Whale music was not just music, then, but prefigurative eco-politics. It identified a range of subject positions for identifying with, and making sense of, environmentalism. Such, at least, are the arguments of my recent paper in the journal, (“Environmentalists Abide: Listening to Whale Music, 1965-1985”), which surveys the rise of whale music over its most celebrated period.

Messeri’s contribution lies in her focus on the role of place in astronomy and related fields. She finds that place-making is central to the work of outer space scientists to render the immensity of outer space, and research thereof, in terms that can be understood by policy-makers, funders, and the public.

Povinelli brings her critique of the governance of difference and the limits of multicultural recognition into conversation with the governance of markets in the Anthropogenic age of extinction and extractive capital, thereby opening an inquiry into how late liberalism uses different ontologies of human and nonhuman arrangements of existence to both celebrate and discredit certain economic and cultural practices in order to facilitate the entwined logics of extractive capital and settler liberalism.

An atmosphere cuts through the ontology of elements, isolating them and not allowing them to connect. But it does this on a bed of continuum, agreement, desire. This is the most important characteristic of atmospheric engineering: an atmosphere must dissimulate itself as pure emergence and never show itself to be an engineering feat, for otherwise resistance to it will be cropping up at an uncontrollable rate.

Can the desire to do something in digital spaces, like social media, produce social changes that are effective, and can the concept of the Anthropocene accommodate these changes? I explore these two questions in my recently published article, “The contingency of change in the Anthropocene: More-than-real renegotiation of power relations in climate change institutional transformation in Australia.”