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A review by aegagrus
The Promise of Multispecies Justice by Karin Bolender, Sophie Chao, Eben Kirksey
5.0
Stunning. So much to sit with and to consider. Includes meditations on the fraught-but-necessady rhetorical assertion of species difference (e.g. in the chapter discussing activism against aerial pesticide application in Mindanao), and on non-reciprocal but intimate relationships and encounters (e.g. in the chapter on the ambivalent comradeship between displaced humans and stray dogs in post-extractive Baku). There are no easy answers here, and there is much that I found challenging in an extremely useful way -- most especially in the chapter profiling a maker of artisinal rodent traps in Tanzania, situating his livelihood (which necessarily entails killing) as embodying much of the generative ethos of multispecies negotiation. Ultimately, this volume is a ringing endorsement of thoughtfulness -- of viewing justice from multiple frames, and of "slowing down" before making ethical judgements which flatten and smooth over the rough edges of the multispecies world in which we live.
Certainly an academic book, and won't be everyone's speed. But it was definitely mine.
Certainly an academic book, and won't be everyone's speed. But it was definitely mine.