Weber—The Contemporary West | Fall 2018

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Transformations of the

Anthropocene

Rachel Carson Center —

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Fall 2018 | Volume 35 | Number 1

In Collaboration With The

LUDWIG — MAXIMILIANS — UNIVERSITAT MUNCHEN

Fall 2018 | Volume 35 | Number 1

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Deriving from the German weben—to weave—weber translates into the literal and figurative “weaver” of textiles and texts. Weber are the artisans of textures and discourse, the artists of the beautiful fabricating the warp and weft of language into everchanging patterns. Weber, the journal, understands itself as a regional and global tapestry of verbal and visual texts, a weave made from the threads of words and images.

It has been said, with bitter humor, that we humans have become a tumor on the Earth and we should be cut out. But that’s not the self-image of humans that the Anthropocene party wants to promote. That would be too negative. When I started asking myself why the word “Anthropocene” has become so popular in the media and the naming competition, I always came back to its root, “Anthro.” It bestows dignity along with critique; it suggests humans in all their glory and calls on us to become even more human and godlike in our rationality. It says that “our species” really matters, and appeals to our self-admiration more than self-loathing.

—Donald Worster The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized.

How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind?

—Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

Front Cover: Patrick Reed, Notable Structures #4, graphite on paper, 8.27” x 11.69”, 2017

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VOLUME 35 | NUMBER 1 | FALL 2018

EDITORIAL BOARD CO-EDITORS

Michael Wutz Hal Crimmel ASSOCIATE EDITORS

Kathryn L. MacKay Russell Burrows Victoria Ramirez Brad Roghaar MANAGING EDITORS

Kristin Jackson and Kelsy Thompson EDITORIAL BOARD

Phyllis Barber, author Jericho Brown, Emory University Katharine Coles, University of Utah Diana Joseph, Minnesota State University Nancy Kline, author & translator Delia Konzett, University of New Hampshire Kathryn Lindquist, Weber State University Fred Marchant, Suffolk University Madonne Miner, Weber State University Felicia Mitchell, Emory & Henry College Julie Nichols, Utah Valley University Tara Powell, University of South Carolina Bill Ransom, Evergreen State College Walter L. Reed, Emory University Scott P. Sanders, University of New Mexico Kerstin Schmidt, Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt Daniel R. Schwarz, Cornell University Andreas Ströhl, Goethe-Institut Washington, D.C. James Thomas, author Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner, author Melora Wolff, Skidmore College EDITORIAL PLANNING BOARD

Bradley W. Carroll Brenda M. Kowalewski Angelika Pagel John R. Sillito Michael B. Vaughan ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Shelley L. Felt Aden Ross G. Don Gale Mikel Vause

Meri DeCaria Barry Gomberg Elaine Englehardt John E. Lowe

LAYOUT CONSULTANTS

Mark Biddle Jacob Hansen EDITORS EMERITI

Brad L. Roghaar Sherwin W. Howard Neila Seshachari LaVon Carroll Nikki Hansen EDITORIAL MATTER CONTINUED IN BACK

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TABLE OF CONTENTS VOLUME 35 | NUMBER 1

PREFACE HAL CRIMMEL & MICHAEL WUTZ

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ESSAYS PAULA UNGAR 24 The Mountains We Touched— The Role of Care in Delimiting Ecosystems

ON THE COVER 39 PATRICK J. REED Notable Structures

SOPHIA KALANTZAKOS 52 The Desert Takes on the Climate Crisis MIKE HULME 65 Weather-Worlds of the Anthropocene and the End of Climate JANE CARRUTHERS 77 Wildlife and Humanity in the Anthropocene— Reflections from South Africa JOHN BARRY 90 Toward a Sustainable Economy—Ideas, Ideology, Institutions and “letting go to move on” MICHELLE MART 102 Nostalgia and the Search for Pleasure—Rethinking What to Eat ALAN MACEACHERN 115 The First Lawnmower of the Season AMANDA BOETZKES 127 How to See a Glacier in a Climate Landscape DAN PHILIPPON 139 Kitchens of the Great Anthropocene VIMBAI KWASHIRAI 152 Zimbabwe—Changing Climate, Changing Farmers SASKIA BEUDEL 164 Science and Stories Offering Hope for the Climate CHIHYUNG JEON 177 You Say “Restoration,” We Say “Destruction”— Korean Artists’ Resistance to the Four Rivers Restoration Project MARÍA VALERIA BERROS 189 Stories from the Anthropocene—The Constitutional Recognition of the Rights of Nature in Ecuador

READING THE WEST 199 CONVERSATION 8 AGNES KNEITZ What is it about this “Anthropocene”?— A Conversation with Donald Worster

P R E F A C E

PREFACE HAL CRIMMEL & MICHAEL WUTZ

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elcome to our special issue on the Anthropocene—the notion that the earth has entered a new geological era as a result of human impacts on the environment. Weber, in partnership with The Rachel Carson Center, a joint initiative of Munich’s Ludwig-Maximilians-University and the Deutsches Museum, is excited to share the work of fifteen former Carson Fellows who have provided a variety of perspectives on the Anthropocene. The Rachel Carson Center is the leading global center for research and education in the environmental humanities and social sciences, and its interdisciplinary approach is reflected in the interviews, artwork and essays found in this special issue.

What, you might ask, lies behind the term the Anthropocene, this quite recent addition to the vocabulary of the earth sciences and related disciplines. The term has often been used to demarcate various levels of impact of the human species on the globe, from the beginnings of the Agricultural Revolution about 12–15,000 years ago to the Trinity test in 1945—the first detonation of a nuclear device as part of the Manhattan Project. Others see the term as being precisely centered on the Industrial Revolution, when humans switched from wood and other renewable fuels to coalpowered steam technology and, for the first time in the earth’s history, had evolved into a collective force with a veritable planetary impact. On the other hand, Donald Worster, one of our contributors to this issue, disputes the legitimacy of the coinage altogether, arguing that human-induced changes are well covered by the Holocene, the term broadly defining the current geological period dating back to the last ice age about 11,650 years ago. The Anthropocene, by contrast, to him suggests “the latest version of a very old quest for the domination of nature,” and the very danger of erasing nature as an idea, which we very much ought to retain: “Time and again, those who support the concept of the Anthropocene insist that nature is a bankrupt idea—not a material thing but an outmoded idea, and it is time we dumped it on the ash heap of history.”

Suffice it to say that, as of August 2016, neither of the governing bodies within the global scientific community—the International Commission on Stratigraphy and the International Union of Geological Sciences—has officially approved the term as a new marker of geological time. That also includes the further contention that the Anthropocene roughly coincides with the notion of the Great Acceleration, so called, after World War II, when capital, consumer and information flows, and their attendant economic networks, began to speed up at unprecedented levels and put a measurable strain on the material resources of the planet. What is certain is that the human footprint on the earth is increasingly more palpable and destructive, and that this singular domination of one species over its habitat is captured in the very roots of the term—anthro/human and cene/epoch: the epoch of humans.

The following pages are the result of a three-year collaborative process with our slate of contributors, whose broad disciplinary expertise makes for one of our most diverse issues. True to its roots, Weber, as a weave made from the threads of texts and images, is offering a tapestry of viewpoints from around the globe, ranging from the work of an Argentinian law professor and a British climate scientist to a Greek politician, and from a South African environmental historian and a Korean researcher/policy analyst to a Colombian scholar-activist. Our hope is to share how people from across the planet have considered changes to the physical world and to the intellectual spaces we share locally, nationally and transnationally.

We encourage you to enjoy the selections in no particular order. Engage with the ideas in individual essays, in the interviews or the artwork, but also consider reflecting on how these individual pieces speak to one another, offering balance and perspective—much as one might closely observe in nature a particular species before stepping back to see how this one living thing fits into the larger ecosystem.

Hal Crimmel (Ph.D., University at Albany) is currently Rodney H. Brady Presidential Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of English at Weber State University, Hal was founding co-chair of WSU’s Environmental Issues Committee. He teaches environmental and sustainability issues in the Honors and General Education programs, as well as field studies courses. A former fellow at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich, Hal has published five books, among them Dinosaur: Four Seasons on the Green and Yampa Rivers and Desert Water: The Future of Utah’s Water Resources. His latest book, Utah’s Air Quality Issues: Problems and Solutions, will be published by the University of Utah Press in 2019. His documentary film, The Rights of Nature: A Global Movement was completed in 2018 with co-producers Val Berros (Argentina) and Issac Goeckeritz (USA) and is available for screening in the U.S. and abroad.

Michael Wutz (Ph.D., Emory University) is Rodney H. Brady Presidential Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at Weber State University and the editor of Weber. He is the co-editor of Reading Matters: Narrative in the New Media Ecology (with Joseph Tabbi; Cornell, 1997), the co-translator of Friedrich Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (with Geoffrey Winthrop-Young; Stanford, 1999), and the author of Enduring Words—Narrative in a Changing Media Ecology (Alabama, 2009). With Hal Crimmel, he has previously co-edited Conversations with W. S. Merwin (Mississippi, 2015). Together with Geoffrey-Winthrop Young and Ilinca Iurascu, he is currently at work on an edition of Kittler’s essays entitled Operation Valhalla: Friedrich Kittler on War, Weapons, and Media, forthcoming from Duke (2019).

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WHAT IS IT ABOUT THIS "ANTHROPOCENE"?— A Conversation with Donald Worster AGNES KNEITZ

INTRODUCTION More than a decade ago, Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen argued that the environmental impact of the Industrial Revolution has altered the global environment in such a way as to invite humans to rethink their current self-defined historical era. Instead of the Holocene—commonly understood to be the geological epoch that began after the Pleistocene approximately 11,700 years ago— he suggested that we live in an era recently termed the “Anthropocene” that is characterized by a significantly boosted metabolic cycle of civilization. Since then, the concept has been championed by the Intergovernmental

Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a scientific body under the auspices of the United Nations dedicated to providing the world with an objective, scientific view of climate change and its political and economic impacts. Therein, it mostly serves as a reminder to rethink human consumption and emissions, as Will Steffen, former member of the Australian Climate Commission and former executive director of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program, et al. promote. Alternately, the idea has been used as an incentive to rethink alternative “modern” living styles, as at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, and introduced at

a recent exhibition at the Deutsches Museum in Munich. Unsurprisingly, this concept has invited responses from across the academy and found its way into the research agendas of the natural sciences and humanities alike.

Deriving from the Greek word for “human,” the Anthropocene highlights the fact that by their living practices—and their sheer numbers on the globe, exceeding an estimated 8.3 billion by the year 2030—humans alter their environment, not seldom conflicting with the ecology of the earth. Emerging from a desire to factor the natural world into basic human reasoning, environmental history has contributed significantly to a public understanding that impacting the natural world might jeopardize the survival of the species. Who, then, could be a better person to talk about the Anthropocene than Professor Donald Worster, the eminent environmental historian who has, for decades, singularly shaped our understanding of global ecology, nature, and culture.

Donald Worster (Ph.D., Yale University, 1971) is the Hall Distinguished Professor of American History at the University of Kansas and one of the founders of, and leading figures in, the field of environmental history. Worster’s many and major books include Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (1994); Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in

the 1930s (2004); Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (1992); A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell (2002); A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir (2011); along with several books of collected essays, including The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (1993). His most recent book is Shrinking the Earth: The Rise and Decline of American Abundance (2016), and his current research focuses on two projects: Darwinian and post-Darwinian science and the concept of adaptation as theoretical bases for environmental history, and the twin, competing themes of natural abundance and scarcity in American and modern world history.

In 2009, Worster was named to the Society of American Historians and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In May 2012, Prof. Worster accepted an appointment as “the distinguished foreign expert of education” from The Bureau of Foreign Experts, China, and became an affiliated professor at the Center for Ecological History at Renmin University of China in Beijing. The following conversation was recorded in Professor Worster’s apartment overlooking the main campus of Renmin University in April 2017 and has been edited for clarity and length.

CONVERSATION Since the first mention of the concept of the Anthropocene, it seems the term has developed a life of its own, producing more different interpretations and definitions over the last decade than any other concept in a comparable time frame. As a starting point for this conversation, what is your notion of it, Don? It’s very strange to glom onto a word that sounds scientific and not wait for science—that is, the scientists who are most qualified—to define it. For geologists the biggest challenge in defining an “epoch” is to find a beginning

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point that they can measure—a point of fundamental crustal change. The non-geologists intervening in that decision are all over the map on when their Anthropocene began. Paul Crutzen, an atmospheric chemist who was one of the two who coined the name, says the Anthropocene began with up-scaling of coal consumption during the early Industrial Revolution. Others say the proposed epoch began as late as the 1950s, and then we have people saying, no, no, it began much earlier with the invention of agriculture—ten thousand years ago. This debate is too confusing in definition or criteria to be a scientific proposition.

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C O N V E R S A T I O N Taking up this obvious contradiction, what would be the point in naming the era housing modern humans “the Anthropocene,” rather than just sticking with the old Holocene? If we do this, are we not simply relabeling a part of planetary history after we begin to question the effects of our own existence?

For the last 130 years, we have relied on the concept of the Holocene. It includes, in the minds of many scientists who use it, an awareness of the growing human impact on the Earth. For example, the University of California’s Museum of Palaeontology has written this: “Another name for the Holocene that is sometimes used is the Anthropocene, the ‘Age of Man.’ This is somewhat misleading: humans of our own subspecies, Homo sapiens, had evolved and dispersed all over the world well before the start of the Holocene.

Yet the Holocene has witnessed all of humanity’s recorded history and the rise and fall of all its civilizations. Humanity has greatly influenced the Holocene environment; while all organisms influence their environments to some degree, few have ever changed the globe as much, or as fast, as our species is doing.” They go on to include in the Holocene both global warming and wholesale species extermination. Essentially, they are saying, the Holocene already includes the facts of human-induced environmental change, so why do we need to come up with another word?

Talking about the different chronologies humans use to tell the story of their species, those stories are typically taught through the discipline of history. That means that every history lesson potentially has the power to redefine our historical understanding. David Christian has suggested to teach “Big History,” enabling kids to become familiar with these longer categories of time that the natural sciences are opening up for us. You have introduced the term “planetary history” into this debate.

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None of the great geologically defined epochs of the past are “ahistorical.” Geologists are themselves a species of historians.

We need to expand old-fashioned notions of “history” to include the deep-time dimensions of geology and evolution and to begin seeing human history as part of that broader sweep of time.

When employing the “Anthropocene,” are we talking about something ahistorical?

None of the great geologically defined epochs of the past are “ahistorical.” Geologists are themselves a species of historians. We need to expand old-fashioned notions of “history” to include the deep-time dimensions of geology and evolution and to begin seeing human history as part of that broader sweep of time.

Can you go into some more detail explaining your point about the relative recentness or newness of the Holocene? It’s only about 150 years old, after all.

Let’s go back to the 1880s when the International Union of Geological Sciences met to work out all of this. They came up with two concepts: The Pleistocene—which is basically about glaciations in the Northern Hemisphere, massive global climate and crustal change, and planetary cooling. The word means “the new whole”—a bland, vague word that had no baggage to it. Then, when the ice sheets began to retreat, and scholars were not sure whether the Pleistocene was over or not, they added a second concept, the ‘Holocene,’ which means ‘the whole new’ (laughs).“At least those concepts were open and flexible. Now here come some people

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“Socio-Economic Trends” and “Earth System Trends” charts (above) created by R. Jamil Jonna based on data in Will Steffen, Wendy Broadgate, Lisa Deutsch, Owen Gaffney, and Cornelia Ludwig, “The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration,”Anthropocene Review vol. 2, no. 1 (April 2015): 81–98.

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C O N V E R S A T I O N who put forth a new word, “Anthropocene.”

And I wonder, “Why? Why do we need it?”

Well, I think what this new excitement is pointing at is the exponentially increasing consumption of resources that has led to the iconic curve symbolizing the Anthropocene. Its main proponent, Will Steffen, usually argues that the human impact of the last 200 years, like consumption of fossil fuels or the overfishing of our oceans, can be measured in similarly exponential curves. Like others, he hopes to have identified a concept that influences people to evaluate their actions and their environmental impact. But depending on the way you phrase your argument, you can either use the term to support or reject it entirely.

It can be employed to justify unsustainable behavior or to propose sustainable behavior in order to change the future. I think this explosive potential is what a lot of people are concerned about.

In other words, a new word for a new epoch is being pushed in order to influence human behavior. It has a political or ethical purpose, not a scientific one, especially among historians and the humanities. Some of them may sound like environmentalists and others quite the opposite. But for both groups the concept of the Anthropocene was not proposed primarily as a scientific concept, but as a tool to influence world politics. I have no objection to that, or at least to having a debate on the human presence and responsibility at this point in history, but why try to get scientific status for a concept that is not based on science?

Meanwhile there are many other proposed names competing for our attention: “Capitalocene,” for example, the geological epoch of capitalism. Or Tim LeCain‘s “Carbonocene,” when coal and oil have dominated the planet.

Or Donna Haraway’s “Chthulucene,” an epoch of “monstrous” beings we are giving rise to.

But if you feel all of this naming obscures the degradation of the Earth’s health, why not

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call it the Cancerocene? Endless growth on a finite body is the philosophy of the cancer cell. So much naming going on, so much fun and games, but none of it is science.

That sounds really dramatic.

It has been said, with bitter humor, that we humans have become a tumor on the Earth and we should be cut out (laughs). But that’s not the self-image of humans that the Anthropocene party wants to promote. That would be too negative. When I started asking myself why the word “Anthropocene” has become so popular in the media and the naming competition, I always came back to its root, “Anthro.”

It bestows dignity along with critique; it suggests humans in all their glory and calls on us

It has been said, with bitter humor, that we humans have become a tumor on the Earth and we should be cut out. But that’s not the self-image of humans that the Anthropocene party wants to promote. That would be too negative.

When I started asking myself why the word “Anthropocene” has become so popular in the media and the naming competition, I always came back to its root, “Anthro.” It bestows dignity along with critique; it suggests humans in all their glory and calls on us to become even more human and godlike in our rationality. It says that “our species” really matters, and appeals to our self-admiration more than self-loathing.

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to become even more human and godlike in our rationality. It says that “our species” really matters, and appeals to our self-admiration more than self-loathing. The most popular alternative to the word may be “The Age of Humans.” Yet we didn’t call the Pleistocene the “Ice-cene” (laughs). Or the Pennsylvanian epoch the “Dinosaurcene.” Why name a whole epoch after us, why choose that classical, humanistic, distinguished root? I submit that this name brings along cultural baggage that needs to be unpacked. Inside the baggage we will find an old dream that humans are becoming the gods we have long aspired to be. We can call it the “Enlightenment Project.” The concept of the Anthropocene announces that our species has completed the Enlightenment Project, although the results may temporarily look a little less happy than eighteenth century philosophers imagined. Anthropocenists themselves have tried to give their name an intellectual lineage of some dignity.

Yes, but they never really define it.

No, they don’t. But they like to run through names of their illustrious predecessors. They mention George Perkins Marsh, the American polymath from the nineteenth century. Then there is Vladimir Vernadsky, the Russian geochemist, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French Catholic philosopher, who prophesied the point where humans take over the Earth and it becomes, not a biosphere, but a noosphere—a world dominated by the human mind. That’s very Christian, very Catholic. Or they go back to Karl Marx and the Communist Manifesto (1848), which admires how humans are changing the whole face of the planet, moving resources from here to there, leading someday to the brotherhood of man. Marx is right out of the Enlightenment when he talks like that. But I would say the granddaddy of all of these pioneers of the Anthropocene, acknowledged again and again, is GeorgesLouis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon, the great French naturalist and philosopher of the

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eighteenth century. Buffon wrote effusively about the progressive stages of history in Les Époques de la Nature (1778). And the last stage, which commenced with the invention of agriculture, was still unfolding in his own day, when human beings were imposing the rule of reason and rationality, establishing order and beauty all over the planet. A time when humankind would finally take charge of the globe, colonizing everything—not just other peoples, but also the whole planet.

That’s the distinguished lineage that the Anthropocenists see themselves as part of.

For someone who does not know Buffon’s writings, but is literate in the study of (post)colonialism, this may sound as if the Comte was also one of the forethinkers of the imperialist project of the nineteenth century. Does he argue for this planetary subjugation in a geographical sense?

Yes, in a geographical sense, in a technological sense, in a moral sense. The dominant side of the Enlightenment ethos is civilization’s triumph over nature—not just over religious superstition, the dark ages, but also over the animal within us, over nature and wildness. That is not the whole of the Enlightenment, but it is a powerful and persistent narrative. At the end, Buffon says, we will have abolished nature. We will have taken command. You could place Francis Bacon into the same picture: through reason, we will achieve command and control over the Earth.

You can also paint René Descartes into it: the promise that one day we will have enough knowledge to accomplish whatever we want, which is finally the domination of the world.

So I think the Anthropocene is the latest version of a very old quest for the domination of nature. Tied to the idea is a celebration of humankind as a single unified species, not made in the image of God, which would be too religious, but instead a barely admitted “natural species” becoming gods. At the core of all of this lies the conquest of nature as a measure

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Again and again, those who support the concept of the Anthropocene insist that nature is a bankrupt idea—not a material thing but an outmoded idea, and it is time we dumped it on the ash heap of history. of civilization. The core argument of the Anthropocenists is that nature no longer exists.

But they take it a step further than most advocates of the Enlightenment project. They ask, are these developments good or bad? Can we get a little better at managing ourselves and whatever is left of the non-human world?

In his 2009 book Ecology Without Nature, Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, Timothy Morton argues we humans have got the issue about our living in nature, in our planetary ecosystems, all framed and constructed and discoursed to death.

Doesn’t he also argue that we have reached the end of the concept of nature as a stable, permanent background for human history?

Again and again, those who support the concept of the Anthropocene insist that nature is a bankrupt idea—not a material thing but an outmoded idea, and it is time we dumped it on the ash heap of history. Well, if they mean the eighteenth century idea of “nature,” nature as a fixed, Newtonian, and permanent order of the universe, then that nature died long ago. Darwin killed it; Charles Lyell killed it (laughs). Nature as a world perfectly ordered by the Great Clock Maker in the sky is gone.

But do we really think we have the power to kill the full, complex, material reality of nature as a sum of power and creativity, of evolution and change, a force that lies beyond our full understanding and reach? Have we become that arrogant? Or at least have some of us?

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Would that be one of the criticisms—that this concept only represents the view of a minority?

Who knows? I fear the dream of dominating nature represents a very widespread, core concept running throughout Western civilization. Not just a minority opinion. You could argue that it has mainly been white males from upper-class European and North American backgrounds who have been promoting the Anthropocene. I don’t hear people talking about it in China or Africa.

But I would suggest that this idea of gaining complete control of the natural world may be much older and wider than Western civilization. It may not be discussed so much but it is here in China, where we are sitting, although here I don’t see any drive to change our scientific map of epochs and eras.

Did your many visits to China influence your perspective on the concept, directly or indirectly? In a few weeks, several Chinese universities will host you and Helmuth Trischler, head of research at the Deutsches Museum and coeditor of Welcome to the Anthropocene: The Earth in Our Hands (2015), for a professorial discussion on the concept. Is that related to the currently ongoing Chinese Enlightenment Project?

It would be interesting to ask people in China exactly when they think the conquest of nature began. Most will claim it is a Western, not an Eastern, idea, but then they may say, “Mao—and he got it from Karl Marx” (laughs).

It’s supposed to be culturally alien, yet clearly the history of China shows a kind of conquest over nature going back to the origins of millet or rice cultivation. The elimination of East Asia’s elephants, rhinoceros, you name it, the devouring of ecosystems was going on here thousands of years ago. Perhaps we need to make a distinction between Eastern and Western approaches to nature. The Western idea of conquest is intentional, while the Chinese is

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According to conventional understanding, history starts with the first civilizations—that is, with writing, cities, agriculture. Prehistory describes the time when we were animals, or barbarians, without civilization. But why does our being human or having a history have to separate us from the rest of nature? Why do we define history as becoming unnatural? It’s not a scientific concept, and in that way the study of history has been preparing the ground for the concept of the Anthropocene. more unintentional—mixed with calls for “harmony.” On the ground, in the material world, the Asian peasant was not bent on some Buffonian mission but simply acting out of his own self-interest; he had four or five kids to feed and sought to clear more land and grow more rice. That became the material exhaustion of the land we see today, but there was no grand plan, no grand ideology, no cultural dream. In Western culture, however, we are, by conquering nature, supposed to be on our way to some kind of heaven. The Enlightenment secularized that grand ambition and created not just the mundane reality of population growth, but a vast ideology promoting it. In fact our Western concept of history is fundamentally based on this ideology.

This brings us back to the question what role our understanding of history plays in the discourse, and the question of our defining history in the first place, and its contribution to our very own perception of ourselves as human beings.

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I’ve been reading people like Daniel Smail, David Christian, and others on the concept of Deep History. Their complaint is that history, as it is taught in Western societies, begins only when there are written documents.

People who don’t write don’t leave documents behind; therefore, they are a people without history, in the words of Eric Wolfe.

According to conventional understanding, history starts with the first civilizations—that is, with writing, cities, agriculture. Pre-history describes the time when we were animals, or barbarians, without civilization. But why does our being human or having a history have to separate us from the rest of nature? Why do we define history as becoming unnatural?

It’s not a scientific concept, and in that way the study of history has been preparing the ground for the concept of the Anthropocene.

Some opponents of the concept argue that the Anthropocene is highly Eurocentric and that it neglects the living experiences and the history of other parts of the world.

What are your observations along these lines?

One thing the Anthropocenists don’t bother about is whether their name for a new epoch has any cultural resonance in other cultures. If it is in fact an ethical and political notion rooted in Western thinking, yet trying to claim for itself universal scientific validity, then it will mean more to the West than it does to other parts of the world. Another thing the Anthropocenists leave out or marginalize is the continuing power of nature over human affairs.

A third omission is those events in history that don’t quite conform to the overall narrative of unexpected discoveries. Completely overlooked in the grand chronology is the accidental, unforeseen discovery of the Western hemisphere, including the two biggest oceans on Earth. My recent book Shrinking the Earth (2016) tries to remedy that omission. The geoecological discovery that the planet has two hemispheres, a back side as it were, caused

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C O N V E R S A T I O N revolutionary changes in Western culture, the globalization of the economy, and the reanimation of utopian ideas of conquest and endless abundance. This too is where Francis Bacon comes from, and Descartes and Buffon.

If the modern world began with that shattering discovery, as I argue, then what does the fact that we are reaching the limits of that material expansion and era of economic growth imply? How can the Anthropocene “epoch” go forward when energy, mineral, plant, animal, water, and soil resources become increasingly scarce and polluted? Can the Anthropocene concept survive that material reality? Is it facing its ending just as it proclaims its beginning? Is the newly named “epoch” nothing more than a brief age of human expansion fueled by the New World discovery, a mere 500 years of expansion that now starts to fade and vanish? A proclaimed new epoch turns out to be a passing moment in time!

And what will the Anthropocene notion mean when our overcrowded planet begins to see a decline in human numbers? Some are predicting that within two more centuries, the human population may fall to a mere one billion (it is now 8 billion), or about the number alive in 1800 AD. When that day comes, perhaps in two hundred years, where will the Anthropocene be, the epoch made by and dominated by Homo sapiens?

The last full epoch, the Pleistocene, lasted 2,575,000 years. The preceding one, the Pliocene, lasted almost 3 million years. The Holocene has so far lasted a mere 12,000 years. And the time of dramatically increasing human presence all over the Earth has been unfolding for maybe 500 years. Some epoch! We still don’t know what nature has in store for us!

I very much agree—it is important to place the concept into a long-term historical perspective. But is that not risky in the sense that the relatively short time span of human existence can make their

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impact seem marginal? And is this not something that people are afraid of? That, rather than bringing people to act more carefully, it induces the reverse effect and the care for our environment declines?

Could that be the kind of underlying fear in the discourse—that human impact becomes marginalized?

The scientific validity of the Anthropocene concept should have nothing to do with whether humans take responsibility for their impact on nature or not. Calling for moral responsibility, or for an Earth ethic, does not require the Anthropocene. On the contrary, I fear that the Anthropocene may be a way of evading responsibility! It suggests that what we have done is natural and, for many, lies beyond moral responsibility.

The only responsibility clearly promoted by the Anthropocene concept is that we selfproclaimed gods should treat each other better in the future. If nature is dead or extinct or meaningless, how can we care about it or be responsible for protecting it? What matters to the Anthropocenists is not really the other

The only responsibility clearly promoted by the Anthropocene concept is that we self-proclaimed gods should treat each other better in the future. If nature is dead or extinct or meaningless, how can we care about it or be responsible for protecting it? What matters to the Anthropocenists is not really the other than human world but how humans treat each other from this point forward. Anthropoceneism is inextricable from anthropocentrism.

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than human world but how humans treat each other from this point forward. Anthropoceneism is inextricable from anthropocentrism.

But again, I don’t think that our definition of geological epochs, and the names we give them, should be based on any political or moral concern. Whether the Pleistocene or the Holocene was good or is bad is immaterial.

What do you say to Ursula Heise and her 2016 book Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (2016). . . .

I haven’t read her book yet and hope to do so.

Smart scholar, lively mind. So let me change the focus slightly. If we bring home to people that species are going extinct by the millions and at the same time stress that someday, new species will be born; if we say that nature will quickly fill in the spaces, then some might respond, “Oh, what’s the problem then? We can torch the Earth and nature will recover.”

That’s not a new argument. It has been around since businessmen read On the Origin of Species (1859). I think one can make a rational counter-argument that the incredible extinction of species looming around us is bad on material, self-interested, or altruistic grounds.

Humans are the cause of that acceleration of death. It is true that life has always recovered and proliferated after mass extinctions. We cannot kill the life force. But is this really a comforting thought? An ethic that looks good when we look at ourselves in the mirror?

Why not also say that a hydrogen bomb might wipe out a country of ten million people, but its survivors will reproduce and repopulate their country? So what’s the problem with bombing them? Why is that a horrible argument? Oil companies say whenever their oil spills kill marine life, so what, nature recovers and in a few decades we will have our seas back, healthy and thriving. If I said that about Hiroshima, people would rightly call me a heartless brute.

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Whether we are in the Anthropocene epoch or not, we still have to take responsibility for the killing of things. Let’s not confuse that moral responsibility with the notion of what is an epoch and what is the scale of our impact on the Earth.

I agree with you about the hidden anthropocentrism in this whole discourse. It is also obvious that the terminology of the Anthropocene invites crushing the progress of understanding humans in a Darwinian sense as species, but reevaluates them as the pride of creation. But am I following you correctly?

Yes, I think you are. There are people saying, “here we are the lords of creation, and now let’s talk about managing it better.” “We are gods and we might as well get good at it,” says Stewart Brand, an American guru who is a blatantly Enlightenment Project kind of guy, convinced that technology will always solve everything. A similar guy is Erle Ellis, a geographer and biologist, who said it’s time to get a new kind of environmentalism (which is not very new at all, it’s the same old anthropocentrism). He argues we should think only about the welfare of human beings, not the planet. This guy is associated with the Breakthrough Institute, which wants us to get back to such old, recycled moral reductionism. They all warn us, of course, not to do really stupid things. But still their motto is, manage the Earth more efficiently.

If we want to save giraffes, we must first ask, what will the effort do for us? Do we really need them? Do they make us better people? I think that is the old hubris talking.

But not all proponents of the concept seem to fit that description…

There are Anthropocenists who are saying, “we may be gods, but we are killing our future, and that doesn’t feel godlike.” But generally they not feeling good because they

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C O N V E R S A T I O N fear they are trapped in that conquest. In the end, it isn’t the fate of nature that worries them—it’s the fate of people. Humans are tragically trapped inside this machine we have built, this splendid civilization (laughs).

I don’t think that most humanists really care about nature or the non-human. They are starry-eyed about what is uniquely human and focused mainly on our cultural achievements, poetry, literature, art, architecture, maybe for a few of them the natural sciences. They care about libraries, universities, politics, the comforts of apartment living, but they don’t seem to care deeply about what happens to millions of species and ecosystems. Why would they call themselves humanists if they did? On the other hand, they don’t like the way Buffon’s world has turned out—it looks like a prison camp or iron cage.

My advice is, stay with the concept of the Holocene, a very neutral, culture-free concept, and most important, allow the stratigraphic experts to decide whether the human impact

I don’t think that most humanists really care about nature or the non-human. They are starry-eyed about what is uniquely human and focused mainly on our cultural achievements, poetry, literature, art, architecture, maybe for a few of them the natural sciences. They care about libraries, universities, politics, the comforts of apartment living, but they don’t seem to care deeply about what happens to millions of species and ecosystems. Why would they call themselves humanists if they did?

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on the Earth is on an epochal scale or not.

Is the climate change we have set in motion similar to that of the Pleistocene, which was due to nothing less than changes in the Earth’s orbit around the sun? Get data first, then decide. Scientists say that with global warming we are going to see large-scale movements of species, changes in coastlines, more dramatic cycles of drought and flood—but will any of those changes be as big as those of the Pleistocene? If they ever become that big, either a century or a thousand years from now, we can say with more assurance that we are not in the Pleistocene anymore. But even then maybe we might continue calling this epoch the Holocene.

And if that day comes, why even then declare the end of nature? We don’t have to insist that we are the lords and masters of the planet, that we have demolished nature, just because we have learned how to burn fossil fuels or create nuclear power.

So what excites people about the concept?

Maybe one could argue that if you wind the story back to the history of science, to Darwin, that the problem is an underlying anxiety that when we are trapped in an artificial world, humanity can become extinct as easily as any other species? I am not sure that I would agree with your point about humanists and ecosystems. In the excitement of the environmentalist movement, they have been developing disciplines that are trying to overcome this divide—of not celebrating humans apart from nature, but trying to remind humans that they are inextricably a part of it. Some people even go so far as to argue that every artefact is of necessity nature-based as well, because it is all made out of chemical components.

All the chemical components that make up this desk, here, come from the same stellar explosion that our fingernails come from.

The humanists and Anthropocenists are not, I repeat, apt to celebrate our natural origins or

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try to put us back in touch with those origins.

Their tendency to emphasize what makes humans unique and superior to the rest of the universe. Then one day some beings from outer space arrive and jeer, hey, you humans, how primitive you are! (laughs)

But this contradicts a lot of points that especially people in the humanities want to make. Many people look at environmentally informed literature to try to revoke this understanding that people consider themselves part of (even an “animated”) nature.

You don’t overcome the nature-human distinction or the nature-culture divide by saying we have conquered nature, or by claiming that differences or distinctions no longer exist. Or by claiming that everything around us is something we have made, and therefore it is no longer natural. Surely we have learned through all the postcolonial, postimperialist writings of the past halfcentury that differences don’t go away just because the imperialists have arrived. They may try to turn the invaded into something else, but never do they succeed completely, and never for long, and never do they escape being transformed themselves.

Some like to maintain that, once we have abolished nature as something separate

from us, we are no longer alienated from it.

But in fact in that move we become more alienated than ever. We refuse to see that we must always live on both sides of the divide.

And that we must acknowledge the limits of our power and the extent of our dependency on an autonomous natural world.

There is a photograph I saw published in a journal with the caption, “Are we in the Anthropocene?” It shows a space-age skyscraper and highly artificial plaza in Shanghai—that city of twenty-five million people. From this most intensely urban, technological perspective, the whole world may seem like it is under our control. But this is a kind of blindness and selective exclusion. We need to get away from that now and then, spend a night on a prairie or on an iceberg or mountain, and discover how small we are in the sum of things.

Maybe, humans should not worry so much about their future?

No, I’m worried, though like the Anthropocenists I hope that people can discover how to reduce the damage they have caused and repair some of it, whether out of self-interest or altruism. I don’t have much confidence that we know what we are doing, but I am confident that science is improving our knowledge base. It is harder, of course, to define the concept of damage to nature when you live

You don’t overcome the nature-human distinction or the nature-culture divide by saying we have conquered nature, or by claiming that differences or distinctions no longer exist. Or by claiming that everything around us is something we have made, and therefore it is no longer natural. Surely we have learned through all the postcolonial, postimperialist writings of the past half century that differences don’t go away just because the imperialists have arrived. They may try to turn the invaded into something else, but never do they succeed completely, and never for long, and never do they escape being transformed themselves.

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C O N V E R S A T I O N after Darwin. But I think that we can come up with definitions, like planetary and ecosystem health, through the aid of scientific discovery.

But I am not optimistic that this particular civilization we have built, call it global or industrial or modern civilization, can endure much longer. It has a shelf life of how long?

I am not at all confident that we know enough to know how worried to be. Planetary warming has reliably been established by science. But most scientists would add that we humans cannot predict the future of that warming pattern. It’s possible that, in fifty years, it may turn out that we are still in the Pleistocene, in a brief recess or interglacial period, and then global warming may be a blip. We don’t know. I’m not saying that we just go on burning coal, but remember that in the 1970s the U.S. National Academy of Sciences debated whether we were in a cooling phase or not. Evidence from scientists said we were entering a cooling phase, that we are going to see the imminent return of the next glaciation. Forty years later, that possibility does not look so threatening, but the future remains out there in considerable uncertainty. Nature may surprise us.

Because there are sometimes alterations in the graph depicting the Earth’s historical temperature, like in a downward trend?

As there are commonly spikes and then a downward trend?

I am saying that the Holocene itself may turn out not to be a real epoch. Data from the past few decades show that we are in a warming period, but remember that warming has been going on for 12,000 years, a period during which humans invented agriculture and civilization. We do not know for sure just how long that global warming might continue. Most scientists admit this and tend to be cautious about their discoveries and their extrapolations, more so than many popular writers.

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And they are transforming and distorting the information and basically scaring people…?

To me, the uncertainties are even scarier than knowing for sure. We really don’t know at this point the future of the Earth, but I can tell you with some confidence that this whole manmade world that we are impressed by today is not likely to exist indefinitely.

And the idea that we could escape from Earth, if it proves unlivable for some reason, and turn to Mars is laughable. It is science fiction, not science. We are not going to be able to turn Mars into a beautiful planet like our own, with blue oceans and with green forests and rich deep soils—this is more Baconian/ Buffonian nonsense. If you get outside the city, if you try to farm a piece of land and stick with it for very long, you know how much control over this Earth you really have. Very little in truth. If you live in Southeast Asia and experience an earthquake, volcanic explosion, or tsunami, you know that your ability to control things is far from adequate. Even more economically advanced regions have reason to fear nature. Scientists are talking about an earthquake looming in Oregon that will be bigger than anything ever in North America. It may generate a tsunami fifty feet high, wiping out all the coastal towns. Every bridge, every highway might be shattered if and when this

Data from the past few decades show that we are in a warming period, but remember that warming has been going on for 12,000 years, a period during which humans invented agriculture and civilization. We do not know for sure just how long that global warming might continue.

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earthquake happens. We live on a restless Earth with power beyond the technological. And it makes everything uncertain.

I know this is an old question in environmental history. But can we still talk about untouched nature and wilderness if humans have reached even the most remote part through the chemicals that we have been emitting into the atmosphere?

We don’t have sufficient scientific evidence or cultural consensus to say what is wild and what is not. The fact that you find a sulfur molecule on this plant or in that lake could seem significant to some, but it might not be to most people. I’m not trying to diminish the human effect. I see it all the time and am concerned about it. But because somebody drops a Kleenex on a trail in the American Rockies, some declare it’s no longer wilderness. If in a warmer period mosquitoes bring malaria to Alaska, it is no longer wilderness. If a jet plane flies overhead, leaving a contrail, the land 35,000 feet below can no longer be considered wilderness. So the extremists declare. They want “pure” categories, for then they can abolish the idea of wilderness along with the idea of nature. But the purists don’t really offer us any data about land use or the scale of damage and change. Of course we have heavily polluted soils with chemicals, but is every part of this Earth now like that? Much of the planet is not under any real management, and our human traces are often hard to find. We may be having some kind of influence, but it may be hard to detect or measure, let alone pronounce as significant.

Nowadays the world is protected through a network of shipping and food production spanning the entire globe.

Data show how much we have expanded agriculture, and how much food we move from continent to continent. We have learned how to minimize the impact of local drought

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or famine and expand the exotic foods on display in supermarkets. But this doesn’t make the whole planet a farmed landscape.

Quite the contrary, our crops cover a small part of the planet. Maybe half of the planet’s land mass is still without much or any economic use, improved roads, access to world markets, or urban skylines. Moreover, that entire network of production and distribution of food depends on the continuing abundance of the fossil fuels. How long will those fuels will be available? What do we have as replacements that can be made to work efficiently, that can justify a big investment? Our global food system is obviously quite vulnerable, and with population growth likely to continue for at least another half century or more, how secure are we in fact?

Maybe we just have to rethink it? That this is just the acknowledgement that we have no clue what we are doing because we are acting on scales that have totally gotten out of our hands?

We may need new words that can help us grapple with the relation between humans and nature. I am wary, however, of over-excited, media-driven labels or slogans or of fashionable names like Anthropocene. Here is where the socalled “humanities” might have an important role. Not to promote the idea of humans living in splendid isolation from material realities, but to help us find words and values for improving the most important relationship we have, with the other than human.

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C O N V E R S A T I O N That I can agree with, but we must keep trying to discover the facts of our planet and think about our place in it. We need science focused on understanding the whole Earth and its interacting cycles and systems. We have no choice but to get more knowledge.

Ironically, what is required to blow away some of the confusion and anxiety caused by a science-based civilization is more science.

That means giving the scientific community the funding, respect, and ethical direction it needs to flourish. Science can reveal more fully and precisely the limits of our knowledge and the extent of our influence.

Well, this planet houses a lot more people than it used to…

True, but there are plenty of places that you can go with your backpack and be a long way from human power and influence. Take a three-day hike through Canada’s boreal forest. You might discover there are acids falling with the rain and the temperatures are warming here. But you can also find the power facing us humans. You can easily die there. Or be eaten. The Earth is not, nor ever will be, a safe little zoo where we wander through a sequence of habitats that we have created and maintained.

We may need new words that can help us grapple with the relation between humans and nature. I am wary, however, of overexcited, media-driven labels or slogans or of fashionable names like Anthropocene. Here is where the so-called “humanities” might have an important role. Not to promote the idea of humans living in splendid isolation from material realities, but to help us find words and values for improving the most important relationship we have, with the other than human.

New words like “The Age of Humankind” may sound a bit comforting. These humans, who make all these scientific discoveries and realize how little they actually know.

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If we cannot say for sure when the Anthropocene began, then we don’t know whether we are in it or not.

We cannot say what the shape of its future will be. All that we can be sure of is that, as long as humans exist as a species living among others, there will be a “nature” around us, shaping our identity, limiting our ambitions, coming back at us no matter how hard we try to kill it.

Humankind sounds too gentle for who we are and for the world in which we live. Ours has been a rough journey, to borrow from a book title by John Brooke, and it will continue to be rough and unsettling. What seemed so certain to Buffon and to millions of others, going back to hunters and gatherers and forward to computer-savvy technocrats, does not seem to me to be certain at all. This may be my chief reason for being skeptical about the Anthropocene. It carries too much confidence and certainty as well as pride and confidence in human beings. Maybe all periodization aspires to certainty. Periods, epochs, ages are all labels that say we know what happened and why it happened and what it led to. But today’s historian should caution that periodizations, including those of history and of science, keep coming unglued. We may argue about which year or century or millennium this or that changed, what drove that change, and when that change slowed down or ceased, making way for another period.

But then we change our mind a lot. If that is true for writing about the civilizational or geological past, it is even truer for describing the present and projecting into the future.

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Let’s have plenty of debate about all these matters, past and future, but let us at the same time be intensely wary of all claims and labels. If we cannot say for sure when the Anthropocene began, then we don’t know whether we are in it or not. We cannot say what the shape of its future will be. All that we can be sure of is that, as long as humans

exist as a species living among others, there will be a “nature” around us, shaping our identity, limiting our ambitions, coming back at us no matter how hard we try to kill it.

Thank you so much, Don, for your time and your insights.

Agnes Kneitz (Ph.D., Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich, Germany) has written on the development of perceptions of environmental justice and their reflection in European social novels of the nineteenth century. From 2013-2017, she taught environmental and civilization history as Assistant Professor for World History at Renmin University of China in Beijing. Her current research focus is on the historical environmental humanities, with an interest in environmental justice, infrastructure, colonial development, and urban and social ecology. She has published in ISLE, Ecozon@, NTM, and Global Environment. Currently, she is a Visiting Scholar at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich.

Works Cited Timothy LeCain, “Against the Anthropocene: A Neo-Materialist Perspective,” International Journal of History, Culture, and Modernity 3 (2015): 1-28.

The California Museum of Paleontology. The Holocene Epoch. http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/ quaternary/holocene.php. Accessed 25 October 2017.

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THE MOUNTAINS WE TOUCHED— The Role of Care in Delimiting Ecosystems PAULA UNGAR

Reclaiming as political work implies not shying away from what is important to us only because it has been “recuperated” by power, or by hype.

María Puig de la Bellacasa

Introduction The Fetish of Power

W

e kept walking uphill, long after our feet were full of blisters inside the steel toe boots that the company had made us wear. We were limping and exhausted, but every now and then we looked at each other with accomplice smiles and stopped to contemplate the dense, glittering forest around us. We were determined to make it to the top, along the trails that at that altitude had already stopped being clearly demarcated paths and were already lost among deep soils, leaves, rotting trunks and spots of sunlight coming through the not-too-tall forest canopy. The man sent by the company walked at a prudent distance behind us, ignoring our occasional

giggling and trying to conceal his own exhaustion. That morning, he had been introduced to us as a first-aid companion.

Despite our grumbling, the company had insisted on his coming with us because, so they said, they were responsible for our safety as long as we stayed inside their properties—the same compassionate argument they had given for forcing us to wear those damned boots. His small backpack, however, looked empty, and when we asked for Band-Aids he didn’t have any. It was obvious he was there to keep a close eye on us.

We were working for the Alexander von Humboldt Institute, on a project aimed at delimiting upper mountain ecosystems known as páramos. Based on their biodiversity and their key role in providing water for most of the Colombian population, these “strategic ecosys-

tems” have been in the process of being reclaimed for conservation for the last twenty-five years. In contrast to relatively vague legal precedents, the law that had been enacted a couple of years before was rigid and clear-cut: it dictated that inside páramos, delimited by the Ministry “with reference” to maps at a very precise scale, mining and agriculture were to be prohibited. The scientific authority in charge of mapping these ecosystems was the Humboldt Institute.

The political nature of our research couldn’t be more straightforward. The institution we were working for (funded by the central government, part of the Global Biodiversity Network established after the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit), the ideas on which we were standing (a legacy of the totalizing language of science), the instruments and methods we were using and, of course, the aim of our project can, and needs to be, explained in terms of power relations and explicit or implicit projects of domination.

However, I feel that part of the essence of our work is left out if only political projects of simplification and domination are used for explaining it. According to what I experienced, many more human and non-human participants gather in páramos and make them exist and maintain their

existence.1 More specifically, our “vital affective states, ethical obligations and practical labor”2 were part of our work’s indispensable weave. The idea of matters of care, as defined by María Puig de la Bellacasa, has helped me convey part of what I feel to be essential, although silenced, dimensions of our scientific undertaking.

This text is an attempt at thinking through our research with care and at reflecting upon the implications of doing so.

The deep connections between mountain geography and politics in Colombia have a long history. It was on these same mountains that Alexander von Humboldt, one of our nineteenth century forefathers and the original bearer of our institute’s name, had first encountered the South American Andes. Two centuries earlier, not far from the precise place where we were walking, he had walked before us, also looking for the connections between the distribution of living beings and climate, of order in nature, through the lens of the European Enlightenment. As Mauricio Nieto Olarte explains, Humboldt and his coauthor, Aimé Bonpland’s, Essay on the Geography of Plants is deeply political, among other reasons because it translates the untamed Andean life into one allencompassing representation, legible for Europeans and transportable to Europe.3

The deep connections between mountain geography and politics in Colombia have a long history. It was on these same mountains that Alexander von Humboldt, one of our nineteenth century forefathers and the original bearer of our institute’s name, had first encountered the South American Andes.

Two centuries earlier, not far from the precise place where we were walking, he had walked before us, also looking for the connections between the distribution of living beings and climate, of order in nature, through the lens of the European Enlightenment.

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E S S A Y The Nueva Granada naturalists with whom Humboldt worked during his trip, our ancestors, were also reading and translating nature through explorations, drawings, classifications, and maps.

Francisco José de Caldas’ detailed and beautifully illustrated maps of climates and natural riches in the Andes were indeed a political undertaking, explicitly inserted in the Spanish project of economic use of plants, military control of territories, and “the prosperity of the colonies” (see fig. 1). Our job was a direct legacy of those investigations into, and representations of, what Caldas called “the influx of climate on organized beings,”4 and of course of the political urges of a state trying to control its territories.

In my own training as a political ecologist, I had been taught the ways in which science is entangled with power around the conservation of biodiversity. Critical geographers, science and technology scholars, and environmental historians had shown me, in different ways, how

scientific concepts and methods flatten the complexity of emergent nature-cultures into static and artificial nature refuges.

They had illustrated how science often legitimizes and is legitimized by the interests of powerful imperial networks, at the expense of multiple localized worldviews.

I had learned how scientific constructions are accomplices in the civilization of nature. And given that the Colombian Ministry of the Environment would use our research to dictate where corporate mining would be banned (or give mining clear guidelines), claims that with our mediation the state and capitalism were shaping the land cannot be denied.5 A recent dissertation by a Colombian anthropologist, an ethnography of the delimitation of one páramo, pinned down this focus on state-making projects and interests very clearly in its title: “Delimiting is a Fetish of Power.”6 The essay here is part of my own unconcluded, still troubled journey, of my drifting away from the stable harbor where Peña seems to stand, into more troubled waters.

Fig. 1. A profile of the Andes, part of Francisco José de Caldas’ research on “The influx of climate on organized beings” (1808), http://www.lablaa.org/blaavirtual/exhibiciones/historia-natural-politica/hnp-16.html.

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The Mountains We Had Been Trained to See The three of us were aware at every step of the privilege it was to walk through that pulsating, dripping tapestry. It was one of the few remaining upper mountain cloud forests on the western slope of the Colombian Cordillera Central, which have been mostly transformed into cattle pastures and monocultures.

Adriana* had studied ecology, I had studied biology, and Enrique* is a geographer. We were all inheritors of a long tradition of research on páramos and of admiration for their extraordinary nature. We had learned that those cold and foggy wetlands exist at

Map of Cordillera Central range location. www. scielo.org.co.

above approximately three thousand meters only in the Northern Andes, the most diverse of them, by far, being those that crown the three Cordilleras that cross Colombia from the south to the north. Although they are similar in their appearance to alpine landscapes, they are unusual in their richness of life forms, even in relation to a country with the highest values of biodiversity in the world. Páramos are populated by an astonishing number of unique species whose strange adaptations to extreme weather conditions have fascinated naturalists and explorers since the nineteenth century. Although they occupy less than 3% of Colombian surface (about 2,900.000 hectares), half of the country’s endemic amphibians, reptiles, and birds live in or directly depend on páramos. They are home to more than five thousand species of plants, out of which around two hundred have been identified as endangered. Animals at the brink of extinction also live in páramos: the spectacled bear walks along its borders, the Andean condor soars above. New species are identified every time a specialist explores a new páramo corner.

Along with this legacy of knowledge about páramos, we had also inherited reverence for high mountains and a sense of responsibility for them. The geographer Ernesto Guhl, one of the main contributors to the geological and ecological knowledge of páramos, dedicated a large part of his canonical 1982 book to criticizing what he *Names have been changed

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E S S A Y thought of as the false vision of páramos as dreadful places. We had all read his words: “Páramos are not sad, they are serious. They are not melancholic, they are severe. They are not hostile, they are magnificent. And as the geographical and ecological culmination of the Colombian Equatorial Andes, they are unique in the world.”7 Before joining this project, Adriana had been involved most of her professional life in restoration of upper mountain ecosystems. In collaboration with indigenous people, she and her research group (led by one of Guhl’s students) had for years investigated how to reproduce native bushes and trees. They had carried out painstaking experiments in order to re-introduce them into the dense pastures for cattle that now occupy most of the Colombian upper mountains. She was aware of the microscopic and macroscopic miracles that needed to happen in order for a forest like this one to exist, of the amount of time that it stood for.

