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ajkhn's review against another edition
5.0
I was very surprised by how much I enjoyed this. It presents itself as a very dry biological text, except also with quotations of Sloterdijk. It looks intimidating!
But after the first few pages, Kirksey brings a lot of himself into it to try and create this optimistic view of post-apocalyptic life. What sorts of creatures will survive? Where will creatures survive? Will humans be one of those creatures? It's a work of extraordinary empathy that shows how to understand ant life, monkey life and just kinda like...life.
This may sound very new-agey but Kirksey is well-versed in rigorous science and colonial critique (which is necessary, since the book is largely based in Panama and Costa Rica). He does a good job balancing readability – especially for laypeople like me – and academic argument.
It's a great book to plan for life after life starts to get weird and bad. And that counts as a ringing endorsement, I believe.
But after the first few pages, Kirksey brings a lot of himself into it to try and create this optimistic view of post-apocalyptic life. What sorts of creatures will survive? Where will creatures survive? Will humans be one of those creatures? It's a work of extraordinary empathy that shows how to understand ant life, monkey life and just kinda like...life.
This may sound very new-agey but Kirksey is well-versed in rigorous science and colonial critique (which is necessary, since the book is largely based in Panama and Costa Rica). He does a good job balancing readability – especially for laypeople like me – and academic argument.
It's a great book to plan for life after life starts to get weird and bad. And that counts as a ringing endorsement, I believe.
everyeggmm's review against another edition
4.0
Emergent Ecologies by Eben Kirksey is a work of multispecies ethnography that, marrying ecology with anthropology, seeks to look at the way life is thriving in landscapes generally thought of as forsaken to climate change. Examining ants in Panama, macaques in Florida, and a menagerie of many other colorful species relations, Kirksey paints a future for conservation science that, dismissing the popular apocalyptic narratives of current ecology, looks for the light at the end of the tunnel in the ways in which novel ecosystems are emerging in a shattered world.
Witty, engrossing, and insightful, Kirksey’s ethnography has many of the positives of the discipline, with few of the negatives. Though it still errs more than I would like on the side of abstract academia (we get it, you’ve read a lot of French dudes), I managed to juxtapose this with entertaining and informative thick description, and a language that allows one to grasp its arcane concepts with relative ease even if they are not familiar with them. Get past the jargon and this book will change the way you look at be current climate crises plaguing our planet. I know it changed perspectives for me.
Witty, engrossing, and insightful, Kirksey’s ethnography has many of the positives of the discipline, with few of the negatives. Though it still errs more than I would like on the side of abstract academia (we get it, you’ve read a lot of French dudes), I managed to juxtapose this with entertaining and informative thick description, and a language that allows one to grasp its arcane concepts with relative ease even if they are not familiar with them. Get past the jargon and this book will change the way you look at be current climate crises plaguing our planet. I know it changed perspectives for me.
gkahan's review against another edition
4.0
a brilliant mashup of ethnography, memoir, biological research, and new materialist theorizations of various organisms adapting to human-compromised environments. Kirksey takes fieldwork and unpacks it through the work of Donna Haraway, Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour, Karen Barad, Jacques Derrida, and many more. this book pointed me to Anna Tsing's simultaneously spiteful yet hopeful refrain: "ruins are now our gardens" (a quote taken from a Tsing paper appearing in an anthology Kirksey also edited: [b:The Multispecies Salon|21413628|The Multispecies Salon|Eben Kirksey|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1397423228l/21413628._SX50_.jpg|40714436]).
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