Introduction | Environmental Humanities

In an age of intersecting environmental catastrophes, deadly pandemics, and deepening global inequalities, figures of heroes and villains abound. Ranging from selfless conservationists to uncaring states, protective cosmic beings to COVID-19, and climate-friendly crops to industrial plantations, such figures are conjured by multiple actors across the world, with far-reaching and sometimes unexpected consequences. Implicit in these processes are often questions of causality, responsibility, and redress: Who or what caused this problem? Who or what suffers? Who or what might save the day—and how?

In this special section, we take figures of heroes and villains as things to think through, with, and against. Rather than treating them as self-evident or universally recognizable entities, we approach them as heterogeneous ethnographic objects that circulate in the world with very real effects. Building on this premise, our collection has three main aims. First, we seek to trace how figures of heroes and villains are imagined and deployed in multiple Anthropocenic “problem spaces,” and what narratives, claims, hopes, fears, and relations they undergird.^¹ In this capacity, we suggest, heroes and villains can serve as diagnostic lenses onto wider, often dichotomizing, discourses and politics of blame, accountability, victimhood, redemption, and salvation in the contemporary moment. Our second task, then, is to interrogate and disrupt such inculpatory and salvific logics, asking who/what benefits—and suffers—from their enactment across different contexts in a “patchy” planetary landscape.^² But rather than stop at critique, we aim, third, to tease apart the more-than-human relations, practices, and imaginaries that constitute such dichotomic figures and logics and to ask how they might be reconfigured and transformed for more plural and just planetary futures.

The articles in this collection began as contributions to the webinar series Heroes and Villains in the Anthropocene, which ran across several months of lockdown in 2021. These were then collectively workshopped and developed into the present issue. Fittingly, given the collection’s COVID-riddled origins, our exchanges have been inflected by a shared interest in other- and more-than-human agencies and dynamics. These push us to decenter the individual human or anthropomorphic figures that often populate hero and villain narratives. As we shall see through encounters with “climate cows,” exemplary tubers, unreadable spirit guardians, and untraceable peat fires (among others), heroes and villains are always relationally constituted and transformed through multiple ideas, agencies, practices, and politics. As such, they are inevitably fragile and contingent entities, composed—but always potentially decomposable—through particular intersections of human and other-than-human elements. Such decomposability, however, also generates opportunities for transformation, creativity, and the imagination of alternative, more-than-human configurations and politics for the Anthropocene.

All our contributions take invocations of heroes and villains as a shared opening problem and starting point for comparison and critique. Rather than ending with heroes and villains, we gesture toward a plurality of possibilities for reimagining and reconfiguring modalities of responsibility, accountability, care, and repair in the Anthropocene.

Dichotomizing Logics: Diagnosis and Disruption

While heroes and villains have long populated human imaginations, the Anthropocene’s interlocking social and environmental crises have proven fertile ground for the emergence and sometimes resurgence of particular heroic or villainous figures. Take, for example, witches. When medieval Europe was haunted by imaginaries of a degenerate age and end-times during the Little Ice Age (fourteenth–nineteenth centuries), the idea of a demonic witch conspiracy gained traction. Long winters, wet summers, and unprecedented thunderstorms that led to epidemics, famines, and starvation among the European peasantry were blamed on witches and their weather-making abilities.^³ To end the assumed weather magic, courts across Central Europe began prosecuting witches, leading to thousands of mainly female deaths. Religious-scientific doctrines on witchcraft and demonology, the best known of which is Malleus maleficarum (Hammer of Witches, 1486), legitimized the witch hunts. Written by the German Dominican inquisitor Heinrich Kramer and reprinted thirty thousand times through the end of the seventeenth century, Malleus maleficarum became the compendium for secular courts throughout Renaissance Europe, cementing the theory that witches were responsible for climate anomalies.^⁴ However, as Silvia Federici has shown, there is a much more complex story behind the witch hunts. Reaching “its peak between 1580 and 1630 . . . when feudal relations were already giving way to the economic and political institutions typical of mercantile capitalism,” the persecution of women enabled the gentry and state clerics to discipline female bodies in a context of increasing taxation, land privatization, and state control.^⁵ The witch hunts, Federici argues, were a response to “women’s resistance to the spread of capitalist relations and the power that women had gained by virtue of their sexuality, their control over reproduction, and their ability to heal.”^⁶

