Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations, Vol. 2 Place

*Part of the 5-Volume Set 2022 Nautilus Book Award Gold Medal Winner: Ecology & Environment and Special Honors as Best of Anthology

Volume 2 of the Kinship series revolves around the question of place-based relations: To what extent does crafting a deeper connection with the Earths bioregions reinvigorate a sense of kinship with the place-based beings, systems, and communities that mutually shape one another? 

We live in an astounding world of relations. We share these ties that bind with our fellow humansand we share these relations with nonhuman beings as well. From the bacterium swimming in your belly to the trees exhaling the breath you breathe, this community of life is our kinand, for many cultures around the world, being human is based upon this extended sense of kinship.

Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations is a lively series that explores our deep interconnections with the living world. The five Kinship volumesPlanet, Place, Partners, Persons, Practiceoffer essays, interviews, poetry, and stories of solidarity, highlighting the interdependence that exists between humans and nonhuman beings. More than 70 contributorsincluding Robin Wall Kimmerer, Richard Powers, David Abram, J. Drew Lanham, and Sharon Blackieinvite readers into cosmologies, narratives, and everyday interactions that embrace a more-than-human world as worthy of our response and responsibility.

Given the place-based circumstances of human evolution and culture, global consciousness may be too broad a scale of care. Place, Volume 2 of the Kinship series, addresses the bioregional, multispecies communities and landscapes within which we dwell. The essayists and poets in this volume take us around the world to a variety of distinctive placesfrom ethnobiologist Gary Paul Nabhans beloved and beleaguered sacred U.S.-Mexico borderlands, to Pacific islander and poet Craig Santos Perezs ancestral shores, to writer Lisa María Maderas vibrant flow of kinship in the equatorial Andes expressed in Pacha Mamas constitutional rights in Ecuador. As Chippewa scholar-activist Melissa Nelson observes about kinning with place in her conversation with John Hausdoerffer: Whether a desert mesa, a forested mountain, a windswept plain, or a crowded citythose places also participate in this serious play with raven cries, northern winds, car traffic, or coyote howls. This volume reveals the ways in which playing in, tending to, and caring for place wraps us into a world of kinship.

Proceeds from sales of Kinship benefit the nonprofit, non-partisan Center for Humans and Nature, which partners with some of the brightest minds to explore human responsibilities to each other and the more-than-human world. The Center brings together philosophers, ecologists, artists, political scientists, anthropologists, poets and economists, among others, to think creatively about a resilient future for the whole community of life.