Contemporary concern about climate change has been accompanied by a resurgence in questions about what part human numbers play in environmental degradation and species loss. What does population mean, and how is this concept being put to use at a moment when the urgency of climate change seems to elevate the appeal to/of numbers? What role has and should kinship play in understanding “population”? Through a discussion of three recent books—Adele Clarke and Donna Haraway’s edited collection Making Kin Not Population, Michelle Murphy’s The Economization of Life, and Jade Sasser’s On Infertile Ground—this book review essay grapples with the place of human numbers in our understanding of the connections between human reproduction, kinship, and environmental issues. This essay engages most closely with the chapters by Clarke and Haraway in Making Kin, setting out concerns about their turn to (over)population through the analytical insights, historical perspectives, and empirical data of Murphy and Sasser. By putting these three books in dialogue with one another, this essay argues that responsibility for limitations on one’s ability to make kin lies within a heteronormative, White supremacist, capitalist political-economy and its inherent structures of inequality rather than in individual (decision) making.

Social scientists have shown that scientific characterizations of the egg and the sperm are shaped by gender stereotypes and cultural values. How have such characterizations been transformed by a recent embrace of -omics, when studies of reproduction increasingly go beyond genomics to incorporate proteomics, transcriptomics, exposomics, and other -omics perspectives? Scientists studying reproduction and analyzing eggs, sperm, and embryos are in some ways reimagining the roles, identities, and functions of gametes as fundamentally shaped by other molecular entities and environments. Such relational understandings of substances and processes, however, continue to operate through a teleology that often conscripts more nuanced -omics reflection into familiar genomic visions of sex and reproduction. While ideas of the gene as an alienable object may be unraveling, -omics efforts to go beyond the egg and the sperm are frequently constricted by an understanding of reproduction that remains tied to individualized bodies and by a genomically infused interpretation of the gamete as life itself.

Concern about the harmful health effects of industrial pollution is increasingly taking on an intergenerational dimension. In environmental health sciences such as toxicology, this has resulted in emphasizing the influence of toxic chemicals, substances, and situations across generations. Toxic relationalities are now being explored through research on gene-environment interaction, including toxicogenomics and epigenetic research through animal experiments and birth cohort studies. Based on fieldwork conducted among reproductive and developmental toxicologists working in Nanjing, China, this article shows how toxicological research both expresses and produces renewed anxieties about "passing down pollution." These toxicological accounts of intergenerational harm problematically work through overly simplistic renderings of reproduction and biological relatedness. But they also have the potential to catalyze creative understandings of toxic relationalities and responsibilities at a moment when making kin is increasingly seen as key to securing livable futures. [toxicology, environment, epigenetics, kinship, China] Wang Bo, a Ph.D. student in reproductive and developmental toxicology at the Nanjing Institute of Medicine and Science (NIMS), picks up a mouse from one of five cages sitting in the corner of the laboratory where we stand. 1 He holds the mouse by the scruff of the neck and brings him to a laboratory bench. Wang Bo sits down on a stool and invites me to sit on another stool beside him to observe the experiment he will conduct today. The experiment explores whether or not "multigenerational exposures"-exposures that transmit epigenetic effects across multiple generations-contribute to reduced sperm counts or other forms of semen decline. 2 The mouse Wang Bo is now holding and will soon kill is a third generation specimen, reproduced in an effort to understand the intergenerational dimensions of toxicity and, in my interpretation, to explore how far toxic relationalities extend.Wang Bo is a member of the DeTox Lab, a group of approximately 20 reproductive and developmental toxicologists at varying levels of seniority that I studied between 2008 and 2011 as part of my research on the science of men's infertility in China. My interest in the DeTox Lab was piqued in the mid-2000s because of their

In Infertile Environments, Janelle Lamoreaux investigates how epigenetic research into the effects of toxic exposure conceptualizes and configures environments. Drawing on fieldwork in a Nanjing, China, toxicology lab that studies the influence of pesticides and other pollutants on male reproductive and developmental health, Lamoreaux shows how the lab’s everyday research practices bring national, hormonal, dietary, maternal, and laboratory environments into being. She situates the lab’s work within broader Chinese history as well as the contemporary cultural and political moment, in which declining fertility rates and reproductive governance and technology are growing concerns. She also points to how toxicology in China is a transnational endeavor tied to both local conditions and international research agendas and infrastructures, which highlights the myriad scales and scope of epigenetic environments. At a moment of growing concerns about toxins, endocrine-disrupting chemicals, and climate change, Lamoreaux demonstrates that epigenetic research’s proliferation of environments produces new kinds of toxic relations that impact multiple generations of humans.

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Situated alongside and drawing from emerging inquiry, debate, and reflection about making and unmaking kin at a moment of critical reflection on racial, social, and reproductive inequities and changing environments, this special edition considers how anthropology can ethnographically examine and engage with intergenerational dynamics as they influence different scales and spheres of life. It brings together medical anthropologists and science and technology scholars conducting research in Bangladesh, China, the United Kingdom, South Africa, and the United States as they reflect on the un/making of kin in settings of expert knowledge production and dissemination, including practices of seed collecting, epigenetic science, birth cohort studies, social policy generation, and clinical trials. Contributors to this special issue consider how intergenerational relations and modes of transmission take form in and through biosocial research-both as an object of study and a method of analysis. [intergenerational, environmental change, kinship, biosocial] Connections between generations are increasingly understood as fundamental to individual, collective, and ecological well-being. We live, as Michelle Murphy puts it, in "intergenerational times" (2017), when the traumas, infrastructures, and exposures of the past as well as the structural inequities of the present are linked to un/livable futures. In a moment of growing concerns about planetary survival including environmental toxicity, climate change, and diminishing biodiversity, attention to intergenerational relations has taken on renewed urgency. Such urgency comes to the fore in worry about endangerment and extinction, environmental health, and the state of the planet we are leaving for future generations (Choy 2011;Dow 2016;Hoover 2018).Attention to the potential role of kinship in protecting the world and its creatures from further ecological devastation has brought to the fore calls to action, and even pleas to "make kin, not population" (Clarke and Haraway 2018; Haraway 2016).

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