Fast forward to 2018–19, when the environmental movement Extinction Rebellion marched through London to draw attention to the climate crisis and mass extinction. These marches were accompanied by members of the Red Rebel Brigade, an “international performance artivist troupe” comprising silent marchers with white-painted faces dressed in long red robes who enact various stylized, slow-motion tableaux to “symbolize the common blood we [humans] share with all species.”^⁷ As they seek to “illuminate the magic realm beneath the surface of all things,” the Red Rebels have been joined by druid, pagan, and witch communities that not only see magic as a natural extension of their feminist and environmental activism but cast their occultist practices as salvation to tackle the social and environmental crises.^⁸

Witchcraft activism is also on the rise elsewhere: in climate protests, struggles for abortion rights, labor reform movements, and efforts to influence elections in Europe and North America.^⁹ As part of environmentalist and ecofeminist groups like Extinction Rebellion, Witch Bloc, and W.I.T.C.H. or Witch Resistance, self-proclaimed magical practitioners join the witch resistance. Practical guides like “Witchcraft Activism” promote witchcraft as an earth-based spiritual tool for rebuilding humans’ connection with the natural world.^¹⁰ By reconfiguring the witch as heroic symbol of social disobedience and resistance, such invocations counter historical images of witches as villains while building on and perpetuating long-standing ideas of their uncanny abilities to act on the environment and resist capitalist logics and patriarchal oppression.

Whether condemned as a malevolent weather-shifter or recast as an environmental and feminist hero, the witch appears in mainstream Euro-American society (though not necessarily to its contemporary self-identified practitioners) as a consistently polarizing figure—the embodiment of either “evil” or “good” or a mediator between moral opposites. However, as Federici reveals, these dichotomic imaginaries often conceal and suppress many ambiguities, nuances, and tensions, attention to which may engender alternative understandings and visions of the world in which they are embedded. Fueled by a similar attentiveness to complexity, this special section seeks to both trace and disrupt the dichotomizing logics and imaginaries that shape contemporary invocations of heroism and villainy. Like Euro-American discourses about witches, such invocations tend to center individual figures as embodiments of essentialized, morally charged traits: the brave freedom fighter, the selfless leader, the deceitful corporation, the cruel dictator. In this capacity, each hero or villain conjures its diametric opposite: the good ruler versus the evil usurper; truth tellers versus peddlers of falsehoods; elites versus ordinary people; nature protectors versus nature destroyers, and so on. Alternatively, heroes and villains may be portrayed as complex individuals mediating diametrically opposed conditions or outcomes—as illustrated, for example, in Christos Lynteris’s exploration of filmic depictions of the epidemiologist as a “culture hero” who navigates between past and present, bestiality (nature) and human sociality (culture), life and death, autonomy and self-limitation.^¹¹ Here, heroism lies less in the individual’s traits than in their uncommon capacity to manage the relation between contrasting states and future possibilities.

One task of this special section is to describe and interrogate various contemporary manifestations of this dichotomizing logic. For example, Columba González-Duarte reveals how monarch butterfly conservation is built around North American imaginaries of heroic amateurs protecting butterflies from the loggers and other villains who destroy the monarchs’ migratory home in Mexico. These imaginaries are not immaterial but also impact the lives and well-being of the rural communities who often bear of the brunt of restrictive conservation interventions, showing that, as Ursula Heise has pointed out, “conservation is, in many contexts, a matter of justice.”^¹² Imaginaries also have material effects in Viola Schreer’s ethnography, set against the backdrop of devastating forest fires that break out annually in Central Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo, blanketing the wider region in a choking, noxious haze. Schreer examines how Indigenous villagers and oil palm companies in the province are routinely framed as fire villains by both governments and NGOs as they seek to mitigate this recurrent problem. Their search for villains, however, is undermined by both the inherent untraceability of these fires’ origins and various parties’ strategic deployment of willful blindness in navigating this Anthropocenic milieu.

