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September 30, 2019
invitation to pay attention to a “wakeful world” (Restall Orr 2012), to a world of diverse forms of mindful and creative presence, of beings with their own understandings and desires, their own modes of inquisitive and agentive life. In short, an invitation into what Val Plumwood (2009) called “nature in the active voice.” Of course, if we pay attention, all living beings issue an invitation of sorts, as do many nonliving entities and processes.1 But it has always seemed to me that crows do so in a particularly blatant, perhaps even dramatic manner. For example, if we delve a little deeper
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We live on a “damaged planet” (Tsing et al. 2017). So pervasive is the impact of particular forms of human life over earthly possibilities that our contemporary period is increasingly coming to be called the Anthropocene, the age of humanity (discussed further in chapter 3). But so unequal are these impacts and culpability for them, and so deep their roots in particular
It takes the form of a series of five stories, each one situated in a different part of the world, in a particular set of human-crow relationships. These stories weave my own travels, interviews, and observations together with the diverse literatures of the
this way, it asks what ethics might look like if we take crows seriously: not just what they need but what they can do. That is, not just as possible subjects of others’ ethical regard but as beings who are themselves shaping our shared worlds in consequential ways.
As a virtually ubiquitous presence around the world—
and maybe even agents of extinction through their actual or potential
impacts on other species.
While the stories in this book all start with and keep coming back to the crows, they are, at the same time, explorations of globalization and the expanding footprint of global trade, of a changing climate, of colonization and associated struggles for Indigenous sovereignty and local autonomy, of entrenched patterns of unequal urbanization and economic development,
The birds referred to as crows in this book are the members of the genus Corvus (crows, ravens, rooks, and jackdaws). These
Around the world, these birds also have in common the fact that they share many of the same complex cognitive, emotional, and social capacities,
thought to be one of the most intelligent groups of animals on the planet (Emery 2017).
and the possession of a sense of fairness. These remarkable capacities are a key part of the stories I tell in this book. They help us appreciate the crafty and creative
unsettle the all too frequent, simplistic, singular association of crows with death and scavenging:
such difficult neighbors
It is rather an effort to subvert scale, to pay careful attention to some very particular places, their people, and their crows as a way of grounding, making sense, and responding responsibly to processes and problems that are often staggering in their immensity.
As Donna Haraway (2016, 101) notes: “We need stories (and theories) that are just big enough to gather up the complexities and keep the edges open and greedy for surprising new and old connections.”
into the crows’ wake.
center on the killing of crows—extinction, extirpation, extermination.
is an opportunity to grieve and to learn, something that crows themselves seem to be doing in the face of death.7
Indeed, a wake is also an opportunity to celebrate a life and to move forward well with those who remain.
The wake is a space, a possibility, outside of binary oppositions between optimism and despair (see chapter
it asks for a relational, ecological engagement with what particular forms of life and death mean and why they
the possibility of wakefulness.
a wakeful world, a world composed of diverse forms of mindful, agentic, purposeful existence.
we inhabit “a world of many worlds” (Blaser and de la Cadena 2018).
the various forms of agency,
As John Law (2015, 128) argues, in such a context, we will need to craft approaches that are “contingent, modest, practical, and thoroughly down-to-earth.
to-earth.”
realities of actual corvids in consequential
Hawai‘i, a decades-long program of captive breeding seems finally to be paying off with
to as onderduikers, with deliberate allusions to the Dutch protection of Jews and
effort to “redescribe something so that it becomes thicker than it first seems” (Haraway and Goodeve 2000, 108), an
moves us away from ethics as an abstract inquiry into “the good” and toward an insistence that there are only ever better and worse worlds and that even these determinations must always be relational and situated. I understand
profound consequences for a group of plant species that have become dependent on these birds for the dissemination of their
Crows and their humans are my focus: it is
the good must be carefully crafted, in the multiple, again and again. A restless ethics for a wakeful world.
These are my own stories: my sense of what it might mean to do worlds well, or at least better, in these contexts. These
“field philosophy”
2018). The stories I tell in this book, as with much of my previous work, draw on field research—principally interviews and my own observations—with some of the many people whose lives are caught up with crows in one way or another: conservationists, farmers, hunters, Indigenous peoples, and many others. At the same time, I also
Each of the chapters in this book draws on this research to tell a story that centers on a particular key concept.
flourishing also provides little by way of an anchor, a focus around which inquiry might proceed. As such, the approach I adopted in researching and writing this book was to deliberately ground each chapter in a single concept as a way of gathering up and centering my inquiry
As Stephanie LeMenager (2017) has noted, there has been a surge of interest in lexicons and keywords within the environmental humanities and related fields in recent years.17
in fields dominated by an impulse to multiply voices, to acknowledge plurality, keywords become concrete foci around which complexity can be rendered in some way intelligible. These particular keywords might be helpful for multispecies
In so doing, field philosophy has the potential to challenge and unsettle the homogeneity of the Western philosophical canon, at least as it is often taught and thought about, with a predominant focus on the works of educated, white men (Hutchison
put it in her discussion of climate change, “none of the terms of our ethical vocabulary … is up to the task. Many terms and principles might even exacerbate the problem.”
One important aspect of doing so is the effort to open up space for the multiplication of creative forms of attention toward other-than-human modes of worlding. How do crows do hope,
and measure animal behaviors and choices in relation to one another (de Waal 2009). These studies are important; they fascinate me, and I discuss them briefly in this book (see “Cooperating”). In general terms, however, my sense of ethics is more experimental, open ended, and tentative than this.
in a broader more-than-human world? Val Plumwood (2009) provided the seed for this inquiry in her discussions of “nature in the active voice,” which aimed to rethink notions of creativity and mindfulness in an effort to find them in the wider material world rather than view them as the exclusive domain of human or perhaps even “higher-animal” life. For example, in invoking the notion
Crows experiment. From new sources of food and new sites for nesting to entirely novel modes of interspecies relating, it seems that crows are accustomed to trying things out. This is true all over
Corvid experimentation is the cause of all this consternation. It seems that some of Japan’s crows have taken to constructing their nests out of new materials; wire clothing hangers are particularly popular. Gathering these hangers from the environment, one after the other, crows pile and interweave them into sturdy nests. The particular method that I have seen involves a crow climbing inside each clothing hanger and then wriggling, stretching, and pushing against the wire with
