene and, 55, 76,

159, 185–86n56; denizens of, 81; Diné

and, 94; Earthbound and, 43; etymology

of, 31, 53; icon of, 186n61; Lovecraft’s

Cthulhu vs., 101, 169n2 (intro.), 174n4;

making compost in, 57; making kin in,

4, 89; as netbag, 54, 55, 121; nurtur-

ing of, 193n36; ongoingness in, 3, 71,

180n36; as real and possible timespace,

101; resurgence in, 94, 97; slogans of,

102; stories of, 31, 55, 56, 88; string

figures in, 79; as sympoietic, 33, 55, 98,

168; tentacular tasks of, 42, 90, 97, 159;

terrors of, 174n4; urgencies of, 7

Church of Stop Shopping, 187n63

circumpolar North, 5, 71, 73. See also Arctic

citizen science, 21, 24, 27

Clarke, Adele, 216n4

Cleveland, Robert, 198n64

Clifford, James (Jim), 101, 173n3, 185n54

climate change, 100, 159; in Anthropocene,

44; Christians and, 6, 208n18; Climate

Change summit, 80; deniers of, 208n18;

Inuit and, 198n65, 198n67; irreversible,

140; modeling of, 45, 181–82n43; puta-

tive benefits of, 194n37; summit on, 80;

violent, 145

climate justice, 97, 193n32, 204n91

Climate Justice Alliance, 97

cnidarians, 32; corals and, 45, 54, 56, 72

coal industry and coal mining: in Appala-

chia and West Virginia, 218–19n11; in

Australia, 217n6; Black Mesa and, 73–76,

94, 203n81, 217n6; in China, 217n6;

Coconino aquifer and, 74; in Commu-

nities of Compost, 141, 153; emissions

from, 194n37; Mohave Generating Sta-

tion and, 73–74, 96, 193n35; mountain-

top removal and, 144, 175n10; Navajo

aquifer and, 73–74; Navajo Generating

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Station and, 74; sedentarization and,

196n58; transition from, 96

Cody, Pat, 210n2

collaboration, collaborations, 5, 102; in art

activism, 5; between breeders and their

animals, 22, 129; with Camille stories,

136, 140, 147, 150, 154; in Chthulucene,

56, 101; computer world games and, 87;

cosmopolitics and, 23; between da Costa

and engineer, 22; between humans and

babblers, 128–29, with Inupiat, 87; odd-

kin and, 4; between racing pigeons and

humans, 16–20, 25; between peoples,

16; research, 63, 66, 111; response-ability

and, 21, 22, 25, 28; story-making and,

136, 143; survival and, 37; sympoietic, 66,

87, 102; webs of, 206n6

Colombia, Putumayo region of, 158f,

217n6, 225n32

colonialism, colonialists, 5, 94; anthropo-

genic devastation and, 76; appropriation

and, 199n68; in Madagascar, 82, 197n58;

neo-, 165; post-, 15, 82, 121, 125, 138, 150,

154, 221n17; settler, 96; state, 196n58.

See also colonization, colonizers; decolo-

nialism and decolonization

colonization, colonizers, 13, 26, 73, 82,

87, 88, 89, 199n68, 200n72; Colum-

bian Exchange and, 223n26; creatures

of empire and, 203–4n83; non-, 57;

U.S., 92. See also decolonialism and

decolonization

Colorado Plateau, 73–76, 91–94, 204n83

Colorado River, 193n36; transbasin water

transfers and, 74, 226n39

Colorado Water Users Association, 226n39

Columbidae family, 170n13. See also

pigeons

communication, 104, 187n65, 228n45; ani-

mal, 122; bacteria and, 66; of butterflies,

224n30; multispecies, 65, 68, 123–24,

214n14, 228n45; with pigeons, 18–22;

plants and, 122. See also language,

languages

Communities of Compost, 8, 138, 147,

217n4; agriculture in, 141, 160; in

Amazon, 227n41; ancestors in, 154, 156,

157; art in, 140–50; binding sym and

nonsym, 160–61; biodiversity in, 159;

birthing practices in, 138–39; birth rates

in, 145, 146, 147, 159; bodily modifica-

tions in, 146, 149; bullying in, 150, 160;

caracoles and, 155; in Chthulucene, 159,

168; conservation practices of, 155; cor-

ridor thinking of, 218n9; cosmopolitics

in, 157, 160; critters in, 160; culture in,

149; early days of, 149; ecojustice in,

154, 155, 160; education in, 150; extinc-

tions in, 143, 159, 162; gender choice

in, 140; Great Dithering and, 144, 145;

