[Commlist] new book: Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity

The /Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity/ 
<https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbook-of-Ecocultural-Identity-1st-Edition/Milstein-Castro-Sotomayor/p/book/9781138478411> (2020) 
is a timely book, as across the globe more and more of us awake to our 
always interconnected selves. The /Handbook/ brings the ecological turn 
to sociocultural understandings of self and group identities, 
introducing an interdisciplinary, insightful assembly of original theory 
and research on planetary positionalities in flux in the Anthropocene – 
or what in this /Handbook/ cultural ecologist David Abram presciently 
renames the Humilocene, a new “epoch of humility.” Forty international 
authors craft a kaleidoscopic lens, focusing on ways all identities are 
ecocultural and on the multiple and unspooling ways identities evolve 
and transform and, in so doing, may support reciprocal surviving and 
thriving.　


Introduction chapter and endorsements are below. Table of Contents, 
editor bios, and authors can be found at this Routledge link 
<https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbook-of-Ecocultural-Identity-1st-Edition/Milstein-Castro-Sotomayor/p/book/9781138478411>. 
  Please help share this among your networks. And please ask your 
libraries to purchase the book (or put it on their to-buy lists if their 
budgets have been temporarily frozen) -- The Handbook is an important 
resource for our times for scholars, teachers, students, protectors, 
policy-makers, and practitioners. Routledge has provided a 20% discount 
code: FLR40. The editors are available for Q&A, interviews, guest 
commentary, talks, etc. An online book launch is likely forthcoming — 
we’ll keep you posted :)!


          */What has been said about the Handbook:/*


          *“Intricately transdisciplinary and cross-geographical, it is
          the first volume of its kind to caringly craft a gathering
          concept, that of ecocultural identities, bringing together the
          social, political, and ecological dimensions of identity. What
          results is a treasure of insights on the politics of life,
          broadly speaking, and a novel toolbox for tackling effectively
          the damages caused by modern capitalist modes of extraction
          and the urgent task of Earth’s ontological repair and renewal.”*


          *Arturo Escobar, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill*


          **


          *“Too often mislabelled an ‘issue,’ the environment is in fact
          integral not just to everything we do but to who we are. This
          link between our identity and our ecology has long been
          recognised in many societies, but others seem to have
          forgotten its signal importance. This superb collection shows
          why all identities are ecocultural ones, and why full
          recognition of this is essential to all our political futures.” *


          *Noel Castree, University of Manchester*


          * “A smart, provocative, and original collection, the Handbook
          of Ecocultural Identity provides a definitive introduction to
          the constraints upon, and the contexts, formations, and
          impacts of, our diverse – but often unexamined – ecological
          selves.” *


          *Robert Cox, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and
          three-time national president of the Sierra Club*


          *“I am in complete solidarity with this book.” *


          *Donna Haraway, University of California, Santa Cruz*

*

*/Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity/ 
<https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbook-of-Ecocultural-Identity-1st-Edition/Milstein-Castro-Sotomayor/p/book/9781138478411>* Introduction: 
*

"We humans are cultural and ecological beings. This doesn’t make 
us unique as a species – myriad other beings, from orcas to elephants, 
are cultural and ecological, too. Yet, perhaps for an increasing 
majority of us humans, it seems as if our ecological selves have 
become steadily less accessible. The lack of earthly self-awareness in 
an increasingly human-centered world is reflected in the invisibility 
and deniability we assign to our environmental interlinkages, impacts, 
and interdependencies. And this lack of wakefulness is reified in 
the largely unabated extractive and destructive orientation that 
powerful interests and the majority of governments maintain toward 
the planet.

The absence of ecological palpability also has been evident in much 
social activism, which often has emphasized sociocultural identity 
formations, such as race, gender, sexuality, and class, yet largely 
disregarded interrelated more-than-human dimensions (environmental 
justice movements being among the clear exceptions). Equally 
in scholarship, research overwhelmingly has articulated identity as 
shaping, and being shaped by, human society but rarely as shaping, 
and being shaped by, the more-than-human world (Dervin & Risager, 2017; 
Gupta & Ferguson, 1992; Nakayama & Halualani, 2010). Indeed, identity, 
representation, difference, contingency, and power can be understood as 
‘pre-ecological’ concepts (Jagtenberg & McKie, 1997, p. 
121), notions emerging from societies and scholarships that 
predominantly have ignored or denigrated extra-human relations, 
knowledges, and practices.

