Pub Date : 2024-07-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-11150075
Nicolai Skiveren
This article examines the use of humor in contemporary environmental short films, centering on the alleviating power of humor and its capacity to challenge conventional modes of perception. It argues that humor constitutes an important narrative device in the stories of critical hope that scholars claim are necessary in moving beyond the debilitating registers of apocalyptic rhetoric and crisis discourse. By comparing two short films—the Indian satire Finding Beauty in Garbage, and the American mockumentary The Majestic Plastic Bag—the article examines the affordance of irony, parody, and satire to model alternative and hopeful ways of interacting with contemporary toxic landscapes. The article demonstrates that while genres and devices such as satire, irony, and parody all trouble anthropocentric paradigms of human mastery, they do so in different ways and with different implications. Whereas satire offers an effective vehicle for lamenting the proliferation of waste, the critical mood that defines the genre also restricts its capacity for generating meanings and sensibilities outside conventional environmental discourse. By contrast, parody and irony appear more suited to mobilize such changes, as their playful estrangements model innovative and self-reflexive ways of perceiving waste as a source of beauty, a site of agency, and an object of guilt.
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Pub Date : 2024-07-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-11150043
Michelle Bastian
This provocation critiques the notion of long-term thinking and the claims of its proponents that it will help address failures in dominant conceptions of time, particularly in regard to environmental crises. Drawing on analyses of the Clock of the Long Now and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, the article suggests that we be more wary of the concept’s use in what we might call chronowashing. Like the more familiar greenwashing, where environmental issues are hidden by claims to be addressing the problem, the article explores how these examples of long-term thinking distract from extractivism, racism, and environmental injustice, making it harder to address the complexities involved. In particular, the article discusses examples where long-term thinking provides a veneer of environmental concern that actually disconnects from the work of building more equitable forms of relation. As a contrast, the article’s author asks: What is lost when we diagnose a problem as arising due to short-term thinking and propose long-term thinking as the solution? Against chronowashed environmental time, the author argues for more complex approaches that explicitly take into account the temporalities of inequality, political organization, ethical responsibilities and much else. The article engages with approaches to time that foreground the work needed to create time and move ethically within it, including Charles W. Mills’s white time and Kyle Powys Whyte’s kinship time. The author suggests that a stronger emphasis on the temporality of community, solidarity, and coalition—versus what James Hatley and Deborah Bird Rose have described as temporal narcissism—can better foreground the kinds of work that needs to be done, particularly by those with privilege.
这篇文章批判了长期思考的概念及其支持者的主张，即长期思考将有助于解决主流时间概念的失误，尤其是在环境危机方面。文章通过对《长今之钟》（Clock of the Long Now）和金-斯坦利-罗宾逊（Kim Stanley Robinson）的《未来之部》（The Ministry for the Future）的分析，建议我们对这一概念在所谓的 "时间洗礼"（chronowashing）中的使用保持警惕。就像我们更熟悉的 "洗绿"（即通过声称正在解决问题来掩盖环境问题）一样，文章探讨了这些长期思考的例子是如何分散人们对采掘主义、种族主义和环境不公的注意力，从而使人们更难解决其中的复杂问题。文章特别讨论了一些例子，在这些例子中，长期思考为环境问题披上了一层外衣，但实际上却与建立更公平的关系形式的工作脱节。作为对比，文章作者提出了以下问题：当我们把问题归咎于短期思维，并提出长期思维作为解决方案时，我们失去了什么？针对被时间冲淡的环境时间，作者主张采用更复杂的方法，明确考虑不平等、政治组织、伦理责任和其他许多方面的时间性。文章采用了一些时间方法，包括查尔斯-米尔斯（Charles W. Mills）的 "白色时间"（white time）和凯尔-鲍伊斯-怀特（Kyle Powys Whyte）的 "亲缘时间"（kinship time）。作者认为，更加强调社区、团结和联盟的时间性--而不是詹姆斯-哈特利（James Hatley）和德博拉-伯德-罗斯（Deborah Bird Rose）所描述的时间自恋--可以更好地突出需要完成的工作，尤其是那些拥有特权的人需要完成的工作。
{"title":"Is Long-Term Thinking a Trap?","authors":"Michelle Bastian","doi":"10.1215/22011919-11150043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-11150043","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This provocation critiques the notion of long-term thinking and the claims of its proponents that it will help address failures in dominant conceptions of time, particularly in regard to environmental crises. Drawing on analyses of the Clock of the Long Now and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, the article suggests that we be more wary of the concept’s use in what we might call chronowashing. Like the more familiar greenwashing, where environmental issues are hidden by claims to be addressing the problem, the article explores how these examples of long-term thinking distract from extractivism, racism, and environmental injustice, making it harder to address the complexities involved. In particular, the article discusses examples where long-term thinking provides a veneer of environmental concern that actually disconnects from the work of building more equitable forms of relation. As a contrast, the article’s author asks: What is lost when we diagnose a problem as arising due to short-term thinking and propose long-term thinking as the solution? Against chronowashed environmental time, the author argues for more complex approaches that explicitly take into account the temporalities of inequality, political organization, ethical responsibilities and much else. The article engages with approaches to time that foreground the work needed to create time and move ethically within it, including Charles W. Mills’s white time and Kyle Powys Whyte’s kinship time. The author suggests that a stronger emphasis on the temporality of community, solidarity, and coalition—versus what James Hatley and Deborah Bird Rose have described as temporal narcissism—can better foreground the kinds of work that needs to be done, particularly by those with privilege.