Essay

Hoagland essay

Anonymous — Wed, 07 Apr 2021 18:00:25 +0000

Hoagland essay Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 04/07/2021 - 12:00

Keyword: Scar

A scar is a mark. A mark of a “wound, burn, or sore that has not healed completely” (Oxford Dictionary, 2021). Different types of scars exist beyond that of bodily tissue scars, one type being ecological scars. Ecological scars appear due to the human-produced wounds of industry and extraction. Ecological scars aren’t always visible but show their presence in various ways. The most readily visible scars are found in the landscape: mining pits, dried waterbeds, and sites of nuclear damage. Tree rings exhibit scar marks in a similar way to human skin and note a past fire. The most inconspicuous form of harm is human scars. When I say human scars, I am not speaking of connective tissue scarring, but rather of the internal scarring that occurs due to nuclear tests, air pollution, and runoff.

A scar on bodily tissue forms connective tissue that has a different fiber pattern than the surrounding tissue. Standard body tissue weaves itself in varying directions, while scar tissue threads in one direction (Goldman, 2016). This is because the skin is trying to heal itself in the fastest way possible, but not necessarily the best way possible. A scar’s formation occurs in tandem with the body responding directly to an injury. A series of bodily processes occur during this response, including inflammation and the activation of fibroblast cells sent to the site of the injury (Goldmann, 2016). The human body is a system in the same way that Earth is a system. Earth endures these scars as a mechanism of healing, but much like a human body, if these scars are not rehabilitated well they lead to dysfunction.

Just because a scar in the landscape may be isolated from the human eye does not mean that scar does not affect Earth’s system as a whole. Earth’s landscape consists of interconnected elements and beings; Kyle Whyte writes, “Ecosystem is a term that has one of its origins in the field of ecology. The term often refers to a community of relationships of organisms that are connected through their sharing of nutrients and energy” (Whyte, 268). The formation of ecological scars activates Earth in a similar way to how bodily scars activate the body. Scars can be intentional, but they always evoke pain in their healing process.

Summitville, CO mining scar. Source: https://westernmininghistory.com/towns/colorado/summitville/

A scar is a form of residue, it is a marking that represents a past harm and lived history. Resource extraction presents many visible scars. This process does not reciprocate its act or give back to the land, it only removes layers of the earth’s surface until there is nothing left to extract. It is a violent process that strips the land of the ability to heal itself. A being can heal from a few scars, but when there is a multiplicity, an exponential amount of scars growing in number and scale, how can the healing occur? Extractive scars are occurring and have depleted the land on vast expanses of this planet. Just as these scars of extraction are present globally, they are present locally here in Colorado as well.

Ecological scars occur in various ways but for similar reasons. Other examples of visible ecological scars include scars from logging, scars from beetle kill, burn scars from forest fires, and dried water sources. While these ecological scars may seem less directly connected to human influence than scars due to human resource extraction, they are still related to our influence on the planet. For instance, in an article from the USDA regarding invasive bark beetles, it is noted, “research suggests warming summer and winter temperatures are major drivers of beetle population outbreaks across the US, and apparent range expansion in some species” (Bentz, Klepzig, 2014). Additionally, research suggests that large and severe fires are associated with warm and dry conditions, and such conditions will likely occur with increasing frequency in a warming climate (Halofsky, Peterson, Harvey, 2020). Human-caused climate change is directly correlated to these events and increases in ecological scarring.

Beetle Kill Scar. 2016. Source: https://durangoherald.com/articles/202308#slide=0

What about invisible ecological scarring? What about the scars that are not as readily visible to the eye but still just as present? Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge in Colorado is an example of one such site of invisible ecological scarring. Contamination can be invisible. For almost 40 years, nuclear weapons parts were produced at Rocky Flats. The industrial facility used radioactive materials and more than 8,000 chemicals. From 1952 to 1989, Rocky Flats workers used plutonium to build nuclear weapons triggers, called "pits." Workplace accidents, spills, fires, emissions, leaking storage containers, and day-to-day operations allowed plutonium and chemicals to be released from the plant site. Plutonium has a half-life of 24,000 years, meaning this invisible radioactive material will scar the landscape for a very long time (Moore, 2015).

Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge. 2018. Source: https://www.cpr.org/2019/08/21/tests-show-conflicting-levels-of-plutonium-at-rocky-flats/

Another example of invisible ecological scarring is pollution runoff. One such site is Globeville in Denver, CO where runoff from a smelter has resulted in the area becoming an EPA superfund cleanup site. According to the EPA website, “Various metal and refining operations took place on-site between 1886 and 2006. Historical operations contaminated soil, sediment, groundwater and surface water with metals and other chemicals.” Globeville has historically been a residential area for immigrants and remains so today. People are living intertwined with the contamination caused by the smelting that previously took place. Jacqui Patterson states, “Where you live is a powerful indicator of health and well-being, due to social, economic, and environmental factors, such as air pollution. Place matters.” The location of one’s neighborhood greatly impacts one’s health; land and personal health are inextricably linked (Whyte, 268). The scarring of the land can lead to personal and physical scarring due to health problems that may arise from issues such as chemical contamination.

How do we learn how to better live in unison with the land? How to appreciate it and honor it and help it heal? This statement from Wendell Berry stands out to me, “The more local and settled the culture, the better it stays put, the less damage. It is the foreigner whose road of excess leads to a desert” (Berry, 8). Stay local and appreciate your local surroundings, advocate for them to stay healthy and well cared for. When harm comes their way, stand up for them and help them heal in whatever way possible.

Sources Cited:

Berry, W. (2010). What are people for?: Essays. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint.

Bentz, B.; Klepzig, K. (January 2014). Bark Beetles and Climate Change in the United States. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Climate Change Resource Center. www.fs.usda.gov/ccrc/topics/insect-disturbance/bark-beetles

Globeville neighborhood. Retrieved April 04, 2021, from https://www.usajrealty.com/areas/globeville

Halofsky, Jessica E., David L. Peterson, and Brian J. Harvey. "Changing Wildfire, Changing Forests: The Effects of Climate Change on Fire Regimes and Vegetation in the Pacific Northwest, USA." Fire Ecology, vol. 16, no. 1, 2020. ProQuest, https://colorado.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.colorado.idm.oclc.org/docview/2345435222?accountid=14503, doi:http://dx.doi.org.colorado.idm.oclc.org/10.1186/s42408-019-0062-8.

Goldman, J. (2016, October 10). Why is scar tissue different to normal skin? Retrieved April 04, 2021, from https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20161007-why-is-scar-tissue-different-to-normal-skin

Mimiaga, J. (2018, January 05). Pine beetle gaining ground in Southwest Colorado. Retrieved April 02, 2021, from https://durangoherald.com/articles/202308#slide=0

Moore, L., & Klotz, M. (1992). Citizen's guide to Rocky Flats: Colorado's nuclear bomb factory. Boulder, CO (P.O. Box 1156, Boulder 80306): Rocky Mountain Peace Center.

Patterson, J. (2020). At the Intersections. In All We Can Save (pp. 194-202).

Scar: Oxford ADVANCED American dictionary at oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com. Retrieved April 02, 2021, from https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/scar_1

Superfund sites in reuse in Colorado. (2020, August 28). Retrieved April 05, 2021, from https://www.epa.gov/superfund-redevelopment-initiative/superfund-sites-reuse-colorado

Tests show conflicting levels of plutonium at rocky flats. (2019, September 17). Retrieved April 02, 2021, from https://www.cpr.org/2019/08/21/tests-show-conflicting-levels-of-plutonium-at-rocky-flats/

Whyte, K. (2020). Indigenous environmental justice. Environmental Justice, 266-278. doi:10.4324/9780429029585-23

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Psychogeography

Anonymous — Tue, 23 Mar 2021 21:24:29 +0000

Psychogeography Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 03/23/2021 - 15:24

Key Word: Psychogeography

There are about ten songs I repeat in my mind, which I’m not sure make them my favorites, but nonetheless, one of their lyrics is: “I got tired of living with depression so I went for a little walk” (“Hands in the Dirt” 2011). This punchy song is a young adult’s Southern reckoning with a loss of thrill. And it’s practical. The instructions are a how-to for coping with grownup sadness. After your walk, if all else fails, “stick your hands in the dirt.”

My mom used to leave the house for an hour each evening when we were old enough to bath ourselves and walk in the darkness of the neighborhood. I became a walker shortly after. I continually choose to walk alone over rotting leaves and through foreign cities to peek at the unknown.

