An invitation. A puzzle. A provocation to engage with unknown potentialities. At first encounter, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet as a physical artifact is deliberately indeterminate. Its format: a topsy-turvy/front-to-back/back-to-front arrangement, disrupts any notions of a point of entry, throwing the reader back on themselves to decide how to proceed, how far to apply learned templates of conventionality, or how far to take the opportunity to pursue less conditioned responses. From the outset, this book offers an explosion of possibilities.Inspired by the conference Anthropocene: Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet held at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2014, and a follow-up conference held in Aarhus, Denmark, later that same year, the book is divided into halves, each of which coalesces around the theme of “Ghosts” or “Monsters,” although, it seems, these themes are themselves inseparable. In each half, chapters rove through time, space and embodiments to create nodes and divergences. The halves, each dedicated to the Anthropocene (given here as “the proposed name for a geologic epoch in which humans have become the major force determining the continuing livability of the earth” (p. G1)), cover diverse genres of writing, from memoir and field notes, to science reports and poetry. The book calls for a scholarly generosity in moving beyond disciplinary prejudices to an openness toward varied knowledge practices, and what they might offer. All contributions in some way seek to awaken and broaden the curiosity about life on earth that is urgently needed to forestall the current trajectory toward the sixth mass extinction. All can also be read as love-letters to the planet in the face of existential destruction.The “Ghosts” section engages with landscapes of loss: ghosts as “the traces of more-than-human histories through which ecologies are made and unmade” (p. G1). The US–Mexico border, and Los Laureles Canyon, which traverses it, are the starting points for Lesley Stern's Heideggerian meditation on the shifting forces and unlikely human and nonhuman components that constitute place. Historian Kate Brown goes on to slip the bonds of perceptible location in her subatomic landscape biography of the Chernobyl power station. Here, she interviews Aleksandr Kupny, a health physics technician in 1986, the time of the Chernobyl accident. He has subsequently ventured into the irradiated understory of the sealed plant to experience that invisible energy firsthand. Energy and interconnectedness of the life force, or “shimmer,” is discussed in anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose's account of Northern Australia's threatened flying foxes. She holds up “shimmer” as an Aboriginal people's “aesthetic” that could help “call us into these multispecies worlds” (p. G53). She also brings the Indigenous power of the ancestors into dialogue with Isabelle Stengers's philosophical premise of “reciprocal capture”: a process of encounter and transformation, not absorption.Other notable contributions in this rich and thought-provoking section include Andeas Hejnol's call to rethink the abiding scientific metaphor of evolutionary life as a ladder or tree ascending in complexity (and all the misplaced human and racial supremacy arguments that it has been used to substantiate) to a rhizomatic or meshlike network that acknowledges newly observed gene swapping in bacteria. Then, too, Andrew S. Mathews's description of the chestnut forests of Monti Pisani, central Italy, in which he recounts the physical landscapes alongside the historic, biological, cultural, and linguistic ghosts that remain as traces across and within them. Common to the majority of these “Ghost” chapters is a call to pay close attention to the landscapes at hand, to acknowledge the ghosts that haunt them, and equally to attend to our own internal landscapes and the ways we can open ourselves beyond our present boundaries as a positive action to counter the destruction inherent in the Anthropocene.Similar themes run through the “Monsters” section, which delves deeper into the chimeric nature of life, and the inextricable entanglements that the Anthropocene so disastrously fails to appreciate. Ursula K. Le Guin tells us that in order to “use the world well, to be able to stop wasting it and our time in it, we need to relearn our being in it” (p. M15). While science, she says, can be used to describe from outside, it is poetry that describes most accurately from inside. Both languages, she concludes, are needed to move minds away from irresponsibility and exploitation. Donna Haraway mirrors this cross-discipline approach in her chapter on how arts-sciences activisms can craft new genres and ways of storytelling. While Margaret McFall-Ngai takes the notion of symbiosis as an overlooked component of evolutionary biology further by using the bob-tailed squid as an example of a co-evolved microbial community. Not only does this tiny squid use its bacterial partners' luminescence to disguise its own presence while night hunting, but there is increasing evidence that points to human health and behavior as being dependent on the microbes living within us. In fact, the number of nonhuman cells in our bodies is at least equal to the number of human cells. Acknowledging that the human body, among many other nonhuman bodies, must be envisaged as a nested ecosystem has significant implications, not only for biology and science but for definitions of the individual and the collective more broadly. This issue is picked up by Scott F. Gilbert in his extended discussion of the “holobiont,” or “an organism plus its persistent communities of symbionts” (p. M73). Thereafter, further chapters examine disparate examples, such as salmon farming in West Norway, collective behavior in ant colonies, and the interdependency between horseshoe crabs and red knot birds. These case studies not only serve to illustrate the intricacies of life form interconnectedness, but also highlight the Anthropocene's rapid progress toward the sixth mass extinction.Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, arguably, ends in the middle with a temporally inflected call that “we should worry but not despair” (p. M174). It remains indeterminate whether humans, analogized as the unwitting and unaware janitors of an apartment block filled with unknown inhabitants, are part of an emergent ecology that will indeed “carry on.”However, the question, whichever way you look at it, still remains—arguably requiring more urgency since this book's publication—will humans, in continuing to precipitate irrevocable global damage, emerge at all in the thereafter?This is a question that After Extinction meets head on. It is the last of an informal trilogy of books arising from annual conferences sponsored by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Center for 21st Century Studies. Edited by Center director, Richard Grusin, it reflects the 2015 conference of the same name, and brings together a set of wide-ranging, deeply considered responses to the single question: what comes after extinction? This is urgent, unflinching territory. And, as Grusin points out, paradoxical: our human gaze must be projected forward to form a retrospective view of the present and likely near future, as precipitated by the “Anthropocene.” Each chapter unpacks an aspect of that gaze, and then goes on to critique the “anthropos” of the “Anthropocene.”In “Extinction Events and Entangled Humanism” William E Connolly unpicks prevalent worldviews predicated on human exceptionalism in the Western tradition and argues instead for an “entangled humanism.” This transfiguration would need to acknowledge “a world composed of innumerable entanglements” (17), from bacteria in the human gut and interspecies symbiosis (as previously highlighted by both McFall-Ngai and Gilbert in “Monsters”), to racial and regional struggles, and planetary geophysical processes. It would also necessitate a new experimental activism at both micro and macro political levels. As a means to reverse human extinction, Connolly optimistically recommends cross-regional general strikes to focus demands on those regimes involved in extractive and polluting practices. This he frames as an “urgently needed improbability,” one arguably made even less probable by the current global pandemic. Connelly's subsequent course of action would be “to move onto the next item on the agenda” (21), though it remains unclear as to what, other than human extinction, that item could be.As if to fill the void left by Connolly, Jussi Parikka explores the posthistory paradox through two artistic examples. In the first, Finnish art media pioneer Erkki Kurenniemi looks back from 2048 as a consciousness inhabiting, not a living body, but a computer mainframe. Second, a fictional Chinese historian narrates Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway's 2014 book, The Collapse of Western Civilization, from the future. Parkkia goes on to argue for a politics of chronoscapes and an acknowledgment of entangled temporalities. He offers Vilém Flusser's concept of “posthistory” as an epistemological mode for creating the necessary vocabularies of the future. Similarly, Joanna Zylinska examines photography as a helio-centric and generative phenomenon, one through which we can take steps toward a new energetics and form a more ethical relationship to fossil fuels. Joseph Masco also examines the environmental damage arising from the industrial age and the complexities of how it has been envisioned through contemporary art. Rather than one defining image, as with the nuclear mushroom cloud, for the sixth mass extinction, he argues for a proliferation of the modes of conceptualization and visualization to match the complexity of human interventions and “most importantly evolve radically with those understandings” (102). In focusing on the endangered California condor, Cary Wolfe unpacks profound philosophical and practical considerations through juxtaposing an exhibition of interviews given by conservation biologists with a detailed examination of Derrida's animal theory as conveyed through his The Beast and the Sovereign seminars.It is the last four chapters, and their shift from predominately aesthetic and philosophical considerations to the political dynamics of extinction that, between them, provide a valuable, in-depth critique of the “Anthropocene.” Nicholas Mirzoeff's broadening of the conversation to include the question “What does it mean to say #BlackLivesMatter in the context of the Anthropocene?” (123), leads to an acknowledgment that the Anthropos in question is unmistakably the white, imperialist male. Mirzoeff traces the entrenched racism that historically informed interpretations in the natural sciences. He also calls out recent moves in humanities scholarship to the Anthropocene turn, the material turn, and the nonhuman turn at the expense of deeper understanding of race, white supremacy and colonialism. He argues that recognizing the Anthropocene as part of the structures of white supremacy is key, and sees possibilities, based on historic precedencies, for seemingly intractable edifices, such as white supremacy and fossil fuel capitalism, to fall.In her clearly argued and persuasive examination of the interrelationships between concepts of extinction and disability, Claire Colebrook thinks through the question of what comes after extinction, given, in her construct of disability, that we are all disabled. Ashley Dawson then outlines the work of capitalism in the extinction crisis as it is progressed through biocapitalism, synthetic biology, and de-extinction. For him, the extinction crisis is at once an environmental issue and a social justice issue, with all efforts to be made to ensure secure and equitable access to the environmental commons. The concluding chapter takes as its starting point the experiences of North America's native peoples. For them, authors Daryl Baldwin, Margaret Noodin, and Bernard C. Perley contended that the extinction event already happened on October 12, 1492, with the arrival of Columbus and his ideologies of superiority. From this perspective, the authors argue that there is life after extinction and they use the attempts to support three North American Indigenous languages to illustrate notions of vitality, nuances of rhetoric, and evolving cultural identity. To conclude, they offer American Indian strategies for “awakening, emergent vitality, and sovereignty for surviving what will become a global New World” (223). This sense of agency outlasting extinction, though specific and localized, is most welcome.