Vetri Nathan
As lands burn, oceans boil, species go extinct and cultural conflicts multiply, Our Multispecies Futures urgently calls for a paradigm-shift in humanity’s relationship to life on Earth. This timely volume argues that the delusion of human exceptionalism stokes colonial and hierarchical relationships with our animal, plant, fungal, and microbial companions. It undertakes multi-scalar explorations of life, ranging from vast oceanic currents down to intricate psychic mechanisms that fuel our personal fears, desires and fantasies to reveal both the damage of this delusion and the rewards of overcoming it. We discover how multispecies harm is amplified by the digital revolution which has rapidly accelerated opportunities to control life (both human and non) for profit. The book proposes the Cybercene as a new framework to study this moment, where digital ’realities’ and representations are rapidly transforming identities and substituting the value of actual bodies and living habitats. Rather than focusing on doomsday scenarios, however, readers are invited to explore pragmatic alternative pathways for ecocultural care and kinship. We embark on a global journey, mapping diverse entangled lives-from mini-foxes and mysterious underground fungal networks to seemingly sentient chatbots and the American Bison. Through these stories, the book suggests ways to jam and ’glitch’ capture-and-control practices, and how to care differently for our multispecies kin. Accessible to a broad audience, Our Multispecies Futures serves as both an introduction to the young field of Multispecies Studies and a manual showcasing new interdisciplinary research methods like multispecies thick-mapping and naturalcultural discourse analysis. It offers a vital guide for reimagining a shared future.
