Environmental Futures

How do we learn to care for creatures we may never meet, in places we may never go? UO environmental humanities scholar Stacy Alaimo joins host Melody Allison to journey into the deep sea through her new book, The Abyss Stares Back, and to consider the creatures, images, and ethical questions we encounter there. Their conversation moves between wonder and violence, intimacy and estrangement, asking what happens when cameras, science, film, and art bring distant ocean lives close to us.

From posthumanism to scientific capture, microplastics, and deep-sea mining, Alaimo asks what kinds of relationships are possible across enormous distances and differences. Can beauty and wonder move us toward care without turning other creatures into objects for human consumption? And what might happen if, rather than conquering the depths, we allowed ourselves to be unsettled by what looks back?

Episode References

Blue Peril. 2022. Film. Deep Sea Mining Campaign (DSMC), 2022. https://dsm-campaign.org/blue-peril/.

Braidotti, Rosi. 2019. Posthuman Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity.

Covarrubias, Miguel, Plate 1. With four jars of fanciful specimens in the background, a piscine-looking Beebe bends over to salt and fry a cheerful fish. Miguel Covarrubias, “Professor William Beebe,” in No. 2 of the Private Lives of the Great series, Vanity Fair, November 1933, 29. Library of Congress Control Number 2016680404. Image courtesy of Marina Elena Rico Covarrubias.

Earle, Sylvia. 1996. Sea Change. New York: Ballantine.

Haraway, Donna. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm.

Majuli, Katrina. 2024. Managing Life's Future: Species Essentialism and Evolutionary Normativity in Conservation Policy, Practice, and Imaginaries. University of Oregon. https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/items/4d065eb3-efa5-4db6-a211-ec64ded2940d

Meg 2: The Trench. 2023. Directed by Ben Wheatley. CMC Pictures.

Oreskes, Naomi. 2014. “Scaling Up Our Vision.” Isis 105, no. 2.

Sehgal, Melanie. 2018. “Aesthetic Concerns, Philosophical Fabulations: The Importance of a ‘New Aesthetic Paradigm.’” Substance 47, no. 1

Widder, Edith. 2021. Below the Edge of Darkness: A Memoir of Exploring Light and Life in the Deep Sea. New York: Random House.

Widder, Edith. 2016 “The Fine Art of Exploration.” Oceanography 29, no. 4.

Wolfe, Cary. 2010. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.