Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene

Challenging us to look at life in new and excitingly different ways, each part of this two-sided volume is informative, fascinating, and a source of stimulation to new thoughts and activisms. I have no doubt I will return to it many times." — Michael G. Hadfield

Living on a damaged planet challenges who we are and where we live. This timely anthology calls on twenty eminent humanists and scientists to revitalize curiosity, observation, and transdisciplinary conversation about life on earth.

As human-induced environmental change threatens multispecies livability, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet puts forward a bold proposal: entangled histories, situated narratives, and thick descriptions offer urgent “arts of living.” 

Included are essays by scholars in anthropology, ecology, science studies, art, literature, and bioinformatics who posit critical and creative tools for collaborative survival in a more-than-human Anthropocene. 

The essays are organized around two key figures that also serve as the publication’s two openings: Ghosts, or landscapes haunted by the violences of modernity; and Monsters, or interspecies and intraspecies sociality. 

Ghosts and Monsters are tentacular, windy, and arboreal arts that invite readers to encounter ants, lichen, rocks, electrons, flying foxes, salmon, chestnut trees, mud volcanoes, border zones, graves, radioactive waste—in short, the wonders and terrors of an unintended epoch.

Edited by Elaine Gan, Nils Bubandt, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, and Heather Anne Swanson

With contributions from Lesley Stern, Kate Brown, Deborah Bird Rose, Jens-Christian Svenning, Andreas Hejnol, Karen Barad, Nils Bubandt, Andrew S. Mathews, Anne Pringle, Mary Louise Pratt, Ursula K. Le Guin, Donna Haraway, Margaret McFall-Ngai, Scott