Rock | Water | Life

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.Isabelle Stengers is 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: wounded contemporary soils, which bind multispecies human and nonhuman worlds; cement, one the planet's biggest contributors to global warming; carbon, which both joins and threatens Gaian critters and their ecologies and economies; and oil and uranium. 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 “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?) "A thoughtful text on the intersections of inequality, racism, colonialism, and environmental destruction in South Africa. . . . [Green] provides a complex, nuanced contribution to the fields of environmental and decolonial studies.  Highly recommended. Graduate students and faculty. General readers." - J. Werner (Choice) “Lesley Green’s fascinating, timely, and lucidly argued Rock Water Life…is urgently needed and should be required reading for all environmental managers in South Africa and beyond.” - Jules Skotnes-Brown (Journal of Southern African Studies) "Lesley Green provides a richly layered response ot the growing outrage in South Africa against inherited colonial regimes of knowledge and its socioecological ravages. The book is a passionate manifesto of how decolonising one's claims to supreme knowledge is profoundly tied to one's material politics, indeed, how one relates to rock, water, and life." - Chandana Anusha (Contributions to Indian Sociology) “Poetic and complex, Rock/Water/Life evidences a love of South Africa’s environments and peoples. . . . As much political manifesto as scholarship, it calls upon us to rethink the questions we ask and create a more just ecopolitical system.” - Cathy Skidmore-Hess (Journal of Global South Studies) “Rock Water Life is a foray into the past armed with anti-colonial theorists and science and technology studies scholars as her way finders. . . . Green urgently searches for the tools that would allow for a new relationship with nature.” - Emily Brownell (African Studies Review) “The appearance of Rock Water Life is to be welcomed as South Africa confronts environmental and other challenges on an unprecedented scale.” - Jane Carruthers (Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa) “Lesley Green’s Rock Water Life is a remarkable text, and one that can be read in many ways. It is at once a deeply personal reflection on a planet in crisis, and a scholarly call to new ways of thinking. . . . Green herself is so conscious of what it at stake.” - Jess Auerbach (Postcolonial Studies) “[Rock Water Life] makes utterly clear the crises we face (and already experience), if we do not undertake to step out of the mental prisons and all too real gulags bequeathed to us by modernity and colonialism. It is a compelling read, but the compulsion is not simply rhetorical just as the location is not simply South Africa-it is profoundly ethical wherever we are settled.” - Graham Ward (South African Journal of Science) "Green proposes an integrative way forward to deal with the misapplication of science. The book’s refreshing perspective includes drawing on important African postcolonial thinkers to encourage imaginative approaches to toxic landscapes. . . . The book includes important work on naming the racial divide in South African ecological issues, and the traumatic histories that led to this situation." - Ruth Sacks (H-SAfrica, H-Net Reviews)

• Foreword. Isabelle Stengers  xiAcknowledgments  xviiIntroduction. Different Questions, Different Answers  1Part I Pasts Present  231 Rock. Cape Town's Natures: Hu-!gais, Heerengracht, Hoerikwaggo™  252 Water. Fracking the Karoo: /Kə'ru/kə-ROO; from a Khoikhoi Word, Possibly Garo-"Desert" 60Part II Present Futures  773 Life. #ScienceMustFall and an ABC of Namaqualand Plant Medicine: On Asking Cosmopolitical Qeustions  814 Rock. "Resistance Is Fertile!": On Being Sons and Daughters of Soil  106Part III Futures Imperfect  1335 Life. What Is It to Be a Baboon When "Baboon!" Is a National Insult?  1386 Water. Ocean Regime Shift  171Coda. Composing Ecopolitics  201Notes  233Bibliography  269Index  291