Mama (2019)

If you keep walking, eventually you’ll end up far from where you started. This is when psychogeography takes hold, because you’ve changed, and the land saw it happen.

Psychogeography is coined an ‘art term’ by the Tate in London: “[It] describes the effect of a geographical location on the emotions and behaviors of individuals” (“Psychogeography”). When I first heard this term, I had no idea what the internet had concurred to define it as, but my gut immediately knew. Something important is in this name because I’ve felt it my whole life. In our human bodies we have operated with-by-through psychogeography to write origin stories, fulfill desire, and ultimately glimpse “home.” Everyone has.

Guy Debord christened psychogeography (1955) via his avant-garde background of Marxist theoretical systems: “Philosophy must become reality” (qtd. in Chambre and McLellan). He credits land as an ultimate reality as a start for the environmental justice-combination. That 1960’s name might yet bring “climate change” down from lofty politics and back to the moral space. “Environmental justice!” is a cry by BIPOC communities, from a deep respect for psychogeography: America’s most polluted environments are intentionally established in areas where people of color and the poor live and walk.

Inspired by the concept of the flâneur, an apolitical observer of modern life (Charles Baudelaire, 1863; “this wanderer of the city, chronicler of the present, and contradiction-laden figure of the crowd, has always been a myth”(qtd. in Livingstone and Gyarkye)), Debord emphasizes the importance of play (“drifting”) when attempting a “less-functional” navigation of modern architecture and spaces. He writes, “reflective nostalgia is a form of deep mourning that performs a labor of grief both through pondering pain and through play that points to the future” (qtd. in Boym 54). He was a founding member for Situationist International (1957) which organized creatives who longed to engineer radically different situations in opposition to culture, to expose previously unrecognized forces of homogeneity. Walking is one of the first things they could agreed upon as a revolutionary action. He writes that, “activities like walking the city aimlessly were reimagined as statements against a society that demanded production, and maps were cut up and reassembled to facilitate wandering”(“Situationist International”).

With this history in mind, I understand psychogeography as a reconciliation. To the absurd, to the exhausting, to the places our food comes from, to the quiet, to the uncontrolled, to the other stories, to “…the possibility of hidden patterns, patterns that, if unearthed and understood, would somehow explain me -my life- to myself”(Birkerts 5). Walking takes us away from the noise of stories we’ve always heard so that we can remember what we’ve always known. As Debord writes, “one becomes aware of the collective frameworks of memories when one distances oneself from one’s community…. Collective frameworks of memory are rediscovered in mourning” (qtd. in Boym 55). When reconciling with alternative narratives of living, simultaneously one is distanced from a previous reality: a continual cycle of loss. So we keep walking.

Loss is not necessarily an automatic trigger for sadness. Sally Mann writes, “ultimate beauty requires that sweet edge of decay, just as our casually possessed lives are made more precious by a whiff of the abyss” (Hold Still). Walking towards a deep, futuristic horizon is putting a finger on the source for why we’re sad. Theorist Ann Cvetkovich argues, “investigating public ‘epidemics of depression’ recognizes long-term histories of violence tied to colonization and power and might offer ways to ‘come to terms with disappointment, failure, and the slowness of change’ in response. Such negative emotions might sometimes be antisocial, but they may also serve to catalyze creative forms of affiliation or relationality” (qtd. in Cohen 72). It is normal to think with our bodies. Our physical bodies can translate abstract heritages of violence in ways that feel too distant for cognition. In walking, I activate my body knowledges and simultaneously, reorient myself to notice the other stories on the land: As Sara Ahmed puts it, “depending on which way one turns, different worlds might even come into view. If such turns are repeated over time, then bodies acquire the very shape of such direction” (qtd. in Rifkin 2). A thought paradigm of moving and listening to bodies could work its way down to our feet, to remind us that our feet are on the ground, that we are never disconnected from this soil. Our responsibility to seek justice for the earth systems is referenced by these walking-feet.

Noticing the effects of psychogeography is never an unbiased or neutral experience. Walking and processing psychogeography is a methodology for reexamining perspective: As Claire Atherton writes, “history haunts landscapes to become a part of our gaze” (“Living Matter”). Or as Kathryn Yusoff writes, “looked at through the lends of geography and slavery, the descriptive opacity of the Anthropocene as a reckoning with geologic relations seems disingenuous” (“The Inhumanities”). Walking can be a beginning. The psychogeographic reimagining of space is kin to Dada and Surrealism because it depends on the subconscious and its capabilities to alter our perspectives. Our subconscious humbles us, as does walking, and I think this is a mighty combination for making displacement from land and ecologic relation (ours and alternative histories) intelligible.

I am interested in the future of thinking. As a globe, processing histories of colonialism and pain, walking is a labor that enhances our thinking into the depths of our bodies. This holistic thinking mends loss while causing it and if the loss of uniformity, popular stories, comfort, and understanding don’t freeze us, the reply of movement starts “a future.” Environmental justice is a horizon that urges us to keep walking, to come closer.

References

Atherton, Claire. “Living Matter.” Bomb Magazine, September 2019, vol. 148. Retrieved March 2021. https://bombmagazine.org/articles/living-matter/

Birkerts, Sven. The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2007.

Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001.

Chambre, Henri, and McLellan, David T. “Marxism.” Britannica. Retrieved March 2021.

Cohen, Brianne. “Towards a feeling of animacy: Art, ecology, and the public sphere in Vietnam.” Afterimage, Vol. 47, no. 3, pp 66-90. 2020.

Livingstone, Jo, and Gyarkye, Lovia. “Death to the Flaneur.” The New Republic. Retrieved March 2017. https://newrepublic.com/article/141623/death-flaneur

Mann, Sally. Hold Still. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2015.

“Pyschogeography.” The Tate London. Retrieved March 2021. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/p/psychogeography

Rifkin, Mark. Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination. Duke University Press, 2017.

“Situationist International.” The Art Story. Retrieved March 2021. https://www.theartstory.org/movement/situationist-international/

Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

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Anonymous — Wed, 18 Nov 2020 19:33:15 +0000

Advertisements Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 11/18/2020 - 12:33

Key Word: Advertisements

We are consumed by advertisements. Our lives are decorated with enticing images and sharp catchphrases that are meant to elicit a response from us in our inherent role as consumers. Their depth is inescapable; advertisements peek out at us from roadways, they speak to us from radios, and they compel us to look via pop-ups as we browse the internet. We do not consent to advertisements, but they are fed to us and aim to create an environment in which we are inexplicably compelled to buy, watch, or do what they tell us to.

The possibilities of advertisement are more interesting than the realities. How can we alter the current status quo of advertising and create a shift that encourages us to move away from unabashed consumption – of clothes, of food, of travel destinations, or of material items – and towards awareness and positive change regarding that which affects our very survival? If advertisers can manipulate or influence the mentalities of any given consumer, why not ensure a creation of positive globalized behavior, as opposed to localized interventions that emphasize a small group of corporate interests?

Catch of the Day, Surfrider Foundation, 2008

The power held by advertisers is practically boundless, beholden only to the interests of their benefactors. Perhaps therein lies the answer – in a world where those who hold power are oftentimes those who create the conditions that the powerless must attempt to escape, the unrestricted powerful will continue to shift responsibility away from themselves and continue, business-as-usual. In a secular and consumerist world, advertising has a similar role to the church, the government, or other forms of interrelated sociopolitical powers.[1] The scale of the power of advertising is monumental, and must be made productive before it only destroys itself.

Contradictorily to Audre Lorde’s refrain about the master’s tools not being able to dismantle the master’s house, advertising’s maneuverability, dynamism, and relative accessibility make it a ripe area for environmental activism. These qualities are presented through the possibilities of new mediums for advertising, the wide reach of advertisements, and the relative accessibility of advertisement creation and distribution with the introduction of guerrilla and experiential marketing.[2] Advertising and marketing are no longer limited to the powerful…although the reach of the powerful is still overwhelming.

Is this inherently a negative element? Politics and the powerful are not diametrically opposed to interests of the environment, and there have been times where those in power have committed to enacting forms of environmental change. When Richard Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act into law in 1970, he did not view his power and the economic success of the United States as contrary to the goals of the environmental movement; rather, Nixon was clear to emphasize the unity needed to heal the environment, and the indubitable fact that the environment is a collective habitat in which we all thrive or fail equally.[3] The powerful must be invested in our global successes, for if we fail at the task of keeping our planet alive, their interests are inherently gone (as will be the human race).

