News at salon.com of Marilyn Baptiste’s victory in Canada—Baptiste and others managed to convince the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency (CEAA) of the dangers involved in Vancouver-based Taseko Mines Limited’s plan to drain Fish Lake in order to build a huge gold and copper mine.
Watched again Donna Haraway on the "Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Staying with the Trouble" in May 2014. A call for thinking—“Think We Must!” (Virginia Woolf)—that begins with the point that Arendt said Eichmann was incapable of a certain kind of thought, i.e she spoke about him of his “incapacity to think the ‘worlding’ in which one is engaged.” How to do such thinking today? Haraway’s three tools: the Anthropocene (i.e. humans burn fossils), the Capitalocene (i.e. trade is responsible), and the Chthulucene (endosymbiotic theory, the chthonic, the tentacular). Still pondering this last one.
Played a round of Clim' Way, an online game in which the player attempts to manage public, private, and citizen efforts to manage climate change. The game, while not the most exciting ever for various reasons, gives a good idea of just how difficult it is to think about long-term vs. short-term objectives, how different parts of the ecosystem fit together, which actions one should take first. Is it better to start research on sites for new wind turbines? Or to kick-off citizen-run efforts around carpooling or home compositing? Or should solar panels be created, even if in the short term that means actually producing pollutants? How does "ecotourism" fit in? What about fishing? Who should do what? What are the dangers that you're not seeing at the present time? Few people are in the position--anyone?--of being in a position of overviewing all the different elements, as here, especially over such a long (50 year) timespan. In "reality" there would be lots more squabbling, no ideal gameplay possible, because even if you have all the facts, even if you're in a position of political power, you're unlikely to be in the position of benevolent dictator of the whole world--that's perhaps the biggest difference between this game and "reality." Still, a useful lesson in complexity and ecological thought--as the images below show, my first try to manage things didn't go so well...
A perfect summary of how to connect things to make a Mortonian mesh--it's a revolution, but it's ultimately rather simple. Jurassic Park is real, and it's right here.
Last week I read Ernest Cline's fabulous Ready Player One, a dystopian sci-fi novel at the heart of which is the fact that most humans now spend most of their time not "in" the world but "in" a different electronically created universe. To solve their quest, characters fly in spaceships to different planets. The characters are all double: characters, then characters-in-the-game, a re-enlivening of Gidean mise-en-abyme. Point is: these future humans almost forget their bodies and the material realities that make 24-hour gaming "possible." Now what do we find? Such a game is currently being created by a team of programmers in Guilford. "Players will begin at the outer edges of a galaxy containing 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 unique planets," writes the New Yorker. Lest we think this merely escapist, let us perhaps think that it might provide a new generation of gamers with something other than shooting random beings, perhaps with an idea of the "ecological thought" (Morton), for the game articulates multiple environments: "Each planet had a distinct biome. On one, we encountered a friendly-looking piscine-cetacean hybrid with a bulbous head. (Even aggressive creatures in the game do not look grotesque.) In another, granular soil the color of baked salt was embedded with red coral; a planet hung in the sky, and a hovering robot traversed the horizon." Perhaps. I can't say the trailer (see below-and which I only watched after writing what precedes) really communicates this hope, but let's wait and see. Yesterday, Bill MbKibben wrote a piece for the New York Times about Obama's decision to allow drilling for oil in the Arctic. The facts: "The Arctic is melting, to the extent that people now are planning to race yachts through the Northwest Passage, which until very recently required an icebreaker to navigate." And the ignoring of the facts: "This is not climate denial of the Republican sort, where people simply pretend the science isn’t real. This is climate denial of the status quo sort, where people accept the science, and indeed make long speeches about the immorality of passing on a ruined world to our children. They just deny the meaning of the science, which is that we must keep carbon in the ground." The spirit of McKibben's piece is taken up by a short satirical piece in the New Yorker today by Andy Borowitz, "Scientists: Earth endangered by new strain of fact-resistant humans."
In happier "extraction landscape" news, "Dutch solar road makes enough energy to power household": according to aljazeera.com, a trial road surface that generates electricity in Amsterdam has turned out to be more effective than hoped for. See full story here.
