Abstract
This article discusses the theory and practice of environmental ethnography and how it joins with (and differs from) multispecies ethnography. In the context of geographical research, environmental ethnography attends to the irreducibility of context and the individuality of living and non-living entities. Moving beyond the universalizing ontology of species—which in some instances can be too narrow and in other instances too broad—facilitates a line of posthumanist inquiry that complements multispecies research even as it opens up new frontiers. In doing so, environmental ethnographies overcome the dualisms of “organism-environment” and “life-nonlife” that structure Western ontology and remain stubbornly (if partially) embedded in some academic theory and practice. I begin with a brief history of the decentering of the human in geographical research before mapping the still-in-progress development of environmental ethnography, highlighting examples from other scholars while drawing on my own experiences in remote Iñupiaq and Siberian Yupik communities in Western Alaska. Moving beyond the rigid ontologies of genetics and metabolism reveals the political horizon to be wider than we often imagine.
Keywords
“To try to understand the animal apart from its background, except as an imaginative exercise, is to risk the collapse of both. To be what they are they require each other.”—Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams (1986: 177)
This article parses the challenges and opportunities of environmental ethnography, a term I use to refer to a methodological affinity, a knapsack of geographical, anthropological, and critical theoretical tools to understand the more-than-human world. Environmental ethnography sometimes requires setting aside—or transgressing—certain inherited frameworks, such as the ontology of species or the tacit assumption that ecological activity is the nearly exclusive provenance of DNA-bearing life forms. While environmental ethnography is already widely practiced, it has not yet been clearly defined in scholarly literature. In the following pages, I provide some background to the theoretical origins of environmental ethnography. I then propose three boundaries that might distinguish environmental ethnography from related and complementary approaches, particularly multispecies ethnography. I conclude with a note on the term ethnography, an admittedly imperfect tool for the task at hand. Ultimately, environmental ethnography remains a work in progress.
When species comes up short
On the entrance to the Tribal government office, taped to the door, a small poster announces, “2022 Seal / Algae Investigation (Voluntary).” It continues: “Intestine samples needed.” It requests that hunters supply “∼2-foot lengths” in plastic bags and ship them to a scientist via the local airline, whose friendly bush pilots wear sweatshirts and knit caps. The problem, the poster explains, involves Alexandrium catenella (a species) and Pseudo-nitzschia (a genus), which “negatively impact the health of mammals.” Although the flyer does not specify which mammals, these algae are known to cause amnesic shellfish poisoning and paralytic shellfish poisoning when indirectly ingested by humans—either by eating shellfish directly or by eating shellfish-consuming animals (Anderson et al. 2022). Next to this poster about algae and seals is another poster, announcing the first annual Young Hunters Walrus Summit, to be held the following week in the regional hub of Nome, Alaska. One wonders: What about walrus intestines? The door offers no answers.
The door opens onto what scholars might identify as a multispecies issue. But it is more-than-multispecies and less-than-multispecies in ways that cause the term to buckle under the load. At play in this particular arrangement are seals, walrus, humans, two algae of ill-repute, and the shellfishy food chain that connects these mammals to the dangerous dinoflagellates. But even this is a partial apprehension. There are forces at play that have no place within a species ontology but which nevertheless take on leading and supporting roles. Climate change, for instance, is likely driving the increase in algae populations (Anderson et al. 2021; Gobler 2020). The devastation wrought in the North Pacific by industrial whaling and walrus hunting in the 19th and 20th centuries created a famine in parts of Western Alaska, leading to changes in human diets (less whale, more seal and walrus; Bockstoce 2009; Demuth 2019). Fossil fuels power the outboard motors used by today's hunters, fueled by the mineralized bodies of Mesozoic plankton. Shifting patterns of sea ice have caused further changes in walrus and seal distribution and in the prevalence of another seal-eating mammal: the polar bear (Rode et al., 2022).
In this instance, modern biology's concept of life is a blanket that is at once too small and too large. It cannot possibly cover the non-living forces like climate change and the changing patterns of ice in the Bering Sea. A biologized framework struggles to recognize these processes that do not contain DNA and do not metabolize (Clark and Yusoff 2017; Povinelli 2016). At the same time, the ontology of the species overshoots the particularity of these arrangements, which are local and utterly geographical. To make a species-wide conjecture about “seal-human relationships” based on this snapshot of place and time is to overlook specific conditions of habitat, geology, and ecology. These are not species among other species, but species within geology within species … and so on. Finally, the seal-human-shellfish-algae-climate-boat-ice relationships in the North Bering Sea are likely poor proxies for any place besides the North Bering Sea. The nature of these relationships is both local and more-than-biological.
Before and after the “species turn”
In recent decades, the “posthuman turn” (Braidotti 2013; Ferrando 2016) and the “species turn” (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010) have led to a panoply of boundary-pushing research, much of which has made scholars more accountable to the earth and nonhuman forms of existence. In the wake of these shifts, posthuman ethnography fanned out in different directions. Multispecies ethnography framed “animals, plants, fungi, and microbes … alongside humans in the realm of bios, with legibly biographical and political lives” (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010, 545; see also Agamben 1998). In a distinct but complementary approach, chemo-ethnographers have investigated the social and political significance of non-DNA-bearing forms of existence, such as industrial pollution, pharmaceuticals, and household chemicals (Engelmann and McCormack 2021; Kirksey 2020; Murphy 2017; Pollock 2016; Shapiro 2015; Shapiro and Kirksey 2017). A less-defined approach has eschewed biologized or chemical frameworks and instead taken what I term an environmental direction to understanding human and nonhuman worlds. Environmental ethnographies are still interested in DNA-bearing life and chemicals (e.g., greenhouse gases) but also attend to forms of existence that do not fit in either category, such as ice, mountains, land spirits, and fire (Hastrup 2013; High 2017; Povinelli 2016; Pyne 2004). This latter approach is of particular interest to geographers precisely because it can accommodate the landscape itself as an object of ethnographic consideration.
