From shorelines remade by sea level rise to extractive enterprise, urban construction, and rural terraforming, sand is a preeminent indicator of human-induced global disturbance forming the substrate of Anthropocene lives. Drawing on case studies from Asia and Africa, this special section centers sand in ethnographic inquiry to argue that matters of sandy admixture are ripe for theorization, comparison, and informed engagement of planetary change and provide an impetus for methodological innovation. For geoscientists, sand is distinguished from other rock-based sediments in terms of size. The authors' approach reaches beyond issues of strict scientific classification to cover sandy matters more broadly, such as sediments born from bodily and consumer waste, construction debris, and industrial tailings. The authors argue that these anthropogenic outputs are increasingly difficult to separate analytically or mechanically from organically or geologically generated substances as human extractive and productive endeavors intensify. Through examinations of Congolese sand divers, Beiruti environmental activists, ghosts of Malaccan development projects, and sewage-clogged waterways of urban Addis Ababa, contributors develop three analytic optics rooted in anthropology's empiricist legacy to capture sand's distinctive socialities and materialities. The first, "granular particularism," offers a framework to trace the heterogeneous materials and scales of intertwined human and geological substances and practices. Second, attention to "sedimentary configuration" provides a means to the play of fixity and flow characterizing sand-based geosocial formations. Finally, the notion of "compositional politics" makes evident the unsettled alliances and inherent inequalities between human and more-than-human actors that derive value from sand's utility to fostering life and livelihood.
Once a vibrant trading hub in Southeast Asia, the Malaysian port city of Malacca is now part ghost town, part real estate development. Built on the prospect of transforming Malacca into a tourist magnet and a node in China's Belt and Road Initiative, hasty reclamation and exaggerated sales promises have turned the coastline into a mud field and the construction sites into ruins. Driven by national and transnational interests, sand is made operational as a medium of economic transformation and political consolidation. Taking the silted Straits of Malacca as a point of departure, this article proposes a reading of land reclamation aimed at transforming sand into fixed forms against the unpredictable vibrancy of the matter. As fieldwork reveals, mudskippers thrive, and locals claim unexpected agency in the mire of Malacca's near abandonment and the decaying remnants of past and future urban designs. Attention to the structural potential of sand's granular physics unsettles practices of environmental control and financial speculation, highlighting the ambiguity of contemporary processes of urban transformation. Substrate and effect of the ongoing limbo that conflates urban and economic development strategies and postcolonial identity politics, Malacca's coastline comes to express capital flows as partial and unstable sedimentation.
The tidal Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, USA, presents a waterscape at once singular and uniquely local while also typical of a novel ecosystem. Heavy with centuries of legacy pollutants from coal and oil refining, the river water presents a liquid archive with few finding aids, catalogs, or guides. Propelled by a fundamental paradox (if "wisdom sits in places," how do we know "forgotten places"), this article considers a series of collaborative learning experiments animated by insights from academic and community researchers about Black ecologies. It traces a series of public environmental humanities experiments undertaken over a five-year period in and with the river's historic wetlands and their various communities. Sharing insights from insurgent learning practices, the article aims to further the environmental humanities' transformational premise and promise to envision and foster more just futures. As we, academic researchers, have learned with and from community partners, we have sought to make mutually beneficial work, including much that hardly resembles conventional academic outcomes. A "living" digital river archive offers a compendium to the article.
Over the past decades, underwater mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo shifted from free diving for diamonds to diving with slowly fine-tuned and motorized "sand-suckers" for gold and 3T (tin, tungsten, tantalum) minerals among the sandy tailings of river bottoms. This article decodes how Congolese miners navigate tributaries of the Congo River basin and earn a living in rural parts of postcolonial war-and landscapes. It offers an ethnographic account of a distinctive historical memory and technical and geocoded lexicon used by miners: assembling, touching, and composing their informal practices amid hydro-, atmo-, and geosocial encounters. Here, the sandy nature of the mineral resources highlights an analytic frame to consider the present logic of capital, with Congolese miners converting sandy residues from earlier production cycles into capitalist value and reengineering and fine-tuning their extractive gear. From reading underwater composites to reassembling sprockets, this article follows informal profit-sharing practices that emerge from it. In these compositional economies, capital accumulation is translated from resource to residue through seasonal and technologized reshuffling and the regenerative practice of unmixing composites in sand-laden remains.
This article explores how practices of soil care in urban gardening contribute to a sense of ecological belonging. Human-soil belonging can be invoked with vastly opposed cultural material underpinnings and sociopolitical implications. Starting from complex fractured understandings of belonging as always intrinsically unbelonging, and based on interviews and fieldwork among diverse communities of committed urban growers from uprooted and migrant backgrounds in a city of the British East Midlands, the article looks at how material, affective, and ethical relations in soil care may offer a distinct opening to more-than-human relations of belonging to/with land. Growers repair and nourish soil guided by complex obligations toward a range of socioecological processes and creatures, connect to pasts and futures of urban land, and navigate affective and ethical ambivalences in ways that reconfigure place, identity, and more-than-human community. Attention to these experiences both troubles and reclaims ways of belonging ecologically at the heart of diverse, composite, and uneven worlds.