As important as extant identity scholarship and activism have been 
to understanding and improving aspects of the human condition, 
cultural commentators such as Akanbi (2019) have begun to explore how 
clinging too hard to sociocultural dimensions of one’s 
identity ‘can shutdown conversation,’ make social movements ‘hollow and 
full of holes,’ and block compassion, empathy, understanding, nuance, 
interconnectedness, and common recognition. This clinging is part of a 
cultural condition Haraway (1991) pinpoints as a long-defined ‘proper 
state for a Western person’ that centers an urge ‘to have and hold 
a core identity as if it were a possession’ (p. 135). Such ‘ownership of 
the self’ (p. 135), however, conflicts with actual social and 
ecological interlinkages of selves, which interweave unavoidable, often 
invisible commonalities and evade hubristic attempts at possession. 
Indeed, all of us, each and every one, are always participants 
in crisscrossing sociocultural and ecological webs of life, 
whether consciously or not. It is the growing majority of humanity’s 
obliviousness – and even active denial – of 
our interrelated sociocultural and ecological constitutions and 
conditions that has us where we are today, in the midst of unfolding 
anthropogenic biospheric catastrophe. This is the context for the 
/Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity/ 
<https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbook-of-Ecocultural-Identity-1st-Edition/Milstein-Castro-Sotomayor/p/book/9781138478411>/./

This Handbook brings together diverse voices from around the globe to 
illuminate dynamics and forms of ecocultural identity so we can better 
understand – and better relate and respond to – the intertwining of 
disrupted ecosystems and our day-to-day and long-term mutual existences. 
The chapters within account for a plurality of subjectivities in flux 
and formation in the Anthropocene (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000), 
Capitalocene (Moore, 2015), Chthulucene (Haraway, 2016), or what Abram 
(2020) in this Handbook presciently introduces as the Humilocene, a 
grounded-human epoch steeped in both humiliation and humility. In order 
to intervene in the ontological, political, and institutional flows that 
configure this many-named epoch of human-surpassed 
earthly boundaries (Alexiades, 2018), the Handbook authors reinterrogate 
what it means to be human and reimagine the many ways we identify that 
are of essence to whether we can think and cultivate our ways into 
inhabitable futures.

The Handbook’s assembly of original theory and research provides views 
into ways sociocultural and ecological identities not only are entwined 
but also mutually constituted. Our intention is to help foster a radical 
multi-lensed epistemology focused on ways ecocultural selfhood is being, 
and could be, understood, felt, performed, and practiced. As such, this 
Handbook has three core transdisciplinary goals: first, to provide a 
prismatic introduction to the emergent concept and framework of 
ecocultural identity for researchers, instructors,  students, activists, 
and practitioners; second, to provide a catalytic resource for 
examining, critiquing, and activating ecocultural identities as 
they manifest in everyday lives and in structural processes; and, third, 
as the Handbook illuminates the depth, breadth, and common threads of 
a diverse budding body of knowledge and expertise, this collection aims 
to ignite increased interest in academic and public realms and to expand 
dialogues regarding the planetary positionalities at the heart of our 
most actively destructive and robustly thriving presents and futures.


What is ecocultural identity?

As identity has become an increasingly central concept across the public 
sphere, scholarship has examined ways ‘the lived experience of 
identities is always implicated in processes of transformation’ (Elliot, 
2020b, p. 12). Narrations and navigations of identity intersect with 
politics, society, and processes of reinvention, reconstruction, and 
renewal. Antiessentialist understandings of identity emphasize ways 
identities never emerge from an already present unchanging 
core, but rather within contexts and relationalities, making identities 
‘continually and differently constituted’ (Escobar, 1999, p. 3) often 
partly in milieus of power. What largely has been missing across 
disciplines and in the public domain, however, is a dedication to 
understanding identity ecologically in tandem with cultural and social 
modes of consideration. An ecocultural identity framework troubles this 
tendency to conceive of the environmental as separate from or 
a subsidiary of the economic, political, historical, and cultural, 
and instead situates group and individual ecological affiliations and 
practices as inextricable from – and mutually constituted with 
– sociocultural dimensions.

