Centre for Environmental Humanities
One of the UK’s leading centres for research on the environmental humanities
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.
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.
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.
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
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’.
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.
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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.
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Dr 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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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:
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
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.
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 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.
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).
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 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).
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.
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/
Binge-watching of boxsets on BBC iPlayer or Netflix is a growing habit. And binge-listening isn’t far behind. Podcast series downloadable through BBC Sounds are all the rage (with a little help from footballer Peter Crouch). Enter Radio 4’s ‘Forest 404’ – hot off the press as a 27-piece boxset on the fourth day of the fourth month (4 April 2019). This is something I’ve been involved in recently: an experimental BBC sci-fi podcast that’s a brand-new listening experience because of its three-tiered structure of drama, factual talk and accompanying soundscape (9 x 3 = 27).
Try to imagine a world in which not only forests but every last trace of the natural world as we know it has been erased (almost……). This eco-thriller by Timothy X. Atack (credits include ‘Dr Who’) is set in the 24th century following a data crash in the early 21st century called The Cataclysm (404 is also the error message you get when a website is unavailable). The action follows lead protagonist Pan (University of Bristol Drama alumna and ‘Doctor Who’ star Pearl Mackie), a sound archivist who archives recordings surviving from the early 21st century. These include items such as a speech by President Obama’s on climate change, Neil Armstrong’s remarks after landing on the moon and Beyoncé’s ‘Crazy in love’. Pan is merrily deleting them all (useless and senseless). Until, one day, she stumbles upon a recording of birdsong in the Sumatran rainforest that inexplicably grabs her. In fact, she’s left intoxicated, almost falling in love with it. So begins Pan’s quest to understand its origin and purpose – not to mention her mission to reconstruct the meaning of an almost completely eradicated world of nature.
Over the past couple of years, I’ve been working on a project with the world-famous, Bristol-based BBC Natural History Unit (funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council), exploring wildlife filmmaking over the past quarter-century. We wanted to include and support a creative dimension going far beyond the project’s more strictly academic and historical elements. Something poetic and performative that could take the study of nature at the BBC into new territory, and away from the visual. But the core theme remains the same: the value of the natural world and its representation in cultural form. This haunting drama focuses on that cultural value very closely by exploring an alien and alienating future world without nature – a world where the only memory of its former existence is preserved in Pan’s sound archive.
This is a deeply historical approach that re-unites me with a piece of research I published some time in the journal Environmental History (2005) what I called the strange stillness of the past – how sounds, both human and non-human generated, were overlooked by most historians. ‘Forest 404’ also ties in with another recent AHRC activity led by my colleague, Dr Victoria Bates. The project was called ‘A Sense of Place: Exploring Nature and Wellbeing through the Non-Visual Senses,’ and I participated as a volunteer. It was about immersing people in natural sensescapes using 360-degree sound and smell technologies. The idea is that we can potentially ‘take nature’ to people who can’t go to it for a first-hand experience.
With my partners at the BBC and Arts and Humanities Research Council, I see ‘Forest 404’ as part of an emerging research area known as the environmental humanities. The starting point of ‘enviro-hums’ is the conviction that a scientific perspective, no matter how important, cannot do full justice to the complexity of our many layered relationships with nature.
The humanities and arts have a big contribution to make in helping us to appreciate the value of what ecosystem services researchers call cultural services. This denotes the so-called non-material benefits we derive from the natural world – its aesthetic value (beauty), how it inspires imaginative literature, painting and music, its spiritual significance, and its role in forming cultural identities and giving us a sense of place. Last spring, Radio 3 broadcast a week-long celebration of all things forest and trees, following it up with another week in the autumn. ‘Into the Forest’ was all about how forests have supplied an almost unlimited source of inspiration for creative activity. ‘Forest 404’ confronts us with the brutal possibility of a world not just without forests and trees but even lacking a conception of nature. And it makes us think about how that absence impoverishes us culturally and spiritually as well as the more obvious ecological dangers we face.
Accompanying the podcast is an ambitious online survey devised by environmental psychologists at the University of Exeter and operated by The Open University. Data on how we respond to nature has previously concentrated on the visual. This focus on natural soundscapes will add a fresh dimension to what we already know about how contact with nature benefits our physical and mental wellbeing. Give the podcast a listen. Then please do the survey – over 7,000 people have already done so. It takes less than 10 minutes.
Full details can be found on the BBC website: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06tqsg3
Peter Coates, Professor of American and Environmental History
In the memorable second instalment of Blue Planet II, we are offered glimpses of an unfamiliar world – the deep ocean. The episode places an unusual emphasis on its own construction: glimpses of the deep sea and its inhabitants are interspersed with shots of the technology – a manned submersible – that brought us these astonishing images. It is very unusual and extremely challenging, we are given to understand, for a human to enter and interact with this unfamiliar world.The most watched programme of 2017 in the UK, Blue Planet II provides the opportunity to revisit questions that have long occupied us. To whom does the sea belong? Should humans enter its depths? These questions are perhaps especially urgent today, when Nautilus Minerals, a mining company registered in Vancouver, has been granted a license to extract gold and copper from the seafloor off the coast of Papua New Guinea. Though the company has suffered some setbacks, mining is still scheduled to begin in 2019.
