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EcoGothic gardens in the long nineteenth century

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Dr Sue Edney, Senior Associate in the Department of English, has just published her new book with Manchester University Press, EcoGothic gardens in the long nineteenth century: Phantoms, fantasy and uncanny flowers.

We’re delighted to share the details of the book here, along with a podcast Sue put together for Manchester University Press.

From the MUP website:

EcoGothic gardens in the long nineteenth century provides fresh approaches to contemporary ecocritical and environmental debates, providing new, compelling insights into material relationships between vegetal and human beings. Through twelve exciting essays, the collection demonstrates how unseen but vital relationships among plants and their life systems can reflect and inform human behaviours and actions. In these entertaining essays, human and vegetal agency is interpreted through ecocritical and ecoGothic investigation of uncanny manifestations in gardens – hauntings, psychic encounters, monstrous hybrids, fairies and ghosts – with plants, greenhouses, granges, mansions, lakes, lawns, flowerbeds and trees as agents and sites of uncanny developments. The collection represents the forefront of ecoGothic critical debate and will be welcomed by specialists in environmental humanities at every level, as a timely, innovative inclusion in ecoGothic studies.

Table of contents

Introduction: Phantoms, fantasy and uncanny flowers – Sue Edney

1. Deadly gardens: The ‘Gothic green’ in Goethe and Eichendorff – Heather I. Sullivan
2. ‘Diabolic clouds over everything’: An ecoGothic reading of John Ruskin’s garden at Brantwood – Caroline Ikin
3. The Gothic orchard of the Victorian imagination – Joanna Crosby
4. Gothic Eden: Gardens, religious tradition and ecoGothic exegesis in Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Lost Valley’ and ‘The Transfer’ – Christopher M. Scott
5. ‘That which roars further out’: Gardens and wilderness in ‘The Man who Went too Far’ by E. F. Benson and ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’ by Algernon Blackwood – Ruth Heholt
6. Darwin’s plants and Darwin’s gardens: Sex, sensation and natural selection – Jonathan Smith
7. ‘Tentacular thinking’ and the ‘abcanny’ in Hawthorne’s Gothic gardens of masculine egotism – Shelley Saguaro
8. Green is the new black: Plant monsters as ecoGothic tropes; vampires and femme fatales – Teresa Fitzpatrick
9. Death and the fairy: Hidden gardens and the haunting of childhood – Francesca Bihet
10. Presence and absence in Tennyson’s gardens of grief: ‘Mariana’, Maud and Somersby – Sue Edney
11. Blackwater Park and the haunting of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White – Adrian Tait

Afterword: Z Vesper, the Wilderness Garden, Powis Castle – Paul Evans

Thinking with salmon about ecological ruin, ontology, and decoloniality

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Austin Read, a PhD candidate in human geography at the University of Bristol, introduces his project on ontology, decoloniality and salmon.

Salmon anatomical plate drawing. Source: University of Glasgow Archives & Special Collections (Sp Coll RQ 271)

If you carried out a survey of what people think is the most important thing that we can do to stem the tide of ecological ruin sweeping the planet, challenging Euro-Modern ontologies of nature (beliefs and ideas about reality, or ‘nature’s nature’) probably wouldn’t emerge as a number one priority on the list. In a time of crisis, where time literally feels like it’s running out and the apocalypse is already here for some people, carrying out this kind of philosophical reflection might feel like ineffective political strategy. Yet a challenging of our assumptions about ontology is precisely what a growing chorus of theorists and activists are calling for. For my PhD project, I want to examine how heeding these calls might allow us to better understand the nature of the ecological crisis we are facing.  

Specifically, my project is building upon decolonial scholarship and activism that emphasises the role that the politics of ontology has played in bringing about intertwined social and environmental injustices. Within the history of Western philosophy, the study of ontology has mostly consisted of making assessments of the reality of the world. Decolonial theorists such as Arturo Escobar, Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser have challenged these dominant philosophies of ontology by destabilising the very idea that we live in a singular world or universe. Instead, these thinkers have argued we live in a world of many worlds they call the pluriverse, in which there exists multipleradically different ontologies. Decolonial theorists have documented the political currents of power that exist between pluriversal worlds, diagnosing Euro-Modern ontologies as predicated upon a dominance of culture over nature and therefore ecologically ruinous, as well as violent and colonising, supressing any ontology that does not align with its firmly held principles of rationality and individualism. In this sense, for proponents of the pluriverse, environmental justice begins with a dismantling of the systems of power through which Euro-Modern ontologies have violently dominated others.

Decolonial activism and scholarship has emerged primarily from Latin American and Indigenous geographies, and as such most of the literature examines thought coming from these worlds. However, I am intrigued by Escobar’s (2020) suggestion that it is possible to bring about decolonial and ‘nondominant’ Wests – that another Europe is possible. To think about how insurrectional decolonial ontologies of nature might arise from within Europe, I’m turning to a perhaps surprising companion: the salmon.

