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Dark-dwellers as more-than-human misfits: a new synthesis of disability studies, environmental history and histories of human-animal relations

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Dr Andy Flack, lecturer in the Department of Historical Studies, writes about his new AHRC Leadership Fellowship project.

There are at least a billion people on this planet today who are directly affected by disability, and many more besides when their families, friends, and colleagues are taken into consideration. Disability – and the structures that create it – really matters. It may be marginalized, but it is hardly a minority experience. As disability studies scholars have compellingly illustrated, the concept of disability is underpinned by a range of assumptions about the form and function of bodies – the ‘normal’, ‘able’, and their opposites – and the world these ‘misfitting’ bodies inhabit. Such assumptions are always a matter of perspective and they have histories of their own. They reflect value systems which, historically, have had profound material effects, generating and entrenching maginalisation.

This project investigates whether these historically contingent value systems transcend the human world and proposes that historians need to pay attention to the broadest application of concepts relating to disability such as ‘ability’, ‘normativity’, ‘vulnerability’ and ‘adaptation’ and to the material impacts of such classifications on bodies and the worlds that they inhabit. They need to understand how dominant groups – in this case human beings – imagined and dealt with all kinds of ‘differently-abled’, bodies that appeared to inhabit the world in strange and incongruous ways. In sum, they need to ask new questions of the past in order to better understand the discursive foundations of disability as an imposed identity and the allied impacts of those systems on living beings.

Through this leadership fellowship I will develop an agenda for future interrogations of disability’s intersection with environmental history and histories of human-animal relations. To do this, this project focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and North American natural history discourses relating to animals adapted to living and seeing in the dark. These are the creatures who spend most of their lives beyond our sight and living in ways that we struggle to comprehend. The period 1840-2000 captures key moments in the emergence and development of natural historical knowledge relating to these kinds of animals. Indeed, over its course, there have been far-reaching transformations, not only in the imagination and classification of diverse bodies but also in terms of human impacts on their shrouded worlds. Their strange, perplexing, non-normative bodies were frequently branded as ‘broken’, ‘degenerate’, or, indeed, ‘super’; attitudes that reveal changing norms and transforming valuations of ability and judgements about what it means to be ‘normal’.

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Image: Adam Bixby via unsplash

 

Animals living in the world’s darkest environments, from deep underground to the oceanic abyss, were imagined in the British and North American contexts – and across both scientific and popular contexts – as extreme others, inhabiting the margins of the world and knowing it in ways which rendered them ‘non-normative’, often ‘extraordinary’, beings whose otherness made them enchanting, even seemingly other-worldly. Such ‘differently-abled’ others were subjected to an array of assumptions and, later, wide ranging studies aimed at understanding how their bodies worked and how they survived and flourished in their dark worlds.

Conceptualizations of echolocating bats are an illustrative case in point. During the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, natural philosophers sought to understand the ‘otherworldly’ nighttime navigations of these creatures via gruesome laboratory experiments on their perplexing bodies. Torturing many hundreds of bats, eyes were gouged out with red hot needles and ears blocked with starch before their capacity to navigate in the dark was put to the test to identify and understand their ‘special’ sensory abilities. Such an interrogation of bat sensory capacity broke with an historical tradition of dismissing the creatures as quite literally blind, even ‘broken’; Natural history writer Thomas Bewick’s view at the end of the eighteenth century was that bats were, in consequence, ‘imperfect’ animals.

[image2] AF AHRC post
from Thomas Bewick’s A general history of quadrupeds (1824) via Biodiversity Heritage Library

Narratives of deficiency and exceptionalism characterise historical British and North American comprehensions, not only of echolocating bats, but also of many dark-dwelling species. By the middle of the twentieth century, as the senses required for life in the dark had become better understood – including Donald Griffin’s detection of bat echolocation in 1938 – dark-dwellers had been drawn from the margins towards the mainstream of British and North American comprehensions of nature’s diversity. At the same time, however, and perhaps ironically, writers across scientific and popular publications began noting that many of these creatures were becoming increasingly marginalised by the anthropogenic environmental transformations of modernity, including the illumination of darkness, the construction of transport infrastructures and, most recently, the cascading effects of climate change. Consequently, the imagination of these animals transformed: they came to be construed not only as ‘differently-abled’, but also as ‘vulnerable’, ‘adaptable’, and ‘resilient’. Such adjectives are profoundly familiar to people living with disability in the world today.

In building a history of difference through a case study that transcends an exclusively human world, this highly innovative research project places the nonhuman world at the heart of an analytical framework and historical methodology that excavates familiar source materials for the wide-ranging discursive structures that underpin the modern concept of disability:  ability, normalcy, vulnerability and adaptation.

The resulting ‘beyond-the-human’ reconceptualization of the meaning of these categories widens historical appreciation of the discourses that generate and perpetuate disability. In the process, I will produce a suite of publications that enable me to set a stimulating agenda for further research. Crucially, I will also ask challenging questions about how this research might apply to diverse communities beyond the academy. Through the development of innovative impact activities focused on key stakeholders – Key Stage 2 children, teachers, sight-impaired individuals and vision clinicians – I seek to transform understandings of diversity, ability, and disability in important and radical ways.

 

[image1] AF AHRC postDr Andy Flack is a lecturer in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Bristol. He is an animal and environmental historian, working primarily on human engagements with the non-human animal world across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His first book, The Wild Within: Histories of a Landmark British Zoo was published by the University of Virginia Press in 2018.

 

Header image: Clément Falize via unsplash

An Unusual Bee Hotel: Cultivating Care in a time of Ecological Loss

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by Rosamund Portus

 

The door to my house is much more than it appears. It is, I think, a well-known hotel amongst the bee population of York.

Allow me to explain.