The effects of dichotomic environmentalist thinking are also explored by Adam Searle, Jonathon Turnbull, and Catherine Oliver, who point to the imaginative limits of treating cows (qua methane producers) as either climate villains or potential climate heroes (via efforts to reengineer their metabolic pathways). They argue that technoscientific constructs, as part of a quintessentially ecomodernist project, occlude both the knowledge-power practices that underpin climate change mitigation interventions and the possibility of engaging with living, breathing creatures as anything other than climate problems or climate solutions.^¹³ But more than interrogating the effects of hero/villain dichotomies, Searle and colleagues foreground our special section’s diagnostic interest in examining the broader frameworks, politics, and relational dynamics in which figures of heroes and villains are often embedded—in this case, by revealing how technoscientific processes of defining and fixing climate problems are imbricated with politics of blame, salvation, and the governance of nonhuman lives. Similarly, Schreer’s and González-Duarte’s contributions point to the vastly unequal structural and political conditions that enable particular logics of culpability, victimhood, and redress to shape some lives and spaces more than others.

These critical analyses are complemented by a number of articles that illuminate particular diagnostic templates and theories that disrupt, or at least blur, dichotomic renderings of heroes and villains. Olivia Angé takes us on a tour across space and time through an exploration of different sites of potato cultivation—from highland Andean societies to agro-industrial plots and gene banks—and the contrasting sociopolitical, affective, and economic frameworks through which they are evaluated and characterized. Like the monarch butterfly in González-Duarte’s article, the seemingly commonplace tuber is not a singular thing but a shifting, ambiguous entity—neither just heroic nor just villainous—that serves as a diagnostic lens onto different global and historical regimes of value. Here, multiplicity and divergence from dominant “onto-epistemic” norms are not problems to be tamed but conditions to explore and work through.^¹⁴

Jan van der Valk also works through multiplicity in his exploration of Tibetan medical practitioners’ diagnostic conversations about the emergence of COVID-19. Examining a flurry of media interviews, webinars, blog posts, and articles in 2020–21, van der Valk traces how Sowa Rigpa physician-scholars drew on idioms of contagion, spirit provocation, and karmic retribution to contrast idealized human-environment relations with a “degenerate age” of disasters, epidemics, and social collapse. Circulating alongside biomedical understandings and practices, these etiologies point to cosmically inflected theories of agency, transgression, and salvation that took on added salience during the COVID-19 pandemic. In grappling with deities and spirits that could be variously protective or wrathful, these diagnostic discussions (like Federici’s analysis of witch hunts) point toward a more complex rendering of heroes and villains that takes seriously their ambiguity, ambivalence, and mutability.

Ambiguity also lies at the heart of Andrew Alan Johnson’s article, which examines the complicated, shifting relations between fishermen on the Thai-Lao border along the Mekong River and the animist island kings—place-based spirits—with whom they share long-running alliances. Johnson reveals how, amid sweeping environmental changes caused by new hydropower projects in Laos and China, the tutelary roles traditionally played by these spirits gave way to indeterminacy and contestation as villagers struggled to figure out what and who would work for them on a drastically changed river. Neither clearly heroes nor villains, island kings remained as unknowable as the faraway governments shaping the life and flow of the Mekong. If Johnson’s interlocutors were haunted by ontological “indeterminacy,”^¹⁵ the Batek plantation workers with whom Alice Rudge worked appeared to actively ambiguate both their relationship to oil palm and their own predicament within the Malaysian nation-state. By refusing to treat oil palms as persons and hence capable of villainy, and by treating plantation work as just a means to an end rather than an immutable identity, these Batek people, Rudge argues, also defy widespread activist and other dichotomies that contrast (Indigenous) heroism with (oil palm) villainy.