These various approaches are hardly mutually exclusive; if anything, they are complementary. Nor are these categories meant to divide or sort scholars. The same researcher might variously undertake multispecies ethnographies, environmental ethnographies, and studies that are both environmental and multispecies. These analytic tools are affinities, not identities. But retaining the capacity to draw a distinction between related but distinctive approaches is useful, particularly for geographers, whose emphasis on the importance of space and place is not necessarily considered in every multispecies ethnography.
In what follows, I use the term “biological life” or “organism” to refer to life forms with DNA—i.e., organisms that, within a Western geontology (Povinelli 2016), are alive in a literal sense. I use the term “biological” here only in reference to the discipline of Western biology—and not in reference to Agamben's (1998) zoê / bios distinction (discussed below). I also follow Povinelli in using the term “existents” or “forms of existence” (2016, 5) to refer broadly to a category that includes biological life among other things without DNA—e.g., chemicals, glaciers, and smartphones.
It bears mentioning that Western scholarship of the environment writ-large was only made possible by the notion of the environment, which itself arrived relatively recently into social and scientific thought in the early 20th century (Sloterdijk 2005). The contemporary understanding of the environment is often attributed to biologist Jacob von Uexküll, whose exploration of the animal Umwelt catalyzed an early wave of posthumanist scholarship. Before von Uexküll, early environmental writings—such as Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (1994), written in the first century BC—usually unfolded from a decidedly humanist viewpoint. Von Uexküll's writings, by contrast, “express the unreserved abandonment of every anthropocentric perspective in the life sciences and the radical dehumanization of the image of nature” (Agamben 2004, 39). This profound rethinking of the nature of experience—and of locating experience and sentience beyond the confines of the body, as existing in concert with one's surroundings—would later animate the work of influential philosophers including Merleau-Ponty (2002), Heidegger (2019), and Gilles Deleuze (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). In sum, the advent of environmental thought facilitated new lines of scholarly inquiry based on understanding things in relationship to their contexts in a non-contingent way, emphasizing belonging and connection. In what follows, I use the term “environment” to indicate, broadly, forms of existence that are related by affinities. These affinities are often geographical, but not always. I follow Ingold, who (following Heidegger) argues that a given “thing” in an environment “is not an object at all, but a certain gathering together of the threads of life” (2010a: 4).
Without suggesting that one approach to ethnography is more valuable than the other, I argue that a certain modernist inertia might sometimes pull scholarship away from environmental (and by extension, more geographical) analysis. As humans with bodies, scholars tend to be relatively unmoored from place, accustomed to traveling thousands of miles for a job or a degree. Some of us are descended from settlers, without connections to land or sea that stretch along horizons of generational time. Many of us travel great distances to conduct our research in faraway places, rather than examining our own homelands. Our understanding of belonging is rife with contingency. What's more, we are (mostly) indoor and urban creatures (Ingold 2007). From our offices and bookshelves to the bike paths and rail lines along which we travel, our days are usually spent surrounded by the built environment. The city—or college town—is a terrarium of our own making. These places of human dwelling are not unnatural; but they are self-made habitats.
This is not a problem per se. Particularly when the object of study is related to the container itself—in the way urban birds have much to reveal about the cities they share with humans (Kirksey et al., 2018)—multispecies ethnography offers an intimate way for geographers to explore our homes with new perspectives. But our disciplinary vocabulary would benefit from the ability to distinguish between ethnographies that focus on species as such and those that are more concerned with the forms of existence occupying a given geographical setting. We must also take care to address the living contingency of some of these investigations—that many of our studies are not really about a species but about specific living and non-living organisms (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 239–241; Haraway 2008, 88).
This article attempts to place a signpost at the junction of these different approaches. It does not seek to provide a taxonomy to define what counts as multispecies research as opposed to environmental research—such an effort would fall prey to the very universalisms this article interrogates. Rather, what follows is meant to scaffold discussions about how these two adjoining methods constellate with each other in productive and complementary ways. As part of this scaffolding, I offer an itinerary for environmental ethnography that resists the gravitational pull back to the familiar paradigms of humanist and universalist epistemologies.
Moving beyond the human
Environmental and multispecies ethnographies have a shared heritage. Both grew out of a raft of 20th-century scholarship that “denaturalize[d] intrahuman differences established along the lines of gender, race, class, nation, caste, sexuality, and ability” (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010, 550). This evolution was pioneered in part by scholars who took interest in the facts of life as such, turning the study of humankind away from the idealized Vitruvian Man and toward humanity's messy and queerer qualities. The breadth of human experience could not be measured in terms of deviation from an archetypal Homo sapiens (Braidotti 2013). Idealizations of health, language, behavior, and beauty were recast as unstable cultural contingencies (Butler 1999; Foucault 1994).
This work was further advanced by feminist scholars, whose studies on gender, kinship, dependency, and belonging reimagined what it means to be related (Haraway 2016). These developments borrowed from pioneering work by biologists like Lynn Margulis, who illuminated micro- and macro-biological relationships governed by interdependency rather than competition (Hird 2009). The paradigm of evolution as a contest—“survival of the fittest”—could hardly explain growing evidence that symbiosis was also a powerful force shaping life on earth. Instances of “co-evolution,” such as when a species of fig and a species of wasp become mutually dependent, suggested that the development of biological life may rely as much upon cooperation as competition (Kirksey 2015). The enterprise of biology continued to erode one of modernity's core principles: that ruthless interspecies and intraspecies competition is the dominant force organizing planetary life.
In this new critical understanding, Western scholarship reconsidered biological life as a process of mutual allowance. In time, new forms of ethnography, including multispecies research, emerged from the perforated boundary that separated humans from their supposedly passive environment (Braidotti 2013; Descola 2013). “Human nature,” Anna Tsing observes in an essay about fungi colonizing humans, “is an interspecies relationship” (2012, 141).