The fact that the powerful must show vested interest in the success of the environmental project in order to prolong their profits may seem cynical, but it is no less true because of that. They find themselves between a rock and a hard place – they must either fundamentally change their practices and encourage others to do the same, or face the knowledge that humanity’s death is a direct result of their irresponsible practices. It is imperative to encourage them to take the former option.

Advertising has not excluded the environment from its endless customers. There have been attempts to create a so-called “green consumerism” as a subset of marketing in the United States, starting in the 1980s.[4] But we have seen that consumption is antithetical to the goals of an environmental and ecological movement. How can advertisement change its ethos from wanting us to consume and instead encourage us to change? It is not a novel idea – the scourge of political advertisements every two Novembers encourage us to change our minds and our voting habits, so why is this not replicated in contexts that encourage non-partisan change: change regarding the survival of our environment?

The possibilities of advertising for social change have begun to be explored. Advertising is a factor that is already present in the actions of many social activist groups, particularly in organizations that meld political advocacy with social advocacy.[5] Even beyond this, we have seen a rise in corporate advertisements that include environmental messaging in their campaigns, purportedly encouraging customers to make environmentally-conscious decisions. Though novel, these environmental campaigns are not unheard of. Unfortunately, many of them are an exercise in “greenwashing,” a term used by Paolo Peverini to define advertising campaigns that aim to obscure their own roles in the destruction of the environment, all the while freeing themselves of blame, continuing harmful practices, and encouraging consumers to be the ones who must be responsible for sustainability.[6] These companies do not necessarily do so to encourage purchases of their products, but rather in order to build up a social image that positions them as a net social positive.[7]

When our collective necessities are obscured and supplanted, turned into a political game, or otherwise removed from visibility, we must be able to reclaim the medium of messaging. This is not a lofty ideal – it has already begun to happen. For example, Michael Schwarzer eloquently describes bus advertisements of local endangered species in California as emphasizing the fragility and transitory natures of the species that had been neglected by locals.[8] Thus, the focus of the advertisement used the traditional advertisement strategy of appealing to emotions, but instead of encouraging the viewer to consume, it encouraged the viewer to evaluate their role in the potential extinction of an animal, and thus of our collective habitats. Another vivid example is a series of advertisements funded by an ocean conservation foundation that showcased actual litter recovered from beaches or oceans and placed it in the context of a fish market, thus forcing the consumer to reckon with the consequences of consumption of these natural resources.[9] The problem is not the medium, but rather the willingness of corporations, foundations, and even us, as individuals, to use it in a honest and straightforward manner.

Advertisements encourage us, with urgency, to change our situations by acquiring that which they manipulate us to need. Xinghua Li argues that there are cruxes of desire that drive us, particularly in the United States, to make choices based on advertisements.[10] One of them is obsession – should we not be obsessed with the ways in which we will live? Outside of the personal scale of what we will wear, eat, or do, we must endeavor to shift towards messaging that encourages us to think about that which we have taken for granted: our collective necessity of a home.

Bibliography:

Altstiel, Tom and Jean Grow. Advertising Creative: Strategy, Copy, Design. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE, 2017.

Lane, Ronald W., Karen Whitehall King, and J. Thomas Russell. Kleppner’s Advertising Procedure. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2008.

Li, Xinghua. Environmental Advertising in China and the USA: The Desire to Go Green. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016.

Martin, Reinhold. "Environment, C. 1973." Grey Room, no. 14 (2004): 79-101. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1262651.

McFall, Elizabeth Rose. Advertising: A Cultural Economy. London: SAGE, 2004.

Peverini, Paolo. "Eco-Images and Environmental Activism: A Sociosemiotic Analysis." RCC Perspectives, no. 1 (2013): 73-85. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26240483

Schwarzer, Mitchell. "Animal Wrappers: Endangered Species on the Bus." Boom: A Journal of California 2, no. 3 (2012): 62-78. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/boom.2012.2.3.62

[1] Elizabeth R. McFall, Advertising: A Cultural Economy, (London: SAGE, 2004), 41.

[2] Tom Alstiel & Jean Grow, Advertising Creative: Strategy, Copy, Design, (Los Angeles, CA: SAGE, 2017), 331-333.

[3] Reinhold Martin, "Environment, C. 1973," Grey Room, no. 14 (2004): 79-80.

[4] Xinghua Li, Environmental Advertising in China and the USA: the desire to go green, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 15.

[5] Ronald W. Lane, Karen Whitehall King, & J. Thomas Russell, Kleppner’s Advertising Procedure, (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2008), 761-762

[6] Paolo Peverini, "Eco-Images and Environmental Activism: A Sociosemiotic Analysis," RCC Perspectives, no. 1 (2013): 73.

[7] Lane, King, & Russell, Kleppner’s Advertising Procedure, 783.

[8] Mitchell Schwarzer, "Animal Wrappers: Endangered Species on the Bus," Boom: A Journal of California 2, no. 3 (2012): 65. The entirety of this article is an invaluable resource into viewing how advertising can assist in the shifting of the contemporary narrative of environmental activism.

[9] Peverini, "Eco-Images and Environmental Activism,” 79.

[10] Li, Environmental Advertising in the USA and China, 132.

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Material Witness

Anonymous — Tue, 10 Nov 2020 00:31:32 +0000

Material Witness Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 11/09/2020 - 17:31

Keyword: Material Witness

The concept of material witness has been articulated by researcher, documentary filmmaker, and artist, Dr. Susan Schuppli, in her book Material Witness as “nonhuman entities and machinic ecologies” that archive their complex interactions with the world, producing ontological transformations and informatic dispositions that can be forensically decoded and reassembled back into a history [3]

Schuppli has primarily defined this concept as “evidence of an event” and as the “event of evidence” of acts of violence, but with further qualification that material witnesses are not just archival materials. In order to become material witnesses, rather than simply materials, the “complex histories entangled within objects” must be “unfolded” and their information must “testify” in public [18]. Some examples of material witnesses from Schuppli’s work include a ‘dead’ CCTV monitor from the infamous Long Kesh Detention Centre in Northern Ireland, which has an image of the hallway of the now defunct prison burned onto its non-functioning screen; the administrative documents of the Nazi regime in Germany; and Liri Loshi’s videotaped evidence of the aftermath of the massacre at Izbica, Kosovo in 1999.

Though her concept centers around information that has borne testimony in trials, Schuppli is not interested in exploring the concept of the material witness through a legal framework, nor the question of justice within the various contexts she is examining [13]. Rather, she is concerned with the “intertwined relations” between “human and nonhuman forms of testimony” and their ability to “bear witness to powerful events” as they act as “agents endowed with the capacity of (technical) speech” [13]. She asserts that artifacts can “induce the affective register of testimony” and that indeed materials can bear witness [14].

The CCTV monitor as reproduced in Schuppli’s Material Witness, originally from the Irish Republican History Museum, Belfast, Northern Ireland.

As a linguist working within the domain of language revitalization and reclamation, reading Schuppli’s concept articulated as materials bearing witness brought to mind Hupa feminist scholar Dr. Cutcha Risling-Baldy’s book We Are Dancing for You: Native Feminisms and the Revitalization of Women’s Coming-of-Age Ceremonies. In her book, Risling-Baldy articulates the continuity of Native peoples’ relationships with relatives and other than human relations, including language, songs, and dances, and discusses her own experiences with contending with material witnesses of a sort.

In chapter 3, entitled “Wung-xowidilik Concerning It—What Has Been Told ANTHROPOLOGY AND SALVAGE ETHNOGRAPHY”, Risling-Baldy gives her account of working with archived field notes of anthropologist Alfred Kroeber. Explaining Kroeber’s legacy, Risling-Baldy quotes noted Hupa scholar Jack Norton that Alfred Kroeber is one of the worst-perceived ‘liars’ for California Indian peoples, stating that the compromised figure can be noted for his prolific work, even as his “interpretations of social, economic, and religious factors” need to be “reevaluated as ethnocentric, anthropocentric and in some cases…racist” [73].

Risling-Baldy explicates how despite his belief in his own objectivity and cultural relativism, Kroeber’s worked is layered with his colonial point of view and the interpretation that Kroeber imposed on his accountings of Native peoples. Particular to this view is also the documentation of the ‘cultures’ of Indigenous peoples as a form of salvage ethnography. Kroeber and his contemporaries viewed any information they could learn from their Native ‘informants’ as an effort at gleaning a more ‘pure’ account of precolonial ways of life from their modern consultants. Risling-Baldy deftly articulates how such anthropological accounts have been used to invisibilize Native peoples and citing Lakota scholar Vine Deloria Jr., how these anthropological portrayals of Native peoples have actually deeply influenced colonial law and certainly Federal Indian Policy in the US [79].

