Becoming-With: Living Lexicon for the Environmental Humanities

Abstract

The Environmental Humanities is an engaged, scholarly response to madness - an attempt to address the systemic pathology of a species disconnected from the conditions of its world. Becoming-with offers a metaphysics grounded in connection, challenging delusions of separation - the erroneous belief that it is somehow possible to exempt ourselves from Earth's ecological community. Donna Haraway tells us that '[i]f we appreciate the foolishness of human exceptionalism then we know that becoming is always becoming 'with', in a contact zone where the outcome, where who is in the world, is at stake.' This image speaks directly to the life and death stakes of failing to recognise connectivity, feedback loops, interdependence and vulnerability.