An Artforum Best Book of the Year
A Legal Theory Bookworm Book of the Year

“After Nature argues that we will deserve the future only because it will be the one we made. We will live, or die, by our mistakes.” —Christine Smallwood, Harper’s

Nature no longer exists apart from humanity. Henceforth, the world we will inhabit is the one we have made. Geologists have called this new planetary epoch the Anthropocene, the Age of Humans. The geological strata we are now creating record industrial emissions, industrial-scale crop pollens, and the disappearance of species driven to extinction. Climate change is planetary engineering without design. These facts of the Anthropocene are scientific, but its shape and meaning are questions for politics—a politics that does not yet exist. After Nature develops a politics for this post-natural world.

“Dazzling…Purdy hopes that climate change might spur yet another change in how we think about the natural world, but he insists that such a shift will be inescapably political…For a relatively slim volume, this book distills an incredible amount of scholarship—about Americans’ changing attitudes toward the natural world, and about how those attitudes might change in the future.”
—Ross Andersen, The Atlantic

Far into the Atlantic Ocean, the outflow from the Amazon River creates a "sweet sea" of fresh water. At the river's mouth, a vast delta of river channels and marshes, floodplain and upland forests, open and scrub savannas, floating meadows, and mangrove swamps hosts an astonishingly diverse assemblage of plant and animal life. So rich is this biological treasure house that early European explorers deemed it inexhaustible.

In this highly readable book, Nigel Smith explores how human use of the Amazon estuary's natural resources has been affected by technological change, rapid urban growth, and accelerated market integration. Avoiding alarmist rhetoric, he shows how human intervention in the estuary has actually diversified agriculture and helped save floodplain forests from wanton destruction. His findings underscore the importance of understanding the history of land use and the ecological knowledge of local people when formulating development and conservation policies. The book will be of interest to everyone concerned with the fate of tropical forests, conserving biodiversity, and developing natural resources in a sustainable manner.

Widespread human alteration of the planet has led many scholars to claim that we have entered a new epoch in geological time: the Anthropocene, an age dominated by humanity. This ethnography is the first to directly engage the Anthropocene, tackling its problems and paradoxes from the vantage point of the world’s largest tropical rainforest.

Drawing from extensive ethnographic research, Nicholas Kawa examines how pre-Columbian Amerindians and contemporary rural Amazonians have shaped their environment, describing in vivid detail their use and management of the region’s soils, plants, and forests. At the same time, he highlights the ways in which the Amazonian environment resists human manipulation and control—a vital reminder in this time of perceived human dominance. Written in engaging, accessible prose, Amazonia in the Anthropocene offers an innovative contribution to debates about humanity’s place on the planet, encouraging deeper ecocentric thinking and a more inclusive vision of ecology for the future.

Exploring the frozen past to rethink our warming future
 

Do we really know what cold is? In Arcticologies, Lowell Duckert delves into early modern European texts to trace how representations of frigidity from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have contributed to historical understandings of climate and contemporary debates on climate change. Arguing that human culture and science are, in fact, indebted to the cold, Duckert suggests that these early depictions offer critical terms for advancing the aims of climate-change activism and assisting in counterapocalyptic thinking.

An imaginative and intellectual journey, Arcticologies reveals the enduring role of cold in wide-ranging storytelling traditions. It draws on Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Othello and the works of Thomas Dekker, René Descartes, and Thomas Hobbes and is informed throughout by contemporary Indigenous writing, including that of Sheila Watt-Cloutier and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. In reflecting on these assorted accounts, Duckert sees cold as not only an environmental hardship but a source of cultural creativity and resilience, highlighting moments of collaboration between humans and the icy world, from arctic exploration to urban fairs on frozen rivers.

Cold, Duckert makes clear, is more than the absence of warmth. Situating our contemporary obsession with impending planetary meltdown within the mazelike arcticologies of the past, Duckert shows how early modern cold brought about forms of curiosity, vocabulary, and interspecies relationality that can serve us today. In doing so, he asks us to identify what has been lost and who is at risk in today’s thinning cold—while also urging us to imagine alternative futures focused not on inevitable and total collapse but on adaptation and preserving what remains.

A visually stunning narrative of three eras in humankind’s vexed relationship with nature.

Ascension is a novel about the end of nature, or rather, the end of three “natures”: the time just before Darwin changed the natural world; the 1980s, just as the digital and genetic revolutions begin to replace “nature” with “environment”; and today, a time when we have the ability to manipulate nature at both the scale of the planet and at the genome. The narrative follows three different biologists on the brink of each of these cultural extinctions to explore how nature occupies our imaginations and how our imaginations bring the natural world, and our place in it, into existence.

Ascension is a story of how we continually remake the world and are in turn remade by the new nature we’ve created. It is the story of humans yearning to understand their families, themselves, and the world they live in as it comes to a close, leaving them to anticipate what will follow. Rich in visual depictions of the natural world—from nineteenth century engraving and paintings to twentieth century photography and twenty-first century databases—Ascension uses the materials of three eras to drive home our inability to escape nature, and the ways our fates are irrevocably bound together even as our actions usher in an end-time.