ABSTRACT
We respond to this path with an alternative expressed in the form of a manifesto. We choose the manifesto as a declarative format that makes a pathchanging proposal “to stop going further in the same way as before toward the future” (Latour 2010, 473). In his own “Compositionist Manifesto,” Latour (2010, 486; see also Latour 2013) argues that such a break requires us to “turn our back, finally, to our past, and to explore new prospects, what lies ahead, the fate of things to come.” Postnatural conservation’s scornful take on nostalgia for Nature and its reorientation around building futures resonate with Latour. In contrast, our manifesto urges a temporal orientation to reckon with the past. Looking back directs attention to what Stoler (2008) calls ruination, the discursive material processes of annihilation, displacement, and replacement driven by imperialism. Indeed, MacKinnon (2013) drew on early colonial records to suggest we inhabit a planet with only 10 percent of the biological variety and abundance it had before the mass culls and extractions that have marked imperial capitalism to present.2 Looking back also shows us what we should strive for: a world literally filled to the brim with different creatures.
