Category: CEH publications

Frozen Empires Revisited

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Dr Adrian Howkins, Reader in Environmental History (Bristol), reflects on the new paperback edition of his book, Frozen Empires.

The recent release of the paperback edition of Frozen Empires: An Environmental History of the Antarctic Peninsula, offers an opportunity to revisit the arguments I made in this book and reflect on how it continues to shape my work in Antarctica and thinking about environmental history.  The book sets out to frame the mid-twentieth century Antarctic sovereignty dispute among Argentina, Britain, and Chile as an environmental history of decolonization.  Through a strategy I refer to as asserting ‘environmental authority’, Britain used the performance of scientific research and the production of useful knowledge to support its imperial claims to the region as a territory known as the ‘Falkland Islands Dependencies’.  Argentina and Chile both contested Britain’s claim, and put forward their own assertations to sovereignty based on a sense that this was their environment as a result of proximity, geological contiguity, and shared climate and ecosystems.  In the contest between British assertions of environmental authority and Argentine and Chilean ‘environmental nationalism’ it was the imperial, scientific vision of the environment that largely won out.  There was no genuine decolonization of the Antarctic Peninsula region, or the Antarctic continent more generally.  Instead, the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, which remains in force today, retains pre-existing sovereignty claims in a state of suspended animation (‘frozen’ in the pun of the treaty negotiators) and perpetuates the close connection between science and politics across the Antarctic Continent. 

Much of my work since researching and writing Frozen Empires has focused on the history of the McMurdo Dry Valleys on the opposite side of the Antarctic continent.  I am a co-PI on a US National Science Foundation funded Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) project, collaborating with scientists to ask how historical research might inform our understanding of this unique place.  The McMurdo Dry Valleys are the largest predominantly ice-free region of Antarctica and since the late 1950s have become an important site of Antarctic science.  Geologists are attracted to the Dry Valleys by the exposed rock, geomorphologists by the opportunity to study the glaciological history of the continent, and ecologists by the presence of microscopic ecosystems.  The close connection between politics and science that I identified in the Antarctic Peninsula is also applicable to the history of the McMurdo Dry Valleys.  The two most active countries in the region, New Zealand and the United States, can both be seen as making assertions of environmental authority to support their political position.  A major difference is that now I find myself on the inside of this system, working with scientists to help produce the ‘useful information’ that is being used for political purposes.

Working as more of an insider in a system I critiqued in Frozen Empires raises a number of awkward questions.  Can I retain a critical distance?  Am I contributing to the perpetuation of an unequal system?  What might the decolonization of Antarctic research look like?  These questions are not easy to answer.  Not infrequently I find myself looking back on the lack of inhibition I felt while researching and writing Frozen Empires and wishing for something similar in my current research.  Academic collaboration by definition leads to entanglements, and these entanglements increase complexity.  It is much easier, for example, to write critically about the imperial history of Antarctica than to convince scientific colleagues that this imperial history continues to have an impact on contemporary scientific research. 

But for all the messiness and difficulties involved in collaboration, there are also tremendous opportunities.  I have learned a lot about how science gets done through working with the McMurdo Dry Valleys LTER site, and I have learned about working as part of an academic team.  Place-based studies offers an ideal opportunity for interdisciplinary research, and I think it is vital to have humanities perspectives represented in these collaborations.  It takes time – often more time than expected – for effective collaborations to develop, and this process involves a significant degree of mutual learning.  Researching and writing Frozen Empires fundamentally shaped what I bring to the table as an environmental historian in the McMurdo Dry Valleys project, and I remain convinced by its argument for imperial continuity.  But the process of engaging in collaborative research has unsettled at least some of my earlier positions, and the book I’m writing on the history of the McMurdo Dry Valleys will likely be quite different to Frozen Empires. 

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Header image: American base at Stonington Island, by Mark Sykes at Wikimedia Commons

A Nature Almanac for the 21st Century

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We had exciting news at the CEH this week as publishers Hodder & Stoughton announced they have commissioned Gifts of Gravity and Light: A Nature Almanac for the Twenty-first Century, co-edited by Dr Pippa Marland (Bristol, Department of English) and Anita Roy. The collection features Dr Michael Malay (Bristol, Department of English), alongside some of the most exciting voices in contemporary nature writing.