A salmon farm near Bergen, Norway. Marius Ltu/Getty Images/iStockphoto

Salmon are playing a complex role in the theatre of contemporary Anthropocene politics. An enchanting creature that travels thousands of miles using ancestral memory as its guide home, salmon ways of life are becoming increasingly threatened as rivers and oceans are warped by the toxic infrastructure of modernity. Activists, scientists, Indigenous communities, fishers and nature-lovers have all documented the alarming rate at which wild salmon and other water-dwelling creatures are being threatened with extinction. As salmon are simultaneously caught by trawlers, domesticated in industrial salmon farms, bred in hatchery pens to boost depleted wild stock and subject to increasingly stringent conservation laws, they sink deeper and deeper within the folds of Euro-Modern logics.

However, as well as being indicators of the logics of modernity, salmon are also sources of hope. Fisheries have been highlighted as some of the most hopeful sites for fostering nondominant ontologies of nature within Europe. Salmon have swum in European rivers and oceans for millennia, meaning there are deep historical cultures of angling and caring for salmon that we might turn to as examples in the struggle to bring about fair and just ecological relations. Elsewhere, efforts to articulate alternative communal economic arrangements and relocalize food have found fisheries to be potent and generative sites of experimentation (see, for example Elinor Ostrom’s influential work on the commons).

For my PhD project, I am proposing that we let salmon, the injustice they materialise and the hope they symbolise, act as a guide. Following salmon in the UK and across Europe, both as they emerge in present material entanglements and in historic flows, leads us to a dizzying array of political ecologies of extraction and conservation in which we find unfolding conflicts over use, meaning and access to salmon. It’s my suggestion that a detailed study of these political ecologies and the different queer and historic ontologies emerging within them could serve, in its own small way, as a crystallising political narrative for bringing about environmental and social justice. As Environmental Humanities scholars have shown, bringing about environmental justice will not just be about new technoscientific technologies or acts passed in parliament: it will be, in part, about what kinds of stories we tell. I say let us listen to the stories of the salmon: stories of ancestral struggle in the face of the ever-encroaching logics of modernity, stories of resistance in the face of power and domination, so that we might have a better understanding of the problem we must ourselves struggle against.

You can follow Austin on Twitter @austin_jread. 

“Between the Insect Hordes and Ourselves”: Imaginaries of Insect Declines from the 1960s Onwards

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Eline D. Tabak, PhD researcher in English (Bristol) and Environmental Humanities (BSU), introduces her SWW DTP-funded project.

‘According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a bee should be able to fly. Its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground. The bee, of course, flies anyway because bees don’t care what humans think is impossible.’ You might recognise these words as the opening from the animated film Bee Movie (2007). The film is as known for its memes as its compulsive heteronormativity. If you are unaware: not only are there many happy nuclear bee families, the star of the film, Barry, is a male worker bee. On top of that, the human woman with whom Barry takes on the honey industry and fights for equal bee rights appears to develop some warm feelings for him. Needless to say, Bee Movie is fun but not a cinematographic masterpiece.

A still from Bee Movie (2007), directed by Simon J. Smith and Steven Hickner

Jokes aside, the 2007 film is a good indicator of an influx of documentaries, memoirs, novels, and poetry collections starring the Western or European honeybee. Perhaps I’m being too critical here. This influx does excite me in a way, as it shows that insect life and decline has become part of a broader conversation. But, with this awareness of insect decline in our cultural imagination comes a sting in the tale. In this case, the sting is an almost obsessive focus on the European honeybee in an age of overall insect decline and what Elizabeth Kolbert (2014) popularised as the sixth extinction. There are thousands of known species of bees all over the world—not to mention other bugs—and yet a select group of people continue to talk, write, film, draw and campaign for the European honeybee. (Are you familiar with the concept of bee-washing?)

In response to these stories, I started thinking about the following: why is there so much creative work on the honeybee? Insects make up the most biodiverse and largest class of described (and estimated) species in the animal kingdom. And while many of these—not all—are indeed facing decline or even extinction, the European honeybee is not one of them.

What started out as a general interest, quickly evolved—metamorphosed!—into my doctoral project on insect decline. Inspired by Ursula Heise’s (2016) work on the cultural side of extinction, I started asking the following: what kind of narratives do people create when talking about insect decline, and how do they tie in with other and older insect stories, our broader cultural memory? Is there an explanation to be found for this honeybee hyperfocus when it comes to narratives of insect decline? Thinking about these questions, I kept returning to Donna Haraway, who wrote that ‘it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with … It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.’ (12) Haraway’s keen (if not overcited) observation also applies to the case of insect decline. When looking at creative storytelling—of which there is a lot—we’re not just considering entertainment or aesthetics. Even with something as seemingly banal as Bee Movie, it does matter what stories we tell to tell the story of insect decline. So why do people contribute to this, for lack of a better word, honeybee extravaganza?

An assortment of contemporary honeybee stories

My project become more than a chance to get deep into the problem with honeybees and other charismatic microfauna. Thinking about tiny critters (instead of charismatic megafauna) created the opportunity to engage with and tease out some of the broader questions in the fields of critical animal and extinction studies. Between all the reading and writing and talking and plotting out of the work that needs to be done, theories and ideas and random shower thoughts keep falling into place, and I have a red thread or two running through the different chapters of my thesis. Watch this space.