The map of Dwinelle Hall at UC Berkeley, home of the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, where copies and some original field notes are stored. Source: https://theblacksheeponline.com/uc-berkeley/realistic-self-tour-uc-berkeley-prospective-students

Risling-Baldy asserts that in spite of these layers and certainly unbeknownst to him, his notes themselves contain a “continued negotiation of refusal” by his ethnographic consultants and demonstrate their “self-determination” [75]. As Risling-Baldy states

…it is not that Native consultants wanted recognition from anthropologists and ethnographers in regard to the importance or centrality of women’s coming-of-age ceremonies but rather, in my view, that they insisted on documenting these ceremonies because they were leaving a record for future Native peoples…After having survived brutal attempts to annihilate their culture and ways of life, Native people must have been conscious of how women’s ceremonies were continuously threatened by settler colonial policies of genocide, assimilation, and termination. The ethnographic record became one way for them to build an informed documentation of these ceremonies. [76-77]

Nevertheless, as Risling-Baldy explains, the ethnographic record, despite containing inaccuracies stemming from the biases of scholars like Kroeber and others, also contains the information that Native people would not leave out and that remains there, even as the narratives of disappearing Native peoples and their ways of life still try to erase them [97]. Thinking through Hupa women’s work before her own and through her own work, Risling-Baldy gives the summation that the Flower Dance ceremony

…never disappeared and would never disappear, go extinct, or be forgotten. The ceremony could be none of those things because this ceremony was in the memories of our elders, in the records and stories left by our ancestors in the ethnographic record, and being danced for all time in the heavens above, waiting for us to recall it [99].

I see Schuppli’s concept of the material witness as useful in conversation with accounts like Risling-Baldy’s in viewing the field notes of a deeply flawed figure like Kroeber for their potential to act as a witness to the biases of a researcher like Kroeber, and by extension the colonial apparatus’s attempts to place Native peoples and their lifeways in the past. As agentive and affective and in considering the public witnessing component of Schuppli’s concept, however, it would seem that the notion of material witness does not place enough agency with the Native peoples whom Kroeber and others learned from. Informed by Risling-Baldy, rather than casting the human parties solely in terms of the actors of violence and its victims, these notes testify to the self-determination and refusal of Native people, who bear witness through these notes to future generations. Through these notes, past generations are able to speak to future generations.

Dancers Kayla Begay (left), Viola "Chummy" Brooks and Stephanie Lumsden (front) with Flower Dance sticks at a demonstration at the California Indian Big Time and Social Gathering at Humboldt State University. - PHOTO BY CUTCHA RISLING BALDY. Source: https://www.northcoastjournal.com/humboldt/the-flower-dancers/Content?oid=10229320

Works Cited:

Risling-Baldy, Cutcha. We Are Dancing for You: Native Feminisms and the Revitalization of Women’s Coming-of-Age Ceremonies. University of Washington Press, 2018.

Schuppli, Susan. Material Witness: Media, Forensics, Evidence. MIT Press, 2020.

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Naturecultures

Anonymous — Mon, 09 Nov 2020 22:35:44 +0000

Naturecultures Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 11/09/2020 - 15:35

Keyword: Naturecultures

In this keyword essay I attempt to interrogate the nature/culture binary through personal histories

Heartbroken, I weep by the shore of this life,
Who, pray, will take me across?
Boatman, I don’t know your name. [1]

The beats of the Bhatiali ebb and flow like the tides of rivers. Sung by men on boats slowly floating downstream, fluidity characterizes this folk music tradition of Bengal. The rivers become a metaphor for life and boats become bodies at various stages of fray. Majhi, the boatman, is a philosopher poet who gleans knowledge about the rhythms of life with the beats of the river. Bengal delta, called the land of rivers, is a filigree of freshwater systems as intricate as the cultures that have developed on it. The crisscrossing of the rivers is also how kingdoms and now nationstate boundaries were drawn.

Do lines drawn on marshlands stay?

The delta, with plenty of irrigation and alluvial soil, gave rise to a peoples fed on a diet of fish and rice. The landscape is littered with date palms whose sweet sap is used to make sweetmeats that have travelled the world over as delicacies and memories of home for Bengalis. My great grandmother would pack the long-lasting ones and travel to her mother’s home which she left upon getting married. We no longer remember where it is except that it is on the other side of the India-Bangladesh border. Not the border that was drawn during the first partition of Bengal but the second one, after which it became pretty certain that going back and forth was not a possibility. Her Hindu relatives had left their homes, under much more violent conditions than she had and crossed a border instead of merely taking a boat to the home she now had with her husband and children. My father migrated with the names of his forefathers for the last seven generations committed to memory because they’re used in rituals to honor the ancestors. However, the legacy of mothers seems to have dissolved with their ashes in the Ganga.

Do rivers remember those that were never mothers or fathers?

My grandmother didn't know the date of her birth. Whenever asked, she would say that her mother told her that she was born six months after the big earthquake. On a whim one day, I googled the most severe earthquakes in India and found the one that she spoke about. Incidentally, within a few weeks of me learning about the earthquake, it was all over the news. The earthquake of 1934 was the last earthquake that was as devastating as the Nepal earthquake of 2015. I remember our house in the Indian Himalayas trembling and all of us running out that morning in April 2015. Our house was of the newer kind made of concrete and it shook for what seemed like minutes. Nepal is still recovering from the impact of the disaster.

Do earthquakes get citizenship?

My mother's mother was born on the banks of the Ganga in Benares and moved to the banks of the Yamuna when she married my grandfather. But the music was still from the floodplains of the Bengal delta. She hummed the tunes even when dementia took most of her memory and speech away in the months before she passed. My parents wake up at 7am everyday to watch GoodMorning Bangla, which is a TV show where artists from all over the world perform Bengali music. My parents live in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand. Two of my grandparents passed away in that house and their ashes were immersed in the Saryu. They were born closer to the mouth of the Ganga on the Bengal delta, but died closer to its source in the Himalayas.

Do rivers go to heaven or come from there?

Bengali is my first language but it was taken over by English with my education to become the language I think in. My uppercaste upbringing made sure I never questioned the privilege that came with my proficiency in the colonizer’s tongue. However, I often lamented the alienation from the language and geography of the Bengal delta which is my affective idiom. The nostalgia was fueled further by uppercaste Bengali authors writing in English and speaking to the diaspora that my family now identify as. I felt yoked to the mangroves of the Sundarbans, the Irrawady river dolphins and the Bengal tiger through the pages of The Hungry Tide. Even though my uppercaste grandparents would have never had to lead a life inside a forest with maneaters, these were stories much like the ones they told me. The landscapes are now alive in my imagination as a home I have never visited.

Do books birth landscapes?

I moved to Boulder, Colorado in August 2019 when unknown to me, precursors of what 2020 was going to be were already surfacing. I have not been able to go back. Each time I walk on trails surrounded by pine, I am immediately transported to the Himalayas of Uttarakhand. My dog was picked up by a leopard there while I was writing end-of-semester essays. I made a paper boat with his name and sent it floating in the Boulder creek. However, it was almost a year of living here that the red soil of Colorado looked like the ranga maati of the plains of Bengal. I am doing a PhD in Geography and Feminist Political Ecology as subfield. Naturecultures and critiquing the binaries that have colonized my worldview through the aftermath of the Enlightenment, are central to my studies in grad school. In my seminars when I have to introduce myself and talk about something interesting about me, I drop the factoid that my name, Prakriti, is the Sanskrit word for nature. I am often told that the work I do now, was fated. This feels contradictory to my experience of wading through a series of interrogations and eliminations involving lots of thinking and doing. It doesn’t seem to be over yet.

Is nature a legacy or destiny?

May be the answers lie at the end of rivers. May be the boatman can take us there.

[1] translation by Moushumi Bhowmik in her essay “A BOATMAN NAMED RANEN ROYCHOWDHURY”

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Looking

Anonymous — Thu, 05 Nov 2020 17:30:10 +0000

Looking Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 11/05/2020 - 10:30

Keyword: Looking

In the Introduction to The Ecological Thought, author Timothy Morton makes an intriguing suggestion for a mode of perception in regards to thinking of and seeing the environment, especially concerning the visualization of ecological crises and ecological interconnectedness. He wrote that the study of art could provide an applicable format of perception as art forms make one question reality. A questioning mode for the original question; how does one perceive the environment? In fragments— in waves? The environment is more than aesthetic contemplation, more than sublime appreciation, more than traumatic experience. As such the wide-eyed questioning Morton presupposes is meant to broaden the shadowed edges of periphery; to look to where reality bends and becomes unfocused, unfamiliar, strange. The act of looking; the searching eye becoming a radical questioning gaze.