One hot June day, during the very first summer I was living in my house, I was rushing out the door when I had a surprise encounter. Turning round to push on the door, satisfying myself that it really was locked, I was shocked—and delighted—to see a reddish-brown bee flying directly into the old, unused keyhole situated near the bottom of the door. The keyhole, which has been neglected in favour of the shiny new Yale lock at the top of the door, was evidently a perfect nesting spot. As I stood there, captivated by the idea that a bee was inside my door, another small bee followed suit. Finding the hole occupied, this second bee shimmied back out and took flight in search of a different nest.

This encounter genuinely thrilled me. Despite my impending appointment I spent some minutes trying—and failing—to capture a photo of the bee. Even more delightfully, in the coming weeks I spotted the bee—which I later identified as a red mason bee—a number of times. Of course, as June moved into July this little bee disappeared. A quick internet search of a red mason bee life-cycle followed, and I figured the bee was probably no more.

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An Unusual Bee Hotel by Rosamund Portus (2020)

You can imagine the delight I felt when, around twelve months later, a bee flew out of the very same unused keyhole. This bee, which was a beautiful gold colour, similarly spent the next six weeks or so making the odd appearance before once again completely disappearing.

This year marks my third summer living in this house. It is also—wonderfully—the third summer I have seen a bee come and find shelter in my door. It seems that year after year this small opening in my door provides the perfect bee hotel.

Observing bees living inside my door is nothing but wonderful. For me, it is a reminder that even in an environment designed wholly for human activity other forms of life find a way of being and living. Yet, my utter joy at my door doubling as a bee hotel also reveals my internal bias in how I respond to the presence of nonhuman species. To elaborate, when a wasp enters my house I will go tense, carefully shutting it in a room with the window open and praying it finds its way out before I re-enter. Similarly, I remember feeling far from delighted when a flurry of mosquitos found their way into the room of a Spanish guesthouse I was due to spend a fortnight. And whenever I am confronted with an eight-legged, eight-eyed friend I will watch from a (very) safe distance whilst my partner uses paper and a glass to remove it from the house.

Over the course of my studies into human-animal relations, I have learnt to appreciate and respect those many other invertebrates and, of course, arthropods which find themselves unwitting guests in our homes. This is, however, a care which I have had to actively cultivate. Bees, on the other hand, have long been knitted into my imagination as fundamentally good. The reasons for my—and many others—association between bees and goodness are myriad: they are rooted in the pleasure of honey, the sweet smell of beeswax, the appeal of flowers, the knowledge of our reliance on pollinated crops, and our willingness to aesthetically appreciate their fluffy bodies. Our tangible entanglements with bees have further facilitated their presence in our stories, traditions, languages, and artworks (Maeterlinck, 1901; Ransome, 1937; Wilson, 2004; Hanson, 2018). Of course, whilst predominantly honeybees sting when threatened, many associate all bee species with the painful feeling of being stung. And yet, as bees become increasingly known as species haunted by the possibility of extinction, they have more and more become creatures of empathy in the public eye (Moore and Kosut, 2013).

Thinking through my response to the bees that have made nests in my front door, I came to consider how our everyday reactions to species have consequences that extend far beyond whether a creature might be squished, admired, or given a wide berth. In the current era of rapid biodiversity change and loss, the values and understandings associated with different species intertwine with wider processes of care, responsibility, and protection. As literature across the environmental humanities is increasingly unearthing, public perceptions of different forms of life become a matter of life and death (see van Dooren and Rose, 2011; van Dooren, 2011; O’Gorman, 2014; Clark, 2015). In the case of bees—a species that has become intertwined with fears of decline—our affection for them has ignited a global campaign for their survival. Bee species have become a focus for ecological care, responsibility, and action (Moore and Kosut, 2013).

However, the public perception of a species can also detract from possibilities for care and protection. Take, for example, the wasp. Wasps, the species from which bees evolved, are battling increasing stressors in the modern day (Heffernan, 2017). Yet, as Sumner et al. (2015) make clear, wasps are universally disliked: they are demonised as stinging, aggressive, and vicious creatures. This typical intolerance for wasps not only dampens support for conservational efforts towards protecting wasps, but it is also broadly accepted as the justification for the removal and eradication of wasp nests. Thus, our internal biases, fuelled by specific historical and cultural contexts, have implications which transcend beyond our interactions with individual life-forms, and influence wider conservational choices, actions, and possibilities.

In questioning and thinking through our internal biases, we are presented with opportunities to overcome them. This is not to say we need to seek out interactions with species we find intimidating in some way. I, for one, am under no illusion as to how much fear I still feel when a wasp comes close to me. Rather, it is to suggest that if we—by which I mean anyone who has the interest to—can work to positively shift narratives surrounding species which are typically unloved or undesired, we can open up new possibilities for the flourishing of lives that are too often easily eradicated or dismissed. For whilst we might hope for a future filled with bees, we also need a future that is alive with the many other species—wasps, spiders, slugs, worms, or rats—which are equally as valuable for both sustaining and nurturing new forms of biodiversity, and yet whose presence seldom brings the same easy delight as the presence of a bee.

—

Clark, J.L. 2015. Uncharismatic Invasives. Environmental Humanities. 6(1), 29-52. DOI:10.1215/22011919-3615889.

Hanson, T. 2018. Buzz: The Nature and Necessity of Bees. Basic Books.

Heffernan, O. 2017. Steep decline of wasps and other flying nasties is a bad sign. [Online]. New Scientist. Last updated: 19 October 2017. Available at: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2150977-steep-decline-of-wasps-and-other-flying-nasties-is-a-bad-sign/ [Accessed 20 July 2020].

Maeterlinck, M. 1901. The Life of the Bee. George Allen.

Moore, L.J. and M. Kosut. 2013. Buzz: Urban Beekeeping and the Power of the Bee. New York UP.

