Volume 119 Winter/Spring 2025 Guest Editor’s Note

Folio: The More-Than-Human World

I grew up searching for horned toads and cicadas. My father, the biologist, tried (in vain) to teach me the name of every plant, mineral, and creature; their morphology; their life cycles and qualities; and, perhaps more importantly to me at the time, what they liked and didn’t like. Yes—even the rocks. And between him and my Oneida mother, we referred to most animals the way we might to humans. 

As I grew up, and moved to the city, other cities, other continents, at times it felt like my connection to flora and fauna slipped away, or they mostly appeared as metaphors for human performance—because it was me that hid from them. It was me, every morning, walking into the office building at the bottom right corner of Times Square, the one with the LED curved ticker tape flashing stock prices in bright red across the doorway. The kind that, for its own part of the night sky, easily blots out the stars. Every day, I swiped my badge and rode an elevator like a hawk’s favorite thermal, and as I sat behind a desk and closed my office door, I sealed my burrow as best I could to the rest of the world. And I did it all again when I returned to my own nest. I lowered down the Murphy bed, rearranged my piles of cotton and dross, and only when I dreamed at night did I return to the trees and the forest floor and the particular feeling of bare feet in a cold stream, slipping over algae-covered rocks, bound, not for shore, but for deeper waters.

When did some notion of success supersede ecological responsibility? When did fitness in a changing climate become the fine art of business casual? My changing climate these days involves energy-efficient windows and smart thermostats. 

I also think about the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address, and how we begin in gathering and ceremony by recognizing and thanking all those with whom we share this earth, and the earth itself, as our relatives. All our relations. 

The notion of the “more-than-human-world” is not new, as David Abram writes. “Of course, the recognition of our human embedment within a more-than-human biosphere brimming with its own intelligence is hardly a new insight. On the contrary, this understanding has been common to Indigenous or First Nations peoples on every inhabited continent and archipelago for numberless generations.” (Abram, “On the Origin of the Phrase, ‘more-than-human’”)

Abram defines the term as “intended, first and foremost, to indicate that the realm of humankind (with our culture and technology) is a subset within a larger set—that the human world is necessarily embedded within, permeated by, and indeed dependent upon the more-than-human world that exceeds it. Yet by this new phrase I also meant to encourage a new humility on the part of humankind, since the ‘more’ could be taken not just in a quantitative but also in a qualitative sense.”

In this folio, I looked toward the nature of the relationships between our more than human world and us, and the more than human world on its own. And however much this may be possible, for the more than human world to be framing our human conception, rather than the other way around. If I could have, I’d have made this folio twice as long—that was the quality of the work we received. Thank you to all who shared their work with us. 

The poems included here sing love songs to a broad menagerie. It feels like a Thanksgiving Address all its own, and I encourage you, as you are reading and as you make your way in the world, to lead with gratitude, encouragement, ecological responsibility, and deep attention.

In a world of wingbeats, histories, tectonics, cosmic fire, rockscript, flame, the peacock’s forlorn yowl, the seagull’s cheerful cry, plagues of peeper toads, and the biggest raccoon you ever did see, may we recognize our relatives, our legacies, our greater ecosystem, and our shared future. 

So now, let’s bring our minds together
all of us, together—
furred, feathered,
green and growing,
stars and earth. 

❤️ – K