Belonging in a World of Relations: Partners: Vol 3

Volume 3 of the Kinship series revolves around the question of interspecies relations: How do relations between and among different species foster a sense of responsibility and belonging in us?

We live in an astounding world of relations. We share these ties that bind with our fellow humans—and we share these relations with nonhuman beings as well. From the bacterium swimming in your belly to the trees exhaling the breath you breathe, this community of life is our kin—and, for many cultures around the world, being human is based upon this extended sense of kinship.

Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations is a lively series that explores our deep interconnections with the living world. The five Kinship volumes—Planet, Place, Partners, Persons, Practice—offer essays, interviews, poetry, and stories of solidarity, highlighting the interdependence that exists between humans and nonhuman beings. More than 70 contributors—including Robin Wall Kimmerer, Richard Powers, David Abram, J. Drew Lanham, and Sharon Blackie—invite readers into cosmologies, narratives, and everyday interactions that embrace a more-than-human world as worthy of our response and responsibility.

How do cultural traditions, narratives, and mythologies shape the ways we relate, or not, to other beings as kin? “Partners,” Volume 3 of the Kinship series, looks to the intimate relationships of respect and reverence we share with nonhuman species. The essayists and poets in this volume explore the stunning diversity of our relations to nonhuman persons—from biologist Merlin Sheldrake’s reflections on microscopic fungal networks, to writer Julian Hoffman’s moving stories about elephant emotions and communication, to Indigenous seed activist Rowen White’s deep care for plant relatives and ancestors. Our relationships to other creatures are not merely important; they make us possible. As poet Brenda Cárdenas, inspired by her cultural connections to the monarch butterfly, notes in this volume: “We are— / one life passing through the prism / of all others, gathering color and song.”

Proceeds from sales of Kinship benefit the nonprofit, non-partisan Center for Humans and Nature, which partners with some of the brightest minds to explore human responsibilities to each other and the more-than-human world.

The Center brings together philosophers, ecologists, artists, political scientists, anthropologists, poets and economists, among others, to think creatively about a resilient future for the whole community of life.

Part of the Kinship 5-Volume Set 2022 Nautilus Book Award Gold Medal Winner: Ecology & Environment and Special Honors as Best of Anthology

Gavin Van Horn is Executive Editor of Humans & Nature Press Books, the author of The Way of Coyote, and the coeditor of City Creatures, Wildness, the award-winning five-volume series Kinship, the five-volume series Elementals, and Sensoria. He currently resides in the lands of the Northern Chumash people in San Luis Obispo, California, where you can find him wandering the nearby hills and shores, learning the flowers, trying to go light.

Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, botanist, writer and Distinguished Teaching Professor at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York and the founding Director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. She is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and a student of the plant nations. Her writings include Gathering Moss, Braiding Sweetgrass, and The Serviceberry. As a writer and a scientist, her interests include not only restoration of ecological communities, but restoration of our relationships to land. She lives on an old farm in upstate New York, tending gardens domestic and wild.

John Hausdoerffer is author of Catlin’s Lament: Indians, Manifest Destiny, and the Ethics of Nature as well as co-author and co-editor of Wildness: Relations of People and Place and What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be? John is the Dean of the School of Environment & Sustainability at Western Colorado University and co-founder of Coldharbour Institute, the Center for Mountain Transitions, and the Resilience Studies Consortium. John serves as a Fellow and Senior Scholar for the Center for Humans and Nature.