For now, I do want to say that one of the more rewarding elements of my research so far has been the deep dive into care ethics. My understanding of the concept has both expanded and gained new focus, and my deep dive into care and conservation has opened my eyes to the possibility of care as a violent practice (Salazar Parreñas 2018). One of my current challenges is to see how care, understood as ‘a vital affective state, an ethical obligation and a practical labour’ (Puig de la Bellacasa), is reflected in the poetics of insect decline. What does a poetics of care look like when we let ourselves become subject to, as Haraway (2008) phrased it, the ‘unsettling obligation of curiosity, which requires knowing more at the end of the day than at the beginning’ (36). What happens when we allow ourselves to pay careful attention to the other-than-human life around us and start to care?

Assorted Coleoptera in the University of Texas Insect Collection

Another thread is that of the different (temporal and spatial) scales of extinction and the limits of our empathy for other-than-human animals. As Ursula Heise (2016) and Dolly Jørgensen (2019) so effectively argue in their monographs on the topic, extinctions come to matter once they reflect upon our own (human) pasts, presents, and futures and we can emotionally engage with them. And like these different pasts, presents, and futures, extinction isn’t singular. It is easy—and to a certain extent even useful—to put it all under the label of the sixth extinction. Still, I am increasingly convinced that such labels obscure the differences and intricacies people need to be aware of in the face of the sixth extinction—or rather, extinctions.

There are local extinctions, global extinctions, extinctions completely missed or forgotten (by human eyes), even desired extinctions. Communities respond to and engage with different species and local and global extinctions in different ways. Especially when something tricky like shifting baseline syndrome ensures that some communities aren’t aware of local extinctions or declines in the first place, while passionate campaigns for charismatic megafauna put certain species on the global agenda and in the public eye. I’m not saying this is always a bad thing (I’m just as passionate about the survival of the Malayan and Sumatran tiger as the next person).

I am, however, saying that it is worth researching how attention and care are directed and, ideally, can be redirected in times of need. And insects—in all their creeping and crawling diversity, with important ecosystem functions such as pollination, prey, and waste disposal—have turned out to be an excellent group to consider these questions.

You can follow Eline on twitter @elinetabak and see more of her writing and work at www.elinedtabak.com

Sources

Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke UP, 2016.

—. When Species Meet. U of Minneapolis P, 2008.

Heise, Ursula K. Imagining Extinctions: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. U of Chicago P, 2016.

Jørgensen, Dolly. Recovering Lost Species in the Modern Age: Histories of Longing and Belonging. MIT Press, 2019.

Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. Bloomsbury, 2014.

Puig de la Bellacasa, María. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. U of Minnesota P, 2017. Salazar Parreñas, Juno. Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation. Duke UP, 2018

Nowhere, Somewhere, Elsewhere, Here: Nature Conservation and Cultural Representations of the Dutch Wadden Sea

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The Literary and Visual Landscapes group hosted a talk by Dr Eveline de Smalen on 28 October 2020. Eveline kindly agreed to allow the talk, ‘Nowhere, Somewhere, Elsewhere, Here: Nature Conservation and Cultural Representations of the Dutch Wadden Sea’, to be recorded.

We are delighted to be able to share the video of that talk here, thanks to Eline Tabak and the Literary and Visual Landscapes group:

Nowhere, Somewhere, Elsewhere, Here: Nature Conservation and Cultural Representations of the Dutch Wadden Sea by Dr. Eveline de Smalen

Abstract: The Wadden Sea, an intertidal UNESCO world heritage site, stretches from the north coast of the Netherlands to Esbjerg in Denmark. As an ecologically and culturally important site, it has been presented in fiction and poetry on many occasions and in many ways. This paper discusses the engagement with place in contemporary Dutch Wadden Sea literature and focusses on how literary texts present the Wadden Sea as connected or disconnected from other places and how they engage with local ecologies and communities. A close reading of these texts shows that many display a lack of concern for entanglements and local particularities in ecology and community. This cultural imagination of place is not without its implications in the real world. For example, it is echoed in problems with nature conservation that have been identified by several scholars in the humanities and social sciences. They argue that there are communication problems between conservationists and communities, because the former disregard the particularities, customs and desires of the latter. This paper shows how reading literature can diagnose the extent of this problem, which is not limited to particular groups or regions, but is reflected in the cultures of the Wadden Sea countries at large. While literature can help diagnose this problem, it can also be a tool to remedy it. By providing insights into the lived realities of local communities and the relations between human and non-human beings, literary texts can improve understandings of local cultures. This way of engaging with literature against the background of very urgent and specific problems poses fundamental questions about the position of literature in the world today that is neither politically detached nor wholly instrumental. Analyses of place in literature can be productively linked with real-world environmental problems, but these connections should always urge us to consider carefully how we conceive the place of literature in a world of environmental crisis.

Bio: Dr Eveline de Smalen is a literary scholar who works on literatures of coastal and riverine landscapes, with a particular interest in the transformative capacities of the imagination and the interactions between the realm of the imagination and that of policy and politics. She studied English and comparative literature at Utrecht University and completed her PhD in Environmental Humanities at the Rachel Carson Center in 2019. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the project “Corridor Talk: Conservation Humanities and the Future of Europe’s National Parks” (DFG-AHRC, 2020-2022/3) and visiting fellow at Integrated Research on Energy, Environment and Society (IREES) at the University of Groningen. For this project, she works on the cultural imagination of the Wadden Sea.

