Keywords for Environmental Studies:Imagination

Joni Adamson, ProfessorEnglish and Environmental HumanitiesSchool of Letters and SciencesSenior Sustainability Scholar, Global Institute of SustainabilityProgram Faculty, Human and Social Dimensions of Science and TechnologyArizona State University 

--All the trees have spirits, they look, they listen . . . --Juan Carlos Galeano, The Trees Have Mothers

Keywords for Environmental StudiesAgrarian Animals Biodiversity Biopolitics Bioregion. Biomimicry

Biosemiotics Conservation/preservation AnthropoceneBuilt environment Climate change Consumption Cosmos Degradation

Democracy Eco-art Ecocriticism Ecofascism Ecofeminism Ecology

Ecomedia. Economics Ecopoetics Ecoterrorism. Ecotourism Place Education

Environment Environmentalism(s) Ethics Ethnography. Evolution Biosphere

Extinction Genome Globalization Culture Green History Health

Humanism/post-humanism Imagination Imperialism Indigeneity. Landscape

Nature writing Pastoral Environmental Justice Natural disaster Nature Political ecology Pollution Queer ecology Religion

Risk society Species Sublime Sustainability Translation Urban ecology

Multi-species Ethnography:Writing in the Anthropocene

An emerging mode of research which is inflecting many branches of academic study as it gathers up the sensibilities of Charles Darwin, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Gregory Bateson, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, Debra Bird Rose, Eduardo Vivieros de Castro, and Eduardo Kohn to pull creatures—animals, plants, fungi, and microbes once confined “to the realm of zoe or bare life”—that which is killable” into the realm “of bios” (Kirksey and Helmreich 545).

The Wood Wide Web / Rhizomatic Systems

Arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi are mutualistic symbionts living in the roots of 80% of land plant species, and developing extensive, below-ground extraradical hyphae fundamental for the uptake of soil nutrients and their transfer to host plant (Giovannetti, et. al. 1)

American Indian Literature, Ecocriticism and Environmental

Justice, by Joni Adamson

Oral or written “story archives” as “seeing instument” for examining the future of “anthropos” on the planet. In the Americas—indigenous and non-indigenous peoples--have employed these kinds of story cycles, both oral and written, as archives of information, or “living books.” An imaginative force for thinking about “the origins and [ongoing] transformations of the world and its inhabitants.”

World Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, in Tiquipaya,

Cochabamba, Bolivia.

Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth, drafted on Earth Day, April 22, 2010

Cosmovisions thousands of years in the making. . . .

Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth and Climate Change

Declares that multiple species (including humans) should be granted the right to regenerate biocapacity and continue vital cycles

Advocates a politics that supports the recovery, revalidation, and strengthening of “cosmovisons” based on ancient and ancestral indigenous knowledges

Bruno Latour’s Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies

Bruno Latour (here receiving a cultural prize at Ludwig-Maximilians-University , and playfully weaving comments about Avatar into his remarks, February 2010).

Pandora’s Box

Hesiod

Acts of Imagination

James Cameron’s Avatar, tells the story of the Na’vi, blue-skinned humanoids trying to defend their home from rapacious humans intent on mining a rare mineral, “unobtainium,” located directly beneath their “Hometree.”

Juan Carlos Galeano, Columbian-American poet, folklorist, and filmmaker

Darwin looked for similarities and symmetries.

Thinking with narrative techniques of “self-

similarity” or anthropomorphism? Or

imagining biological processes like “neural

networks”

Dr. Grace Augustine, playedby Sigourney Weaver

Grace’s Research: A Debt To Darwin

The Trees Have a Mother: Amazonian Cosmologies, Folktales, and Mystery

Director/Producer, Juan Carlos Galeano

Films on Demandhttp://digital.films.com/play/WNHAND

Aerial roots of red mangrove on an Amazonian river

Forest Mothers

Galeano’s film makes visible the “things”--trees--that ordinary Amazonian people are naming as allies. “Forest mothers” help articulate a “cosmos” of increasingly complex multicultural, multinational and multispecies relationships that are being changed by chemical spills, overfishing, water pollution and poverty. The articulation of these relationships is “cosmo + politics.”

Eduardo Vivieros de Castro

The world is inhabited by different sorts of subjects or persons, human and non-human, which apprehend reality from distinct points of view.

Perspectival Multinaturalism:

“Oel ngati kameie” or “I see you”

CosmographySee Laura Dassow Walls, A Passage to Cosmos

Alexander von Humboldt Franz BoasA discourse that had to be imagined, represented, circulated and

reimagined in works of great beauty and power, among thinkers and poets

A Pluriverse of “Intra-Actions,”the Worlding of Worlds

--De la Cadena, Stengers, Strathorne, Haraway, Latour, Barad, . . . .

• Our Modern World: The “Pluriverse” transformed into a Single Natural Order or “Universe” (Latour)

• Imagining a humanities, science and politics that transforms the “universe” into a “pluriverse” of relations

• Such inter-actions would be imagined as “world making relations” (Barad, 2007).

• Not a multicultural, but a multinatural world (Viviero de la Castro, De la Cadena)