As a child, leaving the ground in a 737 with two hundred other passengers, I would lean my forehead against the curved interior window and watch as the interlocking grey and black grid grew and grew. This grid became larger and smaller by the second, evolving into a dense web. Eventually Chicago itself would be lost to the grey blue water of Lake Michigan until that too was enveloped by the vision of green and brown earth. I would likewise watch through the arch of a car window as the passing line of trees shifted and vibrated into the far distance. I thought then that the trees lining the highways were dense forests that stretched for many miles; a wilderness flanking our comings and goings; a watcher looking at me just as I looked at it. As though something great and dark had been allowed to linger in northern Virginia: a memory or a reminder of the past. A laughable thought. The wilderness I thought I saw was merely a large verge between public and private property, seen between the trees: something to frame the highway just as the windows framed my vision; just as the road framed my interaction with Nature; just as my ignorance framed my understanding.

That glimpse between tree trunks was a questioning glance— a view of reality that The Center for Land Use Interpretation also asserts; that this nation’s lands are portioned, utilized, and perceived. Though not within the Center’s purview, one can broaden this assertion and proclaim that the world is portioned, utilized, and perceived. From continent to island, from river to ocean.

The Center of Land Use Interpretation, which I have been following on and off for three years, has been photo-documenting sites in the United States which reflect significant human interaction since 1994. The Center “...is a research and education organization interested in understanding the nature and extent of human interaction with the surface of the earth, and in finding new meanings in the intentional and incidental forms that we individually and collectively create.” The sites captured by the Center photographers fall between lines of curious, fantastic, and terrible in their innocuous simplicity. Whenever I move, I look up the area in the Center’s database to see the place’s hidden visual history— to look between the treeline and see where a human hand has been burned into the soil. Looking through the examples within the Colorado borders, one can find aerial views of the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons production facility, multiple uranium disposal cells, multiple abandoned mines, and a few gold mills such as the Summitville mine which has become a massive superfund site: the uncompleted clean up of which will continue to cost hundreds of millions of tax dollars. Not only sites of toxic radioactive waste are documented. Campsites, tourist attractions, national forests, national wildlife preserves (former superfund sites!), monuments, and prominent earthworks are also listed.

It is essential that The Center of Land Use Interpretation lists an aspect of land-use as perception. Seeing, looking, understanding. While Morton argues for a perception of interconnectedness, a breakdown of the boundaries of inside/outside and the barriers between here and there, he also acknowledges that this creates a curious ambiguity of things which should feel familiar, a forced dissociation of the intimate or internal. Morton uses the term ‘strange stranger’ to refer to this disconnection between humans and animals as an example of this, but I disagree. The trouble begins well before the animal; it is in the ‘here’ and ‘there’ of the other, it is in our inability to reconcile, to see, the slow environmental violence as well.

In the introduction to Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Rob Nixon coins the term ‘slow violence’ to mean “...a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is not typically viewed as violence at all.” A violence which is not easily seen, an effect in which its totality escapes visualization. Whether due to extraction of resources or toxic disposal, Nixon notes the long term consequences of these actions, like those photographed by the Center for Land Use Interpretation, is felt not by the extractors who “...arrive, despoil, and depart…” but by the long term “dispensibe citizens.”

The difficulty of internalizing Morton’s interconnected web with this violence lies in its visualization, in the mapping of the official landscape of extraction. Mirzoeff notes in Visualizing the Anthropocene that the steps of visualization include “...classification, separation, and aestheticization.” Classification and separation are an act of othering, aestheticization creates a frozen dual image of beauty and disaster. Mirzoeff asserts that the use of aesthetics when depicting the environment numbs the response and results in a loss of perception. With aesthetics, the ability to perceive, especially the ability to see and experience ecological violence in a meaningful way, stops at the frame.

Here is where the study of art comes in hand. A fundamental question to ask: yes, it’s beautiful, but what else? Yes, it’s terrible, but how? There is a structure to find in the gaze of the camera, a lens to take away in the mimesis of depiction, a framing device in the aesthetics which can reveal instead an intention unknown to the subject of its representation. The representation, the visualisation, is a thing which looks and the viewer must look at how it looks. Which is why I find myself coming again and again to the photographs taken by the Center of Land Use Interpretation. As documentary evidence, they are not nearly as interpretive or as aestheticised as one would think. There is a bluntness to the gaze of their camera.

Perhaps because in perception, the eye appropriates. The eye takes. It is an aggressive arbitrator, assigning value and function, translating sites for material extraction and for voyeuristic enjoyment. Beauty is assigned here, violence is assigned there. Here I can park my car on an overlook and take a photograph of my own, there I receive warnings of live ammunition in the ground. Here I plant a flower garden and do not worry about neurotoxins in the soil, there I feel the repetitious shake of the earth from nearby munitions testing at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, where the smog from the nearby powerplant left a thick residue on the surface of homes for years. There is an interconnectedness darker than Morton’s philosophical suggestion, a web which needs to capture that aesthetic visualization of violence and study, like a work of art, its strange reality.

Bibliography

The Center for Land Use Interpretation. “About The Center.” CLUI.org. Accessed October 25 2020. http://clui.org/section/about-center.
The Center for Land Use Interpretation. “Summitville Mine, Colorado.” CLUI.org. Accessed October 25 2020. http://clui.org/ludb/site/summitville-mine.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. “Visualizing the Anthropocene.” Public Culture 26, no. 2 (2014): 213-220.
Morton, Timothy. “Introduction.” In The Ecological Thought, 8. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010.
Morton, Timothy. “Thinking Big.” In The Ecological Thought, 38-41. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010.
Nixon, Robert. ”Introduction.” In Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, 2-17. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011.

(9) Nicholas Mirzoeff, “Visualizing the Anthropocene,” Public Culture 26, no. 2 (2014): 213.
(10) Mirzoeff, “Visualizing,” 220.

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Social Permaculture

Anonymous — Fri, 30 Oct 2020 17:11:00 +0000

Social Permaculture Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 10/30/2020 - 11:11

Keyword: Social Permaculture

Social Permaculture is the praxis of permaculture methodology applied to social relationships. This method of social relating and community building draws inspiration from the intelligence and cycles of the natural environment. Social permaculture is a concept by which communities look to natural environments to model co-existence and co-creation. Patrick Whitefield calls permaculture, ‘the art of designing beneficial relationships.’ Social permaculture is a process that is as collaborative and interwoven with community building as it is with environmental justice. There are many facilities, events and groups locally, nationally and globally that model various forms and elements of social permaculture as a means of changing the social paradigm. Each offers a lens of learning through which we can individually and broadly implement social permaculture within our own lives. We are living in a time where permaculture and sustainability, both environmentally and socially, have become necessary tools to design a livable future.

To preface, permaculture is often described as working with nature, not against it. It encourages planting crops which grow better together rather than separately, and to consider the location of where to effectively maximize the resources of the land. An example of this would be the ‘three sister’s garden’ a historically recognized practice of indigenous communities planting corn, beans and squash together. These crops will yield the most effective production due to their symbiotic relationship. All three play a role in their growth and protection of each other; the corn stalk allows the bean’s vines to grow tall, the beans fix nitrogen into the soil for the corn and squash, and the squash leaves provide shade to mitigate the growth of weeds and defend against browsing herbivores. Although each plant is capable of growing on their own, when planted together they fulfill the needs of the other plants to propagate the most plentiful yield. The relationship cultivated through these plants represents just one of the many social metaphors implied by permaculture practices.

“According to the Permaculture Association, permaculture has three aspects: (1) It is an ethical framework; (2) It involves understanding of how nature works; and (3) It is fundamentally a design approach, in the light of this. Thus, permaculture seeks to understand how nature works and consciously, and ethically, shape human patterns to mimic this. Permaculture characterizes naturally designed social systems in three ‘permaculture ethics’: earth care, people care, and fair share (or return of surplus).”