More Literary and Visual Landscapes events are coming up this term. The remaining programme for 2020 is as follows:

Banner image: Ollicze

Thinking with eels

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CEH members Ben GJ Thomas and Michael Malay have collaborated on a new podcast about the transatlantic history of eels. Loops is a podcast from Bristol-based Caraboo Projects, exploring visual arts, social histories, folklore and music.

In this episode, Ben explores entanglements of eels in Atlantic histories with guests Michael Malay, Thom van Dooren, John Wyatt Greenlee and Rebecca Thomas. Stream the podcast on the Caraboo Projects website here.

Embodied Experience and the Landscape of South-West England, 1800-1914

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Lena Ferriday introduces her PhD research on landscape and embodied experience in the south west of England. Her research is funded through the AHRC South West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership.

Despite its material and ecological origins, environmental history has been profoundly influenced by the cultural turn, with scholars emphasising the importance of considering the cultural contexts in which natural spaces are embedded. My PhD project seeks to blend the cultural and material approaches with a focus on the human body and its corporeal sensations. Over the next four years, I intend to explore the implications of embodied experience on the cultural demarcations of certain landscapes, and thus demonstrate the value of this material-cultural approach for examining the historical development of human-landscape relationships.

Using the urban and rural landscapes of South-West England as a case study, my project will interrogate the embodied experiences of tourists across the long nineteenth century. Extending from a central research question which asks how visitors corporeally experienced the South West in this period, I will then consider the implications of these experiences on wider national conceptions for how landscapes should and should not be engaged with in this period. Scholarship of outdoor leisure movements has often positioned the expansion of ramblers’ clubs in the 1920s as a milestone for the fostering of a new corporeal relationship with British landscapes, the point at which experience diverged from those of Victorian elite gazing upon landscapes from a distance.

South West Coast Path, Lyton. Image by Annie Spratt via unsplash

I will begin by analysing guidebooks to the South West, in order to consider the expectations and norms regarding tourists’ physical navigation through these landscapes in this period. These sources will then be combined with accounts of tourists, which will elucidate where these expectations were observed and contravened, allowing for greater comprehension of the extent to which Victorian tourists regarded landscapes to be visceral, multi-sensory spaces of engagement.

Focusing on the environments within which sensory stimuli are produced, this project proposes a new methodological framework for sensory history. Mark Smith has set an influential agenda for sensory history which asserts the importance of considering the consumption of senses, as opposed to their production. By focusing on the physical components of sounds and smells, he argues, much sensory history has attempted to discursively ‘reproduce’ the sensory stimuli of an historical moment, rather than consider their consumption as historically and culturally contingent. Therefore, it is sensory consumption that scholars should examine, in order to situate sensual experience in its historical and cultural context.

By combining sensory and environmental history, this project, however, emphasises the importance of both the production and consumption of sensory stimuli. Sensual experiences are fundamentally entangled with the environmental contexts which produce them. Drawing together the landscapes from which sounds, smells and embodied experiences manifest, and their cultural reception by the tourists that moved through them, will allow for a more comprehensive understanding of the dynamics of landscape engagement in this period. In so doing, I will advocate for the importance of assimilating sensory and environmental histories. 

Across the project, I endeavour to engage with practice-based methodologies that are slightly unconventional for scholarship within the humanities. Inspired by the recent autoethnographic phenomenological studies of Tim Ingold and John Wylie exploring the corporeal experiences of rural walking, the resources of the DTP will support a number of trips to conduct walking as a research method. Spending time in the South West tracing the routes taken in the life-writings I am studying, will allow me to engage more deeply with the embodied experiences that these landscapes provide.

I hope that gaining experience with and finding value in such practice-based methodologies will allow for these trips to evolve into a public engagement program in my final year. Here, I intend to produce a series of curated walks across the South West, to engage the local public in the area’s mobile and sensual histories. With the success of writers such as Robert Macfarlane and Simon Armitage, I hope that drawing on the popular appeal of reflective walking will provide a valuable and unique opportunity to engage the wider community in my research.

Sit down and wake up! On Buddhist theory and planetary crisis

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Courtenay Crawford introduces her new MSc and PhD project, funded by an ESRC 1+3 grant through the South West Doctoral Training Partnership.

Mention Buddhism and you’ll often get a response shaped by its recent commodification into a self-care trend. Mindfulness apps, cheerful Buddha incense holders and the Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up have led many to assume that Buddhism, like deep breathing and scented candles is primarily a technique for managing stress. Do I even need to tell you that these assumptions are wide off the mark? Probably not, yet even those who are aware ‘Buddhism’ goes deeper than these stereotypes may be surprised to hear it paired in the same sentence with ‘post-humanism’ ‘decoloniality’ ‘deconstruction’ and even ‘anarchism’.

Yet I’m about to embark on research linking just these streams of thought. This October I’ll be studying for the MSc Society & Space with plans to continue to PhD study through the ESRC 3+1 route in 2021. My research will ask how Buddhism can help us reconceive the politics of the more-than-human world in an age of planetary crisis. Buddhist thought has a unique contribution to make here, yet it’s frequently overlooked as a source of theory for approaching these questions (and other social science questions more generally).

