We’re now a quarter of the way into the present century, and what a rollercoaster it’s become.
Every ten years this century I’ve posted a list of the “Books of the Decade in Ecocultural Theory.” (The last one was here; the previous, here.) Given how quickly things are evolving — and the precarious state of the world that’s accompanying them — it feels appropriate to take advantage of this quarter-turn in the century’s clock for a deep dig into the kinds of insights we need to make sense of our intertwined ecological and cultural, i.e., ecocultural, challenges.
Here’s a baker’s top ten (which makes eleven) of the books I am nominating for the most ecoculturally insightful of the last 25 years. Three of them were published since my last list, and only four of the remaining eight are repeated from previous lists.* A retrospective gaze enables a revised valuation of the earlier books’ significance, but also opens up an opportunity for me to think a bit more broadly about what’s needed these days. (And I smuggle in several other titles into the comments.)
As always, deep apologies to those whose excellent work is missing from this list. Among the authors who’ve published important work this century are Isabelle Stengers, Deborah Bird Rose, Thom Van Dooren, Marisol de la Cadena, Ursula Heise, Achille Mbembe, Jane Bennett, William Connolly, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Timothy Morton, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Nigel Clark, Joachim Radkau, Alf Hornborg, John R. McNeill, Malcom Ferdinand, Brian Burkhart, Sean Cubitt, Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Stefan Helmreich, and plenty of others whose work I’ve cited elsewhere on this blog or in my own writing.
This list represents one person’s view of things at this particular moment in time. It has little to do with citations or influence, and is certainly not intended to cover any entire field, such as the environmental humanities (which has became too large to encompass) or anything that could be constituted as “ecocultural studies.” I offer it for what it is, and welcome your comments and suggestions for others you would recommend.
1. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena, and Feifei Zhou, Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene: The New Nature (Stanford University Press, 2024) — There are many books that try to cover our current Anthropocene predicament with a synoptic and transdisciplinary gaze. This one rises to the top of the heap due to the authors’ creative juxtapositions and insightful conceptual language, which draws sciences and humanities, histories and ontologies, together around concepts of patchiness, ferality, rupture, hotspots, scale-jumping, infrastructure building (and “unbuilding”), and varied other ways of mapping and “collaging” time, space, and change. The book is an accompaniment to the many-authored digital project Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene, which is worth spending several hours perusing. Together they make for a powerful educational punch, one aimed at resituating us within, and no longer on the (incomprehending) outside of, the processes that we are making through our lives and that we can therefore unmake and remake if we put our minds to it.
2. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds., Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth (ZKM/MIT Press, 2020) — Bruno Latour edited or co-edited so many important anthologies this century, each one a little more audacious than the last, and most of them accompanying exhibitions that were equally ambitious, transdisciplinary, and boundary-breaking. Each of them — from Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art (2002) and Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (2005), both co-edited with Peter Weibel, to Reset Modernity!, edited with Christophe Leclercq (2016), and this one, with Weibel — are worthy of close attention. Latour’s own work has also remained singularly important: An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns (2012) served as his magnum opus, though verdicts on it remain rather mixed, while Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (1999 in its French original, 2004 in English translation) and Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime (2017) have both retained an influence on much that has come after them. I list this volume here not just because it’s the last of the collaborative ventures and therefore the most up-to-date in its concerns, but because its notion of a “critical zone” is capacious enough to corral scientists, artists, and humanists into a different understanding of life on this planet. Framed by Latour’s notion of “landing on Earth,” or becoming “earthbound” after our society’s flirtation with a kind of disconnected globalism, Critical Zones contains a richness of valuable ideas worth working with in the years to come.
3. Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (Verso, 2015) — There’s a great need for a grand synthesis of environmental history (the history of human relations with environments), historical ecology (the historical study of ecosystemic relations in their full complexity), and political economy (the historical interplay between politics and economics) — political ecology, for short — that would make sense of the ways in which human ways of living have brought the “social” and the “natural” into different kinds of relational entanglements over time, leading to the present conjuncture with its sticky impediments for moving forward. To my mind, Jason Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life makes the most important single contribution to this task of any book published this century. Its central idea — that “nature” and “society” are historical products whose configuration changes depending on what humans and their economic systems do — may not be original, but its ambitious synthesis of Marxist political economy and world-systems theory with ecology makes it indispensible for understanding today’s economic system, how it emerged, and how it is causally related to the systemic crisis we are currently in the midst of. (That said, the ten years since its publication call for an update that would make sense of the latest wave of capitalist overproduction, that of digital media and now AI. The book was written before Shoshana Zuboff’s 2019 The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, and it shows.)
4. Amitav Ghosh, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2021) — Ghosh’s The Great Derangement brought this novelist onto the stage of global literary stars articulating an ecological message. This follow-up is one of the most incisive overviews of the messy 400-year ecocultural history that leads us into the current climate precipice. In a sense, it doesn’t belong on this list, as it’s less an original contribution than a distillation of so much of what the ecocultural disciplines have learned in the past decades. With his skills as a narrator, however, Ghosh accomplishes what more scholarly authors fail to do, resulting in what is probably the most readable volume on this list. “The questions of who is a brute and who is fully human, who makes meaning and who does not,” he writes, “lie at the core of the planetary crisis.” If this insight seems puzzling to you, and even if it is simply not yet second nature to you, then I strongly recommend reading Ghosh’s tour de force from start to finish.