O’Gorman, E. 2014. Belonging. Environmental Humanities. 5(1), 283–286. DOI: 10.1215/22011919-3615523.

Ransome, H.M. 1937. The Sacred Bee in Ancient Times and Folklore. George Allen & Unwin.

Sumner, S., G. Law, and A. Cini. 2018. Why we love bees and hate wasps. Ecological Entomology. 43(6), 836–845. DOI: 10.1111/een.12676.

van Dooren, T. 2011. Invasive species in penguin worlds: An ethical taxonomy of killing for conservation. Conservation & Society. 9(4), 286-298.

van Dooren, T. and D.B. Rose. 2011. Introduction. Australian Humanities Review. 50, 1-4.

Wilson, B. 2004. The Hive: The Story of the Honeybee and Us. Thomas Dunne Book.

 

 

 

Report: a brief reflection on insect entanglements

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by Eline D. Tabak

The ‘Insect Entanglements’ workshop’s CFP was first shared online in the last week of February, when the effects of Covid-19 were still vaguely taking shape in the periphery of our academic community. Perhaps naively so, we—that is, my co-organiser Maia and I—spent some time thinking about how many participants we could host, whether or not we wanted to allow non-presenting attendees into the room, and where to get the best vegan lunch in Bristol. In the following weeks—after receiving cancellations, postponements, and some very reasonable updates saying “we simply don’t know yet”—we decided to move the workshop online. After all, insect entanglements had always been about inclusions and exclusions, and this way we hoped to include as many people as possible. In our online workshop, we had participants based in the States, Canada, Norway, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK. While it’s definitely not the same as everybody meeting in the same room, we know the workshop would not have been open to so many people—not just academics in the field of environmental humanities—had it been hosted in Bristol. This, at the very least, was a good thing to come from moving the event online.

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Typical venue for academic events in 2020

To me, the workshop felt like a follow-up to two previous events: the first being the interdisciplinary symposium, ‘On Bees and Humans: A Love Affair Between Nature and Culture,’ organised by Dr Anja Buttstedt and Dr Solvejg Nitzke at the B CUBE Center for Molecular Bioengineering, TU Dresden. The second was ‘The Insectile’ workshop, organised Dr Fabienne Collignon and Jonas Neldner at the Internationales Kolleg Morphomata at the Universität zu Köln. I was lucky enough to present some of my own research on insect entanglements during these events and was extremely happy to see some familiar faces with new ideas in the Insect Entanglements workshop. Granted, it’s to be expected that you get to know scholars in the field (or subfield of a subfield), but I’m always eager to meet new people, hear new ideas, and again and again realise that so many people are working on such exciting new research. (And it needs to be said: there was some really exciting new research presented at the workshop.)

Entanglements are rather fashionable right now, and when we first put out the CFP we received a question forcing us to reflect on what exactly such an entanglement entails. In true PhD fashion, we deflected the question and said that there’s no such thing as a single entanglement, but that we were sure we would figure it out during the workshop. The original CFP cited Eva Haifa Giraud, who, in her remarkable book What Comes After Entanglements? (2019), does not pull any punches and immediately forces us to recognise that with (any) politics of entanglement also comes a reality of exclusion. With that in mind, we wrote to all our presenters asking them to critically reflect on what their research (proposed or already conducted and written) could potentially mean for the same bugs they would later present on. This question does not always invite an obvious answer, especially when your research brings you to, say, early modern England or famous still life paintings of the Low Countries—even contemporary installation art.

Our first panel, ‘Bug Materialism’, was made up by researchers Rachel Hill (Strelka), Kay McCrann (University of Portsmouth), and Katharina Alsen (Hamburg University of Music and Theatre). This panel brought together a wide range of research that was distinctly material: the life and death of flies in space, line-drawing practices as a way of connecting with the natural history archives, and the aforementioned art installations focusing on not just the theoretical and philosophical aspects of these entanglements, but also their material lives. The second panel, ‘Ways of Looking’, found Anja Buttstedt (B CUBE) and Rosamund Portus (University of York) talking about different bee species and Fabienne Collignon (University of Sheffield) on the different forms of the gaze. The combined presentations really highlighted the importance of looking—and looking with care—when it comes to the more than human world around us. Our last panel, ‘Storied Entanglements’, was comprised by Sheng-mei Ma (Michigan State University), Marguerite Happe (Literature, UCLA) and Eric Stein (Trinity Western University). Covering a range of topics, from game studies to early modern literature to sinophone literatures in the twentieth century, these three presentations again brought to the forefront the joy and importance of telling a good story when thinking about and thinking through the insect (and worm-like) other.

At the end of the day (specifically after spending around eight hours in an office looking at two tiny laptop screens) we still didn’t have a definite answer to the question of what constitutes an insect entanglement. Reflecting on our workshop and the diverse presentations, I also know that between the storied, the material, and the different ways of looking at insects, there isn’t supposed to be a single answer. Insect entanglements are situated and unique things—not wholly surprising when there are over a million described species out there. As mentioned before, to me this felt like the third in a series of events on what I now dare to call cultural entomology, and I’m very much looking forward to more.

On a final note: when people signed up we asked them what their favourite insect was. Here are the results:

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A pie chart showing participants’ favourite insects

Insect Entanglements Online Workshop

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The Insect Entanglements workshop takes place this Friday 19 June. The workshop is organised by CEH members Eline Tabak and Maia Dixon, and will be hosted via Zoom. You can sign up to attend the workshop through the link in Eline’s tweet below.

 

https://twitter.com/elinetabak/status/1265260368458285056

 

The full conference programme is available to download here, and to whet your appetite we’ve reproduced the introduction from the CfP below.