Photo by Jeff Jones

How can we bring this tangible method of gardening into the complex realm of human relationships and where are we seeing this concept in practice? If we build our community around sustainable relationships we can implement this back into our connection with the earth. A multi-faceted system of symbiotic relationships creates a positive feedback loop between people and the land. An ethical relationship both with the land and our community propagates positive reinforcement of trust and support. If we feed and nurture ourselves through our social relationships we can proliferate this as a parallel to the flora and fauna of our surroundings. A community benefits most when there is a diverse set of skills shared throughout the social ecosystem. Everland is a new addition to conscious community building, focusing on land restoration, eco-retreat experiences and engagement through immersive art. A local example here in the Rocky Mountains, Everland embodies the lessons of the co-existence of permaculture both through environmental and social praxis. A small group of collaborators began the project and are using social permaculture to enlist others to co-create. Optimizing the genius of the individual to build community surrounding Everland to cultivate sustainable living and ecologically conscious gathering space. The founders recognize the limits of their expertise and seek to fill the gaps through the skills of others. They systematically provide food, lodging and support while receiving aid in land restoration, management and sustainable development. Although there are examples of failures and successes of these communal practices, a seemingly utopian agenda is not one of an unattainable reality but a method of conscious, intentional practice towards a better future.

The term Anthropocene is seeping into public rhetoric through conversations of climate change. A concern on the forefront of many, but unfortunately not all. As we face adversity against social justice, climate justice and act against the progressing tensions of the present COVID-19 pandemic, cultivating sustainable communities is as important as cultivating sustainable agricultural systems. Our social environment is bleeding onto the screen in hope for connection. Working at home with limited external relationships have heightened our usage of Zoom meetings and TikTok duets. Our marginalized lands are burning at an ever increasing rate in the American West. Oceans swell from melting glaciers creeping over islands and coastal cities. The imperative act of care must permeate through our being, our kin, and our earth. “...not in the sense of an eco-voluntarism, by placing the agency and responsibility to act on ecological issues within an individual, or even a group of individuals. But rather re-cognizing one’s extensions, influences, co-constituting beings and objects begets a call to participate together, join allegiance with, act-alongside, and act-with.” If we can recognize how we imprint ourselves socially, we can assimilate this to our imprint on the land. Our current climate is in no way detached from our community engagement, relationships and communal interactions.

Photo by Jeff Jones

Bibliography

Writer, Art and Culture, et al. An Eco-Retreat and Playground Inspired by Burning Man Is Coming to Colorado. 1 May 2020, https://303magazine.com/2019/12/everland-eco-retreat-colorado/
Aiken, Gerald Taylor. (2017). Permaculture and the social design of nature, Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 99:2, 172-191
Old Farmer's Almanac. “The Three Sisters: Corn, Beans, and Squash.” Old Farmer's Almanac, https://www.almanac.com/content/three-sisters-corn-bean-and-squash#
https://www.everland.co/home/#vision
Social permaculture. (2011). Communities, (153), 14-16. Retrieved from https://colorado.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.colorado.idm.oclc.org/docview/911987427?accountid=14503

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Salvage

Anonymous — Wed, 28 Oct 2020 19:57:10 +0000

Salvage Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 10/28/2020 - 13:57

Keyword: Salvage

I first came across the term “salvage” used in a complex of environmental and value implications in Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. The loaded title matches the weight of the information in the book; Tsing describes the matsutake trade which is based on salvage capitalism. I have not studied capitalism deeply (except for as a current user) and so I cannot speak directly to the research that might apply when we talk about how value is determined; where Marx (or anyone else) might fit it, we do not have room here. What I will do is supply an overview of how I see the term salvage being used, its connotations and possible implications, and how we might capture, or salvage, this idea for a brighter ecological future.

Matsutake mushrooms. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Matsutake.jpg

Tsing uses the term “salvage” to describe “salvage accumulation” through a capitalist lens as “the process through which lead firms amass capital without controlling the conditions under which commodities are produced. Salvage is not an ornament on ordinary capitalist processes; it is a feature of how capitalism works” (63).

Salvage is a term used to denote marine salvage, the rescuing of ships and their cargo; in water salvage, people are rescued from floods; in salvage archaeology, a site is under threat of impending construction; salvage ethnography involves the recovery of informational remains of a culture before its disappearance; salvage therapy is for patients who are not responding to the first line of therapy. Recycling was referred to as salvage in the 20th century, and there have been campaigns during the mid-1900s that used this term to drum up civilian participation in the form of recycling owned goods for the wartime efforts of a nation.

Steel crushed and baled for recycling in a recycling plant outside Galva, Illinois, United States. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Steel_recycling_bales.jpg

My relationship to the term is first and foremost through recycling. In high school, I adopted the idea that I could save money and also enjoy some time outdoors by collecting beer cans out of the wire trash bins along the beach in my hometown of Clearwater, Florida. I filled enough black trash bags to pack into my family’s Honda Odyssey and asked my dad to drive with me to the recycling center 20 minutes south of us. My van full of aluminum brought us a whopping $3.27. I gave that activity up. Salvage, in this case, was a choice, a hobby. It was not a matter of “making ends meet” or a requirement for continued life within the capitalist landscape. The kind of salvage that deserves our attention is the kind that causes the most violence (slow or fast in speed), but salvage is both a function of capitalism and an intent to create something new outside of that system. It is worth noting that all types of salvage are related, not just through the act of salvaging, but the intent to create a new reality, whether that be tiny or vast and profound.

The connotations I can trace around salvage in my personal life, in the definitions above, and in Tsing’s handling of the term are these: salvage involves a saving of something. Value is created where value had previously degraded. This something being saved may be broken or destroyed, discarded and used. It is at the end of its supposed consumer lifecycle, or it is not worth repairing. From the ruins and destruction something new can be crafted. At times, salvage can take an unexpected form. To salvage is to scavenge and save what is worth saving, it is taking something from its original context and reimagining its use. It implies that things will degrade and that a second life is not expected or imminent, but that it is at least possible. Accumulation of salvaged materials might provide value or a second life in the physical realm. There are skills and materials available and that could be used, often in a creative or secondary way, not aligning with intended or original use. With some ingenuity, close looking, or modification, or even cleaning, these skills, materials, and information can live a new life. Scraping, assembling, and translating are the verbs that come along with salvage. There’s a crafty and cunning vibe that comes along with the word, which could also be seen at times as heroic or as scrappy. I think that it is inevitable that salvage is part of the capitalist machine, but I also ask: might a salvage mindset or ethos be of use outside of capitalism? Is salvage a necessary mode?

Salvage is all over, and a salvage ethos, I would argue, has just become more common as a way to battle the shrinking middle class and the widening gap in inequality across the globe, and also as a way to defend against the once-unintended side-effects of industrialization: climate change (Ventura).

On one part of the earth, Tik-Tok users in the United States demonstrate how to salvage furniture, such as thick velvety or floral-print chairs, cleaning these on video and telling how much the refurbishing cost and how much the piece sold for; a way of making a quick dollar in a lacking economy. It’s worth noting, here, that salvage is the act of saving, of taking and using something that was once wasted or discarded, or perhaps sight unseen. Refurbishing would be an act within salvage, the cleaning or rebuilding of the salvaged material before it re-enters circulation. While this example is absolutely one of salvage, I want to think beyond creating value with singular objects that enter back into systems of monetary value, beyond recycled cans for a little extra spending money.

To consider more grave examples, I turn to Ursula Biemann’s film Deep Weather. This film features, firstly, corporate salvage in the form of the Alberta tar sands seen from above, and then, a Bangladeshi community building protective mud embankments to prevent impending disasters: floods from monsoons, fiercening storms from climate change, and rising sea levels are to be protected against. This second featured moment of the film, showing the great community effort to create this embankment structure, is a form of conservation, of saving a community. I think it is salvage in that this community is using what the earth has provided, in this case, mud, to create a new life, new use and structure in the face of impending destruction. Communities in Bangladesh and global south that are affected by the “slow violence” of neoliberal policies and petro-capitalist desires are forced to do the most work in salvaging that which has already faced ruin: communities displaced, lands facing storms and sea level rise, poison from mining and drilling and spilling that which should remain in the earth.

Aerial photograph of open pit mine in the tar sands oil fields of Alberta, Canada. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tar_sands_in_alberta_2008.jpg

What are the implications of salvage? Well, salvage only can exist if production of a new set of things or understandings exists. The production of the new from the discarded is salvage; finding value and extending life using the tools available is salvage. How can we salvage ideas from capitalism, from neoliberalism, and reimagine our relationship to the earth and to each other? Capitalism and neoliberalism functioned once when humanity was divided between humans and many people were othered in the name of value creation. If we take up Denise Ferreira da Silva’s idea in On Difference of reimaging the universe as non-local and rid ourselves of separations that cause this violence, this restructuring leaves us with broken systems and structures. Neoliberalism and capitalism, as we already know, do not serve ecosystems or humans. Instead, these structures are meant to create value for a select, separate few. While I am in support of Da Silva’s un-separation as a way to reimagine sociality, I think we can still use separation as an act of salvaging to sort through the waste built up from colonization, neoliberal policies, oil-minded explorations. What is worth saving, if anything? What practices are maintained, what parts of a broken system can still function?