The enterprise of Enlightenment science rested heavily upon the taken-for-granted notions that humans were somehow different from the rest of animals, plants, fungi, and bacteria. This dates back at least to Aristotle, who distinguished between zoê (animal, or bare, life) and bios (political life; see Agamben 1998). Destabilizing the ideal of Homo sapiens at the top of an evolutionary pyramid undermined the privileged positions of both science and the human (Braidotti 2013; Hird 2009). In this revised understanding, scholars recognized that “the world beyond the human is not a meaningless one made meaningful by humans” (Kohn 2013, 72).
These studies of interrelatedness and interconnection led to bold retellings of the human place on planet earth. Geographers are particularly well suited to contribute to these posthuman ethnographies by emphasizing the importance and contingency of place. In doing so, we resist reproducing certain humanist ontologies of nature and associated biological universalisms that may unintentionally fall back into the universalizing “view from nowhere” (Shapin 1998). These opportunities (and hazards) warrant a careful consideration of the different-but-related issues of environment and species. By addressing the role of each in ethnography, I hope to provide a rough map by which to navigate this epistemological landscape. With an eye toward aligning more-than-human methodologies with more-than-human theory, I offer three axes that help locate environmental ethnography alongside to its multispecies cousin. These axes are not lines drawn in the earth but rather pivot points. Their intention is not to shut out, but to welcome in.
Axis 1: ecology
The first axis along which environmental and multispecies research diverge involves ecology. At times, multispecies ethnographies trend away from the ecological, instead delving into the intimate relationship of a handful of species, one of which is often human (e.g., Swanson 2017; Van Dooren 2014; Van Dooren and Rose 2012). These investigations are often fruitful. But in some cases, they are also excisions, in which forms of existence are regarded with respect to one another, and less so with respect to their contexts. There is much to be learned from such a process, but also much to be missed. In the Bering Sea, the human consumption of toxic seal flesh is a process mediated by (at least) three other DNA-bearing creatures: seals, algae, and an intermediate organism. And while the toxic algae comprise one species and one genus (with 58 known species), a vast array of snails, clams, crabs, fish, isopods, worms, and shrimp might act as vectors in the transmission of toxic algae to seals. One survey of the bearded seal diet in the Bering and Chukchi Seas listed 12 species, 12 genera, and two families as “major prey species” (Lowry et al., 1980, 333). This is certainly a multispecies interaction, but when the species involved exhibit such taxonomic range, the wider lens of ecology offers a more robust and maneuverable tool. In this case, environmental ethnography reveals a “contaminating relationality” (2015, 40), to borrow from Anna Tsing. “Everyone,” she writes, “carries a history of contamination; purity is not an option” (2015, 27). The organism itself is only a partial perspective.
As environmental ethnography draws attention to forms of biological life in the messy context of their environments, it exhibits close allegiances to the “more-than-human” ethnography described by Maan Barua, including by attending to the “meshworks” of creatures and materials with relatively little regard for the role of species as a sense-making tool (2023, 19). The matsutake mushrooms studied by Tsing are the fruiting bodies of vast interspecies meshworks, involving trees and soils and humans—in sufficient complexity that all industrial attempts to cultivate matsutake have failed. In such settings, an attempt to enumerate the life forms involved in these complex arrangements are likely to fall short.
Barry Lopez, one of the great environmental ethnographers of the 20th century, wrote about the hazards of neglecting the broader ecological context. “To try to understand the animal apart from its background, except as an imaginative exercise, is to risk the collapse of both. To be what they are they require each other” (1986, 177). Taken out of ecological context, multispecies ethnographies often offer fascinating insights into the relationships between biological life forms. In many cases, the absence of the “background” is itself an object of fruitful investigation, as in the case of endangered whooping cranes reared in captivity—where the lack of an ecological context offers lessons about care and companionship that would be markedly different if the birds were observed in the unbuilt environment (Van Dooren 2014). Another delightful example is Eben Kirksey's study of wasps and figs in a botanist's laboratory (Kirksey 2015). In these instances, isolation from the environment becomes an indelible part of the ethnographic landscape.
Eduardo Kohn's “anthropology of life” (2007) is an example of an ethnography that does not tune out other biological life. Rather, it takes place in the messy presence of a cascade of interspecies relationships. Kohn's human research participants, the Runa, are deeply concerned with their canine friends, who themselves dream excitedly of other animals in the forest, including birds and jaguars. Kohn's apprehension of the human is a snippet in a cascade of relationships. His assessment is not a scrutinizing gaze at the intersection of two species, but a wide-angle lens. “In many ways, dogs and people in Ávila live in independent worlds,” writes Kohn. “Resting in the cool shade under the house, stealing off after the bitch next door, or … hunting down a deer on their own—dogs largely live their own lives” (2007, 9). Here, Kohn is observing the connections between humans and dogs as they unfold in the jungle's landscape amid a tangled web of interdependency (see also Lorimer et al., 2019).