Header image credit

Insect Entanglements

Insects are everywhere, our (human) lives entangled with them, and yet we know surprisingly little about them. In the introduction to Insectopedia, Hugh Raffles writes the following:

For as long as we’ve been here, they’ve been here too. Wherever we’ve travelled, they’ve been there too. And still, we don’t know them very well, not even the ones we’re closest to, the ones that eat our food and share our beds. Who are they, these beings so different from us and from each other? What do they do? What worlds do they make? What do we make of them? How do we live with them? How could we live with them differently? (3)

These critters have been around longer than we have. They come in so many configurations — different shapes, sizes, and ecological functions. We encounter insects as part of a collective, or as lone individuals. Yet, there is still much to learn about them and, considering their newly realised precarity, the ways in which we can live affirmatively with them.

In the words of Deborah Bird Rose (2013): ‘We live in a time of almost unfathomable loss, and we are called to respond.’ How does one respond to the insect—whether as a taxonomic rank, a certain species, a figure or story, or even the single individual that buzzes and keeps you up at night. What shapes do insect entanglements take in a time of significant biomass and diversity loss, dominated by several flagship species? After all, as Eva Haifa Giraud argues (2019), with (any) politics of entanglement also comes a reality of exclusion, asking us to pay careful attention to those ‘frictions, foreclosures, and exclusions that play a constitutive role in the composition of lived reality.’ These are, of course, only suggestions for topics that are certainly not meant to limit presenters’ areas of research and creativity.

—

Giraud, E.H. 2019. What Comes after Entanglement? Activism, Anthropocentrism, and an Ethics of Exclusion. Duke University Press.
Raffles, H. 2011. Insectopedia. Random House.
Rose, D.B. 2013. In the shadow of all this death. In J. Johnston and F. Probyn-Rapsey, eds. Animal Death. Sydney University Press.

 

Three history lessons to help reduce damage from earthquakes

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Daniel Haines shares his blog post, first posted on the Cabot Institute blog.

Earthquakes don’t kill people,’ the saying goes. ‘Buildings do.’ There is truth in the adage: the majority of deaths during and just after earthquakes are due to the collapse of buildings. But the violence of great catastrophes is not confined to collapsed walls and falling roofs. Earthquakes also have broader effects on people, and the environments we live in.

Practitioners and researchers have achieved great progress in reducing disaster risk over the past few decades, but we must do more to save lives and protect livelihoods.

Can history help?

Building against disaster

Buildings are a good, practical place to start.

Material cultures offer paths to resilience. A major example is traditional building styles that reduce the threat from seismic shaking. A building is not only a compilation of bricks and stones, but a social element that reflects the cultural life of a community. This is the powerful point made by the Kathmandu-based NGO, National Society for Earthquake Technology (NSET), in a recent report on traditional Nepalese building styles.

NSET, and others working in the field, have identified features of traditional building styles that limit damage during shaking. For example, diagonal struts distribute the load of a roof and limit damage during earthquake shaking.

Historic building with diagonal struts at Patan Durbar Square, Kathmandu, Nepal. Photo: Daniel Haines, 2017

This is important because parts of falling buildings often kill people.

Nearby, in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, the royal government is investigating the earthquake-resistant features of traditional rammed-earth buildings.

An old (c. 400 years?) rammed-earth residential building near Paro, Bhutan. Photo: Daniel Haines, 2017

In fact, seismically-appropriate building styles have evolved along similar lines across a huge Eurasian arc of tectonic unrest, from Italy to Kashmir.

But in most countries, population pressure and the use of cheap, unreinforced concrete construction in growing towns and cities has crowded out traditional construction methods.

Reducing disaster risk always means weighing costs in the present against potential protection in the future. Recovering or encouraging traditional methods is potentially cheaper than enforcing modern seismic engineering.

Long-term health impacts

Focusing only on buildings, though, neglects other important aspects of large earthquakes. These shocks do not only shake buildings down, but can dramatically re-shape landscapes by causing huge landslides, changing the level of water in rivers and leading to flooding.

History shows that these changes can hurt people for months or years after the rubble of buildings have been cleared and reconstruction has begun.

For example, a giant (8.4 Mw) earthquake struck northeast India in 1897. Its epicentre was near Shillong, in the borderlands between British India and China. Luckily, the quake happened in the afternoon, so most people were out of doors. The official death toll – the number of deaths that the colonial government attributed directly to the earthquake – was around 1,500.

Yet officials also thought the poor health conditions that followed the earthquake and the substantial floods that it caused were largely responsible for a major cholera epidemic which killed 33,000 people in the Brahmaputra Valley during the same year. That is twice as many as the previous year.

From the available evidence, it is not yet clear how directly the earthquake and the cholera deaths were linked, but other examples saw similar scenarios. In 1934, another major (8.0 Mw) quake devastated parts of Nepal and North India.

This time, the official death toll in India was around 7,500, but again many more people died from related health complications over the following years. In one district in northern Bihar province, an average of 55,000 people died of fever every year over the next decade. In other areas, malaria was unusually prevalent over the same period.

Government reports held secondary effects of the earthquake responsible for the high death rate.
Events that happened long ago therefore demonstrate the complexity of earthquakes’ impacts, even on the relatively straightforward question mortality. Studying them highlights the need to focus present-day disaster responses on long-term health implications.

Of course, this says nothing of earthquakes’ less concrete, but very important, impacts on social structures, community life, governance or the economy.

History in action 

In some cases, historical researchers are contributing directly to initiatives to reduce risk from natural disasters.

Hurricane Katrina showed in 2005 that low-lying New Orleans is terribly vulnerable to storm surge and flooding. Craig Colten, a historical geographer at Louisiana State University, is working with a team of scientists to find solutions by raising the height of the ground in parts of the city while adding forested wetlands on its north shore. Colten is studying analogous historical efforts in other American cities – flood-control measures in nineteenth-century Chicago and responses to hurricanes in Galveston, Texas, around 1900 – as well as examining previous proposals for creating buffers between New Orleans and the sea.

