Volume 2 of the Kinship series revolves around the question ofplace-based relations:To what
extent does crafting a deeper connection with the Earths bioregions reinvigorate a sense of
kinship with the place-based beings systems and communities that mutually shape one
another?We live in an astounding world of relations. We share these ties that bind with our
fellow humansand we share these relations with nonhuman beings as well. From the bacterium
swimming in your belly to the trees exhaling the breath you breathe this community of life is
our kinand for many cultures around the world being human is based upon this extended sense
of kinship.Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations is a lively series that explores our deep
interconnections with the living world. The five Kinship volumesPlanet Place Partners
Persons Practiceoffer essays interviews poetry and stories of solidarity highlighting the
interdependence that exists between humans and nonhuman beings. More than 70
contributorsincluding Robin Wall Kimmerer Richard Powers David Abram J. Drew Lanham and
Sharon Blackieinvite readers into cosmologies narratives and everyday interactions that
embrace a more-than-human world as worthy of our response and responsibility.Given the
place-based circumstances of human evolution and culture global consciousness may be too broad
a scale of care. Place Volume 2 of the Kinship series addresses the bioregional multispecies
communities and landscapes within which we dwell. The essayists and poets in this volume take
us around the world to a variety of distinctive placesfrom ethnobiologist Gary Paul Nabhans
beloved and beleaguered sacred U.S.-Mexico borderlands to Pacific islander and poet Craig
Santos Perezs ancestral shores to writer Lisa María Maderas vibrant flow of kinship in the
equatorial Andes expressed in Pacha Mamas constitutional rights in Ecuador. As Chippewa
scholar-activist Melissa Nelson observes about kinning with place in her conversation with John
Hausdoerffer: Whether a desert mesa a forested mountain a windswept plain or a crowded
citythose places also participate in this serious play with raven cries northern winds car
traffic or coyote howls. This volume reveals the ways in which playing in tending to and
caring for place wraps us into a world of kinship.
