Carp as Villians and Victims
Teri Harman considers resilience, fishy companionship, and the culpability of “invasive” carp in Utah Lake. Are carp villains or victims?
Category: Essays
A Cage of One’s Own? On Interspecies Captive-ation
Using the concept of captivation, Quinn Georgic unpacks human-animal interspecies relations by looking closely at mutual power that binds humans and primates together—from HBO’s CHIMP CRAZY to fieldwork with lemurs.
Kelp Can Help Build More Just Futures
Lydia Lapporte traces how the project of kelp recovery in the Pacific Ocean connects to the mission of decarceration. Relational companionship and abolition ecologies can be useful for both kelp and incarcerated people.
Consensual AI? A Call for Indigenous-Led Caribou Conservation
Genevieve Pfeiffer explores human-caribou entanglements and how Indigenous relationships with them could guide future conservation efforts—avoiding past disasters like the James Bay Project.
My Strange Kinship with a Tick
What messages are shared through a tick bite? Maxime Fecteau explores his experience with Lyme disease, revealing how an undesired relationship with ticks nonetheless has profound impact on his way of seeing ecological degradation, multispecies kinship, and the Anthropocene.
Beastly Consent and Relationships Beyond Boundaries
Vita Sleigh investigates the connections between animal consent, interspecies erotics, and the (at times violent) power differentials that characterize commonly experienced relationships with animals. How can we attend to the otherness of creatures and hold our attractions to them with care?
Swampy Relations & Imperfect Restoration
There’s a sinking swamp in the middle of Manhattan that has kept a host of species safe for millennia. Nat Xu uses the space and their work in it to reflect on Indigenous stewardship, more-than-human precarity, and restorative conservation as an imperfect practice.
Losing Touch with Herring in the Rappahannock River
Mara Dicenta Vilker, Micah Dill, and Elena McCullough explore herring as interspecies companions, bringing together herring restoration discourse with fishers’ oral histories.
How to Be More Like Biocrusts in Precarious Times
Lizzie Smith describes the oft-overlooked living skin of the desert: biological soil crusts or “biocrusts.” Biocrust bundles show that deserts are full of life, wonder, and instructions for a more interconnected future.
Equine Companionship and the Multispecies Construction of Wilderness
Inspired by volunteering on equestrian trail crews in the Cascade Mountains, Kathleen Gekiere argues wilderness is a multispecies performance, embodied by the practices of horses and humans on the trail.