We’re pleased to share the press release here:

HODDER & STOUGHTON COMMISSIONS ‘A NATURE ALMANAC FOR THE 21ST CENTURY’

Hodder & Stoughton has commissioned Gifts of Gravity and Light: A Nature Almanac for the Twenty-first Century, which will take the reader, season by season, through one year of the natural world in all its biodiversity, as experienced by those who, for reasons of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, class, upbringing or disability, are not always seen or heard when it comes to nature writing. Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo will write the foreword and the title is taken from a poem by the Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage.

These writers come to the natural world from a different place to the ‘traditional’ nature writer, so the reader will see the seasons through new eyes, focusing on details that have perhaps previously gone unnoticed, or finding nature in places we’ve not thought to look before. Whether it’s the seashore or an inner-city street corner, the natural world is a part of our daily lives, just as we are all part of nature.

Hodder & Stoughton acquired world rights and will publish Gifts of Gravity and Light in July 2021.

Hodder Non-Fiction Publisher Rupert Lancaster explains:

‘Nature writing is one of the most popular genres today and yet it is still disproportionately dominated by writers from very similar backgrounds, making it something of a literary monoculture. Anita Roy and Pippa Marland were so positive when I approached them with this idea and are creating something very special. It feels like a book that is needed, so I’m very proud that Hodder is the publisher.’

Editors Anita Roy and Pippa Marland comment:

‘Gifts of Gravity and Light will explore a year of nature in ways that will challenge and inspire the reader to look again at what is around us. We wanted to include authors who are well known, though not necessarily as nature writers, as well as relatively new voices. All are from diverse backgrounds and we believe will offer fresh perspectives in a genre that often feels predictable in all sorts of ways.’

The contributors each write about a season that has a special resonance for them:

SPRING:

Kaliane Bradley is an Anglo-Cambodian writer, editor and dance/theatre critic based in London. Her work has appeared in Catapult, The Willowherb Review, The Tangerine, Somesuch Stories and Granta, among others. 

Pippa Marland, co-editor of this collection, writes on the spring equinox (see biog below).

Testament is a Hip Hop MC, beatboxer and the author of the play Black Men Walking, which was inspired by the Sheffield Black Men Walk for Health group and by historical documentation of black walkers in the Peak District centuries ago.

SUMMER:

Michael Malay was shortlisted for the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize. He grew up in Indonesia and Australia and has written for The Clearing and Dark Mountain. He is working on a new book entitled Late Light. 

Tishani Doshi is an acclaimed dancer, poet and novelist of mixed Gujarati and Welsh parentage. Her latest poetry collection, Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods, was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award, and her recent novel Small Days and Nights was shortlisted for the RCA Ondaatje Award.

Jay Griffiths is an award-winning author of more than six critically acclaimed books, including Wild: An Elemental Journey. She is a passionate advocate for the living world and the cultures that protect it. She lives in Wales.

AUTUMN:

Luke Turner’s first book, Out of the Woods, was shortlisted for the 2019 Wainwright Prize for nature writing and longlisted for the Polari Prize for first book by an LGBT+ writer. He is co-founder and editor of The Quietus.

Anita Roy, co-editor of this collection, writes on the autumn equinox (see biog below).

Raine Geoghegan is a prize-winning author, poet and story-teller of Welsh, Irish and Romany descent. She has recently explored her Romany heritage in two poetry collections: Apple Water: Povel Panni and they lit fires: lenti hatch o yog.

WINTER:

Zakiya Mckenzie was chosen in 2019 to be a writer-in-residence for Forestry England. A passionate spokeswoman for trees, she was born in London, grew up in Jamaica and now lives in Bristol where she is studying for her PhD.

Alys Fowler is an urban nature writer who combines horticulture, biology and biography in her journalism and in her acclaimed book Hidden Nature, which traces both the Birmingham canals and her coming out as a gay woman.

Amanda Thomson is a Scottish visual artist and writer of who teaches at the Glasgow School of Art. Her vivid collection of words and images, from an owl’s call on a summer’s evening (“huam”) to walking in wet mud (“splorroch”), make up her first book, A Scots Dictionary of Nature. Her writing has been published in the anthology Antlers of Water, the Willowherb Review and in Gutter magazine. 