To do this, we must determine structures of value related to a reimagined world where separation doesn’t rule with fear and uncertainty. Can we reframe life to hold the most value in a new system? Can we scrap the destructive systems of violence as a way to salvage life in a precarious state?

Seagrasses of Dry Tortugas National Park. National Park Service photo taken by John Dengler. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Seagrasses_(6022423172).jpg

Works Cited
da Silva, Denise Ferreira. "On difference without separability." 32nd Bienal De S~ ao Paulo Art Biennial,“Incerteza viva (2016).

Deep Weather. Directed by Ursula Biemann, 2013, https://vimeo.com/90098625.

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press, 2015.

Ventura, Luca. “Wealth Distribution and Income Inequality by Country 2018.” Global Finance, 26 Nov. 2018, www.gfmag.com/global-data/economic-data/wealth-distribution-income-inequality.

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Visibility

Anonymous — Thu, 22 Oct 2020 17:16:59 +0000

Visibility Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 10/22/2020 - 11:16

Keyword Visibility: Mass Incarceration’s Presence During Climate Change

“If we make it a bad enough experience then wouldn’t that deter people from prison?”

The same sentiment seems to be the last hope of the quiet population watching the climate change, if conditions get bad enough, we’ll stop our bad behavior, won’t we?

Beliefs like these are the worst of naivety. A memory of right/wrong behavior, immorality/consequence, and good/bad people predominately occupy short-term economies and uncomplicate history. They comfort the western world by repeating that America has been without a past before, and that we can do it again.

People made invisible know the answers to the problems that are causing capitalism and globalization to fail. Selective visuality delays the burden of the past and extends the inhabitancy of the powerful: indigenous genocide, keeping woman in domestic settings, Jim Crow laws, LGBTQ criminalization, Central American refugee deportation, and incarcerating people whose demographics are not represented in politics (black/brown bodies, impoverished, etc.). These voices are carriers of histories much older than the stories that uphold American exceptionalism. I believe that imprisoned peoples have a historic understanding, because of their marginalization, that can provide reference and growth in people’s relationship with climate change, regardless of present authoritative systems.

The incarcerated experience time differently than the nonincarcerated. Imprisoned peoples learn different signifiers to characterize change, making them more apt to observe the subtleties of slow passage. This skill is powerfully beneficial to society. Watching differently for effects of time would free us from the limited knowledge of capitalism’s instantaneous greed, and reveal a slow violence, “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space.” (1) But before we can claim this skill for noticing and naming slow violence, we must respect the people who already have this skill by changing our biased visualization of them. Looking at pictures of prisoners, not of their mugshot, I still feel shocked to recognize another complex human being and recognize my prejudice. What if I was caught doing the worst thing I have ever done?

In popular entertainment, journalistic exposés, and documentaries, images of “life behind bars” fascinate, horrify, and titillate. They also offer a familiarity with prison as a cornerstone institution of modern life… visuality functions to keep the imprisoned stigmatized as criminals who are excluded from realms of the intimate, social, and political. (2)

I connect this knowledge to the empathic cry after the Holocaust, a question I asked myself while sitting in a fifth grade school desk: “What inventions, cures, thought patterns, dreams, and generosity did we lose to genocide? What work will never be done by those doctors, astronauts, writers, teachers, sculptors, social workers, and politicians?” Genocide functions to erase populations. Modernity has cleverly reconstructed genocide to be unrecognizable. From my experience, of forgetting to the extent of not caring that people are existing in prisons and jails, I testify to the brainwashing that normalizes the prison system in the United States of America: a population of 2.3 million has been lost to society.

Group Leaders. Denver University Arts Initiative. 2020. https://liberalarts.du.edu/prison-arts/our-work/group-leaders

Like the recent summers and winters, reported as the warmest on record, and the wildfires and hurricanes as the biggest we’ve ever seen, the condemned “super-predator” in the public conscious has shifted to “super-storm”. Juvenile super-predators of the 1990s are serving life sentences without parole and have been described as such in the Washington Examiner by John DiLulio, an American political scientist:

Moral poverty begets juvenile super-predators whose behavior is driven by two profound developmental defects. First, they are radically present-oriented. Not only do they perceive no relationship between doing right (or wrong) now and being rewarded (or punished) for it later. They live entirely in and for the present moment; they quite literally have no concept of the future. As several researchers have found, ask a group of today's young big-city murderers for their thoughts about "the future," and many of them will ask you for an explanation of the question. (3)

It is said that what bothers you about other people are truly the parts of yourself that you despise the most. DiLulio disapproves of these youth’s comprehension of the future and names it as a developmental defect that leads to crime. Perhaps the western world’s relationship to “living entirely in the present moment” in terms of environmental impact, as opposed to thinking seven generations ahead, exposes a developmental defect. Most current members of American society were raised without the names of our ancestors, which could be a metaphor equivalent to teenaged super-predators raised without parents. Without a reference to the past, behavior for the future is less intentional.

Super-predators were juveniles growing up in an already violent environment. We have watched climate change affect the most vulnerable communities, living in “national sacrifice areas”, with bad air quality, toxic work conditions (corporate farming, coal mining), polluted water (Flint, Standing Rock), rising sea levels, and food shortages. A reference point for the future of these communities could be the aridity line in the Middle East and North Africa, as drought and food shortages have led to desperate wars. (4) This violent list adds pressure to already difficult living situations (products of colonialism, systemic racism, militarism, etc.). Instead of fighting crime with harsher sentencing, crime could be mitigated by advocating for environmental justice.

The Trump administration is increasing imprisonment practices, as the Law and Order candidate, and the opportunity for human-caused climate change. The fascinating statistic of the USA carbon emissions at 25% (only representing 5% of world population) and also housing 25% of the world’s incarcerated people testifies that the link between these two facts of the 21^st century are tightly interwoven.

Environmental justice scholars and organizers have for well over three decades articulated how race, indigeneity, poverty, and environmental inequality are linked in a toxic brew. Environmental justice is focused on intersectionality (race, class, gender, immigration/refugees, Indigenous land claims/territorial sovereignty) and organized around expanding social and racial justice in terms of environmental terms (land, pollution, health.” (5)

Environmental justice’s focus is for transferring power from those who exploit it to those who can compassionately wield it. Prisons are often built in areas already contaminated by industry and military activity and the people that occupy them traditionally experience a quality of life with compromised health (air pollution, food deserts) prior to incarceration. (6) Prison reform that allows incarcerated peoples to care for the environment, with their abnormal perception of time and a previous knowledge of neglect towards their communities, connects them and gives them a sense of responsibility beyond themselves. This gesture towards normalcy, prior to release, is an investment in the influencers of the future, in stories that will outlast the present.

References

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, US: Harvard University Press, 2011. 2.
Fleetwood, Nicole. Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration. Harvard University Press, 2020. 15.
DiLulio, John. “The Coming of Super Predators” Washington Examiner. November 1995. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/the-coming-of-the-super-predators
Klein, Naomi. “Let Them Drown: The Violence of Othering in a Warming World” London Review of Books, Vol 38. No. 11. June 2016.
Sze, Julie. Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger, University of California Press, 2020. 5.
Veit, John. 2018. “How Anthropogenic Climate Change Exacerbates Vulnerability In Prison Communities; A Critical Environmental Justice Analysis” Master of Arts in Sociology. Humboldt State University, Arcata. 2. https://digitalcommons.humboldt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1266&context=etd

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Geoengineering

Anonymous — Sat, 03 Oct 2020 16:01:39 +0000

Geoengineering Anonymous (not verified) Sat, 10/03/2020 - 10:01

Keyword: Geoengineering

Geoengineering is usually defined as the deliberate large-scale intervention in the climate system of the Earth with the purpose of mitigating the worst consequences of global warming. Understandably, this activates deep anxieties about technology in a lot of people, since it involves a radical level of interference with what we think of as “nature^{^[1]}.” Although the earliest recorded instance of a scheme to mitigate climate change dates from 1965, during the Johnson administration^{^[2]}, geoengineering proposals have become more frequent in the last two decades, as predictions from climate scientists have grown increasingly alarming.