I had been researching the relationships among local communities, nature and the state in different parts of the country. I had listened to people’s stories about the connections between singing and healing, between fishing and weaving, between nodding and resisting. The most recent project in which I had participated was an investigation on the ways peasants relate to

páramos. I had seen their paths and mills and orchards and cemeteries materialize on sheets of paper; I had helped transcribe their songs about plants and had analyzed their tense relations with the state. As part of that project I had learned that páramos are sacred places for at least sixteen different indigenous communities whose territories include upper mountains. Through their eyes, páramos’ crystalline lakes are the origin of humanity. About 120,000 people live in páramos and care for them as their homes, the source of their drinking water and their medicine, the places where their cows and sheep graze and where their sheltering spirits dwell.

I had met Enrique when he was working for the Colombian National Parks. Our first conversation had taken place more than ten years before, by the side of the Amazon River. He was already then categorical about the need for a rigorous cartography, for good data, for more precise scientific work for conservation. Now he was working at the Humboldt Institute, among others tracing the routes of the water that rises in páramos. He was trying to pin down in maps of hydric networks the common knowledge that the water for most of Colombia’s forty million inhabitants comes from páramos: that it supplies the houses and industries in most of the country’s towns and cities, that it irrigates small farmers’ orchards,

If the project was allowed to go on, this mountain was going to become the greatest open-pit goldmine in the country. Despite its beautiful name in Spanish, minería a cielo abierto, “open-sky” mining is alarming for environmentalists and local inhabitants. The images we have all seen, of mountains that look as if they have been cut with a giant knife, where bulldozers drive along unending grey flat surfaces, are the visible result of this kind of mining.

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potato, and onion cultivations of upper lands, and irrigates big agro-industrial rice and sugarcane monocultures that feed the country. The three of us were now coordinating a national network of thirty-five research groups that involved more than two hundred biologists and ecologists, anthropologists, historians, and geographers who were carrying out fieldwork under our guidance and training, all along the three Cordilleras.8

“The World is Collapsing” In order to prepare for our trip, I had sent some information about the place where we were going to Enrique and Adriana in an email with the subject: “Getting ready for entering the death star.” Attached was a report by the British NGO Colombia Solidarity Campaign (CSC) called “La Colosa: A Death Foretold,” and a few links to newspapers reports about recent events in the region.9 La Colosa is a gold mining project owned by the South African corporation Anglo Gold Ashanti (AGA), on whose premises we were walking that day. The Ministry of Mines had announced this project as holding the biggest gold reserve in the country and one of the ten biggest in the world.

According to the investors’ report, its profits could amount to $60 billion U.S. (equivalent to 75% of the country’s external debt). AGA had fenced the perimeter of the property, and strong security measures were taken to control visitor access. They had also built concrete roads for their jeeps—which strongly contrasted with the local, dusty roads—and, as our guide proudly showed us (when he was still talking to us), they had built kilometers-long wooden platforms and stairs in “the

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most delicate parts of the forest, so that the employees walking daily to and from the drilling places wouldn’t affect the soils.”

The project was at that moment in the exploration phase—a period of three years in which the company was allowed to investigate the size and distribution of the gold reserve before going on to the exploitation phase.

If the project was allowed to go on, this mountain was going to become the greatest open-pit goldmine in the country. Despite its beautiful name in Spanish, minería a cielo abierto, “opensky” mining is alarming for environmentalists and local inhabitants. The images we have all seen, of mountains that look as if they have been cut with a giant knife, where bulldozers drive along unending grey, flat surfaces, are the visible result of this kind of mining. Bigger environmental effects are, however, outside the cut. The debris (which would be around 100 million tons for this mine) would have to be dumped in valleys in the region, changing its landscape, and the toxic residues that result from extracting the gold with cyanide would have to be dumped in leach ponds of up to five square kilometers behind dams over 100m in height. The report also states that the extraction of gold from La Colosa would need a volume of water equivalent to the minimum monthly needs of about two million people.

On our way to the entrance of the proposed mine, early that morning we had passed jeeps loaded with sacks of coffee and corn and bunches of plantains on their roofs, carrying children in their well-ironed uniforms to rural schools, loud vallenato music pouring out of the windows. Unlike other places in Colombia where multinational mining corporations have been arriving in

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E S S A Y the last decades, Cajamarca has no mining tradition. This municipality, whose average altitude is 1800m and a mean annual temperature 19 degrees Celsius, is known as one of “Colombia’s agricultural pantries.” Half of its twenty thousand inhabitants are campesinos— cultivating beans and a great variety of native fruits for local and regional markets.

Six months earlier, a British report was dedicated to César García, one of the campesinos who had been killed in Cajamarca before our field trip. He, his wife, and his nine-year-old daughter were on their way back from planting some palos de agua (water plants) when he was shot in the head. He had been a leader of the “regional environmental and peasants committees,” a group of active opponents to the mine heading demonstrations under slogans like “yes to life, no to mining.” According to a national newspaper, more than a thousand people from the whole region attended his funeral, accompanied by “mariachis, weeping, and a latent fear.”

César’s assassination had been preceded, less than a week earlier and only a few kilometers away, by another violent death, in circumstances directly related to our research. As part of the project for delimiting páramos, the Colombian Geographic Institute produced a cartographic study of the region’s upper mountain soils. A team of technicians was visiting this same rural district in a rented car when two handmade explosive devices were thrown into it from a nearby bush. The driver, Mr. José del Carmen Ramírez, was killed. According to what members of a local NGO later told me, the car had probably been taken for one of the company’s and was attacked by opponents of the mine, maybe guerrilla militia members.

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The next day, the general director of the Humboldt Institute wrote an email to all staff from both the Humboldt and the Geographic Institutes, expressing his condolences and convictions: We could hide in the depths of academic disquisitions in order to not see.…

But the world is collapsing.… and we are involved: every activity that we undertake must be a search for peace, not an inane contribution to abstract knowledge that will supposedly make us better human beings, in the refuge of our privileges.

That was the commitment of the institute we were working for. Those were our urgencies. We were required to do much more than just “abstract well-wishing.” We were to perform “an embodied and practical ethics.”10

Making the Maps Our fieldwork that day was just a little step in the complex procedure of generating páramos maps. Páramos, as all ecosystems, do not have visible, clearcut boundaries. When you are in the middle of a páramo, you can get easily lost, but you will not doubt that you are in a páramo—the only thing that can obstruct your view, in those extensive prairies splattered with bushes, ponds, wetlands, creeks, and peat lands, is the dense fog that can appear and disappear suddenly. Upper mountain cloud forests, some hundreds of meters lower, are altogether different places: shady, dense woods of crooked trees whose bark is covered with thick mosses and whose branches sustain innumerable orchids, vines, and bromeliads.

But the meeting place among them is a blending ecotone of grasses, bushes, and small and medium-sized trees.

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Sometimes there is a gradual change from forests to páramos (a gradual decrease in plant size and density); in other places grasslands, shrubs, and trees spill into one another. Páramo species penetrate the upper parts of forests, and gatherings of trees can be seen keeping company with each other in the unsheltered and windy páramo grasslands. Also, the footprints that result from people’s relations to páramos are generally seen in this meeting point.

Pastures for cattle, orchards, potato and onion monocultures, villages, roads, and mines replace the previously existing forest-páramo transition.

So, mapping páramos is a complex process. A line needs to be drawn on those fuzzy places. The procedure that we carried out involved, in general terms, two parallel activities that merged at the end. On the one hand, fieldwork had to be carried out in order to sample the changing fauna and flora along the altitudinal gradient. That day’s field visit was the “inspection phase” for that possible future fieldwork. If we found the place suitable, botanists and zoologists would camp there for five days, sampling plants, collecting insects, amphibians, and reptiles, and observing birds, as was being done in the whole country, by research groups trained by Adriana and her team. They were all following very precise instructions for transect establishment, specimen sampling, and data analyses. They were making the deceptive boundaries of twenty-one páramos readable and portable in charts, tables, graphs, and maps; they were contributing to packing those upper parts of the mountains into words.11 In order to be able to do that, however, they also had “to touch the field and be touched by it.”12 They deployed skills and made innumerable decisions

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that were not explicit in those formal methodologies. They negotiated access with local owners who felt they might be kicked off their lands by environmentalists. In some parts of the country they asked for guerrillas’ permission to enter, or had to re-design the transects to avoid landmines. Most of the time, they had to “follow their instincts” in order to decide how to establish sampling transects that would comply with the technical guidelines of standardized procedures in often virtually inaccessible topographies. They talked to birds tangled in nets, so that they would not die in the sub-zero dawn. Scientists were “tuning into” páramos in much more than rational, mechanical ways.

For field scientists, their bodies, their affects, and their ethics were vital for their tasks.13 The other part of this mapping procedure was carried out on powerful computers in a 7th floor office in the main business center in Bogotá. A team of geographers, cadastral engineers (mapping ownerships), and biologists led by Enrique were developing “potential distribution models” that allowed the identification of forestpáramo transition zones (TZ) for each páramo complex. The TZs are the representations, in images that look like irregular belts surrounding the tops of the mountains, of the potential meeting places of páramos and forests (see fig. 2).

Based on the idea that there is a correlation between climate and topography, on the one hand, and plant distribution, on the other, the models allowed the reconstruction of the TZ (and the identification of the páramo limit) in the places where lower páramos are already transformed.

In many points, this computer-aided procedure necessitates difficult judgments by experts. Among others, inter-

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E S S A Y preting Geographic Information System or GIS images depends on field experience. Only embodied skills resulting from familiarity with the places captured in the satellite images allow them to identify a particular color or texture with a particular land cover.

The models are programmed on the basic logic that TZs are those places where there is probability of presence of both forest and lower páramo vegetation—where the climatic variables indicate that they probably coexist or coexisted. But the amplitude of the TZ (that is, the amplitude of the “meeting place”) cannot be decided by the machines. They need human input regarding, among other aspects, the probability of presence that is considered significant. Where to “cut” the meeting zones needs to be decided by interests and ethics, by what is at stake for the ones who make the call. There were discussions until midnight in the office, with rum glasses in our hands, and arguments during long retreat weekends in scientists’ houses, about the dangers of a too-wide TZ and on how to “reduce the creativity of the decision-makers,” within the rigorous procedures that a technical peer review would allow.

After the TZs were identified, the experts had to draw lines with precise trajectories. This is again not the result of some kind of mechanical objectivity. It is impossible to render páramos visible without resorting to ethical and affective commitments.

Different lines inside this TZ could be judged, out of context, as equally correct and sound, and they could all pass strict

peer reviews. In fact, similar studies hired by a mining company, aimed at determining the páramo limit in a place in which they were interested for its potential extraction, found the páramo limit at a higher altitude. Their data and analyses were as complete and sound as ours. However, in the light of our understanding that these lines could act as shields, preventing mining from trampling on páramos, our views of these limits were, indeed, worlds apart.

It is in that zone where the highest diversity of upper mountains is to be

Fig. 2. A representation of the transition zone (light grey) between lower páramos (black) and upper forests (medium grey), resulting from the potential distribution model. URL: http://repository.humboldt.org.co/handle/20.500.11761/9287

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found, as species from both sides meet and facilitate the flow of information, energy, and matter between altitudes.

Scarabs pollinate páramo plants and forage in the upper forests; the Andean bear sleeps in nests under the trees of the upper forest and eats páramos’ juicy leaves; miniature parrots swallow fruits in the forest and deposit their seed in lower páramos. Water latent in the fog is caught in the upper parts and flows through the ground to emerge in forest springs. That visible and invisible, superficial and underground warp and weft of water, plants, and animals is what sustains life in páramos and in forests. Thus, based on powerful scientific ideas of ecological integrity and precautionary principle, the lines were generally drawn along the lower limit of the TZs. Ethics and affects formed the invisible but fundamental compass for the procedure. Our account of páramos, “produced with and for care…, visions that ‘cut’ their shape differently.”14 Even if the mud and the cold wind were far away from our office, our bodies were still involved in the process.

When the legal act was being written in the Ministry to declare the first delimited páramo, a year after our visit to La Colosa, information was leaked to us from that office. It seemed that the power of lobbying corporations might succeed in “pushing the line up,” in a site in which they had big interests. We tried to calm ourselves, repeating to each other that our scientific work had been done to the best of our capabilities and that it was already out of our hands. At this stage, this was not more than a rumor. Yet, a few hours later I was driving Enrique to the hospital with arrhythmia and an acute pain in one leg, later diagnosed as a cardiovascular incident.

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Páramos Don’t Listen In the upper part of our route, we stopped often and looked carefully around, and talked about what we saw around us and what we knew about that place. The smaller trees and shrubs that would signal that we were in the meeting place with páramos were nowhere to be seen. I whispered a stupid joke: “I wish we could secretly spread extra-rapidly growing Pentacalia or Espeletia seeds along this path.”

The three of us laughed. I really did wish with all my heart that the páramo would move down, extending its recently acquired legal powers downhill, to protect this wonderful and docile cloud forest. Without proof that it was part of the lower part of a páramo, it was vulnerable, exposed to the bulldozers. Or at least that is what we thought back then.

At a certain point I couldn’t walk anymore, I was exhausted. My partners went on and I sat on a rock from which I could see the town of Cajamarca and, behind it, on the horizon, the Magdalena Valley. It was a hot day, hotter than expected. I could see a section of the road that crosses the Cordillera Central and connects the Magdalena and the Cauca Valleys, and beyond them, Eastern Colombia with the country’s biggest international trade port, Buenaventura, on the Pacific. Along this artery, a river of shining, roaring trucks flows constantly, day and night.

I was reminded of the fact that, no matter how elaborate our maps would be, and even if the government was ready and capable of enforcing the prohibitions announced in the law, climate change would still make páramos shrink, move up, dry up. Everything in them would change, as it had been doing for millions of years, only this

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E S S A Y time much faster. Many species adapted to present páramos’ cold and rainy weather will retreat to smaller and smaller islands on the tops of the mountains, leaving space for other species coming from lower, warmer lands, who in turn will be escaping the warming of their territories. “Our lines” would be incapable of stopping planetary change.

We were probably only working for it not to happen in such a violent, sudden, obscenely unjust way.

The Poisonous Terrains of Care While we were visiting Cajamarca, other páramos in the country were also being mapped through the procedure described above. Unlike here, in many of them there is a long-standing tradition, of centuries in some cases, of gold and coal mining. Although often motivated and led by international enterprises, it is local families, displaced from the more fertile lower lands, who have built their lives around mining for generations. Mines and minerals have been sustaining families, and building identities and weaving people’s relations to territories, in many Colombian páramos. Mines have also brought with them roads, towns, schools, and cultivations.

For example, Santurbán, in the northeastern extreme of the country, also presently reclaimed by corporations, has been a gold mining territory since the sixteenth century, when conquerors arrived looking for El Dorado.

For four centuries, people have been establishing themselves and making their living within that páramo, often motivated by the state, before páramos became objects of conservation. Agriculture initially spread in order to feed the miners and later expanded as an economy with its own regional and

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national markets. Up until the early twentieth century, wheat and barley were harvested and flour was milled in the more level and drier parts. Now, Santurbán provides onions for the whole northeast region of the country. Two villages, extensive cultivations and cattle pastures, as well as roads that connect cities on both sides of the mountain, were built. Today, about nine thousand people live in that páramo.15 So, while in some places delimitation could be an ally of local resistance against corporate mining, in many other páramos our maps could also be used for criminalizing artisanal miners and peasants.

According to the valid legal frameworks, the Humboldt Institute’s maps were just one consideration for the implementation of the law: the Ministry would be in charge of enforcing the prohibitions dictated by it, with these maps serving only “as a reference.”

As we understood the process, people living inside páramos were a problem because of a blunt legal framework that prohibited everything everywhere inside páramos, in the short term, without attending to particular histories, ways of relating to nature, or feasible alternatives. The studies I was in charge of were aimed precisely at giving these kinds of localized recommendations.

We fought the Ministry bitterly and argued in private and public scenarios

While in some places delimitation could be an ally of local resistance against corporate mining, in many other páramos our maps could also be used for criminalizing artisanal miners and peasants.

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that the law needed to change in order to accommodate the complexity of páramos through more place-based governance strategies.

However, we would have been blind not to acknowledge that our work was “entangled with hegemonic regimes” and that our work could be “instrumentalized… for perpetuating inequalities and preventing collective change.”16 I am still struggling with that ambivalent work in which I had been involved for the last three years. Violence is also part of the work of care: “a way of caring over here could kill over there.”17 Critical cartography and many of the strands of thought mentioned in the first section of this essay have shown how making maps implies complying with the divisions between what “is” versus what “is not”; who belongs versus who does not; what and who is allowed to stay versus what and who is not. By throwing light on the care in our work, I do not intend to justify, and thereby sharpen, the scientific knife that has the power to cut territories and lives. I am very aware of that risk.

By throwing light on “the poisonous terrains of care” on which we were constantly stepping, and more generally, by looking at protected ecosystems as complex assemblages, I intend to take responsibility for the fact that “touch and regard have consequences.”18

Caring for Whom?

That morning, as a first stop in our hike, our host had invited us to see La Colosa’s soil samples. Inside a solid 100 square meter rectangular shed built in the lower part of the forests, under a translucent roof, cylinders of approximately 20 cm diameter and 1m length, made of compact earth of different colors, were aligned beside each other,

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Tiny hand-written notes were scribbled on the frames: numbers, indecipherable abbreviations. I was moved: clear-cut pieces of soil and stone that had been buried hundreds of meters below our feet for millions of years were lying in front of us.

Deep history made visible. inside wooden frames. There were at least two hundred of them, side by side, along the walls of the shed. Tiny hand-written notes were scribbled on the frames: numbers, indecipherable abbreviations. I was moved: soil and stone that had been buried hundreds of meters below our feet for millions of years were lying in cylinders in front of us. Deep history made visible. I took out my camera, but was politely told that taking pictures was forbidden.

Those drill cores were the witnesses of the depth, the location, and the density of the biggest gold reserve in the country. All that information was an industrial secret, and our host wanted to keep it that way.

How similar, I thought, were these cylinders to our transects (see fig. 3).

Both of them aim to find the precise place where something valuable will be found through systematic translations of nature. Both of them, heirs to the Enlightenment, extract and frame a part of the seemingly chaotic world in order to make sense of it. I wondered about the differences between their research and ours. I wanted to think that their search for knowledge is radically different from ours—and my first reaction was to think that this radical difference lies in care. However, affects, labor, and

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E S S A Y

Fig. 3. Drill cores from a gold exploration project in the Yukon's White Gold District, “Mariposa Overview”; Pacific Ridge Exploration Ltd., 2017. http://www.pacificridgeexploration.com/s/mariposa.asp?ReportID=663245

a particular ethics were certainly also molding their search for gold. I suppose the main difference between them and us is for whom we care.

Final Remarks Drifting into Troubled Waters The official results of our field trip found that our site was not suitable for establishing sampling transects. This was communicated in a succinct e-mail to the Environmental Sustainability Manager of La Colosa. The sampling plots were established somewhere else, outside the mining title. In the official document for delimitation that was handed in a year later to the Ministry, the map of páramo “affected” approximately 15% of the project.

However, early in 2017 and after eight years of demonstrations, of hundreds of pages of signatures gathered on the streets, and of struggles against

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judicial and political authorities, local environmentalist movements were able to carry out a popular referendum in the municipality. 98% of the voters were against mining in their territories.

The project is now blocked, at least temporarily, in the face of such massive opposition, in what has been regarded as “the victory of David against Goliath.” The matters of fact produced by science about nature have played a role in that process and in other similar local resistance movements that are taking place elsewhere in the country: páramos have appeared in placards, in leaders’ statements and on judicial decisions that allowed referendums to take place.

Therefore, making our uncertainties, our ethics, and affects visible, and carrying out this exercise of humility, is a risky endeavor. During the project, those dimensions were actively suppressed in official accounts of our work. In fact, while writing this essay, I have had to constantly fight my doubts

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regarding the convenience of exposing our intimate affective struggles, rather than defending the objectivity and detachment of our work—which is the more typical way to proceed in the public sphere. Our ability to be taken seriously as the spokespersons for páramos depended on transmitting certainty, on

purifying our work from subjectivity, affects, politics, and aesthetics. Maybe caring for páramos, being responsible for them, consists also in hiding “the fragile gatherings that they constitute,”19 in concealing that we had touched them and had been touched by them.

Dr. Paula Ungar (Ph.D., Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) has been engaged, both as a practitioner and as a scholar, in the relationship between knowledge and politics around environmental governance in Colombia. Between 2011 and 2016 she worked at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute, the national institute responsible for research on biodiversity. There, she was part of an interdisciplinary team tasked with research on “delimiting strategic ecosystems” in response to the public policy agenda. Paula is the editor of Hojas de Ruta, a collection of methodological guidelines that invites practitioners to carry out integrative research and recount significant stories about upper mountain ecosystems.

Acknowledgments This essay was written during a Rachel Carson Center fellowship and received vital feedback from many scholars at the Center. I am thankful to “Enrique” and “Adriana” and many others at the Humboldt Institute, who made me “know more at the end of the day than at the beginning” (Haraway 2008), every single day of our project.

Notes 1. Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (2004): 225–248.

2. María Puig de la Bellacasa, “‘Nothing Comes Without Its World’: Thinking With Care.”

The Sociological Review 60, no. 2 (2012): 197–216.

3. Mauricio Nieto Olarte, “Orden natural y orden social: ciencia y política en el Semanario del Nuevo Reyno de Granada.” (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, 2007), 436.

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E S S A Y 4. Francisco José de Caldas, “El influxo del clima sobre los seres organizados, por Don Francisco Joseph de Caldas, individuo meritorio de la Expedición Botánica de Santafé de Bogotá,” Semanario del Nuevo Reyno Granadam, no. 22 (1808): 200.

5. Dan Brockington, Rosaleen Duffy, and Jim Igoe, Nature Unbound. Conservation, Capitalism and the Future of Protected Areas (London and Virginia: Earthscan, 2008).

6. Carolina Peña, Delimitar es un fetiche del poder: etnografía del proceso de delimitación del complejo de páramos de Sonsón. Dissertation, Universidad de Antioquia (2017).

7. My translation of an excerpt from Ernesto Guhl Nimtz’s Los páramos circundantes de la Sabana de Bogotá: edición conmemorativa (Bogota: Jardín Botánico de Bogota Jose Celestino Mutis, 2015).

8. For a detailed recount of the project, see María Elfi Chaves et al., Páramos y Humedales.

Construcción de insumos técnicos para la gestión integral del territorio y la adaptación al cambio climático en ecosistemas estratégicos, ed. Carlos Enrique Sarmiento Pinzón (Bogotá: Instituto de Investigación de Recursos Biológicos Alexander von Humboldt, 2016).

9. “La Colosa: A Death Foretold, Alternative Report about the AngloGold Ashanti Gold Mining Project in Cajamarca, Tolima, Colombia.” BM Columbia Solidarity Campaign, accessed December 2013, https://www.colombiasolidarity.org.uk/attachments/article/612/ LA%20 COLOSA_A%20Death%20Foretold.pdf.

10. Thom van Dooren, “Care.” Environmental Humanities 5, no. 1 (2014): 291–294.

11. Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

12. María Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 20.

13. Jamie Lorimer, “Counting Corncrakes: The Affective Science of the UK Corncrake Census,” Social Studies of Science 38, no. 3 (2008): 377–405.

14. María Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care, 60.

15. Alejandra Osejo and Paula Ungar, “¿Agua sí, oro no? Anclajes del extractivismo y el ambientalismo en el páramo de Santurbán,” Universitas Humanistica 84, no. 84 (2017).

Accessed December 21, 2017, http://dx.doi.org/10.11144/Javeriana.uh84.ason.

16. María Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care, 9.

17. María Puig de la Bellacasa, “Matters of Care in Technoscience: Assembling Neglected Things,” Social Studies of Science 41, no. 1 (2011): 85–106, esp. 100.

18. Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

19. María Puig de la Bellacasa, “Matters of Care in Technoscience,” 90.

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PATRICK J. REED

Notable Structures #1, graphite and colored pencil on paper, 8.27” X 11.69”, 2017

NOTABLE STRUCTURES

Notable Structures # 2, graphite and colored pencil on paper, 8.27� X 11.69�, 2017

Notable Structures #3, graphite and colored pencil on paper, 8.27” × 11.69”, 2017

Notable Structures #4, graphite and colored pencil on paper, 8.27” × 11.69”, 2017

Notable Structures #5, graphite and colored pencil on paper, 8.27” × 11.69”, 2017

NOTABLE STRUCTURES is a series of drawings that considers the phenomena of cultivation architectures and critical infrastructures. The designs presented here reference a broad swath of historical examples, from apicultural huts to lingam-shaped nuclear monuments.

Through their various forms and functions, these structures alter the face of the earth, the behavior of its inhabitants, and the rhythms of the biosphere itself. In most cases, the timescale of their influence reaches far beyond the geological tenure of the human societies that conceived of them. Rendered in graphite — itself a product of mineral refinement — these drawings attempt to recognize and catalogue the tenacious legacy of such human innovation in its many forms.

PATRICK J. REED Patrick J. Reed is an artist and writer originally from Iowa City, Iowa. His work explores the aesthetics of disaster, with an emphasis on cultural responses to ecological crises. He has exhibited internationally and is the recipient of several honors, including a Fulbright award and DAAD award—both in support of his creative research at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society from 2014- 2016. He is trained in art history, photojournalism, printmaking, and papermaking, and he has worked extensively in the fields of intermedia and experimental education.

Reed lives and works in Berlin, where he represents the European editorial branch for the critical/ cultural online publication, Serpentine Magazine .

He is a guest lecturer for the Node Center for Curatorial Studies, and an instructor at the Berlin Drawing Room. For more on Patrick's work, visit patrickjmmyreed.squarespace.com.

Notable Structures #6, graphite and colored pencil on paper, 8.27” × 11.69”, 2017

Notable Structures #7, graphite and colored pencil on paper, 8.27” × 11.69”, 2017

Notable Structures #8, graphite and colored pencil on paper, 8.27” × 11.69”, 2017

Notable Structures #9, graphite and colored pencil on paper, 8.27” × 11.69”, 2017

Notable Structures #10, graphite and colored pencil on paper, 8.27” × 11.69”, 2017

Notable Structures #11, graphite and colored pencil on paper, 8.27” × 11.69”, 2017

Notable Structures #12, graphite and colored pencil on paper, 8.27” × 11.69”, 2017

E S S A Y

THE DESERT TAKES ON THE CLIMATE CRISIS SOPHIA KALANTZAKOS The desert environment has taught us to be patient until the land blossoms bestowing its bounties on us. Thus, we have to be fortitudinous, supporting our odyssey of development and progression to achieve the aspirations of our people.

I

t was as if time had stood still for hundreds and hundreds of years.

Camels crossed the endless deserts and caravans brought news and trade, forging connections across the vast desert expanse. Every so often, an oasis town sprang out of the depths of the sandy oceans, a respite from the harshness of the burning heat and the gusts of sand-laden wind. Abdelrahman Munif, in Cities of Salt, describes it as “an outpouring of green amid the harsh, obdurate desert, as if it had burst from the sky…. [T]his wadi with its palm trees and plentiful water, which soothed and supplied travelers on the way to better places, was indispensable; without it there would have been no life or movement, no road; no tribes would have come.”2 When oil was discovered in the Middle East, the landscape changed, the people changed, the rhythm of life changed, the points of connection were

—Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan 1

forever transformed. And time? Time flowed like an accelerating river pushing the tight-knit groups of tribes into modernity. Oil unlocked riches for a small population that could now grow, overcoming its previous geographical and environmental limitations. Oasis living, humble, sustainable, sufficient was no longer enough. The constantly changing desert landscape now served as a “blank canvas” on which modern civilization sought to prove its permanence, carving the terrain, immobilizing the fluidity of space, claiming it simultaneously as its hestia—its focal point— and launching pad for expansion of influence and conquest. Those who had experienced life in the Gulf before the “miraculous transformation”—especially from the 1990s onwards—could hardly believe the changes. Cities sprang from tiny little settlements or sleepy ports. Others were constructed anew, a piece of land carved out of the

desert chosen for its proximity to water, oil, or both—now the cities’ two most vital lifelines.

Today, the countries of the Gulf are still busily solidifying the construction of their modern nation-states, even while new changes are afoot ushering in a fresh round of significant transformation. The climate crisis is an acknowledged security threat for the region with respect to its human, economic, and strategic vulnerability.3 It is, moreover, understood that the continued, inordinate reliance on fossil fuels as a source of income in an era of emission controls would be an active denial of the changing energy landscape. This is why GCC nations— the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council—are seeking to create a knowledge economy for their people.

They are investing heavily in education and deploy policies and strategies to diversify their economy in order to reduce their reliance on energy exports.

Some, especially the United Arab Emirates (UAE), aspire to build a modern society where tradition and cultural identity remain central as they welcome people from across the globe under different auspices: work, pleasure, and discovery. These nations plan ahead for a world without oil, a world in which reserves are exhausted or remain buried out of necessity. In the aggregate, this makeover represents one more cycle of transformation in the light of the changing environmental pressures and ecological concerns brought about by the Anthropocene.

It comes as no surprise then, that the UAE, one of the richest and most open countries in the Gulf, has set out to develop sectors beyond the fossil fuel industry. Already a strong tourist destination, a commercial and innovation hub, a center for educational excellence, a cultural oasis, and a real estate

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developer, the UAE has also targeted the health sector by offering world class healthcare. According to a report prepared by the International Monetary Fund in 2016 entitled Economic Prospects and Policy Challenges for the GCC Countries, the UAE is not alone in its efforts, although results vary significantly from country to country. “All GCC countries have formulated strategic development plans, including Saudi Arabia’s recent Vision 2030. These plans focus on innovation with the goal of reducing the proportion of GDP derived from the energy sector. They typically anticipate that several strategic sectors such as logistics, tourism, energy, financial services, health care, and manufacturing will help generate the much-needed private-sector jobs and growth.”4 In 2017, for instance, Saudi Arabia revealed a surprising and grand plan to create an entertainment city south of Riyadh funded by the Kingdom’s public investment fund, as well as a massive tourism project on the Red Sea.5 This decision will generate a wave of transformations on the closed and conservative kingdom with even wider socio-economic and political implications for the region.

Expert analysts posit that the urgency to diversify economically is largely necessary because of the wide fluctuation of oil prices on which national budgets rely almost exclusively. The current transformation is thus a product of a newfound practical necessity.

After years of high oil prices hovering between USD 90-120 a barrel, the last few have put significant stress on oil-producing nations. Especially those who do not have sovereign wealth funds to draw from have needed to curb budget spending.

According to the IMF, “while the needed size of adjustment varies across countries, eliminating this year’s [2016]

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E S S A Y budget deficit would need an average generate power, boosting investments spending cut of 27% of total spending. in clean energy which include solar and A gradual approach involving less connuclear to drive growth. The recently solidation in the near term is appropriannounced UAE Energy Plan 2050 ate for those countries with large bufdoes just that, aiming to “cut carbon fers and potential headwinds to non-oil dioxide emissions by 70%, increase growth from external and financial clean energy use by 50% and improve conditions. However, countries with energy efficiency by 40% by the middle fewer [sic] buffers and of the century, high public debt may resulting in savings need to accelerate their Of all the member-states in the worth 700 billion fiscal adjustments.”6 Dh[Dirham] (USD region, the UAE embraces this The sectors that 190,579,914,000). The countries like the UAE new round of transformational policy’s targets for are hoping to grow, the source of energy activity most eagerly and however, require for local consumpthus remains at the forefront increased levels of tion by 2050 have of change. In the last decade, energy, and therefore been set at 44% from investment in the renewable energy, for instance, the country has deployment of renew- begun to develop ambitious 38% from gas, 12% ables. Once again, from clean fossil energy is the epicenter plans to significantly reduce fuels and 6% from of the transformative nuclear energy. At its dependence on natural gas experience in the Gulf. to generate power, boosting the moment, more Only this time the sun than 90% of the investments in clean energy is a major contributor UAE’s energy needs together with wind are met by natural which include solar and and nuclear power. gas.”7 Moreover, nuclear to drive growth.

This departure from an investment of an exclusive reliDh600bn (USD ance on fossil fuels is 163,354,961,881.95)8 perhaps the only way to achieve the over the next 33 years has been slated overarching goal of successful ecoto achieve the transition to renewable, nomic diversification and ensure the nuclear, and clean fossil energy. endurance of modern statehood in The UAE is not alone in this energy the foreseeable future. Oil wealth has conversion effort, though it certainly given and continues to provide the Gulf remains the most strategically driven. countries with the means to adapt to Saudi Arabia, the largest and most the new challenges ahead. influential actor in the Gulf, has also Of all the member-states in the taken a serious interest in renewables region, the UAE embraces this new as part of its new plan of economic round of transformational activity transformation. Currently, the Kingmost eagerly and thus remains at the dom relies on crude, refined oil and forefront of change. In the last decade, natural gas for its power needs, but this for instance, the country has begun to is about to change. Minister of Energy develop ambitious plans to significantly Khaled al-Falih announced an investreduce its dependence on natural gas to ment ranging from USD 30-50bn that

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would ensure that “the percentage of renewable energy by 2023 will represent 10% of the total electricity of the kingdom.” Furthermore, according to the Minister’s statement, Saudi Arabia is not only looking to become a consumer of renewables but also a nation that “develops, manufactures and exports the advanced technologies of renewable energy production.”9 Qatar has followed suit. Minister of Energy and Industry Dr. Mohammed bin Saleh Al Sada, speaking in London in April 2017, underscored that this country was working to “execute a mega solar power venture at a capacity of 500 megawatts (MW),”10 enough to power about 350,000 homes.

Declarations notwithstanding, the Gulf and the wider Middle East have still a long way to go. In practice there had been relatively little alternateenergy capacity operating in the Middle East by the end of 2016. The most recent REN21 (Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st century) 2017 Global Status Report on renewables pointed out that “interest in solar PV has started to pick up…. Oil producers are taking advantage of good solar resources, low land and labor costs, and favorable loan rates to preserve their fossil resources for export. Israel remained the region’s leading market, adding 0.1 GW (gigawatt) for a total over 0.9 GW. Jordan and Kuwait both brought large plants online during the year and, in early 2017, Dubai inaugurated a 200 MW plant. Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi and Dubai (UAE) all held tenders, and Iran signed several agreements to deploy solar PV and build manufacturing facilities.”11 With respect to wind, which is also an appealing renewable technology for the region, according to the same report, “in the Middle East, Kuwait was constructing a 10 MW

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wind farm during 2016, and, in early 2017, Saudi Arabia commissioned its first utility-scale turbine and announced a 400 MW tender.”12 Does the necessity for economic diversification alone account for the dramatic paradigm shift? Oil has powered the Gulf miracle since the early twentieth-century and there is still much of it available. Might it be premature to mourn its passing? Undoubtedly the growing climate crisis and the direction in which climate negotiations have been developing have also impacted this decision for a number of reasons. The Gulf countries have not only helped to exacerbate the climate crisis as robust global exporters of fossil fuels.

They have also substantially contributed to the global emissions landscape at a national level. According to World Bank data, CO2 emissions in the Arab World in 1950 stood at a mere 59,535.

397 kilotons (kt), but in 2014 measured 1,895,700.321 (kt).13 For the UAE, the fastest acceleration of CO2 emissions has taken place since the late 1990s and especially after 1998. While in 1960 CO2 emissions were negligible, standing at a mere 11 (kt), by 1998 they had reached 81,495.408 and by 2014 they had grown to 211,369.547 (kt).14 For Saudi Arabia, in 1960 emissions stood at 2,677 (kt), and by 2014 that number had reached 601,047 (kt).

It is important, moreover, to note that only a few years back, during the 2009 COP summit in Copenhagen, Saudi Arabia’s lead negotiator, Mohammad S. Al Sabban, had claimed that “We are among the most economically vulnerable countries.”15 In fact at the time, OPEC members—and Saudi Arabia, in particular—were seeking financial aid (compensation for their losses) for oil-producers in the event that the new agreement would require

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E S S A Y cuts in fossil fuel usage.16 This demand was not well received by the international community, to say the least, who saw this request as an outrage given the economic wealth of the most prominent Gulf nations. Moreover, the push of the region’s most active players had been toward more robust investment in carbon capture and storage technologies, rather than toward renewables as an alternative to fossil fuel consumption.

In Kyoto, moreover, the Gulf countries had signed on as developing nations and were therefore not obliged to cut emissions, which at the time already accounted for 2.3% of global emissions.

Throughout the negotiating processes, it was mostly Saudi Arabia17 that had been singled out as being the most resistant to a comprehensive climate deal. Analysts at the time had argued that the Saudis used their influence in the Like Minded Group of Developing Countries, or LMDC18—which included other Middle East oil economies, as well as China and India19—to defend their position. According to Wael Hmaidan, director of the Climate Action Network, ”Saudi Arabia is able to use such groups to increase division…. It is good at finding arguments that appeal to these countries.”20 Today, gradually, reluctantly, and perhaps out of expediency, the narrative that Gulf countries are developing on the climate discourse has changed.

The reasons have been manifold and include fear of international isolation and stigmatization as the culprits of fossil fuel production; a rapidly growing local energy demand that has allowed for less product to be exported while being consumed at lower prices domestically21; rapid population growth both of the national populations and influx from other nations; the need to defend the accomplishments of Gulf states and their modernization process with

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respect to the physical, economic, and social environments; and the acknowledgement that there is much to be gained by participating in the next energy revolution which remains at the core of modern economic growth.

More important, there has been a tacit acknowledgement that with the climate crisis rapidly worsening, fossil fuels might in the near future be required to remain underground.22 This kind of development would mean that current producers must preserve whatever market share they now have and/or try to increase it in the near-term, and ensure that, as experts in energy, they are prepared and actively engaged in the transition that has already begun.

More specifically, as underscored

by Dr. Kishan Khoday, team leader in the Arab Region for Climate Change, Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience at the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), “In countries which now may be exporting two-thirds of their production and using only a third locally, this might flip by 2030, affecting their development model.”23 In

There has been a tacit acknowledgement that with the climate crisis rapidly worsening, fossil fuels might in the near future be required to remain underground.This kind of development would mean that current producers must preserve whatever market share they now have and/or try to increase it in the near-term, and ensure that, as experts in energy, they are prepared and actively engaged in the transition that has already begun.

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fact, statistics comparing the increasing rates of consumption of fossil fuels between India and Saudi Arabia since 1973 are telling. India (population, 1.2 billion) increased consumption by 1.2 million barrels per day (mbd) while Saudi Arabia (a country of under 30 million people) showed an increase of 1.3 mbd.24 Behind GCC logic, therefore, there is a clear rationale according to which diversification addresses issues of security and economic imperatives.

The UAE, for example, has tripled in population since 1995 and continues to grow. As a result, this puts increased pressure on the supply of energy and water. Because of this pressure, the UAE not only has strategically decided to diversify its energy mix, but also to increase efficiency and make use of the best available technologies in its oil and gas sectors.

“Ensuring the sustainability of energy resources means ensuring the sustainability of the country’s growth,” said Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, Vice President and Ruler of Dubai, adding that “those who don’t think about energy aren’t thinking about the future.”25 Moreover, as cities like Dubai and Doha are emerging as finance centers for South-South cooperation, climate action and in particular investment in renewables becomes an important avenue for economic and political cooperation.

The rapid increase in energy consumption in the Gulf is not only due to population increase and growing economic activity. It is also a product of generous energy subsidies that are increasingly troubling the governments in the region because they are considered an integral part of the social contract between the kingdoms and their publics. Phasing out gasoline subsidies was the easiest and necessary

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first step. In 2014, for instance, the UAE spent USD 1.7bn on petrol subsidies. By August 2015, reforms had already taken place. Natural gas subsidies reached USD 11.6bn, close to 3% of GDP, in 2014 according to figures from the IMF. Furthermore, electricity subsidies reached USD 3.6bn in 2014.26 With oil prices hovering around the USD 50/barrel markdown from a USD 100 high, it became more urgent for the Gulf countries to balance their budgets, find ways of cutting costs, and push more strenuously for economic diversification. Traditionally, attempts at subsidy cuts have first been applied to expatriates to minimize protests from its citizens. This is particularly true with respect to electricity and water pricing, which represent the bulk of the subsidy program. Given the climate of intense heat and the lack of water resources, continual and ever-increasing desalination is required to cover water usage in the Gulf. According to export.gov, in the UAE where drinking water is desalinated, “desalinization capacity is expected to increase steadily over the next few years, contributing 96.5% of all water produced by 2019, according to figures released by BMI 2015 industry reports. By 2019, total production is expected to reach 2.19 bn cubic meters of water (up 205 mn on 2015 production projections).”27 The Abu Dhabi Water and Electricity Company, moreover, predicts that by 2030 the peak water demand will be 1,362 million gallons daily.28 The costs of desalination according to a Forbes article is estimated at around USD 3 billion/year, which is why the emirate of Sharjah, for example, has been experimenting with technologies that will help water authorities better monitor consumption patterns, help reduce waste, and identify anomalies.29

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E S S A Y The UAE is playing catch-up.

The Emirates, like other countries in the Gulf, experienced an urban and real estate boom, but largely bypassed issues of energy efficiency and region-and climatespecific engineering solutions.

They have created cities that favor cars and provide little shade for pedestrians, and they have used building materials that are energy demanding.

Powering desalination plants with renewables is also a top priority for the UAE government. More specifically, Masdar in 2015 awarded a contract “to four water technology companies: Spain’s Abengoa and Degrémont, France’s Veolia, and U.S.’ Trevi Systems to build four small-scale desalination plants, designed to test solar energydesalination processes.”30 The construction is taking place near the Abu Dhabi border with Dubai, and the government is assessing the effectiveness of the endeavor.

According to the Water Resources Management Strategy of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi 2014-2018, prepared in 2009, there are three main reasons for the increase in water consumption, which is projected to double by 2030: population growth, economic development, and changes in lifestyle. These factors have raised the demand for water not only for irrigation (agriculture continues to rank as the emirate’s number one consumer) but also human consumption and industrial processes.31

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The UAE uses predominantly groundwater in agriculture, as it is of lower quality, brackish, and ill-suited for human consumption. However, the extensive pumping of groundwater for cultivation has reduced water supplies to dangerous levels, and already the UAE is re-injecting treated wastewater back into the aquifers to avoid their collapse. Desalination for drinking water, moreover, is not only energy intensive, but powered by fossil fuels. There too the UAE is looking to use solar and nuclear energy to support water production.32 The UAE’s commitment to reduced energy consumption cannot be denied.

Under forward-thinking leadership, the country is making these announcements a reality. This is why, for example, the headquarters of IRENA, the International Renewable Energy Agency, were wooed by the UAE and are today housed in Abu Dhabi, and the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology was set-up to help design, create, and deploy new renewable technologies and more sustainable living spaces.

In part, however, what the UAE is doing is playing catch-up. The Emirates, like other countries in the Gulf, experienced an urban and real estate boom, but largely circumvented issues of energy efficiency and region-and climate-specific engineering solutions.

They have created cities that favor cars and provide little shade for pedestrians, and they have used building materials that are energy demanding. All current interventions, such as the introduction of the Pearl Building Rating System (PBRS) for sustainable buildings,33 are now designed to retrofit and to correct omissions in their initial conceptualization. They are also aimed at increasing sustainability. Yet, sustainability in the modern age presupposes the continua-

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tion of high quality living and economic growth, with the simultaneous protection of the planet’s natural systems and ecological balance.34 UAE policies reflect today’s thinking about life in the Anthropocene and are in line with more widely known and accepted practices of mitigation and adaptation. Ambitious to a certain degree, the hope is that they become more swiftly deployed as well as more daring. Nonetheless, however much the UAE prepares for the challenges ahead, solutions to the climate crisis remain global in scope. Moreover, policy formulations leave unacknowledged one of the most pressing questions about transformations in the Anthropocene: namely, whether or not some nations in the end will need to come to terms with loss and retreat,35 regardless of how wealthy they are at the moment. As Oran R. Young observes, “In seeking to understand (and modulate) these complex and uncertain coupled systems, we need to move beyond conventional notions of risk, stability, and control, and instead shift our attention to the dynamics of resilience, vulnerability, and adaptability. We need to begin to tie our analysis of adaptability, resilience, and vulnerability in biophysical systems to an understanding of these same features in social and economic systems.”36 This lurking question that begs for a particularly complex answer recognizes that in the Anthropocene, human activity has planetary impacts of a scale and magnitude never before experienced. Change is now taking place at a system’s planetary level “not only through accumulation but also through the accelerating emergence of systemic symptoms of high magnitude and notable simultaneity and synchronicity.”37 The human footprint is changing

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the face of the planet, in terms of land usage, air and water pollution as well as the unprecedented rate of extraction of non-renewable resources. Entire ecosystems are now being altered forever on both land and sea to include large-scale planetary processes and systems such as the global climate. The acceptance that human agency has been instrumental in causing these planetary changes is accompanied by the narrative that it must now play a key role in determining the future.

The magnitude of the transformation is such that it is more often than not accompanied by doomsday, apocalyptic scenarios of uninhabitable lands, mass migrations of climate refugees, retreat, and irreparable loss. In 2015, Pal and Eltahir published their famous letter in Nature Climate Change, raising worries about human adaptability to new high temperatures in particular parts of the globe, such as the Middle East.

A human body may be able to adapt to extremes of dry-bulb temperature (commonly referred to as simply temperature) through perspiration and associated evaporative cooling provided that the wet-bulb temperature (a combined measure of temperature and humidity or degree of ‘mugginess’) remains below a threshold of 35 °C…. This threshold defines a limit of survivability for a fit human under well-ventilated outdoor conditions and is lower for most people. We project using an ensemble of high-resolution regional climate model simulations that extremes of wet-bulb temperature in the region around the Arabian Gulf are likely to approach and exceed this critical threshold.38

The scientists did, of course, link their models to the assumption of business-as-usual practices and in the

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E S S A Y absence of mitigation efforts. While this constitutes a noteworthy caveat to their predictions, the ongoing situation even post-COP21 is that much of the world still hesitates to invest in large-scale climate-driven innovations, distracted by numerous other concerns as well as what seem like daunting present financial costs to offset even steeper ones in the future. The U.S. pullout from the Paris agreement after the election of Donald Trump dealt a serious blow to international efforts. Although other industrial nations have vowed to honor their signatures and redouble their efforts with or without the United States, the fact remains that the climate crisis requires everyone to be onboard for a viable and more equitable solution. Global political instability, terrorism, economic concerns, geopolitical shifts and realignments are just some of the other daily realities that distract governments from the Earth’s greatest challenge. In other words, the climate crisis continues unabated.

Not surprisingly, doomsday narratives—however realistic—face strong opposition both on a “factual” level but also as a critique to the sensationalization of the climate crisis that produces paralyzing fear. The argument is that humanity needs both hope and a strong belief in its own agency to become a steward of the planet.39 In Time magazine, Elthahir and Pal’s predictions for the Gulf area in 2015 generated the headline, “These Cities May Soon Be Uninhabitable Thanks to Climate Change,”40 and Fox News declared, “Could Worsening Heat Make the Persian Gulf Uninhabitable?”41 Eltahir had to issue an explanatory video statement indicating that the temperatures he referred to in his research would not occur on a daily basis.42 Moreover,

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access to air conditioning during these spikes of temperature could keep people living in cities of the Gulf safe for considerable stretches of time.

Warnings about the adverse impacts of human activities on the environment and even possible catastrophes have been issued repeatedly in the past: from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Kenneth Baldwin’s The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth, Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, and Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth to Pope Francis’ Laudato Si: On Caring for Our Common Home,43 and even the most current scientific report on climate change of fall 2017 prepared by American scientists for the U.S. government.44 David Wallace-Wells had to defend his recent article in the New Yorker—tellingly entitled “The Uninhabitable Earth”—by observing that his “purpose in writing the story wasn’t to survey the median scenario, it was to survey the worstcase scenarios, because I believed—and still believe—that the public does not appreciate the unlikely-but-still-possible dangers of climate change.”45 Some transformations are less palpable than others, and publics are not receptive to terrible news, especially of the kind that they cannot reverse.

The hope is that human ingenuity will allow for technological solutions that reverse the damage; carbon capture and storage, for example, has been touted as a promising such technology but is still far from having any kind of impact on the levels of carbon currently being emitted in the atmosphere. Are Gulf countries in denial of their particular vulnerability? Do they believe that the urban infrastructure they have created can provide a safe haven for their populations if they secure continuous and abundant energy? Will the Gulf survive

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as an urban fortress able to weather the impossibly harsh conditions of the near future?

There is no official position on this eventuality, nor could we honestly expect such public announcements.

However, countries like the UAE whose population is small (approximately 1.5 million Emiratis in a country of close to 10 million residents) are moving in the right direction. Through their push to create an educated, innovation-minded next generation that is open to world cultures, tolerant, and increasingly well travelled, they are ensuring that their people may survive as productive members in any other part of the world.

Already Emiratis are the only citizens of the Gulf who do not require a visa to travel in Europe’s Schengen area. Moreover, private individuals as well as UAE sovereign funds are strategically invested in Europe, most recently in the Balkans, especially

Serbia, as well as select countries in Asia and Latin America. Furthermore, the UAE is quickly strengthening and considerably expanding its ties in East Africa with port investments in Djibouti, Berbera, and Eritrea, and a number of investments in agricultural production in Ethiopia and elsewhere.46 While geostrategic concerns—among them, the regional rivalry with Iran—top the list of reasons for the current deepening of ties in a basin that has historically been vital to the Arabian Peninsula, one may also view this expansion as a way for the UAE to hedge its bets by taking a long-term view of developments. In the end, the UAE is adapting, mitigating, planning ahead, expanding its hinterland, and doing all that it can to provide its people with the tools necessary to weather one more sweeping transformation.

Sophia Kalantzakos is Global Distinguished Professor in Environmental Studies and Public Policy at New York University and is currently an affiliate at NYU Abu Dhabi. Her publications include China and the Geopolitics of Rare Earths and The EU, US, and China Tackling Climate Change: Policies and Alliances for the Anthropocene. Calling on her prior experience as a member of the Hellenic Parliament and Government Minister with substantial international experience in EU policies and NATO, she focuses on challenges that are reshaping international politics across the globe, such as cross-border mobility and forced migration, resource competition, and global environmental governance.

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E S S A Y Notes 1. “Selected Sayings by Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan—Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque Center,” accessed August 16, 2017, http://www.szgmc.ae/en/selected-sayings-bysheikh-zayed-al-nahyan.

2. Munīf, Abdelrahman, Cities of Salt, trans. Peter Theroux (London: Vintage, 1994), 1.

3. Jürgen Scheffran et al., Climate Change, Human Security and Violent Conflict: Challenges for Societal Stability (Berlin: Springer Science & Business Media, 2012), esp. 387-389.

4. “Economic Prospects and Policy Challenges for the GCC Countries” (Riyadh, Saudi Arabia: International Monetary Fund), accessed August 17, 2017, https://www.imf.org/external/np/pp/eng/2016/102616b.pdf.

5. “Saudi Arabia to Build Entertainment City South of Riyadh,” The National, accessed August 21, 2017, https://www.thenational.ae/business/travel-and-tourism/saudi-arabia-tobuild-entertainment-city-south-of-riyadh-1.34185; “Saudi Arabia Plans Mega Red Sea Tourism Project,” The National, accessed August 21, 2017, https://www.thenational.ae/business/ travel-and-tourism/saudi-arabia-plans-mega-red-sea-tourism-project-1.615973.

6. “Economic Prospects and Policy Challenges for the GCC Countries.”

7. “UAE Energy Plan Aims to Cut CO2 Emissions 70% by 2020,” The National, accessed August 6, 2017, https://www.thenational.ae/uae/uae-energy-plan-aims-to-cut-co2-emissions-70-by-2020-1.51582.

8. Conversion rate August 11, 2017.

9. “Saudi Seeks 10% Renewable Energy in Six Years: Minister,” accessed August 16, 2017, https://phys.org/news/2017-04-saudi-renewable-energy-years-minister.html.