as humus, 140, 160; hymn of, 228n49;

immigration in, 147; industrial agri-

culture in, 141; making kin in, 138, 147,

160; in Mexico, 154; mining and, 217n6;

modernity and, 157; monarch butterflies

in, 141, 160, 162; population control of,

220–21n17; population of, 147, 159; rav-

aged habitations of, 141, 147, 160; reha-

bilitating land in, 154, 155; scientists of,

146, 157; sf and, 227–28n45; sociality in,

145; stories in, 161; symanimagenesis

in, 154, 160; symbionts in, 139–40,

144–49, 159, 218n8; symbiogenetic

children in, 154, 159, 160; sympoiesis in,

146, 147, 157, 160; Tagaq’s effect on, 165;

training minds in, 140, 160; worlding in,

160; Zapatistas and, 155–57

companion species, 11, 110, 115; account-

able, 125; actions of, 65; ant-acacia asso-

ciations, 124, 125; becoming-with and,

13, 110; cum panis, 29, 55, 115; infection

by, 29, 115; instruction by, 117; plants

and, 122; playing string figures with,

9–29, 132, practices of, 10–16; sowing

worlds and, 118; stories of, 40, 119; sym-

biosis and, 124

compost, 134–68, 187n62; collaborations

as, 4; made by Chthulucene, 57; making

oddkin as, 4; not posthuman, 11, 55, 97,

101; piles of, 97, 180n38; Strathern on,

34. See also Children of Compost; Com-

munities of Compost

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compostist, 150; archives of, 162; Camille

1 and, 148; citizenship rights of, 147,

159; environmental justice and, 159;

plant sympoiesis and, 147; practices of,

159, 160; not posthuman(ist), 97, 101–2;

Pullman’s stories and, 161, 162; self-

described, 145; symbiont development

and, 149, 162; work to restore, 156

compounding pharmacies, 107, 108, 109,

211n4

conglobulation, 110, 114

conjugating, 110; kin, 110–14

Connery, Chris, 188n69, 217n6

conservation: in Communities of Com-

post, 146, 155; efforts for Hawaiian

crows, 38; Jolly and, 81, 85; Madagascar

and, 85; through fire suppression, 196n58

containers, 14, 39, 91; importance of, 40,

118; time of, 11

contraception and birth control, 6, 27,

209–10n18, 211n6. See also reproductive

freedom and rights

Cook Inlet Tribal Council, 71, 86f, 87,

198n64, 199n68. See also Never Alone

copresence, 4, 132, 136

coproduction, coproducers, 18, 21, 22, 49,

179n35

coral and coral reefs, 55, 56, 188n68,

205n94; art/science activisms and, 5, 71,

72, 78, 194n43; dying coral symbioses

and, 45, 56, 183n45; as ecosystems, 64,

73, 78, 193n32, 194n43; Great Barrier

Reef, 71, 79, 80, 90. See also Crochet

Coral Reef

Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithol-

ogy, 24, 27

corridors, 87, 138, 143, 152, 154, 160, 168; as

central task of communities, 140; con-

servation of, 146, 222n22; ecologists of,

153; thinking in, 218n9

cosmology, cosmological performance,

14, 89–91, 97; Navajo weaving as, 96,

201n77, 202n79

cosmopolitics, 176n12, 207n12; Camille 2

and, 157; Camille 3 and, 160, 161; com-

posing by storytelling, 15; Da Costa and,

23; globalizing, 11; Stengers and, 12, 98;

Strathern on, 12

country, 26; care of, 27, 49, 80, 96

coupling, linear, 180n36; nonlinear, 43;

structural, 176n13

coyote, coyotes, 13, 14f, 74, 91, 202–3n80

Crasset, Matali, 25, 26; Capsule, 26f, 26,

133

crayfish, 146, 222–23n22

creatures, 32, 61, 189n2; critters vs., 169n1

(intro.); of empire, 5, 15, 26, 203n83. See

also critters

Crist, Eileen, 49–50, 185n53

critical theory, theorists, 3, 20, 51, 178n32,

211n18

critters, 61, 98, 169–70n3, 183n46, 196n58,

205n94; in Ako Project, 83; alliances

with, 50; ants as, 124; art-design-activist

practices joining, 133; associations with

ants and acacias, 125; autopoietic sys-

tems and, 33; on Black Mesa, 73, 74, 96;

in Chthulucene, 101, 186n61, 192n28;

in coral reefs, 56, 72; cyborgs as, 104–5;

on edge of disappearing, 8; endangered,

221–22n22; entanglements and, 49, 60;

exterminations of, 55; health of, 20, 21;

