Creaturely Encounters: New Naturalism and Affective Storytelling at the Edge of Humanity

In the Summer 2025 edition of Orion Magazine (“The Future is Fungi”), Corey Pressman proposes the emergence of a New Naturalism, a perspective that “is causing us to reconsider, realign, reappraise, and reimagine” nature and our place in it. Pressman immediately acknowledges the ontological boundaries inherent in language, delineating nature from culture; suggesting that New Naturalism is part of the effort of “getting around those problems, that cutting that separates things from each other and us.” This presentation examines the potentials of new naturalist storytelling beyond the confines of human language and argues for the importance of affective and positively charged forms of engagement.

Firstly, I posit affective and visual new naturalist storytelling as potential mitigators of environmental crisis. As the limits of language become quickly apparent in efforts to decenter the human, visual storytelling offers a more immediate, predominantly affective entry point into nonhuman realms. I analyze two contemporary Netflix documentaries – My Octopus Teacher (2020) and Fantastic Fungi (2019) – as examples of highly effective visual storytelling that evokes kinship, empathy, and hope, allowing viewers to connect with more-than-human worlds – even such forms of life that have historically been framed as alien, threatening, or radically other in Western discourse.

Secondly, I draw on research in sociology, anthropology, and philosophy to argue that, in light of the polycrisis of the 2020s and attendant affective states of stress, anxiety, overwhelm, and powerlessness, positive affective attachment and the revived kinship with more-than-human-worlds have the potential to fundamentally shift how we relate to other forms of existence. I argue that because it offers the kind of emotive reactions we crave in our current moment (such as wonder, community, and hope) new naturalist storytelling has the potential to reach viewers who may not respond to traditional strategies such as education and confrontation with ever-worsening data on planetary health.

Finally, I propose three components of successful new naturalist storytelling as a means of imagining and paving the way toward new futures: 1.) effective/affective science communication, 2.) visibility but not centrality of the human, and 3.) visual and sensory modalities that circumvent the anthropocentric limits of language.