The drastic reductions in human activities and mobilities associated with quarantines implemented to curb the spread of SARS‐CoV‐2 was recently described as “the anthropause” by Christian Rutz and colleagues. Field scientists argue that the anthropause is a once‐in‐a‐lifetime opportunity for observation and data collection in a world devoid of anthropogenic disturbances, notably those from extractive industries and travel. In this commentary, we unpack the anthropause as a spatio‐temporal event, attending to its geographies, histories, and genealogies. There are multiple precursors of anthropause events which have locally altered human impacts on the environment. We document the ways in which the COVID‐19 anthropause has brought into focus human–animal relations through an analysis of the practices of scientists, publics, and nonhuman animals themselves. Following Arundhati Roy, we conclude by advancing an understanding of the pandemic as a “portal” rather than a pause, identifying lockdown lessons from the anthropause for a post‐pandemic new normality.

Stories of nature’s resurgence during quarantine have been dangerously conflated with an alarming narrative contending ‘Earth is healing, we are the virus’. Deploying a more-than-human perspective, we show how this discourse arises from biocultural decontextualisation that assumes nature has an inherent capacity to resurge. Such fetishisations distract from the need for urgent environmental action and obscure what resurgence actually is: a multispecies endeavour requiring cultivation and nurture.

Quarantine conditions led to the proliferation of digital encounters with nonhuman animals. Here, we explore three prominent forms: creaturely cameos, avatar acquaintances and background birding. These virtual encounters afforded during lockdown life generated novel and affective human–animal relations that could have lasting effects for humans and nonhumans post-quarantine, posing interesting questions for more-than-human scholarship.

Humans, non-human animals, and technologies are increasingly entangled.Using the peregrine falcon (Falco peregrinus) as an illustrative example, we propose 'technonatural history' as a theoretical and methodological approach for observing, describing, and examining the role technologies play in shaping human relations with other species. After nearing extinction in the 20th century, peregrines have become woven into the fabric of everyday urban life and are a frequently sighted urban raptor in the UK, nesting on high-rise buildings and church spires since the late 1990s. Their unexpected presence in cities symbolises hope for multispecies conviviality amid the contemporary ecological crisis.As their populations resurged, crucially, webcam and livestreaming technologies developed rapidly. Peregrines were one of the first animals to be broadcast over the internet via 'nestcams', granting broad publics access to their intimate lives.We examine the related technological histories of livestreaming technologies and natural histories of peregrine falcons in the UK, tracing the emergence of 'the digital peregrine' and its manifold implications for more-than-human and digital geographies. To do so, we build on oral history interviews with people associated with digital peregrines throughout the UK: nestcam technicians, peregrine conservationists, professional ecologists, activists, and citizen scientists. While digitisation brings broad publics closer to these cosmopolitan raptors, they can only ever grasp at the wildness of peregrine falcons and their wider milieus as the digital peregrine is a distinct entity, encountered via its own set of affects and affordances. In the peregrine's case, digital technologies create unexpected and radical opportunities for urban conviviality, signalling the positive potentials technologies host for forging meaningful more-than-human connections.

The contemporary ecological condition is one of ‘global weirding’, a term coined to describe both anthropogenically changed worlds and the experience of dwelling within them. In this paper, we foreground New Weird fiction as a progressive literary style, distinct from its problematic roots, with conceptual import to human geography. Through attention to the New Weird’s treatment of difference, dis/orientation and ecological relation, these texts provoke geographers to foster a speculative ethics suited to a weirding world. In suggesting this ethical approach, this paper contributes to emerging debates in geography concerning ambivalence, disorientation and affirmation/negation.

Digital technologies increasingly mediate relations between humans and nonhumans in a range of contexts including environmental governance, surveillance, and entertainment. Combining approaches from more-than-human and digital geographies, we proffer ‘digital ecologies’ as an analytical framework for examining digitally-mediated human–nonhuman entanglement. We identify entanglement as a compelling basis from which to articulate and critique digitally-mediated relations in diverse situated contexts. Three questions guide this approach: What digital technologies and infrastructures give rise to digital entanglement, and with what material consequences? What is at stake socially, politically, and economically when encounters with nonhumans are digitised? And how are digital technologies enrolled in programmes of environmental governance? We develop our digital ecologies framework across three core conceptual themes of wider interest to environmental geographers: (i) materialities, considering the infrastructures which enable digitally-mediated more-than-human connections and their socioenvironmental impacts; (ii) encounters, examining the political economic consequences and convivial potentials of digitising contact zones; (iii) governance, questioning how digital technologies produce novel forms of more-than-human governance. We affirm that digital mediations of more-than-human worlds can potentially cultivate environmentally progressive communities, convivial human–nonhuman encounters, and just forms of environmental governance, and as such note the urgency of these conversations.

The spectacle of de-extinction is often forward facing at the interface of science fiction and speculative fact, haunted by extinction’s pasts. Missing from this discourse, however, is a robust theorization of de-extinction in the present. This article presents recent developments in the emergent fields of resurrection biology and liminality to conceptualize the anabiotic (not living nor dead) state of de/extinction. Through two stories, this article explores the epistemological perturbation caused by the suspended animation of genetic material. Contrasting the genomic stories of the bucardo, a now extinct subspecies of Iberian ibex whose genome was preserved before the turn of the millennium, and the woolly mammoth, whose genome is still a work in progress, the author poses questions concerning the existential authenticity of this genomic anabiosis. They serve as archetypal illustrations of salvaged and synthesized anabiotic creatures. De/extinction is presented as a liminal state of being, both living and dead, both fact and fiction, a realm that we have growing access to through the proliferation of synthetic biology and cryopreservation. The article concludes through a presentation of anabiotic geographies, postulating on the changing biocultural significances we attach to organisms both extinct and extant, and considering their implications for the contemporary extinction crisis.

In lieu of material encounters, nonhuman spectres are made sense of through spectacles, imageries speculated upon with their own geographies and affects. This paper explores histories of trophy hunting in the Spanish Pyrenees, illustrating the emergence of the spectacular in relation to contemporary ideals of nature for hunters, in particular questioning the material implications of hunting for the extinction of the bucardo (or Pyrenean ibex). Theoretically, this paper converses Jacques Derrida’s metaphor of spectrality and Guy Debord’s conceptualisation of the spectacle to understand how hunting ghost animals removes them from particular ecological contexts. Trophy hunting and taxidermic practice serves to produce spectacles of animals at the interface of life and death, detaching them from temporal linearities, and allowing trophy animals to speak to broader sentiments of mastery over landscape. The bucardo was a ghostly figure prior to its extinction, famously difficult to encounter and kill by the 19th century, and as such its absence was marked through trophies to infer its broader presence in the landscape. I trace the changing significances of spectres and spectacles through the development of photographic technologies; prior to the camera’s spread and widespread use, spectral spectacles were produced through hunting practice. A typology is offered for the sensing of ghosts in their cultural contexts: mourning, or the attempt to ontologise remains; marking, or the conditional attribution of language to the spectral; and working, the means through which the ghost transforms itself or is transformed.