ROCK, WATER, LIFE, ecology & humanities for a decolonial South Africa

296pp., illus., paperback, First SA Edition, Johannesburg, 2020.

First published in the USA in 2020.

Foreword by Isabelle Stengers, Professor of Philosophy of Science at the Université Libre de Bruxelles.

“In Rock | Water | Life, Lesley Green identifies questions and materials where new ways of Earth governance and African well-being are acutely at stake ... Each materiality is rooted in geophysical complexities and in sub-Saharan African thought and cosmologies. Green's book is important to anyone who cares about the centrality of African environmental matters in their situated complexity. Green searches powerfully for decolonizing ways to live on a damaged planet. Haunted by ongoing colonial practices, this necessary book is also full of openings for what can and must still be crafted together, differently.” Donna J. Haraway, author of Staying with the Trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene

“So many writings on the ecological crisis remain grounded in the opposition between ‘the pragmatic cold analytical eye’ and ‘the romantic warm emotional heart,’ unaware that this binary is at the very heart of the crisis they are analyzing. This book is driven by a fresh participatory ethics that leaves this binary behind to introduce a caring relation that is analytically sharp and an affective engagement that is systematically incisive.” Ghassan Hage, author of Is Racism an Environmental Threat?

Lesley Green is founding director of Environmental Humanities South at the University of Cape Town, editor of Contested Ecologies: dialogues in the South on nature and knowledge, and coauthor of Knowing the Day, Knowing the World: engaging Amerindian thought in public archaeology.