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Atmospheric disturbances hang over our heads a heavy sense of urgency, a series of alarms that ring out a global chorus of catastrophic proportions: economic collapse, pervasive terror, hysterical politics, ecological disaster. Has crisis become the defining mood of the twenty-first century? Or is this cultural anxiety the exaggerated production of an overactive media in an age of around-the-clock transmissions?

Crisis has long been the defining catalyst of the modern environmental movement, which has gained momentum and legislative traction through its ability to communicate the plight of plant and animal species on a more immediately human scale. In the past decade, concern for the planet's environmental future has moved into mainstream consciousness most markedly through the issues of global warming (or climate change as the more encompassing term), overconsumption of limited natural resources, and the toxic saturation of everything from industrialized food systems and children's toys to Hungarian villages. Increasingly spectacular pressure points of environmental catastrophe—and their undeniable impact on human communities—have manifested these issues as no longer merely inconvenient or marginal to politics but constitutive of new legislative and social agendas. Still, genuine environmentalist action threatens to be subsumed by a more fuzzy conversion to consumerist "eco-friendly" lifestyles.

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towhee [Pipilo crissalis] wakes a human

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The title of an August 2010 article in the satiric newspaper The Onion, "Millions of Barrels of Oil Safely Reach Port in Major Environmental Catastrophe," ironizes the systemic violence and long duration of the petro-imperialism that was reanimated through the BP blowout. Describing the routine docking of an oil tanker at Port Fourchon, Louisiana, The Onion continues: "Experts are saying the oil tanker safely reaching port could lead to dire ecological consequences on multiple levels, including rising temperatures, disappearing shorelines, the eradication of countless species, extreme weather events, complete economic collapse." As Rebecca Solnit notes, the BP blowout is "a story that touches everything else." Solnit's comment, which is not satiric, points to why the article in The Onion is recognizable as humor. The BP blowout marks a rough edge of what we in the United States and arguably in the developed world take for granted as normal, petroleum economies that generate multiple levels of injury. Mike Davis has written of the "dialectic of ordinary disaster" in relation to the apocalyptic rhetoric that defamiliarizes predictable geological events such as landslides in the poorly sited inland suburbs of Los Angeles. Extending Davis's critique, Rob Nixon refers to the "slow violence" of neoliberalism as the occluded referent of "disaster," which in a modern risk society is often a misnomer. 

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Nature and technology are for most people mutually exclusive realms. Many sympathize with Richard Louv's judgment in Last Child in the Woods that generations born since the 1970s are increasingly victims to what he calls "nature-deficit disorder." Predictably, Louv's primary culprits are television and the electronic devices that have come to occupy a disproportionate amount of our time—computers and game consoles in particular. Yet while we may grant that Louv's work has sparked valuable efforts to reclaim wild land for the education and spiritual growth of children, a crucial problem remains in that Louv, like the nature-technology dichotomy itself, leaves little room for forms of media to be productive agents for social and environmental change.

Many of the benefits of the natural experiences Louv describes could be found in computer and video games: free, unstructured play without adult supervision; a chance to learn about natural processes and life cycles, or how people, animals, plants, and inorganic matter are connected; educated mentorship, or a guiding presence knowledgeable enough to provide more information about what one is experiencing; and hands-on activity with actual consequences. While game environments, no matter how lovingly realized, are not substitutes for direct experience of the natural world, more and more people are turning to virtual worlds not only for entertainment but also for challenge, companionship, and even civic participation—why not embrace and encourage game design in forms that recall our favorite modes of natural play?

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Harryette Mullen writes: My tanka diary started with a desire to incorporate into my life a daily practice of walking and writing poetry. Normally I go for short walks in various parts of Los Angeles, Venice, and Santa Monica, or longer hikes in the canyons with friends. I also regularly lead student poets on "tanka walks" in the Mildred Mathias Botanical Garden on the campus of UCLA. At other times, I stroll through unfamiliar neighborhoods as I travel. These poems are my adaptation of a traditional Japanese form of syllabic poetry. Usually a tanka is thirty-one syllables, often written in five lines.

Shy extrovert entices and repels
with petals and thorns. Modest exhibitionist
hides her blush under a pink ruffle.

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What is ecocriticism? The imprecision with which it has been defined and the increasingly disparate uses to which it and its cognates have been put recall Arthur Lovejoy's classic essay "On the Discrimination of Romanticisms" (1924)—by which Lovejoy meant the problem of distinguishing among conflicting usages that belies the implication of a coherent category implied by its customary deployment in the singular.

For romanticism, Lovejoy tried to impose a semblance of order through historicization, even though he was sorely tempted to throw up his hands. Romanticism "has ceased to perform the function of a verbal sign," he lamented. "When a man is asked . . . to discuss Romanticism, it is impossible to know what ideas or tendencies he is to talk about, when they are supposed to have flourished, or in whom they are supposed to be chiefly exemplified" ("ODR," 232). In a similarly jaundiced mood, one might say the same of ecocriticism.