There is something to the jungle and the forest that makes these connections easier to apprehend—or harder to ignore. Landscapes that appear visually and sensorily crowded to humans are more clearly home to interconnected forms of existence. By contrast, deserts (of sand, ice, water, or urban space) are often described as empty or relatively lifeless (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 382; Lezak 2019). In such spaces, life more readily appears as a collection of individual creatures interacting on a passive and flat stage. This atomized vision is predisposed to focusing on this creature or that creature. Lopez wrote of the difficulty of unlearning this tendency to atomize. He recalls traveling in an unspecified landscape in the High North and noticing his Indigenous companions' proclivity to attend to the whole of their surroundings rather than the constituent parts: If my companions and I, for example, encountered a grizzly bear feeding on a caribou carcass, I would tend to focus almost exclusively on the bear. My companions would focus on the part of the world of which, at that moment, the bear was only a fragment. The bear here might be compared with a bonfire, a kind of incandescence that throws light on everything around it. My companions would glance off into the outer reaches of that light, then look back to the fire, back and forth. (2015)
Axis 2: species logic, organism logic
The second axis concerns two distinct but related problems of scale. One is the perforating definition of the organism. The other is the limited concept of the species itself. Although they are scalar opposites, the two problems are profoundly linked, nested within each other. The concept of the species as a bounded unit is modeled after the concept of the organism as a bounded unit (Haraway 2008, 2016; Hird 2009; Kirksey 2015; Parisi 2004). But consider the seals of the Bering Sea. The notion of the species is too broad to encompass the particular issue at play for the subsistence hunters of Western Alaska and the bearded seals. Erignathus barbatus is a circumpolar species occupying a vast territory spanning the North Pacific, North Atlantic, and Arctic Oceans. Their diet varies considerably with their geography. For any number of reasons, the bearded seals along the northern coast of Siberia likely have a very different relationship to local algae than in the North Pacific. The notion of the species is also too narrow, since the organism of the bearded seal is usually considered to be distinct from the harmful algae within it—ditto the shellfish mediating the seal-algae relationships. In instances like these, the notion of species itself struggles to contain the unruly and geographical contingencies of the environment. In this way, practicing environmental ethnography requires a careful attunement to the logic of the species and organism alike.
Long before posthumanist scholarship became a staple of geography and anthropology, philosophers and psychologists began interrogating the notion of the sovereign being and the environment (Heidegger 2019; Merleau-Ponty 2002). Their work followed (and in some cases paralleled) millennia of non-Western thought that had arrived at similar conclusions and was ignored by (or considered inadmissible to) academia (Ferrando 2016). In the 1960s, writers such as Alan Watts brought these concepts into the Western mainstream, drawing directly upon non-Western philosophy and religion. “The prevalent sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin is a hallucination,” wrote Watts (1966, ix), “accords neither with Western science nor with the experimental philosophy-religions of the East.” At the same time, microbiology began entertaining the notion that organisms thrived not in spite of the porosity of their membranes, but because of it. Contamination replaced containment in certain conversations around the prerequisites for life, based on the observation that, generally speaking, no critter could survive when sealed off from its environment. (Ingold 2007; Parisi 2004; Tsing 2015, 27–36).
Multispecies ethnography is often conducted from a conventional “epidermal point of view” (Povinelli 2016, 40), wherein organisms relate to each other as sovereign bodies inhabiting empty space. A fascination with membranes—and the subsequent notion that what lies within the skin is an indivisible whole—underpins a concept of life as composed of sovereign biological units. The notion of the multicellular organism itself depends upon a dualism between what counts as a living tissue and what belongs to the external world. From this perspective, a lock of hair is a part of the body until a pair of scissors transforms it into part of the outside world.
This problematic ontology of the multicellular organism, in turn, provides a scalar metaphor for the idea of the species, yet another sovereign collective (Ingold 2013). At the core of traditional species logic is the notion that a species is made up of individual organisms in the way that an organism is made up of many cells—collective identities, not heterogeneous affinities (Dupré 1992). Both species and organisms are products of this epidermal perspective.
Species logic
Every summer, birdwatchers travel thousands of miles to Western Alaska for the express purpose of seeing a handful of birds, which they call “lifers”—meaning, a bird that one would like to see at least once in a lifetime. A frequent lifer is the bristle-thighed curlew. On one marathon day of birdwatching in summer 2023, curlews were scarce, but there was an abundance of more common whimbrels. The whimbrels caused considerable irritation to some members of this organized tour. Even with the aid of binoculars and spotting scopes, whimbrels and bristle-thighed curlews are nearly indistinguishable except by their calls. Time and again the group experienced a hopeful elation, only to be disappointed when the bird in question sang a beautiful, gently accelerating trill. Another whimbrel. Sighs of frustration. No member of this outing seemed to believe that the bristle-thighed curlew's song was more beautiful. But the curlew was rarer. Here, taxonomy had cleaved a fissure between two animals that share a genus and a summer breeding ground along the Seward Peninsula but sing different songs. The ontology of species—not musical preferences—led these travelers to yearn for one tune and grumble at the sound of another.
The origin of species logic is closely attached to evolutionary theory (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 48; Dupré 1993, 38–44). As such, it has certain uncomfortable allegiances to the ideas of competitive reproduction (“survival of the fittest”). In multispecies ethnography, the logic of species often (but not always) underpins the notion that members of a species share a collective story (Van Dooren and Rose 2012). This universalism is often well-grounded, as in the case of some animals on the brink of extinction (Kirksey 2015), where the last members of a species occupy a single wildlife preserve, or in the case of animals that occupy an exceedingly small range, such as the Devils Hole pupfish (Cyprinodon diabolis). Species ontology can provide an organizing logic by making endangered and threatened animals legible to policymakers and publics, which then facilitates conservation (Kirksey 2015; Van Dooren 2014). In the United States, the protection of the entire ecosystems is often enacted through legal channels that rely upon the Endangered Species Act of 1973, which permits the protection of vast stretches of habitat and complex ecologies in the name of a particular species. Frequently, habitat protection in US policymaking requires the identification of an endangered species in order to justify federal intervention through the ESA (Scoville 2019). In such instances, the political power of species logic may determine the fates of entire landscapes.
Historically, species have been regarded as stable categories “that exist in nature independently of their discovery, or naming, by humans” (Dupré 1992, 312). More recently, the logic of the species has become the subject of fraught debate among interdisciplinary scholars (Wilson 1999). To speak of the species-whole can sometimes result in performing the “god trick” (Haraway 1988, 581) that slides carelessly from the partial perspective into a universal claim. The logic of species also raises difficult questions about how species develop and become—as evolution is a continual process of becoming, and we humans are biased toward seeing slow-moving systems as permanently fixed in place (Dupré 1992). The species concept “might reify an Aristotelian notion of fixed difference” (Kirksey 2015, 773); but like mountain ranges and constellations, species are in constant motion, and it is our bias toward human timescales and neat taxonomies that lends them the quality of apparent stasis.