Ideally, climate change would be solved by a significant, coordinated worldwide reduction in carbon emissions. However, even achieving emission reductions that are well below what’s needed to avert catastrophic changes has so far proven politically impracticable, due among other factors to the huge economic toll such measures would take, and the diversity of competing national interests. Additionally, every year that passes without concrete action on the climate makes the reduction measures required more aggressive, and therefore even harder to implement. As a consequence, interest in geoengineering has kept growing. A search of the term in the ��ƷSM��ӰƬ library website lists over fourteen thousand journal articles^{^[3]}.

In terms of general schemes, there are two particularly active subfields in the discipline: one attempts to reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere, either through natural or artificial means such as depositing iron in the oceans to stimulate algae growth, while the other aims to manage the amount of solar radiation that the atmosphere allows to pass^{^[4]} by, for instance, stimulating the formation of stratocumulus clouds over the subtropical ocean^{^[5]}. This and similar ideas would increase the percentage of solar radiation reflected by the Earth, which would have the result of lowering the average temperature of the planet.

As I mentioned above, there is no shortage of reasons to oppose geoengineering. Some of them are ethical: there is a problematic aspect to thinking that we have the right to alter the climate for generations that will have no say in our decision, but will be forced to live with the results of our actions^{^[6]}. At the same time, it seems more problematic to prioritize the needs of people who might exist over those of people who do exist, especially given that the former group may not get to exist at all if humanity continues its current trajectory. There are also pragmatic reasons: climate is the paradigmatic complex system, and the idea that we could alter it in such a radical way without producing unexpected effects is simply delusional. The problem with this objection is that, were we to actually take it seriously, it would be utterly paralyzing, since uncertainty about the more causally distant consequences of our acts is inherent to any action we perform.

Yet another common objection when projects such as these are discussed revolves around the ostensible responsibility of technology in the series of environmental disasters we are experiencing. Wouldn’t it then be absurd to think that following the same course of action—only more intensely—would have a different result? What is needed, according to these critics^{^[7]}, is less technology, not more (technology in these critiques acting as a stand in for modern technocapitalism). I counter that there are at least two problems with this line of criticism: the first is that it ignores the centrality of technology in every human culture^{^[8]}, while simultaneously erasing the possibility of distinguishing between different technologies by judging their effects. The second problem is that significant evidence exists of several agrarian cultures that experienced societal collapse due to resource depletion and environmental degradation. That seems to have been the case of the classic Maya civilization, that collapsed between the 8th and 9th centuries, the Polynesian inhabitants of Pitcairn Island, and the Anasazi people that lived in territories that today correspond to the states of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado in the USA^{^[9]}. This strongly suggests that human inability to achieve a sustainable relation with its environment is not limited to specific economic systems^{^[10]}.

Unfortunately, while fear of geoengineering is not unreasonable—it might after all accidentally cause damages that are as great or greater than anything we have experienced so far, including continuing ocean acidification, ozone depletion, an increase in acid deposition and deleterious effects on plants^{^[11]}—its deployment might still be unavoidable. A group of twelve climate scientists from India, Ethiopia, Kenya, Brazil and other developing nations led by Atiq Rahman, Executive Director of the Bangladesh Center for Advanced Studies, published a text in Nature in 2018 in which they declared “Solar geoengineering is fraught with risks and can never be an alternative to mitigation. But it’s unclear whether the risks of solar geoengineering are greater than the risks of breaking the 1.5 °C warming target. As things stand, politicians will face this dismal dilemma within a couple of decades^{^[12]}.” And former Chief Scientific Advisor for the British Government, John King, is more emphatic: “Time is no longer on our side [...] It’s certainly critically important to have deep and rapid emissions reductions, but there’s too much in the atmosphere today. As we move forward, we have to take on the concept of switching out fossil fuels entirely, but it is critically important to research removing emissions from the atmosphere in order to meet net-zero emissions^{^[13]}.”

If the Nature signatories and King are correct, a particularly problematic aspect that will require immediate consideration is that, unlike action on carbon emissions reduction, which depends upon the formation of overarching consensus to be implemented, geoengineering technologies can be tested and put into practice by individual actors who don’t even have to be nation-states. The effects of the technology are global, but the people behind it might decide to bypass global—and even national—institutions. This greatly increases the chances of action on the issue, but also the likelihood of chaos and conflict as a result. Avoiding outcomes of this sort is going to be one of the great geopolitical challenges of the century.

^{^[1]} For an excellent discussion of how the concept of nature and its relationship with the human affects conversations about the environment, see Vogel 2015.

^{^[2]} Restoring the Quality of Our Environment. Report of the Environmental Pollution Panel President’s Science Advisory Committee (The White House, 1965)

^{^[3]} https://ucblibraries.summon.serialssolutions.com#!/search?ho=t&l=en&q=geoengineering. Last accessed 9/25/2020.

^{^[4]} This was first proposed by Paul Cruzen in his paper “Albedo enhancement by stratospheric sulfur injections: A contribution to resolve a policy dilemma?” (Crutzen 2006).

^{^[5]} (Robock 2008).

^{^[6]} This is the position of a not insignificant group of philosophers and political theorists (Elliot 1989, McKinnon 2019, Reichenbach 1992). They hold that future persons have rights which include access to a clean environment. Space prevents us from developing our views on this matter in the present text, so we’ll simply state that we do not find their arguments persuasive. For a criticism of the idea of the rights of future persons, see De George 1979 and Parfit 1987.

^{^[7]} See for instance Klein 2015.

^{^[8]} Some authors, in fact, go as far as to claim that technology had an essential role in the emergence of the very sphere of the human, and that the two are co-constitutive (Stiegler 2018).

^{^[9]} (Diamond 2014).

^{^[10]} In Janssen & Scheffer 2004 it is hypothesized that the sunk-cost effect in human decision making has played a significant role in the collapse of early societies that built larger structures.

^{^[11]} (Robock 2008).

^{^[12]} (Rahman et al. 2018), last accessed 9/26/2020.

^{^[13]} “Sir David King: Urgent Focus Needed on Climate ‘Restoration.’” Edie.Net, https://www.edie.net/news/9/Sir-David-King--Policy-and-business-action-needed-on-climate--restoration-/. Accessed 26 Sept. 2020

Bibliography

Crutzen, P.J. “Albedo enhancement by stratospheric sulfur injections: A contribution to resolve a policy dilemma?” Climatic Change, 77 (3–4), 2006, 211–219.

De George, Richard. “The Environment, Rights and Future Generations”. In Goodpaster, K. E., and K. M. Sayre, editors. Ethics and Problems of the 21st Century. University of Notre Dame Press, 1979, pp. 93-106.

Diamond, Jared. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York, Penguin Books, 2014.

Elliot, Robert. “The Rights of Future People.” Journal of Applied Philosophy, vol. 6, no. 2, 1989, pp. 159–70.

Janssen, Marco A., and Marten Scheffer. “Overexploitation of Renewable Resources by Ancient Societies and the Role of Sunk-Cost Effects.” Ecology and Society, vol. 9, no. 1, 2004.

Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. London, Penguin Books, 2015.

McKinnon, Catriona. “Sleepwalking into Lock-in? Avoiding Wrongs to Future People in the Governance of Solar Radiation Management Research.” Environmental Politics, vol. 38, no. 3, 2019, pp. 441–59.

Parfit, Derek. Reasons and Persons. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1987.

Rahman, A. Atiq, et al. “Developing Countries Must Lead on Solar Geoengineering Research.” Nature, vol. 556, no. 7699, 7699, Nature Publishing Group, Apr. 2018, pp. 22–24.

Reichenbach, Bruce R. “On Obligations to Future Generations.” Public Affairs Quarterly, vol. 6, no. 2, [North American Philosophical Publications, University of Illinois Press], 1992, pp. 207–25.

Robock, Alan, et al. “20 Reasons Why Geoengineering May Be a Bad Idea.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, vol. 64, no. 2, May 2008, pp. 14–59.

Stiegler, Bernard. La Technique et le Temps - (I. La Faute d’Epiméthée, II. La Désorientation, III. Le Temps du Cinéma et la question du mal-être ). Fayard, 2018.

The White House, Report of the Environmental Pollution Panel President’s Science Advisory Committee. Restoring the Quality of Our Environment. Washington, 1965.

UA, “Sir David King: Urgent Focus Needed on Climate ‘Restoration.’” Edie.Net, https://www.edie.net/news/9/Sir-David-King--Policy-and-business-action-needed-on-climate--restoration-/. Accessed 26 Sept. 2020.

Vogel, Steven. Thinking Like a Mall - Environmental Philosophy After the End of Nature. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2015.

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