As Abram states in this Handbook, ‘we don’t have a hoot of a chance of 
healing our social justice issues until we begin including the 
more-than-human world within our sense of the socius, or the community’ 
(Abram with Milstein & Castro-Sotomayor, 2020, p. 24) The large-scale 
erasure of our species’ perception of our nestedness within 
ecological communities, Abram argues, also renders our 
human relationships – from the intimate to the international – 
remarkably brittle. As Earth floods, quakes, and melts, and as extremist 
rhetoric intoxicates much of the political arena, an ecocultural 
perspective on identity offers an expanded, potentially recuperative 
lens for understanding self, others, and existence as intrinsically 
relational and broadly ethical.

This Handbook introduces a new term: ecocultural identity. As such, we 
want to make clear from the start what this term means and what it does 
not mean. The notion of ecocultural identity offers an overarching 
framework for understanding all identities. In other words, ecocultural 
identity is not a normative concept – for instance, chapters in this 
Handbook are not limited to environmentalist identities, which much 
previous work has focused on (e.g., Chianchi, 2015), 
nor ecocentric identities (e.g., Clayton & Opotow, 2003; Horton, 2003; 
Thomashow, 1995), another area of well-developed research. Rather, an 
ecocultural identity lens serves to widen the scope on all identities 
to understand ways sociocultural dimensions of selfhoods are always 
inseparable from ecological dimensions.

The ecological turn in this conceptualization of identity hinges upon 
the assumption that all identities have earthly constitutions and forces 
– whether those identities are destructive or protective, complacent or 
creative, extractive or restorative. In illuminating ecological 
dimensions of identity, the importance of culture also cannot be 
overlooked as identities are always materially and discursively 
constructed. We are made of, part of, emerging from, and constantly 
contributing to both ecology and culture – producing, performing, and 
constantly perceiving and enacting through the both. In 
these ways, one’s ecocultural identity – whether latent or conscious – 
is at the heart of the positionalities, subjectivities, and practices 
that (in)form one’s emotional, embodied, mental, and political 
sensibilities in and with the all-encompassing world.

The lens of ecocultural identity is boundary-crossing in a number of 
respects – traversing across different fields of thought as well as 
surmounting culturally constructed borders separating human, flora, 
fauna, and environment. As such, the study of ecocultural identity has 
the potential to illuminate the complex and thickly storied self as 
vitally entangled within the stories of other species and the Earth 
itself. Such ecocultural inquiry expands notions of intersectionality 
to include not only sociocultural categories but also oft overlooked 
more-than-human groupings, including but certainly not limited to those 
of mammals, oxygen-carbon dioxide exchangers, land-dwellers, bodies 
of water, and biomes. This more-than-human intersectionality can lead 
to acknowledgements of enduring intraspecies, interspecies, and 
elemental commonalities and to shared questions, concerns, and actions 
regarding our collective course of living (Nicholas Jacobson, personal 
communication).

Scholarly explorations of cultural and ecological identification as 
mutually constituted have been steadily growing (Armstrong, 1995; 
Carbaugh, 1996; Elliot, 2020a; Gómez-Barris, 2017; Grusin, 2015; Hodden, 
2014; Jagtenberg & McKie, 1997; Junka-Aikio & Cortes-Severino, 
2017; Mendoza & Kinefuchi, 2016; Milstein, 2012b; Milstein, Thomas, 
& Hoffmann, 2019; Mortimer-Sandilands & Erickson, 2010; Weiss & Haber, 
1999). These developments of renewed understandings of an extended self, 
at once indivisibly ecological and cultural, unshackle predominant 
notions of human subjectivity, senses of selfhood, and worldly 
experience, and have liberatory potential. As Grusin (2015) states,