The hazard of species logic is the capacity to reduce the individuality of organisms into “a catalogue of biodiversity” (Ingold 2013, 19). In an uncritical species logic, a multispecies ethnography of sewer rats in London becomes a human-rat ethnography, as opposed to an ethnography of a handful of observed rats and a handful of observed humans, in a particular place, at a particular time. “The lone wolf is not fundamentally a characteristic or a certain number of characteristics,” write Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 239). Fundamentally, the lone wolf is an instance of contingency, connection, and setting. Tsing's (2015) ethnography of matsutake mushrooms is notable for her practice of encountering one species across three different continents and paying careful attention to the ways in which matsutake-human relationships change with geography.
As contemporary geographers, we are accustomed to avoiding species logic in certain instances. Kohn's (2007) environmental ethnography of the Runa is not an ethnography of Homo sapiens. Despite our scholarly commitments to observing the extraordinary differences within our own (human) species, we sometimes settle into the habit of speaking about nonhumans as interchangeable clones, each possessing an essential core that exists purely by dint of genetic conformity. Consider the ontology of sub-species. The domestic dog is one single species: Canis familiaris, and so to say, “I love Border Collies,” is to make a statement about a sub-species. When applied to animals, these are topics of casual, first-date conversations. Applied to humans, the same concepts of sub-species become hideously racist (Haraway 2008). We are comfortable with the universalizing logic of genetics only when applied to nonhumans. The double standard reveals a proclivity toward treating humans as individuals that is less readily extended to nonhumans.
This is not a call to throw out species logic altogether. “Abandoning the notion of species,” cautions Kirksey, “would mean losing a useful tool for grappling with other animate beings … to study the relational becomings of entangled plant, fungal, microbial, animal, and human communities” (2015, 777). In response to a complicated ontological landscape, Dupré proposes a “pluralistic answer: in some contexts species are treated as individuals, in others as kinds” (1993, 43). Maintaining this hybridity requires engaging thoughtfully with the assumptions underlying species logic that might otherwise go unnoticed. Often, individuals and kinds may overlap. For example, Van Dooren's study of nearly extinct whooping cranes, mentioned above, is a case when “care for the species and care for the individual birds … are bound together in mutually reinforcing ways” (2014, 91).
“We must be hostile to easy relativisms and holisms built out of summing and subsuming parts” cautions Donna Haraway (1988, 585). We see as much in Haraway's fruitful research relationship with Ms. Cayenne Pepper, a cohabitating canid. Suffice to say: Pepper is not a stand-in for any dog other than herself, and Haraway, in turn, is deeply reverent toward Pepper's singular existence. This is not a human-dog ethnography, but a Donna Haraway-Ms. Cayenne Pepper ethnography. “Individuated critters matter; they are mortal and fleshly knottings, not ultimate units of being” (Haraway 2008, 88). Species, in this particular instance, has little to do with it.
Organism logic
The logic of the species cinches up myriad forms of biological life into tight-knit collectives. The logic of the organism does precisely the same, but on a cellular scale. In the organism ontology, two myths underpin the epidermal perspective of organisms as self-enclosed beings: metabolic individuality (Povinelli 2016) (the idea that we are separate from our environments) and genetic individuality (the notion of each organism as a genetically distinct from all other species of life. Above, I illustrated how species logic might generalize from a few organisms into a global unit (Dupré 1993; Kirksey 2015). Organism logic acts in a similar way, facilitating an ontology in which life itself is restricted to that which occurs inside the skin.
This organismal reading of life reflects the values of the society from which it emerged: a Western framework that champions individuals over society or kin. We imagine that the spaces outside of these organisms are neutral and inert. In this common understanding, life is regarded as something that unfolds in the gooey enclosures of bodies (Ingold 2007). But organisms are not like satellites in space, orbiting through inert emptiness. Organisms “relate not as closed forms but by virtue of their common immersion” (Ingold 2007, 1). Life, Povinelli explains, is “external to the other only if the scale of our perception is confined to the skin, to a set of epidermal enclosures. But human lungs are constant reminders that this separation is imaginary. Where is the human body if it is viewed from within the lung?” (2016, 42).
Contemporary biology is filled with refutations of organism logic (Gilbert et al., 2012). The most well-known instance of this is the relationship of mitochondria to eukaryotes (Hird 2009). Beginning in the 1960s, biologists found that the DNA of mitochondria—which are responsible for cellular respiration—are entirely distinct from the DNA of the multicellular organisms they inhabit. (Hundreds of millions of years of multicellular life has led to only one instance of a genus that evolved away from this relationship with mitochondria—an unassuming flagellate named Monocercomonoides.) Unlike humans, mitochondria have a single, linear chromosome—entirely separate from the nuclear DNA with its familiar 23 chromosomes. Put differently, part of the DNA of our own cells is not entirely our own, but is rather an inheritance, passed matrilineally in humans, and shared with almost all multicellular life. Put under biology's own microscope, the concept of the organism increasingly appears as a heuristic model rather than a faithful mapping of reality.
We are left to reckon with how supposedly sovereign organisms, in fact, “are species multiples, crowded with swarming forms of life” (Kirksey 2015, 776). In a less corporeal sense, organisms are also composed of—and enacted by—practices, politics, technologies, and a host of social and cultural forces that are not observed with technologies of genetic sequencing (Mol 2003). For example, ideas and practices about disease (e.g., malaria and COVID-19) exert forces upon genetically distinct organisms (e.g., mosquitoes, bats, and pangolins), which in turn press upon public policy and human thought (Kirksey 2015). A multiplicity of biological and non-biological forms of existence may exist and overlap within a singular organismal whole. “[E]very animal is fundamentally a band, a pack” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 239).
