Paper short abstract:

Building on indigenous and scientific portrayals of ecological catastrophe, this paper experiments with the idea that environmental crisis makes humans constantly other, allowing for unexpected, poetic forms of environmental relationality, sensitivity and understandings of responsibility to emerge.

Paper long abstract:

The "Anthropocene" is a contemporary framing of nature-culture that demands that we re-think humanity's relationship to the environment, and has caught the attention of scholars across the social sciences and humanities. But an intriguing tension has emerged from these debates. Either we understand the inanimate as agential, and therefore potentially deterministic, in order to countenance the crisis that confronts us; or we retain and re-iterate the anthropocentrism of this crisis, in order to be able to marshall people to do anything about it. The term "Anthropocene", in its polysemic usage, in fact encapsulates this.



In this paper, we explore this tension through the notion of 'environmental indeterminisms', to consider the idea that rather than determine what humans are, the environment makes us constantly other than we are. This can result in unexpected, poetic forms of environmental relationality and understandings of responsibility. Investigating this form of environmental otherness means thinking with environmental excess rather than trying to contain it, and opens up the possibility of new sorts of unstable and even destructive configurations between the material and the immaterial, the conceptual and the concrete, humans and the earth. Theoretically, environmental indeterminism moves us away from the metaphorical safe-holds of "stability", and towards a poetic process that is radically unstable and volatile. In the paper, we explore environmental indeterminism and ecological poetic process through a comparison of indigenous human and non-human critical relationalities, and Western climate scientific engagements with environmental crisis.