What can the nineteenth-century American novelist Sarah Orne Jewett tell us about inhabiting a present in which historical time appears both deranged and inescapable?

What is the relationship between cruising and environmentalism? How might cruising inspire an ecological ethic more deeply attuned to our impersonal intimacies with the human, nonhuman, and elemental strangers that constitute both our environment and ourselves?

In the final paragraph of his 2002 essay “Sociability and Cruising,” Leo Bersani concludes his discussion of impersonal intimacy and promiscuous attachments with an unexpected turn to ecology: “Let’s call this [ethical model predicated on ascetic practices] an ecological ethics,” he suggests, “one...