Clouds come into visible being, in the verb-oriented grammar of many Indigenous languages, as bodies opting to join this sky or river, for now. In their constant modifications, clouds highlight the recursive nature of time and space. Despite the shared focus of both queer temporality and queer ecology on existence as relational, Indigenous and queer studies are not often brought into dialogue. This article engages Jill Carter's (Anishinaabe) and Scott Andrews's (Cherokee) approach of "red reading," or reading non-Indigenous texts through Indigenous perspectives, to foster such dialogue by bridging Indigenous ecologies with queer temporality. Accordingly, this article expands queer temporality in dialogue with Indigenous ecologies to generate implications for queer ecology: in particular, a theory of entangled presence. Entangled presence extends theories of queer temporality to hold spirals of pasts, presents, and futures and to affirm time as ecological kinship. The entangled presence in A. E. Housman's cloud poem "The Merry Guide" resembles the scientific cloud writing of Luke Howard and Thomas Forster. Housman's, Howard's, and Forster's invocations of clouds model entangled presence, an ecological grammar of time that amplifies awareness of ecological kinship.
In the past three decades, the Lebanese coastline has emerged as a focal point for ongoing struggles on matters of environment and enclosure of coastal spaces. At a public beach in Beirut, environmentalists strive to counter privatization and protect sand from natural and anthropogenic threats. This article focuses on the role of sand in these environmental and urban contestations. It joins discussions in the environmental humanities on the political significance of relational materiality as a core Anthropocene concern. As sand mixes with waste, microplastics, and life, it is also traversed by human histories of leisure, technocratic environmental knowledge, economic interests, and struggle for coastal commons. These mixtures of sand gain relevance as technocrats inscribe value to it, as environmentalists work to purify it of troublesome entanglements, and as citizens flock to it for leisurely enjoyment. Complicating Bruno Latour's call to compositionism, ethnographic attention to compositional politics reveals the unequal footing between sand and its human and nonhuman interlocutors. Sand as mixed matter, through its material characteristics and contextual entanglements, makes evident a compositional politics of the environment and urban space. Mixing and unmixing, sand charts a coastal politics of enclosure, commons, and efforts to recalibrate the wider political economy of Lebanon.
This article examines the sensorial and material conditions of urban decay through the lens of sediment as both an ethnographic object and analytical tool. It explores how sediment is experienced and politicized in Ethiopia's capital, tracing the accumulation of human waste and particulate matter. As the space where the wastes of the city's more than five million residents seep in, coagulate, and build up, Addis Ababa's polluted riverways have become unintentional infrastructure. Recent urban renewal efforts aligned with national leadership aim to overhaul the city's sanitation infrastructure and rehabilitate the riverways. Attuned to sediment's material form, temporal transformations, and physical forces, this article suggests that sediment's disputed traces reveal the tense relations between the municipality's grand schemes of cleaning and greening and urban citizens struggling for dignity.
The planet has emerged in the environmental humanities as a category of interest that offers a certain outlook, and analytic strategy different from the traditional frameworks of world, earth, and globe. The planet is a figure of alterity and invisibility, but also possibility in the sense that it includes the idea of extraterrestrial habitats and astroenvironments. Through three different yet interconnected examples, this article shows how the planetary real, disclosed by globalization and the Anthropocene, haunts the modern world as a threat of annihilation. The article argues that extinction, radioactive materials, and the future solar explosion are closely linked to the Promethean regime-a techno-optimistic worldview-and the logics of capital. While initiatives like de-extinction, nuclear waste disposal facilities, and space travel require a planetary lens, they are haunted in turn by the Promethean regime and the logics of capital. In short, the planetary real haunts the Promethean regime and the Promethean regime haunts the planetary real. By invoking Derrida's concept of hauntology, the article argues that the spectral structure of this entanglement is expressed as forms of absence, remains, and disturbance. Finally, it is shown that the logics of capital is spectral to the core.
The following essay examines the term colony in relation to insect communities. It uses a combination of interdisciplinary critique and personal reflection to track the term across reference texts, entomology articles, popular science books, and humanities research. In doing so, it considers how the word colony circulates in and outside of academic settings as a vague synonym for community but still carries politically fraught histories that are rooted in settler-colonial understandings of natural history. Thus, from one perspective, this essay is a story about paying attention to a word, and it demonstrates how word-tracking can be a methodology that reveals connections and tensions in knowledge systems. From another, it is an argument against the word colony as it currently appears in relation to insect communities: the too-casual use of this complex term invites misreadings of insects' social arrangements, orients researchers away from social insects' cross-species relations in favor of single-species analysis, muddies conversations about the interplay between insect community-building and Euro-American settler colonialism, and reframes knowledge so that it can circulate through hierarchical knowledge systems. Moving beyond insect studies, this essay also challenges readers to ponder their habits of labeling nonhuman social arrangements. It advocates for adopting alternative terminology and new systems of naming that might help researchers engage with more-than-human-histories and recognize other creatures' entanglements in more-than-human colonialisms.