10.“Qatar’s Energy Sector Focused on Renewable Energy: Al Sada,” accessed August 16, 2017, /article/29/03/2017/Qatar-s-energy-sector-focussed-on-renewable-energy-Al-Sada.

11. “REN21. 2017. Renewables 2017 Global Status Report” (Paris: REN21 Secretariat), accessed June 25, 2017, http://www.ren21.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/17-8399_ GSR_2017_Full_Report_0621_Opt.pdf.

12. “REN21. 2017. Renewables 2017 Global Status Report,” 21.

13. “CO2 Emissions (Kt) | Data,” accessed November 4, 2017, https://data.worldbank. org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.KT?locations=1A. 14. “CO2 Emissions (Kt) | Data-UAE,” accessed November 4, 2017, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.KT?locations=1A-AE. 15. “Where Countries Stand on Copenhagen,” BBC News, December 4, 2009, http://news. bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8345343.stm.

16. “Will OPEC Lose from the Kyoto Protocol?,” Energy Policy 32, no. 18 (December 1, 2004): 2077–88, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0301-4215(03)00183-6.

17. Jon Barnett, “The Geopolitics of Climate Change,” Geography Compass 1, no. 6 (November 1, 2007): 1361–75, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2007.00066.x.

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18. The group of Like Minded Countries in the climate negotiations include: Algeria, Bangladesh, Bolivia, China, Cuba, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, India, Indonesia, Iran, Jordan, Kuwait, Malaysia, Mali, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela, and Vietnam.

19. Kathryn Ann Hochstetler, “The G-77, BASIC, and Global Climate Governance: A New Era in Multilateral Environmental Negotiations,” Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional 55, no. SPE (2012): 53–69, https://doi.org/10.1590/S0034-73292012000300004.

20. Deutsche Welle (www.dw.com), “Led by Saudi Arabia, Persian Gulf Oil Countries Resist Tough Climate Agreement | DW Environment | DW | 03.09.2015,” DW.COM, accessed August 13, 2017, http://www.dw.com/en/led-by-saudi-arabia-persian-gulf-oil-countries-resist-toughclimate-agreement/a-18691721.

21. Neil Partrick, Saudi Arabian Foreign Policy: Conflict and Cooperation in Uncertain Times (London: I.B.Tauris, 2016), 42. Saudi Arabia is also faced with fulfilling the role of swing producer that helps to stabilize markets whenever necessary. In addition to its internal consumption, Saudi Arabia has the stability of the MENA region to consider in turbulent times.

22. Bill McKibben, “Recalculating the Climate Math,” The New Republic, September 22, 2016, https://newrepublic.com/article/136987/recalculating-climate-math; Damian Carrington, “Leave Fossil Fuels Buried to Prevent Climate Change, Study Urges,” The Guardian, January 7, 2015, sec.

Environment, http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jan/07/much-worlds-fossilfuel-reserve-must-stay-buried-prevent-climate-change-study-says; Christophe McGlade and Paul Ekins, “The Geographical Distribution of Fossil Fuels Unused When Limiting Global Warming to 2 °C,” Nature 517, no. 7533 (January 8, 2015): 187–90, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14016.

23. Ayswarya Murthy, “GCC’s Place in Climate Negotiations,” Earth Journalism Network, accessed August 4, 2017, http://earthjournalism.net/stories/gcc2019s-place-in-climate-negotiations.

24. Partrick, Saudi Arabian Foreign Policy.

25. “UAE Energy Plan Aims to Cut CO2 Emissions 70% by 2020.”

26. “Government to Launch Further Subsidy Cuts,” accessed August 17, 2017, http://country. eiu.com/article.aspx?articleid=353900019.

27. “United Arab Emirates—Water | Export.gov,” accessed August 17, 2017, https://www. export.gov/article?id=United-Arab-Emirates-Water.

28. “Abu Dhabi Water & Electricity Authority—ADWEA,” accessed August 17, 2017, http:// www.adwea.ae/en/home.aspx#water.

29. Sasha Banks-Louie, “OracleVoice: UAE To Save Water By The Millions Of Gallons,” Forbes, accessed August 17, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/oracle/2017/07/27/uae-to-save-waterby-the-millions-of-gallons.

30. “United Arab Emirates—Water | Export.gov.”

31. “Executive-Summary-of-The-Water-Resources-Management-Strategy-for-the-Emirateof-Abu-Dhabi-2014-2018” (Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates: Government of Abu Dhabi, 2014), 2014-2018, https://www.ead.ae/Documents/PDF-Files/Executive-Summary-of-The-Water-Resources-Management-Strategy-for-the-Emirate-of-Abu-Dhabi-2014-2018-Eng.pdf.

32. Mousa S. Mohsen et al., “Energy Options for Water Desalination in UAE,” Procedia Computer Science 83 (2016): 894–901, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2016.04.181.

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E S S A Y 33. “Department of Urban Planning and Municipalities—Pearl Community Rating System,” Department of Urban Planning and Municipalities, accessed December 26, 2017, https://www. upc.gov.ae:443/en/en/Estidama/Pearl Rating System/Pearl Community Rating System.

34. “About : Gulf Sustainable Urbanism,” accessed August 20, 2017, http://gulfurbanism. com/menu/about/.

35. Orrin H. Pilkey, Linda Pilkey-Jarvis, and Keith C. Pilkey, Retreat from a Rising Sea: Hard Choices in an Age of Climate Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 129.

36. Oran R. Young et al., “The Globalization of Socio-Ecological Systems: An Agenda for Scientific Research,” Global Environmental Change, 16, no. 3 (August 1, 2006): 304–16, https://doi. org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2006.03.004.

37. Will Steffen et al., “The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration,” The Anthropocene Review, January 16, 2015, 2053019614564785, doi:10.1177/2053019614564785; Xuemei Bai et al., “Plausible and Desirable Futures in the Anthropocene: A New Research Agenda,” Global Environmental Change 39 (July 1, 2016): 351–62, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2015.09.017.

38. Jeremy S. Pal and Elfatih A. B. Eltahir, “Future Temperature in Southwest Asia Projected to Exceed a Threshold for Human Adaptability,” Nature Climate Change 6, no. 2 (February 2016): 197–200, https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2833.

39. Eric Holthaus, “No, Climate Change Won’t Make the Persian Gulf ‘Uninhabitable,’” Slate, October 27, 2015, http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2015/10/27/climate_change_heat_ waves_won_t_make_persian_gulf_uninhabitable.html.

40. Justin Worland, “These Cities May Soon Be Unlivable Thanks to Climate Change,” Time, accessed August 19, 2017, http://time.com/4087092/climate-change-heat-wave/.

41. Michael Casey, “Could Worsening Heat Make the Persian Gulf Uninhabitable?” Fox News, (October 26, 2015), http://www.foxnews.com/science/2015/10/26/could-worsening-heat-makepersian-gulf-uninhabitable.html.

42. Holthaus, “No, Climate Change Won’t Make the Persian Gulf ‘Uninhabitable.’”

43. Pope Francis, Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality: On Care for Our Common Home (Melville House, 2015).

44. Michael D. Shear and Brad Plumer, “Climate Report Could Force Trump to Choose Between Science and His Base,” The New York Times, August 8, 2017, sec. Politics, https://www. nytimes.com/2017/08/08/us/politics/climate-trump-scientists-supporters.html.

45. David Wallace-Wells, “The Uninhabitable Earth,” Daily Intelligencer, July 9, 2017, http:// nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html; Chris Mooney, “Scientists Challenge Magazine Story about ‘uninhabitable Earth,’” Washington Post, July 12, 2017, sec. Energy and Environment, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/07/12/scientists-challenge-magazine-story-about-uninhabitable-earth/.

46. Asteris Huliaras and Sophia Kalantzakos, “The Gulf States and the Horn of Africa: A New Hinterland?” Middle East Policy 24, no. 4 (Winter 2017): 63-73.

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E S S A Y

WEATHER WORLDS OF THE ANTHROPOCENE AND THE END OF CLIMATE MIKE HULME One mid-October afternoon last year, the mid-day skies over Britain turned an eerie shade of orange, bedimming the atmosphere, altering moods and unsettling the people’s sense of normality. #apocalypse started trending on Twitter and newspaper headlines spoke of “Britain’s Martian sky” and “The day Britain’s sky turned orange.” Journalists alluded to times past when ‘strange weather events’ were regarded as omens of doom but now, they claimed, in 2017 “unusual weather is no longer the sign of doom to come, it is the doom itself.”1

I

nterpretations of extreme and unusual weather have always reflected human fears of a world unravelling. People have sought, and continue to seek, comforting explanations of the sky’s unusual appearance— explanations that these days tend to be scientific—reassuring them that such apparitions are not portentous of fearful events yet to come. The aforementioned orange sky could therefore be explained as the result of the gale-force winds of the decaying Atlantic hurricane Ophelia entraining Saharan dust particles and dispersing them high above the cloudy

atmosphere of Britain. Yet this episode, and the public reaction to it, spoke of a wider unease about today’s climate and whether its supposedly normal and reassuringly patterned behavior can be relied upon any longer. Unusual weather—”weird weather” in popular parlance—nowadays acts as an allegory for a world disturbed and set loose from stable, comforting and predictable foundations. “Weird” or “freakish” weathers are now publicly interrogated to reveal the deeper political, cultural or moral meanings of climate change. That the weather is no longer perceived as “nor-

E S S A Y mal” is symptomatic of the realization that humans have irretrievably altered their world, their weather-worlds as much as their altered bodies, cities, ecosystems, landscapes and oceans. Red October skies, and any number of other unsettling atmospheric manifestations, are somehow portentous of the new climates of the Anthropocene, the epoch of humans.

In this essay,2 I interrogate this phenomenon and argue that there is something indeed changing in the human imagination. Climate is an idea inherited by modernity from the deeper past. It is an idea we have grown up with and to which we have become accustomed. For the most part it has served us well, but perhaps no longer. In the Anthropocene the future of climate is uncertain. By this I do not mean that future weather is necessarily uncertain; the weather of the Anthropocene will largely be what we make it to be. Rather, I mean that in the Anthropocene the accustomed psychological function of the idea of climate will disintegrate, irrespective of how the weather actually turns out.

The Idea of Climate To develop this argument it is first necessary to do some work to understand the idea of climate itself.

Climate is an ancient idea, traceable over nearly three millennia of cultural history. Contrary to contemporary scientific definitions of climate as “a statistical ensemble of thirty years of weather” or “a generalized description of the state and dynamics of the physical planetary system,” I approach climate as “an idea which mediates between the human experience of weather and cultural ways of living that are animated by that experience.”3 This idea of climate makes it

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possible for humans to live culturally with their weather. 4 It transforms the raw perception of a turbulent and untamed atmosphere—and the associated phenomena we call weather—into recognizable and expected patterns of atmospheric behavior and performance. Winter and summer, freeze and thaw cycles, monsoons, heatwave or hurricane seasons, rhythms of drought and flood, El Niño and La Niña… these are some of the attributes of climates which, around the world, provide a scaffold for human existence and offer the possibility of fruitful human action.

Although not fully predictable, these patterned elements of climate enable expectations of normal weather to be constructed. This then allows recognition of the abnormal. To say that today is “exceptionally warm for the time of year” or that “we haven’t seen much rain this spring” are claims that are only possible because of the normalizing idea of climate.

Climate becomes a powerful way of ordering the world.

People living in places develop their sense of climate through lifelong experience of how their weather behaves, often mediated through memorialized artefacts in the landscape or through oral histories. This tacit sense of “what weather happens here” is established even before people listen to the pronouncements of the forecaster or see the statistics of the climate scientist. It relies on personal knowledge before it becomes reified through scientific knowledge. 5 The artist/anthropologist Roni Horn reveals this tacit weather sense-making through her work amongst Icelandic citizens, Weather Reports You. 6 Fishers, farmers, towndwellers, office-workers, young and old alike, are all finely attuned

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Winter and summer, freeze and thaw cycles, monsoons, heatwave or hurricane seasons, rhythms of drought and flood, El Niño and La Niña… these are some of the attributes of climates which, around the world, provide a scaffold for human existence and offer the possibility of fruitful human action. Although not fully predictable, these patterned elements of climate enable expectations of normal weather to be constructed. This then allows recognition of the abnormal. To say that today is “exceptionally warm for the time of year” or that “we haven’t seen much rain this spring” are claims that are only possible because of the normalizing idea of climate. Climate becomes a powerful way of ordering the world. bodily and emotionally to their local weather. And each, in their different way, offer a personal, cultured account of their climate, confirming the contention of phenomenologist Julien Knebusch that “climate refers to a cultural relationship established progressively between human beings and weather.” 7 This is one of the reasons why moving from one region or country to another is a disorienting experience. In coming to terms with unfamiliar weather, migrants experience an ex-situ change in their climate—a disruption to their expectations of atmospheric normality—to which they have to accommodate bodily, materially and psychologically. 8 The idea of climate and its realization in familiar places, built up over time, offers people a sense of security and stability, a reassurance that the atmosphere’s vicissitudes are limited and contained. Our sense of climate assures us that the weather can transgress only so far; there are certain boundaries within which it will, or at least should, remain. For the human imagination the idea of climate, one might say, puts weather in its place.

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As historian of science Lorraine Daston explains, “without well-founded expectations [such as climate], the world of causes and promises falls apart.” 9 Or, to quote sociologist Nico Stehr, we “trust in climate.”10 The idea of climate offers the possibility of a stable psychological life and of meaningful human action in the world. Put simply, climate allows humans to live culturally with their weather.

Making the Weather Yet this is not quite the whole story. It suggests too clean a separation between weather and people. To understand what is missing we need to shift attention away from the idea of climate for a moment and think more deeply about the weather itself; or, more specifically, to think about the inter-penetration of weather and people.

Human cultures have often thought of the weather as the “domain of the gods.”11 The performance of the atmosphere, unlike that of the land, has traditionally been thought of as beyond human reach. The weather is the subject of divine fiat and people are the

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E S S A Y recipients of both blessings and curses delivered through the skies. They have to make of these gifts of fate what they will. But set against this notion of the weather as immune from human agency is a long history of human actions altering the weather, of people in effect “cultivating” the skies. Human capabilities to shape and re-make their environments have gradually extended from the forests, land and seas so that they now also encompass the atmosphere.

This “weather cultivation” in the past commonly occurred on microscales, modifying local weather through tree-planting or irrigation. It has occurred both inadvertently and advertently. Weather cultivation has been undertaken often modestly and pragmatically but also, on occasions, with hubristic economic or military intent.12 And increasingly it has emerged from human activities operating across larger scales. These weather modification practices have included, inter alia, animal domesticating, forest clearing, swamp draining, dam building, city building, roof-whitening, fire burning, desert irrigating, cannon-firing, cloud seeding, coal burning, and so on. The frequency and scale of these human practices have grown alongside the rise of industrial capitalism and complex institutional structures. It has therefore become less and less possible to claim unthinkingly that all adverse weather is “an act of God.”13 Rather than seeing the atmosphere as the domain of the gods, the weather must increasingly be understood as an extension of the human. People and their cultural artefacts and practices become weathered, yes; people continually find new ways of living with their weather and its dangers and bounties. But, conversely, the weather becomes cultivated; it increas-

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ingly bears the imprints of human cultural activity often reflecting powerful political, economic and technological interests.

This observation parallels what can be seen on the land when we look carefully. Virtually all ecosystems on the planet, and increasing numbers of species within these systems, are now human-altered. As ecologist Chris Thomas argues in his book Inheritors of the Earth,14 humans are part of nature and so there can be nothing “unnatural” about these new ecological worlds being composed. With regard to ecology, he claims, we must embrace a natural dynamism in which humans are fully active. This is in contrast to “the conservation rationale… [which] is usually stated to be some combination of making the world more natural (which is fallacious) and restoring it to a state that resembles one that existed in the past (which is equally fallacious).”15 The comparison is clear. Just as it is impossible to re-set the biological world to its original trajectory, so too is it impossible to recover the weather of a humanly uninhabited planet. Just as there can be no natural baseline against which ecosystems can be evaluated normatively, so too are we losing any meaningful sense of natural weather which offers a normative benchmark. And just as human-mediated novel ecosystems are coming into being on the land, so too novel weather assemblages are emerging in the sky. Processes of both ecological and atmospheric modification have long been set in motion by human actions and these cannot be reversed.

This inter-penetration of weather and culture was creatively explored in Olafur Eliasson’s massive solar installation, The Weather Project, at London’s Tate Modern in 2003. In the Tate’s public gallery, the Turbine Hall, Eliasson

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Not even the weather remains immune from human touch, even if our designs on the atmosphere are always partial, often inadvertent, mostly poorly directed and frequently unjust. Eliasson is saying that there is no stand-point outside of the weather from which humans can stand and objectively observe, measure or manipulate the atmosphere. The sky is indelibly marked by human hand17 because we live inside the atmosphere and cannot do otherwise. For humans to live culturally with the weather is for the weather to be inescapably altered.

This growing recognition of human-shaped environments on land, sea and sky has given rise to the narrative of the AnthroAndrew Dunkley & Marcus Leith pocene, a proposed new epoch in which humans The Weather Project, mono-frequency light, foil, haze machine, mirror foil, scaffold. are active creators of their Installation view: Tate Modern, London, 2003. © Olafur Eliasson; Photo courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York. own surroundings. Human agency has become increasingly significreated an artificial sun and carefully cant, if not dominant, across all physical manufactured an atmosphere of fake processes and on multiple geographic weather in which visitors were invited and temporal scales.

Chris Thomas to “dwell.” Eliasson was claiming it is makes this point for ecosystems and not just the ecological world of which species.

There can be no return to humans are co-creators; it is the vaster untouched wilderness; ecosystems and space of the atmosphere itself which 16 species can only evolve going forward human activities are co-producing. from the present. We need to recognize What The Weather Project sought to this also for weather. There is no pospoint to in the confined atmosphere of sibility of reverting to weather assemthe Turbine Hall, namely that humans blages of the past, purified of human are unavoidably bound-up in the makinfluence. People are now integrally ing and experiencing of weather, is part of the new weather-worlds that are what is happening in the uncontained in-the-making. atmosphere of the world at large.

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E S S A Y Undermining the Cultural Value of Climate Given that this is so, we can begin to identify the challenges these new weather-worlds of the Anthropocene, and their corollary of novel climates, present us with. These challenges are not merely material: disrupted agricultural practices, inappropriately designed buildings, shifting economic fortunes. They are also cultural and psychological: the stabilizing idea of climate, which tames the arbitrariness of the restless atmosphere, can no longer offer the same assurances. It is this anxiety of an atmosphere becoming unfamiliar that gives rise to the vernacular narratives of climate chaos, weather weirding and a disordering of the natural world. These narratives are recognizable in both westernized and traditional cultures. And it seems merely to heighten the anxiety that this disordering can be traced back to human actions.

The historian Dipesh Chakrabarty describes this new predicament in his essay on the politics of climate change: A world with freakish weather, more storms, floods, droughts, and frequent extreme weather events cannot be beneficial to the rich who live today or to their descendants who will have to live on a much more unfriendly planet.18

The idea of climate acted in the past to banish from the human imagination the possibility of ‘freakish weather.’

What is the value of climate now when freakish weather invades our present and haunts our future? The idea of climate only offers psychological benefit when there is a degree of stability in some sub-set of conditions, whether these be atmospheric, economic, political or moral. When everything is

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changing, not least people’s weatherworlds, and no stable condition is possible—the situation to which the idea of the Anthropocene seeks to give expression—the cultural value of climate as a stabilizing idea is diminished.

One of the central claims of the Anthropocene is that change in the material conditions of the planet is now inescapable and perpetual. There is no normal, no set of conditions to which it is possible to return. This is not only because natural processes are continually changing material forms; such has been the case throughout the course of Earth’s deep history. It is now also because material forms are increasingly bound up with human processes of discovery, invention and improvisation.

In other words, changes in the material world now emerge from the irrepressible human technologies and practices which originate in the cultural imagination and the creative human impulse.

Whether it is human bodies, material technologies, urban ecologies or regional climates… nothing is now merely natural or gifted, other than existence itself.

The consequence of this is that climatic change—i.e., change that is defined by the adjective “climatic”—is losing any meaning as a distinct category. Changes occurring to the weather can no longer be isolated from changes occurring to human economies, technologies, societies and cultures. “Climate change” is simply a synecdoche, a short-hand for a manifestation of aggregated changes which are at one and the same time environmental, economic, technological, social and cultural. This is resonant with Timothy Morton’s idea of ‘hyperobjects,’ objects that are so massively distributed in time and space as to be impossible to place. Drawing on Morton’s idea, ecocritic Liz Boulton seeks to capture this

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sense of being inescapably immersed in a world recursively in the making: As though encased as a series of Russian dolls, humanity now finds itself ‘in’ the problem, not a neutral observer sitting outside it. “There is no exit,” Morton writes, comparing humans’ situation to waking up and realizing that one has been buried alive.19

One of the central claims of the Anthropocene is that change in the material conditions of the planet is now inescapable and perpetual.

There is no normal, no set of conditions to which it is possible to return. This is not only because natural processes are continually changing material forms; such has been the case throughout the course of Earth’s deep history. It is now also because material forms are increasingly bound up with human processes of discovery, invention and improvisation. In other words, changes in the material world now emerge from the irrepressible human technologies and practices which originate in the cultural imagination and the creative human impulse. Whether it is human bodies, material technologies, urban ecologies or regional climates… nothing is now merely natural or gifted, other than existence itself.

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People of the future will therefore have to learn to live without the idea of climate. At least learn to live without climate as an idea that brings order and stability to relationships between weather and human culture. Weatherworlds are continually in flux and so climate becomes a zombie idea20 (an idea which is apparently dead, but which continues to “live-on” through its intellectual and imaginative legacy).

Climate in the Anthropocene So let me reprise my argument thus far. Climate is an old idea that, for the most part, has served us well. It has offered people a way of navigating between, on the one hand, the human experience of an intensely dynamic atmosphere and the precarious weather it yields with its attendant insecurities and, on the other, the need to live in the world with some expectation of meteorological regularity and stability. Second, however, there has always been a degree of fiction to this idea of climatic stability; there has always been an underlying tension and imaginative unease about the integrity of climate. We have always projected our anxieties onto the weather. As Lucian Boia remarks: “The history of humanity is characterized by an endemic anxiety.… It is as if something or someone is remorselessly trying to sabotage the world’s driving force—and particularly its climate.”21 The fact is that people have never been fully separate from their weather, and the skies have never solely been the domain of the gods.

Increasingly, people have altered their weather-worlds, whether deliberately or accidentally, whether locally or at scale, whether mandated or not. And so, third, the reach of human agency has now so extended into the skies that

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E S S A Y in a new century, and in a proposed new epoch, this convenient fiction of a stable climate is unmasked and the full consequences now confront us.

Climates are changing “in front of our eyes”22 and the old re-assurances offered by the idea of climate no longer hold. Clive Hamilton puts it thus in the context of the Anthropocene: “The natural world inherited by modernity is gone and all the ideas that built on it now float on its memory.”23 In the fourth and final stage of my argument I therefore turn to think about the future of climate in the Anthropocene. Given my claim that all human cultures are weathered and that weather is increasingly cultivated, new and more culturally fruitful devices than the old stabilizing idea of “climate” will be needed to guide us.

The idea of the Anthropocene reveals the power humans now have24 of composing the future worlds in which future generations of humans and nonhumans will live. We may not wish it so, but so it is. This future composition will be a never-ending task. These worlds of manufactured nature consist not only of our bodies, robots, cities, species, or ecosystems. They now also extend to the atmosphere and include new weather-worlds that are in-themaking.

These new powers are not a license for any and all forms of weather-cultivation, any more than Thomas’s argument about human-altered biological worlds is that all forms of ecosystem novelty or re-wilding, species-making or de-extinction are ethical, wise or desirable. But he is exactly right in claiming that our aspiration cannot be to go backwards with respect to life and biodiversity on the land and in the ocean. Humans are deeply embedded in the evolutionary processes of

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life-making and these only proceed in one direction. Similarly in the skies.

The atmosphere cannot be “un-made”; its composition and functioning bear our marks and the weather is now and forever of human-making. It is for good reason that Tim Flannery named his best-selling book about the changes happening to the world’s climate The Weather Makers.25 The significance of this realization is that climate can no longer be thought about imaginatively, nor used normatively, as it was in the past. The idea of climate no longer carries the same reassuring guidance for acting in the world. Whatever the climates of the Holocene—and they were considerably more variable than is often assumed—they can no longer offer a normative guide to the climates of the Anthropocene. There is no baseline to which we can return; the equivalent for the atmosphere of re-wilding ecologies on land is not possible. Rather than being useful as an imaginative way of, first, separating weather from culture and, then, of stabilizing relationships between weather and culture, the idea of climate is now moot. In the Anthropocene the possibility of such stability is a chimera. Metaphorically speaking, the climate of the Anthropocene can only be climate-less. The state of being in “a climate” can no longer be attained. It therefore makes no sense to speak of climate, when the imaginative work performed by the idea of climate no longer has traction.

A corollary of this is that the invented notion of “global-mean temperature” offers a false and dangerous illusion of controllability in the Anthropocene. Global-mean temperature has emerged as the guiding index for putative global climate governance.

The limiting of global warming to no

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more than 2 degrees Celsius, or even 1.5, above the pre-industrial level, is the mantra which is now used to regulate economies, technologies and behaviors at all scales. But the climatic abstraction of “global-mean temperature” has little relationship with the multiple ways in which weathermodification occurs in a multitude of places and through cascades of mostly uncoordinated actions. It is wrong to believe that securing a particular global temperature, even were it to prove possible, is a means to re-secure the climate. One only has to examine the plans of the growing cadre of putative climate engineers to see this. Solar climate engineering seeks to deploy technologies—notably the seeding of the stratosphere with artificial particles to mimic the effect of explosive volcanic eruptions—to regulate the radiative fluxes of the planet. By so doing, it is claimed, global-mean temperature can be stabilized. Yet stratospheric aerosol injection is a brute-force method which, whilst seeking control of global temperature, will have uncontrollable effects on regional and local weather.26 So what imaginative resources are we left with to guide weather-shaping practices in the Anthropocene? My suggestion is that we use gardening as a metaphor for thinking about human attitudes towards weather-making.27 Applying this metaphor to the future of climate moves the emphasis away from impossible ambitions to re-secure climate through modernist projects of control. Instead it provokes thoughts of improvisation, of working with nature to fashion outcomes which are neither fully predictable nor fixed.

Holly Buck explains the value of such thinking in relation to the Anthropocene:

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The garden is a site through which we can examine connection and care in practice. It is a powerfully enchanting trope: the linguistic enchantment of the garden of love, the walled garden, the secret garden, and so on. The Anthropocene provokes the question of scale … large-scale industrial monocropped landscapes are a referent for Anthropocene horror tales; planetary gardening imagines something quite different.28

Gardeners require virtues of humility, cheerfulness and attentiveness as they go about their work.29 Gardens are of course a joint product of human imagination and skill, working with and through processes of soil conditioning, photosynthesis and the weather. In her relationship with nature, a gardener is neither in control nor powerless. There is a mutuality in which—at least in the best gardens—human vision and virtuous intention can find expression, alongside a celebration of the freedoms possessed by plants, animal life and soil. The battle against weeds is relentless and without end, but is a battle freely engaged in by the gardener and is pursued resolutely.

The focus is as much on the benefits internal to the practice of gardening as it is on the outcome itself, or the benefits of the outcome.30 Gardening becomes a metaphor for caring and making, mindfully and responsibly.

If we apply this metaphor to the atmosphere then, just as the garden reflects the virtues of the gardener, so we see that the weather-worlds of the Anthropocene will come increasingly to reflect the virtues, or vices, of the Anthropos. To an extent greater than ever before, the weather of the Anthropocene will come to reflect the moral standing of humanity. Our moral triumphs and failures on earth—the struggles between corruption and justice, greed and generosity, ignorance and ingenuity, hubris and humility—will be

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E S S A Y reflected in the sky. Forrest Clingermann and colleagues illustrate this thinking in terms of the desired character traits of the putative climate engineers.31 These authors draw upon religious traditions to identify and apply the virtues of responsibility, humility and justice to climate engineering. If practiced, they argue, these virtues will engage ethicists, citizens and faith communities in the design of the work being undertaken.

The metaphor of gardening also highlights a further, somewhat paradoxical, point: the gardener always recognizes the limits of her cultivating and coaxing powers. So too in the skies will we need to recognize the limits of weather cultivation in the Anthropocene. There will always remain a powerful “otherness” to the weather.32 Just as past weather was never fully tamed, whether by supplication to the gods or through the protec-

tive idea of a stable climate, neither will future weather be fully domesticated by humans’ cultivating powers. To a substantial degree it will always exceed attempts at its cultivation, just as does the soil, the ocean or indeed the human body.

Yet, just as we toil on the land and in the ocean and struggle to make them both yield to human needs, wants and values, so too are we now committed to toiling in the sky. Weather in the Anthropocene will forever be in-the-making, an unending activity which will require constant reflection and adjustment. Just like a tended garden.

Cultivating the weather will be a precarious and morally demanding task, one that will require the courage to dispense with the stabilizing idea of climate. But it is a task that now—for good or ill— humanity cannot shirk.

Mike Hulme is Professor of Human Geography in the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge. His work explores the idea of climate change using historical, cultural and scientific analyses, and the way climate change is deployed in public and political discourse. His research interests are therefore concerned with representations of climate change in history, culture and the media; with the relationship between climate and society, including adaptation; with how knowledge of climate change is constructed; and with the interactions between climate change knowledge and policy.

Most recently, Hulme was Head of the Department of Geography at King’s College London (2013-2017), and before then faculty at the University of East Anglia in the School of Environmental Sciences (1988-2013). During this time, he was a member of the Climatic Research Unit and then the founding Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.

For more on Professor Hulme, including his publications and his personal statement about climate change, see https://mikehulme.org/ and his ORCID page, http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1273-7662. Thomson Reuters reports Mike Hulme as the 10th most cited author in the world in the field of climate change, between 1999 and 2009 (ScienceWatch, Nov/Dec 2009).

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Notes 1. “Apocalypse Now—Why Orange Skies Have Become the New Abnormal,” New Statesman, October 17, 2017, https://www.newstatesman.com/print/node/310827.

2. Parts of this essay are an elaboration on the arguments I first made in Chapter 12, “The future of climate,” in my book Weathered: Cultures of Climate (London: SAGE, 2016).

3. “Climate and Its Changes: A Cultural Appraisal,” GEO: Geography and Environment 2, no. 1, (2015): 1-11, esp. 3, doi: 10.1002/geo2.5.

4. This is a claim I demonstrate historically and culturally in Weathered: Cultures of Climate.

5. Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 464.

6. Roni Horn, Weather Reports You (Göttingen: Artangel/Steidl, 2007).

7. Julien Knebusch, “Art and Climate (Change) Perception: Outline of a Phenomenology of Climate Change,” in Sustainability: A New Frontier For the Arts and Cultures, eds. Sacha Kagan and Volker Kirchberg (Frankfurt: Verlag für Akademische Schriften, 2008), 242-262, esp. 246.

8. Yolande Strengers, and Cecily Maller, “Adapting To ‘Extreme’ Weather: Mobile Practice Memories of Keeping Warm and Cool as a Climate Change Adaptation Strategy,” Environment & Planning (A) 49, no. 6, (2017): 1432-1450.

9. Lorraine Daston, “The World in Order,” in Without Nature? A New Condition for Theology, eds. David Albertson and Cabell King (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 15-34, esp. 32.

10. Nico Stehr,“Trust and Climate,”Climate Research 8, no. 3, (1997): 163-169.

11. Simon D. Donner, “Domain of the Gods: An Editorial Essay,”Climatic Change 85, no.

3-4, (2017): 231-236.

12. See Jim Fleming’s account of human ambitions for climate control in Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). Also see Mike Hulme, “Re-designing Climate,” chap. 10, in Weathered.

13. Note the curious asymmetry that beneficial weather is not institutionally inscribed also as “an act of God.” God is never thanked, only cursed.

14. Chris D. Thomas, Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature is Thriving in an Age of Extinction (London: Allen Lane, 2017).

15. Thomas, ibid, 240.

16. Louis Hornby, “Appropriating the Weather: Olafur Eliasson and Climate Control,” Environmental Humanities 9, no. 1, (2017): 60-83.

17. Bronislaw Szerszynski, “Reading and Writing the Weather: Climate Technics and the Moment of Responsibility,” Theory, Culture and Society 27, no. 2-3, (2010): 9-30.

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E S S A Y 18. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Politics of Climate Change is More Than the Politics of Capitalism.” Theory, Culture & Society 34, no. 2-3, (2017): 25-37, esp. 30.

19. Elizabeth Boulton, “Climate Change as a ‘Hyperobject’: A Critical Review of Timothy Morton’s Reframing Narrative,” WIREs: Climate Change 7, no. 5, (2016): 772-785, esp. 777.

20. See Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and its Social and Political Consequences (London: Sage, 2001).

21. Lucian Boia, The Weather in the Imagination (London: Reaktion Books, 2005), 149.

22. For the significance of this claim, see Peter Rudiak-Gould, “We Have Seen It With Our Own Eyes: Why We Disagree About Climate Change Visibility,” Weather, Climate & Society 5, no. 2, (2013): 120-132.

23. Clive Hamilton, Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), 38.

24. Note: this power is not evenly distributed, nor collectively governed.

25. Tim Flannery, The Weather Makers: How Man is Changing the Climate and What it Means for Life on Earth (London: Penguin Books, 2006).

26. These arguments are explored in my book Can Science Fix Climate Change? A Case Against Climate Engineering (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014).

27. Here I draw explicitly on Chapter 12, “The Future of Climate,” in Weathered.

28. Holly J. Buck, “On the Possibilities of a Charming Anthropocene,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 105, no. 2, (2015): 369-377, esp. 374.

29. Marcello Di Paola, “Virtues for the Anthropocene,” Environmental Values 24, no. 2, (2015): 183-207.

30. Ibid.

31. Forrest Clingermann, et al., “Character and Religion in Climate Engineering,” Issues in Science and Technology 34, no. 1, (Fall 2017): 25-28.

32. Nigel Clark, Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet (London: SAGE, 2011).

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E S S A Y

WILDLIFE AND HUMANITY IN THE ANTHROPOCENE— Reflections from South Africa JANE CARRUTHERS The proper study of mankind is man, but when one regards the elephant, one wonders.

—Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, 1734

Alexandre Chambon

T

he notion of the Anthropocene has thus far resonated in the developed rather than the developing world. Like comparable nations in the Global South, the Anthropocene has an extremely low profile in South Africa, although climate change—one of its critically

important emanations—is somewhat better known and publicized.1 Grabbing the daily headlines are matters relating to poverty, crime, social and political violence, the provision of basic services, education and employment for a population of whom 70% are under the age of 35, not the Anthropocene.

E S S A Y Part of the challenge of presenting the Anthropocene to a public such as South Africa’s is the difficulty of making it visible to those for whom science, learning and scholarly critique are not established ways of thinking. However, some of the limited literature about the Anthropocene that circulates in southern Africa relates to issues around biodiversity conservation in protected areas (such as national parks). In these circles of environmental specialists, the issue of the African elephant Loxodonta africana looms large. The aim of this essay is to frame changes in environmental ethics and conservation biology in twentieth-century South Africa within an Anthropocene paradigm by way of a case study in elephant management, including some concluding observations on the rhinoceros.

The power of humanity over ecological functions has accelerated since the start of the modern era that is characterised by technology development and population growth. It has been during this period that extinction rates of other biota have increased.2 Certainly, since the mid-nineteenth century, with effective weapons and a globalizing market—now referred to as the technosphere and the capitalocene3—humans have either destroyed or manipulated many wildlife species in Africa, including elephants.

Elephants, iconic and charismatic, are massive and intelligent, and have been coveted by hunters for millennia.

Appearing in the oldest texts and images, they epitomize the African continent and were once very widely distributed in Africa, occurring wherever there was suitable habitat. But they, together with certain other megafauna, are currently being hunted to near extinction in certain regions. The purpose of this slaughter is not for human sustenance

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and survival, but for the financial gain to be accrued from exporting the tusks that are worked into ivory ornaments that carry an international high prestige value. Both species of rhinoceros, the white or square-lipped Ceratotherium simum, and the black or hook-lipped Diceros bicornis, are similarly targeted by commercial hunters. In this case, it is their horn—composed of keratin, the protein of hair, fingernails and hooves—that is sought after in the Far East, because the horn is believed to contain powerful medicinal and aphrodisiac properties. In sum, in the Anthropocene, human interests, ethics, and values conflict with the ecological; indeed, as argued here, they interfere with evolution itself.

African and Asian elephants do not share a genus or habits. The Asian species is Elephas maximus, the African Loxodonta africana. (Some scientists consider the West African elephant to be a separate species, L. cyclotis.) African elephants have never been domesticated as they have been in India and elsewhere in South Asia.4 Unlike African elephants, the Asian species is physically, economically and socially very close to the humans with whom they interact. In Shooting an Elephant, an anti-imperial essay about India, George Orwell described how an elephant, a male in musth, had “destroyed somebody’s bamboo hut, killed a cow and raided some fruit-stalls and devoured the stock.…

I rounded the hut and saw a man’s dead body sprawling in the mud.”5 The taking of the human life had to be avenged. Moreover, the elephant owner had rights. “Alive, the elephant was worth at least a hundred pounds; dead, he would only be worth the value of his tusks, five pounds, possibly.”6

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Africa’s elephants, by contrast, are topical because they are worth so much more dead than alive; their ivory has high monetary value worldwide. They shoulder a global nature conservation burden because in many parts of Africa they are illegally hunted, and their numbers are dwindling. In southern Africa, the elephant debate is intense for the opposite reason: there are, many believe, “too many” elephants. Their highly visible depredations to the landscape are worrying. Trees are upended, river valleys and savannahs alike are trampled, turning what humans believe to be “aesthetically pleasing” sights into “unattractive” landscapes. Humans, as Anthropocene agents, have intervened to decide how to limit elephant numbers and thereby reverse or minimize the habitat destruction that they cause and the consequent possible loss of biodiversity. In this southern African “over-populated” region, there are economic arguments to support culling and ivory sales. Socioeconomic and political goals might be met. For example, funds raised from selling ivory

Two very different consequences of the Anthropocene thus play out in the elephant-rich regions of Africa: in southern Africa, culling and population management is deemed to be necessary following successful wildlife conservation efforts, while in East Africa the toll of poachers engaged in an international trade threatens the very existence of the species.

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legally might provide clinics, schools, roads, houses, clean drinking water, and other infrastructure that southern African governments, with poor financial resources and other limitations of underdevelopment, struggle to supply to their citizens.

Although the short-hand, “Africa’s elephants,” is often used, it is not helpful to generalize about a continent as large and diverse as Africa. According to the 2016 International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) African Elephant Status Report, a total of 415,000 elephants are believed to exist in Africa.

Of these, 70% (293,000) are in southern Africa, a region that accounts for 42% of the total range area: the Republic of South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Namibia. Currently, by comparison with southern Africa, Central Africa has 6%, East Africa 20% and West Africa 3%.7 Two very different consequences of the Anthropocene thus play out in the elephant-rich regions of Africa: in southern Africa, culling and population management is deemed to be necessary following successful wildlife conservation efforts, while in East Africa the toll of poachers engaged in an international trade threatens the very existence of the species.

As mentioned, ivory is the allure of the African elephant. The African variety is softer and easier to work than the Asian, whether by cutting, sawing, painting, staining, slicing and carving, and it has been a thread that has linked the people of Africa with the outside world.8 In the pre-colonial era, control of the ivory trade enabled African leaders and chiefs to accumulate power and wealth, and in this way strong states evolved with the emergence of hierarchies based on wealth and class.

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E S S A Y However, with the industrialization of Europe and the United States in the nineteenth century, the decades that some argue mark the start of the Anthropocene, ivory supply and demand peaked. The market expanded into the growing Western middle class, and abundant ivory became knife and tool handles, piano-keys, billiard balls, games, scientific instruments, and ornaments. The hunt for ivory was a major factor that accelerated colonial expansion into the southern African interior, led first by explorer-hunters and traders and subsequently by recreational sport hunters. This lifestyle was encouraged by a colonial/European settler society that believed that free-roaming wildlife, the carriers of many diseases, inhibited the transition from wilderness to a “civilized” and modern state, one in which agriculture and pastoralism might prosper. Local African communities also benefitted economically from the ivory trade, particularly with their adoption of firearms that enabled them to abandon less efficient traditional hunting methods.

While the number of elephants in pre-colonial South Africa is not known,

While the number of elephants in pre-colonial South Africa is not known, Hall-Martin postulated that there may have been around 100,000 before the mid-1600s. By 1900 almost all had been exterminated: the Anthropocene had arrived.

Elephants had been reduced to four relict populations totaling fewer than 200 individuals.

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Hall-Martin postulated that there may have been around 100,000 before the mid-1600s.9 By 1900 almost all had been exterminated: the Anthropocene had arrived. Elephants had been reduced to four relict populations totaling fewer than 200 individuals. One of these populations, comprising a few individual elephants in a river gorge, had survived in part of the game reserve area that was later to become the Kruger National Park. Under conditions of strict preservation, their numbers increased and, augmented by immigration from Mozambique along the Crocodile River, they spread quickly.

In 1905, it was estimated that there were ten elephants in the Kruger Park area; by 1925 one hundred; by 1936 two hundred and fifty; four hundred and fifty by 1946, and one thousand in 1956.

Helicopter counts a decade later (1967) gave a confirmed number of 6,586.10 Until after World War II the management philosophy of South African wildlife conservation was to leave “nature” alone to achieve or regain a stable “balance” of food, water, and wildlife numbers.11 In the 1950s and 1960s, for many reasons, most of which are related to the Great Acceleration in human activity that has characterized the imprint of the human species on the planet beginning with the industrial revolution,12 the national parks organization employed a growing number of university-trained scientists with responsibility to manage vegetation and wildlife along “scientific lines.”

Earlier successful efforts at preservation and propagation in the park had led to a massive increase in the number of almost all large mammals, not only elephant. Management and conservation science altered to take this into account. Taking its cue from agricul-

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To spare the herds the trauma that elephant biologists had identified they would be subjected to, elephants were killed in family groups (not as individuals) that were mustered by helicopters, sedated by darting from the air, and killed quickly with well-aimed bullets by teams on the ground. Carcasses were transported to an abattoir situated near (but not within sight of) the large tourist camp at Skukuza that processed, canned and dried thousands of culled elephant, buffalo, and hippopotamus each year. ture, a paradigm of nature manipulation came into operation after the 1960s, and the national park was managed for productivity in the same way as an extensive cattle ranch. By then, significant technological advances in darting and drugs had made the mass culling and translocation of elephants possible and even, arguably, to some extent “humane.”1 3As South Africa is one of the few countries in which trading of indigenous wildlife is legal, “excess” elephants, and other species, might also be reduced by being sold or donated to individuals and to other protected areas, even restored to parts of the country from which they had been extirpated.

In 1965, after extensive investigation and consultation, biologists took the difficult decision to contain the everexpanding elephant population in the Kruger Park to around 7,000, consid-

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ered to be the “correct” number when taking into account the total size of the area and available food and water. The first trials were experimental, aiming to save as many elephants that might be sold or given away, but this proved to be insufficient, and “lethal control” began. Although the task was emotionally upsetting to those involved, biologists were—it seems—eventually able to distance themselves from the emotional engagement with this “killing for conservation.”14 The public relations campaign launched on the matter described culling as necessary for “obvious reasons” of habitat degradation by elephants and the model was defended as the “pragmatic/economic alternative.”15 However, there were also anthropomorphic statements, such as “it is a comforting thought that the animals which have to forfeit their lives, contribute to the protection and survival of their living brothers in our precious natural heritage.”16 Elephants were culled regularly in the Kruger National Park for almost thirty years to keep the “optimum” at around >0.37 elephants/km2. Eventually some 14,629 lost their lives.17 To spare the herds the trauma that elephant biologists had identified they would be subjected to, elephants were killed in family groups (not as individuals) that were mustered by helicopters, sedated by darting from the air, and killed quickly with well-aimed bullets by teams on the ground. Carcasses were transported to an abattoir situated near (but not within sight of) the large tourist camp at Skukuza that processed, canned and dried thousands of culled elephant, buffalo, and hippopotamus each year. By-products were sold or used as rations. Until it became illegal in 1989, ivory was extracted and sold.18

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E S S A Y In the 1990s renowned East African conservationist Richard Leakey was shown this abattoir and exclaimed, “I watched for a while impressed by the size and scale of the operation, but appalled that this was what wildlife ‘management’ in the late twentiethcentury had come to.”19 As far as he was concerned, the national park had become a modern, industrial farm, based on an ideology of killing for sustainable utilization and maximum production.

It is an irony of the Anthropocene that the power of humans has impacted so differently on Africa’s elephant populations. While Leakey was appalled at South Africa’s utilization of “excess” elephants, plummeting numbers in East Africa bear witness to an enormous decline owing to organized poaching.

Certainly, the ethic of respect for nature and delight in a “wild” or “primitive” “African Eden,” promoted by conservationists such as Leakey in that region, has not been successful in ensuring the survival of elephants, let alone encouraging an increase in numbers.

In 1994 elephant culling ended in South Africa’s national parks for three main reasons. First, at the time of the democratic transition in South Africa that year, and recognizing that funding for national parks would be reduced, external sources of support were sought. This was forthcoming from the International Federation of Animal Welfare (IFAW) in the United States, but only if culling was halted. Second, scientists had begun to question whether their evidence in favor of culling was sufficiently robust, and there were calls to halt culling and rethink the science. Third, a new management paradigm—strategic adaptive management—was emerging in international

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and local conservation science to replace the model of stability and balance, and this would impact on culling as well as other management decisions.20 In 2007, the South African government instituted an extensive scientific assessment around elephant management to synthesize the state of knowledge together with the ethical and legal frameworks. The process was intensive, involving many experts, peer reviewers and stakeholders. It was eventually published as a book, Elephant Management: A Scientific Assessment for South Africa (ed. Robert Scholes and K.G. Mennell),21 and resulted thereafter in a national management policy formulated by the Department of Environmental Affairs. What this assessment also illuminated, however, were other forms of Anthropocene intervention by humans on elephants, in addition to culling, that provide even more examples of growing human dominance over ecological functions and systems.

The attempt to save elephant lives by relocating rather than killing them backfired in many cases. Often individuals, or a group consisting only of juveniles, was relocated. Elephant social organization and learning mechanisms were destroyed. Young rogue elephant bulls killed other animals, including rhinoceros, or exhibited abnormal aggression against humans.22 Over time, some lessons were learned and there were improvements, but the challenge of over-population was not solved by translocation, but rather increased. Once translocated correctly in family cohorts, elephant herds began to expand in their new habitats and even more intervention was required, and on ever larger scales.

More recently, one of the most important attempts, and one with

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significant evolutionary implications, is the control of elephant reproduction through contraception. Experimentation has already been conducted with a number of vaccines that might be effective in rendering female elephants infertile. Much remains to be discovered about this intervention, given the longevity of elephants, their social structure of female natal herds, their long gestation period, their promiscuous mating system, and the need for full anaesthetization while the vaccine is administered initially and thereafter for regular boosters. The long-term effects and efficacy of interference in reproduction are still unknown.23 Moreover, such a program cannot be applied to a population of many thousands, as is the case in many of the larger national parks in southern Africa, but only in small protected areas where individuals can be identified and monitored. Since culling ended in the Kruger Park in 1994, numbers had increased by 2015 to more than 17,000.24 There is not a one-size-fits-all solution. In the southern African spring of 2016, Cape Town hosted the 35th International Geological Congress (IGC) at which the Anthropocene was discussed as a potential geological era.

At the same time, the 17th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) was held in Johannesburg. There, the group deliberated on Africa’s elephant population as though it were coherent throughout the continent, deploring the fact that elephant poaching had been the worst for 25 years. A total of a 60% decline in the elephants in Tanzania—one of the 37 elephant range states in Africa—was mentioned with great regret.25

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In 1989 CITES had listed the African elephant on Appendix I of the Treaty, moving it from Appendix II, the upgrading from one list to the other thus placing a total ban on trade in elephant products. (These appendices, which are altered and updated from time to time, list the species and products that can, or cannot, be legally traded.) Looking at the statistics, many people think that the ban has been an “abject failure.” Some argue that the ban actually fuels the illicit trade, and that it occurs principally in politically unstable regions.26 Criminologists Andrew Lemieux and Ronald Clarke have uncovered the “international big business” involved in the ivory trade, labeling it “green criminology.” And the illegal trade is certainly lucrative.

According to an article in Earth Matters27 and quoting a recent report from Save the Elephants,28 the price of a kilogram of ivory in China three years ago had reached a high of $2,100. Thankfully, owing to the economic slump in China, aided by aggressive awareness campaigns, the price has recently plummeted to $730, although this still has to be translated into a slump in the numbers of dead elephants. Seeking out East and West Africa’s largest tuskers (as opposed to killing families, as is the science behind culling) has led to skewed sex ratios and thus future biological uncertainty.29 The importance of the work of Lemieux and Clarke is that they examine the domestic markets of various African countries, evaluating the effectiveness of the CITES ban, but also suggesting that a closer analysis of the situation in those individual countries where poaching is rife is required. Their conclusions are perhaps not surprising.

Countries with unregulated domestic

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E S S A Y ivory markets, or countries bordering them, have the most vulnerable elephant populations. In addition, also not surprisingly, corruption and civil war play an enormous part in the ivory trade. However, data on ivory poachers and their networks is very difficult to obtain, and until this is rectified, effective policing and prevention is probably impossible.

What CITES and other international conservation institutions and organizations are not yet considering in detail is that there are other emerging impacts of the Anthropocene that also require careful monitoring. A case in point is the belief that wildlife can be moved from one locality to another either without consequence or, more often, considered to have beneficial consequence.

In much of the literature, reintroducing wildlife species to locations previously utilized by these species is considered to be advantageous, an ethical matter of “rewilding” or restoring fauna to what humans consider to be a “natural” environment or a “previously natural” environment.30 Some of the discourse and the initiatives are related to the “losses” of the Pleistocene. Mammoths and mastodons, related to elephants in the fossil record, are mentioned in particular. One is told that elephants, Asian and African, may indeed be reintroduced to fill this niche in North America, now easier to accomplish thanks to climate change.31 Words such as “de-extinction” are now in the vocabulary and notions such as “indigeneity” have become complicated. There is also positive response to recreating extinct species, such as mammoths, passenger pigeons or quagga.32 Some of these initiatives have been controversial. The reintroduction of wolves in Europe and the United States, Yellowstone in particular, might be mentioned in this regard.

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In South Africa, “game/wildlife farming” that began in the 1960s has become a large and important industry.33 Today there are more than 11,600 private wildlife ranches (21 million hectares) in the country, and an additional 15,000 ranches manage domestic livestock and wildlife together.34 This provides another perspective. While the Kruger Park was culling, it—and other protected areas in South Africa —also sold or donated other “surplus” species, such as zebra, to farmers and to the growing number of private nature reserves and game ranches. The unhappy consequences of elephant translocation have been mentioned above, but the literature has now begun to highlight other concerns, particularly the detrimental aspects of genetic mixes.

This issue has worldwide implications wherever wild animals are introduced, or reintroduced.

As Benjamin-Fink and Reilly have argued in detail, translocations may have been responsible for extinctions of pure genetic lineages, and thus negatively impacting other, perhaps rare, species. They also caution about ecological integrity, introgressive hybridization and outbreeding depression, and express their concern that records of locations of capture and release are not carefully maintained. Their paper takes the case of black wildebeest, Connochaetes gnou, and blue wildebeest, Connochaetes taurinus, important component species of the wildlife trade in South Africa, to provide evidence of the potential unwelcome consequences.3 While South Africa rests secure in its growing elephant populations, and even tries to introduce the regulated sale of ivory, illegal poaching has begun to threaten the rhinoceros in the country. The two rhinoceros species were, like elephants, once widely distributed.