A statue of Jizo (Kṣitigarbha) or the Earth-Womb boddhisattva glimpsed through a doorway at the Koya-san temple complex in Kansai region, Japan.

Just like other non-Western philosophies, perceptions of Buddhism have been framed through the colonial encounter. Whilst nineteenth century explorers to Tibet, China, India and Japan, did much to inspire fascination with ‘Oriental religions’, early translations of Buddhist texts often understood Buddhism through a Christian lens, equating the Buddha with Jesus. This, and the general imperial refusal to take other ways of thought and life seriously have ensured that Buddhism is yet to receive much serious academic attention outside of religious studies and history departments.

For this reason alone, Buddhist perspectives can and should be mobilised as a source of decolonising critique. But it’s not just valuable as a perspective from which to criticise.  Contemporary Buddhisms brought to the West by Tibetan refugees and modern Japanese scholars such as D.T. Suzuki from the 1950s onwards have demonstrated the breadth, diversity and originality of Buddhist scholarship and practice. And more recently, excellent work has been carried out demonstrating historical Buddhism’s clear pertinence to contemporary philosophical and political concerns more broadly.

In fact many of most disruptive (and productive) concepts shaping contemporary humanities study today were anticipated by Buddhist thought by literally thousands of years. Put it this way – if names like Derrida, Deleuze, Whitehead, Latour, and Stengers are more familiar to social scientists today than Nagarjuna, Dogen, and Candrakirti this is not because the latter have nothing relevant to say on topics such as deconstruction, non-representational theory, subjectivity and self, embodiment, the symbolic order or the production of knowledge (although of course the way they mobilise and describe these concepts is completely different.)

Post-human concepts of relational networks and assemblages, which have so radically re-shaped geographical approaches to understanding human/environment relations, find close resonance in pratitya samutpada, or the doctrine of mutual causality, an ontology of radical relation. Pratitya samutpada sees reality as process – patterns of self-organising physical and psychological events which have no fixed structure or semiotics. This interdependence logically implies an ethic of care and kind-heartedness (towards all sentient beings), a cornerstone of Buddhist practice common to all traditions.

A moment of contemplation at the D.T. Suzuki centre in Kanazawa, Japan.

In an age of climate crisis the ethical imperative to try to relieve suffering is being interpreted increasingly to include ecological care for the more-than-human world (including heterogenous and complex ‘sentient beings’ such as watersheds, bio-regions and radioactive waste) and the resulting politics of this ‘Eco-dharma’ have many similarities to activisms inspired by deep ecology, indigenous, ecofeminist and anarchist philosophies. This global wave of ecologically-informed Buddhist practice is the starting point for my research, but I’m hoping to use it as a springboard for bringing Buddhist critique into geography more generally – applying Buddhist ideas to questions of political ecology, inter-species relationships, care-giving, and environmental governance.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to disrupt some assumptions along the way – including the idea that Zen is primarily concerned with minimalist interior design and esoteric catchphrases. For me, it offers something much more radical and ultimately subversive – a philosophical commitment to experiment with risky ideas and relentlessly question the foundations of your knowledge (as well as a strong suggestion to not take yourself too seriously, and to always be prepared for absurdity and impossibility!) I hope that these will be useful qualities for a new postgraduate researcher to bring into their academic practice and I’m sure that both Deleuze and Dogen would agree.

And of course, Buddhist psychology and meditative practice do offer highly effective methods for understanding the mind, cultivating equanimity and un-learning habitual patterns of thought. It’s exactly this refusal to sit neatly in disciplinary boxes that makes Buddhism such a fascinating area of study – a philosophy of the mind and world which is simultaneously theory and practice. Buddhism asks us to move beyond dualisms of self/world, human/non-human and thought/reality which is exactly why its perspectives are essential to understanding our entangled, inter-dependent and precarious life in the age of the Anthropocene. It offers us an injunction to both sit down (learn to change your mind through meditation) and wake up (liberate yourself through taking ethical action), demonstrating beautifully Marx’s dictum that the true purpose of philosophy is not just to interpret the world, but to change it.

Mourning Auks: Creative Expressions of Extinction in an Era of Ecological Loss

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Milo Newman, PhD candidate in human geography, introduces his project on creativity and extinction. Milo’s research is funded through the AHRC South West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership.

Looking at your hearts, suspended in their jar, I try and imagine the two of you still alive. I know that if you were anything like your closest living kin, you would have bonded for life. You lived a long time, and it would have been a relationship that had gathered and deepened over years. By the time you came together this final time, the congregations that were so important to your kind were already a thing of the past. Perhaps you were aware of how empty your world had become. Although you were alone on that low rock, it could be that you were accompanied by the memory of the multitude that had once been. By this point it was already too late. There were too few of you to recover what had been lost. Even so, maybe you would have nodded to each other and tried to make the best of it. Maybe you would have started showing off, just as those before you had always done; turning your heads from side to side so the bright white around your eye would have caught the light. Maybe then, with an exuberance tinged with grief, you would have thrown your heads back and let out an ecstatic cry; the vivid yellow inside your mouths shining like a beacon, mimicking the sun.

