Calling a book `mandatory reading' usually feels hyperbolic, but it's justified in the case of Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. A stunning collection of essays from scientists, writers and artists on humankind's impact on the planet, and how we all can survive it. -Shelf Awareness This vibrant, moving, and philosophical two-sided essay collection reminds ... Read moreus of all the ways that human beings and the natural world are interconnected. Deborah Bird Rose's piece on the shimmer of life alone makes the book worth reading. -Chicago Review of Books There's a poetry in facts. And as this book reveals, there is an increasing amount of courage and acceptance to be found in understanding even the most destructive changes in plant and wildlife that the overheated Anthropocene will bring us. -Santa Fe New Mexican Well worth reading: a frank, luminous set of dispatches from future worlds and fractured pasts. -Full Stop Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet is a strikingly aesthetic object, carefully curated at the level of form as well as content. It makes a convincing case for the relevance of `hard science' to art and politics. -Glasgow Review of Books Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet exposes us to the active remnants of gigantic past human errors-the ghosts-that affect the daily lives of millions of people and their co-occurring other-than-human life forms. Challenging us to look at life in new and excitingly different ways, each part of this two-sided volume is informative, fascinating, and a source of stimulation to new thoughts and activisms. I have no doubt I will return to it many times. -Michael G. Hadfield, University of Hawai`i at Manoa Facing the perfect storm strangely named the Anthropocene, this book calls its readers to acknowledge and give praise to the many entangled arts of living which made this planet liveable and which are now unravelling. Grandiose guilt will not do, we need to learn noticing what we were blind to, a humble but difficult art. The unique welding of scholarship and affect achieved by the texts here assembled tells us that learning this art also means allowing oneself to be touched and induced to think and imagine by what touches us. -Isabelle Stengers, author of Cosmopolitics I and Cosmopolitics II What an inventive, fascinating book about landscapes in the anthropocene! Between these book covers, rightside-up, upside-down, a concatenation of social science and natural science, artwork and natural science, ghosts of departed species and traces of our own human shrines to memory... Not a horror-filled glimpse at destruction but also not a hymn to romantic wilderness. Here, guided by a remarkable and remarkably diverse set of guides, we enter into our planetary environments as they stand, sometimes battered, sometimes resilient, always riveting in their human-and non-human-richness. Arts of Living On a Damaged Planet is truly a book for our time. -Peter Galison, Harvard University Show Less