"To extend our academic and critical concern to include nonhuman animals 
and the nonhuman environment, which had previously been excluded or 
ignored from critical or scholarly humanistic concern, should be a 
politically liberatory project in very much the same way that earlier, 
similar turns toward a concern of gender, race, ethnicity, or class were 
politically liberatory for groups of humans." (p. xix)

In these ways, as part of a new social grammar (Santos, 2011), an 
ecocultural lens can contribute both to problematizing and redefining 
conventional concepts of self amidst a crisis of group and individual 
identity marked not only by a fierce fixity of identity labels but also 
by a pernicious anthropocentrism that fixes humanity at the center of 
existence. While inquiries into sociocultural identity can productively 
focus on linking related oppressions that disparate groups experience 
in order to build up coalitions that actively change society, a notion 
of identity that additionally embraces the intrinsic ecology 
of existence aims at coming to terms, too, with the roles 
our oppressions and liberations play in our common extinctions or 
continuances in one form or another. The move to expand views of 
identification to always include who we are relationally 
as ecological bodies and environmental forces and reactants is also a 
move to address dominant feelings of disconnection and polarization 
that underlie both environmental and sociocultural struggles, and to 
form new insights that open alternative public spheres and counter 
patriarchal, imperialist, capitalist, and extractivist systems of 
modernity that rapidly have (trans)formed our shared milieu (Junka-Aikio 
& Cortes-Severino, 2017).

Movements, such as Indigenous-led protector uprisings, Extinction 
Rebellion, and the child-led School Strike for Climate, are examples of 
ways ecocultural perspectives contribute to fostering and delineating a 
radical democracy that, in Sandilands words, ‘is an ecological 
necessity, one which necessarily includes a variety of struggles 
in transcendence of fundamentally limiting notions of the subject’ (as 
quoted in Code, 2006, p. 20). An ecocultural identity lens assists us 
in remembering we are ‘earth citizens,’ which can ‘help us recover our 
common humanity and help us transcend the deep division of 
intolerance, hate, and fear that corporate globalization’s 
ruptures, polarization, and enclosures have created’ (Shiva, 2015, p. 6).


Transdisciplinary and international scope

Today’s problems and opportunities require holistic and kaleidoscopic 
conversations. As such, the /Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity/ 
<https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbook-of-Ecocultural-Identity-1st-Edition/Milstein-Castro-Sotomayor/p/book/9781138478411> provides 
far-reaching original transdisciplinary international research on the 
role of ecocultural identity in processes of local and 
global disturbance and renewal. Such scholarly inquiries commonly 
are dispersed among separate disciplinary subfields or discrete 
interdisciplinary schools of thought with relatively small numbers of 
adherents – and tend largely to be limited to culturally Western 
regions. In an attempt to broaden and interconnect the conversation, the 
Handbook’s authors speak from a wide variety of disciplinary 
and multi-disciplinary backgrounds, including geography, 
communication, environmental studies, anthropology, education, planning, 
agricultural sciences, linguistics, history, sociology, arts, 
cultural studies, and philosophy. The Handbook authors hail from 
North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Oceania, and employ 
an interlinking array of methodologies and a diversity of orientations 
integral to ecocultural work’s vital transdisciplinarity.

The Handbook’s resulting collection of original theory and research 
provides an essential reference on ways individual and collective 
ecocultural identities endure, emerge, and transform responsively 
with/in today’s disrupted world. At the scale of identity, the Handbook 
chapters examine the reasons, ramifications, and possible resolutions 
for anthropogenic environmental problems. Chapter authors develop and 
apply an ecocultural lens to theory building and case studies to 
illustrate and nuance sociocultural and ecological tensions within and 
among a wide range of identities – including but not limited to Indian 
Hindu river protectors, U.S. 
Evangelical Christian environmentalists, Ghanaian illegal miners, 
Swedish pastoral farmers, Thai canal dwellers, and American West 
ranchers. The research within engages broad spectrums of 
cultural, spatial, temporal, and environmental contexts – such as polar 
imaginings, nation-state borderlands, interspecies mobilities, 
childhood educations, Indigenous–settler intersections, forestry 
relations, fossil fuel industry-induced earthquakes, desert waterscapes, 
and ancient and pre-colonial interspecies and political ecological 
histories.