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Bay-Breasted

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"Acts against nature"—what beastly images are conjured by this phrase? When "acts against nature" are committed, the crimes are of no small measure. Moral indignation is oozing forth, like amoebas through Texas soil, and lives are at stake (maybe literally). What kinds of acts against nature inspire moral outrage? Queer pleasures for sure, even some forms of heterosexual sex, and an assortment of other human practices. Clearly, the nature/culture divide is at issue and at stake, but the logic that tries to hold it in place is quite perverse. On one hand, it is clear that humans are understood to be the actors, the enactors of these "acts against nature." The sense of exteriority is absolute: the crime is against Nature herself, against all that is natural. Nature is the victim, the victimized, the wronged. At the same time, humans who commit "acts against nature" are said to be acting like animals. In other words, the "perpetrator" is seen as damaging nature from the outside, yet at the same time is reviled for becoming part of Nature. Bestiality is surely both a spoken and an unspoken infraction here, but the real crime is the breach of the Nature/culture divide, which has not simply been ruptured but has itself been wronged. In other words, those who would prosecute the "perpetrators" of "crimes against nature" trip over the very divide they seek to secure.

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Mugaworter

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The current ecological crisis has stimulated two flavors of reaction: regular (normative ecophilosophy) and cool (the effervescent philosophical movement known as "speculative realism"). The regular flavor conjures up the good old days when things meant what they said and said what they meant. Initial forays into literary ecocriticism were Trojan horses for a replay of 1970s and 1980s theory wars. For theory, read Derrida. The cool flavor fizzes with the future—the bliss of new thinking, more at home with the shock of ecological reality. The regular flavor is somewhat theistic, while the cool flavor is somewhat nihilistic. The regular flavor establishes Nature as an object of reverent admiration; the cool flavor asserts the deep mystery of a Non-Nature. I've argued elsewhere that "Nature" is a self-defeating concept in ecological philosophy, art, and politics. This applies to any reified substrate whatsoever, any "Non-Nature." In this essay I argue that to say "There is no Nature" is different from saying "There is a Non-Nature." What we should think asserts neither Nature nor Non-Nature, single, solid, and "over yonder." What we should think is far from the cool nihilism of Non-Nature, and far from some "realism of the remainder," à la Derrida or Žižek. Its name is object-oriented ontology (OOO, its preferred acronym), pioneered by Graham Harman in four remarkable books: Tool-Being, Guerilla Metaphysics, Prince of Networks, and The Quadruple Object.

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For twenty-two years I have been concerned with the exploitation of animals. For twenty-eight (my whole life), I have been disabled.

For the past few years I have been painting images of animals in factory farms. The following essay was born from this visual artistic practice. My paintings not only led me to research; they forced me to see and focus on animal oppression for hours every day in a way I never had before. Through this focus I became increasingly aware of the interconnections between the oppression of animals and the oppression of disabled people. This connection did not lie, as many people suggested, in my being confined to my disabled body, like an animal in a cage. Far from this, the connection I found centered on an oppressive value system that declares some bodies normal, some bodies broken, and some bodies food.

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Readers of Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism have long hailed it as a ground-breaking analysis of modern mass atrocity. However, we are only recently beginning to plumb the depths of its critical account of human rights. According to the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, which appeared just three years prior to Arendt's book, "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights." For Arendt the problem with this proposition is that its emphasis on birth assumes that rights are hard-wired into one's natural existence as a human being, when in fact politics takes form as the artifice of speaking and acting as a member of an organized community, for example, as a citizen of a nation-state, something quite different from being a member of a biological species. This biologistic assumption not only removes human beings from the concrete, artificial circumstances that give reality to political communities; it abandons them to an animal ontology in principle disarticulated from the conditions of ethical responsibility and political action. On this account the subject who is said to bear rights is, then, not a human being at all, but rather an animal.

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Bosch [bä SH; bô SH]
Bosch, Hieronymus (c. 1450-1516) Dutch
painter. His highly detailed works are
typically crowded with half-human, half-animal
creatures and grotesque demons in settings
symbolic of sin and folly. M. O. D.

The human is both wholly human and wholly
animal and we are all entirely in our element
in nature and nature is all that is and we are
of it and it is in us and of us as well. Denial
of this has been our greatest folly.

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According to the authors of a text on "Wild Plants in the City," published by the Arnold Arboretum, "The curious gardens of wild greenery that penetrate cracks in city pavement and grow lushly on old building lots are produced primarily by plants which have immigrated from overseas. . . . This continual invasion of seeds helps explain the speed with which weeds can colonize a bare site, even when there are few other plants in view. . . . Within three or four years, an undisturbed lot will be wildly overgrown." In his paradigm-shifting essay on (so-called) weeds, Éloge des vagabondes (In Praise of Vagabonds), French gardener Gilles Clément encourages us to adopt something of the perspective of wild, opportunistic plants (sometimes called ruderals) that are quick to colonize disturbed and abandoned spaces and are, Clément insists, the emissaries of life itself.

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Plants travel. Especially grasses.

They move about as quietly as the wind. We can't do much about the wind.

Were we to harvest clouds, we would be astonished to find a weightless seed mixed in with the loess, a fertile dust. Unpredictable landscapes take shape in the sky.

Chance organizes the details, exploits all possible vectors for the distribution of species. Everything is conducive to travel, from marine currents to shoe soles. Travel essentially belongs to animals. Nature charters berry-eating birds, gardening ants, calm, subversive sheep, whose wool holds field upon field of seed. And the human—an animal shaken by incessant movements, free trader of diversity.

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A review of Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); and Stengers, Isabelle, Cosmopolitics I, trans. Bononno, Robert (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

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A review of Argos Collective, Climate Refugees (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010).

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