Ruminations on Rocks: Ethical and Ecological Turns in Witnessing

This chapter examines ethical obligations of bearing witness to ecological devastation and nonhuman worlds in the Anthropocene. A meditation on rocks and reflection on a Holocaust memorial leads to a brief review of the ethical turn in scholarship on historical witnessing in the late 1990s and early 2000s. From there, with reference to the writings of Emmanuel Levinas and others, the chapter explores complexities of witnessing in light of ecological ethics and the post-humanist turn. It debates what select scholarship on an ethics of historical witnessing opens up for ecological witnessing and, conversely, what explorations of ecological ethics and imagination might yield for rethinking a curriculum of witnessing more generally. The chapter throughout poses questions of witnessing specifically with rocks in mind. It concludes with reflection on the implications of ecological witnessing for English language arts education and interdisciplinary curriculum studies.