Catastrophic anthropogenically-driven biodiversity loss is a defining problem of our time, with hundreds of extinctions observed every year, and many more occurring unnoticed. Reacting to the scale of this issue, extinction studies researchers have called for new interdisciplinary responses interrogating what extinction means, why it matters, and how it is narrated.

‘Mourning Auks’ is an innovative practice-led project examining how artful geographic methods and outcomes can contribute to these vital questions. Over the next four years I plan to explore what novel and affective modes of engaging with anthropogenically-driven species loss can be generated through creative articulations of the emotional dimensions of extinction, and how these can be communicated in public artistic and museum contexts.

In extinction studies, extinction is understood not as a singular, generic concept, but as something that exists through multiple specificities relatable to the diversity of lifeworlds being lost. This is generally explored via case studies, which employ critically-driven creative-academic storytelling to express the biological, cultural and temporal particularities of species, their unique phenomenal worlds, and the significance of extinction within multispecies entanglements. This narrative-based approach provides a form of witnessing that is attentive to others in the face of irreparable loss, that counters human exceptionalism, and creates new ethical and cultural modes that help to resist the destructive legacies of anthropogenically-driven extinction more broadly.

Unexplored potential exists for artistic methods to undertake and communicate these extinction-orientated case studies. Through a case study on the now extinct great auk, my practice-led project will explore and analyse ways of engaging broader audiences with this field. It aims to expand the affective reach of these essential attempts to re-articulate contemporary species loss, and its ethical and socio-cultural imperative.

Fig. 1 Alca Impennis by John Gould, from The Birds of Great Britain, Vol. 5 (1873). John Gould/Public Domain

The great auk was a flightless seabird that was once found in the cold coastal waters of the North Atlantic. These birds nested in huge social colonies on isolated islands, which they returned to every year. These remote skerries provided protection from terrestrial predators. However, they became increasingly vulnerable after technological advances in ocean-going vessels brought European sailors into close proximity to these breeding colonies, which they ruthlessly exploited for food on trans-Atlantic voyages.

My research will begin with analysis of the ‘Garefowl books’, a substantial, underexploited resource held in the Cambridge University Library collections. These manuscript diaries, kept by the Victorian ornithologist and egg collector John Wolley, record interviews with witnesses who were amongst the last to see the auks alive, and who took part in the final hunting parties to their breeding places. Close reading of this material will inform studio-based experimentation utilising artistic methods drawn from archival impulses in contemporary art (see the works of John Akomfrah and Tacita Dean, amongst many others). Following on from Brian Massumi’s 2014 book What Animals Teach us About Politics such ‘playful’ creative practices can be seen as animal in origin, and provide a continuum with animal life (see Merle Patchett’s Archiving). In this context, these textual encounters with the auk’s disappearance offer the means of both interrogating the socio-cultural practices that drove their extinction, and of generating sympathetic multispecies re-alignments.

I also plan to draw the narratives surrounding the auks’ disappearance into emotional geographic frames. These examine spatialisations of emotion in relation to landscape, including those relating to death, such as mourning and grief. Study here is mostly restricted to human contexts, and my project aims to develop this to explore the affective geographies of sites of extinction-driven absence.

Fig. 2 An eighteenth-century sketch of Geirfuglasker by Guðni Sigurðsson. Geirfuglasker, a now submerged volcanic island off the south coast of Iceland, was one of the great auk’s breeding colonies. National Museum of Iceland/Public Domain

In recent re-interpretations, avian philopatry has been re-conceptualised as other-than-human ‘storying-of-place’ (see Thom van Dooren’s excellent book Flight Ways). Hypothesising this for great auks gives their breeding sites potency as places, not just because they were invested with history and meaning for the auks, but because these became the traumatic sites of their extinction. In this context, I plan to undertake fieldwork at some of the auks’ historical breeding colonies, and at those of their closest living relatives. Here, imaginative curiosity towards these species’ remote, liminal, and aquatic geographies will inform a creative enlivening of the great auks’ historical lifeworld, providing the basis for further artistic experimentation centred on site-specific place-making exercises. These will attend to how landscapes are matters ‘of [other-than-human] biographies, attachments and exiles’ in which ‘absence, loss and haunting’ abound (Wylie, 2007: 10), and will survey the more-than-representational emotional aspects of extinction.

You can follow Milo on twitter @_milonewman and see more of his work at www.milonewman.com

On decolonising the Anthropocene

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by Mark Jackson 

What follows is an overview of my paper, ‘On Decolonising the Anthropocene: disobedience via plural constitutions’ recently published in the journal Annals of the Association of American Geographers (doi: 10.1080/24694452.2020.1779645).

 A decolonial critique, the paper argues against how the Anthropocene overdetermines environmental politics. In place of increasingly assumed global environmental governance imaginaries, which mobilise under the aegis of emergency, but which also reproduce a status quo coloniality, the paper presents two pluriversal imaginaries, one from Afro-Caribbean historical geographies, another from Anishinaabe legal philosophy. Together they evidence enduring ecological reciprocities that unsettle and refuse the totalising narratives too often invoked by the Anthropocene.