Part I of the Handbook, ‘Illuminating and problematizing ecocultural 
identity,’ features chapters that both create and examine generative 
theory to reveal ways ecocultural identities are produced, felt, 
negotiated, constrained, and transformed in everyday, historical, and 
institutional contexts. Part II, ‘Forming and fostering ecocultural 
identity,’ comprises chapters that examine specific cultivations and 
forces of identity that further ways of being in the world, and 
investigate how these intersect with class, race, gender, religion, and 
the colonial present within historical, political, environmental, 
spatial, interpersonal, and multispecies contexts. In Part III, 
‘Mediating ecocultural identity,’ chapters highlight media and 
technology contexts and consequences for ecocultural identity and the 
significance of public sphere representations in reflecting and 
shaping both ecocultural identifications and relations. Chapters in Part 
IV, ‘Politicizing ecocultural identity,’ examine the 
hybridities, inclusions, and exclusions that circulate within 
and transform identities in praxis and politics, and ascertain barriers 
and opportunities for more radically inclusive and restorative 
democratic systems. The fifth and final part, ‘Transforming 
ecocultural identity,’ features chapters illustrating the interpretive 
power of an ecocultural approach to demonstrate and 
inform transformation in ways often overlooked or undermined by 
exclusively sociocultural or exclusively environmental orientations.


A note on terminology

In creating the Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity, in our 
dialogue together as editors and with chapter contributors, we 
encouraged reflexive engagement with ways the very language we use can 
function to both constrain and cultivate ecocultural vernaculars and 
ways of knowing. We also worked collaboratively with chapter authors 
to have the diverse and evolving original research and theory-building 
of this Handbook be accessible to an equally diverse and 
evolving readership.

Where possible, unnecessary discipline-specific or field-specific jargon 
has been avoided and essential terms that may not have the same 
centrality of meaning across disciplines or in the public sphere have 
been clearly defined. Further, we challenged all contributors to avoid 
unreflexive use of common terms such as ‘nature,’ ‘environment,’ and 
‘animals’ – terms that in the context of dominant discourses often 
function to reproduce notions of a separate, homogeneous, 
and backgrounded ecological other. Instead, we asked contributors to 
trouble the tendency to frame the ecological or the animal as 
separate from or subordinate to the human and to attempt to revive 
the ecocultural power of language to evoke earthly immersion and 
relation. The Handbook also attempts to avoid unreflexively reproducing 
politically strategic terms that have become central to popular speech, 
such as ‘climate change’ (introduced by a U.S. Republican think tank to 
replace the term ‘global warming’ in order to lessen public concern) 
(see Luntz Research Companies, 2002). Instead, the chapters 
favor explanatory terms such as climate ‘disruption,’ ‘crisis,’ 
or ‘emergency’ to indicate human agency and biological urgency.

In understanding ecocultural identity as often shaped by powerful vested 
economic and political interests, we also tried to remain reflexive 
about the potentialities and difficulties of directly engaging with and 
introducing an expanded ecocultural scope in the purviews of 
long-established, long-anthropocentric academic disciplines most of us 
Handbook contributors were trained in as researchers. The ecocultural 
lens itself serves to engage a struggle over meaning and can be seen in 
reflexive symbolic moves and intentions of scholars such as Haraway 
(2008) in her use of the integrative term ‘naturecultures.’ In this 
Handbook, in part by engaging such ecocultural neologisms and concepts 
as the more-than-human world (Abram, 1996), humanature (Milstein, 2016; 
Milstein, 2012a), and humanimal (Mitchell, 2003), we discursively 
interlace culture and ecology in scholarship as they are in 
life, turning toward ‘lexical reciprocal intertwining’ (Milstein, 2011, 
p. 21, note 1) and away from dominant binary constructs that reproduce 
an anthropocentric status quo.

