Clouds come into visible being, in the verb-oriented grammar of many Indigenous languages, as bodies opting to join this sky or river, for now. In their constant modifications, clouds highlight the recursive nature of time and space. Despite the shared focus of both queer temporality and queer ecology on existence as relational, Indigenous and queer studies are not often brought into dialogue. This article engages Jill Carter’s (Anishinaabe) and Scott Andrews’s (Cherokee) approach of “red reading,” or reading non-Indigenous texts through Indigenous perspectives, to foster such dialogue by bridging Indigenous ecologies with queer temporality. Accordingly, this article expands queer temporality in dialogue with Indigenous ecologies to generate implications for queer ecology: in particular, a theory of entangled presence. Entangled presence extends theories of queer temporality to hold spirals of pasts, presents, and futures and to affirm time as ecological kinship. The entangled presence in A. E. Housman’s cloud poem “The Merry Guide” resembles the scientific cloud writing of Luke Howard and Thomas Forster. Housman’s, Howard’s, and Forster’s invocations of clouds model entangled presence, an ecological grammar of time that amplifies awareness of ecological kinship.

The idea that we must move beyond anthropocentrism to overcome interspecies injustice and environmental collapse is widespread in the environmental humanities. Yet the concept of anthropocentrism remains ambiguous and so do some of the arguments raised against it. What exactly should we move beyond and why? The article attempts to answer these questions and clarify the merits and limitations of both anthropocentric and post-anthropocentric views in ethics and ontology. This article proposes that although some implausible and morally problematic forms of anthropocentrism should be denounced, there are other ways we must remain anthropocentric. The article disambiguates the concept of anthropocentrism and assesses the key arguments against it, then outlines a minimal form of anthropocentrism that we call ostensive humanism. Ostensive humanism is compatible with many post-anthropocentric ideas but suggests that the ethical and political project aimed at ending interspecies injustice and the climate crisis inevitably points to human beings as its moral addressees.

Drawing on heritage ecologies, this article proposes a role for the environmental humanities in formalizing a shift from predominantly historical to increasingly futures-focused heritage, reflecting the planetary shift from the Holocene to the early Anthropocene. Its geographic focus is Antarctica, a region formally dedicated to peace and science and governed through the Antarctic Treaty System. Historic Sites and Monuments (HSMs) in the Antarctic are designated to commemorate events ranging from late nineteenth century exploration to contemporary scientific endeavors. Some are tourist destinations, many are almost inaccessible, and others have disappeared under ice. One is yet to be located. As an assemblage, the HSMs appear a little unruly, entangled with geopolitics and ambiguous in purpose. Heritage ecologies suggest that natural processes should not be separated from cultural contexts and include relations between human and more-than-human. More nuanced, potentially disruptive interpretations of Antarctic heritage should extend to new sites that both recognize the peace and science principles of the Antarctic Treaty and highlight the Anthropocene’s precarities. This article is thus a provocation within the environmental humanities to rethink heritage practices with respect to nonhuman nature and the Anthropocene and to consider monuments for the end (geographically at least) of the world.

This preface offers an overview of the guiding themes of the special section. It notes the focus on a critical appraisal of dominant narratives designed to render acceptable contemporary extraction practices in Latin America and their effects on local communities and the environment. Together the essays identify a need to rethink extraction and its implications and advocate for more equitable and environmentally conscious approaches to resource extraction. The preface underscores the intractable nature of mineral extraction, including for renewable energies. Extraction is here to stay. The questions still to be answered are what kinds of extraction, for whom, and at what cost?

Bioenergy derived from plants is typically defined by its capacity to act as a sustainable substitute for fossil fuels. Yet plants might also help us to rethink the very purpose of energy in the Anthropocene, with implications for prevailing attitudes toward growth, productivity, waste, and even pleasure. Drawing on resource and vegetal geographies, the energy humanities, and posthumanist accounts of capitalist production, this provocation begins by highlighting the shared reliance of bioenergy and fossil energy on the work that plants do while photosynthesizing and growing. Recognizing bioenergy as dependent on vegetal labor, rather than as a free gift of nature, serves to foreground the inherent contestability of plants’ use as energy feedstocks. By attending closely to the temporalities and rhythms of vegetal labor, the article argues that we might work with plants not just to restructure incumbent energy systems but also to reshape underlying energy cultures. A closer attunement to plants, the article concludes, could enable society to imagine and embrace new habits of energy consumption. Such habits would reify not continuous expansion or growth, nor even sustainability, but rather the patient anticipation of more transient episodes of deliberate squander and excess.