[image] Jackson - On decolonising the Anthropocene blog post

[Left] Detail from ‘Emergence’ (c. 1999) by Haitian artist Frankétienne. [Centre] Earth Systems Governance research network. [Right] Detail from Children with the Tree of Life (c. 1980-1985) by Anishinaabe artist Norval Morrisseau.

On decolonising the Anthropocene

Names are more than nouns. They are also verbs. Names build and summon relationships—familial, historical, cultural, axiological. Names tell stories. They are ways of remembering and valuing. Names, then, are narratives. And narratives matter.

Few narratives have swept across academic and popular imaginations with the speed and tenacity as ‘The Anthropocene’. From its storied nomination as a gruff rejoinder during a scientific meeting in Mexico in 2000 by Paul Crutzen, to its near ubiquity two decades later, the Anthropocene has quickly amassed an enormous body of scholarship and influence. This scholarship, now legion, and upon which careers, journals, research programs, and government policies depend, attends both to what ‘the Anthropocene’ names—geologically detectable, human induced, geo-physical change on a planetary scale—and how it names modern ‘ecocide’, the systematic killing of the life giving systems that sustain life.

Disagreements about the Anthropocene have, from the off, also been legion. These disputes have not been about ‘ecocide’ per se—only the most irrational and narcissistic of denialists contest that—but about when human induced harmful environmental change started, and who or what’s to blame. Questions debated are things like: has “…every human being, past and present…contributed to the present cycle of climate change” (p. 115), as the critic and novelist Amitav Ghosh argues in his book The Great Derangement (2016)? Or, are specific historical and geographical political and economic structures culpable, structures like capitalism and its social and environmental practices, and so humans as species, sui generis, are not at fault?

Many scholars have argued convincingly that, of course, not all humans are responsible for the ecocide that marks the planetary present. To suggest otherwise actually masks human difference behind a reductionist, naturalising veil that privileges a certain image of the human—white, male, North Atlantic, propertied, ‘developed’—as representative of species being. In fact, numerous human societies today, and in the past, extol forms of environmental responsibility that not only do not destroy their environments but enable complex interdependencies of managed flourishing and reciprocity. Most, indeed, don’t privilege the human as somehow separate from nature at all.

Considered closely, the Anthropocene is deeply colonial narrative. Generalising the cause of planetary ecocide as ‘Anthropos’ is racial, and, further, it blinkers the ability to see, learn from, and enact horizons of living differently constituted by other human lifeways.

Attending to pluriversal lifeways matters because the Anthropocene narrative currently overdetermines ecological imaginaries and environmental politics. It is offered first as a scientific truth claim, and, increasingly, it is also mobilised, politically, under the auspices of emergency. ‘We don’t have time to quibble about names and concepts!’, decry some. ‘We need to do something! We need immediate action at a global scale, led by global actors: nations, corporations, inter-governmental and transnational agencies. We need global earth systems governance!’ A decade ago, Paul Crutzen and colleague Christian Schwägerl wrote that the Anthropocene demands a new ‘global ethos’ of mastery. ‘We [i.e. humans] decide’, they wrote, ‘…what nature is and what it will be. To master this huge shift, we must change the way we perceive ourselves and our role in the world.”

To me, this hubris is worrying. I’m certainly not alone. Many critics contest the coloniality of the Anthropocene. We don’t need institutionalised mastery at a global scale. That’s the last thing we need. Similar hubris has led already to the present’s ecocidal conditions.

Many will scoff and patronise such criticisms with claims of naïveté and irrelevance. Undoubtedly, modern environmental harm does require immediate attention, but one of the great dangers in any response to a declared emergency is a certain unreflexive obedience, an obedience that takes the terms of engagement—the names and narratives—as given, which assumes they are natural, which doesn’t enquire about the relationships they seek to uphold and what work they do. Much harm has been done in the name of urgency, utility, and efficiency. Witness slavery, walls, holocausts, and pandemic power grabs.

What we need instead is more humility, humility to the ecological constitutions within which we have always already been a part. And, we also need to attend closely to the relationships between oppression and knowledge production.

Alternatives to what the Anthropocene over-determinines come from numerous worlds. As the famed development scholar, Arturo Escobar, writes in his new book Pluriversal Politics, ‘another possible is possible’ (2020, ix). The paper presents two possibles as ways of thinking ecological response to what the Anthropocene conditions.

The first is the example of plots. Plots were small gardens outside the global enclosures of plantations with which enslaved peoples grew food to sustain themselves. Plots, writes the cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter, were soils where once peasants “transplanted all the structure of values that had been created by traditional societies of Africa, the land remained the Earth—and the Earth was a goddess” (1971, 100), which fed and sustained, and to whose constitution people returned in death. They were, literally, the marginal spaces that rooted time (ancestrality) and space (African homeland) through food and cultivation, and upon which the colonial architectures of oppression depended. As Wynter writes, they were affirmative ‘roots of culture’ (101).