A fermentation renaissance is afoot. This revival has given rise to work in the environmental humanities that mobilizes DIY fermentation to ground a progressivist politics. The authors share in this enthusiasm but articulate a concern that imputing an essential politics to fermentation is not possible and risks turning it into a fetish. Drawing on a range of work on fermentation, some of which has raised similar concerns, the article outlines a political zymology (zymology being the science of fermentation), channeling the concerns of political ecology to facilitate a critical engagement with fermentation's diversity and avoid its fetishization. The article begins by defining fermentation, situating the fermentation zeitgeist in the ongoing microbial moment, and reviewing recent scholarly work on fermentation that proposes an essential fermentation politics. The article then develops a framework for political zymology, articulating four dimensions for differentiating fermentations-ecology, microbiopolitics, political economy, and cultural politics-and, in doing so, defetishizing it. In conclusion, the article discusses the value of political zymology as a domain-specific subset of political ecology and gestures toward an additional, complementary mode of political zymology of collaboration across disciplines and professions.
This preface offers an overview of the guiding themes of the special section. It notes the focus on a critical appraisal of dominant narratives designed to render acceptable contemporary extraction practices in Latin America and their effects on local communities and the environment. Together the essays identify a need to rethink extraction and its implications and advocate for more equitable and environmentally conscious approaches to resource extraction. The preface underscores the intractable nature of mineral extraction, including for renewable energies. Extraction is here to stay. The questions still to be answered are what kinds of extraction, for whom, and at what cost?
The ways social theorists conceptualize the material world influences their approach to conceiving and addressing the environmental challenges of the Anthropocene. This article uses panpsychist theory, which holds that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous property of the natural world, as a way of conceptualizing and developing responses to these challenges. This is done by contrasting panpsychist conceptions of materiality and consciousness with those of vital materialism and property dualist historical materialism. It is argued that the latter theories have difficulties effectively analyzing the relationship between humans and the nonhuman world in the context of the Anthropocene. Hence, vital materialism tends to diminish human value and responsibility, while property dualist historical materialism tends to devalue and instrumentalize nature. Panpsychism is used as a basis for addressing these deficiencies. A key feature of this investigation concerns intrinsic value in nature and the argument that intrinsic value is dependent on consciousness.
This article examines the figure of the “plant-human” as an anticolonial symbol in Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean literature. It traces the plant-human’s shifting political and generic uses by comparing Suzanne Césaire’s essay “Malaise of a Civilization” (1942) and Shani Mootoo’s novel Cereus Blooms at Night (1996). For both authors, becoming a plant-human represents a way of resisting assimilation to colonial norms. But rather than treat the plant-human as ontological, as recent environmental humanities scholarship might, this article argues the plant-human is allegorical in Césaire’s and Mootoo’s texts. As an allegorical heuristic, the plant-human represents a relationship between two fundamental senses of trans life in the Caribbean: a capacity of gendered embodying, and the geopolitical longue durée of bodies set in motion to fuel racial capitalism. The article thus brings the methods of trans and decolonial studies into dialogue with environmental humanities, while showing how the former challenge the latter’s notion that ontology is a necessary prophylactic to politics.
The idea that we must move beyond anthropocentrism to overcome interspecies injustice and environmental collapse is widespread in the environmental humanities. Yet the concept of anthropocentrism remains ambiguous and so do some of the arguments raised against it. What exactly should we move beyond and why? The article attempts to answer these questions and clarify the merits and limitations of both anthropocentric and post-anthropocentric views in ethics and ontology. This article proposes that although some implausible and morally problematic forms of anthropocentrism should be denounced, there are other ways we must remain anthropocentric. The article disambiguates the concept of anthropocentrism and assesses the key arguments against it, then outlines a minimal form of anthropocentrism that we call ostensive humanism. Ostensive humanism is compatible with many post-anthropocentric ideas but suggests that the ethical and political project aimed at ending interspecies injustice and the climate crisis inevitably points to human beings as its moral addressees.
The dust and ashes from the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001, have developed dual and contrasting significance: valued as remains of loved ones and feared as toxic residue. Dust has long been associated with the evanescence of life—and more recently, with dangerous environmental exposures or toxicities. The desire for connection to human remains in the continuing work of mourning is put in tension with the need to avoid contamination. A process of sacralization is juxtaposed to identification of an environmental hazard. For the past twenty years, artists and scientists have offered multiple framings, often from contrary perspectives, on the meanings of the dust and ashes of 9/11. Drawing on a century of experiment and speculation, they have devised various means of staying close while keeping distant, of attachment and containment. That the remains of loved ones can now be refigured as risk factors seems a characteristically “modern” predicament. Such concerns about dust and ashes draw attention to contemporary regimes of perceivability and breathability, which are manifested also in atmospheric hazards of climate change and aerosolized viral transmission in pandemic disease—ecological regimes that are extending and reframing the scope of grievability.