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141712062","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-07-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-11150147
Hannah Klaubert
This essay engages debates about hopeful critical scholarship in the environmental humanities via an analysis of the figure of the Babushka of Chornobyl in literature, film, and photography. The argument for hazardous hope unfolds in two steps. First, the article discusses how contaminated environments like the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, where the Babushkas live, invite an interpretative move that models what Paul Ricoeur and, more recently, Rita Felski have problematized as the hermeneutics of suspicion. Such a move involves a mistrust of what is at the surface, calling for the exposure of hidden material agencies beyond what can be sensorily perceived. This suspicious disposition is also the critical stance of much environmental humanities scholarship, even when it attempts to be hopeful. Second, the article proposes that the cultural texts it examines not only model a suspicious gaze but can also easily be read suspiciously—as glossing over the harrowing realities of a precarious life in a sacrifice zone. Yet they also show us pockets of beauty, joy, and community and hint toward reformulations of environmental futurity that cannot easily be accounted for via such suspicious criticism. In that, they invite us to leave behind, if only temporarily, the hermeneutics of suspicion and to explore hazardous hope in a contaminated environment.
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Pub Date : 2024-07-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-11150035
Alex A. Moulton
This article suggests that the notion of “the plot” has methodological and epistemological value for the environmental humanities. Conceptualized in the work of Sylvia Wynter, the plot—as material site and narrative mode crucial to the novel form—offers a heuristic for analyzing the conjuncture of political economy, social-cultural aesthetics, and power. The plot names places that have been created through improvisational forms of world-making against racial and socioecological domination. The plot also names an insurgent scheme that is staged from peripheralized places and that is crucial to maintaining these spaces of insurgent living. Plotting is presented as an analytical mode that offers scholars in the environmental humanities: a framework for place-specific historical-geographical and ecological study; a critical cartographical praxis; and an approach for examining the logics and affective relations of place production. Environmental humanities scholarship that engages with Black ecocriticism along these lines is well positioned to examine the geographies of the past, present, and future with attention to the racial politics of human embodiment. Such scholarship would be characterized by more careful use of spatial metaphors, ensuring that ecocriticism and broader environmental humanities work considers the material and physical racial ecologies alongside the discursive and representational environments.
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Pub Date : 2024-07-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-11149811
Natascha de Vasconcellos Otoya
Mr. João de Deus, an elderly Afro-Brazilian man, worked on the ground and contributed to the beginning of the modern Brazilian oil industry. His is a story of environmental hope and personal resilience with roots in the deep past and outcomes that reverberate to the present. João de Deus’s story reveals many layers of history beyond human activity, weaving together different temporalities and kinds of hope. This article layers different temporalities—geological, ecological, and human—to emphasize their interconnectedness. As a method, layering various chronological scales helps highlight how they collectively contribute to a complex and nuanced history of a particular individual, community, or place. It considers the simultaneous existence and impact of multiple historical layers, emphasizing the interplay of different historical timescales and historical actors. João de Deus, situated atop ancient geological layers potentially rich in oil, experienced life as a Black man in slavery-era Brazil. Amid the ecological presence of African oil palms and the emerging industrialization of the Maraú Peninsula, he found himself entangled in multiple concurrent histories of different chronological scales, all influencing his destiny.