These historical examples provide evidence of what works and what does not. They also highlight the politics of decision-making that help determine whether local communities will support landscape engineering projects.

The international frameworks governing disaster risk reduction such as the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and the Sustainable Development Goals understandably focus on the present, not the past. Historians need to join the conversation to show practitioners that lessons from the past can help build resilience in the future.

Sargasso Sisters: Celebrating the European Eel

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Eel Thoughts – Michael Malay

1. On the birth and death of eels

Eels are tiny when they are born, no bigger than a grain of rice, and completely transparent. If you were to look at them with a microscope, you would see into the world. But as they grow older they begin to absorb light, to bend and to capture it. Their skin darkens, their bodies lengthen, and their translucency is replaced by a brackish brown. Streaks of yellow run down their flanks, like bars of muddy gold, and their eyes grow more pronounced. The grain of rice has become a yellow eel.

But the transformations only continue, change following change. As they grow older, their yellow flanks darken, shade into umber, until, reaching full maturity, they take on the colours of a starry midnight. A slick, glossy black covers their top half, while their underbellies take on a silvery sheen. Glints of brown and green cover their back like flecks of mica. The yellow eel has become a silver eel.

Later, when they are ready to breed, eels will abandon their mud-holes in the river and turn their noses west, to the Sargasso Sea. It’s a place they hardly know, having left it when they were only a few days old. But it’s a region written into their bodies, and to which they return with unerring precision. During the day, they dive down to depths of two hundred metres, before moving upwards again at night. Their voyage thus describes a kind of sinewave, a diurnal dipping followed by a nocturnal surfacing: the arc of their homecoming.

The journey back is determinedly single-minded. Eels do not take a single morsel of food as they swim west, having already prepared for this voyage by storing up rich layers of fat. This is why they are rarely caught at sea. They are not returning for themselves but for the future, which makes itself felt as an itch in their bellies. After breeding, it is thought that adult eels simply perish and fall to the sea floor, where they turn into so much silt. But what survives them is instinct: millions of eggs floating up to the surface of the sea, like sparks from an unseen anvil. Each egg is a tiny plasma of light, each an eel waiting to be born.

And so they return east again, towards the rivers of Europe and North Africa: the Shannon, the Oued Sebaou, the Loire, the Elbe – and other points north, east and south.

2. Springtime

Elvers – the name for juvenile eels – arrive in Britain in the spring. And sometimes, in tidal rivers such as the Severn, they surge upstream on the spring tides of April and May. Part of the magic of elvers, then, part of their elvish charm, is how they unite the various meanings of spring. They leap into our world as the sap begins to rise, on the first spring tides of the year. (Spring: from the Old English springan, meaning an energetic leap or a sudden burst.)

As with the return of swallows, then, elvers help fetch the year to us; their entry into rivers is calendricallly precise. And if one could hover over the rivers of Britain, staying there patiently for days, for weeks, one would see what the kestrel sees: a greenness blooming as the elvers pass, an activating greenness that summons the ramsoms and bluebells of April, the cornflowers and dandelions of May…

3. Stenography

Eels are finding it harder to live here. After arriving in Britain, fresh from their Sargasso voyage, they meet with a series of strange hurdles: dams, sluice gates, tidal fences, barrages, weirs. Today, it is thought that there are more than one million man-made obstructions in rivers and streams across Europe.

The contradiction couldn’t be greater. On one hand, the hardness of concrete and the flushness of steel, and, on the other, this sinuous rope of changing life. Over its lifetime, an eel undergoes no fewer than four metamorphoses, as it transforms from being a leptocephalus to an elver, and then from yellow eel to a silver eel. It is an emissary from a world of alterations and flows, a creature of change and movement.

But what if eels are living letters sent from the Sargasso? If so, what messages might they carry?

What if, after looking into the water for weeks, we found ourselves surrounded by thoughts?

Sargasso Sisters from novadada on Vimeo.

A short meditative video-sonic piece celebrating and highlighting the habitats of the endangered European Eel (Anguilla anguilla).

Released for Fish Migration Day, 2020

Conceived and developed by Antony Lyons and Michael Malay.

Music contribution from The Fantasy Orchestra
fantasyorchestra.org
(excerpts from ‘Final Moments of the Universe’ by Richard Dawson)
Arranged and conducted by Jesse D Vernon
extra soundtrack audio by Antony Lyons

Filmed at loactions in Portugal, Ireland and the UK.
Recorded and edited by Antony Lyons
Some Ireland footage by Will O’Connor (ECOFACT)

Poem: ‘L’anguilla’ by Eugenio Montale
narrated by:
Manuela Castagna & Francesca Cozzolino
Translation based on a version by Paul Muldoon.

Additional text by Michael Malay

Produced with funding from Leverhulme Trust and University of Bristol Centre for Environmental Humanities

Exploring the Wildfilm Archive in University of Bristol Special Collections, by Georgina Lever

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Bristol is widely seen as the ‘Hollywood’ of wildlife film-making and is famously home to the BBC’s Natural History Unit, formally established in the city in 1957. The University of Bristol Library’s Special Collections has embarked on a 2 year project to preserve and promote the mixed-media ‘Wildfilm’ archive, supported by funding from the Wellcome Trust. 

An example draft shooting script for the first episode of ‘The Living Planet’ (1984), working title ‘Planet Earth’, later re-used in the 2006 BBC series! [G. Lever] 

I am the Project Archivist working to catalogue and re-package the material, making it available to search online and access in person at the Special Collections reading room. There are treatments, post-production scripts, dubbing cue sheets, filming trip planning, photographs, research and correspondence – documenting a given programme from conception to broadcast – as well as audience research reports, publicity and press packs.  


