Transfiguring the Anthropocene: Stochastic Reimaginings of Human-Beaver Worlds

Abstract

What transgressions and transformations does cross-species imagination demand, amid violence of extinctions? In a thoroughly surveilled and disciplined environment that disowns ecological processes, where can fugitives (including antiassimilationist queers and endangered beavers) find a foothold to invoke these imaginaries? The newly named Anthropocene gathers a swarm of diversely cohering recognitions: as an era of extinction, grief, and shocking change; as a platform for unprecedented ecological interventions figured as necessary for various strands of human survival; as occasion for a totalized human self-recognition positing (global) humankind scientifically exiled from a (fantasy) nature that high technology renders unlocatable. The authors here coax and aggravate anxieties we see underlying figure of Anthropocene engineer, an upright Euro-American hero. Inviting conversation that turns away from flattening and globalizing aspects of dominant Anthropocene discourse, we add our voices to recent feminist science and technology studies queries and work to learn from ongoing decolonizing praxis of Native hefirsttime eitherof ustouched aliving beaver wasthesummer of 2014,in Yakima watershed in eastern Washington, during an era of extinctions, loss, shock, reassessment, and disorientation that is coming to be called the Anthro- pocene. We, authors, had engaged scientifically, artistically, and politically with beaver-salmon-human worlds for years, but not until then had either of us physically felt Castor canadensis in flesh, with all their lively heft, squirm, and odor. We touched these watery mammals while helping to relocate nuisance beavers to territories where they and their unpredictable stream interventions would be welcomed. We set traps, carried beavers to holding facilities, smelled castoreum squeezed from anal glands to identify their sex, and helped build starter lodges to house relocated beavers while they got their bearings. These intimate encounters with teeth, claws, and thick fur gave us a win- dow into feelings of kinship that are developing within some beaver collaborators.