Editor’s Note: ECO-

By Jack Xi

We live in the time of the Great Acceleration; a world characterised by exponential increases in carbon emissions, species extinctions, and intensified extreme weather events. A popular framing of the time we live in is the Anthropocene, or the age of man – but there is a troubling lack of specificity in framing all of humanity as responsible. For one thing, the greatest emitters of carbon are higher-income countries and higher-income individuals. For another, it risks historical and cultural erasures. 

In her book Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, artist and writer Jenny Odell explains how one challenge of responding to the ills of the Great Acceleration is that the boundaries between “humans” and “nature” are reinforced by the term itself and the binary it poses – of human actors atop an inert nature – introduced by colonial extractivism and erasure of Indigenous ways of existing with land. As the “nature is healing” memes of COVID-19 imply, such a binary only serves to pretend that humanity’s only path forward is to view our very presence as corrosive to nature, and to pretend that humans have never been capable of coexisting with nature for mutual flourishing.

In the wake of Anthropocene framings, other thinkers like Donna Haraway, Maan Barua, and Jason Moore have proposed alternate frames for viewing the Great Acceleration – the Chthulucene, a Plantationocene, and the Capitalocene. Each frame brings with it different answers – answers that are playful and tentacular, postcolonial, anti-racist, and anti-monoculture, or post-growth. All of them ask us to look at the place work has in our lives. Despite these differing frames, all have a common agreement that the Great Acceleration has resulted from alienation and plunder – the labour of certain humans and nonhumans rendered cheap, expendable, and exploitable in service of building a rapidly warming and unjust home.

Recalling the shared roots of ecology and economy in “eco”, the home, SUSPECT’s ECO- portfolio presents a powerful suite of seven works. Each challenges notions of whose work counts as work, and whose home we are called to build. Today, we open with Jess Jacutan’s “Gatekeeping Eden”, a clear-headed and incisive nonfiction essay which calls attention to the tensions between tourism and displacement in the Filipino island of Siquijor. In subsequent weeks, we’ll see gruesome cautionary tales of (over)consumption that offer alternate pasts and futures (Maggie Wang’s poems in “Useful Life” and Khai Don’s fiction piece “The Tale of a Fading Islet”); slippery and disorienting rejoinders from non-human worlds (L Kiew’s poems “Discovering Dewponds” with Jon Gresham’s short story “Brothel in the Jungle”); and lastly, deftly triumphant returns of the displaced (Mir Arif’s short story “Roadkill” and Dorian Merina’s poems in “After Watching E.T.”). The imagination and care these works bring to othered humans and nonhumans invite alternatives to careless extractivism – and we’re excited to share them, and a better world, with you all.

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Jack Xi (they/he) is a queer, disabled Singapore-based writer who enjoys relocating bugs so they don't get stepped on. They’ve appeared in several poetry journals and anthologies, both Singaporean and otherwise. Find out more at jackxisg.wordpress.com.

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