These ethnographic analyses develop our diagnostic interests in two ways. First, they lay bare the tensions between dominant dichotomizing narratives of heroism, victimhood, and villainy—such as those found in biomedicine and environmental activism—and the complexities, ambiguities, and indeterminacies that often unfold beneath these surfaces in real life. Examining such narratives thus allows us to diagnose not only the conditions in which they emerge and circulate but also the limits of their reach and efficacy. Second, and more important, by taking seriously their interlocutors’ own diagnostic deliberations, the articles in this collection shed light on how ideas, structures, politics, and (human/more-than-human) relations are configured in specific Anthropocenic spaces, such as pandemics, plantations, and dammed rivers. In this way, they “provincialize” the Anthropocene as a concept and condition, showing—as Elizabeth DeLoughrey reminds us—that this “universalizing figure” is far from a universal, encompassing condition but always grounded in specific places, processes, and more-than-human configurations.^¹⁶ Elucidating the processes and relations that constitute these configurations, however, opens up a further line of inquiry. If these configurations are not fixed and inevitable, how else might they be configured? How might this contribute to the work of reimagination and repair in and for the Anthropocene?

Beyond Figures and Dichotomies

Here our contributions shift from diagnosis toward exploration of alternative motifs, frameworks, and logics of responsibility, accountability, care, and repair. Our aim is to transcend and disrupt the dichotomizing logics of culpability and salvation that often undergird invocations of heroes and villains, and to gesture toward other ways of knowing and responding to the Anthropocene. In this final section we briefly consider some possibilities raised by the articles in this collection.

First, by rooting our analyses in particular ethnographic puzzles or problems—including Tibetan responses to COVID-19, human-spirit relations along a changing river, life in plantations and peatlands in Southeast Asia, and so on—we put “the Anthropocene in place” to foreground the specific historical, geopolitical, sociocultural, and political dynamics and assemblages through which it is apprehended and experienced.^¹⁷ By working through granularity and specificity, our collection presents multiple, diverging Anthropocenes, thus refusing encompassment within universalizing models of the Anthropocene as a singular planetary condition, and the concomitant temptation to reduce its stakes to moral dichotomies. Instead, we take indeterminacy and ambiguity as fundamental features of the current planetary moment—problems that, rather than hastening us toward simple resolutions, invite us to “‘slow down’” thought and work through their implications and possibilities.^¹⁸

While alert to the ontological messes and entanglements that invariably lurk beneath dichotomic imaginings and “charismatic mega-concepts” such as the Anthropocene,^¹⁹ however, we also draw attention to the taxonomies, concepts, and boundaries through which multiple subjects figure and organize their worlds. Our second point, then, is that critical interrogations of dichotomizing logics must be complemented by careful attention to the power and purchase of the theories and categories that we encounter—but also elicit and produce—through our research. In other words, more than dismantling problematic boundaries, what might we gain by thinking through and with Batek ideas of bodily autonomy and individuals’ “own paths” (Rudge), potent yet unknowable jao (spirit owners) of the Mekong (Johnson), the metabolic science underpinning low-methane cows (Searle, Turnbull, and Oliver), or the Sowa Rigpa etiologies of COVID (van der Valk), among other cases? Such figurations often defy hero/villain dichotomies while simultaneously defining and demarcating other figures, categories, and logics, thus gesturing toward possible theorizations of agency, culpability, hope, and responsibility in the Anthropocene. How might (all-too-human) engagements with inscrutable jao, for example, help us imagine ways of acting and committing to action in the face of the near incomprehensibility of the vastness of climate change? How might ideas of contagion, retribution, and degeneration spark thought, and action, about redistribution and reparation amid the excesses of the Capitalocene?