若昂-德-迪乌斯先生是一位年长的非洲裔巴西人，他在当地工作，为巴西现代石油工业的开端做出了贡献。他的故事蕴含着环境的希望和个人的坚韧不拔精神，根植于深厚的过去，其成果回荡至今。若昂-德-迪乌斯的故事揭示了人类活动之外的多层次历史，将不同的时间性和希望交织在一起。本文将不同的时间性--地质、生态和人类--分层，以强调它们之间的相互联系。作为一种方法，将不同的时间尺度分层有助于突出它们如何共同构成特定个人、社区或地方的复杂而微妙的历史。它考虑了多个历史层次的同时存在和影响，强调了不同历史时间尺度和历史参与者的相互作用。若昂-德-迪乌斯（João de Deus）位于可能蕴藏丰富石油的古代地质层之上，在奴隶制时代的巴西经历了黑人的生活。在非洲油棕榈树的生态环境和马拉乌半岛新兴的工业化进程中，他发现自己被卷入了不同时间尺度的多重并存历史中，所有这些都影响着他的命运。
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Pub Date : 2024-07-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-11150051
Randy Laist
The Secret Life of Plants, a 1973 book that was developed into a 1979 documentary film, reports on a flurry of parapsychological research involving attempts to communicate with plants using electrodes, lie detectors, and psychic powers. The book highlights the work of Cleve Backster, an American researcher who claimed he could demonstrate that plants could read people’s minds and that measurements of his plants’ emotional responses to the randomized death of brine shrimp revealed empathetic connections “even on the lower levels of life.” Although this research appears risible in retrospect, Backster’s work expresses attempts to conceptualize plant subjectivity and plant agency against the backdrop of the emergent environmental movement. While it might be overly charitable to credit these experiments in plant communication with inspiring contemporary research into the ways plants share information with one another and with other species, Backster’s outlandish investigations suggest enduring object lessons for human beings in general and for the environmental humanities field in particular regarding the ways that plants continue to baffle us, to enchant us, and even, in their own weird way, to speak to us.
{"title":"Communicating with Plants","authors":"Randy Laist","doi":"10.1215/22011919-11150051","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-11150051","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The Secret Life of Plants, a 1973 book that was developed into a 1979 documentary film, reports on a flurry of parapsychological research involving attempts to communicate with plants using electrodes, lie detectors, and psychic powers. The book highlights the work of Cleve Backster, an American researcher who claimed he could demonstrate that plants could read people’s minds and that measurements of his plants’ emotional responses to the randomized death of brine shrimp revealed empathetic connections “even on the lower levels of life.” Although this research appears risible in retrospect, Backster’s work expresses attempts to conceptualize plant subjectivity and plant agency against the backdrop of the emergent environmental movement. While it might be overly charitable to credit these experiments in plant communication with inspiring contemporary research into the ways plants share information with one another and with other species, Backster’s outlandish investigations suggest enduring object lessons for human beings in general and for the environmental humanities field in particular regarding the ways that plants continue to baffle us, to enchant us, and even, in their own weird way, to speak to us.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141689324","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-07-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-11150091
Lukas Becker
The omnipresence of petroleum makes it an essential part of a history of the modern world. However, this ubiquity also presents a challenge as to which archival materials historians should use to tell this story. By using material gathered during fieldwork in the Colombian oil city of Barrancabermeja, this article aims to investigate the nature of the oil archive. Situated within the broader field of literature on the history of petroleum and archives, the investigation touches upon records in diverse archives, the urban fabric, and repositories of oil’s history to be found underground. By pinpointing such materials across Barrancabermeja, the article argues that the oil archive is not just found in historical documents but embedded in the landscape, in social practices, in human bodies, and even in the geology of the earth. To understand the deep-seated influence of oil, the article argues for the establishment of an interdisciplinary working group of the oil archive. Faced with the impending challenge of climate change and the long-lasting legacy of the fossil fuel age, such a group could provide evidence for how humanity got to this stage, point to different imaginaries of past and future, and clarify issues surrounding climate justice and responsibility.
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Pub Date : 2024-07-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-11150099
Siobhan Angus, Warren Cariou
This two-part essay turns to the landscapes of bitumen mining in the Athabasca tar sands in western Canada. Despite the environmental costs of the tar sands mining process, the Canadian state remains invested in oil extraction in the tar sands. Starting from the premise that the extraction and burning of this bitumen was and is not inevitable, this dialogue locates hazardous hope in the landscapes of the Athabasca region. To do so, the first section is an analysis of Warren Cariou’s photographic practice, situating his work within themes of toxicity and hope. Written by an art historian, it argues that we can read the petrographs through a mode of critical spectatorship that generates questions about how extraction makes our world and how these processes are historically contingent choices based in what society has chosen to value. The second part is a short reflection by Warren Cariou on his practice and how he theorizes hope in the context of pollution.
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