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The recovery in their numbers from the 1960s onwards was one of the most highly publicized and greatly lauded successes of conservation in Africa. In 1961, in what is now the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal, rhinoceros, particularly the square-lipped, or white rhinoceros that had bred well there and increased in number, were successfully tranquilized, thus enabling their translocation and proliferation throughout the subcontinent and indeed around the world. This intervention rescued rhinoceros from the brink of extinction in many places. Different factors determined their decline, and their subsequent rise. Not only were rhinoceros hunted for their tough and useful hides, but in the 1920s government efforts to eradicate tsetse-fly, the vector of trypanosamiasis, a fatal cattle disease, killed many more. In the 1940s and 1950s, however, with the growth of a conservation mentality and the tourist industry, white rhinoceros numbers in the Umfolozi area exploded from close to zero to more than 1,000, and they began to outstrip their limited food resources. Veterinary physiology and the advance of appropriate drugs, combined with excellent practical game rangers who constructed suitable holding pens and transportation and other technical equipment, resulted in successful white rhinoceros relocations to game reserves throughout southern Africa and to zoological gardens in Europe, the United States and the Far East.36 In Africa there are about 5,500 black, or hook-lipped rhinoceros, and 20,000 white rhinoceros. Of the African population, 90% of both species (2,000 and 18,000 respectively) are in South Africa.37 It is regrettable to acknowledge that over the past decade there has been a

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9,000-fold increase in rhino poaching in South Africa, most of them from the world-renowned Kruger National Park, which had accepted many of the original translocated rhinoceros. Sadly, for visitors to the park, the sight of military helicopters and uniformed army personnel have become familiar. Regular national park game rangers alone are unable to stem the current tide of rhinoceros poaching in Kruger and other South African protected areas, as wellorganized and amply resourced international criminal syndicates orchestrate large-scale killings of rhinoceros. With a street value of U.S. $65,000 per kg, in countries like Vietnam and China, the horn is highly valued for its medicinal properties.38 Even stuffed rhinoceros in museums are at risk: the horns were stolen off two specimens in the South African Museum in Cape Town in 2008.39 Our era has been characterized as the Anthropocene because human actions on a large-scale have long-term

Not only were rhinoceros hunted for their tough and useful hides, but in the 1920s government efforts to eradicate tsetse-fly, the vector of trypanosamiasis, a fatal cattle disease, killed many more. In the 1940s and 1950s, however, with the growth of a conservation mentality and the tourist industry, white rhinoceros numbers in the Umfolozi area exploded from close to zero to more than 1,000, and they began to outstrip their limited food resources.

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E S S A Y and permanent effects on planet Earth.

The Anthropocene is thus a tool for action, not only a description of the state of the planet.40 How humanity treats its African elephants and moves them and other biota around to suit human philosophical, material, biological, economic, and cultural needs and aspirations may even become a metaphor for how humanity regards itself as a species at this critical time. Descriptions of how elephants—an intelligent

animal that shares many characteristics with humans—have overpopulated the areas to which they are confined to the extent of destroying their habitat, water and food supplies, reducing biodiversity and behaving “unnaturally,” may mask a conversation that humans are having with one another about their own population dynamics and depredations to the Earth in the age of the Anthropocene.

Jane Carruthers is Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at Unisa. She is one of South Africa’s first environmental historians and has published widely on this topic. Other fields of research include the history of science, colonial art, cartography and comparative Australian-South African history.

She obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Cape Town in 1988, where she had previously obtained her B.A. in 1966.

She went to school at Parktown Convent in Johannesburg and obtained her B.A. (Hons) and M.A. degrees from the University of South Africa in 1975 and 1980, respectively. She lives in Morningside Manor, Johannesburg, and is married to Vincent Carruthers, wildlife author and environmental consultant.

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Notes 1. See Mary Scholes, Mike Lucas and Robert Scholes, Climate Change: Briefings from Southern Africa (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2015).

2. Will Steffen et al. “The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives.”

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sci- ences (31 January 2011): 842-867, accessed 17 November 2017, DOI: 10.1098/rsta.2010.0327.

3. Jason W. Moore, “The Capitalocene, Part I: On the Nature and Origins of Our Ecological Crisis,” The Journal of Peasant Studies 44, no. 3, (2017): 594-630.

4. Jane Carruthers and André Boshoff, “Elephant History and Distribution.” Elephant Management: A Scientific Assessment for South Africa, edited by R J. Scholes and K.G. Mennell (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2008), 23-83.

5. George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays (London: Secker & Warburg, 1950), 3-4.

6. Orwell, Shooting an Elephant, 7.

7. C.R. Thouless, et al. “African Elephant Status Report 2016: An Update from the African Elephant Database,” in Occasional Paper Series of the IUCN Species Survival Commission, No. 60, (Gland, Switzerland: IUCN, 2016).

8. Maggie Campbell Pedersen, Ivory (London: NAG Press, 2015).

9. Anthony J. Hall-Martin, “Distribution and Status of the African Elephant Loxodonta Africana in South Africa, 1652–1992,” Koedoe 35, no. 1, (22 Sep. 1992): 65–88.

10. Ian J. Whyte, Rudi van Aarde and Stuart L. Pimm. “Kruger’s Elephant Population: Its Size and Consequences for Ecosystem Heterogeneity,” in The Kruger Experience: Ecology and Management of Savanna Heterogeneity, eds. Johan T. du Toit, Kevin H. Rogers and Harry C. Biggs (Washington: Island Press, 2003), 332-348.

11. See Jane Carruthers, National Park Science: A Century of Research in South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

12. See J.R. McNeill and Peter Engelke. The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016).

13. See Carruthers, National Park Science.

14. See Rosaleen Duffy, Killing for Conservation: Wildlife Policy in Zimbabwe (Oxford: James Currey, 2000).

15. U. de V Pienaar, “Management by Intervention: The Pragmatic/Economic Option,” in Management of Large Mammals in African Conservation Areas: Proceedings of a Symposium Held in Pretoria, South Africa, 29-30 April 1982, ed. R.N Owen-Smith (Pretoria: HAUM, 1983), 23-26.

16. U. de V Pienaar, “The Culling of Game… Why?”Custos 1, no. 2, (Jan. 1972), 3, 5, 7, 11, esp. 11.

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E S S A Y 17. Ian J. Whyte, Rudi van Aarde and Stuart L. Pimm. “Kruger’s Elephant Population: Its Size and Consequences for Ecosystem Heterogeneity,” in The Kruger Experience: Ecology and Management of Savanna Heterogeneity, eds. Johan T. du Toit, Kevin H. Rogers and Harry C. Biggs (Washington: Island Press, 2003), 332-348.

18. V. De Vos, R.C. Bengis and H.J. Coetzee. “Population Control of Large Mammals in the Kruger National Park,” in Management of Large Mammals in African Conservation Areas, ed.

RN. Owen-Smith (Pretoria: HAUM, 1983), 213–31; Carruthers, National Park Science.

19. Richard E. Leakey, Wildlife Wars: My Fight to Save Africa’s Natural Resources (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001), 220-221.

20. See Carruthers, National Park Science.

21. Robert Scholes and K G. Mennell. Elephant Management: A Scientific Assessment for South Africa (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2008).

22. Douw G. Grobler, “Elephant Translocation,” in Elephant Management, 257-328.

23. Henk Bertschinger, “Reproductive Control of Elephants,” in Elephant Management, 257-328.

24. Sam M. Ferreira, Cathy Greaver and Chenay Simms, “Elephant Population Growth in Kruger National Park, South Africa, Under a Landscape Management Approach,” Koedoe 59, no. 1, A1427 (25 Aug. 2017), accessed 17 November 2017, www.koedoe.co.za/index.php/ koedoe/article/view File/1427/2067.

25. C.R. Thouless et al., “African Elephant Status Report.”

26. Marshall Murphree, Kirsten Conrad and Rowan Martin, “The Ban on Ivory Sales Has Been an Abject Failure. A Rethink is Needed,” The Conversation (22 September 2016), accessed 17 November 2017, https://theconversation.com/the-ban-on-ivory-sales-has-been-an-abjectfailure-a-rethink-is-needed-65665.

27. Drawing from the article by Jaymi Heimbuch,“Some Rare Good News for Elephants: The Price of Ivory is Plummeting,” in Mother Nature Network, accessed 17 November 2017, www.mnn.com/earth-matters/animals/blogs/good-news-elephants-price-ivory-plummets.

28. The full report, Decline in the Legal Ivory Trade in China in Anticipation of a Ban, by Lucy Vigne and Esmond Martin, is available here: http://www.savetheelephants.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/2017_Decline-in-legal-Ivory-trade-China.pdf, accessed 17 November 2017.

29. Andrew M. Lemieux and Ronald V. Clarke, “The International Ban on Ivory Sales and Its Effects on Elephant Poaching in Africa,” British Journal of Criminology 49, no. 4, (1 Jul. 2009): 451-471, accessed 17 November 2017, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azp030.

30. See Caroline Fraser, Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution (New York: Picador, 2010).

31. Josh C. Donlan, “Restoring America’s Big Wild Animals,” Scientific American 296, no.

6, (Jun. 2007): 70-77.

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32. Beth Shapiro, How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of De-Extinction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); for further reading on this topic, visit https://quaggaproject. org/.

33. Jane Carruthers, “‘Wilding the Farm or Farming the Wild’? The Evolution of Scientific Game Ranching in South Africa from the 1960s to the Present,” Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa 63, no. 2, (Oct. 2008): 160-181.

34. Nicole Benjamin-Fink and Brian K. Reilly. “Conservation Implications of Wildlife Translocations: The State’s Ability to Act as Conservation Units from Wildebeest Populations in South Africa,”Global Ecology and Conservation 12 (Oct. 2017): 46-58.

35. Ibid.

36. Ian Player, The White Rhino Saga (London: Collins, 1972); Jane Carruthers, “Operation Rhino, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, 1961,” Global Environment: A Journal of History and Natural and Social Sciences 11 (2013): 195-196.

37. See “Rhino Population Figures.” Save the Rhino International, 2017, https://www. savetherhino.org/rhino_info/rhino_population_figures.

38. See Kevin Leo-Smith, “Live White Rhino Horn Trade Scenario—Why Prices Would Rise 900%.” Fin 24, accessed 17 November 2017, https://www.fin24.com/BizNews/livewhite-rhino-horn-trade-scenario-why-prices-would-rise-900-20161003.

39. See “Rhino horns nicked from museum.” News 24, accessed 17 November 2017, https://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/Rhino-horns-nicked-from-museum-20080414).

40. Libby Robin, “Environmental Humanities and Climate Change: Understanding Humans Geologically and Other Life Forms Ethically,” WIREs Climate Change 9, no. 1, (2018), accessed 17 November 2017, DOI: 10.1002/wcc.499.

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TOWARD A SUSTAINABLE ECONOMY— Ideas, Ideology, Institutions and “letting go to move on” JOHN BARRY

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Introduction

he starting point of this paper is that the main cause of climate change and the intensifying global ecological crisis is economic growth, or more specifically orthodox, GDP-measured, undifferentiated growth as a permanent objective of the economy.1 The Anthropocene, the shift from the climate stability of the past 10,000 years (the Holocene), can be explained as due to fossil-fuelled economic growth and the associated ecological degradation since the postwar period of the twentieth century. And as inconvenient as it may be, there is growing scientific evidence for the idea—putting to one side some mythic and wishful thinking around a technological solution—that the only way to address climate change is to reduce economic growth in the “overdeveloped”minority world.

As climate scientists Anderson and Bows suggest, “(extremely) dangerous climate change can only be avoided if economic growth is exchanged, at least temporarily, for a period of planned austerity within Annex 1 [rich] nations and a rapid transition away from fossilfuelled development within non-Annex 1 nations.”2 Yet just as the rich person will do everything to help the poor person, except get off the poor person’s back, we in societies addicted to carbonfuelled consumerism seem unable to fathom or accept that a part of the solution to climate change means moving beyond economic growth: to move from an economy oriented around producing more as measured

by GDP, expanding the consumption of commodities, focused on quantitative increases etc. to one focused on quality and development, and a notion of human and social progress in which human flourishing and welfare are the focus instead. GDP growth requires more resources, energy, pollution, waste and so on, and while there have been technological improvements (meaning the production of commodities with less energy, water, resources, etc.), the ecological benefits of these improvements in efficiency have been

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HE TEST OF OUR PROGRESS IS NOT WHETHER WE ADD MORE TO THE ABUNDANCE OF THOSE WHO HAVE MUCH; IT IS WHETHER WE PROVIDE ENOUGH FOR THOSE WHO HAVE TOO LITTLE. —FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

outstripped by increased consumption (driven by a culture of consumerism, advertising, meeting, etc.), and also propelled by population growth. The basic dilemma is that a profit-driven economy and a debt-based money system require continuous economic growth, which is fundamentally incompatible with the biophysical “operating space” for humanity.3 As Amelia Womack and her colleagues put it, “instead of a growth-obsessed economy focused on maximizing profits and producing more and more goods and services, we need a steady state economy focused on maximizing well-being and producing sufficient goods and services within ecological boundaries…. In short, instead of getting bigger, the focus shifts to getting better.”4 But why is this reasonable suggestion met with such disbelief, incredulity FALL 2018

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and resistance? Why is it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of economic growth, especially since economic growth is a very recent idea, one that can be traced to the post-World War II period as both a central part of our understanding of a “healthy” economy and what I call a “core state imperative” of liberal-capitalist societies?

In this article, I focus on the imperative for growth within the realm of ideas, specifically neoclassical economics as the dominant form of economic thinking in universities, businesses and governments. I also explore the geopolitical context of pre- and post-World War II, especially the Cold War, which led to economic growth becoming a “core state imperative” of Western countries—an imperative supported and promoted from the “board room

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It is economic growth, we are told, that ensures pensions for when we retire. It is economic growth that creates the wealth we can then use to spend on social or medical infrastructure (such as a national health care system) and welfare payments, or indeed remedial environmental policies. In this way economic growth is a means to these various ends. What is rarely asked, however, is whether these ends could be met without economic growth. to the bar room” serving to legitimate capitalist states against their communist rivals. In short, the basic argument put forth here is that what we need to do is explore the resilience of economic growth, despite the evidence that within capitalist societies it has long passed a threshold beyond which it is a net benefit for those societies. If we have scientific evidence that the populations of these societies are now experiencing “uneconomic growth”5 or “the cancer stage of capitalism,”6 when the ecological, psychological, cultural, and political costs of growth outweigh their (very unevenly distributed) benefits, how can we understand the persistence and resistance of this now sub-optimal idea and social objective? The suggestion here is to look at the origins of growth in the realm of ideas about the economy in general and the power/knowledge of neoclassical economics in particular, and the institutionalization of growth as a structural requirement of a capitalist economy and therefore a “core state imperative” of capitalist states.

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A question that is rarely asked is, “why do we need economic growth?”

So self-evident is this question that even who that “we” is is hardly ever interrogated. But what answers could we find if this question were to be asked? It is economic growth, we are told, that ensures pensions for when we retire. It is economic growth that creates the wealth we can then use to spend on social or medical infrastructure (such as a national health care system) and welfare payments, or indeed remedial environmental policies. In this way economic growth is a means to these various ends. What is rarely asked, however, is whether these ends could be met without economic growth. Could we have pensions, a health service, welfare services etc. without year-over-year increases in GDP? Support for the idea that economic growth is good and is (or was up until recently) a (unqualified) social and political desideratum comes from virtually all sides of the political spectrum.

In terms of left/right support for growth—and here I am simplifying— the main issues often revolve around the distribution of economic growth to capital and labor. On the left we have Thomas Picketty’s analysis arguing for a greater share of growth (wage income) to go to labor.7 On the right we have numerous examples of neo/ liberal defenses of a “rising tide lifts all boats” justifying unequal shares of growth.8 But neither traditional socialist/social democratic nor conservative/ neoliberal parties or policies question economic growth per se. For the most part, it is only green or ecologicallyminded economists who have for decades questioned economic growth (and then mostly been ignored), and it is within that tradition of green political economy that this article is written.

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At its core, it puts forward the view that, while the capitalist growth model has no doubt achieved major improvements in human welfare, the emergence of the Anthropocene and the growing scientific evidence of various ecological, resource, pollution and climate damage, suggest that this model has tilted toward the net negative. Economic and social alternatives to an unmitigated growth model are not only possible, but increasingly necessary.

Neoclassical Economics, Scarcity and Growth The most basic definition of economics, or “the economic problem,” is some version of the following: how do we meet infinite human needs/ends faced with limited means? In this way, scarcity is a fundamental principle of economic thinking and the orthodox economic imaginary. Indeed, one could state that scarcity is a “master concept” in modern neoclassical economics and the solution to the wants/scarcity dilemma in the direction of overcoming scarcity via increasing output, growth etc. a form of axiomatic thinking. Note, however, how this intuitive axiom “organizes out” any attention to the assumption of “unlimited wants” as a given, something beyond consideration or change. In the neoclassical model these are exogenous (which is at odds with the argument that wants are created within the economic system itself, i.e., endogenous, via advertising and marketing, for example). In the model, attention is focused on how we can use limited resources or factors of production (typically, land, labor, capital and enterprise) to produce as many goods and services to satisfy some (though of course not all) of these unlimited wants.

That is, satisfying one particular want

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means not satisfying others (hence the idea, currently quite fashionable, of “opportunity cost”). Such axiomatic thinking is “pre-analytical” and presupposes as “reasonable” assumptions prior to the operationalization or testing of the theory/model in question.9 Other elements of the pre-analytical vision of neoclassical economics include, inter alia, utility maximization, rational decision-making, preference transitivity, substitution between natural and human capital, temporal discounting of the future, and the assumption of an “empty” as opposed to a “full world.”10 These pre-analytical axioms, or self-evident and reasonable “truths,” combine to result in key elements of the pro-growth bias of neoclassical economics, such as the axiom of efficiency expressed by the so-called Pareto Optimality, discussed in more detail below.

I wish to highlight two issues in relation to scarcity as it operates within the dominant neoclassical model. The first is that, while the starting point of economics is infinite wants in the context of scarce or limited means, one could propose that the solution to this dilemma is to focus on the demand side, as it were, and seek to limit human wants. On the assumption that “all else being equal”—or ceteris paribus, as economists like to call it—this is as rational and “reasonable” a way to solve this dilemma as suggesting the solution lies in maximizing means. If scarcity is relational—the mismatch between limited resources and unlimited wants—why is the solution to the economic problem, and scarcity, not to aim for “sufficiency” or “enough” goods and services,11 but rather for more and more?

It is as “rational” and “reasonable” to devise an economic policy realizing the objective of human flourishing and freedom as lying in how few, not how

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Pareto Optimality is essentially a distribution of welfare/utility/ income such that we cannot move from that distribution without making at least one person worse off… [T]his criterion means there is a “built-in” pro-growth bias or dynamic within neoclassical economics, since it sanctions as “optimal” only those changes in resources/welfare that are the outcome of growth, rather than redistribution. In this way, Pareto optimality translates as “economic efficiency” aimed at increasing output per unit of resource input. many, desires/demands a person has.

Bertrand Russell’s statement that “It is preoccupation with possession, more than anything else, that prevents men from living freely and nobly”12 could have been the aim of modern economics as much as meeting and multiplying needs and wants.

The second is that, while neoclassical economics professes to recognize scarcity as a foundational starting point—both in developing and building its conceptual architecture and in making interventions in practical economic policy—it conveniently disregards its own starting point. Neoclassical economics largely ignores the idea of physical (resource or sink) limits to growth by assuming that the price mechanism and an efficient market will call forth technological advances, making it possible to tap new resources and substitution between production factors. An

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example to illustrate this is the reaction from many leading economists to the 1972 Limits to Growth report. Neoclassical economists fiercely refuted any limits to economic growth due to biophysical resource constraints. As Robert Solow put it, “The world can, in effect, get along without natural resources, so exhaustion is just an event, not a catastrophe.”13 Hence, for proponents of endless economic growth, its limiting factor is not resources, entropy, or the capacity of the finite planet to absorb wastes; it is human intelligence and creativity (here understood as a proxy for market-facilitated technological innovation). This belief boils down to the conviction that “human ingenuity is capable of solving any and all aspects of scarcity.”14 Thus we have the remarkable turnaround of economics as a “science” that starts from a recognition of the “reality” of scarcity, indeed makes it foundational, but then seems to simply ignore it. At the same time, by rejecting material scarcity, it recognizes and makes central the exogenously given “fact” of the non-satiability of human wants. As the leading ecological economist Herman Daly put it, “The implication of the dogmas of the relativity of all scarcity and the absoluteness of all want is growthmania.”15 In this way “scarcity” becomes a “pseudo concept” in mainstream economics, acknowledged but not accepted as a limiting factor, but extremely powerful as an axiom to justify productivity growth as the solution to the “economic problem.”

Pareto Optimality, Inequality, Redistribution and Growth One of the main, indeed central, normative justifications for economic growth is often poverty alleviation, which is

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usually expressed in terms of increasing productivity, enhancing economic efficiency (alongside globalization and international competitiveness) and which, in turn, leads to wealth creation (and perhaps) followed by some “trickle down” redistribution. Put simply, the main concern is to increase the “economic pie,” and with it absolute shares of it, rather than change the shares to be less unequal. A major intellectual prop to this anti-redistributive position is the so-called “Pareto Optimality” criterion, which is a foundational principle in neoclassical welfare economics. I will not here discuss the detailed technicalities of this criterion, but am more interested in its normative assumptions and ideological implications in relation to economic growth, inequality and redistribution.

Pareto Optimality is essentially a distribution of welfare/utility/income such that we cannot move from that distribution without making at least one person worse off. The main issue I wish to stress is that this criterion means there is a “built-in” pro-growth bias or dynamic within neoclassical economics, since it sanctions as “optimal” only those changes in resources/

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welfare that are the outcome of growth, rather than redistribution. In this way, Pareto Optimality translates as “economic efficiency” aimed at increasing output per unit of resource input.

Or​,​to put it another way and to give an example, Pareto Optimality means technological innovation becomes oriented towards fewer people working more and producing more, rather than more people working less. The other growth dimension to the principle is the additional claim that those made worse off from a move from a Pareto Optimal position can be hypothetically compensated from the extra income generated from this move, which translates in reality into some version of “trickle down economics” or the “rising tide lifts all boats” argument. To repeat, the main focus here is to point out that under the neoclassical Pareto Optimality principle, the only way to improve the lot of the economically underprivileged is through overall growth in income/wealth or resources, which makes everyone better off. Redistribution that may make some people worse off (even a wealthy minority and by a small amount) but improve the position of others (a majority of poor people and improve their welfare by a lot) is ruled out.

One can see how this principle supports populist (right-wing) arguments, which cast calls for a less unequal distribution of income and wealth as little more than “class envy” or the “politics of envy.” Arguments for redistribution are presented as “economically irrational” and “ideologically motivated” desires

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E S S A Y to take from others and thereby lead to a “levelling down” and decreased economic wealth overall. As Laurence Boldeman put it: [Pareto Optimality] is nothing but a pseudo-scientific defence of the economic and social status quo.... It is possible, therefore, in practice, to improve welfare by taking from the rich and giving to the poor—regardless of what Pareto’s disciples might claim.... A cynic might conclude that the whole idea of Pareto Optimality was invented to deflect a strong conclusion from marginalist theory in favour of redistribution to the poor.16

The anti-redistribution bias of the Pareto principle can be seen in the statement from philosopher David Gauthier, who offers a characteristically brutal and uncompromising (but at least refreshingly honest) defense of inequality and a strong anti-redistribution stance. For him, Pareto Optimality means “the rich man may feast on caviar and champagne, while the poor woman starves at his gate. And she may not even take the crumbs from his table, if that would deprive him of his pleasure in feeding them to his birds.”17 So, in short, we cannot deprive the few of luxuries to meet the pressing needs of the many, since that would reduce the welfare of the rich, and this reduction cannot be compensated for by the increase in welfare of the poor.

As Warren J. Samuels put it: “What the Pareto criterion does is to build in, cast lustre upon, and support the status quo power structure, rights structure, opportunity set structure and so on.

Its ultimate normative function is to limit change. It serves as an ideological limit to change.”18 So, not only is “growth good” in a commonsense manner. According to neoclassical economics, it is also

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the only possible solution to the “economic problem.” The upshot of Pareto Optimality​,​therefore​,​is to act as a justification against direct redistribution from the rich to the poor. ​T​his is a normative/ethical choice, not an objective ​“scientific one​.”​What we are left with from the Pareto principle is the ​ “​imperative​“​tha​t​we can only help the poor if at the same time the rich also benefit. Growth, not redistribution, is the preferred policy choice​.

What Gets Measured Gets Done: The Birth of GDP and the Cold War Origins of Growthmanship Complementing the pro-growth bias within neoclassical microeconomics, a macroeconomic equivalent can be found in the invention of the “Gross National (later Domestic) Product” in the immediate pre-World War II period, and its universal acceptance as the standard measurement of changes in the post-war economy. Initially invented to help the U.S. government under Roosevelt address mass unemployment and the Great Depression, the system of national accounts in the form of GDP was thoroughly political and politicized. The demand for data was politically motivated to address a crisis; the way certain economic activities were included and excluded (non-market/informal economic activities or women’s housework, for example) was informed by political preferences and ideologies; and finally, the availability of this economic information “gave politicians the power of choice: to act or not to act. And here it becomes clear why measuring economic activity was never an objective pursuit, but always a deeply political choice.... Inaction did not require data…. Action certainly did.”19 And

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changed all that. As Robert J. Shapiro, Under Secretary of Commerce for Economic Affairs, noted, When America went to war to be sure that democracy would survive, the Division extended the early accounts to also track production and to produce the first quarterly and annual estimates of GNP, so the government could mobilize the economy for the war effort.20

this action extended to non-economic political ends in the sense that the system of national accounts (created by Simon Kuznets and others in the 1930s within the U.S. Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerces Division of Economic Research) proved indispensable in enabling the U.S. and the UK to allocate resources during the war.

The revolution in statistical measures of national economic activity brought by GNP ensured the U.S. had much better knowledge of its own economy than Germany and Japan, and was therefore better able to organize production and allocate resources more effectively. While government and military leaders in the U.S. and U.K. planned the war effort in terms of their needs (arms, munitions, food, clothing etc.), these demands on national production often did not correlate with actual productive resources (in terms of labor, capital, finance etc.).

That was because up until the 1930s and early 1940s the statistical information for certain sectors was either nonexistent, or patchy at best. The need for diverting factors of production away from domestic consumption to providing the resources to fighting a war FALL 2018

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In this way, GNP became both a measure of the warfighting capacity of the U.S. and UK, and a vital tool in mobilizing resources, labor, and capital towards production to that end.

In the post-war period, a precondition for receiving Marshall Aid from the U.S. was acceptance not just of trade liberalization and economic growth (outlined in the next section), but also the GDP measure of a nation’s economy. As Ehsan Masood notes, Europe’s countries had no real choice in the matter [of submitting their economies to be measured by GDP]. If they wanted America’s aid, they needed to submit to its system of measurement.

Little did they know that the act of measuring their economies would ultimately determine how their economies would be managed. In order to keep receiving American aid, a country’s GDP had to go up each year.21

And the way of measuring whether economic growth was being achieved was by measuring GDP increases. Thus, in the post-war period, GDP-measured growth became embedded across Western Europe and became associated with

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E S S A Y national prosperity, the main ingredients of which were consumer spending and public sector growth. Here we see the birth—initially from a small group of academic and transatlantic policy elites and then to whole populations—of the idea that GDP-measured economic growth and national prosperity were interchangeable. Indeed, a case could be made that economic growth became an integral part of national identity for western countries during the Cold War.22 High levels of sustained economic growth leading to increased consumption of goods and services provided proof of the superiority of capitalism over communism and served to undermine (socialist) arguments for a greater redistribution of wealth. An example of this Cold War context of GDP growth is how, in relation to the decolonizing countries of the Global South (where the U.S. and the USSR vied for influence), a tiny Western economic elite invented the notion of “development” (hence the birth of the division between the “developed” and the “developing world”) and advocated for specific pro-capitalist/Western prescriptions that could be achieved.

One of the classic texts of this post-war period, whose ironic title nicely illustrates this logic, is William Rostow’s influential book, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto.

While the process that led to the creation of the eventual GDP measure was shaped by methodological, statistical and technical debates, it was equally shaped by political, ideological and normative claims and counterclaims.

Simon Kuznets, who can be legitimately viewed as the inventor of GDP/GNP, had a very different conceptualization of GDP than others, such as John Meynard Keynes. He wanted to include income distribution, exclude advertis-

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ing and military spending, and was clear that a key issue to consider was both the quality of economic growth and that growth was a means to an end, not an end in itself. While he lost the “battle of ideas” over how to model, measure and understand GDP growth, he continued to question the way this new measure was (mis)understood by policy-makers and the public alike. As he put it in 1962, “Distinctions must be kept in mind between quantity and quality of growth, between its costs and return, and between the short and long term….Objectives should be explicit: goals for more growth should specify more growth of what and for what.”23 Futhermore, the exclusion of non-market/ non-monetized labor, such as that provided (mostly by women) in the home, is strictly an ideological or normative, not a methodological, decision. This means that GDP offers a partial and indeed radically incomplete conceptualization of the economy, as green and (eco)feminist political economists have long suggested.24

A case could be made that economic growth became an integral part of national identity for western countries during the Cold War. High levels of sustained economic growth leading to increased consumption of goods and services provided proof of the superiority of capitalism over communism and served to undermine (socialist) arguments for a greater redistribution of wealth.

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Indeed, in the Cold War context, the political importance of Western capitalist states being able to reach and sustain high rates of economic growth came down to the systemic superiority of capitalism over its communist alternative, and high rates of growth buttressed popular support for capitalism within Western countries. If a large measure of this popular support was based on the ability to deliver higher levels and more diversified consumer goods and services, such increase had the effect of securing public legitimacy for a capitalist measure-based model and of locking it firmly into place, regardless of the fact that it led to a whole host of socially disruptive, normatively contested and ecologically destructive problems.25 At the same time, it sidelined alternative economic models and objectives that would have been socially and economically more responsible and viable. In this way, consumer-based GDP growth became a “core state imperative” for capitalist liberal democracies. Competition between and within the non-Communist West around which country, party or politician could promote “Growthmanship”—the state management of year over year increases in GDP, incomes, employment, consumption etc.— became an economic complement to the arms race in the Cold War period.

Concluding Questions Giving us Pause On the basis of this, admittedly short, sketch of a much more complex issue, it is legitimate to ask whether an economic policy forged in the Cold War is now “fit for purpose” in our climate changed and carbon constrained 21st century world. Is it not time to “let growth go”? To enable us in the “overdevel-

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oped minority world” to move on to a new economy, new forms of growth in human flourishing that do not result in ecological damage or widening inequalities? For the minority world to go on a “carbon diet,” as it were, to allow the ecological space for those in the majority world of the Global South to develop? And reminding ourselves that, while there are biophysical limits to material economic growth, and that there is a materialist component to any “good life,” the reality is that some of the mainstays of human thriving have no limits, such as social and personal relationships, meaning, knowledge, creativity, play, art and beauty. Is it not high time to move from more to better?

From having to being? To acknowledge the benefits of economic growth (and I would include here fossil fuels upon which it depends), but also recognize that continuing on the treadmill of growth is now a net disbenefit and that growth has now become a fetter on human progress? That what we urgently need is not more of “business as usual,” but creative and imaginative new ways of thinking, making, living and working beyond growth? To thrive within the ecological limits of the planet and realize that good lives do not have to cost the earth? In the admonishing words of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett: Economic growth, for so long the great engine of progress, has, in the rich countries, largely finished its work. Not only have measures of well-being and happiness ceased to rise with economic growth but, as affluent societies have grown richer, there have been long-term rises in rates of anxiety, depression, and numerous other social problems. The populations of rich countries have got to the end of a long historical journey.26

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John Barry is a professor of Green Political Economy at Queen's University Belfast. His main research interests include politics, economics, and ethics of sustainability/sustainable development. He is the author of The Politics of Actually Existing Unsustainability: Human Flourishing in a Climate-Changed, Carbon Constrained World. His blog “Marxist Lentilist” is at http://www.marxistlentilist.blogspot.com.

Notes 1. I elaborate on this idea in my paper “From Pre-Analytic Axiom to Core State Imperative and Dominant Commonsense: A Genealogy of the Ideology of Economic Growth,” which I presented at the annual conference of the Western Political Science Association, during the Ideologies and Political Economy panel, San Francisco, March 29–31, 2018.

2. Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows, “Beyond ‘Dangerous’ Climate Change: Emission Scenarios for a New World,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 369, no. 1934 (2011): 20-44.

3. Johan Rockström et al., “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Nature 461, no. 7263 (September 2009): 472–475, https://www.nature.com/articles/461472a.

4. Amelia Womack, Villo Lelkes, and Prisca Merz, “Ending the Insanity of Ecocide,” Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy, 2013, accessed May 4, 2018, http://www. steadystate.org/ending-the-insanity-of-ecocide/.

5. Herman Daly, From Uneconomic Growth to a Steady-State Economy (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2014).

6. John McMurtry, The Cancer Stage of Capitalism: From Crisis to Cure (London: Pluto Press, 2013).

7. Thomas Picketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).

8. Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

9. David Hausman, The Inexact and Separate Science of Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 212.

10. David Martin, “The Preanalytic Visions of Environmental and Ecological Economics in Investigating Biodiversity Preservation,” in Essays in Ecocritcism, eds. Nirmal Selvamony, Rayson Nimladasan, and Alex K. Rayson (New Delhi: Sarup and Sons, 2007), 67-82.

11. I address this question in my book The Politics of Actually Existing Unsustainability: Human Flourishing in a Climate Changed, Carbon Constrained World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

12. Bertrand Russell, Why Men Fight, (London: The Century Co., 1916), 153.

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13. Robert M. Solow, “The Economics of Resources or the Resources of Economics,” The American Economic Review 64, no. 2 (May 1974): 1-14.

14. Siize Punabantu, The Greater Wealth and Poverty of Nations: An Introduction to Operating Level Economics (Lusaka: ASG Advisory Services Group, 2010), 3. Emphasis added.

15. Herman Daly, From Uneconomic Growth to a Steady-State Economy (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2014), 13. Emphasis added.

16. Laurence Boldeman, The Cult of the Market: Economic Fundamentalism and its Discontents (Canberra: Australian National University, 2007), 224-225. Emphasis added.

17. David Gauthier, Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 218.

18. Warren J. Samuels, “Welfare Economics, Power and Property,” in Law and Economics: An Institutional Perspective, eds. Warren Samuels and Alfred Allen Schmid (Boston: Kluwer, 1980), 9-76, esp. 47-48.

19. Dirk Philipsen, The Little Big Number: How GDP Came to Rule the World and What to Do about It (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 71.

20. U.S. Department of Commerce, GDP: One of the Great Inventions of the 20th Century, Remarks by Robert J. Shapiro, Under Secretary of Commerce for Economic Affairs, December 1999, Washington DC https://www.bea.gov/scb/account_articles/general/0100od/maintext.htm 21. Ehsan Masood, The Great Invention: The Story of GDP and the Making and Unmaking of the Modern World (New York: Pegasus Books, 2016), 35.

22. I make this claim in my aforementioned paper “From Pre-Analytic Axiom to Core State Imperative and Dominant Commonsense.”

23. Simon Kuznets, “How to Judge Quality,” in The New Republic 147, no. 16 (1962): 29-31.

24. Marilyn Waring, If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics (New York: Harper Collins, 1990); Barry, 2012.

25. Tim Jackson, Prosperity without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2017); Barry 2012.

26. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), 5-6.

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E S S A Y

NOSTALGIA AND THE SEARCH FOR PLEASURE— Rethinking What to Eat MICHELLE MART

S

ometimes, the simplest questions can be the most daunting.

At the start of the 21st century, for example, many Americans and other Westerners wrestled with the question: what to eat? That the question was even posed testified to the age of abundance spawned by more than a century of industrial agriculture.

It’s hard to argue with the equation of industrial agriculture and abundance.

Yet, it’s also clear that such an equation assumed that agricultural success was measured solely by the quantity of food amassed, and its falling prices.

But, in the shadow of the mountains of cheap food, there were also serious environmental, health, and cultural consequences which pushed some people toward the seemingly simple dilemma, what to eat?

The question masked a much more serious revolt underway among a small segment of the population.

Going by a variety of names—the new food revolution, the local food movement, the farm to table movement, Slow Food—the new approach to the raising, procurement, cooking, and eating of food at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries called

for a wholesale change to what Americans ate.

Such an ambitious agenda begs the question of what drove the pockets of passionate dissatisfaction with the food status quo? Was it nostalgia for a bygone age and the foods associated with it, or was it the desire to self-consciously create a new, modern food system blending old and new methods, fusing cuisines and cultures? Moreover, was the new food movement driven by pleasure seeking among selfish elites, or less hedonistic motivations to repair the environment and human health? The following pages argue that these goals were not mutually exclusive, and thus pointed the way to a multifaceted new food system that could meet different cultural, environmental, and health goals.

Before turning to the so-called new food revolution, it makes sense to think about what people were rebelling against. Industrial agriculture in the United States had begun to reshape food systems and cultures in the late 19th century. The early success of industrial farming rested on several foundations.1 First was the Western expansion of the nation, facilitated by a growing railroad network, which helped certain regions to specialize in particular commodities, including wheat in Minnesota and the Dakotas, corn and pork in the Midwest, and dairy in Wisconsin and Iowa.

It was not too long before large corporations

built a growing industry to exploit the increasing quantities of commodities that were available for falling prices.

Historian Harvey Levenstein describes just how quickly this new industry was created, writing that by 1900, 20% of the nation’s manufacturing was in food processing.2 The growth of agricultural capacity and output leapt forward with the demands created

by World War I, but an even more dramatic change in food production followed World War II. As in many areas of the American economy, the two decades after the war are often viewed as a golden age of agriculture—at least of industrial agriculture. Building on the technological and business innovations of the early 20th century, agriculture was transformed with the civilian adaption of synthetic, petroleum-based pesticides—such as DDT—which had been developed for military use. Soon after the war, DDT became ubiquitous in American agriculture—used, for example, on grains, fruits, cotton, and in barns for insect control—and led to the creation of new and more powerful pesticides. More than just reflecting the advances of modern chemistry, the explosion of pesticide use (increasing tenfold from 1945 to 1972) demonstrated the unquestioned conviction that the environmental landscape could be manipulated and shaped to satisfy human desires.3 A cursory look at the transformation of postwar farming bolstered faith in human ingenuity and the new technologies (mechanical and chemical), as grain, dairy, and animal production on farms skyrocketed.4 Newspaper and magazine articles and advertisements in the 1940s and 1950s lauded the ballooning output and the technologies that brought it.

Along with praise for the techniques of modern agriculture, news-

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papers and magazines also celebrated the processed and prepared foods which transformed raw materials into modern foodstuffs. Twentieth century Americans had been primed for this culinary revolution by the introduction of factory foods and “scientific cookery” in the late 19th century. Historian Laura Shapiro observes that these technological and philosophical changes reshaped taste for the next century: “Nuances of flavor and texture were irrelevant in the scientific kitchen, and pleasure was sent off to wait in the parlor.”5 Another inheritance of the scientific cookery approach is what writer Michael Pollan labeled “nutritionism,” or the idea that food was merely a collection of nutritional components.6 Such a mindset was reflected in the evolving nutrition guidelines issued by the U.S. government starting in the early 20th century with the research of W.O. Atwater at the Department of Agriculture.7 On first glance, under-

What drove the pockets of passionate dissatisfaction with the food status quo? Was it nostalgia for a bygone age and the foods associated with it, or was it the desire to selfconsciously create a new, modern food system blending old and new methods, fusing cuisines and cultures? Moreover, was the new food movement driven by pleasure seeking among selfish elites, or less hedonistic motivations to repair the environment and human health?

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E S S A Y standing the nutritional elements of various foods and what humans biologically required to stay healthy appeared to be a laudable goal. But as Pollan and others observed, the obsession with nutritional components supplanted culture and destroyed the authority of culinary traditions.

In addition, the idea that food was merely a vehicle to ingest particular amounts of vitamins or proteins led to the assumption that the nutritional elements could be simulated from the lab or manipulated in foods. Thus, food became divorced from the earth and its particular environment.

By the late 20th century, a number of Americans expressed dissatisfaction with the idea that food was a mere nutritional commodity produced by modern technology, not nature. Such sentiments also reflected the spread of modern environmentalism, and the desire among many to reconnect with the natural world. Dissatisfaction with industrial food also grew for health reasons. By the 1970s, there was increasing evidence that despite decades of viewing food through a nutritionist lens, increasing numbers of Americans were succumbing to food related diseases. This proved to be fertile ground for a countercultural approach to food, which included the adoption of unconventional and Eastern-inspired cuisines and support for organic foods raised outside of the conventional system. Organic foods continued to enjoy growing support even after the end of the counterculture movement, until finally achieving legislative sanction first in California in 1990 and then nationally in 2000.8 The new food revolution of the late 20th and early 21st centuries grew from these strands of rebellion and collection of ideals. The movement in its var-

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ious guises sought to replace the existing industrial food system with one of less processed, fresher foods, produced without pesticides and other chemicals.9 Attempting to turn back the clock on the globalization of food which shipped commodities thousands of miles, the movement celebrated local foods and relationships with producers which anchored foods in particular places and seasons. This rethinking of food aimed to repair the environmental damage of industrial food and to restore human health which had been damaged by it. Such goals were made more urgent by the accelerating crisis of climate change. The industrial food system as it had evolved was both a demonstration of economic and technological success in manipulating the earth, and the unthinking exploitation of the environment which characterized the Anthropocene. A challenge to the food status quo then was far more ambitious than it first appeared.

Beyond the mission to fix environmental and medical ills, the food revolution also celebrated traditional food cultures, the pleasures of consuming delicious foods, and the creative possibilities of new cuisines. Alice Waters embraced all of these goals. She was one of the leading figures of the new food revolution, helping to reshape contemporary attitudes toward raising and consuming food. She cared deeply about how food was raised and our relationship to agricultural lands; she cherished beauty and aesthetics in food and the way that it was prepared.

In 1971, she founded what would become a world famous restaurant, Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, California, and thereafter advocated for the new approach to food practiced there.

Reflecting her love of French culture and cuisine, Waters named the restau-

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Attempting to turn back the clock on the globalization of food which shipped commodities thousands of miles, the movement celebrated local foods and relationships with producers which anchored foods in particular places and seasons. This rethinking of food aimed to repair the environmental damage of industrial food and to restore human health which had been damaged by it.

rant after Honoré Panisse, a character in Marcel Pagnol’s film trilogy, Marius, Fanny, and César. Over the years, the restaurant was indeed successful in influencing many chefs, home cooks, and restauranteurs who embraced Waters’ model and ideals.10 As chef and food writer Ruth Reichl observed in 1989, Chez Panisse “changed the way America eats.”11 Chez Panisse changed over the years; it began as a challenge to the bland, processed tastes which dominated American cuisine in the mid-20th century, and also reflected the communal ideals of the counterculture by creating a collaborative, extended family among the staff and neighborhood patrons. The restaurant was communal in structure, not just ideals. It was founded by Waters and six friends, and in its early days in the 1970s, Waters was not always prominent in its press coverage. For example, in a 1979 article in the Chicago Tribune on Chez Panisse’s annual garlic festival, Waters was not even mentioned.12 From its earliest days, taste was an essential goal at Chez Panisse, as expressed succinctly by chef Jer-

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emiah Tower in 1975: “If you know the taste that you are trying to achieve, you can get there one way or another.”13 While always emphasizing good tasting, fresh, quality ingredients, the restaurant came to focus more and more on using very local foods, produced by small farmers, by organic methods. The style of cuisine and menus also evolved over time, moving from simple French market food to adventurous, eclectic, French-inspired haute cuisine, to new American recipes based on the foods of northern California. While staying true to its communal spirit and fostering experimentation, the reputation of Chez Panisse evolved within the food world, drawing visitors from far and wide—including President Bill Clinton in 1993—and earning the widespread accolades of food critics, beginning with its first review in Gourmet magazine in 1975. By 2001, Gourmet named Chez Panisse the best restaurant in the United States.

The cultural and social impact of Chez Panisse was great, but Waters always made it clear that she was motivated by sensual exploration, not abstract goals. Writing about what she termed a “Delicious Revolution” in 2007, she asserted, “I was searching for flavor, not philosophy.”14 Further, in encouraging people to take up cooking, she told her readers to “Enjoy cooking as a sensory pleasure: touch, listen, watch, smell, and, above all, taste,” since “It’s the many dimensions of sensual experience that make cooking so satisfying.”15 In many of her recipe and other books, Waters emphasized the importance of how food tastes more than anything else, and the importance of the ingredients used: “What I really want is a restaurant where you just give people good

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E S S A Y bread and good wine and good olive oil and then you lead them to a wonderful garden and say ‘There it is, help yourself.’”16 As did others, chef Tom Colicchio followed in Waters’ footsteps in his Craft restaurants—first opened in 2001 —which emphasized the simple pleasures of quality ingredients; he asserted that he wanted to focus on food as “craft” not “artistry,” and simply highlight great, unadulterated foods.17 Chef Dan Barber further asserted that “a true primal taste” would indicate that food was grown in the right, ecologically sound way. The pleasure of taste would lead one to a healthy environment and a healthy body: “My point is that you don’t have to be an environmentalist, you don’t have to be a nutritionist, you don’t have to be anything other than somebody who just seeks good tastes.”18 Celebrating the sensual pleasures of food led to one of the most common criticisms of the new food movement and the participants sometimes derisively referred to as “foodies”: that it was at its core selfish and shallow, a precious exercise of elite consumption inaccessible to most people. This criticism was leveled early on at Chez Panisse as the cost of dining there continued to rise. Even back in 1979, one newspaper article observed that Chez Panisse was “patronized by the Berkeley, California elite.”19 Not wanting to compromise on the gourmet quality of the restaurant, Waters tried to address the issue of access by opening the

more affordable café, upstairs from the main restaurant. Affordability, though, is relative, and the café still might have been rarified to some.

Nevertheless, although the new food movement could not be simply dismissed for its epicurean indulgences, this judgment points to a challenging question: can the consumption of food be both noble and satisfying?

Waters certainly thought so. As much as she wrote about pleasure and sensory experiences, she also built Chez Panisse on the idea of local, traditional food cultures, and how food connected us to the land. For instance, the Chez Panisse Café Cookbook included descriptions of the farmers, fishermen, and other purveyors on whom the café relied to encourage readers to seek out such “dedicated” stewards of the land in their own areas.20 Waters believed that taking pleasure in the bounty of the earth would inevitably strengthen communities and cultures, and protect the world in which we lived. In 2004, she told an audience, “if we can educate the senses, and break down the wall of ignorance between farmers and eaters, I am convinced—because I have seen it with my own eyes time and again—people will inevitably choose the sustainable way.”21 Seven years later, she continued to emphasize the importance of this communal and environmental impact: “Our vision at Chez Panisse has always been a world where delicious food enriches the celebration of life and strengthens our connection to nature and culture.”22

Although the new food movement could not be simply dismissed for its epicurean indulgences, this judgment points to a challenging question: can the consumption of food be both noble and satisfying?

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Waters’ celebration of food communities and those who worked to bring forth food from the earth and sea was widely shared among others in the new food revolution.

Along with Waters, other restauranteurs established mutually beneficial relationships with farmers and then identified them on their menus (and the food they provided), sometimes in elaborate prose which eventually became the source of parody by critics who skewered the descriptions as pretentious. Such relationships, of course, could be economically significant for small family farmers trying to compete in a market dominated by corporate suppliers. This was also true for small fishermen and is illustrated by the example of Ingrid Bengis-Palei, a writer and scholar of literature, who also founded a seafood company in Stonington, Maine, in 1985, and was soon supplying fresh seafood to top chefs, including Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Wolfgang Puck, and Thomas Keller. She worked with the same fishermen over many years and made sure the restaurants she supplied were respectful of the food as well as those who labored to produce it.23 In addition to wholesale suppliers and restauranteurs, the desire to build relationships with small farmers was also reflected in the increased subscriptions to CSAs, or Community Supported Agriculture, in the early 21st century by individual consumers; estimates of such farms numbered several thousand by 2015.24 In CSAs, people paid money to farmers up front in return for an amount of produce each week throughout the season. Many individuals reported their satisfaction in getting to know the farmer and where the food came

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from. Tom Colicchio recalled that early in his career he worked to establish collaborative relationships with farmers who would grow the specific seeds he requested.25 The desire of ordinary consumers to feel connected to farmers was also reflected in practices of the wildly successful natural and organic supermarket chain, Whole Foods. Whole Foods stores posted lists of the purveyors who supplied their food, sometimes including detailed portraits of the farmers.26 The yearning for connection with food suppliers was one of the clearest illustrations of the nostalgia which seemed to permeate the new food revolution. Many Americans looked back to a simpler age when small family farmers had dominated the country.

Far from being just an expression of modern dissatisfaction, the agrarian ideal had had a powerful hold on the nation’s identity since its founding.

Thomas Jefferson’s dictum that those who work on the land are the chosen people of God remained a bedrock of American culture long after the vast majority of citizens left the land for other types of employment. Such powerful cultural ideals are ripe for exploitation in the narratives created

by Whole Foods and other corporations, as Michael Pollan indicated in his criticisms of what he labeled “supermarket pastoral.”27 But beyond the romantic nostalgia of “supermarket pastoral,” Alice Waters and others in the new food movement also celebrated the sensual pleasure of delicious food. Waters, for one, sought to create lasting change in these values through her writing and institutional partnerships, and by influencing a new generation’s relationship to food through the Edible Schoolyard project, which she started

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E S S A Y Despite the assertions of those who embraced new food systems, others continued to argue that there was an inescapable tension between nostalgia for food from simple family farms and the pleasures of fresh food that was sometimes too expensive for everyone to enjoy. in Berkeley in 1995.28 Drawing on her background as a Montessori teacher and the philosophy of educating the whole child by encouraging him or her to learn by doing and by using all senses, Waters sought to integrate the growing, preparing, and eating of food into the curriculum of the school, fostering better health among the children, greater respect for food, and a connection to the natural world; she also wanted to encourage delight in wholesome food. Waters established the Chez Panisse Foundation to provide financial support and stability for the project, and several affiliate gardens opened in other American schools. In addition, many other garden projects not directly affiliated with the foundation opened in scores of schools in the years after.

The Edible Schoolyard attracted visitors from around the world, including from Africa and Prince Charles from England.

Other chefs also made their mark in the new food movement, recapturing the unadulterated flavors of fresh, organic food, building relationships with farmers, and changing contemporary attitudes about our relationship with the earth. But as chef Dan Barber indicated, one had to overcome the idea that nostalgia and plea-

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sure seeking were impractical. The chef/owner of Blue Hill in New York as well as a multipurpose restaurant, farm, and education center in upstate New York began his memoir with the description of two seemingly contradictory urges. He told lovingly of his grandmother’s farm where he spent childhood summers, and then wrote about the skepticism with which he greeted one farmer’s practice of planting corn, beans, and squash in a mutually-nourishing patch, using the “Seven Sisters” strategy of Native Americans. He judged the farmer’s idea quaint, yet wrote, “I had nothing against honoring agricultural traditions, but I didn’t need a sisterhood of beneficial relationships. I need a polenta with phenomenal flavor.”

Come harvest time, “It was an awakening,” as his senses were overcome by the flavor of that particular corn: “It was polenta I hadn’t imagined possible, so corny that breathing out after swallowing the first bite brought another rich shot of corn flavor.”29 As did Waters, Barber happily embraced nostalgia and taste as mutually supportive, not competing, goals in the food revolution. Moreover, Barber continued to celebrate taste as the best way to evaluate environmental and human health: “Taste is a soothsayer, a truth teller. And it can be a guide in reimagining our food system, and our diets, from the ground up.”30 Despite the assertions of Barber, Waters, and others who embraced new food systems, others continued to argue that there was an inescapable tension between nostalgia for food from simple family farms and the pleasures of fresh food that was sometimes too expensive for everyone to enjoy. Critic Rebecca Solnit asserted that the participants in the New Food Revolution had done little

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to bridge this gap. “Food,” she wrote, “has become both an upscale fetish… and a poor people’s radical agenda.”31 Her argument seemed reasonable, especially when one compared the choices available to a diner at Blue Hill and a poor resident of an inner city who might live in a “food desert,” far from a grocery store. And, new food enthusiasts were not always sensitive to such concerns. Barber, for example, unselfconsciously used the much derided language of Reagan era politics to explain to his readers that the food revolution “trickles down” from white table restaurants to bistros to everyday food culture.32 Elsewhere, Barber answered such criticisms by pointing out—rightly —that industrial food was not really as inexpensive as some believed, since, for example, it relied on heavily subsidized petroleum at all stages of its production.33 Subsidized petroleum, as many others had pointed out along with Barber, was just one example of how many of the true costs of industrialized agriculture (economic, political, health, environmental) were hidden or “externalized,” leaving many to unthinkingly celebrate the abundance of cheap food. Nevertheless, the zero-sum equation of practicality and hedonism was simplistic: was pleasure in food only reserved for elites and the new food movements hopelessly inefficient?