humans as, 99; humus and, 2; immis-

eration of, 4; interpenetration of, 58;

invertebrates, 54; it, 32; kin and, 216n4;

of Madagascar, 72; marine, 78, 183n45;

mathematics, 68; memory and, 69; met-

abolic transformations of, 56; moral,

101; mortal, 1; novel, 218n8; people and,

3; and pigeon racing, 10; precarity and,

37; primitive, 190n16; recuperating peo-

ple and, 133; rendering-capable and, 7;

self-recognition and, 18, 19; shared flesh

of, 103; slave gardens and, 206n5; sto-

ries and, 15; sympoiesis among those in

Communities of Compost, 140; as term,

169n1 (intro.); of Terra, 97

Crochet Coral Reef, 76–81, 89, 194n43,

202n79; as art/science activism, 71, 79;

beaded jellyfish for, 77f; becoming-with

and, 78; iff and, 71, 77f, 78; string fig-

ures and, 79

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crocheting, models of hyperbolic planes

and, 76, 78

Crownpoint Navajo Rug Auction, 96,

200n76

Crutzen, Paul, 44, 45, 183n45

Cthulhu (Lovecraft), 101, 169n2 (intro.),

174n4

culture, 13, 52, 79, 95, 104, 149, 190n7

curiosity, curious practice, 58, 63, 68, 83,

133, 147, 150, 168; Despret and, 7–8, 127,

130–31; Tsing and, 37

cuttlefish, 55, 188n69

cyborg, cyborgs: as coshapers, 20; cocktail

of, 211n7; defined, 104; feminist, 118;

as holoents, 210n1; as littermates, 7, 31,

104–5, 109–10; as kin, 104; speculative

fabulation and, 105; tools of, 63; world-

ing, 115

Cyborgs for Earthly Survival, 102, 114, 117,

216n4

cynicism, 3, 38, 51, 56, 97

Czerneda, Julie, 161

da Costa, Beatriz, 25, 172n24; art and re-

search of, 21, 24, 26; cosmopolitics, 23;

Crasset and, 25; death of, 171n23; peta

vs., 23, 24; PigeonBlog and, 20, 22, 132,

172n28

Danainae, 227n43; extinction of, 162–63

Danowski, Déborah, 52

darpa (Defense Advanced Research Proj-

ects Agency), 22

Darwin, Charles, 16, 50, 68, 192n24; neo-

Darwinians and, 68, 176n12, 190n16,

191n21; On the Origin of Species, 62

databases, 24, 63, 214n13

Davis, Angela, 223n25

dead, as active presence, 8, 69, 132. See also

speakers for the dead

de Castro, Eduardo Viveiros, 52, 88, 165

decolonialism and decolonization, 6, 94,

138, 154, 218n9, 221n17, 225n32; alli-

ances and coalitions and, 71, 193n35,

203n81, 209n18; indigenous and, 71, 80;

literatures of, 154; multispecies studies

and worlding and, 150, 225n32. See also

colonialism, colonialists; colonization,

colonizers

Defense Advanced Research Project

Agency, 22

deforestation, in Madagascar, 196–97n58

deities, 54, 188n69; kin making and, 216n4.

See also God; goddesses; gods; sky gods;

and under names of individual deities

de la Cadena, Marisol, 227n41

Deleuze, Gilles, 12

demography, 197n58, 209n18; demo-

graphic abstractions and, 210n18. See

also human numbers; population

Dempster, M. Beth: on sympoiesis, 33, 61,

176n13, 189–90n7

denunciation, 50, 56, 127, 185n55

de Roode, Jaap, 163f, 167f; Laboratory,

223n24

des (diethylstilbesterol): in agriculture,

109–10; anxiety over, 106, 108; bans on,

109; feminist women’s health activism

against, 7, 210n2; history of, 107–10,

210–11n4; manufacture and marketing

of, 211n6, 211n7; response-ability and,

104–16

des daughters, 105, 210n2; multispecies,

109

DeSmet (Trumbull), Raissa, 186n61

despair, 4, 51, 56, 130; resurgence vs., 71,

97. See also hope

Despret, Vinciane, 128, 170n7, 177n25;

becoming-with and, 12, 25; Camille sto-

ries and, 134; da Costa and, 25; on par-

able of camels, 131, 132; on pigeons, 25,

132, 133; on philosophical ethology, 132;

on Crasset’s pigeon loft, 25; teachings

of, 101, 130; thinking-with and, 7–8,

126; on virtue of politeness, 127–29;

with Porcher, 129; with Stengers, 130,

131; work of, 129, 131, 132

developmental biology, 63–64, 66, 205n94.