Nature and Culture

This essay addresses the objectification facing the Central Valley region of California in the context of settler colonialism and of native ways of life which characterized it prior to settlement. The region was once famous for its wetland ecosystem and has since seen the entirety of its water rerouted for agricultural use. Environmental and political factors defining the region’s contemporary condition are inherited from settler attempts to mitigate the effects of the natural ecosystem on the identity of the native peoples that lived there, particularly by undermining the living relation with water once held by these communities. Various aspects of the ecosystem continue to exert an unsettling effect on local peoples. Educational institutions in the region ultimately reinforce the separation between the local communities and their ecosystem, reestablishing settler structures.

This article engages with the concept of multi-species justice as an avenue toward incorporating justice and recognition for the more-than-human world. It identifies several elements crucial to a debate on multi-species justice. Sentience and the animal turn in political philosophy have brought a novel dimension to the discussion of political rights. From this follows a discussion on whether a rights-based approach to multi-species relations is a step toward just representation for the more-than-human world. This is juxtaposed with the rights of nature approach and a focus on legal personhood. The conclusion drawn in this article is that a rights-based approach to multi-species justice offers potential for integrating multi-species concerns into political representation but that there is also a need for integrating recognitional justice.

As the climate crisis accelerates, negative emissions technologies (NETs) are increasingly being explored as a supposed climate technofix. Synthetic biology, by which engineering principles are applied to biological systems, recently emerged as a potential NET, exemplifying how proposed responses to the crisis are overly determined by hubris, rather than humility. However, the gravity of the crisis requires a deeper problematization of the dichotomy between hubris and humility. Nevertheless, debates on mitigation strategies cannot ignore that the—highly dubious—likelihood of averting runaway climate change has become dependent on the efficacious implementation of NETs. As such, the pursuit of hubris, or the acquiescence to humility, will, in turn, constitute entirely different pathways for the long-term future of life on Earth.

Climate change forces farmers and agriculturists to reconsider and reform their relations with rural landscapes and their more-than-human dwellers. This article considers to what extent visions of futures seriously engage with agencies of non-humans to produce more sustainable agricultural sites and practices. It shows how reforms that begin with such engagements can end up reproducing pre-existing harms and injustices. By engaging with Tsing’s hopeful term “the arts of noticing,” we analyze the plans put forward by agricultural engineers, farmers, industrialists, and the Turkish government to reform olive agriculture in the face of climate change in the Aegean region of Turkey. We argue that while the arts of noticing foreground certain sensibilities, they are not sufficient on their own as a means to radically challenge existing rural relations.

Debra J. Davidson. 2024. Feeling Climate Change: How Emotions Govern Our Responses to the Climate Emergency. London: Routledge.

Jade Sasser. 2024. Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question: Deciding Whether to Have Children in an Uncertain Future. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.