These are not purely anthropocentric questions. As our collection shows, the stakes of the Anthropocene are not limited to bounded entities—whether humans, animals, or ecosystems—but are diffused across a range of human and other-than-human elements and forces. Our third aim, then, is to decenter and decompose the individual, often anthropocentric, figures that routinely populate hero and villain narratives and to shift attention to the more-than-human agencies, relational configurations, and processes through which such figures emerge. Doing so reveals the politics behind processes of figuration; heroes and villains, like witches, do not emerge fully formed out of nowhere but are defined, appropriated, and evaluated through wider struggles over meaning, control, and power. In this regard, our aims resonate with those of recent scholars of multispecies justice, who persistently ask how justice might be “redesign[ed] . . . away from the fiction of individualist primacy toward an ecological reality where . . . human and nonhuman animals, species, microbiomes, ecosystems, oceans, and rivers—and the relations among and across them—are all subjects of justice.”^²⁰

Take, for example, the peat fires that Schreer discusses. Their biophysical, “vital materiality”^²¹—that is, their capacity to burn and travel beneath the ground, smoldering for days—makes it extremely difficult to pinpoint their origins in landscapes shaped by multiple forms of anthropogenic modification and relations between humans, fire, and environment. The fires’ pyrogenic agency thus stymies governmental and NGO attempts to identify specific (human) perpetrators. There are no singular villains in this story, only more-than-human conflagrations in which agency, causality, and culpability are diffused across humans, peat, biomass, and haze. Indeed, it is precisely this diffusion that enables certain powerful actors to apportion blame and govern lives in rural Kalimantan. But tracing the processes by which certain configurations are politicized also raises a further, hopeful question: how might these configurations be reworked “to imagine and enact alternative futures”?^²² For, as Claire Colebrook has argued, the ability to imagine a world beyond the existing one is a prerequisite for transforming rather than heroically “saving the world” in its current shape.^²³

While not offering definitive answers, our contributors gesture toward various possibilities to escape the impasse between “both technotheocratic geoengineering fixes and wallowing in despair.”^²⁴ Rudge, Schreer, and Johnson focus on the everyday strategies through which marginalized communities seek to live (though not always well) with violent, exploitative, more-than-human structures, whether by “negotiating with giants” (Rudge), cultivating “willful blindness” (Schreer), or seeking help from other sources of power (Johnson). Highlighting subtle ways of getting by in “capitalist ruins”^²⁵ without overturning dominant systems, these everyday practices enact modes of livability by configuring their own relational assemblages and imaginaries—disrupting, in the process, dominant structures of dispossession, culpability, and blame.

In a similar vein, Angé and Searle, Turnbull, and Oliver use different scaling devices to unsettle prevalent capitalist and technoscientific logics. Against generic capitalist depictions of the potato as a heroic, prolific, profitable crop, Angé draws attention to the “nuanced vegetal appreciation” that characterizes her Andean interlocutors’ careful interactions with tubers. Always embedded in specific socionatural worlds, the tubers’ characteristics and potential are inevitably fragmented, “emerg[ing] continuously within an assemblage of ecological relations.” Their “partial exemplarity” invites us to think through the specific to disrupt the totalizing logics of global capitalism embodied in potato monoculture and the generic exemplars that it both produces and demands. A similar critical impulse undergirds Searle, Turnbull, and Oliver’s use of “metabolic thinking” to interrogate technoscientific constructions of cows—or parts of cows—as climate fixes for a “‘Good Anthropocene.’”^²⁶ They highlight how invocations of “the global” and “the planetary” by policymakers, scientists, corporations, and others become powerful ways of justifying and implementing interventions at multiple scales. Yet such discourses and practices, they argue, are ultimately “spectacular stories” that paper over the fundamental drivers of the climate emergency—anthropocentrism, capitalism, and unchecked consumption and production—not to mention the lives of the cows themselves. Showing how such technoscientific projects are “propelling the same old patterns into the future,”^²⁷ their article advocates a different approach to planetary crisis, one that prioritizes justice and structural change across scales, from attending to the living bodies of cows to challenging the socioeconomic and political inequalities that undergird the Anthropocene.