A Radio Times cover from 1962 featuring Peter Scott for the ‘Look’ series [G. Lever] 

A substantial part of the collection is audio-visual, including several hundred reels of 16mm film footage. Among the cans are films produced by Survival Anglia, the BBC, and ethologist Niko Tinbergen FRS (1907-1988) and naturalist Eric Ashby MBE (1918-2003). The archive also contains sound recordings, radio broadcasts and audio from talks and festivals. In Digi-Beta format there is a selection of the 150 most important wildlife films selected by BBC producer Christopher Parsons (1932-2002) and a VHS library collected by Jeffery Boswall (1931-2012), another BBC producer whose papers are also in the archive.  

An example of 16mm film cans in the collection [G. Lever]

As evidence of method and technique there are two of the home-made sound-proof boxes made by Eric Ashby, enabling him to capture intimate footage of badgers and foxes in their natural state of behaviour. For further interpretation there are some unusual supplementary objects such as the penguin flipper, skulls and skin collected during filming in South America for ‘The Private Life of the Jackass Penguin’ (1973).  

Eric Ashby’s home-made box for insulating sound made by camera equipment [Helen Lindsay] 
A dubbing cue sheet for an episode of the BBC’s ‘The World About Us’ [G. Lever] 

It’s an incredibly exciting project to be involved in. I’m working alongside Peter Bassett, a producer with the BBC Natural History Unit who has acted as guardian and advocate for the collection and is a font of knowledge on the history of wildlife film making. Nigel Bryant, Audiovisual Digitisation Officer will join the project for a year to produce lossless digital preservation copies of selected material, enhancing the accessibility of audio-visual media in the collection and protecting the longevity of these fragile, obsolete formats. We’re confident the archive offers significant research value to a variety of disciplines and interests – from the history of media and television to environmental studies, anthropology, history, philosophy and music.  

Consistently these films bear witness to changes in the natural world leading us towards today’s climate crisis, educating us about the animal kingdom and the landscape we inhabit, reminding us of our responsibility to protect it. 

The artist Jody’s mural of Greta Thunberg on the side of the Tobacco Factory, North Street, Bristol [G. Lever] 

The climate activist Greta Thunberg recently guest edited an episode of the Today programme on BBC Radio 4. During a Skype interview with Sir David Attenborough, she said:  

“When I was younger, when I was maybe 9-10 years old, the thing that made me open my eyes for what was happening with the environment was films and documentaries about the natural world, and what was going on, so thank you for that, because that was what made me decide to do something about it.” 

The archive has its foundations in a project led by another Bristol based organisation, Wildscreen, founded in 1982 by Christopher Parsons. Wildscreen hosts an internationally renowned biennial festival on wildlife film (the 20th anniversary festival will be held later this year, 19-23 October 2020) and supports a variety of conservation organisations. It launched ‘WildFilmHistory: 100 years of wildlife film making’ in 2008, a Heritage Lottery funded project that led to a collection of material which now forms part of the ‘Wildfilm’ archive. 

Another compelling aspect of the collection is a series of oral history films made by the WildFilmHistory project, spanning all facets of film-making from producers and cameramen to composers and narrators. The interviews capture both the professional and personal alliance between subject and interviewer, enabling discussion to draw out the working relationships behind the creation of pivotal series such as the BBC’s ‘Life on Earth’ (1979) and ITV’s ‘Survival’ (1961-2001). 

The content of interviews ranges from anecdotal to technical, covering the logistical challenges of filming in remote places, photographic technique, reliability of equipment, battling physical elements, ingenious ways of tackling technological limitations and reflecting on moments of fortune and failure.  

It is a renowned ambition of natural history film-making to capture a rare species or behaviour on camera for the first time; paperwork in the archive documents how this is attempted and achieved, and the role narrative construction may have to play in documentary film.  

In a recent speech at the World Economic Forum, Sir David Attenborough said: 

“When I made my first television programmes most audiences had never even seen a pangolin – indeed few pangolin had ever seen a TV camera!” 

There has been an astonishing level of cultural and technological change since the programme, ‘Zoo Quest for a Dragon’ was broadcast in 1956 on the BBC – then one channel with national coverage only recently extending beyond London and Birmingham. In his published diaries for the Zoo Quest series, ‘Adventures of a Young Naturalist’, Attenborough recollects the obstacles involved in locating species unique to regions of Guyana, Indonesia and Paraguay. Through such programmes viewers gained their first glimpse of far flung parts of the world, now increasingly accessible with the growth of air travel and the tourism industry.   

Improvements in technology allow viewers to observe the animal kingdom from new perspectives. The archive spans an era during which television has evolved from black and white to regular colour broadcasting in the late 1960s, and the invention of cinematic IMAX presentation to home based on-demand UHD (Ultra High Definition) 4KTV offered by streaming services today. In the same speech, Attenborough says:  

“The audience for that first series, 60 years ago, was restricted to a few million viewers... My next series will go instantly to hundreds of millions of people in almost every country on Earth via Netflix”.  

As well as the BBC Natural History Unit, the archive contains material for Survival Anglia, Granada, Partridge Films and the RSPB Film Unit, and international networks like the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and TVNZ.  

There is a slim body of literature and theory on the history of wildlife film, but within the archive there is a unique collection of studies and published papers by academics tapping into this potential. Two excellent books are ‘Wildlife Films’ by Derek Bousé (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000) and ‘BBC Wildlife Documentaries in the Age of Attenborough’ by Jean-Baptiste Gouyon (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).   

Some material relating to Granada’s ‘Zoo Time’ series (1956-1968) [G. Lever] 

All this material is being described in a detailed catalogue, capturing key words such as species and filming locations to ensure relevant content can be found by anyone with an interest in the archive. When complete the full catalogue will be launched on the Special Collections webpage in the summer of 2021. 

What did the dinosaurs ever do for us?