In some parts of Western Alaska, walrus ivory carving remains a key source of income. In one Alaska Native village, I met several carvers who speak proudly of supporting their families through their art. But, two added that it's become much harder in recent years. Walrus remains a food staple, but changing attitudes toward ivory—and changing laws, such as the UK's recent ban on imported walrus ivory—have made it much more difficult for carvers to sell their work. Pacific walrus are not considered an endangered species by regulatory authorities, nor do they attract the sort of public affection as whales or elephants. But the fact that their tusks are reminiscent of other, beloved, and/or endangered animals—e.g., elephants, rhinoceroses, narwhals—caused a shift in both public attitudes and regulations with material consequences for Western Alaskans. Although walrus ivory is indelibly part of a walrus, to many, they trigger a salient association to animals with which walrus share little more than membership in the class Mammalia. In this case, the mere presence of a tusk links elephant lives in Africa to walrus lives in the Bering Sea. In Western Alaska, the putative sovereignty of the walrus-as-organism dissolves before a transnational assemblage of policymakers and activists, who are primarily concerned with entirely different species on separate continents, revealing the leakiness of organism logic.
Another genre of epidermally skeptical environmental research comes from the study of organisms that decompose (e.g., Paxson 2008; Hird 2012). Bacteria remind us that the boundaries of self and other are lively spaces. What passes inside and outside of bodies does not vacillate between self and other. Rather, these categories are plural and porous. Jamie Lorimer offers a helpful story, set “in the graveyard of a wizened botanist”: Waving a windfall apple, she traced the fruit's possible molecular history—from subterranean human corpse, broken by bacteria, carried in the body of a worm to the reaching roots. Lifted high to branch, to bud, and finally to fruit. A bite, a chew, a swallow, and, after some acidic digestion, into me. From human to humus to human again through a humorous, rotten epiphany. (2016, 235)
Recent work attending to such complex habitats include work on urban ecologies (Hinchliffe et al., 2005) and other “feral spaces” of “human and nonhuman becomings” (Hinchliffe and Whatmore 2009, 106). These habitats are not just useful for thinking with animals and plants, but for understanding economic practices, politics, infrastructure, and how cities and suburbs themselves are “co-fabricated with other-than-human life” (Barua and Sinha 2022, 1). Part of what makes these urban ecologies so successful is their grounding in ecology per se, rather than a subset of life forms moving through a passive urban landscape. This owes in no small part to the necessarily geographical attention paid to the city—the context becomes the environment.
The importance of this more-than-organismal perspective becomes especially clear when we consider migratory animals (e.g., Van Dooren 2014, 87–122). One might pick up a garden snail or saddle a horse and thereby conduct a multispecies ethnography—but any reference to the environment would be at the discretion of the human observer. The encounter will always be multispecies, but not necessarily environmental—or even geographical. By contrast, migration requires a reckoning with geography. Across the Pacific Northwest of North America, for instance, salmon are loaded by the millions onto tanker trucks and driven in lightless metal chambers from inland hatcheries to the coastline, where young fish are unceremoniously poured into the sea like so many grains of sand. This set of practices continues to shape some of the largest rivers on the planet, as salmon exert influence on how humans design and build dams (Swanson 2017)—and increasingly how these dams are torn down (Stoffle 2022). A multispecies ethnography of human and salmon would be incomplete without river-ocean-truck-dam-hatchery-fishermen playing their distinct roles in survival and reproduction (Swanson 2022). Such encounters—ethnographic or otherwise—are necessarily environmental, attuned to the spaces between existents. Attending to the spaces in between allows a greater attunement to affect (Massumi 2002) and attachment (Anderson 2022). Life itself is “not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere” (Siken 2019).
Axis 3: life and nonlife
Research in geography and anthropology often tacitly slips into the Western ontological divide between biological life and non-biological existents. In Western urban contexts, non-biological existents are sometimes dismissed as a byproduct of humanity: a social exoskeleton of walls, roads, and railways. In some unbuilt environments, like the Amazon rainforest, non-biological existents may appear relatively quiet against the panoply of metabolic life. But in other contexts, these forms are more easily noticed and harder to regard as a “substratum” (Ingold 2010b: 123) for human activity. Whereas the second axis, above, exhorts environmental researchers to pay attention to ontologies of biological life that separate inside from outside, this final axis pays attention to the geontologies (Povinelli 2016) that separate biological life from non-biological existents, such as mountains, rivers, oceans, sky, clouds, tectonic plates, stars, magnetic fields, and so on.
In Western Alaska, the forces of water, ice, wind, soil, and sunlight are obvious on the landscape. For the Yup’ik, Siberian Yupik, and Iñupiaq subsistence hunters who have lived here for millennia, these forces determine the availability of food in a given year. The way in which toxic algae have come to endanger a nutritional staple in the Bering Sea is inseparable from climatic and oceanic changes—notably, warming sea temperatures that have led to “massive” algal blooms (Anderson et al. 2021). Continued and worsening marine events threaten a cascade of changes for Indigenous communities in Western Alaska, including the potential for paralytic shellfish poisoning, a heightened dependence upon imported Western foods, a corresponding need for waged labor, and the attenuation of traditional hunting practices. These are issues that deserve ethnographic attention, but accommodating these shifts requires a framework that is more-than-multispecies, at least in the sense whereby “multispecies ethnographers are studying the host of organisms whose lives and deaths are linked to human social worlds” (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010, 545, my emphasis).
Standing at the frozen margin of land and ocean one April evening, I spoke to hunters as they butchered a bearded seal. The mood was not celebratory but somber. It was the peak of spring in the North Bering Sea, when whales migrate north. But for two weeks, the shorefast ice extended for miles before leading to open water. That day, there had been a brief opening. Hunters had gone out for bowhead whale; the seal was a meager consolation prize. The wind, they explained, was out of the south, which consolidated the pack ice on the shore, pushing the whales’ spring migration east, toward Russia. The rest of the whaling season would pass without a single successful hunt, with immediate repercussions for food security.
