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...

Rather than ignoring the toxic legacies of our industrial past, what if we engaged with remnants such as Newtown Creek to imagine a more fluid and dynamic Antropocene that moves away from green fantasies towards assessing troubling but necessary realities? 

Rather than marking the advent of "modernity," the year 1610 commemorates a wave of permanent human-induced changes to the Earth system. 

To prevent social and ecological disaster, an alternative Prometheanism requires a turn away from power, production and profit towards a new relationship to necessity and the natural world. 

Living in Nature requires — and sometimes rewards — errancy.