Earthlings

Reviews / Votes

A powerful new lens through which to examine our glorious and battered planet. -- Bill McKibben, author of <i>The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened</i> In a narrative style that combines analytical rigour with lyrical empathy and proximity to her subject-matter, Adrian Parr designs a stunning pattern of interaction across entities, elements, ethnicities, generations and species without amalgamating them or flattening their differences. Poetic and speculative, engaged and concerned, but also polemical and investigative, this book is an ode to the affirmative force of relations and processes of becoming, and to the transformative force of the imagination. She emphasizes the joyful aspects of the interdependence of all living things and shows how they are steered by a constant energy exchange with one another. Parr's eco-ontology takes the shape of a trans-environmentalist journey, that challenges anthropocentrism, while appealing to what is best in humans, namely our shared concern for the future of our-and several trillion other-planetary species. -- Rosi Braidotti, Distinguished University Professor, Utrecht University, the Netherlands This highly original contribution on the impending climate catastrophe in the age of the Anthropocene is nothing short of a new bio-ecological philosophy for life. It confronts head-on the need for a new ethics for cohabitation with other life forms on this planet. In doing so, it asks profound questions on the basis of what it means to be human in the twenty-first century. -- Brad Evans, author of <i>Ecce Humanitas: Beholding the Pain of Humanity</i> Insisting that environmental degradation is a crime against the planet and against our own humanity, Parr concludes that late global capitalism has ravaged the earth and that as earthlings we must creatively and collectively produce-give birth-to a new earth: she thus urges new ways of dwelling on earth outside of capitalist expansion, exploitation, despoiling, and death. -- Jana Evans Braziel, author of <i>"Riding with Death": Vodou Art and Urban Ecology in the Streets of Port-au-Prince</i>