What counts as life, and what doesn’t, shapes how we imagine more-than-human community. (Povinelli 2016). The notion that things with DNA occupy a separate political sphere as things without DNA is largely a creation of Western bioscience. Just as biology was a “translation and purification” (Lorimer 2015, 22) of the world into a neatly taxonomized biosphere, geology established a further distinction by reinforcing the distinction that divested nonlife of most properties except a Newtonian capacity to react (Clark and Yusoff 2017).
For geographers, this often (but hardly always) appears as the ontological segregation of “land” and “life,” which facilitated two of modernity's most successful projects: the social construction of land as inert and the establishment of an ontological dualism between what is “natural” and what is not (Descola 2013; Whatmore 2002). This cosmology allowed land to become property, distinct from the life attached to that same land (Li 2014). For the first time, humans and their institutions could lay claim to life under the auspices of only claiming the two-dimensional notion of land represented on maps and deeds. For instance, across North America in the 19th century, so-called land claims were in fact claims to fur animals, forests, fish, and whales (Demuth 2019). The ontological fissure of life and territory became a near-prerequisite for this particular mode of conquest that shaped much of the contemporary world (Wolfe 2006, 387).
The post-Holocene epoch reveals the obviousness of our misconceptions, “pulling the ‘socio’ and the ‘geo’ together into new discursive formations” (Clark and Yusoff 2017, 14). The so-called Anthropocene is not a metaphor for the long-ignored interconnectedness of human and nonhuman biological life; if anything, it is a metaphor for the interconnectedness of biological life and non-biological existents (Povinelli 2016). With increasing frequency, the vitality of nonlife comes into human lives in startling and shocking ways. For example, the explosion of wildfires in places once thought immune to such disasters has led to a wholesale reevaluation of the impact of nonlife on humans and other biological life. In my hometown, people now speak ominously of “smoke season” and “defendable space.” Defendable. What better word to capture the force of nonlife than the notion of building a fortress to protect oneself from a calamitous threat—in this case, one that cannot be held, stabilized, or even captured in a glass vial. Fire races, climbs, and licks its way into our lives—reacting, not as a tennis ball does to a racket, but with an unpredictability that exceeds our dogged efforts at containment. Its vitality makes some critters look positively inert by comparison. Stephen Pyne's environmental ethnographies argue that humans do not control fire, but that we grew up together (1997, 2004). This work exemplifies what sorts of political and social forces are not normally contained within ethnographic frameworks, but nonetheless deserve attention as vital agents in more-than-human landscapes.
Consider ice. Across the planet, ice is a central force in many landscapes and ecosystems, mediating between life forms (Bravo 2010; Veland and Lynch 2017). As I write this, the Norton Sound community in Western Alaska is reeling from the death of a mother and her child last week. They were killed by a polar bear in a neighboring village, the first such death in Alaska since the 1980s. In January, polar bears would normally be hunting far from the shoreline on sea ice. This year, the ice has come in late. Together with climate change, ice plays a central role in determining human-polar bear encounters (Rode et al., 2022).
“The ice certainly does something in the Arctic,” writes Kirstin Hastrup: It is not simply a placeholder; as an agent, it has also infiltrated all representations of the Arctic … Emplacement within the Arctic topography is literally towered over by geographical structures of such magnitude that there can be no escaping from them. (2013, 52)
Recently, geographers have dedicated a growing volume of research to the elemental (for an overview, see Engelmann and McCormack 2021). This work is particularly exciting for its attention to the in-between forces that are essential to geographical inquiry (Nassar 2021; Simpson 2017). These entanglements are focused on connection rather than difference. For example, geographers working in the blue humanities, an emerging term for scholarship with a particular consideration for oceans, are particularly attuned to the way in which life does not simply float through inert spaces but is partly constituted by those spaces. These works, perhaps by virtue of centering on a medium other than land and air, pay particular consideration to these generative fluxes (Jue 2020; Steinberg and Peters 2015). In a compelling statement on marine environments, Peters and Steinberg suggest viewing the ocean as a complete whole, together with the biological life it contains: “we see these elements as emanating outward from and refracting from the ocean so that, in effect, they too are the ocean” (2019, 294). The echoes of Lopez's incandescent bear, above, are hard to miss. Similar explorations of the elemental have also delved into the subterranean (Squire and Dodds 2020) and even latitude itself (Bravo 2019).
Another fruitful trend in environmental ethnography concerns the incorporation of non-organic chemicals into broader tapestries of biological life and non-biological existents. The “chemical turn” (Balayannis and Garnett 2020) in social sciences draws attention to the often invisible but powerful forces mediating “economic, personal, political, and sentimental relationships that have emerged with modern chemistry” (Shapiro and Kirksey 2017, 482). These interactions are distinctly plural. Chemicals (e.g., pesticides and antibiotics) can protect certain life forms even as they impinge upon others, echoing work on how disturbance yields complex topographies of opportunity, loss, and desire (Kirksey 2020; Pollock 2016; Tsing 2015). Chemo-ethnography is pioneering novel approaches to ethnographic thought by attending to non-living entities—whether in pharmaceuticals, water quality (Murphy 2017), or domestic buildings (Shapiro 2015). Some of the recent humanities scholarship on climate change, driven largely by carbon dioxide and methane, could be called chemo-ethnography. Chemo-ethnography is also notable for its discourse on chemicals as both categories (types/kinds) and objects, reminiscent of the pluralist ontology of species advocated by Dupré (1993). For example, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) do something in the world both as individual molecules (e.g., by bioaccumulating in fatty tissues) and also as a declarative category (i.e., distinct from the molecular objects themselves) by causing changes in human industry, national and global regulatory schema, consumer preferences, and epigenetics (Murphy 2017).