How to address this tension points back to the fundamental question raised at the outset: what to eat? Writer and food activist Wendell Berry provided one answer to critics who saw the new food movement as elitist.

In his 1989 essay “The Pleasures of Eating,” Berry asserted that taking pleasure in food was neither elitist nor selfish, but necessary. He asserted

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that food should be pleasurable—for everyone: The pleasure of eating should be an extensive pleasure, not that of the mere gourmet. People who know the garden in which their vegetables have grown and know that the garden is healthy will remember the beauty of the growing plants, perhaps in the dewy first light of morning when gardens are at their best. Such a memory involves itself with the food and is one of the pleasures of eating.34

Thus, Berry found pleasure in local food and knowledge about the land from which it grew. In his call to find pleasure in the relationship between land and food, Berry also challenged another aspect of the industrial food system. He rejected the idea that the relationship to food was merely about “consumption,” arguing that the food industry wanted people to be “mere consumers—passive, uncritical, and dependent.” As consumers, people were unlikely to realize that “the overriding concerns [of the food industry] are not quality and health, but volume and price.”35 Berry made it clear that the quantities produced was not the way to evaluate a food system. The food revolution reflected this judgment and called for an increase in the number of people who were food producers—not just consumers—as seen in the support for farmers’ markets, CSAs, and backyard gardeners.

A related criticism of the new food movement and its adherents—derided as “foodies”—was that not only was it elitist, but that those involved yearned for a pure, ideal food culture, either drawn from a mythical past or in slavish imitation of contemporary haute cuisine. In her playful celebration of

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E S S A Y aesthetically pleasing foods, blogger Adeline Waugh illustrated the rigidity of such yearnings. Waugh was one of the originators of a minor fad called “unicorn food,” recognizable by rainbow colors, intermittent sparkles, and a fanciful sensibility, akin to that of the mythical creature for which it was named. An essential part of unicorn food included documenting and sharing the image of the item in question over Instagram and other platforms.

Even Starbucks made its contribution to the fad with its sugary Unicorn Frappuccino©, available for just five days in April 2017.36 On first glance, unicorn food appeared to be a parody of industrialized food, encouraging selfish pleasure seeking and the consumption of food products loaded with empty calories. Or, if not a parody, then an extreme example of what Michael Pollan labeled “foodlike substances.”37 But, upon second glance, the story became more complicated. Aside from posting images of her unicorn creations, Waugh was a food stylist who also blogged about health and wellness. She had been experimenting with natural food dyes—such as beets, chlorophyll, and blueberries—to make her food pictures more colorful, and the trend began to spread

after her first posting. Her foods were all made from natural ingredients— unlike many sprinkle and marshmallow bedecked items later created by others—and were intended to make nutritious foods more aesthetically appealing—and fun. For Waugh, then, beauty and enjoyment were neither guilty nor shallow pleasures, and they were not incompatible with healthy food. Moreover, Waugh’s creations harkened back to the highly processed industrial foods of the 1950s.38 But Waugh challenged the industrial food system on different terms. Her playful take on healthy food rejected artificial chemicals and encouraged people to eat wholesome foods which nourished their bodies. In a way, though, she was also issuing a challenge to health food purists who are appalled by rainbow colored foods that looked artificial even if they were not. (Waugh faced an angry backlash after some of her Instagram postings.) Waugh, then, was encouraging an urge to enjoy the consumption of food for aesthetic reasons, while, at the same time, indulging— and upending—nostalgia for industrial food.

The backlash against unicorn food illustrates the point that not all aspects of a century of industrial food could be judged as failures, and that tak-

The new food movement—in its various guises—was a challenge to the existing industrial agricultural food system and a challenge to reimagining a new food culture. It called on Americans not to measure the success of the food system solely by the output, efficiency, and cost of mass produced food; quality mattered just as much as quantity. It called on Americans to recognize that food was not an industrial commodity, but an expression of culture and the human connection to the earth.

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ing pleasure in food was certainly not shameful.39 Undeniably, another success of industrial food was the creation of abundance which had allowed people the security to stop and consider the defects of the existing system and culture. As an example of this unique moment of abundance, writer Susan Allport considered that the prolific number of deer in Westchester, New York—what in other circumstances might be exploited as “convenient packets of protein and fat” for human consumption—were often left undisturbed to feast on most of the edible plants around suburban houses. But the blindness brought by abundance would not simply be repaired by a wide-scale return to deer hunting. As Allport notes, “‘finding food’ had shaped our human selves and turned us into the people who we are today.”40 Allport’s observation that many Americans blessed with abundance had no desire to eat the deer trampling their flower beds also gestured to an inescapable part of modern food culture: class. One cannot deny that what one ate was based in part on

how much money one had to spend.

And, as many critics of the new food movement argued, it was easy to find examples of food used as a precious, wasteful assertion of status by small groups of elites. Nevertheless, it made no sense to condemn the whole new food movement for the class pretensions of some. The new food movement—in its various guises—was a challenge to the existing industrial agricultural food system and a challenge to reimagining a new food culture. It called on Americans not to measure the success of the food system solely by the output, efficiency, and cost of mass produced food; quality mattered just as much as quantity. It called on Americans to recognize that food was not an industrial commodity, but an expression of culture and the human connection to the earth. It called on Americans— grappling with the environmental challenges of the Anthropocene—to affirm Wendell Berry’s observation that “eating was an agricultural act.”

And, finally, it called on Americans to celebrate, not apologize for, the sensual pleasures of food.

Michelle Mart (Ph.D., New York University ) is an Associate Professor of History at Penn State Berks. Mart's research has specialized in recent American culture, the environment, and foreign policy. She recently finished a cultural history of pesticide use in the United States from World War II to the present: Pesticides, A Love Story. Her first book, Eye on Israel, examines relations between the United States and Israel in the post-World War II period, and cultural images of Jews and the Jewish state. Currently, Mart is working on a book-length study of the intersection of food, politics, and culture.

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E S S A Y Notes 1. The growth of industrial agriculture and food in this period has been chronicled in several places. For a discussion of these transformations as they affected the food industry, see Harvey Levenstein, Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 30-41. For discussion of how industrial expectations came to permeate agriculture in this period see, Deborah Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).

2. Levenstein, Revolution at the Table, 37.

3. For further discussion of the cultural assumptions behind the postwar spread of synthetic pesticides, see my book, Pesticides, A Love Story: America’s Enduring Embrace of Dangerous Chemicals (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015). There was a long history of pesticide use in the U.S. before the age of synthetics; for a discussion of pest control in the pre-1945 period, see James McWilliams, American Pests: The Losing War on Insects from Colonial Times to DDT (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), and James Whorton, Before Silent Spring: Pesticides and Public Health in Pre-DDT America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974).

4. Bruce Gardner, American Agriculture in the Twentieth Century: How It Flourished and What It Cost (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 14, 24, 147-48. From 1930-1950, mechanical harvesters used had increased ninefold. Peter Pringle, Food, Inc.: Mendel to Monsanto—The Promises and Perils of the Biotech Harvest (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 47.

5. Shapiro and others have noted that the flavors of factory foods that came to dominate the American palate and the dishes prepared were often limited to sweet, salty, and bland. Laura Shapiro, Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), xviii, xx. For a more detailed discussion on the evolution of cooking at the turn of the 20 th century, see also by Shapiro, Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century. Introduction by Michael Stern (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986, 2001).

6. Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), 1-11.

7. “About the USDA,” USDA website, http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usda/ usdahome?navid=USDA150; Marion Nestle, Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, 2007), 33-5; “Nation’s Surveys of Food Consumption,” three page report, and “USDA Family Food Plans and Costs,” three page report, Nutrition Publications from Sandy Facinoli (Facinoli Papers)(unprocessed), National Agricultural Library (NAL), United Stated Department of Agriculture (USDA).

8. For an overview of the evolving organic movement, see Robin O’Sullivan, American Organic: A Cultural History of Farming, Gardening, Shopping, and Eating (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015); Mart, Pesticides, A Love Story, 204-216.

9. One dramatically visible challenge to processed foods that were mainly collections of isolated chemical ingredients was a book published in 2015 by a photographer who depicted foods in their component parts of chemical powders or dollops of liquids and gels—with little resemblance to an actual “food.” Dwight Eschliman, text by Steve Ettlinger, Ingredients: A Visual Exploration of 75 Additives & 25 Food Products (New York: Regan Arts, 2015).

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10. Much has been written on (and by) Alice Waters. This discussion draws on the following: Thomas McNamee, foreword by R.W. Apple Jr., Alice Waters & Chez Panisse: The Romantic, Impractical, often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 2007); Alice Waters, with Patricia Curtan, Kelsie Kerr, and Fritz Streiff, illustrations by Patricia Curtan, The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons, and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution (New York: Clarkson Potter, 2007); Alice Waters and the cooks of Chez Panisse, in collaboration with David Tanis and Fritz Streiff, illustrated by David Lance Goines, Chez Panisse Café Cookbook (New York: HarperCollins, 1999); Alice Waters and Friends, foreword by Calvin Trillin, afterword by Michael Pollan, 40 Years of Chez Panisse: The Power of Gathering (New York: Clarkson Potter, 2011); Alice Waters, with Daniel Duane, photographs by Davie Littschwager, Edible Schoolyard, A Universal Idea (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2008).

11. Ruth Reichl, “The ‘80s, A Special Report Tastemakers,” Los Angeles Times, December 24, 1989, 11.

12. Mark Blackburn, “Sign of the Times: Berkeley Switches from LSD to Garlic,” Chicago Tribune, June 30, 1979, E3. For another example of its communal spirit, see James Beard, “Ready for Baked Heads of Garlic?” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 18, 1978, 16-H. 13. Lisa Bercovici, “For Them, Haute Cuisine Beats Higher Learning,” New York Times, November 12, 1975, 56.

14. Waters, Art of Simple Food, 3.

15. Waters, Art of Simple Food, 6-7, 4.

16. Reichl, “The ‘80s, A Special Report.”

17. Tom Collichio, oral history interview in Voices from the Food Revolution: People Who Changed the Way Americans Eat (The Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University, 2011), 17.

18. Dan Barber oral history interview in Voices from the Food Revolution, 18.

19. Blackburn, “Sign of the Times.”

20. Waters, Chez Panisse Café Cookbook, xviii.

21. McNamee, Alice Waters, 346.

22. Waters, 40 Years at Chez Panisse, 9.

23. Bengis-Palei also started a local foundation in 2009 to provide support for those who made a living from raising food where she lived on Deer Isle, Maine. She died of cancer in 2017; Emily Burnham, “Writer Who Sold Famous Chefs on Maine Seafood Dies of Cancer,” Bangor Daily News, July 28 2017, C5.

24. There is no consensus on the exact number, and some controversy about the numbers gathered in 2007, 2012, and 2015. Community Supported Agriculture, National Agricultural Library, USDA, (https://www.nal.usda.gov/afsic/community-supported-agriculture) and Community Supported Agriculture, Local Harvest (https://www. localharvest.org/csa/).

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E S S A Y 25. Dan Barber similarly asserted that it was important for chefs and farmers to have a collaborative relationship; Tom Colicchio, and Dan Barber, Voices from the Food Revolution.

26. The history of the remarkably successful grocery chain entered a new stage in summer 2017 when its growth had slowed and it was acquired by Amazon, which promptly announced new policies in August 2017; Nick Wingfield and Michael J. de la Merced, “Amazon to Buy Whole Foods for $13.4 Billion,” New York Times, June 16, 2017; Nick Wingfield and David Gelles, “Amazon’s Play to Rival Whole Foods Rivals: Cheaper Kale and Avocado,” New York Times, August 24, 2017.

27. Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: Penguin Books, 2006).

28. For a pictorial description and history of the project, see Waters, Edible Schoolyard.

29. Dan Barber, The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (New York: Penguin Books, 2014), 1-7 esp. 6, 7.

30. Barber, 22.

31. Rebecca Solnit, “Revolutionary Plots: On Urban Gardening,” in The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2014), 289.

32. Barber, 10.

33. Oral history, Dan Barber (part III), Voices from the Food Revolution.

34. Wendell Berry, “The Pleasures of Eating,” in Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food, introduction by Michael Pollan (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2009), 233.

35. Berry, “Pleasures,” 228, 231.

36. Liam Stack, “Unicorn Food is Colorful, Sparkly, and Everywhere,” The New York Times, April 19, 2017.

37. Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food, 1-2.

38. For a thoughtful discussion of how many Americans both embraced and remade food ideals and practices in the 1950s, see Laura Shapiro, Something from the Oven.

39. Some critics also reclaimed pleasure in food as an answer to what they asserted was overblown anxiety over such issues, having led to a dysfunctional, guilt-laden food culture and an obsession with obesity. For such a framing of cultural discourses, see John Coveney, Food Morals and Meaning: The Pleasure and Anxiety of Eating, 2nd ed.

(London and New York: Routledge, 2006).

40. Susan Allport, The Primal Feast: Food, Sex, Foraging, and Love (New York: Harmony, 2000), 4, 18.

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E S S A Y

THE FIRST LAWNMOWER OF THE SEASON ALAN MACEACHERN

I

n 1878, the approximately one hundred Canadian citizens who were gathering daily weather observations for the fledgling Meteorological Service of Canada [MSC] were issued the agency’s first book of Instructions. Written by MSC head George T. Kingston, the manual was devoted largely to explaining how instruments worked, but there was also a section on how the meteorological forms were to be filled out. After detailing the purpose and appropriate use of the many thin columns recording measures such as temperature and precipitation, Kingston turned to the single wide column for “Remarks” along the right-hand-side of the forms.

This column, he explained, could be used to add notes about instruments, the making of observations itself, or simply “events.” Kingston elaborated on what constituted events worth noting, including those “relative to the seasons, such as the first snow or frost, or first sleighing, ice formed or broken up,” “the appearance or departure of migratory birds,” “the budding and flowering of plants,” and—to make his list truly global in scope—“Events not specified.”1 Kingston trusted that an observation had meaning if it had meaning to its observer—and, in any case, there

was no harm in having the observer document an event and letting the MSC decide if it was truly significant.

Kingston’s Instructions became the Bible for meteorological observers in Canada in the decades that followed, as the number of weather stations ballooned into the hundreds and then thousands, spreading to all corners of the young nation.2 The volunteers dutifully jotted down qualitative remarks alongside their quantitative measurements, and mailed the forms to Toronto. What they never learned was how the remarks, once gathered, were being used.

Because they weren’t. The Meteorological Service never—right down to the present—figured out a way to standardize, let alone compile, analyze, or utilize the observers’ written remarks.3 In 2014, I helped bring all of Environment and Climate Change Canada’s extant MSC weather observations between 1840 and 1960—900 archival boxes, an estimated 1.6 million forms overall—to my university’s archive on long-term loan.

From what we can determine, this is the largest archival arrangement ever made between the Canadian government and a university.4 I undertook

E S S A Y the loan process as a means of ensuring the collection’s preservation and making it available for teaching, but I also saw it as a research opportunity.

Until that point, I had been a dyedin-the-wool environmental scholar who had somehow neglected the most pressing environmental issue of our time—climate change—and I was looking for a way to contribute to its study. And if possible, I wanted the work to be of a scale to lend itself to discussion of the Anthropocene, the idea that humans are now having such an unprecedentedly massive and for all intents and purposes permanent effect on the planet, including its climate, that it constitutes a new epoch not just in human history but in Earth history.

The MSC collection, encompassing such a vast area over the course of a century, all compiled by one agency in relatively standard form, seemed capable of speaking to climate change and the Anthropocene. The observers’ qualitative remarks, having never been used or accessed, would be the way in.

In line with Kingston’s instructions, many of the observers provided

phenological information—that is, signs of the changing of the seasons.

Phenology is the study of cyclical natural phenomena, especially the developmental stages of living things, and especially as they relate to climate.5 Historical phenological records can help provide evidence of a changing climate by showing, for example, either that a flower species bloomed earlier over the course of an observer’s long career or that it used to bloom days or weeks later in a given location than it does today.6 Phenological records have the benefit of immediacy, too. Whereas temperature is the foundational indicator of a warming climate, phenology can demonstrate the broad range of ways that warming is experienced, documenting climate change’s direct impact on the world.

So history students and I have been combing through the MSC boxes, creating a database of all the qualitative remarks that observers thought worth observing, with an eye on phenological events.7 We have worked through more than forty percent of the collection, covering some or all of every Canadian province or territory

Until that point, I had been a dyed-in-the-wool environmental scholar who had somehow neglected the most pressing environmental issue of our time—climate change—and I was looking for a way to contribute to its study. And if possible, I wanted the work to be of a scale to lend itself to discussion of the Anthropocene, the idea that humans are now having such an unprecedentedly massive and for all intents and purposes permanent effect on the planet, including its climate, that it constitutes a new epoch not just in human history but in Earth history. The MSC collection, encompassing such a vast area over the course of a century, all compiled by one agency in relatively standard form, seemed capable of speaking to climate change and the Anthropocene. The observers’ qualitative remarks, having never been used or accessed, would be the way in.

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Fig. 1. A typical Meteorological Service of Canada form, this one from Bella Coola, British Columbia, June 1912. The remarks apparently read, “Potatoes leavs hurted Strong Westwind 12 to 7 Smock from the vulcanic eruption” of Novarupta, Alaska, happening at the time.

except Québec, and transcribed some 56,000 remarks to date. Since the MSC never imposed a common language on observers, it has been up to us to classify these remarks ourselves, and we have created and tagged 23 categories—many, as will be discussed below, relating to phenology, but also other topics such as extreme weather, social/cultural history, and the MSC’s own collections practice. Our eventual goal is to produce a website that allows for geographical, temporal, and thematic searching of these observations, from micro- to macro-scales.

Visitors will be able to search, for example, a select location or all of Canada, a single observer or all of them, a given date or a broader timespan. We hope that researchers and the

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general public interested in such topics as extreme weather, flora, or fauna, or specific topics such as hurricanes, orioles, or lilacs, will use the site to develop research questions and make findings of their own.

The Western world experienced something of a phenological moment in the late nineteenth through early twentieth century. Nations sought to learn as much scientific information as possible about the territories under their control, and having citizens gather phenological data had the added advantage of strengthening the individual’s bond with the nation.8 Canada, with its small population spread across a massive area, was particularly interested in learning more. As the Royal Society of Canada

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E S S A Y stated in 1894, it was not enough to say “that Canada is possessed of ’unlimited natural resources’…. In order intelligently to guide the work of those endeavouring to utilize the benefits given to us by nature in the rough, and to attract population and capital for this end, it is necessary to be much more specific.”9 A number of ambitious citizen-scientist phenological projects developed in Canada in the 1890s at the national and provincial levels, but within twenty years they had withered away—their demise rationalized, when not outright hastened, by the knowledge of the amount of data the Meteorological Service was relentlessly accumulating.

When the Botanical Club of Canada folded in 1910, the Royal Society noted that phenological work was being “very successfully undertaken” by the MSC at a national level anyway, so the dissolution actually “indicates evolution—expansion from voluntary club work to the permanently subsidized and well-staffed” MSC.10 But in one respect the Royal Society was mistaken: with the exception of staff at a small number of chief stations, the overwhelming majority of the Meteorological Service’s observers were volunteers. They were a cross-section of Canadians.11 There were a considerable number of farmers, which was not surprising, given that Canada was a rural nation, plus the Service’s desire to cover as great an area as possible further over-represented rural people. But there were also ministers, lawyers, teachers, and retirees. The number of postmasters, particularly on the Prairies, seems to have been disproportionately large as well. There were a substantial number of women, too. Some were housewives quietly doing the job that had

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been given their husbands, but in time women increasingly worked openly, as in the case of Mrs. W. McCredie of Lyons, Ontario, who took over in 1888 when her husband was injured in a farm accident.12 Since the observers lived where they observed, they knew their surroundings, and only grew more aware of seasonal changes the longer they oversaw a weather station, which was often measured in decades.

When J.R. Connon remarked in 1887, “During a residence of 35 years in Elora I never saw vegetation so early,” he did so with authority.13 The role of weather observer was even sometimes handed down from one family member to another, so a single family might record the weather in a place for more than a half-century. Some observers possessed pre-existing meteorological interests, but most seem to have been chosen solely because they lived in the right place and were willing to take measurements three times per day. It is clear that many saw it as an honor to contribute to this national endeavor. As seventy year-old Manitoban L.G. Summers wrote the head office in 1900, “[i]t is 2 years since I took charge of this station and have always tried to do my best in the interests of the service and will continue to do so as long as I have charge of it. As you state there is no financial reward of it. There is this reward that in contributing to the Metorlogical [sic] Department I also contribute to my own intelectual [sic] knowledge which is all the reward that I expect.”14 Given Kingston’s instructions and the observers’ own natural interests, the students and I fully expected to find many phenological observations, and we have not been disappointed. But what most impressed us is the sheer range of ways Canadians

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twenty percent of all those we have tagged, was the first appearance of a bird species in the spring. Observers in all the provinces and territories made mention of them. There are proportionally fewer such remarks the farther north you go, as one might expect, but more research is needed to determine whether urban areas, strictly in the south, attracted more varieties of birds or whether urbanists were more likely to notice birds or think them worthy of mention. For Thomas Robinson of Gravenhurst, Ontario, birds’ predictable spring return predictably merited exclamation marks— “Robins seen!” in late March 1892, for example, and then “Gulls seen!” three days later. He was unusual only for his degree of enthusiasm.

(Having said that, a Saskatchewanian’s 1955 claims that days were “AbsobloomiFig. 2. An example of the phenological detail that some observers provided. In the nutely great” and “splendifcourse of May 1904, D.O. Thomas of Lakefield, Ontario, noted the first appearance erously perfect” surpass even of 13 distinct plants, 7 birds, and caterpillars.

Robinson’s for gusto.)15 Many observers noted the appeartracked the changing of the seasons. ance of a few easily discernible species How one observed the arrival of a such as crows, robins, and sparrows, new season depended on geographibut more experienced birders might cal location (whether on the Prairies, list a much larger number.

An observin the Far North, or in small-town er in Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan, Ontario), on an individual’s interests stands out as one of the latter group, and vocation (as a birder, farmer, or making mention of the first appearlighthouse-keeper, for example), and, ance of dozens of varieties of birds to some degree, time period. Some over the course of the 1910s and ‘20s.16 observers mentioned diverse signs of And some observers learned more seasonal change, while others called about their surroundings over time: in attention to one field of knowledge the 1890s, W.H. Holland of Norquay, that they knew well.

Manitoba, noted the occasional robins The most common sort of phenoor geese, but by the time he had spent logical remark, constituting about

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E S S A Y twenty years running the weather station he was regularly mentioning juncos, flickers, and whip-poor-wills.17 The MSC collection will help researchers track the spring appearance of myriad bird species over time, precisely because Canadians credited birds, more than anything else in nature, as harbingers of spring. That said, John Vancoe’s March 1885 reference to “First bird froze to death” may well be the paradigmatic Canadian phenological observation.18 Almost as common as remarks about birds were those on the budding and flowering of plants. A 1904 observer in Lakefield, Ontario, for example, documented in a single month the appearance of thirteen kinds of plants, from “dog toothed violets” to “apple in blossom” to “red clover” (as well as caterpillars and seven kinds of birds).19 There is considerable geographic variability in the occurrence of plant-related phenological remarks: they represent almost 40% of all tagged observations in lush British Columbia, just under 20% in Ontario, but only 2% in rocky Newfoundland. Although the recent historical range of most flora in Canada is already known, the eventual mapping of the MSC observations should sharpen our understanding of where wildflowers grew, and will certainly improve understanding of what flowers gardeners were planting across the country.

In farming country—which was much of Canada in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries—observers tracked the weather by noting the seeding, harvesting, and general condition of crops. The Prairies led the way in this respect, with almost one-quarter of Manitoba phenological

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observations related to agriculture; the national average is about 13%. From Manitoban John Parr’s very first qualitative remark in 1885 (“wheat nearly all sown”) to his last in 1893 (“every appearance of a good harvest”), his focus was on farming conditions, including whether the growing seasons were running early or late.

Parr’s records attest to the significance of weather to agriculture, and the attention given that relationship by all members of rural communities. Parr was a store owner and postmaster, after all, not even a farmer.20 For those living along Canada’s coasts, rivers, or lakes, winters were circumscribed by the freezing and breakup of ice, so it received an inordinate amount of their attention.

Whereas only three percent of the observations we have tagged are icerelated, they make up thirty percent of those by Newfoundlanders, for example. Ice was most significant because it could make travel impossible, or possible. In the records of J.W. Bilby, a missionary to the Inuit living on an islet deep in the Canadian Arctic, moving, broken, or thin ice reads as an unrelenting nemesis. Bilby referred to ice in ninety percent of his 1904-05 observations, in some cases describing changing ice conditions on every day of the month.21 By contrast, observers on Prince Edward Island in Eastern Canada welcomed the arrival of ice thick enough for sleigh travel, and noted when the rivers had been “bushed”—evergreen branches stuck in the ice to mark a safe path.22 (Indeed, the first MSC forms had a column that tracked “Sleighing Days” to record the state of winter travel.)

In some cases observers documented when a river reached its maximum

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surprise to anyone who has been there in summer. W.J. Dods, who confers a detailed phenological record of Alton, Ontario, from the 1880s to 1920, made sure to note the arrival of fireflies, butterflies, and bees.24 But other volunteers made note of insects when they were at the peak of their season and most bothersome. Year in and year out, for example, John Hollingworth of Beatrice, Ontario, entertainingly informed the Meteorological Service about blackflies and mosquitoes: “Our lively little friends the Musquitos on hand to give us their annual seranade and collect their yearly tribute”; “Good old friends the Black fly & Mosquitoes doing their best to be agreeable & entertaining,” and the like. The aurally-inclined Hollingworth also reported when he heard “jubilant” crows and the “full chorus” of bullfrogs.25 Meteorological Service of Canada observers also recorded first frosts, first snowfalls, the Fig. 3. Meteorological Service of Canada instruction manual to observers, 1930. turning of the leaves, and the sighting of frogs, snakes, bears, and other animals. But they also demheight each spring. Rev. James Tait, onstrated that Canadians, like all for example, noted when the Ottawa people, developed folkways of trackRiver peaked throughout the 1870s.23 ing the passage of the seasons which Such observations remind us that, only secondarily related to nature. whereas seasonal change can seem For instance, in 1909 Banff, Alberta, a largely a matter of human interest remark that “Some wheeled vehicles today, people of the past could never in use about town” bespoke both forget the degree to which it shaped a newfound familiarity with autotheir existence. mobiles and a recognition that their In contrast to the bug-free winter appearance signaled the snow and months, the appearance of insects mud seasons had passed. Spring was in spring merited mention by some on its way.26 Similarly, pointed menobservers, especially in Manitoba and tion of automobile traffic on Dryden, northern Ontario—which will be of no

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E S S A Y Ontario, country roads through late December 1923 indicated a mild start to winter.27 To Rev. E.C. Saunders of Ingersoll, Ontario, “lawn mower first used” was evidence that summer was well and truly here.28 This being Canada, I fully expect we will come across an MSC observation that speaks of the setting up or dismantling of a backyard hockey rink.

Not all of the MSC remarks were phenological in nature, of course.

Many observers in coastal provinces such as Newfoundland and Nova Scotia were closely attuned to maritime weather, and reported on hurricanes, storms, and fogs. And shipwrecks.

In April 1912, an unnamed volunteer on Sable Island, Nova Scotia, recorded, “S.S. Titanic sunk 500 miles east, iceberg collision 1600 lost about 800 saved by SS Carpathia.”29 Prairie dust storms were recorded with such regularity in the 1930s that the MSC collection will be of value in mapping them. Generally, the MSC collection will be useful to environmental scholars unearthing weather-related events otherwise lost to time, or alternatively enhancing their understanding of known events. Smoke from the colossal Chinchaga forest fire that burned across the British ColumbiaAlberta border in 1950 was reported by observers in provinces all across the country, a range of more than four thousand kilometres.30 A keen-eyed reader will have noticed that, although the MSC collection runs until 1960, most of the examples I have given are from before 1930. The number of phenological observations—and, indeed, all observations—plummeted over time. That was in part because Canada’s turnof-the-century phenological moment passed: national scientific bodies

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It could be said that the ultimate incommensurability of the MSC qualitative remarks is their real source of value. Rather than just offering us another means to move conceptually from the local to the global and the recent to the epochal, they stubbornly force us to maintain our gaze on the smaller scale. Climate change and the Anthropocene are events of world-historical—Earthhistorical—significance, but they are and will be experienced locally, observed locally, and recorded locally. like the MSC grew less interested in having citizens track cyclical natural phenomena in this way. In fact, they grew less interested in qualitative data generally. By the 1930 publication of a new set of instructions for MSC observers—apparently the first such publication since Superintendent Kingston’s a half-century earlier—there was no discussion of the “Remarks” column at all. The very first paragraph of the 1930 volume instead declared that human impressions are unreliable: “Consequently if an accurate history of the weather is to be obtained it must be by means that will not depend on our personal feelings; in other words we must have instruments.”31 The “Remarks” column stayed on meteorological forms, but with the MSC no longer encouraging observers to fill it out, fewer and fewer did. And as Canada became an increasingly urbanized nation with citizens increasingly detached from their natural surroundings, it may well be

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that fewer and fewer could.

My opinion of the research value of the MSC collection, in terms of climate change and the Anthropocene, has certainly changed in the process of digging through it. I no longer imagine the observers’ qualitative remarks capable of providing evidence of climate change at a national level. That thousands of volunteers with varied training and experience, across a country as large as Canada, in various eras and in periods of varied duration, adopting no agreed-upon language and given no precise instructions or any feedback whatsoever, irregularly jotted down mention of whatever different natural elements they spotted in their immediate surroundings and thought worthy of attention, guaranteed that what accumulated would be incommensurable, both at the time and to future researchers. Really, it is little wonder that the MSC ultimately came to favor instruments, where the liquid rose or needle moved to a point that was associated with a number, and the observer’s principal job was to observe that number and jot it down. Only when nature was reduced to numbers was it commensurable, and the meteorological system could

become scalable, to the point that we could eventually recognize and talk about climate change on a global level.

And yet it could be said that the ultimate incommensurability of the MSC qualitative remarks is their real source of value. Rather than just offering us another means to move conceptually from the local to the global and the recent to the epochal, they stubbornly force us to maintain our gaze on the smaller scale. Climate change and the Anthropocene are events of world-historical—Earth-historical— significance, but they are and will be experienced locally, observed locally, and recorded locally. Our archival project will yield concrete applications: I envision countless hyper-local climate change “re-phenology” projects, seeking to compare the timing of the spring arrival of a bird or the blooming of a flower at the exact same location it was observed a century or more ago. But I see the greater benefit of the Meteorological Service of Canada archival collection as more abstract and yet also more immediate than that: it encourages us to consider how people of the past knew the world immediately surrounding them, and asks us to notice ours.

Alan MacEachern (amaceach@uwo.ca) teaches history at the University of Western Ontario. He writes extensively on history, nature, and Canada—often all three together. He is the founding director of NiCHE: Network in Canadian History & Environment (niche-canada. org), a past fellow of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, and the editor of the print and open-access Canadian History & Environment series at University of Calgary Press (https://press. ucalgary.ca/series#canadian-history).

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E S S A Y Acknowledgments I owe a big thanks to Environment and Climate Change Canada’s Ross Gordon, Chris Kocot, Hoppa Lau, and Anna Deptuch-Stapf; the University of Western Ontario Archives and Research Collections Centre’s Robin Keirstead, Tom Belton, and Matthew Fluter; and the History graduate students involved in the qualitative observation project: Nolan Brown, Danielle Demiantschuk, Claire Halstead, Steve Marti, Marilla McCargar, Chris McHale, Chris Schultz, Jonathan Scotland, Nassisse Solomon, Alex Souchen, and Tyler Turek, and project manager Michael O’Hagan. This research would not have been possible without the financial support of the University of Western Ontario and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes 1. G.T. Kingston and Canada, Meteorological Service, Instructions to Observers connected with the Meteorological Service of the Dominion of Canada (Toronto: Copp, Clark, 1878), 183, https://archive.org/details/cihm_32601; On the early history of meteorology in Canada, see Morley K. Thomas, “A Brief History of Meteorological Services in Canada Part 1: 1839-1930,” Atmosphere 9 no.1 (1971), http://cmosarchives.ca/History/ wxsvchistory.html; Suzanne Zeller, Inventing Canada: Early Victorian Science and the Idea of a Transcontinental Nation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), chapters 6-9; and Tom Belton, “From Meteorological Registers to Climate Data: Information Gathering in the Early Years of the Meteorological Service of Canada,” Archivaria 84 (Fall 2017), 127-49, https://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/view/13616/15001.

On observation generally, see Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck, eds., Histories of Scientific Observation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

2. For a compelling visualization of this expansion, see Josh MacFadyen, “Environment Canada Weather Stations, 1840-1960,” https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=0nTpYWdCeSY. 3.The quantitative data, by comparison, was used all the time by the MSC and eventually became the basis for its online National Climate Date and Information Archive, http://climate.weather.gc.ca/.

4. For background on the loan, see Alan MacEachern, “Clio and Climate: On Saving and Researching a Climate History Archive,” HistoricalClimatology blog, 16 May 2016, http://www.historicalclimatology.com/blog/clio-and-climate-on-saving-andresearching-a-climate-history-archive.

5. On phenology, see Mark D. Schwartz, ed. Phenology: An Integrative Environmental Science, 2nd ed. (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013); and Asko Noormets, ed. Phenology of Ecosystem Processes: Applications in Global Change Research (Dordrecht and New York: Springer, 2009). Phenology is not to be confused with phrenology, the Victorian pseudoscience of studying head shape as an indicator of character and intellect.

6. See, for example, A. Gonsamo, J.M. Chen, C. Wu, “Citizen Science: Linking the Recent Rapid Advances of Plant Flowering in Canada with Climate Variability,” Scientific Reports 3 (2013): 2239. doi:10.1038/srep02239.

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7. With one important exception: we have ignored countless observations that state simply “fair,” “cool,” “rainy,” or the like. Our rationale is that a) many such remarks essentially repeat information already provided in quantitative form as temperature or precipitation, and b) it is difficult to imagine a future researcher making use of such remarks.

8. J.E. Clarke, “The History of British Phenology,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 62 (1936), 19-23.

9. Proceedings and Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, 1894, LII. https:// www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/10076#/summary.

10. Proceedings and Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, 1910, CXIV. 11. Although in at least one instance, they were Americans. For a time around 1960, the United States Air Force operated a radar station in Beausejour, Manitoba, and it was their men who completed the MSC forms. Beasejour, Manitoba, Environment Canada box 2 (Manitoba box 2), University of Western Ontario Archives Research and Collections Centre [henceforth, for example, “EC2 (MB2), UWO ARCC”].

12. Mrs. McCreadie, March 1888, Lyons, Ontario, EC173 (ON2), UWO ARCC. 13. J.R. Connon, 29 May 1887, Elora, Ontario, EC116 (ON53), UWO ARCC. 14. L.G. Summers, December 1900, Pipestone, Manitoba, EC37 (MB37), UWO ARCC. Spelling as in original.

15. Thomas Robinson, 23 and 26 March 1892, Gravenhurst, Ontario, EC134 (ON71), UWO ARCC; and Atkins, 1 June and 16 September 1955, Brooksby, Saskatchewan, EC810 (SK8), UWO ARCC. 16. See R.H. Carter, EC824 (SK22), UWO ARCC. With Carter as with others, it is occasionally unclear whether he was speaking of the bird’s first appearance of the year or the first ever there.

17. W.H. Holland, EC32 (MB32), UWO ARCC. 18. John Vancoe, 9 March 1885, Carlow, Ontario, EC93 (ON30), UWO ARCC. 19. D.O. Thomas, May 1904, Lakefield, Ontario, E162 (ON99), UWO ARCC. 20. John Parr, Bradwardine, Manitoba, EC6 (MB6), UWO ARCC. 21. J.W. Bilby, Blacklead Island, Northwest Territories, EC698 (NWT1), UWO ARCC. 22. For example, R.S. Bowness, 1905-09, Summerside, Prince Edward Island, EC508 (PEI6), UWO ARCC. 23. Rev. James Tait, 1870-79, Fitzroy Harbour, Ontario, EC121 (ON58), UWO ARCC. 24. W.J. Dods, 1887-1920, Alton, Ontario, EC68 (ON5), UWO ARCC. 25. John Hollingworth, 23 May 1888 and 29 May 1885, Beatrice, Ontario, EC77 (ON14), UWO ARCC. Spelling as in original.

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E S S A Y 26. Unnamed observer, May 1909, Banff, Alberta, EC711 (AB5), UWO ARCC. 27. R. Wigle, December 1912, Dryden, Ontario, EC112 (ON49), UWO ARCC. 28. Rev. E.C. Saunders, 10 May 1888, Ingersoll, Ontario, EC150 (ON87), UWO ARCC. 29. Unnamed observer, 14 April 1912, Sable Island, Nova Scotia, EC482 (NS29), UWO ARCC. 30. For example, P.B. Japley, 23 September 1950, Alta Lake, British Columbia, EC541 (BC8); E.W. Bowslaugh, 24 September 1950, Grimbsy Rock, Ontario, EC137 (ON74); J.C. Boyd, 27-30 September 1950, Ingonish Beach, Nova Scotia, EC468 (NS15), UWO ARCC; and Edward J. Noseworthy, Cape St. Francis, 28 September 1950, EC516 (NF8), UWO ARCC. Only Bowslaugh and Boyd specifically refer to the smoke as coming from the Alberta fire.

31. Meteorological Service of Canada, Instructions to Observers in the Meteorological Service of Canada. (Ottawa: F.A. Acland, 1930), 1, https://archive.org/details/McGillLibrary-hssl_instructions-observers-metereological_QC871C31930-16351.

 

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E S S A Y

HOW TO SEE A GLACIER IN A CLIMATE LANDSCAPE AMANDA BOETZKES

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hat do we see when we look at a glacier? The phenomenon of glacier melt is upheld as a measure of global warming and its symptoms, including rising ocean levels, hurricanes, new patterns of animal migration and much more.

Such associations often accompany the sight of a glacier. But is that all one sees? Glacier calving is an iconic image of global warming. Yet because climate change is accompanied by scepticism and denial, such images also carry the burden of a politically-charged framFigure 1 ing. Images of melting glaciers are often IL-05 Sólheimajökulll Glacier, Iceland, 2010, https://vimeo.com/6039933. used as scientific testimony while at the same time being dismissed as ideological. ity among many in the public sphere. In Thus, glacial melt is both a real phenomother words, the scientific understandenon and a vision that is invested with the ing of the causes and effects of climate political anxieties of the popular imaginachange is increasingly understood as tion. The emergency of climate change— an epistemological pursuit and, hence, its emergence into a cultural discourse and held against other perspectives within its political urgency—requires clarificathe global imaginary. I would charactertion. What deserves consideration, then, ize the visualization of climate change, is the visual language of climate change at then, as a confluence of two forms of the axis of science, cultural knowledge and knowledge: scientific and indigenous. aesthetics. What grounds the representaEach is underwritten with its own respection of glaciers in a climate landscape? tive political and aesthetic imperatives.

Consider the following two examples: Glaciers at the Confluence of First, in the last two decades a host of images of climate change have emerged Scientific and Inuit Knowledge that could be described as representations of scientific data to the public. One examRepresentations of global warming ple of this type is the landscapes produced demonstrate how the value of scientific by the Extreme Ice Survey (EIS), headed data has shifted from an objective knowlby photographer James Balog (Figure 1). edge to a matter of cultural perspective.

Climate data is taken as only one author-

E S S A Y EIS presents itself as a “visual science” of glaciers that showcases their beauty and documents their melt. The survey does not take samples of the ice nor satellite images of ice cap retreat. Rather, its photographs are attentive to the structures, surfaces and the ethos of glaciers: they are portraits of endangered entities rather than core samples used by scientists. Yet, the photographic procedure is nevertheless geared toward capturing glacier melt with as much precision as possible. The survey team installed cameras at the edges of glacier walls in Greenland, Iceland, Antarctica, Canada, and the American Rocky Mountains and programmed them to capture photographs every hour during daylight hours for at least a year. The photographs could then be composited into time-lapse videos. EIS presumes that their study makes a number of contributions: it creates an archive of glacier melt, captures the retreating lines of glacier walls, and portrays the aesthetic character of each particular glacier. In a sense, the scientific endeavor is the pretense for an exegesis on the glacier as a beautiful but endangered landscape. Over the course of the time-lapse video, the glaciers liquefy

In order to see how these two types of knowledge and the corresponding image practices converge and at times conflict within the visual imaginary of climate change, it is important to establish that both arise from a colonial history of imagining the landscape as a process of mobilizing territory. Indeed, the history of landscape is crucial to understanding the political and aesthetic terrain of climate and its iconic images.

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and collapse. The geological structures succumb to the pressures of atmosphere and warming waters.

As much as the EIS time-lapse videos aspire to an activist art-science, they nevertheless maintain a kinship with the 19th century landscape tradition. They frame glaciers within visual codes of uninhabited terra nullius that has been newly encroached upon by “humans.”

But the question is, which humans? The disappearing glacier is set up as the contamination of nature, a rhetorical structure that codes the landscape as a fetishized commodity. The presumably uninhabited landscape naturalizes the representational act as a communication between human and non-human nature. It therefore behoves us to consider how EIS naturalizes its presence as witness to the dying glacier, even as it presumes to produce and disseminate objective knowledge.

Second, authoritative knowledge characterizes the discourse of climate change through an indigenous (and frequently Inuit) perspective. Consider, for example, the work of Inuit artist Tim Pitsiulak. Pitsiulak hailed from Cape Dorset where the renowned Kinngait Co-Op has procured worldwide interest in Inuit drawing and printmaking. His scenes of Arctic life frequently include the presence of climate scientists. In Underwater Research Team, Pitsiulak draws a scene of researchers studying glacier ice. In the background a red icebreaker ship showcases a prominent Canadian maple leaf, signalling the governmental claim on this landscape (Figure 2). In the middle ground two researchers, one in a red parka and another in a dry suit, have cut a hole in the ice and prepare for a dive. In the foreground, a diver is intently shining a light on a section of glacier below sea level. The glacier sheet melts into a pool that leads to a layer of blue fractured ice that juts out from the water line. Overhead, a chopper flies a crate back to the ship, presumably to add

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to its load of ice samples. All of this is rendered in colored pencil, and situated at an outside observer’s perspective, unacknowledged by the figures. The figures themselves are “costumed,” playing the parts of anonymous government scientists. There is a sense of humorous irony insofar as they appear to bring insight to the signs of global warming, and yet in their myopia do not see that their presence interrupts the landscape: they cut, crack and penetrate the ice they are observing.

The diver shines a light on the ice, Tim Pitsiulak, Underwater Research Team, courtesy Dorset Fine Arts. focusing intently on it. The other figures look insistently downward on a global scale. In the film, Gore shows into the water. By contrast, Pitsiulak graphic charts of the retreat of glaciers at observes the whole scene, an assemblage sites such as Mount Kilimanjaro, Glacier of scientific inquiry, the flexing of national Park’s Grinnell Glacier, the Himalayas, territory and technological prowess. But the Alps and the Columbia Ice Shield of his landscape also renders ambiguous Alaska. Among these he also shows now the cause and effects of glacial melt. Does infamous footage of a glacier calving: an the presence of this assemblage perturb immense piece of ice cracking off the ice the climate landscape or alleviate it? This wall and sinking into the North Pacific landscape is by no means remote or unocOcean. The footage has since become cupied; it is embedded in the conditions synonymous with global warming and that make climate change a reality, and a shorthand for a host of associations perceived through an Inuit lens. including the threats to polar bear habitat, In order to see how these two types increased oil exploration and production of knowledge and the corresponding in the Arctic, and the general spoiling of image practices converge and at times as-yet-wild places. The image of ice calvconflict within the visual imaginary of ing in the Arctic is a social hieroglyph, climate change, it is important to establish to use Marx’s term. While it depicts an that both arise from a colonial history of ecological reality, it also functions as code imagining the landscape as a process of within a textual system. mobilizing territory. Indeed, the history of The need to decipher what appears to landscape is crucial to understanding the be such a transparent image may seem political and aesthetic terrain of climate counterintuitive. However, I would argue and its iconic images. that it is precisely its seeming transparency that requires such skills of analysis.

Moreover, it requires both scientific and The Climate Imaginary, or, cultural decoding—interpretive analysis The Arctic is Paris from a cross-section of disciplines which must be geared toward understanding its Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient efficacy and, just as importantly, producTruth (2006) introduced a powerful ing its possible meanings. The stakes of visualization of glacier melt happening

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Figure 2

E S S A Y deciphering such an image are high given two important factors: first, the image is deployed as a means of convincing the public of the reality of global warming against the backdrop of an entrenched denial of its imminence on the part of governments and corporations. Second, and perhaps more crucially, it is a representation that discloses its own cultural framing. In other words, it is a climate landscape that produces the discourse of climate.

W.J.T. Mitchell argues that landscape does not merely signify or symbolize power relations; it is an instrument of cultural power.1 Landscape is a medium of exchange that produces and silences discourses; it appropriates imagery and focuses attention. It creates the conditions by which to see the land. More strongly, landscape produces social and subjective identities.2 In its specific organization of sense-effects—attention, information, and bodily relationships—the climate landscape is an agent that acts upon knowl-

While it is true that Arctic ice has entered into the public imagination because glaciers are prime objects of the scientific study and measure of global warming, it is nevertheless also embedded within a long history tied to the emergence of industrialization, fossil fuel harvesting, military positioning, indigenous oppression, and colonial settlement. Indeed, the Arctic was an ideal site of imperial dreamwork and is still mythologized as an as yet uncharted frontier, though it is populated by indigenous communities.

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edge, political action and cultural life on a global scale. In this regard, Gore’s glacier calving footage is an image of global warming and a framing of that phenomenon, a climate landscape and an agent that landscapes climate.

Mitchell argues that landscape is a medium found in all cultures, yet it is also a particular historical formation that he describes as the “dreamwork” of European imperialism.3 By this he means that the landscape tradition that emerged in the 17th century and reached its peak in the 19th century disclosed both the utopian fantasies of imperial prospect and the unresolved ambivalence and unsuppressed resistance to it. Certainly, these dynamics are at stake in the visualization of Arctic ice as it succumbs to warming.

While it is true that Arctic ice has entered into the public imagination because glaciers are prime objects of the scientific study and measure of global warming, it is nevertheless also embedded within a long history tied to the emergence of industrialization, fossil fuel harvesting, military positioning, indigenous oppression, and colonial settlement. Indeed, the Arctic was an ideal site of imperial dreamwork and is still mythologized as an as yet uncharted frontier, though it is populated by indigenous communities.

The image of glacier calving summarizes a contested scientific, political and aesthetic terrain. Indeed, it operates by threading one domain of inquiry through the others. This disciplinary coordination is the underpinning of master narratives such as those that are currently underway in the concept of the Anthropocene. But if it is also a social hieroglyph that conceals the basis of its value (in other words, if landscape is a commodity as Marx defines it), then what does it conceal? As much as the climate landscape is a landscape of the Anthropocene, it also demands a questioning of its hidden terrain. What operations are currently producing the meaning

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Figure 3 Mel Chin, The Arctic is Paris, http://thearcticis.org/. Courtesy of the artist.

of ice? The efficacy of the glacier calving image rests on the belief that the ice caps have been untouched environments for millennia, and that these have been newly perturbed by global warming. Yet, while it is certainly true that Arctic ice is rendered as a climate landscape specifically, such a landscape could also be seen as resisting its reduction to a universal trope of the human occupation of nature.

Jason Moore argues for a reconsideration of the Anthropocene as the Capitalocene, in order to give specificity to the material conditions that produce this geological era. Thus, he argues, capitalism is the primary economic frame that organizes nature into a world-ecology of power relations.4 Moreover, as Zoe Todd convincingly posits, the discourse of the Anthropocene appropriates or obscures indigenous experience of the environmental condition. She therefore calls for critical practices that decolonize and indigenize our interpretations of this geological era.5 These coordinations of the global perspective, I argue, are integral to understanding climate landscapes and their potential.

The visualization of glaciers, albeit in the service of studying the effects of global warming, may nevertheless be tied to the capitalist and colonialist procedures of knowing and representing environments in relation to techniques of resource extraction, energy use, and the assessment of its “discontents.� Techniques of imagFALL 2018

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ing glaciers, even for scientific data, have a history in colonial mechanisms of imagining. Inasmuch as the image of glacier calving wants to show the intervention of an anthropogenic climate on a seemingly timeless natural landscape, it also reckons with the visual history of global capitalism and European colonialism. The image is therefore bi-directional: it brings global public attention to the Arctic and embeds the Arctic in a concealed history.

The climate landscape is one that aspires to change the world perspective. Yet, in so doing it risks reiterating the imperial intentions to control the land and, correspondingly, repeat deeply rooted and ineffectual patterns of obscuring the causes of environmental problems precisely by representing them as dissociated from their systemic underpinnings.

The landscaping of Arctic ice is therefore a practice that can be shaped by a global perspective of the historical and emergent forces that are in the process of determining the course of climate change. American conceptual artist Mel Chin devised a performance entitled The Arctic is Paris for the 2015 Climate Change Conference in Paris. He brought two Inuit hunters, one of whom was Jens Danielsen, a delegate from the Inuit Circumpolar Council, and photographed them in their elk and seal furs carrying harpoons in

Figure 4 Mel Chin, The Arctic is Paris. http://thearcticis.org/. Courtesy of the artist.

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E S S A Y front of national monuments (Figure 3).

Chin also filmed them with a dog-team of seven French poodles attached to a sled that would take them through the boulevards (Figure 4). Chin was one of over a hundred artists and architects invited to contribute to a campaign of public engagement with the conference. His project’s uncanny images illustrated the impact of climate change in the Arctic: not only is that specific environment transforming, but its environmental condition affects every global culture and environment. As Chin points out, The Arctic is Paris is just one iteration of a larger project that aims to unify a global field: “The Arctic is Des Moines, the Arctic is Cairo, the Arctic is Beijing, the Arctic is Your Hometown.”6 Moreover, at the site where the future of climate was being determined in the political arena, Chin submitted an indigenized vision of climate change. He therefore conjoined a perspective that is both sobering and surreal to the emerging discourse of climate change. In this way, Chin shows that the social hieroglyph of the Arctic landscape is dynamic and shifting in relation to the global discourse.

Satellite Maps: NASA and Diane Burko Practices of representing climate landscapes point to the convergence of scientific and cultural forms of knowledge in the global imaginary. It should be understood that ice itself is not a natural backdrop for these discourses but rather the very materialization of the history and futurity of climate. Climate science, of which the study of ice is a cornerstone, contends with the widespread governmental, corporate and public denial of global warming (even though 195 nations except the U.S. have signed on to the Paris Climate Agreement). NASA has produced satellite imaging technologies of glacier melt which the National Snow and Ice FALL 2018

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Data Center has made available online as mobile images that show the changes in sea ice, water vapor, near-surface air temperature and other variables (Figure 5). It sets satellite images of glaciers in motion so that data that is otherwise rendered on a chart can be seen as active proof of climate changes.

