Confronted with an unprecedented scale of human-induced environmental crisis, there is a need for new modes of theorizing that would abandon human exceptionalism and anthropocentrism and instead focus on developing environmentally ethical projects suitable for our times. In this paper, we offer an anti-anthropocentric project of an ethos for living in the Anthropocene. We develop it through revisiting the notion of sustainability in order to problematize the linear vision of human-centric futurity and the uniform ‘we’ of humanity upon which it relies. We ground our analyses in posthumanism and material feminism, using works by posthumanist and material feminist thinkers such as Stacy Alaimo, Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway and Jane Bennett, among others. In dialogue with them, we offer the concept of posthuman sustainability that decenters the human, re-positions it in its ecosystem and, while remaining attentive to difference, fosters the thriving of all instances of life.

The question of the human and the nonhuman, how they are produced and inscribed on bodies, has been the subject to a burgeoning amount of research. In this paper I'd like to offer an analysis of what seems to constitute a gap in our theories of the nonhuman, that is the question of dead – radically inert, mute and vulnerable – bodies. By reference to a Greek word sema, which denominated both a ‘tomb’, a ‘sign’ and a ‘trace’, I would like to investigate the three-fold context in which the dead bodies are enmeshed: the material, the discursive and the spectral one. Drawing on the concept of the ‘remnant’ (G. Agamben) and the ‘spectre’ (J. Derrida) I will pose a question regarding the ways in which dead bodies are included in power relations, powers of visibility and normalisation, and how they may challenge them. Finally, I will offer a project of ‘materialistic hauntology’, an ethical stand towards bodies that are in course of dematerialising, but that still matter.

T his special section on toxic embodiment examines variously situated bodies, landand waterscapes and their naturalcultural interactions with toxicity. 1 The ideas of toxic embodiment play out in the social imaginaries of science and popular culture. Toxins have become a widespread and well-known threat to life on the planet, accompanied by iconic photographs of dead killer whales washed ashore. Infertile orcas with extreme levels of PCB (polychlorinated biphenyl) in their system bring to the environmental social imaginary the toxic kinship of predators and other species, including humans, threatened by extinction. The cumulative exposure to endocrine disruptors, neurotoxins, asthmagens, carcinogens, and mutagens comes with everyday life today, making us all toxic bodies. In our present situation, the theme of toxic embodiment embraces extensive existential concerns around health and environment as we all interact with climate change, antibiotics, and untested chemical cocktails through the food we eat, the makeup we wear, the new sofas we sit on, or the environments in which we dwell. Without doubt, we also become more acutely aware today of how we are in nature, and nature, polluted as it may be, is in us. Terms like bio-burden or bioaccumulation circulate widely in the environmental social imaginary, injected by imagery and terminology from the natural sciences and popular culture. Bioaccumulation describes for instance the processes by which toxic substances, industrial waste or human-made chemical compounds, gradually accumulate in living tissue. The highest concentrations of toxic pollutants find their way into organisms at the higher trophic levels of the 1. The concept of natureculture originates in Donna Haraway's The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness.

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This is an interview with Catriona Sandilands, an environmental literary critic and ecocultural scholar whose work brings together questions of ecology, gender and sexuality, and multispecies biopolitics. She coined the term queer ecologies to describe and intervene in the manifold intersections running between sexuality, nature, and power in contemporary ecological conversations. The concept has made a powerful contribution to feminist and queer environmental scholarship, and to the larger environmental humanities. An intuitive gardener as well as plant scholar, she writes about plants in a unique way that pairs wonder about botanical materiality and evolutionary history with a concern about the biopolitical mechanisms that govern both vegetal and other, nonhuman and human, forms of life. Cate is a Professor of Environmental Studies at York University in Ontario, Canada. She is the author of The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy (1999) as well as over 80 essays, reviews, journal articles, and chapters in edited collections. She edited, with Bruce Erickson, the much-celebrated scholarly volume Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (2010); her edited collection of creative writing Rising Tides: Reflections for Climate Changing Times will be published in September, 2019. Marianna Szczygielska and Olga Cielemęcka caught up with Cate on Galiano Island, BC, to discuss the recent vegetal turn in the humanities, feminist commitments to critical plant studies, and the lessons to be learned from paying close attention to the plants around us.