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Since their discovery less than 200 years ago, dinosaurs have invaded popular culture, appearing in literature, fiction, art, film and entertainment. Dinosaur displays draw eager visitors to museums, and dinosaur-related feature films yield some of the highest box-office returns of all time.[1] A general public usually indifferent to science reacts enthusiastically to a new dinosaur discovery reported in popular news and media channels. Yet the word ‘dinosaur’ is still used to refer to something – or someone – out of date, extinct, obsolete and inflexible.

Apart from their entertainment value, why are dinosaurs relevant today? Why spend time, effort and money studying an apparently extinct group of animals? Because dinosaurs were the dominant life form on land for over 200 million years. They were amazingly diverse – they came in all shapes and sizes, from the size of a raven to the largest animals ever to walk on land, living all over the planet from the Antarctic to Siberia, from Scotland to China.

So, first, if we want to understand life in its entirety, we need to understand how and why dinosaurs became so successful, how they adapted to variations in their environment and how they dominated the planet for so long.

Second, and perhaps more urgent today, we need them to tell us what went wrong – what were the global repercussions of a massive asteroid impact? What exactly caused the extinction* of such resilient, adaptable creatures? Dinosaurs lived through some of the most dramatic environmental upheavals the planet has experienced – variations in oxygen levels, climate, even the position of the land masses – yet, in the end, were at the mercy of their changing environment.

Third, some dinosaurs were the largest creatures to walk the planet, massive creatures more than ten times the size of an elephant. Scientists in the field of biomechanics are trying to understand how they lived, exceeding any limits we can even imagine from extant life. How did they live? Eat? Mate? Grow? Understanding them helps us to understand how evolution solves the problems of life.

If the environmental humanities study our relationship with, and effect on, our environment, the dinosaurs can put that in context. More than that, the popularity of dinosaurs in contemporary culture needs the methodologies used by the humanities to understand the underlying critical influences in their interpretations. Any representation of a dinosaur is a product of speculation and that speculation can carry hidden bias and social influences even when based on known science.

*Except, of course, the dinosaurs didn’t die out. Today, around 10,000 species of them feed on your garden feeders, fly overhead and sing at dawn. Birds are dinosaurs, evolved from a common ancestor in the branch of theropods that included T. rex – and T. rex is more closely related to a hummingbird than to a stegosaurus.

This post was written by Vicky Coules (@victoriacoules). Images kindly supplied by Robert Nicholls https://paleocreations.com/

Bristol’s Palaeomedia Project is an informal discussion group and blog, (palaeomedia.blogs.bristol.ac.uk) that explores how dinosaurs and allied prehistoric creatures are represented in media and welcomes anyone in touch with their inner 7-year-old who loves dinosaurs. For further information or to join the mailing group, contact me at victoria.coules@bristol.ac.uk

[1] See, for example, the increase in numbers to Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery when they displayed the diplodocus skeleton from May to Sept 2018 https://advisor.museumsandheritage.com/news/dippy-dinosaur-sized-impact-tour-breaks-records-bmag/; Among worldwide grossing films of all time, Jurassic World is no. 5 and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom no 12. Jurassic Park comes in at no. 32. https://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/world/

Research and Teaching in the Midst of Climate Crisis, by Ashley Dodsworth

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I became a co-convenor of the PSA Environmental Politics sub-group earlier this year, against the backdrop of the rise of Extinction Rebellion and the increasing impact of the environmental movement. The convening team decided to reflect this in our latest event, a workshop on ‘Activism and Academia in an Age of Environmental Breakdown’ at Nottingham Trent which aimed to not only bring together activists and academics, but to critically reflect on the intersection between the two and try to explore how to hold academic events in this time of climate crisis.    

As anyone who’s organised an event knows, finding a convenient data is half the battle. Balancing the start of term dates for myself and the other co-convenors was difficult and the date of 20th September was one of the few that worked for us all. But surely holding an event on environmental activism on the date of the global climate strike was contradictory? After much discussion we decided that the fit between the theme of the conference and the strike could provide a rich source of discussion and that we should try and explore this. So we arranged for the lunchbreak to include time for anyone who wanted to, to attend the demonstration being held in the nearby city centre with directions provided. Some participants also mentioned that they would be attending the workshop as part of their strike action, with one participant wearing a strike arm-band. Registration was free and we were clear that people could attend for whatever time they could, to further support people coming along as part of their strike activities. Participating in a climate protest, whether by labelling attendance at the workshop as such or briefly joining the main demonstration, while at the same time critically analysing both the protest and the intersection of activism and academia blurred the objectivity of the workshop, to say the very least. But bringing our practice into the workshop and openly discussing how they intersected, in addition to ensuring that no activism was compulsory, grounded our discussions and prompted each participant to reflect on how they experienced the intersection of both their research and their action.  

The current wave of climate action and the groups that are spearheading it, such as the school strike movement and Extinction Rebellion, are distinct in the way that they are driven by young activists. Initially we recognised this through a panel on youth engagement, with excellent speakers such as Dr Sarah Pickard presenting their work on young people’s political activism. However this felt disingenuous and was not representative of the movement nor the agency of the young activists driving it. So we reached out to young climate activists around the globe and asked if they would like to record a video to be shown at the conference which explained why they got involved with the climate strike movement and how the networks they were part of were organised. (We took advice regarding data protection and gained the consent of their parents when necessary.) Hearing directly from these activists from across Europe and America brought balance to the panel, ensuring that we weren’t just discussing youth activism, but listening and responding to them and their work directly. This activist engagement was also reflected in the speakers we invited to the conference and the call for papers. We wanted to ensure that activists and practioners were included and highlighted this in both the name of the workshop and throughout. For example the ‘Critical Reflections on Extinction Rebellion’ panel featured activists from the group as well as academics who study it, and representatives from a local wildlife NGO took part in another panel.  The NGOs represented were from Nottingham and the Midlands in part due to proximity to the conference venue but also because we wanted to reflect the context of the area we held the event in, to ‘think global, act local’. We endeavoured to match this with an engagement with the wider context of climate activism, with a discussion of activism and academic globally and in the Global South in particular. Deciding against a specific panel on this topic, we tried to reflect the global context throughout the day, such as including videos from young activists around the world and a specific reflection on this topic at the start of the roundtable led by a scholar of and from the Global South. However keeping the balance between the local and the global was difficult, raising questions of whose voices are included and whose are heard. Within the workshop we wanted to reflect the growing trend of more inclusive academic conferences, a trend that is particularly prevalent within environmental scholarship. The roundtable at the end of the workshop was designed to facilitate this, with activities that paired up activists and academics for discussion and time for the group as a whole to talk together. This turned out to be one of the strongest aspects of the workshop – certainly it was one of the most commented upon and more space for this discussion, even at the expense of time for the earlier papers, would I think have been welcomed.  

