The Afterword begins by reflecting on the form of ecological relation that has been sketched out in the preceding chapters through animating figures of species like the passenger pigeon, coral, or seaweed. These relations are based on a material and metaphorical transport from one to another that joins but also keeps apart. Taking up this conjunctive and disjunctive as a figure of partial relations, the afterword moves on to consider how this defines how things come to matter or mean to one another, whether at the close-reading scale of linguistic significance, at the scale of relations between the fields of literature and science, or at the scale of interspecies figuration. Ending with a reminder of contemporary anthropogenic environmental change, the book concludes by observing the tensions of romantic holism and partial ecology that continue to beset strategies for the survival of species like coral.