The recent 10,000 year history of climatic stability on Earth that enabled the rise of agriculture and domestication, the growth of cities, numerous technological revolutions, and the emergence of modernity is now over. We accept that in the latest phase of this era, modernity is unmaking the stability that enabled its emergence. But we are deeply worried that current responses to this challeng are focused on market-driven solutions and thus have the potential to further endanger our collective commons. Today public debate is polarized. On one hand we are confronted with the immobilizing effects of knowing "the facts" about climate change. On the other we see a powerful will to ignorance and the effects of a pernicious collaboration between climate change skeptics and industry stakeholders. Clearly, to us, the current crisis calls for new ways of thinking and producing knowledge. Our collective inclination has been to go on in an experimental and exploratory mode, in which we refuse to foreclose on options or jump too quickly to "solutions."In this spirit we feel the need to acknowledge the tragedy of anthropogenic climate change. It is important to tap into the emotional richness of grief about extinction and loss without getting stuck on the "blame game." Our research must allow for the expression of grief and mourning for what has been and is daily being lost. But it is important to adopt a reparative rather than a purely critical stance toward knowing. Might it be possible to welcome the pain of "knowing" if it led to different ways of working with non-human others, recognizing a confluence of desire across the human/non-human divide and the vital rhythms that animate the world?
We think that we can work against singular and global representations of "the problem" in the face of which any small, multiple, place-based action is rendered hopeless. We can choose to read for difference rather than dominance; think connectivity rather than hyper-separation; look for multiplicity - multiple climate changes, multiple ways of living with earth others. We can find ways forward in what is already being done in the here and now; attend to the performative effects of any analysis; tell stories in a hopeful and open way - allowing for the possibility that life is dormant rather than dead. We can use our critical capacities to recover our rich traditions of counter-culture and theorize them outside the mainstream/alternative binary. All these ways of thinking and researching give rise to new strategies for going forward.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Part I. Thinking with Others // The Ecological Humanities (Deborah Bird Rose) -- Economy as Ecological Livelihood (J.K. Gibson-Graham and Ethan Miller) -- Lives in Connection (Jessica K. Weir) -- Conviviality as an Ethic of Care in the City (Ruth Fincher and Kurt Iveson) -- Risking Attachment in the Anthropocene (Lesley Instone) -- Strategia: Thinking with or Accommodating the World (Freya Mathews) -- Contact Improvisation: Dance with the Earth Body You Have (Kate Rigby)
Part II. Stories Shared // Vulture Stories: Narrative and Conservation (Thom van Dooren) -- Learning to be Affected by Earth Others (Gerda Roelvink) -- The Waterhole Project: Locating Resilience (George Main) -- Food Connect(s) (Jenny Cameron and Robert Pekin) -- Graffiti is Life (Kurt Iveson) -- Flying Foxes in Sydney (Deborah Bird Rose) -- Earth as Ethic (Freya Mathews)
Part III. Researching Differently // On Experimentation (Jenny Cameron) -- Reading for Difference (J.K. Gibson-Graham) -- Listening: Research as an Act of Mindfulness (Kumi Kato) -- Deep Mapping Connections to Country (Margaret Somerville) -- The Human Condition in the Anthropocene (Anna Yeatman) -- Dialogue (Deborah Bird Rose) -- Walking as Respectful Wayfinding in an Uncertain Age (Lesley Instone)
About the Author: Katherine Gibson is a Professorial Research Fellow in the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Western Sydney and co-founder with Julie Graham of the Community Economies Collective. She is an economic geographer with an international reputation for innovative research on economic transformation and over 30 years' experience of working with communities to build resilient economies. As J.K.Gibson-Graham, the collective authorial presence she shares with the late Julie Graham (Professor of Geography, University of Massachusetts Amherst), her books include The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy (Blackwell 1996; University of Minnesota, 2006), A Postcapitalist Politics (University of Minnesota, 2006) and Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities, co-authored with Jenny Cameron and Stephen Healy (University of Minnesota, 2013). Her work has been taken up by communities around the world to help them revision and enact economies which sustain people and environments by putting ethical concerns at the centre of negotiation about collective futures.
Deborah Bird Rose is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, and a founding co-editor of Environmental Humanities. Her current research interests focus on human-animal relationships in this time of extinctions, and she writes widely in both academic and literary genres. Her most recent book is Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction (University of Virginia, 2011). Others major books include the re-released second edition of Country of the Heart: An Indigenous Australian Homeland (2011), the third edition of the prize-winning ethnography Dingo Makes Us Human (2009), Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation (2004), and Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal views of Landscape and Wilderness (1996). She is an adjunct Professor in the University of New South Wales Environmental Humanities program, and author of the popular website 'Life at the Edge of Extinction.'
Ruth Fincher is a Professor of Geography at the University of Melbourne. An urban and social geographer, her research interests are in the politics of difference in cities and the role of institutions in influencing urban lives and places. Together with Kurt Iveson, she recently wrote Planning and Diversity in the City: Redistribution, Recognition and Encounter (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