The use of the time-lapse image, as in the case of James Balog’s EIS study, is geared toward making truth claims about global warming. NASA’s satellite images chart dramatic changes in a relatively limited span beginning from 1979 and ending in 2015. They are designed to focus on a sharp accelerating trend. Taken from an aerial perspective, the images give no sign of human habitation, only indications of climate effects. They chart atmospheric warming as a given condition, with no rhetorical indication of its cause, yet assume that humans have brought about these changes. NASA uses the images to posit the authority of their knowledge of the Arctic and global climate science; the efficacy of the images lies in their presentation of an objective truth to be read against the backdrop of climate change denial. However, the scientific claims do not necessarily correspond to or even undermine the political rationale for climate change denial. Statements of denial, while irrational, often take the form of evading moral or political accountability through an outright refusal of the scientific claims to the cause and effect of increasing carbon emissions that lead to global warming.7 The political discourse has paralyzed the authority of climate scientists by denouncing its fundamental claims to knowledge in order to cloud the demand for public responsibility for climate change. The scientific procedure of producing an unassailable act that humans have caused global warming has been met by an outright political refusal to accept scientific reasoning. Scientists have therefore had an unprecedented political

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Figure 5

The map and bar graph show how air temperatures in the Arctic compare to averages from 1979 to 2015. On the map, areas with higher than average temperatures for the selected month and year are indicated in dark greys and black (positive anomalies), and areas with lower than average temperatures are shown in light greys and white (negative anomalies), http://nsidc.org/soac/air-temperatures-more-information.

need for a materialist history that would corroborate the correlation between the fossil fuel industry and global warming.

Yet they struggle with a political discourse that would attempt to naturalize global warming.

Herein lies a conflict for scientists in their own representations of climate data.

It is easy to confuse the interpretation of an image of climate change as either an image of natural disaster or an image of human-generated disaster. The visual language of landscape tends to naturalize the image itself. As Mitchell points out, a landscape is neither a natural scene nor a representation of a natural scene, but “a natural representation of a natural scene, a trace or icon of nature in nature itself, as if nature were imprinting and encoding its essential structures on our perceptual apparatus.”8 Mitchell suggests further that the scientific topographical illustration is precisely the site at which this naturalization occurs. With its craving for FALL 2018

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pure objectivity, science espouses a visual language of transparency and suppression of aesthetic signs of “style.” It is thus possible to read NASA’s satellite images not merely as data but as scientific landscapes that stem from a specific epistemological position that engages the visual language of objectivity.

The Anthropocene (or the attenuated Capitalocene) is crucial here as an intermediary. Implicitly positioned as a geological perspective, it is also an area of critical inquiry that claims causal chains that have led to global warming dating back to the Industrial Revolution and involving systemic coordination of technology, colonial expansion, and global finance. The designation of the plastiglomerate as a marker of the Anthropocene is significant in this regard.9 The plastiglomerate, a fusion of rock, plastics, and fossilized ocean matter, stands for the interleaving of the fossil fuel regime and the geological stratosphere, and symbolizes the scientific and political

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E S S A Y her photographs also feature the sensible immediacy of glaciers: their ridges, transparencies and opacities, their overlap with intensely colored skies and seas. Her glaciers loom like shadows in the fog or sparkle against the bright sun. The viewer witnesses the movement of the Ilulissat Icefjord as it compresses and folds under the pressure of warming and fast-moving sea currents, ultimately shedding its Figure 6 cracked shield into the water.

Diane Burko, Arctic Melting, July 2016 (After NASA), Oil and Mixed Media on Canvas, 60”x 84”, 2016, Burko’s paintings repitch this http://www.dianeburko.com/. same phenomenon in oils claims of the Anthropocene as a positive (Figure 6). Working with NASA satellite signification of anthropogenic impact. By images as a template, Burko paints the contrast, glacier melt is a signifier ex nihilo. aerial perspectives of glacier melt along The plastiglomerate appears where the with the cues to its continual reduction glacier disappears. Glacier ice rests at the (red and blue lines that chart its decreasing crossroads of geological, historical and area). Yet she captures a visceral sense of atmospheric conditioning. To suggest that the glacier topography with heaped white glacier melt signifies as absence, howpaint that cracks and fissures as the glaever, is also to indicate its failed political ciers do. Her work thus supplements the efficacy—glacier melt fails to compel a scientific perspective produced by NASA change in the political discourse. While with the hand of an artist who witnesses it invokes affective responses—sadness, the landscape phenomenologically, via awe, introspection—at the same time, it touch, color and visual textures. does not invoke any viewer in particular.

Burko’s glacier series are art-science Rather, it presents a given condition. In hybrids; they redistribute the orientation this way, it naturalizes its own intention of the scientific assemblage, including its within the act of representation. pathways into the landscape by air and It is in this gap between “facts,” episship, its visual equipment, and its data. temological position and accountability Burko’s climate landscape is framed, that artistic responses to scientific informacomposed and sensed with a presumed tion appear. American artist Diane Burko viewer. The image convenes a landscape paints and photographs glaciers in forms and its viewer coextensively. Her redethat incorporate the visual language of ployment of science invokes a viewer NASA’s satellite imaging, while making to witness the landscape differently and important alterations to these images. poses the question, who is witnessing and Burko has photographed glaciers in why?

Greenland, Svalbard, Iceland, Alaska, the Inasmuch as the Anthropocene is Alps and Argentina, sometimes traveling underwritten by a call to action on the with scientist expeditions to access remote basis of a geological perspective of human sites and produce aerial perspectives. Yet impact over a specific historical period

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and its organization of nature through power-relations, so do climate landscapes propose relations with nature against the backdrop of the power regimes since the Industrial Revolution. Thus, when one looks at Burko’s paintings of glaciers cracking from the center with whorls of brown paint surrounding and encroaching from the periphery, one witnesses the landscape in its remoteness and rarity, and at the same time in its imbrication in the climate produced by petro-colonialism.

These characteristics implicate the viewer and are corroborated in the visual experience.

Inuit Perception and Polar Tilt I am arguing that glacier melt does not merely demand to be seen but rather demands to be witnessed, and am calling for seeing climate change in a mode of critical self-reflection. This mode is demanded of the documentary film Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change by Ian Mauro and Zacharias Kanuk. It describes how Inuit hunters and elders in communities across the Arctic reported perceiving the same phenomenon: that over the course of their lifetimes it appears that the world has tilted on its axis. Accustomed to watching the sky for weather patterns amid diurnal seasonal changes, the Inuit have noted longer periods of daylight, even as much as a full hour longer, in the short days of winter. As one hunter from Resolute Bay, Ludy Pudluk, explains, the sun is “higher on the horizon.”10 And while the sun rises from the same location it always did during the calendar year, it appears to set at a different location on the horizon than it did a generation ago. Another hunter, Jaipitty Palluq from Igloolik, describes that the sun seems to be higher and hits more directly since the tilt.11 Hunters are especially conscious of the daylight hours and the quality of light because of the nar-

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row margins of opportunity to hunt and fish in the winter. So while it is possible to measure global warming through ice core analysis and sea temperature changes, the fundamental changes of orientation for the Inuit are taking place in the sky and atmosphere, the site at which they “read” and perceive the landscape.

In a lecture in 2011, Mauro explained that the recurrent perception of earth tilt among the Inuit may be explained as the Novaya Zemlya effect.12 The archipelago of Novaya Zemlya is located in the Russian Arctic. In the late 16th century, an expedition of Dutch explorers first observed this optic mirage: it appeared that the sun was rising on the horizon two weeks before it was due to emerge from the polar night (between November and January). Scientists attribute the mirage to a refraction of the sun’s light in a climatic thermocline, a layer of atmosphere in which there has been a sharp temperature gradient.13 This “inversion layer” (where cold air is trapped under warm air) effects the refraction of the sun’s rays against the curvature of the earth, projecting a light image for hundreds of kilometers.

Hunters are especially conscious of the daylight hours and the quality of light because of the narrow margins of opportunity to hunt and fish in the winter. So while it is possible to measure global warming through ice core analysis and sea temperature changes, the fundamental changes of orientation for the Inuit are taking place in the sky and atmosphere, the site at which they “read” and perceive the landscape.

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To embrace Inuit knowledge and perspective as authoritative, even in the production of scientific knowledge, is to underscore the fundamental value of the lived experience of the condition of the Arctic to the broader global condition, and to imagine an alternative landscape for the future.

In other words, the Anthropocene is a call to change the historical lens of the climate landscape.

However, while the Novaya Zemlya effect is a possible hypothesis for the changing appearance of the sun as a result of atmospheric transformations brought about by climate change, it does not necessarily explain the specific descriptions of the Inuit. Mauro suggests that the interviews with the Inuit are the first documented observations of the optic phenomenon of polar tilt, specifically.

When he consulted with climate scientists they corroborated the observation (it is still currently being theorized). Since the release of the documentary, geophysicist Jianlin Chen and her team have published their hypothesis that the geographic (as opposed to magnetic) North Pole has indeed objectively shifted and is drifting eastward. From a geophysical perspective, both poles tend to wobble on the earth’s axis and also drift in the oceans. Between 1982 and 2005, the pole drifted southeast toward Labrador, but in 2005 it suddenly moved sharply to the east. Chen has noted this dramatic tilt and drift since 2005, and attributes it to the accelerated melt of the Greenland Ice Sheet.14 Such a melding of science, indigenous testimony, and the reframing of glaciers in art offers a more complicated perspective

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on climate landscape. This perspective is informed by the understanding that the earth is an agent whose movements reveal the impact of the industrial colonial apparatus and are a determining condition of the Inuit perception of the environment.

Such a perspective makes it clear that the Anthropocene can and should include indigenous assessments of climate change if it is to give a more complete account of the human impact on the planetary condition. I therefore return to the question, what do we see when we look at a glacier?

A glacier in the age of the Anthropocene is a quite different object of perception than it was in the imperial landscape tradition. Glaciers cannot be reduced to an object of scientific study, even when such a study aims to preserve an archive of the Arctic at the historical juncture at which glaciers are becoming extinct. To embrace Inuit knowledge and perspective as authoritative, even in the production of scientific knowledge, is to underscore the fundamental value of the lived experience of the condition of the Arctic to the broader global condition, and to imagine an alternative landscape for the future. In other words, the Anthropocene is a call to change the historical lens of the climate landscape.

Inuit Envisioning: Annie Pootoogook I have been arguing that to see glaciers in a climate landscape is a demand on both perception and representation. It is to envision and visualize in the midst of a historical condition. To conclude, I want to resituate the dilemmas of perspective at stake in representing the climate landscape through the concept of envisioning raised by the work of Inuit artist Annie Pootoogook. Like Tim Pitsiulak’s, Pootoogook’s work is celebrated for its scenes of everyday life in Cape Dorset. Her images range from the devastating legacies of colonial oppression and government negligence to

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Figure 7 Annie Pootoogook, My Grandmother—Pitseolak, Drawing, 2002, courtesy of Dorset Fine Art.

the joy and exuberance of community life.

Her landscapes are integrated into a lived reality, and while they are not images in non-human geological time, they are no less visions of the Anthropocene. Her drawings attend to the environment and its material conditions in its presentness rather than its future pastness. They effect an imperative to witness it at this pivotal geological, historic, and cultural juncture.

Pootoogook is known for her visual exposition of this realist perspective. She comes from a lineage of artists—including her mother, Napachie Pootoogook, and her grandmother, Pitseolak Ashoona— that creates images in accordance with the Inuit concept of “sulijuk,” meaning “it is true.”15 This mandate to draw and paint what is real is distinct in its epistemological situation; its realism differs from Balog’s photographic practice with its implicit claims to an objective perspective.

She imagines the climate landscape in and through an operation of envisioning. To recall Mitchell’s argument, Pootoogook’s drawings are the landscape and the frame.

In My Grandmother—Pitseolak, Drawing (2002), Pootoogook draws a picture of her grandmother, Pitseolak Ashoona, drawing a picture of the landscape outside her window (Figure 7). Her grandmother is sitting in bed, her drawing table on her lap. A window looking out to a stark snowy

mountain is set adjacent to the bed. The scene is mirrored in Ashoona’s drawing, but the drawn picture animates the mountain with birds, people, and a tent. Pootoogook emphasizes the immediacy of the domestic scene, including a calendar on the wall opened to the month of September with a picture that echoes the drawing and the outdoor landscape. A clock on the wall shows the time of day down to the second: 3:32 pm. The details of the room spring forward with the same even attention: a mug, a packet of cigarettes, a box of Tenderflake, a cane. Pootoogook’s climate landscape is set with vivid immediacy, but it also enfolds another space of aesthetic re-envisioning. The drawing is a space of reflection and reinscription; it is both the space of landscaping and reflection on the act of landscaping. In this way, Pootoogook opens the way to an indigenized perspective of the Anthropocene and its discontents. Her dreamwork, a work that she depicts being carried out by her grandmother, is nested within her realism.

The representational practices of climate change demand self-reflection from within a position of cultural and political entanglement. From this space, glaciers are not environmental objects of naturalized scientific study, but rather an integrated part of a lived condition. They jut out into real space and then recede back into the imagination, alternating between a perspective in the present and a perspective of geological time. So what do we see when we see a glacier? We see that realism itself is navigating the terrain of science, politics and aesthetics. We see the dreamwork of imperialism, its informatization by science, its sensibilization in art, and the counter-dreamwork of indigenizing the Anthropocene. Such procedures set the terms that define climate more broadly and bring its landscapes into a world perspective. The real question to consider then is, how might we see through such co-implications?

E S S A Y Amanda Boetzkes is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Guelph. Her first book, The Ethics of Earth Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), analyzes the ethics and aesthetics of the earth art movement from the 1960s to the present. She is coeditor of Heidegger and the Work of Art History (Ashgate, 2014). Her upcoming book, Contemporary Art and the Drive to Waste (MIT Press, 2019), analyzes how art defines and aestheticizes waste in the age of global capitalism. She is currently working on a project entitled Ecologicity: Vision and Art for a World to Come, which considers modes of visualizing environments and ecological phenomena.

Notes 1. W.J.T. Mitchell, “Introduction,” in Landscape and Power 2nd Edition, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 2.

2. Ibid., 1.

3. Ibid., 10.

4. Jason Moore, “Introduction,” in Anthropocene, or Capitalocene? ed. Jason Moore (Oakland: PM Press, 2016), 10.

5. Zoe Todd, “Indigenizing the Anthropocene,” in Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Politics, Aesthetics, Environments and Epistemologies, eds. Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2015), 243.

6. Mel Chin, “Mission Statement,” The Arctic Is, accessed November 1, 2017, http://thearcticis. org/.

7. Physicist Spencer Weart gives a full account of the history of climate change denial. See Spencer Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).

8. Mitchell, 15.

9. Patricia Corcoran, Charles Moore and Kelly Jazvac, “An Anthropogenic Marker Horizon in the Future Rock Record,” Geological Society of America Today 24, no. 6 (June 2014), accessed November 1, 2017, http://www.geosociety.org/gsatoday/archive/24/6/article/i1052-5173-24-6-4.htm.

10. Ludy Pudluk, interview by Zacharias Kunuk and Ian Mauro, Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change, directed by Zacharias Kunuk and Ian Mauro (Igloolik Isuma Productions, 2010).

11. Jaipitty Pauluq, interviewed in Inuit Knowledge.

12. Ian Mauro, “Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change” (video of lecture, the Smithsonian, 2011), accessed October 28, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOha0liL0w4&t=2917s.

13. W.H. Lehn and B.A. German, “Novaya Zemlya Effect. Analysis of an Observation,” Applied Optics 20, no. 12 (1981): 2043–2047.

14. Richard A. Lovett, “Polar Wander Linked to Climate Change,” Nature, May, 2014, accessed October 29, 2017, http://www.nature.com/news/polar-wander-linked-to-climate-change-1.12994.

15. J. Lynn Fraser, “Interior Spaces, Northern Places: Nunuvut Artist Annie Pootoogook’s Artwork is Observational and Narrative,” Canadian Medical Association Journal 175, no. 9 (2006): 1100.

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KITCHENS OF THE GREAT ANTHROPOCENE DANIEL J. PHILIPPON

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hen my wife and I decided to renovate our kitchen a few years ago, we were primed for what we knew would be a major life disruption, not to mention a considerable investment of time and money. But we also knew we were entering an ethical and ecological minefield from which we would not emerge unscathed, because to renovate a kitchen mindfully in the Anthropocene means to ask a simple but immensely complicated question: What makes a kitchen “sustainable”? Sustainability is not the only—and certainly not the least controversial—framework for addressing our environmental problems in this age of unbridled human impact, but it is as good a concept as any to help those of us in the developed world consider how we might reduce our “ecological footprint,” or whatever your favorite metaphor for “living more lightly on the land” might be. So, to borrow a phrase from J. Ryan Stradal’s Kitchens of the Great Midwest,1 what might the “Kitchens of the Great Anthropocene” look like?

The earliest kitchens, in their many and varied forms before industrialization, all relied on the basic ecological services that have remained mainstays of the contemporary kitchen—fuel for fire, metal for pots, air and light for working, and water for hygiene and cooking—but they did so much more visibly.

The original kitchen, of course, was an open-air gathering around a bonfire, using wood for fuel and bowls and tools made of stone, clay, wood, and skin. As the kitchen

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To renovate a kitchen mindfully in the Anthropocene means to ask a simple but immensely complicated question: What makes a kitchen “sustainable”? gradually moved indoors, into an atrium-like space or other form of “open house,” pots and pans began to be made from a variety of metals, such as bronze, iron, copper, and brass. Cooking fires and their resulting smoke were tamed, at least somewhat, by the use of charcoal in addition to wood, and by the construction of raised hearths, fireplaces, and eventually chimneys.

Candles and oil lamps brought light to the darkness, whether from a minimally lit room or the arrival of sunset.

And cisterns enabled the collection of rainwater from the surrounding roofs.

By the seventeenth century in Britain, however, new technologies began to distance cooks (usually either housewives or their servants) from the natural environment, such as when pipes connected private residences to the public water supply, and coal started to replace wood in the wealthiest households. By the eighteenth century—a popular benchmark for the start of the Anthropocene—the kitchen began to look even more familiar to contemporary eyes, with the appearance of the cast-iron oven (which burned coal more effectively than the open hearth), the increased use of ice houses for refrigeration, and the publication of popular cookbooks.2 Renovating a kitchen in the Anthropocene, whenever it might be said to have begun, requires a series of decisions that make at least some of these

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hidden environmental connections visible again. What kind of appliances should you buy? What kind of lighting is the most efficient? What materials should the countertops be made out of?

And so forth.

There are many places to turn for advice about how to answer these questions, but one place I would not have thought to look was an art museum.

The world continues to amaze me, however, so I recently made my way to the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA) to see an installation of the Frankfurt Kitchen, the first completely built-in or “fitted” kitchen, designed by the Austrian architect Margarete (Grete) Schütte-Lihotzky in 1926.

With its sky blue cabinets and clean white walls, it’s easy to see why so many visitors are charmed by the Frankfurt Kitchen. Not only is it recognizably modern—it resembles a contemporary galley kitchen—but it is also noticeably small: only about 6 feet wide by 11 feet long. Its counters are also less than 3 feet tall, designed to be used by a person seated on an adjustable stool, leading the Star Tribune, our local paper, to deem the kitchen “an overgrown playhouse.”3 Other details jumped out at me the closer I looked. The stove is electric rather than cast-iron, and its enameled white surfaces seem designed to distinguish it from any appliance that would require blacking. The light fixture on the ceiling is movable, sliding back-and-forth along a rod, so it can reach whatever part of the kitchen you are in. A fold-down ironing board (also painted blue) is integrated into the design, and twelve aluminum storage bins with easy-to-grip handles look like smaller versions of the bulk bins at my local co-op. (The bins at the museum are labeled, in German: coffee, salt, semolina, dried fruit, rice, oats, flour,

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Lihotzky made later in her life: “The truth of the matter was, I’d never run a household before designing the Frankfurt Kitchen, I’d never cooked, and had no idea about cooking.”4 File this under: Things that make you go, “hmmm.”

What Schütte-Lihotzky did have was a curious mind and a talent for design, and the Frankfurt Kitchen reflects the rapid changes in technology and society that had occurred since the midnineteenth century in both Europe and the U.S. In addition to the widespread adoption of such conveniences as indoor plumbing, ice-boxes, hot-water heaters, and gas stoves, the late Victorian era also saw the mass-production of packaged goods, which changed how people (especially women) interacted with their kitchens—and Frankfurt Kitchen, 1926-1930. Schütte-Lihotzky studied train dining cars and ship galleys as well as the work of kitchen reformers when designing the Frankfurt Kitchen. thus their environment. The Mass-produced, they were installed in 10,000 new apartments built to ease Gerappearance of commerciallymany’s housing shortage after World War I. canned fruits and vegetables, baking ingredients, fine sugar, noodles, for instance, not only made the timebarley, and sugar.) A similar bin under consuming task of home canning the counter sits ready to receive your seem obsolete, but it also meant that kitchen scraps, while a drying rack the modern family “no longer had to above the sink keeps dishes out of the dine according to what was in season,” way before they are returned to the according to Ellen Plante.5 The arrival cupboards for storage. of branded prepared foods such as In all, it does look like a fun kitchen Shredded Wheat, Grape Nuts, and to play in, but its charm hides both the Jell-O gelatin in the U.S. market fursignificance of its innovations and the ther helped to change the identity of mixed messages it sends about sustainmiddle-class women from “homemakability nearly a century after its creers” into “consumers,” and the kitchen ation. increasingly became less a space to That the Frankfurt Kitchen has produce food from scratch and more a “issues” can be seen most clearly from place to store prepared food prior to its a revealing comment Grete Schütteconsumption.

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E S S A Y Although “convenience” became a, well, convenient explanation for these changes, they were driven by a host of interacting factors, for which convenience was as much justification as it was description. Technological innovation and social change went hand-inhand, and markets for new consumer products both drove and responded to the appearance of those products. To take just one example, the introduction of the Hoosier cabinet, or freestanding kitchen cupboard, occurred alongside increasing numbers of women working outside the home in the U.S., and each development affected the other.

As Ellen Plante points out, “Massive advertising campaigns promoted these products as ‘helpmates’ and ‘servants’ during a period when employing domestic help was on the decline and, indeed, women were told they’d no longer require help in the kitchen if this room was outfitted with the latest modern furnishing, appliances and tools.”6 Particularly during World War I, when women were recruited to fill the jobs of men engaged in the war effort, the “servantless” kitchen increasingly

The arrival of branded prepared foods such as Shredded Wheat, Grape Nuts, and Jell-O gelatin in the U.S. market further helped to change the identity of middleclass women from “homemakers” into “consumers,” and the kitchen increasingly became less a space to produce food from scratch and more a place to store prepared food prior to its consumption.

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became the norm, and the Hoosier cabinet helped to make this transition possible. With its all-in-one design, the cabinet combined the storage space of a traditional baker’s cabinet (repurposed to house packaged goods) with pullout work surfaces and built-in racks for dishware and a host of newfangled kitchen gadgets—all intended to eliminate trips to the pantry and make life easier for the modern housewife, whether she worked outside the home or not.

The impulse toward efficiency embodied by the Hoosier cabinet was manifested in other ways as well, particularly in the development of the field of domestic science, or “home economics,” as it eventually came to be called. Among the leading proponents of this movement was Christine Frederick, whose ideas had a large effect on Grete Schütte-Lihotzky’s plans for the Frankfurt Kitchen. Frederick was herself influenced by the time and motion studies of efficiency expert Frederick Winslow Taylor, to whose work she was introduced by her husband, George Frederick (that’s a lot of Fredericks, I know). What George Frederick saw as useful for his business, Christine Frederick saw as equally applicable to the domestic sphere: namely, the principles of “scientific management,” which sought to optimize productivity through the careful study of workflows.

In her 1919 book Household Engineering: Scientific Management in the Home, Frederick recounts her enthusiasm upon first learning of Taylorist methods: “Couldn’t we perhaps standardize dishwashing by raising the height of the sink and changing other conditions?

Did we not waste time and needless walking in poorly arranged kitchens— taking twenty steps to get the egg-beat-

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Plan for the Frankfurt Kitchen indicating its labor saving features, 1927.

er when it could have been hung over my table, just as efficiency insisted the workman’s tools must be grouped?”7 The result was what Frederick called the “labor-saving kitchen,” created for “the splendid aim of putting housework on a standardized, professional basis.”8 Having read Frederick’s work in German translation, Schütte-Lihotzky imported many of her recommendations directly into the Frankfurt Kitchen.9 In Household Engineering, for example, Frederick calls for “a kitchen small and compact,”10 “cupboards and shelves built into the kitchen itself” in place of a pantry,11 the “scientific grouping of equipment,”12 “a comfortable height for all working surfaces and equipment”13 ; “a high stool (preferably with an adjustable seat) [for] … wash-

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ing dishes, peeling vegetables, preparing pastry, and many other tasks”14 ; and “bins of various sizes for holding flour, sugar, etc. in quantity.”15 That the Frankfurt Kitchen’s built-in cupboards and continuous countertops barely register as distinctive today may in fact be the greatest testament to SchütteLihotzky’s achievement, as these were among the most innovative of all the kitchen’s features—a marked step up from the stand-alone Hoosier cabinet.

Frederick also insisted on windows “preferably placed high in the walls” so they can provide ventilation and light the working surfaces, without the curtains getting soiled or the window sill collecting clutter. Notably, the Frankfurt Kitchen at the MIA features a faux window at the rear of the kitchen, fitted with a sheer curtain, through which the

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E S S A Y visitor can view a photo transparency of the housing complex from which this kitchen was taken: the Höhenblick Estate Housing in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. In all, the Frankfurt Kitchen was eventually installed in 10,000 new working-class apartments built to help address the city’s housing shortage following World War I. Ironically, while Frederick’s goal was to encourage women to stay home (an objective that aligned her with the previous century’s domestic ideology), Frederick herself embodied the role of the modern, professional woman, and the Frankfurt Kitchen she helped to shape was primarily designed not for housewives but for women who worked, as Schütte-Lihotzky herself did. In her later writings, Frederick also served as a cheerleader for consumerism, styling herself “Mrs. Consumer” and authoring the book Selling Mrs. Consumer (1929), which sought to help companies effectively market their products to women, as well as help women become better consumers. She even coined the term “creative waste” to describe the need to discard a functioning consumer good with a new model to keep the economy running.16 The legacy of the Frankfurt Kitchen is thus as mixed as that of its principal inspiration, Christine Frederick—a fact that became even more clear to me as I took one last look out the “window” at the back of the kitchen, which frames not a kitchen garden but the outside of the housing complex, looking a bit more like a prison than I suspect Ernst May, the project’s architect, may have intended.

We live in an older home (by Minnesota standards, at least), built in 1888 and last renovated in the 1970s—a bad decade for pretty much everything, but

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especially for home design. We made some aesthetic changes to the house when we first moved in—taking up the wall-to-wall carpet and refinishing the floors, pulling down the wallpaper and repainting, and removing the popcorn ceilings, among other things—but we didn’t make any major structural changes, given the disruptions these entail, not to mention our limited budget.

Over the course of several years of living in the house, though, we became more and more aware of the limitations of our existing kitchen, as well as more and more intrigued by an interesting possibility. If we were to add a small bump-out to the rear of the house, it would allow us to reconfigure the entire first floor, changing the location of a mudroom and bathroom and opening up the kitchen to better connect with the family room and dining room.

Although our kitchen was not quite as compact as the Frankfurt Kitchen, it shared many of its characteristics: it was a galley kitchen, with access to the dining room through a narrow passage on the south side, and a doorway to a small mudroom (and eventually the back door) on the north side. Like lots of kitchens built since World War II, many of which were influenced by the Frankfurt Kitchen, ours had continuous countertops and built-in cabinets, but the cabinets were made of particle board and had seen better days. The cabinets also stopped well short of the ceiling and were topped by large soffits, which meant that the storage space was more limited than it had to be—forcing us to keep much of our food in the stairwell to the basement and many of our cookbooks on shelves in other rooms. The kitchen was also dark, with only a single window over the sink, and it had so little counter space that

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we often ended up having to use our dining room as an auxiliary counter. In short, this was not a kitchen conducive to cooking, much less one that invited guests to linger and enjoy the company of the cooks.

Our kitchen also shared other flaws with the Frankfurt Kitchen. As Martina Heßler has documented, once residents began to use the Frankfurt Kitchen, they quickly discovered additional drawbacks to its design. Not only did residents complain that the kitchen was too small, but they also said they felt isolated from the rest of the family, and the kitchen prevented them from keeping an eye on their children. Others unsuccessfully “tried to squeeze their big old kitchen tables into the kitchen’s six square meters,” likely craving additional prep space as well as a place for family to gather.17 Rather than adapting the kitchen to its users, the design team responded to these complaints with an “educating program” to get residents to adapt to the kitchen, seeing the problem as the failure of “traditional human beings” instead of a failure of architectural design.18 Being traditional human beings ourselves, we decided to do the opposite and adapt our kitchen to our needs.

If the space was too small, we would expand it; if it felt isolated from the rest of the house, we would connect it; and if it didn’t fit a kitchen table (it didn’t), we would find a way to include one.

Like almost all renovation projects, ours had certain constraints, including the location of our home’s foundation and load-bearing walls, our desire to preserve as much of our small backyard as possible by minimizing the footprint of the addition, and, of course, money.

But with some creative thinking and the help of a skilled architect, we were also able to find a solution to the kitchen-

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table problem: by moving our basement stairway, we could widen the kitchen just enough to fit a long and narrow island, including space for seating.

We could, in other words, no longer feel like we were cooking in prison.

The problems with both the Frankfurt Kitchen and our kitchen are more than just design problems. A better way to say this may be that the design problems of these kitchens reveal that sustainability is about more than just using “green” materials or energy-efficient appliances. It’s also about longevity, relationships, and joy.

Think about it this way: if the reductio ad absurdum of environmentalism is the Church of Euthanasia’s slogan, “Save the Planet, Kill Yourself,” we should be cautious about becoming overly focused on resource use as the sole criterion of sustainability. Yes, we want to limit our environmental footprint in the Anthropocene, but we also want to create things that will last, that will foster extensive relationships, and that will “spark joy” (to borrow a phrase from the organizational maven, Marie Kondo).

The problems with the Frankfurt Kitchen were exactly these. Built with the idea that scientific rationality was the only way, they neglected how people actually used the space, and eventually most of the Frankfurt Kitchens were ripped out, with only a few being preserved in museums such as the MIA. By making it so that only one person could work in the kitchen at a time, by isolating that space from the rest of the living area, and by designing the kitchen with an eye toward processed food, the kitchen disconnected people from one another and from the sources of their food. Perhaps worst of all, while at first glance the kitchen may

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If the reductio ad absurdum of environmentalism is the Church of Euthanasia’s slogan, “Save the Planet, Kill Yourself,” we should be cautious about becoming overly focused on resource use as the sole criterion of sustainability. Yes, we want to limit our environmental footprint in the Anthropocene, but we also want to create things that will last, that will foster extensive relationships, and that will “spark joy.” indeed seem like “an overgrown playhouse,” the closer you look, the more its focus on efficiency doesn’t seem very fun. In fact, it seems more like working in a factory.

At the other end of the spectrum, of course, is not the Church of Euthanasia, but the “trophy kitchen” of the 1980s—the gastronomic pleasure palace designed to impress one’s friends, display one’s wealth, and make one the envy of all the neighborhood. An outgrowth of the gradual transformation of the kitchen from a site of domestic production to a site of conspicuous consumption, the trophy kitchen not only reflected the greed and vanity of America in the Reagan years, but also the development of new kitchen technologies (such as the food processor, microwave oven, and vegetable juicer) and the accessibility of high-status brands (such as Cuisinart, Braun, and Krups) to middle-class consumers, thanks to the booming economy.19 However, the trophy kitchen was decidedly not the look we were after. What we did hope to achieve was the intermediate step of

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the “open kitchen,” which—beginning in the 1960s—returned the kitchen to its rightful place as what Steven Gdula calls “the warmest room in the house.”

And that concept, it turns out, also has a history.

In his examination of privacy and the Canadian home, Peter Ward observes that “studies of the traditional French-Canadian home don’t identify a cuisine until the end of the eighteenth century. They refer instead to a salle commune, the central space in the home where most daily activities unfolded— cooking included—even when the house had several rooms. This room was usually large, often the largest in the dwelling. By the beginning of the nineteenth century a somewhat smaller kitchen, perhaps with a narrower range of functions, began to emerge in rural houses, as well as a summer kitchen located in an annex.”20 And by the end of the nineteenth century, no matter the size of the house, “the kitchen almost invariably stood apart from the rest of the dwelling, separated at least by a wall and usually by its location at the rear of the house.”21 What was true for Canada was also true for the United States, until the social and economic changes of the 1950s began to transform how homeowners, architects, and developers thought about the relationship between cooking and eating in the home, or what Elizabeth Cromley calls the “food axis.” Specifically, says Cromley, they began to ask, “Where should the family eat—in a separate dining room? That seemed so old-fashioned. In the kitchen? Could the working-class history of kitchen meals be superseded to make kitchen eating pleasant for all classes?

Or should meals take place in the living room?”22 What eventually emerged in

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the 1960s were new “kitchen-diningliving areas,” made possible by a range of domestic transformations, including “technological advances such as better electric refrigerators and more reliable plumbing fixtures (which improved kitchen cleanliness and reduced offensive smells), the new availability of prepared foods from grocery shops, the disappearance of servants from all but the wealthiest households, and a popular redefinition of kitchen work as public, pleasurable, and sociable—to the point at which some men were willing to take up cooking themselves.”23 As Ward puts it, echoing Ellen Plante, “Absorbed once again into the spaces used for everyday family life, the kitchen had come full-circle.”24 My point is not that opening up the kitchen is the key to sustainability, but rather that unless we make the spaces in which we prepare food inviting, collaborative, connected, and pleasurable, food preparation will seem more like a chore rather than a joy, and the kitchen more like a prison than a playhouse.

Fortunately, re-envisioning this spatial design of the kitchen can go hand-inhand with more traditional understandings of environmentally-friendly design, such as those that appear in Philip Schmidt’s Complete Guide to a Green Home (2008).25 Calls to “green the kitchen” in this way first began to enter mainstream consciousness in the late 1980s and early 1990s, following the publication of Our Common Future (1987), also known as the “Brundtland Report,” in which the World Commission on Environment and Development (chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland, former Prime Minister of Norway) defined sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future genFALL 2018

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erations to meet their own needs.”26 As if in response (though more likely a case of convergence), architects and designers began to rethink the kitchen as an organic space, one whose inputs and outputs resemble the functioning of an organism more than the Frankfurt Kitchen’s model of a “food factory.”

In The Bathroom, the Kitchen, and the Aesthetics of Waste: A Process of Elimination, the catalog of a fascinating 1992 exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller explore how bodily consumption and economic consumption became intertwined in the twentieth century— and how late twentieth-century designers attempted to move from seeing waste “as a form of positive production” (à la Christine Frederick) to one in which trash functions “as a site for struggles over power.”27 At the beginning of the twentieth century, they note, “The kitchen became a site not only for preparing food but for directing household consumption at large; the kitchen door is the chief entryway for purchased goods, and the main exit point for vegetable parings, empty packages, leftover meals, outmoded appliances, and other discarded products.”28 By the end of the century, however, environmental concerns signaled “a new activism of waste, a politics of garbage,” which called for “informed consumers, responsive designers, and manufacturers, and rigorous public policy, considered on global as well as local scales.”29 Two examples Upton and Miller provide of this new attitude toward waste are William (Bill) Stumpf’s proposal for a “Metabolic House” and David Goldbeck’s development of the “Smart Kitchen,” both of which appeared in 1989.

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E S S A Y Bill Stumpf was a legendary Minneapolis industrial designer, whose 1994 Aeron chair for Herman Miller exemplified his interest in the connections between the human body and its environment. Prompted by the New York Times to fashion a home that would “respond directly to ecological needs,” Stumpf developed an outline for what he called the “Metabolic House,” in which the home functions much like a body in tune with its environment. “Our bodies do a good job of taking in oxygen, food and water, getting nutrition and dispelling waste,” Stumpf observed. “Our houses don’t do that very well. They should have a digestive system just like we do.”30 His visionary proposal for a home tried to better acknowledge its relationship to the surrounding world through a series of chutes, pipes, and conveyor belts that bring groceries and other heavy items into the house and send recyclables, compost, and filtered air out.

Designed in an era prior to the ubiquity of home composting and single-stream recycling, his kitchen features a built-in composter for organic wastes, a prominent recycling cabinet, and under-thecounter bins for sorting glass, paper and aluminum. While some of his innovations are now commonplace, such as bulk-delivery of biodegradable detergent (think Amazon.com) and a carbonated-water tap to cut down on packaging (think SodaStream), others remain niche features for most Americans, including a residential waste-toenergy furnace and a bidet-like paperless toilet.31 David Goldbeck’s The Smart Kitchen shares many of the same assumptions of Stumpf’s proposal for the Metabolic House, but as a book-length guide for homeowners, designers, and builders, it goes into far more detail and provides many more practical suggestions.

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Anticipating the arguments of sustainable food advocates two decades later, Goldbeck writes: I believe that one of the reasons for the declining interest in cooking is that our kitchens have not kept up with changes in life-style. This is one of the reasons for the success of the microwave oven: At least they reflect, for better or worse, that people are beginning to view the preparation of food in a different light. If real cooking is to survive, kitchen design and appliances must be improved.

Unless we adapt this workspace to contemporary needs, we will abdicate to mass producers one of the true pleasures of life and one of our most important sources of health: fresh food. We will be condemned to a ‘boil ’n bag’ and ‘slit ’n serve’ future.32

While some aspects of Goldbeck’s vision now seem dated—he advocates building an under-sink sprout tray, for instance, and provides detailed instructions for adding extra insulation to the outside of your refrigerator—his overall approach has aged well, and it is in fact remarkable how many of his concerns remain current today.

Fortunately, more and more communities have access to the knowledge and materials they need to implement the principles of green design without resorting to some of the more outlandish or homegrown “solutions” that characterized this first generation of sustainability advocates. When it came time for us to make the seemingly endless series of choices that a renovation project requires, we had it easy: we could choose from a variety of energyefficient appliances at Sears, purchase a high-efficiency dual-flush toilet at Lowe’s, and order sinks made from recycled stainless steel online. At Natural Built Home, a local source for eco-

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friendly building materials, we had our choice of colors for our Richlite countertops (made from a combination of 65% Forest Stewardship Council-certified or recycled paper content and 35% phenolic resin), our bathroom vanity top (made locally from recycled auto glass), and the floor tile for our bathroom and mudroom (made from recycled porcelain by a “Green Squared” certified company). And to match the rest of the house, we selected a kitchen floor made from ash trees, of which tens of millions have been felled thanks to the emerald ash borer—another example of how living in the Anthropocene (which in this case took the form of an invasive exotic species) can change the very fabric of our existence.

That we could do any of this at all reflects a degree of economic privilege not shared by much of the world, and that fact remains a central sticking point for any advocate of sustainability. But just as the Church of Euthanasia’s idea of environmentalism is extreme, to say the least, so too is the idea that sustainability must consist of only the purest of actions, free from any moral compromises or less-than-saintly responses

to the considerable environmental, economic, and social challenges before us. None of our choices in this project was perfect, and almost all involved some degree of give-and-take, but we certainly tried hard to avoid outright hypocrisy and rationalization—such as installing granite countertops from halfway around the world in the name of more “sustainable” living. The Anthropocene, as we quickly came to discover, calls us to think creatively and stretch our imaginations in an attempt to live humbly in an already compromised world, all while not making the problem worse by trying to do better.

This is a challenge, needless to say, but also an opportunity. With ten million kitchens being remodeled annually in the U.S.,33 we have the opportunity to make sustainable food mean more than just buying organic produce, shopping at the local farmer’s market, or supporting farm-to-table restaurants.

We have the opportunity to literally build it into the structure of our houses, our apartments, and our condominiums. Sustainability shouldn’t stop at the kitchen counter, in other words; it should start there.

Daniel J. Philippon (Ph.D., University of Virginia) ​is Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where he s​ tudies American environmental literature and its relationship to the ideas of nature, culture, and place. He has served as a Senior Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Germany, a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Turin and University of Gastronomic Sciences in Italy, and is a past president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE). Dan teaches a range of courses that concern the environmental humanities, literary nonfiction writing, and sustainability studies​,​​and ​currently serves as the English department director of undergraduate studies.

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E S S A Y Notes 1. J. Ryan Stradal, Kitchens of the Great Midwest: A Novel (New York: Penguin Books, 2016).

2. Molly Harrison, The Kitchen in History (New York: Scribner, 1972).

3. Mary Abbe, “Kitchen Artistry: Designed in 1926, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts’ New Frankfurt Kitchen Maximized Efficiency and Hygiene,” Star Tribune (July 30, 2006): 3F. 4. Juliet Kinchin and Aidan O’Connor, Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010). https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2010/counter_space/the_frankfurt_kitchen.

5. Ellen M. Plante, The American Kitchen 1700 to the Present: From Hearth to Highrise (New York: Facts on File, 1995), 145.

6. Plante, ibid., 207-208.

7. Christine Frederick, Household Engineering: Scientific Management in the Home (Chicago: American School of Home Economics, 1919), 14.

8. Frederick, ibid., 17.

9. Martina Heßler, “The Frankfurt Kitchen: The Model of Modernity and the ‘Madness’ of Traditional Users, 1926 to 1933,” in Cold War Kitchen: Americanization, Technology, and European Users, eds. Ruth Oldenziel and Karin Zachmann (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 163-184, esp. 169.

10. Frederick, Household Engineering, 19.

11. Frederick, ibid., 20.

12. Frederick, ibid., 28.

13. Frederick, ibid., 37.

14. Frederick, ibid., 39.

15. Frederick, ibid., 48.

16. Janice Williams Rutherford, Selling Mrs. Consumer: Christine Frederick and the Rise of Household Efficiency (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 150.

17. Martina Heßler, “The Frankfurt Kitchen,” 176.

18. Heßler, ibid., 177.

19. Steven Gdula, The Warmest Room in the House: How the Kitchen Became the Heart of the Twentieth-Century American Home (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008), 176-182.

20. Peter Ward, A History of Domestic Space: Privacy and the Canadian Home (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1999), 71.

21. Ward, ibid., 73.

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22. Elizabeth Collins Cromley, The Food Axis: Cooking, Eating, and the Architecture of American Houses (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 177.

23. Peter Ward, A History of Domestic Space, 74.

24. Ward, ibid., 74.

25. Philip Schmidt, The Complete Guide to a Green Home: The Good Citizen’s Guide to Earthfriendly Remodeling and Home Maintenance (Minneapolis: Creative Publishing International, 2008).

26. World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 43.

27. Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller, The Bathroom, the Kitchen, and the Aesthetics of Waste: A Process of Elimination (Cambridge: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 1992), 71.

28. Lupton and Miller, ibid., 1.

29. Lupton and Miller, ibid., 71.

30. Patricia Leigh Brown, “Space for Trash: A New Design Frontier,” New York Times (July 27, 1989): C1, C12, esp. C12.

31. Patricia Leigh Brown, ibid., C12.

32. David Goldbeck, The Smart Kitchen: How to Design a Comfortable, Safe, Energy-Efficient, and Environment-Friendly Workspace (Woodstock: Ceres Press, 1989), 2.

33. Brad Hunter, “True Cost Report: 2017,” HomeAdvisor, accessed May 2018, https:// www.homeadvisor.com/r/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/True-Cost-Report-2017.pdf.

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ZIMBABWE—

Changing Climate, Changing Farmers VIMBAI KWASHIRAI Introduction

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limate change has altered humanenvironment relationships and traditional knowledge, destabilizes longestablished patterns in farming culture and society in contemporary Makonde District, Zimbabwe. Makonde has food and cash crop significance, and is often referred to as the breadbasket of Zimbabwe. Its economic importance directly influences wider environmental changes in the age of the Anthropocene, and such changes are largely a consequence of social, economic, political, regulatory and environmental influences notably with regard to deforestation, soil erosion and water use.

Anthropogenic outcomes in Makonde—be they ecological, economic, technological, or political—affect farming knowledge and practices of local and national farmers.

The scope and type of land reform in Zimbabwe during 2000-2015 was so vast that it had no precedent in Africa, perhaps even the world. The program forcibly redistributed rich, formerly white-owned, commercial farmlands to over half a million black farmers. Resettled food and cash crop farmers now face major financial difficulties. The lack of access to financing limits agricultural mechanization and compels the majority of resettled farmers to use both modern and traditional methods of cultivation. Such methods incorporate the use of agrochemicals formerly applied by white farmers, including fertilizers, pesticides, and other chemicals; these radically transform the Makonde landscape.

Environmental change in post-2000 Zimbabwe points largely toward an ecological degradation narrative driven by farmer-pastoralists, as opposed to one driven by industrial agriculture, which is often the case globally.

Land Reform The existing land and agricultural literature on Zimbabwe is already substantial and contains analyses of colonial injustices about land rights, ownership and distribution.1 Important as this literature is, it generally neglects questions regarding human-environment interactions and climate change. Many scholars fail to acknowledge the impact of rapacious farming on Zimbabwe’s fragile subtropical environments, which are also prone to climate change effects.

These farming practices contribute immensely to economic difficulties, social inequality and ecological crisis. New debates in Zimbabwe and southern Africa have emerged regarding the increasingly negative impact associated with the overuse of land by humans and overgrazing by livestock.

Environmen-

Fig. 1: Makonde District, Zimbabwe.

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E S S A Y tal concerns in African agrarian societies like Makonde provide salutary reminders of the interlocking relationships among capitalism, politics, production, property, poverty, conflict, and environment.2 At the time, parallel and competing structures distributed pieces of land on properties seized from Makonde white farmers. District land committees included traditional authorities—village heads and chiefs, government administrative bodies, ministry of agriculture officials, local government councillors and civil servants, and government-leaning groups including war veterans, the army, police, secret service, and Zanu PF3 supporters—all under the patronage of the Zanu PF party hierarchy. In Makonde, members of land committees prioritized land distribution, but disregarded the environmental and climatic implications of their actions.

For example, little attention was paid to the vandalism and burning of farms or to forest destruction by “armed frontier crack teams” spearheading commercial takeovers. Widespread forest fires, used as a means of intimidation, and poaching activities during violent farm confiscations were two of the most common abuses.

Traditional leaders, land committees, and government conservation officers from the Environmental Management Agency (EMA) clashed over natural resource exploitation and conservation. During land reform and after, the state gave little space to customary beliefs and traditional authorities, nor to state-run and more “scientific” institutions focused on natural resource management.

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Climate and Environmental Knowledge Researchers know little about the knowledge of environment, weather and climate among the 600,000 resettled and communal farmers in Zimbabwe, who have largely been excluded from gaining such knowledge formally in schools, colleges, and universities. They generally rely on traditional ways of reading and understanding the climate, as well as the knowledge their elders can provide (mothers and fathers, but especially grandparents). After independence in 1980, only limited formal education on agriculture and climate was available to secondary school pupils. Especially weak was curriculum regarding climate change and the environmental consequences of agriculture. At the tertiary level, formal education still emphasized the learning of agricultural knowledge and practices more than understanding climate and environmental change. To this day, Makonde farmers don’t receive much education in these areas from governmental agricultural extension services.

Teaching farmers about anthropogenic changes was never a government priority before independence, though some farmers work closely with the centralized meteorological and weather observatory centers in Harare. Others attend seminars, workshops, and conferences to learn about climate and environmental management. Information exchanged at such fora include desirable sustainable agricultural practices for soil conservation measures, among them wind breaks, contour ridges, crop rotation and the application of organic fertilizers.

Most access climate change ideas and farming knowledge through radios and newspapers, but they often

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After independence in 1980, only limited formal education on agriculture and climate was available to secondary school pupils.

Especially weak was curriculum regarding climate change and the environmental consequences of agriculture. At the tertiary level, formal education still emphasized the learning of agricultural knowledge and practices more than understanding climate and environmental change. To this day, Makonde farmers don’t receive much education in these areas from governmental agricultural extension services. find such sources neither adequate nor meaningful, as media presence in rural Makonde is thin and most farmers are without television. However, every household has a mobile phone, and this technology has great potential to revolutionize environment and climate knowledge in the future, as it has already done in the areas of banking and social communication,4 though farmers generally mistrust meteorological information from the media.

Although Makonde farmers listen to climate forecasts, they generally show a preference for traditional knowledge systems. And thus, when scientific forecasting deviates from traditional weather clues, farmers tend to favor indigenous information because it blends well with the culture, has been tried and tested over the years, and comes in a language that farmers

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understand. Yet there is often a striking similarity between indigenous and scientific climate indicators, which tend to overlap in the areas of wind direction, cloud formations, and temperature.

The wind blowing from west to east, and from north to south, for example, is assumed to bring abundant moisture and a good rainy season. The prevalence of a strong wind from east to west during the day and at night between July and early November, however, is an indicator of drought.5 Another significant component of indigenous climate predictions comes from observations of plant, insect, and animal behavior, especially as they relate to rainfall patterns.6 For instance, some farmers associate the heavy production of tree leaves with a good season, while high fruit production is a sign of a poor rainfall season. The reasoning is that high fruit production implies that people will subsist on fruit for lack of alternative foods. Specific examples of indigenous observations include the production of white flowers by mukuu trees, which signals a dry season, while flower production on the top branches of the mukonde tree indicates a good rainy season. Other indigenous signs of an imminent drought include late bearing and lack of figs in July-September from the mukute, late maturing of acacia trees along valleys, and drying off of chigamngacha fruit between September and early November.7 These observations are discussed formally and informally at farmers’ meetings and at social gatherings without government involvement.

Insect and animal behaviors are also closely monitored. One of the most important of these is the behavior of spiders. When spiders close their nests, farmers expect an early onset of rain because spiders do not like moisture in

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E S S A Y their nests. In contrast, a heavy infestation of most tree species by caterpillars during springtime, or an abundance of hen crickets on the ground, leads farmers to expect a poor rainfall season. The movement of elephants is, conversely, associated with a lack of rainfall because they need a lot of water, and in anticipation of dry periods will typically travel in search of stable water sources.

Droughts themselves are generally interpreted both in religious and scientific terms. Some see droughts as punishment for “grave sins,” such as murder, within the community.

Drought is also understood as part and parcel of extreme climate variability caused by global warming. Specifically, climate change has muddled the ability of farmers to plan farming operations with any certainty. If they plant early, the rains may vanish at a critical moment for plant growth, and when they plant later, the rains might still not be assured. Zimbabwe certainly endures changing weather patterns in the form of fluctuating extreme temperatures, unpredictable and variable rainfall, shifting seasons and more frequent and severe droughts. These phenomena concern farmers countrywide, who find themselves gathering to discuss new ideas on how to cope with fast changing weather patterns.8

Climate and Environmental Change in Makonde The lack of reliable environmental and climate information for Makonde farmers means that their farming operations before and after land reform have been impacted with regard to planning and planting arrangements. Not every farmer has been successful in balancing the agricultural and climatic mix

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for the purpose of maximum benefit in each farming season. While a few have become extremely wealthy by cultivation and animal husbandry, others became bankrupt due to climate change, drought, or lack of inputs combined with unsustainable farming practices. Since commercial farmlands averaged 2,200 hectares, elite black and white farmers had over the years been able to practice relatively sustainable agriculture through crop and paddock rotation. Low densities in human and livestock populations permitted such rotations in sharp contrast to the limited land capacity in more densely populated resettlement areas.

Concerned with safeguarding natural resources (land, forests, water and wildlife) in communal and resettlement areas, the government triggered a crisis in Zimbabwe. EMA officials engaged with the issue of environmental degradation when interacting with widely dispersed small-holder farmers, who, along with their families, comprise 70% (9.8 million) of Zimbabwe’s total population. However, neither the EMA nor any other of the actors involved in the land reform process prioritized environmental conservation and climate change mitigation as important issues.

Zanu PF championed land redistribution for food self-sufficiency to reduce the food import bill and maximize crop exports for foreign exchange earnings.