Mr. João de Deus, an elderly Afro-Brazilian man, worked on the ground and contributed to the beginning of the modern Brazilian oil industry. His is a story of environmental hope and personal resilience with roots in the deep past and outcomes that reverberate to the present. João de Deus’s story reveals many layers of history beyond human activity, weaving together different temporalities and kinds of hope. This article layers different temporalities—geological, ecological, and human—to emphasize their interconnectedness. As a method, layering various chronological scales helps highlight how they collectively contribute to a complex and nuanced history of a particular individual, community, or place. It considers the simultaneous existence and impact of multiple historical layers, emphasizing the interplay of different historical timescales and historical actors. João de Deus, situated atop ancient geological layers potentially rich in oil, experienced life as a Black man in slavery-era Brazil. Amid the ecological presence of African oil palms and the emerging industrialization of the Maraú Peninsula, he found himself entangled in multiple concurrent histories of different chronological scales, all influencing his destiny.

This article examines the use of humor in contemporary environmental short films, centering on the alleviating power of humor and its capacity to challenge conventional modes of perception. It argues that humor constitutes an important narrative device in the stories of critical hope that scholars claim are necessary in moving beyond the debilitating registers of apocalyptic rhetoric and crisis discourse. By comparing two short films—the Indian satire Finding Beauty in Garbage, and the American mockumentary The Majestic Plastic Bag—the article examines the affordance of irony, parody, and satire to model alternative and hopeful ways of interacting with contemporary toxic landscapes. The article demonstrates that while genres and devices such as satire, irony, and parody all trouble anthropocentric paradigms of human mastery, they do so in different ways and with different implications. Whereas satire offers an effective vehicle for lamenting the proliferation of waste, the critical mood that defines the genre also restricts its capacity for generating meanings and sensibilities outside conventional environmental discourse. By contrast, parody and irony appear more suited to mobilize such changes, as their playful estrangements model innovative and self-reflexive ways of perceiving waste as a source of beauty, a site of agency, and an object of guilt.

This essay analyzes Miami as a place where plants are a major component of urban infrastructure. The centrality of tropical plants to the growth of Miami connects that city to the history of empire, where control of plant matter was the violent model for the standardization and distribution practices of modern infrastructure. In Miami, the US Department of Agriculture established a Plant Introduction Garden in 1898, with “Agricultural Explorer” David Fairchild activating networks connecting India, Kew Gardens, and Washington to bring mostly Asian tropical fruits, shrubs, and flowers to South Florida. A close reading of archives of botanical gardens, plant nurseries, and community organizations shows that Miami plant infrastructure was created jointly by these elite political/scientific networks and by vernacular, informal networks of Black labor migration and horticultural know-how. The essay focuses on the cultivation of Miami’s best-known plant product, the Haden mango, and the vital role in its propagation played by Black Bahamian gardener Nathan Sands, whose letters to his employer David Fairchild are preserved in the latter’s papers. Recovering the stories of people like Nathan Sands is vital to understanding the development of a global metropolis whose plant infrastructure erased the Black horticultural work on which it depended.

What conditions of possibility have emerged for learning to live on a new earth? This special section builds on scholarship in the environmental humanities, critical Black studies, and geophilosophy to explore how emergent ways of becoming human are forged in relation to powerful earth dynamics, even while earth’s powers are constitutive of contemporary forms of domination. Geologizing Sylvia Wynter’s understanding of being human as a praxis, it proposes that earth as praxis (a) provides a diagnosis of the deeply embedded forms of power that have been materialized, over several centuries, in the earthly conditions of life itself; and (b) represents a critical potential for creating new ways to live on earth through the practical exploration of geosocial relations. We highlight three modes of earth praxis. Inhuman territorializations calls attention to the landscapes and earthy matter subjected to racializing and territorializing modes of power. In turn, such practices participate in the constitution of dehumanized, racialized, and dispossessed bodies and peoples. Becoming geological refers to the ways human forms of living have become shot through with earth system dynamics, mineralogical relations, and energetic possibilities, to the extent that people cannot be who they are without these pervasive anthropogenic geologies. Finally, planetary predicaments helps diagnose the politically vital and collective but deeply unequal and nonhomogeneous conditions of the present. Earth as praxis offers an analytical grip on emerging planetary earth relations that breaks with abstract, universalizing categories, and is capable of diagnosing the wide range of today’s violent, creative, and liberatory planetary practices.