ABSTRACT
Ellen van Neerven's novella “Water” stages the discovery of a new species, the ‘plantpeople,’ who are in danger of being exterminated in the face of a sand-mining project, but who form unexpected bonds with the local Indigenous community. Portraying a romantic interspecies relationship, and playing with dualisms such as nature/culture, male/female, human/nonhuman, the chapter explores the novella's evolutionary understanding. As van Neerven evokes the fundamental role of desire, kinship and symbiosis for multispecies flourishing, “Water” decentres the Darwinian model of species competition. While this turn to symbiotic understandings of evolution resonates with recent scientific findings, the novella conjures this knowledge as an age-old Indigenous cosmology. Employing the neglected modes of romance, humour, survival and activism, moreover, the chapter investigates the notion of a ‘queer’ environmentalism—also known as “Bad Environmentalism.”