The iterative process of working with chapter authors from multiple 
disciplines and practioner realms, most of whom have never met in 
person, mirrored challenges of and opportunities for doing recuperative 
ecocultural work within the public sphere, in daily interactions, and 
throughout the institutions that structure our worlds. From the 
original call for papers, to review and selection of chapters, and 
through several revision stages, as a diverse group of authors we faced 
a shortage of established common frames for ecocultural inquiry. 
In conversation, however, we experienced ways expansive 
and expressive terminologies and frameworks can be engaged, emerge, 
and multiply to galvanize the ecocultural issues of our times.

In the /Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity/ 
<https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbook-of-Ecocultural-Identity-1st-Edition/Milstein-Castro-Sotomayor/p/book/9781138478411>, 
we have strived to create and provide a shared, collaborative, and 
reflexive platform for introducing, connecting, and 
expanding conversations about the ecocultural manifestations and 
reverberations of identities. We worked closely with contributors 
in expressing a multi-voiced language and transdisciplinary orientation 
to define and illustrate ecocultural identity as a framework and to 
apply it as a fruitful lens to a wide variety of today’s overwhelming 
questions. In honoring the significance of both the ecological and 
the cultural in the configuration of the self, this Handbook expansively 
reclaims the constitutive and responsive dimensions of identity. Our 
hope is this expanded ecocultural scope provides a useful lens 
through which to clarify who we have been until now and who we would 
like to be tomorrow.


          */More of what's been said about the Handbook:/*


          “If diversity is a crucial condition for healthy cultural and
          ecological affairs, it is also so in*scholarly matters, and
          that is what readers will find in this excellent Handbook – a
          variety of ways of keeping our social and ecological worlds
          mutually articulated, healthily together.”*


          *Donal Carbaugh, University of Massachusetts*


          **


          “Some of the most transformative scholarship occurs when we
          don’t simply critique the*limits of existing approaches, but
          courageously throw in front of us new conceptual approaches or
          orientations, often marked in the first instance by new words.
          It is in this vein that the Handbook of Ecocultural Identity
          runs, offering up and then beginning to give form, colour, and
          texture to the term ‘ecocultural identity’ as a way to think
          beyond a range of dichotomies that have constituted and
          normalized human exceptionalism and our violent estrangement
          from the eco-worlds in which we are embedded. In a spirit of
          humility and generosity, the editors do not try to fix this
          new term in the net of their own interpretations, but rather
          create a rich interdisciplinary and global forum where the
          chapter authors are welcomed to articulate their
          understandings of what ecocultural identity means, and what
          this term might do to how we might think and act. Readers too
          are invited to join the conversation in what promises to be a
          fertile approach to thinking and acting with appropriate
          humility in an era that is crying out for humans to come home
          to themselves as ecocultural beings.”*


          *Danielle Celermajer, University of Sydney*


          **


          *“This is a superb compilation of exciting transdisciplinary
          theory and research about ecocultural identity, or the
          intertwining of culture and ecology in more-than-human and
          human beings. This volume demonstrates an impressive diversity
          of epistemological, methodological, ontological, and
          disciplinary approaches as well as case studies from
          throughout the many regions, cultures, and species of the
          Earth. The Humilocene, critical ecocultural intersectionality,
          sankofa, pacha, and human animal earthlings are just a few of
          the fruitful concepts introduced that expand our ability to
          see and understand ecocultural identity. The Routledge
          Handbook of Ecocultural Identity lays the groundwork for a
          radical revisioning of human relations with/in the more-than
          human ecological world. It provides needed strategies for
          ecological resilience in the midst of the Anthropocene and for
          imagining our collective future.” *


          *Danielle Endres, University of Utah*


          **


          *“As we find ourselves faced with the extreme environmental
          consequences of the Anthropocene, we need guides to help us
          negotiate appropriate ways of living with and understanding
          our relationship to the more-than-human world. This Handbook
          offers to the field a significant theoretical contribution,
          ecocultural identity, providing a practical and necessary
          guide for comprehending our inseparable place in the
          ecological web of life.” *


          *Barb Willard, DePaul University*


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