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How might performance contribute to a reversal of the social values and political systems that have produced climate chaos, plunging countless species into crisis and catastrophe? What recognitions would such a reversal require? What misrecognitions must it defeat?

The scale and complexity of climate change, as well as its often incremental and unspectacular nature, pose formidable obstacles to dramatic representation. Wallace Shawn's recent play [Grasses of a Thousand Colors] (2009) subtly distorts the conventions of the thesis play, or drama of ideas, to reveal the habits of mind that are responsible for our species' steady progress towards ecological disaster. His 'drama of bad ideas' is read as a response to what scientists are calling the 'Anthropocene' to designate the current era of anthropogenic climate change. The play uses some of Shawn's abiding themes, especially food and sex, to propose a new understanding of the human, beyond psychological subjecthood and sociopolitical agency: the human is to be reconceived as a geophysical force, with behaviors and practices that produce catastrophic 'scale effects' and call for a new species-centric consciousness that will override the ecological myopia of more narrowly-defined group identities such as gender, class or nation.

This essay uses an animal studies perspective to situate Tracy Letts's 1996 play Bug at a particularly fraught and complex moment in the long history of an \"insect imaginary,\" which has variously registered and managed humans' intense ambivalence toward insects. The complexity includes a dawning recognition—alongside a reluctant admission—that insect species may not be as alien as we have traditionally styled them. In Bug, as in a variety of other recent insect representations, a revisioning of the insect imaginary is linked to a digitally inflected post-humanism in which decentered intelligence and distributed agency offer a welcome alternative to individualistic—self-centered—modes of political and artistic expression.

The face-to-face encounter between human and animal, a key trope in the discourse of contemporary Animal Studies as well as of zooësis-the broad field of cultural animal representations-offers a way to chart the effect of the animal presence on traditional performance genres, including tragedy.

And of all nonsensical things, I keep thinking about the horse! Not the boy, but the horse, and what it might be trying to do. —Peter Shaffer, Equus A “zoontology” is currently uncovering the productive difficulty that animals bring to philosophy. in essays in a volume by leading philosophers entitled Philosophy and Animal Life , the contours of the challenge that animals pose to philosophy emerge from discussion of, among other texts, J. M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals , where both rational argumentation and poetic invention are (in Cora Diamond's inspired borrowing from Ted Hughes) “shouldered out” 2 by the impossibility of comprehending and conveying everything that animal lives challenge us to recognize about our human selves. A long-standing response to that impossibility has been simply to declare the subject irrelevant or even—as Peter Shaffer's unhappy protagonist in Equus says—“nonsensical” (21). As that play glosses the role of animality in psychoanalysis, to put the horse before the boy is to violate the anthropocentric grammar of the normal. A similar assumption of animal irrelevance characterizes public culture, camouflaged by such ubiquitous and unexamined “animal-loving” practices as keeping pets and watching wildlife films.

Dear Climate is a project with many incarnations. Comprised of 68 posters and six audio works to date, the work is designed to flex its nimble agitation/meditation muscles in a variety of urban and urbane formats. We prefer the abject, provocative, strange and lonely: a windswept street; a drift of papers, layers of peeling posters; headphones dangling from inside the janitor’s closet. Dear Climate might find its way into an alleyway or a gallery, as a graffiti-walled midnight wheat-paste operation, or as a mysterious alien listening pod floating in a city park pond. It could be dropped from an airplane, or it might appear disguised as an outhouse adjacent to a museum gallery. The posters can be printed from your computer, hung up in your workplace cafeteria or school lunchroom, sheet-mulched into your neighborhood carbon capturing food forest or slipped into the magazine rack at a freeway filling station. The podcasts that are also part of the online Dear Climate project may be used for group meditations at weddings, picnics, concerts, sports events, raves and retreats, or you might enjoy them while lying in your bathtub (empty or full). See www.dearclimate.net/#/homepage .