Generally, Makonde farmers, like their counterparts across Zimbabwe, tried to meet government objectives for the agricultural sector in their plans and farm operations to feed themselves and earn essential income for family needs. Resettled Makonde farmers literally “mine” the soil to produce export-oriented tobacco (fodya), maize (chibage), and cotton (donje). But food self-sufficiency and foreign currency

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Land is venerated through many different practices including elders snuffing fine tobacco while sprinkling some on the ground, in order to beseech ancestral spirits to bless the community with adequate rains, preserve the soil, and avoid harm. Elders also pour specially brewed beer from rapoko and sorghum millets on the soil in prayers for rain, calm weather and bumper harvests. generation from agriculture could not be realized due to the near bankrupt status of the federal treasury. Ominously, government only paid lip service to issues of environmental protection and climate change mitigation. It lacked robust measures and policies to lessen environmental and climatic impacts of farm takeovers, turning a blind eye to unregulated land clearing for farming, panning for minerals, and hunting. In addition, traditional leaders, land committees, farmers’ clubs, and government conservation officers failed to offer educational programs to teach farmers about the environment and climate change. Since farm offer letters, permits, and leases do not provide tenure security to farmers, land holders generally lack strong incentives and resources to invest in environmental conservation to alleviate climate change.

However, the Shona people of Makonde—the dominant Bantu tribe native to Zimbabwe—believe that humans are sons and daughters of the soil; they come from and return to the soil. Zimbabwe has two major ethnic groups—approximately 70% of whom are the majority Shona, 20% Ndebele people, and 10% other minorities. The Shona dominate Zimbabwe’s economy, politics and land ownership. Land is venerated through many different practices including elders snuffing fine

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tobacco while sprinkling some on the ground, in order to beseech ancestral spirits to bless the community with adequate rain, preserve the soil, and avoid harm. Elders also pour specially brewed beer from rapoko and sorghum millets on the soil in prayers for rain, calm weather and bumper harvests.

Elders of land beneficiaries in Makonde continue to perform watered down versions of similar practices before clearing woodlands for farming. Similar customs and rituals are also still practiced before burials. Land reform and Western concepts of agriculture learned in schools, however, have often challenged these beliefs and customs as obsolete, and many farmers’ concerns appear to gravitate towards production rather than traditions of environmental conservation. Nonetheless, Shona traditions in Makonde continue to be based on recognizing the intimate bond between humans and their environment, according to which, total realization of the self is impossible without peaceful co-existence with the climate, soil, minerals, plants, and animals.

On the other hand, government policies appear to push farmers away from long-standing cultural attitudes and toward a scientific understanding of nature, without necessarily providing a solid means with which to acquire that knowledge except the very basics learned in schools. For example,

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E S S A Y through the Ministry of Agriculture, the state often encourages the use of, and regularly supplies, fertilizers and chemicals, regardless of their short-and long-term damage to the environment, including increased soil acidity. Animal husbandry also contributes to degradation. Government promotion of cattle and goat production in Makonde and elsewhere leads to animal-induced soil erosion and rapid vegetation loss. Seasonal grasses in Makonde often come under heavy grazing in some overstocked areas, which in turn accelerates erosion, desertification, and a loss of biodiversity.

Makonde Farmers Human-habitat inter-relationships in Makonde are largely a consequence of strategic livelihood-centered agricultural activities in response to a controversial land resettlement process undertaken in a hostile macroeconomic environment. Makonde land reform farmers came from very diverse backgrounds. While some of them had no prior experience in farming, the majority had been working as peasant communal cultivators and livestock herders before migrating from various corners of the country in search of adequate and productive land in Makonde. Others had been resident in Makonde communal areas and would be advantaged in knowing Makonde weather patterns learned from elders, in contrast to the newcomers. Like many other cultivators, Tabitha Zengeni, a resettled Makonde farmer, states that she formally and informally learned about the climate, environment, and customary and modern cultivation strategies only after arriving in Makonde. Most farmers are believed to practice unsustainable farming, but

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this is a gross overgeneralization since some cultivators have adopted climate smart agriculture, green agriculture or conservation agriculture mindful of environmental protection. For instance, crop production on Zengeni’s farm and those of others comprises a diverse range of grains and other plants such as maize, sorghum, millets, rice, beans, groundnuts, melons, sweet canes, vegetables, cotton, tobacco and a bit of discreet cannabis or dagga. Such mixed farming mimics a forest understory as it preserves soil. Furthermore, farmers leave important standing trees on the fields for shade, fruit and bird habitat.

Makonde farmers also show awareness of scientific concepts connected to climate change in their conversations.

They further participate in discourses that engage with the idea of environmental conservation, changing weather patterns, and harmful agricultural practices. While a few farmers still practice cut-and-burn agriculture, many understand these practices and avoid contributing to carbon emissions.9 For many farmers, environmental protection is a matter of mixed crop farming. Farmers Zengeni and Gatsi, for instance, agree that letting some of the land lie fallow is an age-old sustainable agricultural technique that allows fields to regenerate.10 Farmers who farm sustainably in Makonde argue that land is supposed to be rested through letting it lie fallow as a restitution of the wounds inflicted on the soil.11 Makonde farmers also observe that, unlike in the 1970s, when June was known to be the only cold month, beginning in the 2000s winter began stretching from the end of May to August. August rains known as gukurahundi (clean the chuff) have disappeared. In addition, October was generally known with some measure

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of certainty to be the month for the onset of summer rains. But since the turn of the 21st century, farmers have noted decreases in rainfall across summer, especially during the early and late parts of the season. Frequent incidences of severe drought and late heavy downpours have become common. Other notable climate changes include increased extreme temperatures (especially in summer), localized floods, and decreased/varying river flow.12 Makonde agriculture, particularly plant growth, is sensitive to climatic conditions especially for those farmers dependent upon rainfall as opposed to irrigation. The greatest challenge to government lies in creating awareness among more farmers of the impacts of climate change. This is because managing the environment sustainably becomes a tool for avoiding the excesses of climate change, notably through reducing forest fires that contribute to carbon emissions.

However, even for climate scientists, the prediction of drought is both complicated and unreliable. In southern Africa more generally, cycles of drier years, which occur as a consequence of the El NiĂąo effect, are followed by successive seasons with opposite conditions. Recommendations to farmers range from the planting of droughttolerant and early-maturing varieties to destocking. Even with some improvements in the reliability of climate forecasts, the recurrence of drought and related risks have to be accepted and integrated into land use systems sustainable under climate variability.

The prospect of accelerated changes in climate reinforces the need for longerterm constraints that future climate may place on Makonde farmers.

Apart from concerns about climate change, drought, and their impacts,

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most Makonde farmers try to mitigate the problem of soil erosion, which is understood as an outcome of not only deforestation but also of unsustainable agricultural methods. For example, Makonde farmers believe that the destruction of vegetation exposes soil to the elements of rain and wind that erode topsoil essential for agricultural production. They also link deforestation to climate change, noting that the loss of vegetation cover directly connects to extremes in temperatures and desertification.

Agricultural officials nevertheless believe Makonde farmers threaten forests, the soil, and water sources because their settlement and economic activities spread from the floodplain due to a harried and unplanned land allocation program organized by nonexperts. They are concerned about the impact of cutting vegetation near water sources, including rivers, streams, and wetlands, and argue that the clearance of bush and trees increases the erosive powers of run-off water. However, soil erosion does not seem to concern other Makonde farmers and sections of the central government, who believe that it is neither serious nor widespread enough to warrant attention.13 According to Alois Mbedzi, a resettled farmer, “It is a very slow process teaching soil conservation to farmers, as most of them are naturally conservative persons who, before spending any money, wish to see with their own eyes that the proposed remedy is a certain cure and, therefore, worthwhile.�14 Soil conservation regulations appear unpopular as EMA instructors try to enforce rules in arbitrary ways causing local resentment of conservation measures. EMA officers use police or taxation approaches in their duties. The strict dismissal of indigenous knowl-

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E S S A Y edge and the policing function of EMA officials, as with some donor-funded natural resource management programs, fail to build upon, or even acknowledge, local practices and knowledge at a time when government intervention is constrained by a serious shortage of labor and financial resources.

According to John Chipengo, a resettled farmer, during Vimbai Kwashirai earlier stages of land reform, Fig. 2: Deforestation in the Obva area, Makonde. Cutting down trees for fields and farmers took for granted soil firewood. fertility despite clear evidence of severe soil erosion that conWest Director of Agriculture, believes tinued unabated on farms. However, some Makonde farmers regard the subfrom 2010 onward, many producers ject of soil erosion as more of academic became aware of the impoverishment rather than practical importance.15 of the fields. They reduced crop yields In the Kenzamba, Hombwe, and and used both organic and artificial Godzi areas of Makonde, farmers fertilizers in significant quantities generally protect arable lands with to replenish soil fertility. Poor crop contour ridges to guard against erosion. husbandry practices, notably maize They also leave strips of unploughed monoculture, exploitative cultivation land with vegetation to protect fields methods, ploughing down slopes, and and keep wildlife, such as birds and over-cropping, contributed to the forbees. In the Chivende and Obva areas, est/soil destruction occurring on many EMA officials experienced resistance Makonde croplands. Simon Chamfrom farmers who cut down forests boko, an experienced Makonde farmer, for more farmlands and who failed to observes that until 2010, the way soils practice sustainable agriculture (see had been used made poor short-term figure 2 , above). Among other farmers, economic sense, and farmers lacked the Julius Mafunga in Obva has suffered a willingness to deal effectively with the reduction in maize crop harvests. With problem of soil erosion and the need for no anti-erosion works, Mafunga’s tenradical change in individual and collecyear-old thirty-acre farm in Chivende tive attitudes towards natural resourchas become denuded in many parts. It es. Another farmer, Jane Moyo, attriused to produce twenty bags of maize butes rampant forest and soil damage per acre, but that has decreased to five, to ignorance caused by the “mining of and on certain plots the application of the soil for profit.� In particular, as indifertilizers has had little impact.16 On cated previously, uninterrupted cultivathe other hand, farmers practicing soil tion of tobacco, maize, and cotton on conservation have seen their yields rise the same fields thoroughly exhausted on a yearly basis, reaching thirty bags the land. Onesmo Zishiri, Mashonaland of maize per acre in 2014.17

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Makonde and Zimbabwe are by no means the exception when it comes to soil erosion and declining agricultural yield, but represent what happens in southern Africa and across Africa, as well as other parts of the world. The world clearly cannot sustain the degree of environmental destruction for much longer that is taking place in equatorial zones. Farmers experiencing high environmental losses have been squeezed out of business between the imperatives of increased production costs and decreasing yields, while the growing number of lands already showing a decline in production threaten the viability of the agricultural industry, particularly as farmers encroach more and more upon fertile lands set aside for pastures, forestry and wildlife.

Conclusion Recent changes in the political leadership in South Africa and Zimbabwe will probably mean wider reforms in southern African agriculture that embrace climate change mitigation and sustainable use of the environment.

Farmers in southern Africa and in arid

regions across the world can learn from the practices and experiences in Makonde, particularly regarding environmental transformations and climate change impacts. They can draw lessons from the pitfalls of unplanned land reform alongside the overexploitation of natural resources, as well as from the challenge of reconciling traditional knowledge systems with a changing climate. Another key lesson would be the skewed prioritization of agricultural productivity for food security and foreign exchange earnings that cause severe environmental destruction in fragile subtropical lands. This does not suggest in any way that Zimbabwean farmers and government do not agonize over climate variability in extremes of temperature, inadequate and erratic rains, as well as acute and more frequent drought. On the contrary, it is the communities that ultimately suffer the consequences of natural resource depletion, degraded pastures, the conversion of grazing land and forests into residential and crop land, and the harvesting of trees for fuel without thought given to reforestation or to the impacts on soil, climate and people.

Vimbai Kwashirai is a Zimbabwean and Oxonian scholar. His research interests are in economic and environmental issues, specifically in modern Zimbabwe and Africa more generally. The author of Green Colonialism in Zimbabwe, 1890–1980, Vimbai has published extensively on these themes as well as on the social and political developments in Zimbabwe.

He has taught at several universities in Zimbabwe and the United Kingdom, including Durham and Liverpool. Vimbai has been awarded many academic awards and fellowships in the U.K. and Germany. His forthcoming book with Cambridge University Press is called Ballot or Bullet—Election Violence in Zimbabwe, 1980-2015. A leading expert on Zimbabwean human rights, land rights, poverty, and ecological transformations, he has successfully carried out wide-ranging consultancies with various governments, churches, private companies, and non-governmental organizations on the big questions regarding contemporary Zimbabwe. Currently, he is working on a project studying the corruption of the lobola culture and women’s rights in Africa.

E S S A Y Notes 1. For example, Horace Campbell, “Mamdani, Mugabe and the African Scholarly Community,” Pambazuka News, December 18, 2008. https://www.pambazuka.org/ resources/mamdani-mugabe-and-african-scholarly-community; Kirk Helliker,“Dancing on the Same Spot: NGOs,” in Contested Terrain: Land Reform and Civil Society in Contemporary Zimbabwe, ed. Sam Moyo, Kirk Helliker, and Tendai Murisa (Pietermaritzburg: S&S Publishers, 2008), 239–274; Ian Scoones, et al., “Livelihoods after Land Reform in Zimbabwe: Understanding Processes of Rural Differentiation,” Journal of Agrarian Change 12, no. 4 (2012): 503-527; Gibson Chitiga and Percyslage Chigora, “An Analysis of the Implications of the Fast Track Land Reform Program on Climate Change and Disaster Management in Zimbabwe: A Case of Chegutu District,” Journal of Sustainable Development in Africa 12, no. 2 (2010): 124-143; Easther Chigumira, “Livelihoods after Land Reform in Zimbabwe, My Land, My Resource: Assessment of the Impact of the Fast Track Land Reform Programme on the Natural Environment, Kadoma District, Zimbabwe.” Working paper 14 (2010): 1-21.

2. Vimbai C. Kwashirai, “Ecological and Poverty Impacts of Zimbabwe’s Land Struggles 1980 to Present,” Global Environment: A Journal of History and Natural and Social Sciences 2, no. 3 (2009): 222-253; Rudo B. Gaidzanwa, “Women and Land in Zimbabwe” (paper presented at the Conference “Why Women Matter in Agriculture,” Sweden, April 4-8, 2011).

3. ZANU-PF stands for the “Zimbabwe African National Union—Patriotic Front,” which has been the ruling party in Zimbabwe since independence in 1980. The party was led for many years under Robert Mugabe, first as prime minister, then as president, until his ouster in 2017.

4. Focus group discussion with resettled farmers Amos Bwerinofa, Maria Tinarwo, and Anelli Dzapata, Ward 19, Makonde, July 22, 2014.

5. Ibid.

6. Interview with Makonde District Chief Executive, Crynos Gandiwa, Mhangura administrative offices, July 25, 2014; Indigenous refers to cultural knowledge passeddown through generations and scientific means climate knowledge learnt formally in school, college, or university.

7. Focus group discussion with resettled farmers (see note 4 above).

8. Ibid.

9. Interview with Rueben Gatsi, resettled farmer, Ward 14, Makonde, June 12, 2013.

10. Interview with Tabitha Zengeni, resettled farmer, Ward 20, Makonde, June 27, 2013.

11. Focus group discussion with resettled Makonde farmers Betty Muchada, Moses Dzawo, Kunaka Imbayago, Denigo Dzvairo, and Mary Chaitezvi, Nkosana primary school, Makonde, March 10, 2012.

12. Ibid.

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13. Ibid.

14. Interview with Alois Mbedzi, resettled farmer, Ward 2, Makonde, March 30, 2012.

15. Focus group discussion with resettled farmers, Simon Chamboko, Jane Moyo, and Chenai Chinhoyi, Ward 14, Makonde, July 30, 2014; Interview with John Chipengo, resettled farmer, Ward 2, Makonde, March 30, 2012; Other farmers, like Chenai Chinhoyi, observe that many streams and rivers in the area carry fertile silt soils from uninterrupted monocultures.

16. Interview with Julius Mafunga, resettled farmer and Ward 15 Counsellor, March 23, 2012.

17. Interview with Never Chambati, resettled farmer and Ward 15 Counsellor, July 20, 2014.

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E S S A Y

SCIENCE AND STORIES Offering Hope for the Climate SASKIA BEUDEL

W

hile the idea of the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch is still under formal review by the stratigraphic community, the concept has attracted widespread attention and debate across diverse scholarly fields. The startling idea that human influence on the environment “has now become so large and active that it rivals some of the great forces of Nature”1 has prompted a “rapprochement” between disciplines. As Tom Griffiths puts it, through an escalating sense of global environmental crisis, “the sciences and humanities—so often separated in our training and thinking—are now turning towards one another with a grate-

Scholars in the humanities know that stories change the way people act, the way they use available knowledge. The stories we live by determine the future. So, in harnessing the power of narrative, in listening to, rediscovering and generating true stories, we change the world.

Tom Griffiths

ful and urgent sense of opportunity and collaboration.”2 This new turn is fuelled in large part by acknowledgment that the gap continues to yawn large between what we know “needs to be done and what is actually being done” to avert crisis.3 As Sverker Sörlin points out, environmental problems were seen for much of the twentieth century as the prerogative of the natural sciences—as problems to be solved through the expertise of environmental scientists.4 They are now understood as complex cultural, social and “collective action problems”5 that require diverse forms of expertise, experience and knowledge. In this regard the Anthropocene is perceived as a “multidisciplinary mental framework” that links science and engineering to social and cultural theories and practices.6 Expressions of interest in enhanced collaboration between the sciences and humanities can be found at a range of scales and in varying contexts, including large global environmental change (GEC)7 research initiatives such as Future Earth. Announced in 2012, Future Earth builds upon three decades of work conducted by predecessor programs including the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme

(IGBP, est. 1987) and the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP, est. 1980).8 To date, involvement of the humanities in the GEC field has been slight. Future Earth’s intentions to “integrate” the humanities along with natural and social sciences thus marks a significant departure in GEC research strategies.

Desire for enhanced collaboration can also be found in smaller scale interdisciplinary initiatives such as IHOPE* (est. 2003) and RESCUE (2009-2011) and in many aims of the environmental humanities. For example, the editorial welcome to the inaugural volume of the journal Environmental Humanities stated its intention to foster “novel interdisciplinary approaches to scholarship… drawing the humanities and the natural and social sciences into dialogue in new and exciting ways.”9 Ursula Heise notes that the environmental humanities seek “to respond to the call for new institutional formations to correspond to innovative kinds of knowledge” and to be relevant to broader public debates around environmental issues.10 In the field of the creative arts, actual rather than proposed collaborations seem to have flourished more readily, with a number of collaborations between performance and/or visual artists and scientists based around environmental themes.

This article is undertaken in the spirit of this unprecedented desire for enhanced conversation and dialogue between fields. It asks a simple question: what kinds of narratives emerge through interviews with environmental scientists who have either played key roles in GEC programs and/or studied the impacts of climate change on local environments. And what might these narratives have to offer broader non-

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This article is undertaken in the spirit of this unprecedented desire for enhanced conversation and dialogue between fields. It asks a simple question: what kinds of narratives emerge through interviews with environmental scientists who have either played key roles in GEC programs and/ or studied the impacts of climate change on local environments. And what might these narratives have to offer broader non-specialist or nonscientific audiences to enhance our ability to comprehend and respond to our transforming world?

specialist or non-scientific audiences to enhance our ability to comprehend and respond to our transforming world?

I will center my essay around an interview with Pep Canadell, the Executive Director of the Global Carbon Project (GCP), a core project of Future Earth (that was formed to “assist the international science community to establish a common, mutually agreed knowledge base supporting policy debate and action to slow the rate of increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere”).11 Before turning to this interview, however, I want to place this discussion in the context of Rachel Carson’s work, and how her writing helped shift the perception of science’s supposed mastery over nature. * Visit IHOPE at: http://ihopenet.org/about/

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E S S A Y A Changed World In 1958 author Rachel Carson wrote a remarkable letter to Dorothy Freeman.

Formed in response to the establishment of nuclear science, her letter describes both a major transformation in the relationship between humans and nature, and in Carson’s thinking about that relationship: I suppose my thinking began to be affected soon after atomic science was firmly established. Some of the thoughts that came were so unattractive to me that I rejected them completely, for the old ideas die hard, especially when they are emotionally as well as intellectually dear to me. It was pleasant to believe, for example, that much of Nature was forever beyond the tampering reach of man—he might level the forests and dam the streams, but the clouds and the rain and the wind [were beyond his reach].… I have now opened my eyes and my mind. I may not like what I see, but it does no good to ignore it, and it’s worse than useless to go on repeating the old “eternal verities” that are no more eternal than the hills of the poets.12

In Silent Spring Carson used different words to convey this momentous shift in the relationship between “man and nature,” stating that both radiation and synthetic chemicals had changed “the very nature of the world—the very nature of its life.”13 She noted that in a deep history of interaction between living things and their surroundings only one species, humans, had “acquired significant power to alter the nature of [their] world”14 and then only in the speck of time represented by the twentieth century.

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As well as describing revolutionary change in the nature of the world, Carson’s letter describes transformative change in her own thinking. As can be inferred from the numerous calls for new forms of multidisciplinary collaboration mentioned earlier, responding to environmental crisis does not simply require better scientific understanding (more knowledge and data), it requires willingness to act, respond and change.

Reasons for societies failing to take necessary decisions to halt global warming lie within social and cultural traditions and habits, within ideological, political, economic and other values, as well as in views on personal freedom.15 Numerous commentators have noted that anthropogenic environmental change requires new kinds of action at both individual/psychological and communal/sociological levels of behavior. Yet behavioral change that is fast and effective enough is precisely what is so elusive. Karen O’Brien and coauthors argue that to overcome resistance to transformative change requires “exploring one’s own (individual and collective) assumptions, which often involves confronting existing priorities, interests, habits and loyalties that can be threatened by processes of change.”16 Carson’s letter points to her capacity to undertake just this kind of difficult self-reflexive work. She describes identifying and then relinquishing certain dearly-held beliefs, loyalties, and habits of mind in order to develop new ways of acting in and attending to the world.

Her apprehension at both intellectual and emotional levels of a “changed world” resulted in a significant shift in her practices as a writer. She undertook a transition from her earlier more lyrical books on the sea written in a

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nature-writing tradition, in which people scarcely appear, to the politicized Silent Spring, for which she is best known today. In Silent Spring she systematically maps and challenges the indiscriminate and undemocratic use of “biocides” for economic gain, and she brings to life in pioneering ways the inseparability of human bodies from broader ecological systems (water, soil and atmosphere).

Her role as “activist-writer”17 has granted her iconic status. In the popular imagination, Silent Spring launched the modern environmental movement.

Her book is widely acknowledged for effecting tangible change in the real world. It led to the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 and prompted the passage of the Clean Air Act (1963), among others.

Scientists recognize Carson as one of a handful of “precursors of our present concerns with Earth System integrity,” along with Aldo Leopold, Paul Ehrlich, Garrett Hardin and Donella Meadows.18 I would like to suggest that Carson’s letter prompts a question for our own times: how do today’s GEC and other environmental scientists express the fundamental shift in the interrelationship between humans and nature encapsulated by the Anthropocene?

What kinds of narratives do scientists form in response to this changed world we now all inhabit? Might these narratives provide broader audiences greater insight into, understanding of, and imaginative apprehension of, our current situation?

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Just as atomic science prompted the realization that “humans could destroy the livability of the planet—whether intentionally or otherwise,”19 the notion of the Anthropocene prompts the realization that the earth we live upon is not the passive background to human affairs and human history often assumed since the Enlightenment.20 Instead, it is an active force that speaks back and is “moved by”21 a myriad human-directed interventions upon its systems. Human activity and Earth system activity are bound together in powerful feedback networks. Knowledge of this interactive and whole Earth system breaks down the nature/culture divide embedded within so many modern Western habits of thought and collapses “the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history.”22 Nature can no longer be conceived as removed from society.

How has this revolutionary shift in “the very nature of the world” (as Carson might put it) registered among scientists who are responsible for analyzing, comprehending and articulating anthropogenic environmental change? In asking this question, I mean registered at the more personal level conveyed by Carson, rather than within formal scientific discourses of peerreviewed findings and mission statements, which, of course, are already available in the public domain. What kinds of narratives do scientists form in response to this changed world we now all inhabit? Might these narratives provide broader audiences greater insight into, understanding of, and imaginative apprehension of, our current situation?

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E S S A Y Interview with Pep Canadell I had the privilege of interviewing Pep Canadell in August 2017 in Canberra, Australia. We sat in a quiet ground floor meeting room at the Oceans and Atmosphere offices of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) overlooking an empty green sport field. It seemed a long way from the hub of international scientific activities Canadell takes part in.

Canadell trained as a biologist in Spain during the 1980s and holds a Ph.D. in terrestrial ecology from the University Autonomous of Barcelona (1995). When he moved to the U.S. in the nineties, he soon became drawn into the emerging field of Earth system and global change science. He became Executive Director of Global Change and Terrestrial Ecosystems (1998 –2003), a core project of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program, and has held the position of Executive Director of the Global Carbon Project since 2001. He has published over 140 scientific papers and books on topics stretching from terrestrial ecosystems and the impact of carbon earlier in his career to, more recently, the development of global and regional carbon budgets; processes driving carbon exchanges between the biosphere (the region of the earth occupied by living organisms) and atmosphere; and “assessment of CO2 stabilisation pathways” for the future.23 He also conducts public outreach and communication work, publishing regularly in forums such as The Conversation. As a member of the United Nations IPCC (Fourth Assessment Report), he was awarded

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the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. In 2017 he was elected a Fellow by the American Geophysical Union for outstanding contribution and discovery in Earth sciences and for contributing to scientific understanding needed to build a sustainable future.

Our interview ran for ninety minutes, during which Canadell spoke generously and fluently throughout, expressing great enthusiasm and passion for his subject. Our conversation ranged across topics, including developments in Earth system science from the 1990s onwards, and Canadell’s involvement in what he calls “informative advocacy.”24 We discussed increasing positive responses to global warming, including the uptake of renewable energy technologies in Texas, Europe and China; Canberra setting a 100% renewable energy target for 2020; the widespread availability of organic food in places like California, catering to mainstream rather than niche consumers (which breaks reliance on agricultural systems that use artificial nitrogen fertilizers while also making economic sense for businesses25); the proposed phasing out of the combustion engine through government directives in the UK and France and through automotive industry decisions in Germany; and major banks refusing to loan money to the controversial Adani coal mine in Australia, a situation that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

Our conversation then turned to the question of meeting the Paris climate agreement to limit global warming to less than 2º Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

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Tracking for the Future How do you think we are performing in terms of a carbon budget26 and emissions rates?

The first questions is—what do we want to track? In Paris we agreed that we want to stay below 2º Celsius excess from pre-industrial rates. So we’re doing very poorly, exceptionally so. This past week there was a new analysis as to how the rich world is tracking just for the targets for 2030, which are very modest, and even the rich countries are not playing their part,27 let alone what you’d expect from places like China and India. For most of the community I work with, we don’t think we can actually meet the Paris agreement. We think that it’s going to go beyond 2º Celsius.

Two degrees is a social construct. There is no scientific basis by which, after 2º Celsius, the ice sheets are going to disintegrate and we’re all going to be doomed under 20 meters of water and so on. It’s a social construct in the sense that, given the science we know, the impacts we think are going to be there, and what we thought realistically could be done—and “realistic” is already a subjective thing—two degrees was first put on the table in the 90s, in the mid-90s. But we spent almost 25 years on international negotiations and diplomacy that took us absolutely nowhere. All the time, of course, we were elevating climate change as a very important issue. But the problem of waiting all this time is that our carbon budget shrank dramatically.

So what in the mid-90s seemed, “well, we can do it,” later on became, “let’s just try to do it.” The penalty for 25 years of non-action or little action is very big.

We know that we’re going to overblow this carbon budget. That’s what we’re now talking about. When we signed the Paris agreement, we agreed that, in the second part of this century, we will have to develop technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

So if we go to zero carbon emissions by 2050,

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which will be an incredible feat, an energy system that doesn’t emit, and we get a good handle on some of the agriculture and the nitrogen, even then we won’t reach the target agreement.

This first part of the century we’ll overshoot the carbon budget, and then we need to go into the second half and start removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere either with technologies that are not fully available or proven at this point, or are ridiculously expensive. What we discuss a lot is bioenergy.

It’s called biomass with carbon capture and storage.28 The first plant was opened in the U.S. recently and captures a million tons of CO2 per year. If we want to stay within the 2º Celsius target, we would need to do this big time. One million tons is nothing. We would need to have thousands and thousands of these plants all over the world if we were to go with this technology.

Beyond the Technological Fix For the Paris agreement, we need to look at transformation that goes above and beyond technologies. If we were to deploy everything we have now on renewable energy, on carbon sequestration, it’s still not enough. We have to look at the demand side, the social side of everything and rethink how we transport ourselves, what we eat.… All these end parts are very important. The way we work. Millions of people commuting hours and hours as though there’s no tomorrow, how many miles you need to move just to work. With the internet and 3D printer, you can actually distribute the production of stuff in ways we never imagined. We always thought we had to have huge industrial plants that produce all this stuff. But people can now produce things in a smaller place at a more convenient location.

Then we don’t need to shift things from China 1,400 miles away. We talk a lot about this social transformation—it will be almost hand in hand with these super rapid technological transformations.

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E S S A Y For the Paris agreement, we need to look at transformation that goes above and beyond technologies. If we were to deploy everything we have now on renewable energy, on carbon sequestration, it’s still not enough.

We have to look at the demand side, the social side of everything and rethink how we transport ourselves, what we eat.… All these end parts are very important. The way we work. Millions of people commuting hours and hours as though there’s no tomorrow, how many miles you need to move just to work. With the internet and 3D printer, you can actually distribute the production of stuff in ways we never imagined.

We always thought we had to have huge industrial plants that produce all this stuff. But people can now produce things in a smaller place at a more convenient location.

Then we don’t need to shift things from China 1,400 miles away.

We talk a lot about this social transformation—it will be almost hand in hand with these super rapid technological transformations.

In terms of assessing decarbonization pathways, we now have a section focused on consumer end powers. We’re not saying we all have to become vegetarian, but a small reduction in meat consumption (say, a 1/3), and a small reduction in waste—if you put it

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all together, you see all of a sudden you’re going to achieve as much saving here as opposed to all these fancy technological expenses and studies.

That seems so important and also empowering. It means that more individuals need to take more responsibility. To me that’s exciting because it’s not the techno-fix, which is part of the system that got us to where we are in the first place, the capitalist paradigm.

It empowers people because they buy in to the problem, or into the solution, either way you want to look at it. So instead of saying, “Oh well, climate change, yet again the government is not really doing what it should be doing.” Well no, because ultimately the government will do what we tell it to do.

Let’s be real. There’s vested interest from big corporations, but ultimately even those big corporations are going to be fragile; they are already fragile, actually. The opportunities for individual buy-in are very strong because if you say, “Okay, if I’m going to reduce my meat consumption, I want my government, or my center, or my workplace, or whatever, to go and speak for climate change, because I’m doing my part and I expect you guys to be doing your part.” It is empowering and can trickle through the whole system for the system transformation we need to undertake.

Window Into the Future At this point, our conversation turned to the question of how soon Canadell expects the impacts of climate change to become more visible and acute.

Again, it’s important that the 2º Celsius is not seen as this thing that, when you cross it, everything’s terrible, and before you cross it, it’s all good. It doesn’t work like that. It’s not a linear relationship of impacts. Climate change expresses itself in extremes. This cen-

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tury we’re going to have anywhere between half a meter and a little more of sea level rise.

The issue is when you combine that massive, unusual, once-in-a-century storm with a king tide, with a 50 centimeter top-up of sea level.

That’s when you get events like flooding of the World Trade Center site when Hurricane Sandy hit New York. To me, this is an illustration. Of course Sandy was a very exceptional thing, but that’s exactly what we’re talking about.

You can get rid of all the coral reefs in Queensland and all the environmental fisheries in the mangroves of the Gulf of Carpentaria with a 1.5º Celsius increase. It happened with 1.2º Celsius in the last El Niño.

El Niños are an incredible window into the future because they bring all this heat and in a way put the world where it may be in thirty years’ time, or twenty years’ time. What happened in the last large El Niño of 2015-2016 is that we had all the issues with the coral reef bleaching,29 and then about 700 kilometers of mangroves lining the Gulf of Carpentaria from Queensland all the way into the Northern Territory died in a month. This has never been reported anywhere else in the world.

There’s been massive ecological transformation in this country and somehow these things don’t go through the media enough because of… whatever. The mangroves were recorded by satellites, their leaves disappeared in a huge line. Mangroves are the spawning places of fisheries for local regions and also for export. This was the second big thing that happened. The third thing is that the Murray Darling River had one of its worst algal blooms. This is normal when waters get too hot; algae blooms and water cannot be used for irrigation or livestock, so it was a big deal even economically. The El Niño of 2015 was so big and hot that the algae that was part of that bloom was not one that belonged to the region. It came from hotter, adapted places up in Queensland. So we see all these things happening stronger and bigger than ever before to the point that even the biology behind these events has to be a different biol-

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ogy because it’s too hot for the old biology.

The fourth thing that happened that summer was fires in the alpine area of Tasmania. There are no records for the past 8,000 years (since the last glacial period) that there has ever been a fire in this part of the world. These are the peats that are permanently moist areas. It was so exceptionally dry. The fifth thing was high storm surges on the southeast coast.

Although they can’t be scientifically proven to be related to climate change, suffice it to say that every centimeter of sea level rise has a multiplier effect on the impact of storm surges. And finally there was the loss of 900 square kilometers of kelp forest along 100 kilometers of the Great Southern Reef in Western Australia. This occurred through a marine heatwave in 2011, but since its demise the kelp forest has shown no signs of recovery.30 These ecological signs are unprecedented, all in this little window of a warmer world that El Niño brought for us. Globally, we were between 1.2º Celsius and 1.3º Celsius excess temperature at that point. We’re saying we’re likely to be beyond 2º Celsius. The potential impacts as we move into a more permanent state of what El Niño brings us once every ten years or so—at some point these windows will be a true representation of how the world will be in years to come.

At this point in the interview I read Canadell the extract from Rachel Carson’s letter. I asked him if he’d ever had a similar experience of deep-seated recognition that “the very nature of the world—the very nature of its life” had altered.

Not exactly like that, so probably not. But I’ll tell you two things. One is actually everything I just told you, a full appreciation of what happened in the 2015-16 El Niño. It was so much in your face. And you just said that you didn’t realize all these things happened, despite the communication efforts we made. When I go overseas and talk about it, people say, “How come we don’t know about this stuff? It feels like the canary in the coalmine because

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E S S A Y of the high sensitivity of Australia to climate change.” It’s among the most sensitive continents in this regard.

It was a revelation to me, because I could plot the impact of what’s still a fraction of the global warming we’re committing to. Getting this reaction from my overseas peers when I presented this stuff, I realized it is not a fiction we’re talking about.

We’re going to see this thing several times over, times many things, and the level of impact will be really important, especially for more vulnerable communities like the Pacific Islands and Bangladesh. We, all of us, have to have a say as to whether this thing is acceptable to us as a community as opposed to, “this thing is going to come and there’s nothing we can do.”

The second thing I just realized this morning: My fourteen-year-old son, Jordi, was telling me about a book he’s reading for school.

It’s a novel about this naïve little kid who goes through the Holocaust and finds explanations for why the regime, Hitler, was doing things to people, threatening them or even shooting them. There was always a “reasonable reason” that the little boy could come up with for why that thing happened. In the last third of the book, the kid realizes that he was just being naïve and that real stuff is happening. It made me think about climate change.

We see things, a little signal here, a little signal there, but we say, “well, we’ve had this before, it’s a little worse, but you know….” Ten years passed, twenty years passed, twentyfive years passed since I started in the early nineties doing this work. At what point will we say, “this is true and there’s nothing we can do, and we lost all this time.”

I mean, it’s a terrible comparison and I’m not even sure we should be talking about this, but it feels a little like that.

Afterword

As noted during the interview, some of these events were in the media, particularly the Great Barrier Reef and the fires in Tasmania, but few media reports connected the dots and read across multiple “signals” to glean the larger ecological picture Canadell captures in his metaphor of “windows into the future.”

Glimpses through the window of the El Niño negotiate against more stereotypical images of future catastrophe (“under 20 meters of water and so on”) and apocalyptic narratives. They convey tangible and dispersed impacts of climate change in the here and now.

The vast scale of global warming, “massively distributed in time and space,” may be an impediment to more people taking action to curb climate change.31 Risks such as anthropogenic climate change, as Stuart Allan and his collaborators put it, “operate outside the capacity of (unaided) human perception.

This im/materiality gives [such] risks an

To conclude with my initial questions —what kinds of narratives do scientists form in response to the changed world we inhabit, and what might these narratives have to offer broader audiences— one observation is how mixed these narratives are. There are stories of hope and excitement: a sense that despite lack of clear directives at a federal government level, positive change is occurring across business, technological and grassroots community initiatives. As Canadell said with great enthusiasm during our interview, these positive transformations are now “unstoppable.”

In tandem with hopeful stories are narratives that bring audiences up close to the immediacy of climate change as it manifests in the present—through the demise of kelp forests, burning peats, bleaching coral, coastal storm surges, migrating algae, and dying mangroves.

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air of unreality until the moment they materialise as symptoms.”32 Canadell’s observations help materialize otherwise amorphous phenomena of climate change. They bring climate change closer to home.

Glenn Albrecht’s work is a strong reminder that when environmental damage and change occurs in familiar and loved home-environments, not only does this result in psychological distress, it often results in action. Care and action feed one another. Although activism and action is not the focus of Albrecht’s research, it is clear in his account of developing his influential concept of “solastalgia” (“the homesickness you have when you are still at home”)33 that residents of the Hunter Region in New South Wales, Australia, were not only distressed by their damaged environment; they were also taking action. As Albrecht notes, they were attempting to “halt the expansion of open cut coal mining and to control the impact of power station pollution.”34 One potential contribution of narratives such as Canadell’s, whereby the ”signals” of climate change that now surround us in all sorts of local places are brought into relief, is that broader audiences and participants are able to engage

with enriched “circuits” of information about climate change in order to make choices about actions.35 Finally, Canadell’s narratives are a powerful reminder of individual and societal agency in the face of climate change. As artist Natalie Jeremijenko observed: What the climate crisis has revealed to us is a secondary, more insidious and more pervasive crisis, which is the crisis of agency, which is what to do. Somehow buying a local lettuce, changing a light bulb, driving the speed limit, changing your tires regularly, doesn’t seem sufficient.36

While Jeremijenko vividly captures a common sense of inadequacy or uncertainty precipitated by climate change, Canadell’s statements about the relevance of “consumer end powers” or the “demand side” make clear that everyday choices at both individual and collective levels do indeed have measurable and significant impact. These actions and choices are not “insufficient”—they have the power, in Canadell’s words, to trickle through and transform the whole system.

Change can start with each one of us.

Saskia Beudel is the author of two books of non-fiction, a novel, essays and scholarly articles. She writes about landscape, environment, walking, memory, art, wartime internment, and histories of science. Her books have been shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, the Dobbie Award and the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature. She collaborates with artists, curators, and others.

Saskia has held full-time research positions at UNSW Art & Design and Sydney College of the Arts at the University of Sydney. In 2016 she was a Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment & Society in Munich, Germany. She currently teaches writing and literary studies at the University of Canberra.

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E S S A Y Notes 1. Will Steffen, et al., “The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 369, no. 1938 (2011): 842–67, esp. 842.

2. Tom Griffiths, “The Humanities and an Environmentally Sustainable Australia,” Australian Humanities Review, 43, (2007), accessed November 29, 2014, http://australianhumanitiesreview.org/2007/03/01/the-humanities-and-an-environmentally-sustainable-australia/.

3. Joern Fischer, et al., “Mind the Sustainability Gap,” Trends in Ecology and Evolution 22, no. 12, (2007): 621–624, esp. 621.

4. Sverker Sörlin, “Reconfiguring Environmental Expertise,” Environmental Science & Policy 28, (2013): 14–24.

5. Eva Lövbrand, et al., “Who Speaks for the Future of the Earth?,” Global Environmental Change 32, (2015): 211–18, esp. 212.

6. Welcome to the Anthropocene: The Earth is in Our Hands, curated by Nina Möllers, Deutsches Museum, 2014–2016, http://www.environmentandsociety.org/exhibitions/ anthropocene/.

7. According to the American Geophysical Union, “Global Environmental Change addresses large-scale chemical, biological, geological, and physical perturbations of the Earth’s surface, ocean, land surface, and hydrological cycle with special attention to… human-caused perturbations, and their impacts on society.”

8. Other programs include DIVERSITAS (est. 1991) and the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP, established 1990).

9. Deborah Bird Rose, et al., ”Thinking Through the Environment, Unsettling the Humanities, “Environmental Humanities 1, (2012): 1-5, esp. 4-5.

10. Ursula K. Heise, “Comparative Literature and the Environmental Humanities,” State of the Discipline Report, March 9, 2014, 10-18, esp. 9-10. https://stateofthediscipline.acla.org/entry/comparative-literature-and-environmental-humanities; See also, Christoph Kueffer, et al., “Developing the Environmental Humanities in Switzerland,” Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences 23, no.1, (2015): 67-69.

11. Global Carbon Project. “About GCP.” Last modified 2018. http://www.globalcarbonproject.org/about/index.htm.

12. Rachel Carson, Always Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, 1952-1964, Martha Freeman ed., Boston: Beacon Press, 1995, 248-49.

13. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 23.

14. Ibid.

15. See Mike Hulme, Why We Disagree About Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014); Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2017).

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16. Karen O’Brien, et al., “You Say You Want a Revolution? Transforming Education and Capacity Building in Response to Global Change,” Environmental Science & Policy 28, (2013): 48-59, esp. 50.

17. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011).

18. Frank Oldfield, et al., “The Anthropocene Review: Its Significance, Implications and the Rationale for a New Transdisciplinary Journal,” The Anthropocene Review 1, no.

1, (2014): 3-7, esp. 4.

19. Tsing, The Mushroom, 3.

20. See, for example, Griffiths, “The Humanities and an Environmentally Sustainable Australia”; Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” Critical Inquiry 35, no.

2, (2009): 197–222.

21. Michael Serres, The Natural Contract, trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), esp. 3-4. See also Bruno Latour, “Is Geo-Logy the New Umbrella for all the Sciences? Hints for a Neo-Humboldtian University,” (lecture, Cornell University, October 25, 2016), http://bruno-latour. fr/sites/default/files/150-CORNELL-2016-.pdf, esp.1.

22. Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 201.

23. Josep G. Canadell, “Carbon Sciences for a New World,” Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 2, (2010): 209.

24. Whereby scientific research aligns with pressing societal issues and policy needs to provide information useful to decision-making.

25. The amount of nitrogen used in farming is larger than natural nitrogen production. When nitrogen mixes with soil and atmosphere, it forms nitrous oxide, the third most problematic of the greenhouse gases after CO 2 and methane.

26. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently identified the world’s carbon budget as the “estimated amount of carbon dioxide the world can emit while still having a likely chance of limiting global temperature rise to 2° C above preindustrial levels. The international scientific community estimates this budget to be 1 trillion tonnes of carbon (1000 PgC)…. The world is currently on track to spend the remainder of this budget in just three decades.”

27. Adrian E. Raftery et al., “Less than 2° C warming by 2100 unlikely,” Nature Climate Change 7, (July 2017): 637-641, doi: 10.1038/NCLIMATE3352.

28. Biomass with carbon capture and storage (Bio-CCS) grows plants, which bind carbon from the atmosphere as they grow, puts them in combustion furnaces to produce electricity, captures the CO 2 produced, and stores it underground. See Jasmin Kemper, “Biomass and Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage: A Review,” International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control 40, (2015): 401–430.

29. Ocean temperatures in excess of 1° to 1.5° C above seasonal averages led to 90% of the top 1000 km of the Great Barrier Reef to suffer various degrees of bleaching with a third completely bleached. See also the recent documentary, Chasing Coral, https:// www.chasingcoral.com/ (accessed 23 May 2018).

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E S S A Y 30. Initially because of sustained above-average ocean temperatures, and more recently because seaweeds have taken over the ecosystem.

31. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 1.

32. Quoted in Hulme, Why We Disagree, 236.

33. Glenn Albrecht, ‘“Solastalgia’: A New Concept in Health and Identity,” PAN 3, (2005): 41–55, esp. 41.

34. Albrecht, G., “The age of solastalgia,” The Conversation, 7 August 2012, http:// theconversation.com/the-age-of-solastalgia-8337.

35. Hulme, Why We Disagree, 221-222.

36. Natalie Jeremijenko, “The Art of the Eco-Mindshift,” (video of TED talk, October 2010), https://www.ted.com/speakers/natalie_jeremijenko.

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E S S A Y

YOU SAY “RESTORATION,” WE SAY “DESTRUCTION”— Korean Artists’ Resistance to the Four Rivers Restoration Project CHIHYUNG JEON

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he Four Rivers Restoration Project (hereafter, the Project) was the biggest environmental engineering project in modern South Korea. During the short period of its planning and execution (2008-2012), the Project spent about USD 20 billion in “restoring” the four major rivers in the nation—Han River, Geum River, Youngsan River, and Nakdong River. The use of the word “restoration” in the project’s official title by the Korean government was clever, since not everyone agreed that the Project was about restoring the rivers. Citing the shortage and degraded quality of water and the risk of flooding, the government claimed that by dredging the riverbeds, constructing weirs, installing bicycle paths, and opening leisure and sports facilities, the Project would revive and redevelop the rivers. Environmental activists, academics, media outlets, and citizens, on the other hand, fiercely opposed the plan, as they thought that the Project would simply “kill the rivers” by blocking the water flow and disrupting the ecosystem. The Project was the most expensive and contentious undertaking in recent years, in effect dividing the nation. 1

In this essay, I describe the literary and photographic responses—or resistances, to be more accurate—to this state-led river development project dubbed a “restoration.” The poems, essays, and photographs produced by those opposed to the Project reveal their sentiments and judgments about rivers, the environment, and stateled infrastructure development. The writers and artists employed the literary and visual rhetoric of life, flow, and innocence, which was intended to critique the technocratic language and impulse of the state to subject rivers to management and development. What motivated these languages and images of opposition was the shared perception of the imminent transformation of the rivers and the irreversibility of those consequences. There existed an acute sense that the Project would certainly bring about an environmental transformation of unprecedented scale and scope in the nation. For many, it meant a catastrophic culmination of the modernist and authoritarian development that had driven the nation for the past half century. By contrasting the languages and images of the resistance with those of planning and promotion, this essay attempts to make sense, if only belatedly, of this destructive transformation—and search for clues, however faint, for undoing it.

E S S A Y Words and Images as Resistance Korean poets, writers, and photographers organized themselves to oppose the government’s plan for the four rivers. They published collections of poems, essays, and photographs that documented, lamented, and criticized the destruction of the rivers incurred by the Four Rivers Restoration Project.

Most notably, one poetry collection, one essay collection, and one photograph collection were published in 2011, when the Project was underway at full speed. (These literary and photographic works form the core of this essay). But even after the official completion of the Project in 2012, writers and photographers continued their work on the rivers and shared them through books, prints, documentaries, and exhibitions.

For Photography Remembers Rivers, a collection of photos and short essays, ten photographers spent more than a year recording what was happening at the construction sites along the four rivers. Each photographer was assigned to different sections of a river in order to cover all the sites. Unsurprisingly, the photographers were not welcomed.

The construction companies and workers as well as the government officials in charge of the Project were wary of any outsiders who might document and criticize their work. The photographers were casually denied access to many of the sites, and one was even chased away by a construction company’s vehicle.2 The photographs were accompanied by a collection of 100 poems and 29 essays in two volumes, Don’t Be Ill, Rivers, Not Even in Dreams and The Sleepless Rivers, respectively.3 The writers claim that they set out on this project to fulfill the artist’s role as “a canary in a coal mine.” Both collections were edited by the Committee on Writing as Resistance in the Writers Association of Korea. In FALL 2018

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their introduction, the editors note that “the river has been an infinite source of creation [of writing].” The river is “a life-space, time, history, and a truly clear language full of deep metaphors.”

With the Four Rivers Project, however, “poets, and languages, are now about to be expelled from the rivers.” The editors also offer a poetic definition of the Project: “A barbarity that can only be committed by those who turn their eyes away from the world of invisible things” (pp. 5-6). Thus, the crisis of rivers is a crisis of poetry. One contribution to the collection ends by equating the fate of rivers with the fate of poetry: “Rivers do not flow. Poems are not written” (Kim Sa-in, “For Poetry,” p. 178).

While each artist has his or her own way of addressing different themes— often by using related tropes and figures—the common premises and concerns are best represented by Doh

There existed an acute sense that the Project would certainly bring about an environmental transformation of unprecedented scale and scope in the nation. For many, it meant a catastrophic culmination of the modernist and authoritarian development that had driven the nation for the past half century.

By contrasting the languages and images of the resistance with those of planning and promotion, this essay attempts to make sense, if only belatedly, of this destructive transformation—and search for clues, however faint, for undoing it.

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Jong-hwan, a bestselling poet who was serving as the chair of the Committee on Writing as Resistance in 2011. (Since 2017, Mr. Doh has been the Secretary of Culture, Sports, and Tourism in the new government of President Moon Jae-in.) In his preface to the collection, Doh writes, “For a poet, a river is not just a river. It’s a lifeline for creatures as well as a lifeline of poetic inspiration . . . . It’s like a sister, like a mother.” To him, it seems that the destruction of the rivers, or their “disappearance,” in his words, by the Project makes “our souls, our imagination desolate.”

If you build weirs to block the flow of water and put it in a cement cast, it’s not a river but only a waterway. The government is insisting that it’s reviving the river when it’s discontinuing the life of water and launching a ship of capital (p. 8).

The distinction between a river and a waterway is crucial for him, because the former means benign nature, the latter ruthless capitalism. It is an atrocity that the river was killed to build a waterway. The poet does not use the word “killing” lightly. As the river has, for him, the nurturing qualities of a mother, the Project was “killing the mother of all things.” It was “a sin against heaven.” He even goes further to claim that the straightening of rivers only facilitates the flow of cash, but not the flow of life: “This is a slaughter. This is a massacre. This is a greedy spadework only to share the profit of development. This is violence from ignorance” (pp. 7-10).

The writers and photographers had one common goal—to expose the “massacre” and resist the violence done by the Four Rivers Restoration Project. In doing so, they mobilized words and images to depict the rivers’ suffer-

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ing and to express despair and anger against those who were inflicting pain on the rivers. At the same time, their words and images revealed their beliefs, worldviews, and even stereotypical assumptions about nature, technology, development, capital, and most significantly, gender. As much as the writers and photographers hated to see the rivers dredged and destroyed by machines of capital and power, and the military-industrial complex, their depiction of such processes and consequences remained grounded in the age-old, gendered perception of rivers. In emphasizing masculine aggression against feminine rivers, they also tended to accept the traditional boundary and the gap between nature and artifice. While this conceptual distinction might have been effective in identifying the violent, and in effect penetrative, character of the Project, such an extreme disconnect did little to rethink how to undo it and forge a new relationship between the rivers and humans.

Machines in the River All the photographers seem to have been shocked by the destruction done to the rivers. To them, the Project was simply overwhelming. What they found most visually disturbing was the dredging in the rivers. Machines dominated and violated nature at the dredging sites.

Yellows and browns displaced blues and greens. Photographer Cho Woo-hae writes about her experience in terms of a dystopian moonscape.

I was overwhelmed by the scene, which seemed as though the river’s stomach was cut open. I imagined a future covered with dust and barren land. The machinic sound of excavators eating up the sand and the footsteps of the trucks represent-

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E S S A Y

Dump trucks on the Four Rivers Restoration Project site. Photo courtesy Lee Sang-yup. Photography Remembers Rivers.

ed the dead rivers where no fish could survive ( p. 144).

No wonder that the Project was often compared to a large-scale military operation. The “organic and inorganic beings” that exist in and around the rivers were “like innocent people enduring an air raid, lying flat and shivering,” as the Project was “thoughtlessly digging, trampling, pouring with heavy equipment, as if rushing toward to the enemy” (Lee Hye-kyung, “Everything Will Flow, But…,” p. 133). The rivers as biological organisms or innocent people were forced to surrender to an invasion by military machinery.

