Baldwin: Conceptualizing beaver as non-human placemakers
Baldwin, J., 2020. Conceptualizing and recognizing placemaking by non-human beings and lessons we might learn from Marx While Walking with Beaver. In The Routledge Handbook of Placemaking (pp. 378-388). Routledge.
The chapter is in part a response to recent calls in the environmental history literature both to engage more fully with social theory and to reinvigorate an examination of human–environment dialectics. Through a revisitation of Marx’s work on material historicity in light of recent research on animal behavior, the chapter provides a theoretical framework through which non-human beings can be understood as historic actors, in and of themselves. Massey’s work on the production of place then provides an explicitly spatial framework which invites the consideration of non-human beings as self-interested, inter-active, and so political, actors. These biospheric companions both author their own trajectories, or projects as Plumwood frames these, and also negotiate relations with multiple co-present trajectories authored by others; and in so doing, work to co-produce place.