ABOUT THE EDITORS:

Anita Roy is a writer, editor and publisher of mixed British and Indian heritage. She spent twenty years living and working in New Delhi, until returning to the UK in 2015. Her work has appeared in Granta, Guernica, The Clearing and Dark Mountain. She has recently published an acclaimed novel for children and the nature diary A Year at Kingcombe: The Wildflower Meadows of Dorset.

Pippa Marland is an author and academic, whose research focuses on the nature writing genre, especially the representation of small islands and farming communities. Her creative writing draws on her childhood experiences of living in Ghana, Malta, West Wales, and the South of England, as well as her lifelong islomania. Her work has appeared in Earthlines, The Clearing, and the forthcoming Women on Nature.

For more information please contact:

Maria Garbutt-Lucero maria.garbutt-lucero@hodder.co.uk

Hodder & Stoughton, Carmelite House, 50 Victoria Embankment, London EC4Y 0DZ

Collecting What the Sea Gives Back: a new paper by Paul Merchant

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CEH member Paul Merchant has published new research on the Pacific Ocean in Chilean cinema in the Bulletin of Latin American Research.

”Collecting What the Sea Gives Back’: Postcolonial Ecologies of the Ocean in Contemporary Chilean Film’ addresses the entanglements between ecology and postcolonial politics in the films of Tiziana Panizza and Patricio Guzmán.

The abstract, from BLAR, is:

This article proposes a new mode of understanding the entanglement of ecological and postcolonial questions in contemporary Chilean filmmaking, through the lens of directorial subjectivity. Both Tierra sola (Solitary Land, Tiziana Panizza, 2017), and El botón de nácar (The Pearl Button, Patricio Guzmán, 2015) contest hegemonic structures of belonging by constructing an alternative ‘oceanic archive’. Yet where Guzmán’s metaphorical meditations on indigenous connections to the ocean risk collapsing into romanticism and replicating colonial visuality, Panizza’s reflexive conception of filmmaking as a situated and embodied practice facilitates a subtler understanding of cinema’s political engagement in this sphere.

You can read and download the article here.

PM AHRC post

Dr 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.

Header image credit: Tierra sola (Solitary Land, Tiziana Panizza, 2017)

Contesting Hydropower in the Brazilian Amazon

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Dr Ed Atkins of the School of Geographical Sciences has just published a new book on hydropower in Brazil. Contesting Hydropower in the Brazilian Amazon is published by Routledge in their Routledge Studies in Sustainability series.

From the Routledge website:

In Contesting Hydropower in the Brazilian Amazon, Ed Atkins focuses on how local, national, and international civil society groups have resisted the Belo Monte and São Luiz do Tapajós hydroelectric projects in Brazil. In doing so, Atkins explores how contemporary opposition to hydropower projects demonstrate a form of ‘contested sustainability’ that highlights the need for sustainable energy transitions to take more into account than merely greenhouse gas emissions.

The assertion that society must look to successfully transition away from fossil fuels and towards sustainable energy sources often appears assured in contemporary environmental governance. However, what is less certain is who decides which forms of energy are deemed ‘sustainable.’ Contesting Hydropower in the Brazilian Amazon explores one process in which the sustainability of a ‘green’ energy source is contested. It focuses on how civil society actors have both challenged and reconfigured dominant pro-dam assertions that present the hydropower schemes studied as renewable energy projects that contribute to sustainable development agendas. The volume also examines in detail how anti-dam actors act to render visible the political interests behind a project, whilst at the same time linking the resistance movement to wider questions of contemporary environmental politics.

This interdisciplinary work will be of great interest to students and scholars of sustainable development, sustainable energy transitions, environmental justice, environmental governance, and development studies.

Description from Routledge

Ed wrote about the themes of the book in a piece for The Conversation. You can read ‘Belo Monte: there is nothing green or sustainable about these mega-dams’ here.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: Redesigning Hydrology

Chapter 3: Damming the Amazon

Chapter 4: ‘By hook or by crook’

Chapter 5: Belo Monstro

Chapter 6: “A country that cannot live with difference”

Chapter 7: Refusing to Celebrate Victory

Chapter 8: Final Remarks

Appendix

Bibliography

Index

Dr Ed Atkins is a Lecturer in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol. You can find his published work here, and follow him on twitter @edatkins_

Header image: International Rivers on Flickr

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

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