In Communicating in the Anthropocene: Intimate Relations, the contributors analyze how to live in connection with other beings in the face of crisis and to engage the concept of the Anthropocene from within.

The purpose of Communicating in the Anthropocene: Intimate Relations is to tell a different story about the world. Humans, especially those raised in Western traditions, have long told stories about themselves as individual protagonists who act with varying degrees of free will against a background of mute supporting characters and inert landscapes. Humans can be either saviors or destroyers, but our actions are explained and judged again and again as emanating from the individual. And yet, as the coronavirus pandemic has made clear, humans are unavoidably interconnected not only with other humans, but with nonhuman and more-than-human others with whom we share space and time. Why do so many of us humans avoid, deny, or resist a view of the world where our lives are made possible, maybe even made richer, through connection? In this volume, we suggest a view of communication as intimacy. We use this concept as a provocation for thinking about how we humans are in an always-already state of being-in-relation with other humans, nonhumans, and the land.

Table of Contents

Foreword: Undisciplined Stories

Acknowledgments

Carol J. Adams

1. Introduction: Intimate Relations for Earthly Survival

Alexa Dare and C. Vail Fletcher

Part I: Grief, Resilience, and Storytelling

2. Vigilant Mourning and the Future of Earthly Coexistence

Joshua Trey Barnett

3. Presence and Absence in the Watershed: Storytelling for the Symbiocene

Emily Plec

4. The Trouble with Resilience

Jessica Holmes

5. Solastalgia and Art Therapy in Climate Change

Chelsea Call

6. Living (in) Spider Webs: More-than-Human Intimacy in Installation Art by Tómas Saraceno

Katharina Alsen

Part II: Nonhuman Collaborators: Oysters, Birds, and Elephants

7. The Permeable Heart: Mindfulness in Animal-Human Communication

Peggy J. Bowers

8. Intimacy on the Half-Shell: Place, Oysters, and the Emerging Narrative of Virginia Aquaculture

Anne K. Armstrong, Richard C. Stedman, and Marianne E. Krasny

9. i am naiad: Becoming Benthic

laura c carlson

10. Ada Clapham Govan and “Birds I Know:” Ecological Intimacy in a Mass-mediated Sisterhood

Peter W. Oehlkers and Anna Ijiri Oehlkers

11. Dialogic Elephant and Human Relations in Sri Lanka as Social Practices of Cohabitation

Elizabeth Oriel, Deepani Jayantha, and Amal Dissanayaka

12. ocean medicine, mother medicine, and sky medicine

Michaela Keeble

Part III: Plants and Other Family Members

13. Weirding Wellness: Mushrooms, Medicine, and the Uncanny Renaissance of Psilocybin in the Chthulucene

Josh Potter

14. Multispecies Motherhood: Connecting with Plants Through Processes of Procreation

Mariko Oyama Thomas

15. Plant Persons, More-Than-Human Power, and Institutional Practices in Indigenous Higher Education

Keith Williams and Suzanne Brant

16. OAK

Marybeth Holleman

17. Objects/Ecologies: Jardin d’Incertitude le système écologique et l’objet technologique

Christianna Bennett

Part IV: Nonhuman Agency, Activism and Legal Personhood

18. If the Ocean Were a Person

Jenny Rock and Ellen Sima

19. Personal Affairs: Litigating Nonhuman Animal Personhood in the Anthropocene

S. Marek Muller

20. Tahlequah’s Internatural Activism: Situating the Body and the Intimacy of Grief as Evidence of Human-Caused Climate Change

Madrone Kalil Schutten

21. Never the Same River Twice: How Legal Personhood of Rivers Affects Perceived Stability of Policy Solutions

Carie Steele

22. The Titans at the Heart of the Anthropocene: Diving into the Non-human Imagery of Leviathan

Patricia Castello Branco

23. Listen to the Lake: Nature as Stakeholder

Kathy Isaacson

24. The Geo-Doc: A Proposed New Communications Tool for Planetary Health

Mark Terry

Part V: Gender, Earthly Intimacies, and Other Trouble

25. Intimate Dwelling and Mourning Loss in the (m)Anthropocene: Ecological Masculinities and the Felt Self

Todd LeVasseur and Paul M. Pulé

26. The Climate Gaze and Koalas in Extremis

Lyn McGaurr and Libby Lester

27. From Fatbergs to Microplastics: New Intimacies of an Extruded World

Paul Alberts

28. Doğa İçin Çal (Play for Nature)

Çağrı Yılmaz

29. Subversive Art: Communicating the Climate Crisis on a Planetary Scale

Catherine Sarah Young