Posthuman insights for environmental education. A review of Mental health and wellbeing in the Anthropocene: A posthuman inquiry, by Jamie Mcphie. 2019, Singapore: Springer Nature. €69.99, ISBN 978-981-13-3326-2.

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Notes

1 Admittedly, the Anthropocene as a label is troublesome for Mcphie, due to its anthropocentric foundation (see also, Haraway, 2016, for further discussion on the problematic naming of the epoch), and uses it for its accessibility.

2. Personally, I much prefer footnotes to endnotes. A quick glance at Mcphie’s footnotes adds variant readings, a way to think with a concept or makes an interesting side comment without having to flick all the way to the back of the book. For me, the footnotes add to the reading rather than disrupting it.

3. As Mcphie (2019) elaborates:

We can never ‘reconnect to nature’ because there were never any points to connect in the first place. An immanent version of nature always already includes us. It includes the impoverished. It includes the minoritarian. It includes our products. It includes plastic. It includes moving from observation to participation. This post-romantic perspective is a far cry from a Teletubby [manicured] landscape (p. 223).