If Angé and Searle, Turnbull, and Oliver seek to cut hegemonic structures and ideals down to size, González-Duarte and van der Valk proffer more far-reaching, ambitious programs for transformation. Against imaginaries that treat “tree cutters” and “butterfly crusaders” as diametric opposites, González-Duarte advocates making connections across incommensurable “care worlds” in order to redress the shared degradation of those worlds. Hers is a call for mobilization across difference in defiance of the divisive, distancing dichotomies that fragment our worlds. Van der Valk, meanwhile, wonders how specters might serve as catalysts of radical, systemic change in a post-COVID world. Rather than living with giants (Rudge), van der Valk thus seeks to slay them. What sort of “wrathful reckoning,” he asks, is needed to enact destructive and transformative change to the hubristic, capitalist system that gave rise to the Anthropocene?

These questions are not merely thought experiments. As anthropologists and geographers working in or on deeply fraught contexts of rapid environmental degradation and profound structural inequalities, we cannot extricate ourselves from the problems about which we write, how we define them, and what stories we tell (or do not tell). Accordingly, the contributors to this special section have, to greater or lesser degrees, left their selves in their articles, revealing how certain interactions engendered specific responses (González-Duarte; Rudge; Searle, Turnbull, and Oliver), how their own experiences afforded certain insights (Schreer), how their own subject positions and commitments frame their analysis (Angé; van der Valk), and how their interlocutors sought to engage them (Johnson). Acknowledging the personal, partial nature of our knowledge production also means grappling with our own implication in the creation and reproduction of certain imaginaries, epistemic economies, and power structures, as well as the limits of our ability to disrupt them. Are we too complicit in generating essentialized figures of heroism and villainy? Can our analytical dichotomies and logics become stifling, extractive, or misleading? What are our responsibilities as researchers, writers, and theorists on an increasingly polarized, “burning” planet?^²⁸ Addressing these questions is beyond the scope of this special section. What the following articles do, however, is remind us of the continued value of attending to the granular, quotidian textures of life in the Anthropocene—not as detached observers but as subjects with our own stakes in the situation.

Conclusion

All the contributions to this special section begin with figures of heroes and villains, but they do not necessarily end with them. Instead, heroes and villains serve as our opening puzzle—a shared, if not identical, concern that allows us to engage in comparative conversations about the politics of blame, accountability, care, and repair in the Anthropocene. Central to our collaboration has been the work of decomposing heroic and villainous figures, of asking how they are produced, sustained, and deployed in multiple contexts through shifting relational assemblages and processes. In this respect, figures of heroes and villains can serve as diagnostic lenses onto the contours of power, culpability, and inequality in the contemporary world and the dichotomizing logics and imaginaries to which they give rise.

Laying bare the more-than-human agencies, processes, and relations lying beneath heroic or villainous surfaces, however, also opens possibilities for recomposition—not of other heroes or villains, but of different relational assemblages and potential Anthropocenic futures marked by “more grounded visions of adaptation, resilience, and community.”^²⁹ This shared interest in configuring possibilities runs through all our articles, with each sketching its own vision of what else could be. Yet these are not simply abstract philosophical speculations about “alternative political visions, modes of relation and opportunities for ethical responsiveness” in a multispecies world.^³⁰ As will become clear, these ideas are all grounded in, and derive from, ethnographic particularities and very real concerns and dilemmas. What unites them is a commitment to pushing beyond blunt moral dichotomies and exploring various modalities of accountability, responsibility, and repair in or for the Anthropocene—not by offering yet more clear-cut solutions but by revealing possibilities for living with and through a world of uncertainty and indeterminacy.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the editors of Environmental Humanities for their meticulous engagement with our introduction and their support throughout the editorial process. We also thank the contributors to our special section, our colleagues from the Global Lives of the Orangutan and POKOK projects, as well as all participants in the original webinar series Heroes and Villains in the Anthropocene. Our research has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement no. 758494).