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Acting with the World

Agency in the Anthropocene

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Pages: 168

Illustrations: 1 illustration

Published: April 2025

Author: Andrew Pickering

In the Anthropocene our actions are coming home to roost. Global warming, species extinctions, and environmental disasters are the dark side of our mastery of nature. In Acting with the World, Andrew Pickering identifies a different pattern of being and doing that can evade this dark side, a pattern that he calls acting-with the world. In contrast to our usual practice of acting on the world, acting-with foregrounds nonhuman or more-than-human agency and aims to attune our practices to the propensities of nature. Pickering explores examples of acting-with from around the globe, including flood control on the Mississippi River, ecosystem restoration on the Colorado River, the Room for the River project and rewilding in the Netherlands, natural farming in Japan, Aboriginal fire techniques in Australia, and Amazonian shamanism. Pickering argues that acting-with intimately and gracefully plugs us into nature, undercuts the Anthropocene from below, and offers a constructive approach to addressing otherwise intractable wicked problems.

Praise

“Andrew Pickering is a wonderful writer as well as a consistently original thinker who weaves together empirical materials and conceptual sophistication in a way that is both instructive and a pleasure to read. He speaks to current concerns with the environmental and climate crisis with a distinctive and important voice. Acting with the World is a book to enjoy and to be provoked by.” - Andrew Barry, author of Material Politics: Disputes along the Pipeline

“Rethinking our ways of addressing and acting with nature and the natural world in a time of ecological catastrophes, Andrew Pickering provides a way for us to (re)imagine utopia. Few books engage in the challenging matters of biodiversity loss, pollution, and climate change as clearly, deeply, and beautifully as Pickering’s. It is hard to overestimate Acting with the World’s potential importance and influence.” - Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther, author of Our Genes: A Philosophical Perspective on Human Evolutionary Genomics

"Recommended. Graduate students and faculty." - T. Johnson, Choice

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Author/Editor Bios Table Of Contents Rights Additional Information

Author/Editor Bios

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Andrew Pickering is Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Philosophy at Exeter University and author of The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science and The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future. He is the coeditor of The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society, and Becoming, also published by Duke University Press.

Table Of Contents

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Preface  ix
Introduction. Acting on or with the World  1
1. Eels: The Dance of Agency  16
2. The Mississippi: Enframing and Letting Go  20
3. Erosion: Poiesis  29
4. The Colorado  32
5. Water: A New Paradigm  46
6. Natural Farming  56
7. A Choreography of Fire  77
8. Spirits  91
Conclusion. Poiesis  97
Notes  107
References  135
Index  151
 

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Related Links Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-3151-2 / Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4780-2830-7 / eISBN: 978-1-4780-6049-9 / DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478060499