Faculty Favorites: Environmental Care

We encounter and interact with the more-than-human every day. Landscapes, plants, animals, environments, pathogens, waste, beings beyond—the list seems endless. We appear very small in comparison, which makes the catastrophic effects of anthropogenic climate change and intentional environmental degradation even more distressing. How might humans use an approach of care to reorient their relationships to their histories, their politics, their identities, and their worlds? Can an ethics of environmental care mitigate destruction already done, or aid in mutual, multispecies survivals?

In this post, Edge Effects invites scholars to recommend texts that examine the many dimensions of pluriversal or more-than-human care in the past and for the future. These books present many visions for that care, including historical fiction, wider roadmaps for multispecies worlds that redefine and reorient, and niche examinations of shared ways of being. They guide us through a new horizon for coexistence.

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Hester Blum, Professor of English, Penn State University

Recommendation: Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq (Penguin, 2018)

The avant-garde throat singing of Inuk artist and writer Tanya Tagaq (from Ikaluktutiak [Cambridge Bay], Nunavut) lends something of its texture and resonance to her first novel, Split Tooth: the novel’s voice has the multidimensionality of throat singing in its shift from narrative to lyric to legend. In Tagaq’s novel the complexities of Inuit hamlet life in the 1970s register through a young girl’s encounters with the sentience of both the animal world and the Northern Lights, as well as with the ongoing effects on her community of colonialism and the residential school system. Split Tooth models expansiveness, and its vision of Inuit past, present and futurity is witty and disquieting, marvelous and bracing.

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Lisa M. Brady, Professor and Department Chair of History, Boise State University

Recommendation: Making Peace with Nature: Ecological Encounters Along the Korean DMZ by Eleana J. Kim (Duke University Press, 2022)

I love this book—it aligns with my research into the environmental history of Korea’s DMZ, and it pushes me to think about my assumptions about the place and how it has been represented in both popular and academic writing. Kim’s approach, founded in ethnography, requires readers to rethink their views on the DMZ, its history, and its nature. It certainly caused me to reconsider how I characterize the DMZ and its reputation as an “accidental nature preserve!” Very highly recommended for all interested in the region, in conservation, and in war and environment issues generally.

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Catherine De Almeida, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture, University of Washington

Recommendation: Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds by Arturo Escobar (Duke University Press, 2017)

Environmental care in action needs design—the imagining of alternative futures and how they might be equitably implemented to create just built environments that support human and environmental health and well-being. This year, I have the pleasure of leading our Department’s capstone studio, a 2-quarter design course option for students completing their Master degrees in landscape architecture. Arturo Escobar’s Designs for the Pluriverse is a core text to support the students’ visions for transitioning to post-carbon futures, and how they might be enacted in equitable and just ways that embody environmental care in action. This is a critical text for design theory and practice that argues for flattening power relations between trained designers and community groups who practice their own design and visioning approaches as one pathway to decolonizing design. He argues how traditional design perpetuates harmful and capitalist ends, and advocates for an “autonomous design” approach that is collaborative and place-specific, and acknowledges the interdependencies of all beings. It is a critical text in transitions design, and for imagining multiple possibilities and futures for addressing challenges, rather than finding one answer to solve a problem.

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Jerry Zee, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and the High Meadows Environmental Institute, Princeton University

Recommendation: Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs (AK Press, 2020)

This fall, I’m teaching a big introduction to anthropology and environment, where we’re asking questions about what it means to live and die on this planet as it becomes many other planets, and whether there are ways of thinking with the natural world without evacuating it of history, politics, and possibility—that is, without naturalizing it. The course is heavy because worlds are heavy, and I have long given up on hope as a responsible response to existential crisis. I’m looking forward to reading Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals with my students. It’s a stunningly beautiful and deeply considered set of meditations on political and environmental possibility. It considers cetaceans, pinnipeds, the occasional shark, as beings whose ocean Earth is ancient and new, braided in with the worlds of capitalism, captivity, and emancipatory movements, and is imperiled. I read this book while staring at the ocean, and this semester, I’m looking forward to bringing that ocean, with all its teachers, into the classroom.

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Featured image: an ocean diver amongst a coral reef and a school of fish. Photo by NEOM, 2023.