5. Arturo Escobar, Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes (Duke University Press, 2008) — In 2010, I described this book as a “tremendous synthesis that places social movements — actual people doing things together to change their worlds — at the center of thinking for how the ecological-cultural dynamic is changing in our time.” Cultural anthropologist Escobar has consistently worked at clarifying the intersections between culture and ecology, from his early critiques of “developmentalism” through to his development of the notion of a “pluriversal politics,” which has become so influential in decolonial thought. For its detailed exploration of Afro-Colombian socio-ecological movements, this remains his most brilliant and satisfying volume.
6. Anselm Franke, Elisa Giuliano, Denise Ryner, Claire Tancons, Zairong Xiang, Ceremony (Burial of an Undead World) (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2022) — In his years curating art at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), and before that at KW Berlin and Extra City Kunsthal in Antwerp, Anselm Franke has led some of the most audacious exhibitions and multidisciplinary projects working the intersections of politics, ecology, and culture. Animism was particularly innovative (and the HKW’s 10-year-long Anthropocene Curriculum also deserves mention in this context, though it wasn’t led by Franke). Ceremony strikes me as a kind of grand finale mega-project, a deeply thoughtful and wildly interdisciplinary exhibition and book project that takes its starting point from Caribbean philosopher Sylvia Wynter’s declamatory 1984 proposal that we need to find a “ceremony” for decomposing the ontology and practice of colonial modernity, so that a new way forward for humanity could be found. It is a rich and beautiful collection full of wonders.
7. Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human (University of California Press, 2013) — Kohn’s book brought Peircian (bio)semiotics to a wider world (which made it especially relevant to my fields of theory), but more importantly it connects the “ontological turn” of current anthropology with rigorous thinking about what a forest, a society, and communication are and how they alter the very notion of what it means to be human. Other books on the sociality of forests, fungi, plants, and other nonhumans may be much more approachable, but the stakes in Kohn’s game are higher and more satisfying, if you’re willing to do the work for it. I still highly recommend it.
8. John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (University of Chicago Press, 2015) — I’ve been arguing (most recently in The New Lives of Images, but also in The Routledge Handbook of Ecomedia Studies) that understanding media, especially at this digital juncture of their global development, is crucial to any kind of societal transformation we might be able to pull off. Peters’ book is not about digital media, but it is arguably the most conceptually powerful rethinking of what media are, and how the world is essentially a mediated world. As a preparation for thinking mediatically about the world we live in, with all of the environments that mediate it for us, it is unparallelled.
9. Donna Haraway, Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin with the Chthulucene (Duke University Press, 2016) — Haraway remains a giant in the world of cultural theory and this is arguably her most satisfying and engrossing book of the century so far. It’s rich in theoretical provocation and in ethnographic texture, and suffused with an intelligence that works its way from the midst of all the muddles and “troubles” of our time to indicate directions for movement and creative action. Its focus on the arts and on visioning or “futuring” exercises is particularly helpful in our days when, as it’s been put too often, the end of the world is easier to imagine than the end of capitalism. Haraway envisions something different to both of those “ends.”
10. (tie) Toby Hemenway, The Permaculture City: Regenerative Design for Urban, Suburban, and Town Resilience (Chelsea Green, 2015) — Most people today live in cities. For our world to transition from an unsustainable global economy built around fossil fuels, which underlie our food, transportation, and communication systems, to one that is much more sustainably integrated within local ecological patterns and capacities, we need to transform our cities. Permaculture — which began as a kind of unacknowledged appropriation of Indigenous agro-ecological practices — is not the answer to everything, but its core insights are essential. Of all the books published on the topic, this one is the one that (to my knowledge) is most usefully focused around transforming our cities. With sections exploring city gardening, food forests, urban water systems, local economies, and much more, it is brimming with insights on how to make cities not only more habitable, but socially and ecologically regenerative, which is crucial for any kind of human future.
10. (tie) Robert L. Thayer, Jr., Life Place: Bioregional Thought and Practice (University of California Press, 2003) — This could be considered a companion to Hemenway’s book, providing the broader regional perspective that underpins the kind of thinking that permaculture, bioregionalism, agroecology, ecovillages, and other forms of world-changing ecological praxis are aimed at. It’s over two decades old, but is still is the closest thing we have to a manual in bioregional living. If there’s anything that would likely be added were this book to be revised for the mid-2020s, it’s a chapter on collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in bioregional activities. That said, what all locally and regionally focused approaches, like this or Hemenway’s book, tend to neglect is the global scale, which is why the first several books on this list focus on that. (Their lack of the political can also be a weakness; a book like Terry Leahy’s The Politics of Permaculture attempts to address that.)
Read these eleven books and you will be pretty well informed about how we’ve gotten to where we are and what can be done about it.
Comments and suggestions welcome!
*This was corrected soon after publication when I realized that Critical Zones had been published and mentioned in the 2020 list, but did not make the top ten.