“The menacing alterity of the natural environment”… wow. Perhaps epitomized by city living.

I very much appreciate your taking the time to write this response, Justine. When you wrote about Othering the Earth, I associated to the book Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times, by Stacy Alaimo, director of the environmental and sustainability studies minor at the University of Texas at Arlington (published in 2016 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota). Alaimo writes beautifully about how in our culture we attempt to distance ourselves from the natural world, even in the architecture of our homes. She writes, “The normal sense of the domestic is deeply infused with what Simon Estok has called ‘ecophobia,” as the domestic walls off bad nature, the ‘menacing alterity of the natural environment’” (p. 22). I very much appreciate Searles’ emphasis on our kinship with the nonhuman environment and his seeing the nonhuman world as part of the field that we as analysts need to explore and examine.