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| Blue Planet’s team explore the deep. Image credit BBC/Blue Planet |
This marks a new era in our interaction with the oceans. For a long time in Western culture, to go to sea at all was to transgress. In Seneca’s Medea, the chorus blames advances in navigation for having brought the Golden Age to an end, while for more than one Mediterranean culture to travel through the Straits of Gibraltar and into the wide Atlantic was considered unwisely to tempt divine forces. The vast seas were associated with knowledge that humankind was better off without – another version, if you will, of the apple in the garden.
If to travel horizontally across the sea was to trespass, then to travel vertically into its depths was to redouble the indiscretion. In his 17th-century poem Vanitie (I), George Herbert writes of a diver seeking out a “pearl” which “God did hide | On purpose from the ventrous wretch”. In Herbert’s imagination, the deep sea is off limits, containing tempting objects whose attainment will damage us. Something like this vision of the deep resurfaces more than 300 years later in one of the most startling passages of Thomas Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus (1947), as a trip underwater in a diving bell figures forth the protagonist’s desire for occult, ungodly knowledge.
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| An early diving bell used by 16th century divers. National Undersearch Research Program (NURP) |
Mann’s deep sea is a symbolic space, but his reference to a diving bell gestures towards the technological advances that have taken humans and their tools into the material deep. Our whale-lines and fathom-lines have long groped into the oceans’ dark reaches, while more recently deep-sea cables, submarines and offshore rigs have penetrated their secrets. Somewhat paradoxically, it may be that our day-to-day involvement in the oceans means that they no longer sit so prominently on our cultural radar: we have demystified the deep, and stripped it of its imaginative power.
But at the same time, technological advances in shipping and travel mean that our culture is one of “sea-blindness”: even while writing by the light provided by oil extracted from the ocean floor, using communications provided by deep-sea cables, or arguing over the renewal of Trident, we perhaps struggle to believe that we, as humans, are linked to the oceans and their black depths. This wine bottle, found lying on the sea bed in the remote Atlantic, is to most of us an uncanny object: a familiar entity in an alien world, it combines the homely with the unhomely.
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| Wine bottle found in the deep North Atlantic. Laura Robinson, University of Bristol, and the Natural Environment Research Council. Expedition JC094 was funded by the European Research Council. |
For this reason, the activities planned by Nautilus Minerals have the whiff of science fiction. The company’s very name recalls that of the underwater craft of Jules Verne’s adventure novel Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas (1870), perhaps the most famous literary text set in the deep oceans. But mining the deep is no longer a fantasy, and its practice is potentially devastating. As the Deep Sea Mining Campaign points out, the mineral deposits targeted by Nautilus gather around hydrothermal vents, the astonishing structures which featured heavily in the second episode of Blue Planet II. These vents support unique ecosystems which, if the mining goes ahead, are likely to be destroyed before we even begin to understand them. (Notice the total lack of aquatic life in Nautilus’s corporate video: they might as well be drilling on the moon.) The campaigners against deep sea mining also insist – sounding not unlike George Herbert – that we don’t need the minerals located at the bottom of the sea: that the reasons for wrenching them from the deep are at best suspect.
So should we be leaving the deep sea well alone? Sadly, it is rather too late for that. Our underwater cameras transmit images of tangled fishing gear, cables and bottles strewn on the seafloor, and we find specimens of deep sea animals thousands of metres deep and hundreds of kilometres away from land with plastic fibres in their guts and skeletons. It seems almost inevitable that deep sea mining will open a new and substantial chapter on humanity’s relationship with the oceans. Mining new resources is still perceived to be more economically viable than recycling; as natural resources become scarcer, the ocean bed will almost certainly become of interest to global corporations with the capacity to explore and mine it – and to governments that stand to benefit from these activities. These governments are also likely to compete with one another for ownership of parts of the global ocean currently in dispute, such as the South China Sea and the Arctic. The question is perhaps not if the deep sea will be exploited, but how and by whom. So what is to be done?
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| A feather star in the deep waters of the Antarctic. BBC NHU |
Rather than declaring the deep sea off-limits, we think our best course of action is to regain our fascination with it. We may have a toe-hold within the oceans; but, as any marine scientist will tell you, the deep still harbours unimaginable secrets. The onus is on both scientists and those working in what has been dubbed the “blue humanities” to translate, to a wider public, the sense of excitement to be found in exploring this element. Then, perhaps, we can prevent the deep ocean from becoming yet another commodity to be mined – or, at least, we can ensure that such mining is responsible and that it takes place under proper scrutiny.
The sea, and especially the deep sea, will never be “ours” in the way that tracts of land become cities, or even in the way rivers become avenues of commerce. This is one of its great attractions, and is why it is so easy to sit back and view the deep sea with awed detachment when watching Blue Planet II. But we cannot afford to pretend that it lies entirely beyond our sphere of activity. Only by expressing our humility before it, perhaps, can we save it from ruthless exploitation; only by acknowledging and celebrating our ignorance of it can we protect it from the devastation that our technological advances have made possible.
This blog is written by Laurence Publicover, Lecturer in English, University of Bristol and Katharine Hendry, Reader in Geochemistry, University of Bristol and both members of the University’s Cabot Institute. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
