Emergent Ecologies
Eben Kirksey is a permanent faculty member in Environmental Humanities at UNSW Australia and a Visiting Research Scholar at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is the editor of The Multispecies Salon and the author of Freedom in Entangled Worlds: West Papua and the Architecture of Global Power, both also published by Duke University Press.
Hope in the Reverted Zone
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Published:November 2015
Multispecies communities are flourishing in zones of abandon near the City of Knowledge, an abandoned U.S. military installation in Panama. Former bombing ranges have become habitat for a multitude of endangered animals: spider monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi), Baird’s tapirs (Tapirus bairdii), and cotton-top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus). Unexploded bombs and chemical weapons, rivets fastening an emergent ecosystem in place, have the indeterminate properties of the pharmakon. Classically, the pharmakon is a poisonous substance that can have a therapeutic effect depending on the dose, the circumstances, or the context. Isabelle Stengers understands the pharmakon as any obstacle...
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