Place

Vol. 02 (Kinship: Belonging In A World Of Relations #2)

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Place (2021, Center for Humans & Nature)

English language

Published Jan. 2, 2021 by Center for Humans & Nature.

ISBN:
978-1-7368625-1-3
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OCLC Number:
1268133073

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3 stars (3 reviews)

10 editions

Making Kin with Nonhmans

4 stars

This is the third book in the series Kinship. It is a series of essays and poems, this volume focussed on relationships betqeen human and nonhuman kin. Like the first two, it suffers from a white bias and a US-centric viewpoint in some of the essays, but mostly it contains some wonderful writing and is the best in the series so far.

Standout articles are by the always-brilliant Anne Galloway and her kinship with sheep, Merlin Sheldrake's thoughts on fungi and lichen, and Richard Powers' thoughtful considerations on the degrees of separation between us and other creatures (although that essay also contains one of the series' most damning howlers in reference to the Rwandan genocide). Great, broad essays and a worthwhile book.

Limited Placeness

2 stars

This collection of essays is the second in the 5-volume series Kinship. Presented as "Place", the editors suggest that this book will be about situatedness and "crafting a deeper connection with earth's bioregions". Unlike the first volume, which brings together fascinating essays from many different perspectives and nations (albeit US-weighted), this collection of essays and poems is deeply flawed.

There are two main reasons for this. The first is that "place" seems to predominately mean "the USA" and more specifically mean "US border regions". This surely misses the point entirely, both because it considers place through enclosure only and because it leaves out almost all of the human-inhabited places in the world. The second (related) issue is that the authors, including those writing about "Indigenous experience", are mostly white and educated or working in the US education system. This is an obvious failing of the editors and seems …

Water, Moon, Mountain

4 stars

Planet is the first of a 5-volume curated collection of essays and poems about kinship released by the Centre for Humans and Nature. As with many collections, it features a variety of writing, some strong and some not. The first volume is on "planet" and combines thoughts on this pale blue dot from thinkers, writers, artists, poets and philosophers.

Overall, the writing is of a very high standard and the collection is well presented. Standout essays include Andrew S. Yang's Kinshape, which is a conversetion with stardust as kin, via his mother. Co-editor Robin Wall Kimmerer's part-speculative fiction about humans being invited back into the family by other creatures that share this space is thoughtful and wonderful. Ceridwen Dovey's essay on giving rights to the moon raises fascinating questions and is written with a beautiful sense of care. However some of the essays fail to land, particularly the "celebrity" …

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  • Nature

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