In an article titled “Forbidden Data: Wyoming Just Criminalized Citizen Science,” Justin Pidot (Slate; and Asst. Prof. at Denver Sturm College of Law) has underscored the power of representations of landscape in terms of environmental power and policy: as of now, a citizen can face up to one year in prison for taking a photo that contains data about the state of the environment if said data is subsequently shared with the state or federal government, such as for example the National Weather Service’s photo competition. Pidot explains: “The state wants to conceal the fact that many of its streams are contaminated by E. coli bacteria, strains of which can cause serious health problems, even death.” The origins, argues Pidot, are political: the level of E. coli is due to cows grazing on public lands too close to streams and rivers—and Wyoming ranchers clearly don’t want such practices inquired into or legislated on. Idaho and Utah apparently have similarly laws. Wyoming’s new law is frighteningly broad: “It makes it a crime to “collect resource data” from any “open land,” meaning any land outside of a city or town, whether it’s federal, state, or privately owned. The statute defines the word collect as any method to “preserve information in any form,” including taking a “photograph” so long as the person gathering that information intends to submit it to a federal or state agency.” The announcement harkens back to at least two papers at the Approaching the Anthropocene conference at UCSB: Daniel Grinberg’s thoughts on PPGIS, Erin E. Wiegrand’s work on visualizing factory farming, the Public Lab balloon project, etc. How we represent, and who has the right (or not) to represent, landscapes are essential questions. A group of “kayaktivists” in Seattle, reports the NYT, protest the Shell Oil’s proposes leasing of a terminal in the Port of Seattle for its Arctic drilling fleet. shellno.org phrases the problem as follows: “On January 8, we learned that Shell will be hosting their Arctic drilling rigs in Terminal 5 of the Port of Seattle. That same day the journal Nature published an article saying that Arctic oil MUST be left in the ground in order to avoid catastrophic climate change. Drilling for Arctic oil is an open attack on people in the global south, who are already losing communities to rising seas and extreme weather. It could also spell disaster for one of the most unique wilderness areas on the planet and all of its inhabitants.” Seattle’s Mayor, Ed Murray, seemingly agrees with the spirit of the protest: “We need to focus our port, our businesses, on the new economy, on things like clean energy of the future and not on the old economy that is dying out, such as oil.” The kayaks, by gathering on the waters, make visible an “extraction landscape” that might otherwise remain somewhat invisible since far away from the shores and the city.
PMU came across this and sent me details about Mileece's ecoscapes: "Mileece is a sonic artist whose interactive “ecoscapes” are generated from the electromagnetic emissions of plants and by handmade, sensor-based musical instruments." Mileece's Main Site.
This is an "extraction landscape" of a different kind to the ones I've been talking about in The Humanist Anthropocene, which mainly relate directly to mining the Earth in the early modern period and today. Flying over Arizona, close to Phoenix, I snapped this image of (huge) solar panels extracting energy from the sun in the middle of the dry desert. (Full size) USB-JFK took too long, but allowed for some reading and thinking about talking with animals, via (a) a re-viewing of Herzog's fabulous Grizzly Man about Timothy Treadwell and (b) discovery of the Interactive Fiction Lost Pig (playable here), in which the player becomes an orc (i.e. a humanoid akin to a goblin) who searches for a pig that has escaped from a pig farm. I won't elaborate here, especially as I haven't got far into Lost Pig, but there are many interesting questions that the two works raise about the question of, and limits to, talking with non-human animals, imagining the non-human animal, etc:: Treadwell's longing for communion vs. Herzog's "that bear's blank stare expresses only hunger" vs. chasing an escaped pig vs. the estrangement of being an "orc" (not-quite human), etc. Leading the way in thinking about human-non-human connections in the context of French early modern is Louisa Mackenzie (Washington U. eg. this on Guillaume Rondelet and Bruno Latour). For further reflection.
Day 2 of Approaching the Anthropocene in Santa Barbara was as rich as Day 1, taking a slightly more "eco-depressive" turn, a turn to the darker and the less resolved, to the less activist. In one of the discussion sessions, Susan Derwin recalled Melanie Klein's idea of "the depressive position," which opens out onto potentially productive possibilities ("If the confluence of loved and hated figures can be borne, anxiety begins to centre on the welfare and survival of the other as a whole object, eventually giving rise to remorseful guilt and poignant sadness, linked to the deepening of love" - from Melanie Klein Trust website). Lili Yan (English, Soochow University and Shanghai Normal University Tianhua College) spoke about Margaret Atwood's Year of the Flood (2010). Yi Chuang E. Lin (Foreign Languages and Literatures, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan) revisited The Waste Land via the Anthropocene. Next up: art. Kayla Anderson (New Center for Research & Practice) responded to the idea that Anthropocenic art should propose "solutions," asking instead that it be understood as a response to Zylinska's idea that the Anthropocene presents a "crisis in critical thought." Anderson's presentation discussed various key art projects that fall on one side or the other of this solution-driven/critical-thought divide: Yes Naturally – How art saves the world at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag; the agitprop posters and podcasts of Dear Climate; the various projects of Dunne and Raby; etc. Brad Monsma (English CSU-Channel Islands) spoke of the blurring of the art/culture/nature divide at the truly amazing Echigo-Tsumari Triennale around the concept of satoyama ("a Japanese term applied to the border zone or area between mountain foothills and arable flat land" - Wikipedia; and see this book). On the same panel, Leila Nadir and Cary Peppermint (U of Rochester/ EcoArtTech) spoke of several of their recent/current art projects that bring us into the "Late Anthropocene"--truly fabulous. In the afternoon, artist, programmer, professor Lisa Jevbratt (UCSB Art) discussed teaching a class on interacting with non-human animals, as well as her app Zoomorph that allows anyone to see the colors of the world "translated" into what different animals would see. Zoomorph "still lifes" (HUMAN, CAT, hamster, deer)One of the day's other highlights was Erin E. Wiegand's discussion (San Francisco State, Cinema Studies) of the different ways (heights, technologies, methods) for filming factory farming in her "Visualizing the Factory Farm," with discussion of close-up undercover reporting, drone footage, and satellite imagery. The paper nicely tied up with issues raised through Day 1 about viewing, perspective, citizen-driven environmental cartography, etc.