A note on the term “ethnography”
This article focuses primarily on what it means for an ethnography to be environmental and how that quality might overlap with or differ from multispecies research. But the term “ethnography” also deserves a word of attention. In broad strokes, writes geographer Nick Megoran, ethnography “classically denotes an extended sojourn amongst a group of people where the researcher immerses himself or herself in daily life, continuously reflecting on meticulously kept fieldnotes, to learn the social understandings of the group in its own terms” (2006, 625). Unlike many other social scientific methods, ethnography eschews research methods that attempt to create reproducible results by means of controlling certain elements of the research process (e.g., surveys, focus groups, or structured interviews). Instead, it embraces “an ethos of practical experimentation” (Hitchings and Latham 2020, 977), quietly at odds with the part of the scientific method in which the hypothesis always precedes the data analysis. Ethnographers’ openness to the field offers a humbler way to approach scholarship, particularly in settings with fraught power dynamics (Saville 2021).
For many geographers, ethnography is an imperfect term: borrowed from anthropologists but never fully retooled for our purposes (Herbert 2000, 564). It is possible that geographers’ wariness toward ethnography simply came from a hesitancy to trade in the currency of another discipline. Whatever the cause, the past two decades saw an uptick in geographers’ use of explicitly ethnographic methods. Recently, geographers have labeled myriad approaches and methods “ethnographic” (Hitchings and Latham 2020).
Even within anthropology, the term is the subject of heated debate. “Ethnography is not a method,” insists Tim Ingold (2017, 23). For Ingold, ethnography is always at risk of alienating the object of the study—by rendering it an object in the first instance rather than encountering our research participants on a level epistemological field. Instead, Ingold exhorts readers to focus on the humility of participant observation (Ingold 2014, 2017). Perhaps the term “environmental participant observation” is a more accurate combination of words to describe the process of attuning to one's environment as an observer-interlocutor than “environmental ethnography.”
These arguments are important, but they are also semantic. Our terminology is ultimately in service of our scholarship and not the other way around. These are imperfect terms, ripe for replacement by future researchers. This article is not about the term “environmental ethnography,” but about the practice itself. That said, there is something about ethnography worth retaining. There is a patience implied by ethnographic research (Hitchings and Latham 2020). Geographers, literary critics, philosophers, and shamans all might practice environmental ethnography on any given day, simply by allowing understanding to unfold at a schedule determined by the field site and its many participants (Ingold 2014). It is the humility of gathering only that which is offered, when it is offered.
In practice, such patience is a tonic against quick judgment or generalizations. When I met with one Alaska Native village council to ask permission to conduct research as part of a multi-sited ethnography, the tribal president told me, sternly, “you’re only looking at four villages—we have, 20, I think, in the whole region. And they are all very different.” Our fellow human beings are uniquely equipped to tell us researchers to stay longer, to broaden our sample size, or to come back in winter and see how different it is. Working with nonhuman research participants also requires this patience. In the High North, for example, populations of caribou experience regular cycles of population growth and collapse. In one year, an Alaska Native village might land five bowhead whales; in another, it might not land any. A reticence to make ethnographic statements about a species per se is ultimately a hesitation about generalizing from a sample to a broader population. Often, this hesitation is informed by an appreciation for the importance of geographical contingency. Similarly, patience in practicing environmental ethnography wisely heeds a hesitation to generalize across time scales, a reluctance to extrapolate a larger truth from a relatively short moment.
Conclusion: toward an environmental ethnography
What does it mean to “do” environmental ethnography? At its core, environmental ethnography decenters the human in patient and curious inquiry, seeking insights from scales that confound our usual sensibilities. Often in alignment with multispecies research, this involves stepping beyond atomistic human-nonhuman comparisons and looking instead for unlikely and sometimes less-charismatic research participants.
In many instances, this requires an openness to mismatches of scale. Animals are more amenable to traditional ethnographic methods, 1 which is precisely why environmental ethnography often looks to less charismatic and obvious forms of existence. Recent endeavors in environmental ethnography (some of which have already been mentioned above) include attending to forms of existence that are often overlooked as empty context, such as weather (Rantala et al., 2011; Simpson 2017), ice (Hastrup 2013; Veland and Lynch 2017), pollution (da Costa 2008; Nassar 2021), and forests (Kohn 2013; Tsing 2015). Others include affective and less tangible entities, such as Aboriginal Australian Dreamings (totemic formations, Povinelli 2016), the dreams of dogs (Kohn 2007), anticipation (Reeves 2017), and hunger (Phillips 2018). Others still attend to objects and entities that are often regarded as inert, such as gold ore (High 2007, 2017), garbage (Bennett 2004), and fire (Pyne 1997, 2004).
The value of these propositions is the extension of posthumanist critical theory into grounded posthumanist research. Environmentally attuned epistemologies hold space for notions of deep time, vastness, and what it means to be alive in ways that challenge and disrupt inherited humanist paradigms. The practice of environmental ethnography requires stepping outside of ourselves in uncomfortable ways, beyond our bias toward the familiar scales of time, size, and sentience.
At its core, environmental ethnography invites researchers to become more geographical—better attuned to contingencies and connections that structure the relationships between humans and nonhumans. “Formulations of living space,” writes Maan Barua, “enable more-than-human geographers to look to their own tradition for thinking about the cartographies of nonhuman life” (Barua 2018, 10) In this sense, environmental ethnography offers a toolkit for scholarship to become more-than-multispecies and, in the process, more accountable to the land beneath our feet. Indeed, if there were a sine qua non of environmental ethnography, it might be the awareness of and appreciation for the power and potential of space. Through this practice, geographers offer a unique contribution to the boisterous field of more-than-human research.
As posthuman and environmental scholarship continues to advance, researchers should embrace these contingencies in the same way we embrace the heterogeneity of our human research participants. This doesn’t mean that scholarship should provide a role for every human and nonhuman participant. Some songs are best performed by a string quartet rather than an orchestra. But a string quartet needs a place to perform, whether it be a concert hall or a living room. It needs instruments to play and ears to listen. Thinking with environments asks us to attend to the background and the protagonist at the same time. Honoring the uniqueness of place keeps our research (and our research subjects) grounded in habitat. In these more-than-human and more-than-multispecies communities, this act of grounding gives us someplace to call home.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Gates Cambridge Trust.
