In an era of global warming, natural disasters, endangered species, and devastating pollution, writing on the environment largely focuses on doomsday scenarios. Eben Kirksey suggests we reject such apocalyptic thinking and instead find possibilities in the wreckage of ongoing disasters. We hope you will join us for a panel discussion and q&a.

 

 

Symbiotic associations of opportunistic plants, animals, and microbes are flourishing in unexpected places. Emergent Ecologies uses artwork and contemporary philosophy to illustrate hopeful opportunities and reframe key problems in conservation biology such as invasive species, extinction, environmental management, and reforestation. Following the flight of capital and nomadic forms of life—through fragmented landscapes of Panama, Costa Rica, and the United States—Kirksey explores how chance encounters, historical accidents, and parasitic invasions have shaped present and future multi-species communities. New generations of thinkers and tinkerers are learning how to care for emergent ecological assemblages—involving frogs, fungal pathogens, ants, monkeys, people, and plants—by seeding them, nurturing them, protecting them, and ultimately letting go.

 

 

Eben Kirksey is Professor of Environmental Humanities at UNSW Australia and Visiting Lecturer at Princeton’s Environmental Institute. He is the editor of The Multispecies Salon and the author of Freedom in Entangled Worlds: West Papua and the Architecture of Global Power. João Biehl is Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University where he is also the Co-Director of Princeton’s Program in Global Health and Health Policy. He is the author of Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment and Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival. Bill Gleason is Professor and Department Chair of English at Princeton University where he is also an affiliate of the Environmental Institute. He is the author of The Leisure Ethic: Work and Play in American Literature, 1840-1940, and of Sites Unseen: Architecture, Race, and American Literature.

 

 

Free and open to the public