As these two posts hopefully demonstrate, the Approaching the Anthropocene conference brought together a wild array of smart and fascinating people, working with humility to understand where we are and where we're going.
A fantastic first day at the Approaching the Anthropocene conference organized by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center (IHC) (director Susan Derwin) at UCSB. I somehow won the honor and burden of opening the conference, with a paper titled "A Humanist Anthropocene? The Case of Extraction Landscapes" that walked through (a) the term's history and untranslatability; and (b) extraction landscapes in early modern Europe and now (Burtynsky, but also the Guardian's Keep it in the ground campaign, on the [very differently motivated] Carbon Tracker, etc.). The day featured many highlights, of which I mention here just a few. Volker M. Welter (UCSB Art and Architecture) plotted out the fascinating architectural history of the notion of a "humanly designed environment" (starting in the 19C), with mention of E. A. Gutkind's seminal Our world from the air and Husserl's idea of geography as "synthetic unity."
Janet Walker (UCSB Film and Media Studies) and others spoke about "Climate Justice at the Crossroads of Extractivism and Resistance," which lead to multiple exciting conceptual and project discoveries--especially the Public Lab and its Balloon and Kite Mapping project, which allows anyone to participate in mapping environmental damage (see also this useful tool called Mapknitter). By now, the theme of seeing, of how to see, of which height to see from, of how controls our mapping had become a key (and I think unplanned) theme of the conference. Sarah Jane Pinkerton (UCSB Feminist Studies) introduced us to the Invisible5 audio project that--again on the theme of mapping the environment, of making its landscapes visible--allows drivers along Interstate-5 to discover those "extraction" landscapes through which they drive. Christopher Walker (UCSB English) spoke of asteroid mining (and showed this non-spoof spoof-like DSI promotional video -- which includes some fabulous interstellar "extraction landscapes" of whole asteroids being "towed" for "harvest" by DSI spacecraft). John Foran (UCSB Sociology) spoke of the important Climate Justice Project. The afternoon continued with more compelling presentations. Lynn Badia (Alberta, English and Film Studies) spoke of how Karel Čapek's The Absolute at Large (Továrna na absolutno) (1922) fantasized about "free energy." Tristan Partridge (UCSB Center for Nanotechnology and Society) raised questions inter alia about responsibility, drawing attention to Leonora Carrington's painting Sanctuary For Furies that includes the inscription "Anthropos at work." Daniel Grinberg (UCSB Film and Media Studies) discussed the use of GIS and PPGIS for mapping the environmental and cultural effects of agent orange--public/popular/crowdsourced cartography reveals its political efficacy here too. (Grinberg also discussed the War Legacy Project). Julie Koppel Maldonado (American University, Anthropology) spoke of Rebecca Marshall Ferris's documentary Can't Stop the Water, again raising questions about the battle to keep land above water level, to keep it in the hands of those who have lived on it for generations, and to keep the battle visible in media--more extraction landscapes. The day ended with a firework keynote by Tim Morton on "humankind"--a humankind that is "withdrawn" and never wholly graspable, with human life as "arrivant" (Derrida)--that reacted inter alia to various critiques of the term "Anthropocene": including the facts that (1) it is not specist; and (2) it is not about human hubris ("You can't be hubristic about your heartbeat"--indeed, "we" trashed the earth unconciously). Conclusion: "The Anthropocene is the first fully non-anthropocentric concept." Throughout the day a few key thinkers and works came up many times, most notably perhaps Joanna Zylinska's Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene (2014) and Rob Nixon's Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2013). Can't Stop The Water from Cottage Films on Vimeo. |
Project THE HUMANIST anthropoceneis a thought archive and workspace of Phillip John Usher (NYU) at the crossroads of early modern humanism and the problems and insights of the Anthropocene. Main Research Page. Categories
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