Reflecting on the workshop now, while there are changes I would make, the attempt to not only bring together academics and activists but to embed that approach within the format of the day and its priorities was I felt worthwhile. To research and teach on environmental issues in the face of climate denialism and apathy as well as the increasing environmental collapse is a political act and we should recognise that in our forums.    

Ashley Dodsworth is a lecturer in politics in SPAIS at the University of Bristol and co-convenor of the PSA Environment sub-group. Her research explores the intersection of the history of political thought and environmental politics, and environmental rights. She is co-editor of Environmental Human Rights: A Political Theory Perspective (Routledge, 2018). 

Reflections on European Society for Environmental History Bi-ennial Conference, Tallinn, 21-24 August, 2019

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Back home after the conference, my mind flitting around memories including the stupendously impressive opening ceremony, the highlight of which was an Estonian choir serenading conference attendees from atop a submarine in Tallinn’s Seaplane Harbour Museum – no really – and conversations with such a wide variety of attendees that it only serves to remind me what a broad church environmental history is – and ending up committing to do another book review as a result of a chance encounter with an envhist colleague/book review editor for a journal.

But uppermost in my thoughts is one of the keynote speeches, which I think was a masterclass in how to deliver a compelling narrative whilst relating it to relevant historiography and conceptual themes, using different sources of material to inform and balance judgements about conflicting information, and paying due attention to agreed conference themes.  To name just a few of its qualities.  The keynote was by Professor Kate Brown of MIT in the States, presenting on aspects of her most recent book, ‘Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future’.  Quite apart from the important factual content of direct relevance to us (blueberries and other fruit and vegetables from Ukraine and Poland are now off my shopping list probably permanently), Professor Brown critiqued the existing Chernobyl historiography and present mainstream mind-set as being limited both geographically and temporally, focused on the immediate geographical site around the nuclear plant, and also on an “accident” narrative which regards the disaster as a one-off event suspended in time, rather than an ongoing disaster with accelerating consequences.

Commenting also on the perspectives created by popular media/culture, Brown critiqued the (much-praised from a dramatic perspective) HBO ‘Chernobyl’ TV series as perpetuating a prejudice that a “Chernobyl” could only happen in an authoritarian regime such as the Soviet Union – whilst, as Brown asserts, the liberal democratic authorities in Japan took three months to acknowledge that there had been a nuclear disaster at Fukushima. 

Of greatest interest from a budding historian’s perspective however, was her analysis of the primary research material available, recognising that official documents from the period were more useful in illustrating the deleterious impact of Soviet bureaucracy and power structures on the capacity to provide accurate information about the health consequences of Chernobyl – than they were useful in terms of understanding the actual health consequences.  For the latter Brown undertook oral history research with workers who had been present in dealing with aspects of the aftermath, identifying what they had done, why, and what the consequences for their own health and that of their now deceased colleagues had been.  Professor Brown’s presentation was filmed by ESEH and is now available on: vimeo.com/354501590

Her presentation reminded me of some of the things I learned in my MRes in Historical Research at the Institute of Historical Research, that not all sources of material are accurate, that they may exist for a particular reason, and reflect the views/bias of the person and/or organisation responsible for their creation – not something I had exactly forgotten, but which had been pushed to the back of my mind in my rush to “do” the research for my ongoing PhD.

Elsewhere in my ESEH conference experience, I’m left reflecting on the value of making presentations, as opposed to just attending conferences to hear other people and “network”.  Although there were in total 500 ESEH conference attendees (although not all at the conference at the same time) there were in most segments of the timetable around ten parallel sessions, and for my ‘Landscapes of War’ session in which I presented there were just nine attendees, plus the three speakers, the chair, and a technician – spread out in an unfortunately quite large lecture room.  I had a similar experience at ASEH back in April – hundreds of conference attendees in all, lots of competing parallel sessions, and our five-strong panel nearly outnumbered the audience.  I know, I know, the contacts you make, the practice you get in public speaking, the opportunity to reshape your PhD material according to the themes of the conference, thereby broadening your perspective on your own material…but nevertheless I found all the empty seats quite dispiriting, and in stark contrast to the buzz I got from speaking at the Rural Modernism and British Agricultural History Society conferences earlier this year where, whilst there were only 30 or 40 attendees in total, there were no parallel sessions, so I had an audience of all the conference participants, and it really made me feel like it was worthwhile. 

I’m sure the issue of how many parallel sessions to have is a perennial tension for conference organisers, and I’m certainly not going to attempt to give advice – but only to say that I think, in deciding to participate in future conferences, I will just have to accept that as a landscape militarisation envhist, I will likely have to resign myself to speaking to small audiences for the larger international conferences, in order to benefit from the events’ scale and breadth in other ways – and wait for the smaller single-session conferences to give me the exciting and stimulating experience of presenting to a good-sized audience.

Gary Willis

Year Two PhD Student

Department of Historical Studies / Member of Centre for Environmental Humanities