Taking a page from Ben Goldfarb’s Eager (2018), the term “Castorcene” is an invitation to imagine and shape new paradigms of ecocentric identities beyond extractive worldviews. The idea of a Castorcene is obviously a nod to the power that the term “Anthropocene” has had to define a species’ impact on the planet. Pre-contact North America was a landscape engineered by millions of beavers—a watery, muddy, ecologically diverse Castorcene. But the fur trade nearly made beavers extinct in the 19th-century, and humans have engineered a drier, less diverse, and endangered planet.
Imagining a Castorcene invites new questions because human-beaver entanglements are fast becoming a test of our willingness to decenter human agency and privilege for the sake of the planet and a multispecies future. They challenge us by insisting on taking up space and adapting to human-dominated landscapes, yet they remain on the margins of our understanding and capacity to coexist: What are the ways that ushering beaver back onto the landscape would challenge dominant anthropocentric identities? How do we imagine a new ethics of coexistence? Can we remember how to live in a wetter, more biodiverse space?
What is the castorcene?
This project offers a way to explore the limits and possibilities of coexistence with a species we need back in our lives. It will challenge disciplinary boundaries, the work of memory, and human privilege—and suggest new cultural and material ways of building and knowing with beaver.
cULTIVATING rEGENERATIVE fUTURES
Regenerative futures depend on taking account of our extractive pasts and the intersections of land justice, biodiversity, and the exploitative relationships settler colonial humanism has perpetuated across race, gender, and multispecies contexts. It demands a reckoning with our definitions of what it means to be human, as well as the central work of the imagination to realize these new contexts and relationships. Building a future that sustains ecocultural identities, and multispecies justice will mean a shift in values and habits of perception and knowing. We invite you to explore these possibilities with a slow orientation. Finding our way means establishing a new axis or orbit in the universe. It’s a slow cosmology to embrace a wetland.
Coexistence Amidst More-Than-Human Relations
“Coexistence” is one word among many that we need to imagine new relationships on a multispecies planet. “Coexistence” implies a kind of sharing of space, but we can generate—and use—more language to honor the mutualities that give rise to new ecocultural identities. “Affective justice” might mean having a relationship of love and respect for the more-than-human world validated over political discourses that can only affirm transactional or “economic” relationships. “Radical memory” might mean that though settler humans may not remember their interdependence with the more than-human world, other species do, and we can recover relationships by allowing them to show us new capacities for knowing and feeling with them. We invite you to think about what new language might be needed to help us discern new possibilities for these relationships. We celebrate the return of biodiversity but rarely recognize that that return can create a challenge. When beavers are the engineers of biodiversity, they challenge us to coexist.
eCOLOGICAL iDENTITIES BEYOND EXTRACTION
Beaver complexes are spaces that offer a glimpse into a time before settler colonial extractivism, which means they hold the power to guide us toward ways of being and knowing that are anti-colonial. Beaver complexes are also very difficult to access or discern the boundaries of, so they have the power to challenge extractive ideologies and habits of thought that only see the more than human world as a resource for human consumption. In this way, beaver wetlands become a mirror that prompts reflection on all the ways that extractive practices and worldviews are intertwined with the false hierarchies and dry land ethic of settler humanism. This is a good place to start.
pROMOTING eCOCULTURAL iMAGINARIES
Because the return of biodiversity in a beaver complex challenges human privilege on the landscape, this digital wetland can be a space that provides an opportunity to reflect on and create avenues to explore those challenges and reimagine our relationships with the land, the more than human world, and each other. We invite you to remember that a more biodiverse world might mean decentering our privileges and the power we assume in relationship to the return of biodiversity. Developing an ecocultural imaginary depends on our ability to share physical spaces traditionally reserved only for humans. But coexistence is also not just about making spaces on the land for the return of biodiversity—it’s also about making spaces in our minds and hearts.
Our Core Values
Our Mission
Castorcene: A Digital Wetland is a space where we can reflect on the practical and cultural questions surrounding the ethics and futures of coexistence with beavers and the biodiverse wetlands they build. The project aims to create a space where inquiry, imagination, and shifting ecocultural identities can take shape as we question what it means to be human in a more-than-human world.
Our Vision
We envision a future where the dignity and sovereignty among species is shared and where our entanglements and interdependencies with the more-than-human world have the cultural, social, and political power to drive value systems that protect and celebrate those necessary and beautiful relationships.
Our Digital Wetland Team
Andrea Knutson
Professor of English & Environmental Humanities
Oakland University
Jaxson Ayer Williams
Graphic & Web Designer
JAW Design Lab
Land Acknowledgement
Oakland University resides on the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary lands of the Anishinaabe, known as the Three Fires Confederacy, comprised of the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi. The land was ceded in the 1807 Treaty of Detroit and makes up southeast Michigan. In recognizing the history and respecting the sovereignty of Michigan’s Indian Nations, Oakland University honors the heritage of Indigenous communities and their significant role in shaping the course of this region. Further, we recognize the wrongs done to those forcibly removed from their Homelands and commit to fostering an environment of inclusion that is responsive to the needs of First Peoples through our words, policies, and actions. The preservation and perpetuation of customs and traditions of Indigenous nations are essential to our shared cultural heritage. A deep understanding of Native peoples’ past and present informs the teaching, research, and community engagement of the university in its ongoing effort to elevate the dignity of all people and serve as shared stewards of the land.
Proudly designed by JAW Design Lab
© 2025 by Castorcene: A Digital Wetland