Of all the machines mobilized for the Project, the excavator was the most prominent; it was not just a machine, but a symbol supercharged with meaning. In the epilogue for the photo collection, poet Kim So-yeon explains:

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The excavators in the photographs were not so much a construction tool as a lethal weapon. We are reminded how often the excavator has been used as a lethal weapon for massacres in our history of development. The rivers are fatally injured by the excavators’ violent scratches (p. 283).

Those photos captured not just construction sites, but “murder scenes.”

Excavated not in the name of ecological health, but the flow of goods and logistical ease, the rivers were being “martyred to capitalist power.” Their martyrdom was for “the absolute order that humans and nature belong to one large organism, and that we should never damage that great solidarity” (p.

283). Referring to the atrocities committed at Auschwitz, Kim insisted that “we should never forget this site of massacre, and should not commit another

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An old man watches an excavator operate at a Four Rivers site.

Photo courtesy Choi Hang-young, Photography Remembers Rivers.

one by failing to remember it” (p.

284). The photo collection of the rivers became a profound act of commemoration and resistance.

Another prominent artifact in the Four Rivers Restoration Project were the numerous weirs, a total of sixteen.

For the proponents of the Project, these weirs represented a major success of water management. In celebrating the Project’s achievement, the Korean government produced a series of photographs highlighting the weirs’ architectural designs, night lighting, auxiliary facilities (such as pavilions), viewpoints, and bicycle paths. Photographed in one of eight volumes of the official report on the Four Rivers Restoration Project, the weirs were presented as symbols of progress, aesthetic vision, and prosperity as a result of streamlining meandering riverbeds.4

In the photographs taken by the critics, however, the weirs were the main target of censure. To them, the weirs represented exactly what was wrong with the Project: human arrogance and ignorance of how water can and should flow. The weirs’ obstruction of water flow was most problematic. A poet dubbed the salience of weirs as a “weir cult.” There was going to be a long fight against this “weir cult,” which would probably “die out in twenty years” (Moon Dong-man, “Casting a Net,” pp. 89-90). This “cult” could best be witnessed in the speed and rigor with which the weirs were constructed. Construction was rushed, day and night, without delays or environmental impact statements. For the supporters of “Restoration,” the weirs solidly embodied the technocratic power and economic progress that drove the whole project. For the critics, by contrast, the weirs stopped water and killed fish.

Yeoju weir on the Han River. Phoro courtesy The River Revitalization of Korea (2012), pp. 2627, an English-language brochure by the Korean government.

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E S S A Y Let the river flow like that.

In the rivers are the spirit of freedom, the soul of art, and our hearts heaving like a praying candle (pp. 71-72).

A dead fish surfaced near a weir. Photo courtesy Kim San, The River Does Not Flow.

Nature’s Curves The immediate consequence of the excavators and weirs was that the rivers became flattened, straightened, and stagnant. Naturally, the photographers and writers all believed that these changes were in opposition to the rivers’ natural state. Several poems refer to the presumably natural state of the river as flowing continuously in curves as a result of the currents, geology, and gravity that have shaped riverbeds over long stretches of time, not along straight lines. The preface to the collection states that what the photographers saw were “straight lines that someone drew over the winding rivers” (p. 6).

This was a critical response to the fact that the Project was straightening the course of rivers by dredging. The message from writers and photographers was to let the rivers run in their original, natural state. A poem “River” by Jeon Ki-chul expresses the sentiment: Let the river just flow.

Embracing mountains and running around them.

Running with open arms through plains.

Just let it flow. ……

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In its free, natural state, the poem suggests, the river never stops, but only curves when it meets other elements of nature, such as mountains and plains.

Carving and making curves is the essence of the river’s movement. Poets attached various meanings to the rivers’ curved flow. Woo Dae-sik’s poem explains “why the rivers make curves”: Rivers make curves because they want to show their backs for long stretches. . . . Rivers make curves and curves because life resides in those curves. Living creatures shake hands at the curves where the rivers take a short break. . . . Rivers make curves around villages to show their deep gratitude to all living in them.

—Woo Dae-sik, “Why the Rivers Make Curves,” p. 136

Of course, this romantic anthropomorphism of a river’s curves is not unique to Korean poets, but the sudden attention given to the river’s natural shape of movement is a direct consequence of, or response to, the Four Rivers Restoration Project.

Defending the natural curviness of the rivers, indeed, became an important rhetorical strategy for the writers to oppose the Project.

In a similar vein, “flattening” was another point of concern. The curves, unevenness, and irregularities that exist in natural river systems were forcefully being eliminated. It was a violence done against evolved natural forms and organic asymmetries. For poet Baek Mu-san, flattening is a mode of control, domestication, and exploitation. Through flattening, nature ceases

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to be nature and becomes measurable and useful. In his prose poem “Extinction,” Baek writes: How can it be useful if it’s not flat? If it’s not useful, it’s all useless. If it’s useless, it doesn’t even exist. You cannot govern what you cannot measure. Land becomes real estate—that’s the evolution of land. Rivers stop flooding and become waterways—that’s the evolution of river. Water overcomes vortices and runs straight—that’s the evolution of water (pp. 118-119).

For Baek, flattening nature’s inherent irregularities is at the core of the state’s vision of its territory, akin to what James Scott describes as “seeing like a state.”5 It is fundamentally modernist in its ambitions and enabled by science and engineering.

The land is in disorder before it becomes national territory. No land becomes national territory until the soldiers tread on it and make it flat . . . . Look at the barbaric struggle of the river that refuses to become national territory” (p. 119). [emphasis added]

Rivers are savage as they act like anarchists, denying the state’s gaze and hand, and resist annexation into national territory. The river’s barbarity—its chaotic flow—has to be tamed, and it can only be tamed, that is, brought under control, through capital investment and regulatory development. Baek’s poem continues: What can possibly wind, round, and bend? Nature is just another name of undeveloped land. It’s just a gesture until we reach out to it. Once touched by the hand of development, it turns into a flower of capital, takes off its barbarity, and throws itself into our arms (p. 119).

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As seen above, one of the basic premises of many poems and photographs is that the “barbaric” and anarchic river submit to the orders of capital, development, and technology. The Project made the naturetechnology opposition clearer than ever.

The river was “turning deadly pale, frightened by the sound of metal and machine, / oh no, it’s now bleeding” (Kong Kwangkyu, “The Shocked River, But …,” p. 85).

Whereas “the river’s clear water and beautiful scenery are basic human longings,” an essay explains, “those who convert them into money are machines blinded by profit.” Before “excavators arrive,” the sand beaches along the river were “as beautiful as a shy virgin’s cheek.” But soon we will see “straight lines of concrete walls” (Kim Il-young, “Time Must Flow to Low Places,” pp. 75-76). Humans can use, abuse, and exploit the river only because they have the technical means to do so.

In several poems and essays, the writers make a simplistically romantic distinction between the “natural” and the “artificial.” Pointing out a paradox in the government catchphrase of “green growth,” a novelist sets out to teach the Project’s proponents “what a river is, what nature is”: “Nature is born and lives on its own, and artifice is what humans create with money. Even elementary schoolers know that. If rivers filled with robot fish mean ‘green growth,’ then the aquarium in the sixty-three-story building can be said to be an uncontaminated ocean” (p.

114). The “robot fish” refers to an idea proposed by President Lee Myung-bak as a technical means to monitor the water quality of the four rivers. According to the president’s proposal, engineers would design fish-shaped robots that could swim freely and sense any problems in the water quality of the rivers. The president hoped that this real-time monitoring would resolve public concerns about water quality degradation due to the Project. The

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E S S A Y idea was not implemented, after all, but critics liked to cite it as evidence of the wildly technocratic approach of the Project. They rightfully asked why robots should replace living organisms such as fish.

For many writers, technically transformed rivers could no longer be conceived of as unspoiled nature. In the rivers that were subject to a “renewal” process, the writers no longer saw reeds or bushes. Instead, the renewed rivers were like a “state-of-the-art system,” which includes “a self-purifying system and automatic water-level control devices.” These may be “fake,” but they look real. “Children cannot see real rivers, not even once, but they can paint what looks more real than real” (Yoon Ye-young, “An Elegy for Rivers,” pp.

202-205). From the writers’ perspective, “fake” means that the rivers have lost “the right to write” or “the freedom to express their own stories.” The rivers’ stories were being “erased and rewritten after censorship,” washed away or rewritten by the hand of capital and control. Writers therefore demand “the original be returned,” claiming their “right to read and write the original river” (Kim Hyun, “Resting My Head on a River’s Lap,” p. 89).

Rivers and Women Some writers took the rivers’ pain as their own. Song Gyeong-dong’s poem, “A River that Does not Flow,” equates the river to the narrator’s body. From the perspective of the river as body, dredging was not just the most visible technical operation, but the most painful one. Feeling the pain and frustration of rivers with his own body, the poet expresses his anger at dredging, weirs, and excavators as well as the president who ordered them:

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I wish you could straighten the winding blood vessels in my body.

I wish you could build a concrete wall in my stomach And block the backflow [of gastric juice] I wish you could put an excavator at the bottom of my pancreas And dredge out the old stones (pp. 207209).

In a similar vein, poets compared the Project to a forced surgery, in which the river as a patient is falsely diagnosed. The river is being treated like a critical patient needing invasive surgery and reconstruction, when it is in fact a patient with only minor problems like “enteritis or rhinitis for which a prescription had already been issued.”

The Project performed a devastating, not to say fatal, surgery on the rivers (Lee Won-gyu, “Milky Way of the Earth, Rivers of Candles”): Put under general anesthesia Bring excavators and big trucks Remove the river’s intestine of gravel, sand, willow, and reed Insert steel bars into the river’s solar plexus, philtrum, forehead, and crown Build concrete revetment in the river’s belly button and backbones Administer anticancer drugs that cause hair loss in the riverside swamp Perform a reckless plastic surgery on the face of the mother river (pp. 93-97).

The trope of a maternal, nourishing river has a long tradition. The feminization of water, in fact, is an old conceptual and rhetorical device in both celebrating and critiquing the scientific and industrial treatment of nature. Modern science and industry have been “conquering” or “killing” nature (which in itself is often coded

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as female), which typically equates with economic prosperity or ecological catastrophe, depending on one’s point of view. 6 The gendering of the four rivers, in that sense, is no exception. What is remarkable, however, is that when gender enters into poetic and literary treatments of the Four Rivers Project, the language discussing the violence done to the age-old river flow tends to get starker. While it may be an old cliché to think of a river’s curves as a woman’s waist or bosom—associated with giving and nourishing life—now the woman’s body is writhing in pain from the dredging work (Kim Sai, “Sand Dunes,” pp. 67-68). In its natural state, the river is “a woman who does not die forever,” flowing from mountains through plains and cities to the sea, and “repeating circulation and resurrection.” The cement dams built during construction, however, “tied her hands and feet,” making her arthritic and breathing hard. The speaker asks the children of the river “not to put a knife on her body,” further observing that “How can we expect her to live, if we take out her womb, amputate her arms and legs, and crush her face?” In the view of its opponents, the Four Rivers Project was doing exactly that: Canal construction will bring in all kinds of metal Digging up and tearing apart her body Will bring dirty and heavy grease Stirring up her five viscera and six entrails Her body will rust dark and blue —Lee Jae-moo, “O Her Children, Please Don’t Kill Her,” pp. 123-126

Other poems similarly emphasize the violence done to the maternal river body. In “Flower Candle,” for example,

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Kim Sung-kyu describes the river as “flowing like a woman who is lying down after delivering a baby” (pp.

56-57), or, in the words of poet Nah Jong-young in “Mother Lives on Sumjin River,” as “a mom who gave me breath in her womb.” Jong-young, speaking as a poet-qua-son, asks the mother to “forgive the undutiful child who did not serve rivers, life, and nature well,” and pledges “not to dirty your soul again with excavators, spade-works, and lies” (pp. 63-64). Another poem wonders why the river-as-mother is naked “without realizing that a violent hand is digging up inside and making it all muddy,” and why “your flesh that was white and clear like crystal is turning deep bronzy” (Lee Kyung-lim, “River,” pp.

58-59). A very short poem titled “Song of the River” highlights the immoral violence against the mother: “Let me live in a country where we don’t commit a sin against heaven by inserting a spade blade into our mother’s chest” (Koh Jeung-sik, p. 193).

For these writers, the Project is like a mother’s impending death notice sent to her children, mixed with disturbing images of rape and forced penetration. They go see their dying mother, but are unable to do anything because “we were too weak and they were too strong, armed like riot police with heavy machinery and backed by capital and power.” They cannot but witness the river’s dying, as “its rapids were taken out like a womb, and its sands were cut like intestines” (Kim Jae-young, “Yeo River Cries in Red,” p. 82). Doh Jong-hwan, who chaired the Committee on Writing as Resistance, titled his contribution simply “River,” in which he compares the disappearance or destruction of a river to the passing of a grandmother. Her life had been “mild and simple” like a river that “flows calmly,” but she passed

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E S S A Y The day her undershirt was torn into pieces The day her underskirt was hit by a spade and covered with blood The day the heavy equipment got an erection and was roaring and rushing (pp. 101-102)

der and power, resource use, abuse, and extraction make up a complex set of figurations that variously speak to the ecological concerns of these writers.

Nakedness is an additional trope in the metaphor of the river as a woman. The river is often described as a woman who is naked by nature or by force. In one poem, she was given a “green coat” by the Creator, but greedy people stripped her of the beautiful coat and hurt her skin, promising a better coat that only ended up “covering her sore skin with concrete and green paint,” and “fix[ing] it tightly so that she cannot undo it herself” (Lee Jin-hee, “Green Coat,” pp. 75-76). In another poem, “Woman, Like the River Bed,” the speaker compares a dredged river to a naked body that has shed her “dress of water.” “The body,” which “had long been wet with ever-flowing water,” was now “drying out under the starlight” (Kim Hae-ja, “Lady, Like a Riverbed,” pp. 27-28). The speaker of another poem invokes Heraclitus’ old dictum that “You cannot step twice into the same river” as signifying “the river’s virginity.” He desires the virginal body of the river and immerses himself naked into it, (perhaps paradoxically) suggesting that it is not his own merging with the water, but rather its re-engineered course and riverbed that make it vulnerable and penetrable. Streamlining and flattening are what “dress the naked body of water, remove its armor, and rape the water” (Choi Jong-chun, “The River Should Flow,” pp. 91-92). In all of these poems, gen-

In 2014, photographer Kim San published his own collection of the Four Rivers photos.7 He had been photographing the rivers even before the Project started and detailed its processes and consequences. Adopting the often-used phrase The River does not Flow as the collection’s title, he further subdivided it into three parts: “The river that used to flow,” “The river that suffers,” and “The river that doesn’t flow.” The second part, of course, features many scenes of dredging work, with excavators and dump trucks, both up-close and from a distance. Water is not a prominent theme in these photos, as they tend to emphasize the construction sites themselves, rather than the rivers. The last part, by contrast, centers mostly on the weirs, dead fish, and algae. A few colors dominate the photos: the yellow of the sand, the browns of the muddy water, the orange of the excavators, and the green from the algae. They demonstrate that, after the completion of the sixteen weirs, dead fish kept turning up in the stagnant water, which also tended to turn green due to the algae bloom during summertime. The water not replenishing its oxygen supply, because it was largely standing (still), was to blame.

Two years after the Project’s completion, the rivers seemed irreversibly dead.

What will it take to make the rivers flow again? Political steps for undoing the Four Rivers Restoration Project have already been taken. After the regime change in 2017, the new government has been assessing the damage and

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Will the Rivers Flow Again?

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attempting to implement measures in an effort to revitalize the rivers. Some weirs have already been opened to facilitate water flow and to help recover the ecosystem. We may see the reversal of some changes in the rivers soon. What is more, while artistic protests typically have little influence on the outcome of such large-scale projects—often serving mainly as vehicles of expression and catharsis—here they seem to have contributed to the new government’s changed perception.

But what about the ideas and metaphors behind the literary and photographic responses to the Four Rivers Restoration Project? In the course of criticizing and resisting the Project, writers and photographers have drawn from conventional ideas about nature, technology, engineering, and capital. They have invoked the old but strong distinction between nature and artifice, in particular. Will they be able to maintain that simplistic binary these days, now that the Project is being reconsidered and repealed? Likewise, the metaphor of the river as a woman is pervasive in their critique. While the more or less categorical gendering of rivers may have been effective during the Project’s construction, the talk of undoing it and “re-naturalizing” the rivers currently underway may question whether unambiguously gendered notions of water are valid and helpful for framing such conversations in the future.

The transformation of the rivers by the Project was of an unprecedented scale and intensity in modern-day Korea. For writers and photographers, it was difficult to find proper metaphors and angles within which to express and capture the violent changes done to the rivers. They had to mobilize the full range of their skills—essentially, words and images—to not only describe, but also work through for themselves the

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In the course of criticizing and resisting the Project, writers and photographers have drawn from conventional ideas about nature, technology, engineering, and capital.

They have invoked the old but strong distinction between nature and artifice, in particular. Will they be able to maintain that simplistic binary these days, now that the Project is being reconsidered and repealed? Likewise, the metaphor of the river as a woman is pervasive in their critique. While the more or less categorical gendering of rivers may have been effective during the Project’s construction, the talk of undoing it and “re-naturalizing” the rivers currently underway may question whether unambiguously gendered notions of water are valid and helpful for framing such conversations in the future. destruction they were witnessing. Now may be a good time to rethink the relationships, both literal and metaphorical, between rivers and technologies, and between rivers and women. “Renaturalizing” rivers won’t be as simple as to “just let them flow naturally”; it will inevitably involve technical designs, human labor, and government planning. The whole process of undoing or re-naturalizing will need new concepts and metaphors that are historically grounded, culturally nuanced, ecologically sound, with a view toward longterm viability and balance.

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E S S A Y

Chihyung Jeon teaches Science, Technology, and Society (STS) at the Graduate School of Science and Technology Policy of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). He is also a group leader at KAIST’s Center for Anthropocene Studies, a new initiative funded by the National Research Foundation of Korea. This essay started as a part of his research as a fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany, where he learned how to think about the Four Rivers Project in terms of the Anthropocene. He is grateful to Sungeun Kim for his assistance in writing this essay.

Notes 1. Dennis Normile, “Restoration or Devastation?” Science 327 (26 March 2010): 1568-1570.

2. Je-wook Kang et. al., Photography Remembers Rivers (Seoul: Archive, 2011).

3. Committee on Writing as Resistance (ed.), Don’t Be Ill, Rivers, Not Even in Dreams (Seoul: Archive, 2011); Committee on Writing as Resistance (ed.), The Sleepless Rivers (Seoul: Archive, 2011).

4. Ministry of Land, Transport, and Maritime Affairs, Four Rivers Restoration Project, Vol. 8 (Photographs) (Seoul, 2012).

5. James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).

6. See, for example, Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980).

7. San Kim, The River Does Not Flow: Witnessing the Four Rivers Development Project (Seoul: Nunbit, 2014).

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E S S A Y

STORIES FROM THE ANTHROPOCENE— The Constitutional Recognition of the Rights of Nature in Ecuador MARÍA VALERIA BERROS Introduction

I

n 1957, Italo Calvino wrote The Baron in the Trees, a novel in which the protagonist, Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò, who had lived in trees since 1767 when he was 12 years old, proposed a constitutional project for republican cities.1 This constitution incorporated a series of declarations on human rights, on women’s rights, and also on domestic and wild animal rights (including birds, fish, and insects) and on the rights of plants.

In Calvino´s story, no government embraced this proposal, but the notion got people thinking about a Rights of Nature recognition. For Cosimo, who lived in the middle of nature, these were important elements of constitutional rights.

This story helps conceptualize the possibility of a non-anthropocentric perspective for rights recognition, as many contributions from humanities and the law in the last decades of the 20th century have suggested. In fact, this idea of the recognition of rights beyond those of humans has played an important role both in animal and environmental ethics.2 The diversity of perspectives on the topic is also visible in the legal field, where professors are debating this possibility, arguing that different extensions of rights have occurred throughout history, and this would be a new case.3

This idea may perhaps be crucial in the Anthropocene.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the first constitutional discussion on the Rights of Nature took place in Ecuador, and according to the former president of the Ecuadorian Constitutional Assembly, Alberto Acosta, literature had a relevant role in inspiring the discussion.4 An interesting connection between law and literature was central to a main constitutional debate: is it possible to recognize the Rights of Nature, of Pachamama? Pachamama is an Andean divinity that comes from the Incas and is still present in many Andean cultures and beyond. Pacha means space and time simultaneously; it is the reality of which we are a part and contains every form of existence. In the present moment and space, an indivisible community is central to sustaining life, and this community includes air, animals, water, sun, land, rocks, moon, stars, etc.

Mama makes reference to the maternal figure.5 The answer was not unanimous for the members of the assembly, and much debate ensued.

Then, on April 18, 2008, two days before a scheduled debate on this topic, the president of the Constitutional Assembly decided to distribute copies of Eduardo Galeano´s essay, “Nature is Not Mute,” to members of the central assembly. Galeano,

E S S A Y a famous Latin American writer from Montevideo, Uruguay, argued in his short text that nature has a voice. According to Acosta, this literary contribution was important in persuading the majority to support the Rights of Nature proposal.

Galeano wrote: An object that wants to be a subject. For thousands of years almost all people had only the right not to have rights. In reality, quite a few remain without rights today, but at least now the right to have rights is recognized, and this is considerably more than a gesture of charity by the masters of the world to comfort their servants. And nature? . . . Moreover, and this is equally important, the revindication of nature is part of a process of recuperating some of the most ancient traditions of Ecuador and all of Latin America . . . . It is not by chance that the constituent assembly started by identifying their objectives of national growth with the ideal of ”sumak kawsay,” which means “harmonious life” in Quichua: harmony among people and between us and nature, which engenders us, feeds us, shelters us, and which has her own life and values independent of us . . . . The communion between nature and people, a pagan custom, was abolished in the name of God and later in the name of Civilisation. Throughout the Americas, and the world, we are paying the consequences of this divorce.6

Eduardo Galeano, as Cosimo before, found nothing odd or abnormal in having the Rights of Nature connected with particular worldviews, in this case, as expressed in the Ecuadorian Constitution.

The members of the assembly voted in 2008 to include this concept into their constitution, and henceforth the rights of Nature or Pachamama entered our sociolegal history. In this central pact, some indigenous communities’ expressions and words appeared for the first time: sumak

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Pachamama is an Andean divinity that comes from the Incas and is still present in many Andean cultures and beyond. Pacha means space and time simultaneously; it is the reality of which we are a part and contains every form of existence. In the present moment and space, an indivisible community is central to sustaining life, and this community includes air, animals, water, sun, land, rocks, moon, stars, etc. Mama makes reference to the maternal figure. kawsay, Pachamama. These words and expressions from ancestral worldviews started to emerge in one of the most important agreements governing contemporary societies: the constitution.

Suddenly, an enormous potential for imagining a new relationship with nature opened up, but many questions remained: What specific worldviews and perspectives inspired this idea? How can a society that recognizes the Rights of Nature implement those rights? What are the risks associated with this kind of recognition? Is there a danger that this sort of “revolution” in legal history could degenerate into a cheap “slogan” about environmental issues? These and other questions have circulated since that moment in 2008, not only in Ecuador, but also in Bolivia and other countries, regions and cities where this discussion is taking place.7 The following pages explore this process over the last ten years in Ecuador. The first section discusses the constitutional recognition in 2008. The second section follows ideas emerging from a series of interviews for the film The Rights of Nature: A Global Movement (2018)8 and relies on the voices of different

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social actors engaged with the application, implementation, or monitoring of this recognition a decade after its constitutional inclusion.

The Rights of Nature, Anno 2008 The reform process in 2008 in Ecuador was supported by different social actors in which indigenous people and their worldviews played a central role. Not only indigenous people, but also ecological, feminist, and socialist movements were part of a network of actors involved in this re-founding of the constitution, following a difficult neoliberal period in Latin America, and Ecuador in particular.

The reform was finally approved in September 2008, after a referendum in which nearly 64 percent voted in favor of the new constitutional text that included the notion of sumak kawsay, or Buen Vivir in Spanish. These terms are usually translated as the “good way of living” or “harmonious life” in English. Central to the constitution is the recognition of the rights of Pachamama as the ecological component of this broader proposal in which Buen Vivir is presented as a post-capitalism alternative in Ecuador and Bolivia. In legislation and the national development plans of both countries, this idea is viewed as a desirable goal. For example, in the case of Bolivia, in the so-called Law 300, there is an articulation between the Mother Earth Rights and the Vivir Bien, including a list of principles that inspired this proposition.

In this constitution it was not only possible to recognize our right as humans to a healthy environment, which is already enshrined in many constitutions, local and national regulations, and international agreements around the world. For the first time in human history, it became feasible to go beyond human rights, however broadly defined, and to include a notion of Nature inherently worthy of protection and not subject to the vagaries of human FALL 2018

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objectification and exploitation. Nature, or Pachamama, for the first time in history was recognized as a legal entity.9 The period of discussion following this designation has of course not concluded, but in this contemporary legal framework, that designation exists in a particular way: it is Pachamama that is endowed with certain rights.

The recognition of the rights of this indivisible community goes beyond the discussion of how to distinguish between the human and non-human that is central in animal ethics debates.10 It also goes beyond the discussions about the possibility for plants or for inanimate nature to be considered as subjects of rights.11 With Pachamama, the emphasis is on a dynamic system in which an indivisible community is interrelated, and in which interdependence and complementary relationships are relevant concepts. A distinction between living and inert beings is absent, as both are integral to Pachamama, and all beings have life. Finally, Pachamama is considered a total sacred entity that is present in all of daily life and with whom it is possible to communicate and to have a daily relationship.12 This worldview, in conjunction with other stakeholders and fields of knowledge,13 has brought on a dialogue and infused the language of the law with the language of rights. The Pachamama is already explicitly anchored in the constitution’s Preamble and is central to the idea of a new social pact, as well as a new way of coexistence:

We women and men, the sovereign people of Ecuador . . . .

Celebrating nature, the Pachamama, of which we are a part and which is vital to our existence, . . . . Calling upon the wisdom of all the cultures that enrich us as a society, As heirs to social liberation struggles against all forms of domination and colonialism and with a profound commitment to the present and to the future,

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E S S A Y Hereby decide to build A new form of public coexistence, in diversity and in harmony with nature, to achieve the good way of living, the sumak kawsay . . . .

Among the articles, nature’s rights to restoration and inherent respect occupy a significant place in the seventh chapter of Ecuador´s constitution, titled “Rights of Nature”: Nature, or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and occurs, has the right to integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes. All persons, communities, peoples and nations can call upon public authorities to enforce the Rights of Nature . . . . 14 Nature has the right to be restored. This restoration shall be apart from the obligation of the State and natural persons or legal entities to compensate individuals and communities that depend on affected natural systems . . . . 15

Not only does Pachamama have the right to be respected and restored; she can also be represented by any person or community, and the state, for its part, has a central role in developing the Rights of Nature as part of the sumak kawsay.

Already, different spaces exist to observe how this legal proposal has begun to work, both as a judicial argument and as a basis for inspiring public policies and institutional designs. The Rights of Nature recognition implies a new perspective as a result of the introduction of Andean worldviews into the law. That

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integration presupposes a combination of the legal language and these heterogeneous and powerful ideas. That challenge is also present in so-called tribunals, where ecological justice has begun to be delineated.

The potential for creating a new concept in law is as enormous as the risk of losing the profound meaning of these, largely indigenous, worldviews. In the following pages, I want to explore the perspectives of some of these initial advocates of the Rights of Nature.

What About Rights of Nature in Ecuador Today?

This section provides an update on the current situation in Ecuador and includes information from individuals involved in the very beginnings of the constitutional reform, as well as others who started to work on this topic later. Both offer interesting perspectives on this transformative period.16 As with other juridical innovations, there are different ways of tracing their imple-

With Pachamama, the emphasis is on a dynamic system in which an indivisible community is interrelated, and in which interdependence and complementary relationships are relevant concepts. A distinction between living and inert beings is absent, as both are integral to Pachamama, and all beings have life. Finally, Pachamama is considered a total sacred entity that is present in all of daily life and with whom it is possible to communicate and to have a daily relationship.

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Geoff Gallice At Sacha Lodge, Laguna Pilchicocha, Ecuadorian Amazon.

mentation and results. One of them is to follow judicial decisions, especially where interpretations and applications of certain rights are observable. Another option is to speak with relevant social actors who are monitoring how these decisions and innovations are starting to work, such as nongovernmental organizations. Finally, those working within the context of universities can provide analysis about how the rights of nature recognition is working from different disciplines generally connected to theoretical debates about the extension of rights beyond those of humans.

In 2011 a provincial tribunal in Loja, in the south of Ecuador, issued an important ruling affecting the future of the Vilcabamba River, which has been negatively impacted as a result of road expansion driven by increased tourism.17 Vilcabamba, a small city that shares the name with the river, has gained an international reputation as a result of its unique climate and the longevity of its inhabitants. Authorities widened the road following the river to accommodate more traffic without ever doing an environmental impact assess-

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ment. That lack alone could have been a central argument for a judicial decision.

However, the main reason for the judges’ decision to adjudicate in favor of the Vilcabamba was the right of the river to its natural course, and so they decided to pause the road expansion project and restore the damage caused.

The judge who decided this landmark case understood that the new constitutional pact, where Rights of Nature were first applied, opened a series of opportunities to build new arguments, in addition to the classic idea of securing humans’ right to live in a healthy environment.

Such opportunities also presented themselves to the Constitutional Court of Ecuador, where a small number of cases in which the Rights of Nature were implied had been decided in recent years.18 Nevertheless, to date the number of such cases is modest in relation to the potential legal revolution this idea represents.

Changes in the legal field can take more than a decade to enter into the arguments and deliberations of lawyers and judges.

Legal education and curricular reforms in

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E S S A Y law schools assume here a relevant role, as well as environmental education in general. Enshrining the Rights of Nature is also important because these rights afford an opportunity to create an altogether new civilization, as Alberto Acosta has suggested. Ecuador currently faces three major obstacles to implementing these rights.19 The first one is the extractivism as a sort of unique destiny not only for Ecuador, but also for Latin America. If the exploitation of natural resources on a large scale for export purposes continues to remain the basis of most South American economies, the Rights of Nature can hardly advance and be taken seriously, as Esperanza Martinez, co-founder of Acciรณn Ecolรณgica, and Natalia Greene, part of Pachamama Foundation, have pointed out. So, how is it possible to reconcile the Rights of Nature with the prevailing economic system? From a narrowly economic point of view, the experience has certainly failed, but from a more inclusive perspective it is possible to interrogate how a transition could be made from the current socioeconomic system to one in which the Rights of Nature could assume a more important role.

The second barrier that usually appears in these discourses is the anthropocentric culture and thinking model that inspires our relation with nature, our institutions and public policies. This obstacle is immediately related to the previous one: if nature continues to be considered an inanimate object subject to human use and exploitation, how can we really implement these kinds of rights? To solve these problems, we (as a human, and ultimately global, collectivity) need to formulate and implement a revised ethical foundation that integrates all of nature into a sustainable totality.

The last barrier to implementing the Rights of Nature is the criminalization of environmental defenders while turning a blind eye to corporate malfeasance.

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With Pachamama, the emphasis is on a dynamic system in which an indivisible community is interrelated, and in which interdependence and complementary relationships are relevant concepts. A distinction between living and inert beings is absent, as both are integral to Pachamama, and all beings have life. Finally, Pachamama is considered a total sacred entity that is present in all of daily life and with whom it is possible to communicate and to have a daily relationship.

The tensions between the economy and the defenders of rivers, mountains, and forests, etc. are increasing every year. Latin America leads the world in the number of murders related to conflicts between defenders of the environment and those who exploit it. At the same time that the Rights of Nature are expanding in particular countries, provinces and cities, extractive industries are pushing people out of their territories and affecting ecosystems and biodiversity.20 A case that gained international visibility was the murder of Berta Cรกceres in March 2016 associated with the campaign she was leading against the Agua Zarca dam in Honduras.

This project affected the Gualcarque river, which is considered sacred by the indigenous Lenca community. Since 2016, the number of eco-related murders has been rising.

In spite of these challenges, however, the existing agreement on the transcendence of this idea is clear, in terms of an opportunity for a new civilizing pact and as one of the main contributions of Ecua-

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dor to the world. The global scale is the space where non-governmental organizations are focusing a significant part of their efforts, especially with the creation of the International Tribunal of Mother Earth Rights in 2014 as an autonomous institution to present and rule on violations of the Rights of Nature.21 The efforts to create an international declaration for the rights of Mother Earth also spell out the work of these organizations, as well as in countries such as Bolivia, which played a key role in the international diplomatic efforts to advance this idea.

Academic voices argue about the important innovation of the Rights of Nature, but also about the necessity to recognize its origin in the worldview of indigenous people. First of all, a deep recognition for the values and traditions of ancestral communities must exist, as Arturo Izurieta Valery from the Charles Darwin Foundation in the Galápagos Islands affirmed. It is impossible to understand and to advance the implementation of the Rights of Nature without indigenous people’s perspectives and knowledge. The potential of this idea is something to highlight, according to Kelly Swing—professor at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito—especially taking into account the mega-diversity present in the Ecuadorian territory. In this region, the Yasunni ITT project—with the objective of leaving underground oil reserves untouched by setting up a compensatory trust fund—is one of the failed experiences in Ecuador that helped the Rights of Nature idea gain visibility beyond that country. Ecuador intended to contribute to the global problem of climate change by reducing emissions. As compensation, the international community had agreed to contribute half of the profits that Ecuador would have obtained had the country decided in favor of oil exploration, but the payout was inadequate, and in 2013 the project was ended.22

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Scholars are supportive of the Rights-ofNature idea, agreeing that its legal recognition has valuable potential, though it creates challenges for the juridical field. Another aspect often highlighted is that this legal recognition beyond the rights of humans could turn into a universal principle that could be applied to the increasing number of environmental problems taking part in different places of the world. This is what Edgar Ish López, professor of the Universidad Central del Ecuador, has observed.

Ten years after the Rights of Nature were first recognized in the Ecuadorian constitution, indigenous communities who first inspired this recognition continue to have problems in their territories, especially when disputes about the implementation of these rights arise. These problems are not limited to Ecuador, and the field of international law could contribute to a better future.

In historical terms, ten years is a short period to have a clear idea about the real meaning of the legal recognition of the Rights of Nature and its consequences in terms of justice, ethics and public policies.

However, I would offer two initial observations. The first is that this process is one of the rare cases involving environmental concepts coming from the Global South before spreading to the more industrialized North. The second is that the Rights of Nature movement includes and validates the wisdom and sensibilities of indigenous communities who have traditionally been shut out of environmental policy making. We have a deeply embedded idea about the human right to live in a healthy environment, with sustainable development and a green economy. The gradual evolution of the Rights of Nature suggests a new approach to dealing with ecological crises.

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María Valeria Berros is a junior professor at the National University of Littoral and researcher at the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research in Santa Fe City, Argentina. She is a former Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU, Munich, Germany. During the last ten years she has researched at the Sorbonne University, the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences in Paris, Limoges University, and Nantes University in the areas of environmental risks and law. Her current research focuses on environmental law, rights of nature, environmental ethics, and social movements in Latin America and the Global South.

Notes 1. Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees, trans. William Collins Sons & Co., (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959).

2. For an introduction on the topic, see Patrick Curry, Ecological Ethics: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011). In relation to animal ethics, see an introductory contribution by Juan-Baptiste Jeangène Vilmer, L’étique Animale (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2011). In the case of environmental ethics, see Paul Taylor, Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).

3. For some relevant perspectives on those topics in the legal field, see Gary Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007); MarieAngèle Hermitte, La nature, sujet de droit? (Paris: Annales, Histoire Sciences Sociales, Editions de l’EHESS, 2011); Martha Nussbaum and Cass R. Sunstein, Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Christopher Stone, “Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects,” Southern California Law Review 45 (1972): 450-501.

4. Personal interview with Alberto Acosta, Quito, Ecuador, May 2017.

5. I am grateful to Juan Ángel Orellana, member of the Community of Original Peoples of the Awyayala, and Jeremías Chauque, member of the Mapuche Community, who shared with us very valuable information on this topic.

6. For the complete English version, see http://www.ipsnews.net/2008/04/nature-isnot-mute/.

7. For example, there is a proposal for a European Directive on Rights of Nature led by different non-governmental organizations in Europe, a law project in Argentina, many local ecocentric regulations in different cities in the United States and Canada (Baldwin, Broadview Heights, Forest Hills, Halifax, Mahanoy, Mora County, Mountain

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Lake Park, Newfield, Nottingham, Pittsburgh, Santa Monica, Tamaqua, West Homestead, Yellow Spring) and in the state of Colorado. There is also the new constitution of Mexico City and the constitution of Guerrero State in Mexico, and a local regulation in Bonito city in Brazil, among others, including agreements between the New Zealand government and Māori tribes regarding the Whanganui River, the Te Urewera region, and Mount Taranaki. In the last two years there have been additional important judicial decisions from India and Colombia. In Colombia a recent case focuses on the relation among climate change, future generations, and the recognition of Amazonia as a legal entity as a step toward stopping deforestation in this country.

8. The Rights of Nature: A Global Movement, dir. Isaac Goeckeritz, Hal Crimmel, María Valeria Berros, 2018.

9. A similar process took place in Bolivia where a new constitution was approved in 2009, following a referendum. In the case of Bolivia, there is a reference to Pachamama in the Preamble of the Constitution, but the recognition of the rights of Mother Earth at a legal level exists in two specific laws: the Mother Earth Rights Act (2010) and the Framework Act on Mother Earth and Holistic Development for Living Well (2012).

10. See Nigel Rothfels, Representing Animals (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002); Steven Wise, Drawing the Line. Science and the Case for Animal Rights (Cambridge: Perseus Books Group, 2002).

11. See Florianne Koechlin, “The Dignity of Plants,” Plant Signaling & Behavior 4:1 (2009): 78-79.

12. There are some special days, for example August 1, when different expressions of gratitude take place in the context of Pachamama’s day.

13. In the constitutional debates it is possible to identify not only these worldviews, but also references to fundamental works of environmental ethics, such as “The Land Ethic” by the American conservationist and environmentalist Aldo Leopold.

14. Article 71, Constitution of the Republic of Ecuador, 2008. Translation from Constitution Project.

15. Article 72, Constitution of the Republic of Ecuador, 2008. Translation from Constitution Project.

16. During the May 2017 filming of The Rights of Nature, I had the opportunity to visit Ecuador and to interview individuals central to the movement: Alberto Acosta (former Ecuadorian minister of Energy and Mining and former president of the Ecuadorian Constitutional Assembly); Natalia Greene (Pachamama Foundation, Ecuador); Edgar Isch López, (professor at Universidad Central del Ecuador, Quito, Ecuador); Esperanza Martínez (co-founder of Acción Ecológica & Co-founder of Oilwatch, Quito, Ecuador); Dr. Kelly Swing (founding director at Tiputini Biodiversity Station, Amazon, Ecuador and professor at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Quito, Ecuador); Dr. Arturo Izurieta Valery (executive director of The Charles Darwin Foundation, Puerto Ayora, Galápagos, Ecuador); Marien Segura Reascos (judge at the Constitutional Court in Ecuador); and Luis Sempertegui (former judge in Loja Province, Ecuador).

17. River Vilcabamba Judicial Judgment, March 31, 2011. An analysis of this and other judicial cases in Ecuador can be found in my article “Defending Rivers: Vilcabamba in the South of Ecuador,” Perspectives, vol. 6, Can Nature Have Rights? Legal and Political Insights (2017).

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18. Constitutional Court of Ecuador, Judgment no. 065-15-SEP-CC, 11 March 2011; Constitutional Court of Ecuador, Judgment no. 017-12-SIN-CC, 26 April 2012; Constitutional Court of Ecuador, Judgment no. 166-15-SEP-CC, 20 May 2015.

19. Alberto Acosta and Esperanza Martinez, “Los Derechos de la Naturaleza como puerta de entrada a otro mundo posible,” Revista Direito e Práxis, vol. 8, no 4 (2017).

20. The NGO Global Witness publishes several annual reports with this information. In the 2017 report, 207 cases were listed, and 121 were in different Latin American countries, especially Brazil with 57 cases and Colombia with 24. A complete report is available at: https://www.globalwitness.org/en/.

21. The first tribunal took place in Quito in 2014, the second in Lima, Peru, at the end of the same year, the third one in Paris, France, in parallel to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2015, and the last one in Bonn, Germany, in 2017.

22. For a complete explanation about the project, see Matthieu Le Quang, “Dejar el petróleo bajo tierra,” La iniciativa Yasunni ITT en Ecuador (Quito: Editorial IAEN, 2013).

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read-ing [from ME reden, to explain, hence to read] – vt. 1 to get the meaning of; 2 to understand the nature, significance, or thinking of; 3 to interpret or understand; 4 to apply oneself to; study.

THE BENEFICIAL BEAVER The American Beaver is native to North America and is its largest rodent. Much of the expansion by non-Natives into the American West in the 19th century was driven by the quest for this animal’s fur. In the 1820s, one of the largest corporations on earth, Britain’s Hudson Bay Company, tried to kill every beaver in the Northwest. Company trappers and those working for competing American and independent companies nearly eradicated the animal from the continent—leaving only about 100,000 in hard-to-reach parts of Canada—down from a population of hundreds of millions.

However, as early as 1901, efforts were made to reintroduce beavers in some areas, such as the Adirondacks of upstate New York, and widespread reintroduction efforts were made in many states by the 1930s. Today the estimated population of beaver in North American is between 10 and 15 million.

Ironically, beavers are among the few species, including humans, who manipulate their surroundings enough to make big ecological changes. As described in a recent NPR report: Much like us, beavers build dams along streams for their own benefit.

They make ponds to protect their lodges and flood areas to increase the vegetation they feed on and use for building materials. While their motivations are selfish, in the process they end up helping their woodland friends, like elk, moose, birds, fish, and insects.

Scientists have shown we get lots of benefits, too. Beaver dams improve water quality, trap and store carbon—and in the aggregate could be a significant way of storing groundwater in dry climates.

Source: Luke Runyon, “The Bountiful Benefits of Bringing Back the Beavers,” NPR, 24 June 2018; https://www.npr.org/2018/06/24/620402681/the-bountiful-benefits-of-bringing-backthe-beavers

RESTORATION DESIGN Utah State University hosts “Partnering with Beaver in Restoration Design,” which provides information about beaver restoration and conservation and offers public workshops including one on Beaver Translocation. Scientists involved with these efforts created a beaver restoration Assessment Tool (BRAT) to help assess the potential for using beavers as a stream conservation and restoration agent.

Source: http://isemp.org/projects/brat/

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KILLING BEAVER: THE BEAVER STATE Not all see beaver restoration as beneficial. Efforts to control damage to agricultural fields, timberland, and roadways caused by flooding from beaver dams result in the federal Wildlife Services killing hundreds of beavers, river otter, muskrat, and mink each year. The program has recently been suspended in Oregon, the “Beaver State,” until a study assessing the impact of such practices on endangered fish is completed.

Over the past seven years, 3,459 beavers have been killed statewide under the program, operated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services.

Numerous studies show that beavers benefit endangered salmon and steelhead by creating ponds that provide fish with food and a habitat, the Center for Biological Diversity and Western Environmental Law Center said in a November 2017 letter, threatening to sue. Wildlife Services has never analyzed the impact of its program on endangered fish, as required by the Endangered Species Act, the groups said.

Source: Tracy Loew, “Oregon Beaver-Killing Program Suspended by Federal Officials,” Statesman Journal, 10 January 2018; https://www.statesmanjournal.com/story/tech/science/environment/2018/01/10/oregon-beaver-killing-program-suspended-federal-officials/1021984001/

LOSS OF SAGEBRUSH COUNTRY In May 2018, The Western Association of Fish & Wildlife Agencies issued a report which documented that invasive plants, such as fire-prone cheatgrass, have reached enormous levels of range and are spreading. As summarized in the Chicago Tribune: Public lands managers are losing a battle against a devastating combination of invasive plant species and wildfires in the vast sagebrush habitats in the U.S. West that support cattle ranching and recreation, and are home to an imperiled bird, officials said . . . .

This could mean more giant rangeland wildfires that in recent decades destroyed vast areas of sagebrush country that support some 350 species of wildlife, including imperiled sage grouse.

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The top problem identified in the report is the limited ability at all levels of government to prevent invasive plants such as fire-prone cheatgrass from spreading and displacing native plants.

Source: Keith Ridler, “Officials: Efforts Failing to Save US West Sagebrush Land,” Chicago Tribune, 28 May 2018; http://www.chicagotribune.com/sns-bc-us--sagebrush-wildfire-strategy-20180524-story.html

CHEATGRASS As posted on the website, The Great Basin and Invasive Weeds: Cheatgrass was introduced to North America through contaminated grain seed, straw packing material, and soil used as ballast in ships sailing from Eurasia. This first occurred between 1850 and the late 1890s. During this time, abusive use of rangelands, coupled with drought, left many Great Basin rangelands in poor condition. Cheatgrass was able to occupy areas where the native vegetation had been reduced, beginning its persistent march across the landscape. It can now be found from the bottoms of desert valleys to mountain peaks as high as 13,000 feet.

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Because cheatgrass stands dry out by mid-June, fires are more likely to occur earlier in the season. These mid-summer fires are tough on native forbs and grasses. Cheatgrass seeds drop prior to fires and will germinate with fall precipitation. This gives rise to dense, continuous stands that make additional fire ignition and spread more likely. Fire return intervals have gone from between 60-110 years in sagebrush-dominated systems to less than 5 years under cheatgrass dominance. With every reoccurring fire, cheatgrass becomes more dominant and expands its range further.

Source: https://www.usu.edu/weeds/plant_species/weedspecies/cheatgrass.html

ESCAPING GRASS More than a decade ago, the company Scotts Miracle-Gro developed a grass which it hoped would help revolutionize the front yard. The largest market was, however, the golf course industry. The GMO grass “escaped” and is potentially driving endangered species to extinction. As recently reported in High Country News, creeping bentgrass thrives in canals and ditches, which impedes water flow.

No one believes the bentgrass can be fully eradicated, either. And as long as it’s around, some fear it could contaminate non-GMO crops and invade natural areas. “It just scares the bejeezus out of me,” says Jerry Erstrom, a retired Bureau of Land Management natural resource specialist who chairs the Malheur County Weed Advisory Board.

So far, Scotts has led the battle to rein in its escapee, with some recent success. But in a series of decisions over the last several years, the USDA has relieved Scotts of future responsibility in return for the company’s promise not to market the grass. Scotts has pledged not to turn its back on the problem, but after this summer, it no longer has to bankroll cleanup efforts. Now, Erstrom and others say there are no legal safeguards to keep the task — with its reported $250,000 annual price tag—from becoming the burden of local growers and the state and county governments.

Source: Julia Rosen, “GMO Grass is Creeping Across Oregon,” High Country News, 25 June, 2018; https://www.hcn.org/ issues/50.11/plants-genetically-modified-grass-creeps-across-eastern-oregon

THE “NEW NORMAL” FOR WATER IN THE WEST Some scientists are suggesting that after twenty years of drought in the American West, the “new normal” may actually be aridification. The Colorado River Research Group issued a recent white paper in which it proposed that an unvarnished characterization of the situation should guide Colorado River management practices.

“There’s lots of talk of drought but there’s not enough talk that this is likely the new normal,” said Brad Udall, a member of the group and a senior water and climate research scientist at Colorado State University. “We really need to think in the long term that we are actually going to see less water in the [Colorado River] basin and we’re never going back to the 20th century.”

The Colorado River basin is not the only area impacted by this scenario—the Rio Grande basin is in a similar situation, said David Gutzler, a professor of Earth and planetary sciences at the University of New Mexico . . . .

With warmer temperatures, what snow there is melts earlier, and evaporation rates go up, reducing water supply even more. “It’s part of the tendency toward aridity that we’re experiencing in the West,” said Gutzler, which presents a big management challenge.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that a crisis is in store, but a change in the way rivers are managed may be. “We should be able to work out a way to deal with 20 percent less water in a way that doesn’t harm the economy, that doesn’t harm the environment, and if you do it right, it causes minimal harm to agriculture,” said Udall.

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The solutions don’t just involve talking about water management, but also reducing greenhouse gas emissions. “There is this total political hang-up on having the discussions we need to have on greenhouse gas emissions,” Udall said. “This is so important and yet we somehow have managed to think we can ignore it—even well-meaning people think they can ignore it and it’s just not the case. We have to, as individuals and states and municipalities, begin to grapple with how to get greenhouse gas emissions down as fast as we can.”

Source: Colorado River Research Group, “When is Drought Not a Drought? Drought, Aridification, and the ‘New Normal,’” March 2018; https://www.coloradoriverresearchgroup.org/uploads/4/2/3/6/42362959/crrg_aridity_report.pdf

RESERVOIRS AND ENGINEERS In 2010, Stanford University established Water in the West as a joint program of Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Bill Lane Center for the American West. The group issued a report this year observing that, unless changes were made to the outdated operations by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which manages hundreds of dams and reservoirs throughout the country, flood risks will increase, the ability to meet water demands will decrease, and downstream ecosystems will deteriorate.

Two-thirds of the dams managed by the Corps were built more than 50 years ago and only a handful of Corps-funded dams have been built since 1990. The studies and data that provide the basis for the Corps’s water control plans and manuals for those dams comes from the first half of the 20th century and do not take into account the changing climate.

Multiple studies have found that expected impacts from climate change in the western U.S. will pose significant challenges to reservoir operations by changing snow-rain fractions, snowpack volumes, runoff timing and peak flows, as well as by increasing climate variability overall.

Predictions are that flood risk will increase due to more intense precipitation events and more precipitation falling as rain and not snow. The anticipated reductions in snowpack storage and other climate-induced changes will introduce new challenges to meeting both water supply and flood control goals, as well as other goals such as fish and wildlife conservation and recreation.

These anticipated conditions will differ (and already do differ) significantly . . . .

All of the challenges facing the Army Corps in reservoir operations will be enhanced by the ever-increasing sedimentation of the reservoirs and the resulting shrinkage of storage space. In addition, sedimentation reduces reservoir discharge capacity and flood attenuation capabilities (needed for flood management), thereby increasing flood risk.

Sources: Letty Belin, “Adapting to Change: Recommendations for Improving U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Reservoir Management,” Water in the West, 20 June 2018; https://waterinthewest.stanford.edu/news-events/news-insights/adaptingchange-recommendations-improving-us-army-corps-engineers

EDITORIAL MATTER

ISSN 0891-8899 —Weber is published biannually by The College of Arts & Humanities at Weber State University, Ogden, Utah 844081405. Full text of this issue and historical archives are available in electronic edition at https://www.weber.edu/weberjournal Indexed in: Abstracts of English Studies, Humanities International Complete, Index of American Periodical Verse, MLA International Bibliography, and Sociological Abstracts. Member, Council of Learned Journals.

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©1998, Kent Miles

ANNOUNCING the 2018 Dr. O. Marvin Lewis Essay Award

to Shaun T. Griffin for “Dressing for Fire” in the Fall 2017 issue

The Dr. O. Marvin Lewis Award of $500 is presented annually to the author of the best essay published in Weber during the previous year.

The funding for this award is generously provided by the MSL Family Foundation.

Nonprofit Org U.S. POSTAGE PAID PERMIT No. 151 OGDEN, UTAH

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AN INTERNATIONAL, PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL SPOTLIGHTING PERSONAL NARRATIVE, COMMENTARY, FICTION, NONFICTION, AND POETRY THAT SPEAKS TO THE ENVIRONMENT AND CULTURE OF THE AMERICAN WEST AND BEYOND.

FALL 2018—VOL. 35, NO1—U.S. $10 CONVERSATIONS Agnes Kneitz with Donald Worster ESSAYS Paula Ungar, Sophia Kalantzakos, Mike Hulme, Jane Carruthers, John Barry, Michelle Mart, Alan MacEachern, Amanda Boetzkes, Daniel J. Philippon, Vimbai Kwashirai, Saskia Beudel, Chihyung Jeon, María Valeria Berros ART Patrick J. Reed

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