Rootedness also articulates affirmative reciprocity within Indigenous legal constitutions, the second example suggested. Indigenous legal scholar, John Borrows, writes that the Anishinaabe word akinoomaagewin communicates an ‘earthbound’ sensibility of learning (2018: 66). From aki meaning ‘earth’ and noomaage meaning ‘to point towards and take direction from’, ‘…teaching and learning literally means the lessons we learn from looking to the earth…. The earth has a culture and we can learn from it.’ Grounding ‘earthway’ relations as the source of just living is referred to in the Anishinaabeg legal tradition as minobimaatisiwin. Minobimaatisiwin refers to the idea and virtue of living a good life. Minobimaatisiwin is an embodied relation of, as the Anishinaabe legal scholar and geographer Deborah McGregor writes, “reciprocal responsibilities and obligations that are to be met in order to ensure harmonious relations” (2018: 15). The ground of conceptual reflexivity here is a lived attention to earthbound care rather than an institutionalised governance that begins in epistemic politics which necessitate technicity or mastery. Fundamentally, care comes from the Earth and listening to it, rather than the assumed humanist (and Abrahamic) hubris that the Earth is mute and humans tend care to it. Nope. Flip it and now build your politics.

Indigenous and dispossessed peoples have been living with what the Anthropocene seeks to name for a very long time. Their struggles and survivals have depended on responding in affirmative and grounded ways to rooting relations. In most cases, they’ve listened to the Earth. Listening to how the Earth precedes and therefore anticipates the present planetary struggle might enable modern subjects to appreciate political possibilities other than globalised mastery.

Moderns don’t have to take the Anthropocene narrative for granted, as science or as politics. There are other narratives, and they also name other, life-affirming worlds of possibility.

Mark Jackson is Senior Lecturer of Postcolonial Geographies in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol. m.jackson@bristol.ac.uk   

Reimagining the Pacific: Images of the Ocean in Chile and Peru, c.1960 to the Present

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Dr Paul Merchant, Lecturer in Latin American Film and Visual Culture, writes about his new AHRC Leadership fellowship.

Coastal communities around the world are facing significant challenges, both ecological (such as rising sea temperatures) and as a consequence of human activity (for instance through flows of migration). Chile and Peru have been identified as two of the countries likely to be most affected by climate change, with their fishing industries vulnerable to rising sea temperatures, and their coastal regions vulnerable to the El Niño phenomenon, which is intensified by climate change. This project asks how visual and audiovisual creative responses to these and other issues from Chile and Peru can help us to live well in changing coastal environments across the world.

Scholars working in the environmental humanities and the emerging field of oceanic studies have argued that in order to develop a more sustainable relationship to the world’s oceans, we must understand the history and present of our responses to them. This project fills an important gap in this field of enquiry, which has to date paid little attention to the Pacific coast of South America and has remained focused on European and North American contexts. The project’s exploration of creative responses to ports as places of transnational encounter and exchange moreover responds to global concerns over how to adapt to increasing flows of migration. Coasts have long been viewed as spaces of exhibition and performance, where social change is particularly apparent, and while the Pacific Northwest of the United States of America has long been recognised as a hive of counter-culture and creativity, the diverse political traditions and cultures of Pacific ports such as Valparaíso and Callao have received far less attention.

Callao
The Port of Callao, Peru. Credit: Paul Merchant

Beginning in 1960, the date of a major earthquake and tsunami on the Chilean coast, this project asks how visual and audiovisual responses to the Pacific Ocean from Chile and Peru can shape a new critical understanding of how coastal communities respond to social and environmental pressures. The project analyses the production, reception and circulation of feature films (Patricio Guzmán, Javier Fuentes-León), video art (Cecilia Vicuña) and installations (Claudia Müller, Ana Teresa Barboza), among other forms of cultural production. It asks what changes are visible across the time period studied (1960 to the present), and shows how coastal cultural production brings to the surface lesser-known local, national and transnational histories.

How can scholars of audiovisual media produce critical work that supports public engagement with ecological issues?

The project also asks a methodological question: how can scholars of audiovisual media produce critical work that supports public engagement with ecological issues? This question is particularly important given the vital role that audiovisual media have played in recent years, whether in the form of television series or online video clips, in furthering public understanding of contemporary ecological challenges. One need only think of the influence of the BBC’s Blue Planet II series on debates around plastic use in the UK.

The project’s findings will be disseminated through several major scholarly publications, including a monograph with a leading university press and a methodological article in a leading peer-reviewed environmental humanities journal. A Post-Doctoral Research Assistant will be recruited, and they will publish an article in a major peer-reviewed Latin American studies journal.

In addition to these academic outputs, I will hold stakeholder workshops with local arts organisations and representatives of environmental NGOs in Chile and Peru. I will work with the Project Partner, the Centre for Cinema and Creation in Santiago de Chile, to develop the format of these workshops and to disseminate outcomes. Discussions at these events, along with a symposium on ecomedia and audiovisual research methods to be held in Bristol, will inform the design of a project website on which to disseminate examples of the material studied, and critical responses to it.

 

PM AHRC postDr Paul Merchant is lecturer in Latin American Film and Visual Culture in the Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, at the University of Bristol. His research focuses on 20th- and 21st-century Latin American film and visual culture, with particular emphasis on the countries of the Southern Cone and, more recently, Peru and Bolivia. He has recently completed his first book, Remaking Home: Domestic Spaces in Argentine and Chilean Film, 2005-2015.