Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-9481473
Fernando Varela
The myxoma virus (MYXV) was used in Australia in 1950 to control, albeit temporarily, the overpopulation of the invasive European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus). A different strand of the virus was released in France two years later, resulting in the drastic decline of European rabbits in the Iberian Peninsula and the rest of Europe. The MYXV’s disease, myxomatosis, is a highly contagious and normally fatal infection in a rabbit species lacking resistance, such as the European rabbit. As myxomatosis was spreading across the European continent, Spain started to invest in nuclear energy. The use of myxomatosis as a bioweapon and the creation of nuclear energy capable of radioactive pollution are also at the core of Spanish filmmaker Carlos Saura’s La caza (The Hunt, 1966). This article argues that The Hunt provides an important examination on extinction and biopolitics at both local and global levels through its portrayal of myxomatosis and radioactivity.
{"title":"Myxomatosis and Radioactivity in Carlos Saura’s La caza (The Hunt, 1966)","authors":"Fernando Varela","doi":"10.1215/22011919-9481473","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9481473","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The myxoma virus (MYXV) was used in Australia in 1950 to control, albeit temporarily, the overpopulation of the invasive European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus). A different strand of the virus was released in France two years later, resulting in the drastic decline of European rabbits in the Iberian Peninsula and the rest of Europe. The MYXV’s disease, myxomatosis, is a highly contagious and normally fatal infection in a rabbit species lacking resistance, such as the European rabbit. As myxomatosis was spreading across the European continent, Spain started to invest in nuclear energy. The use of myxomatosis as a bioweapon and the creation of nuclear energy capable of radioactive pollution are also at the core of Spanish filmmaker Carlos Saura’s La caza (The Hunt, 1966). This article argues that The Hunt provides an important examination on extinction and biopolitics at both local and global levels through its portrayal of myxomatosis and radioactivity.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46025437","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 : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-9320156
Jeremy J. Schmidt
In 2019 several funerals were held for glaciers. If enough glaciers die, could they go extinct? Is there geologic extinction? Yes. This article develops three arguments to support this claim. The first revisits Georges Cuvier’s original argument for extinction and its reliance on geology, especially glaciers. Retracing connections to glaciers and the narrowing of extinction to biological species in the nineteenth century, the author argues that anthropogenic forcing on how the Earth system functions—the Anthropocene—warrants rethinking extinction geologically. The second argument examines the specificity of ice loss and multiple practices responding to this loss: from art exhibits at United Nations climate change meetings to anticolonial claims for the right to be cold. The third argument consolidates a theme built across the article regarding how Isabelle Stengers’s notion of ecologies of practices provides an approach to geologic extinction that recognizes both relational and nonrelational loss.
{"title":"Glacial Deaths, Geologic Extinction","authors":"Jeremy J. Schmidt","doi":"10.1215/22011919-9320156","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9320156","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In 2019 several funerals were held for glaciers. If enough glaciers die, could they go extinct? Is there geologic extinction? Yes. This article develops three arguments to support this claim. The first revisits Georges Cuvier’s original argument for extinction and its reliance on geology, especially glaciers. Retracing connections to glaciers and the narrowing of extinction to biological species in the nineteenth century, the author argues that anthropogenic forcing on how the Earth system functions—the Anthropocene—warrants rethinking extinction geologically. The second argument examines the specificity of ice loss and multiple practices responding to this loss: from art exhibits at United Nations climate change meetings to anticolonial claims for the right to be cold. The third argument consolidates a theme built across the article regarding how Isabelle Stengers’s notion of ecologies of practices provides an approach to geologic extinction that recognizes both relational and nonrelational loss.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45802687","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 : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-9320200
K. Linthicum, Mikaela Relford, J. C. Johnson
Native American authors in the first half of the nineteenth century—the dawn of the Anthropocene in some accounts—were witness to the rapid expansion of settler-colonialism powered by new ideologies of energy and fueled by fossil capitalism. These authors, though, resisted extractive metaphors for energy and fuel, offering more organic and intimate visions of energy instead. Using energy humanities theories developed by Warren Cariou (Métis) and Bob Johnson, among others, this article will analyze Mary Jemison’s (Seneca) autobiography; Jane Johnston Schoolcraft’s (Ojibwe) poem, “On the Doric Rock, Lake Superior”; and John Rollin Ridge’s (Cherokee) novel, The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta. These works show how Native American authors defined energy as cyclical and intimate in contrast to the growing settler society’s vision of linear, unending extraction. This article argues that nineteenth-century Native American Anglophone literatures expand the scope of the energy humanities by describing energy intimacy while also extending the histories of Indigenous resistance to settler energy imaginaries. Nineteenth-century Native American literatures can make important contributions to the scope of the energy humanities and need to be integrated into the field to grasp the full scale of current environmental crises.
{"title":"Defining Energy in Nineteenth-Century Native American Literature","authors":"K. Linthicum, Mikaela Relford, J. C. Johnson","doi":"10.1215/22011919-9320200","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9320200","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Native American authors in the first half of the nineteenth century—the dawn of the Anthropocene in some accounts—were witness to the rapid expansion of settler-colonialism powered by new ideologies of energy and fueled by fossil capitalism. These authors, though, resisted extractive metaphors for energy and fuel, offering more organic and intimate visions of energy instead. Using energy humanities theories developed by Warren Cariou (Métis) and Bob Johnson, among others, this article will analyze Mary Jemison’s (Seneca) autobiography; Jane Johnston Schoolcraft’s (Ojibwe) poem, “On the Doric Rock, Lake Superior”; and John Rollin Ridge’s (Cherokee) novel, The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta. These works show how Native American authors defined energy as cyclical and intimate in contrast to the growing settler society’s vision of linear, unending extraction. This article argues that nineteenth-century Native American Anglophone literatures expand the scope of the energy humanities by describing energy intimacy while also extending the histories of Indigenous resistance to settler energy imaginaries. Nineteenth-century Native American literatures can make important contributions to the scope of the energy humanities and need to be integrated into the field to grasp the full scale of current environmental crises.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42582256","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 : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-9320244
Peter Johnson
Michel Serres’s philosophy is scantly known outside France. In this review essay the author takes up three books that Serres published late on in his life and that engage in different ways with the environmental emergency. These short eminently readable books appeal to a wide audience and at the same time draw together major concerns and approaches from his life’s work. In each of the three books, Serres explores the preconditions for, and the emerging sense of, a contract between humans and the rest of the natural world.
{"title":"The Inclusive Philosophy of Michel Serres for Our Time of Crisis","authors":"Peter Johnson","doi":"10.1215/22011919-9320244","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9320244","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Michel Serres’s philosophy is scantly known outside France. In this review essay the author takes up three books that Serres published late on in his life and that engage in different ways with the environmental emergency. These short eminently readable books appeal to a wide audience and at the same time draw together major concerns and approaches from his life’s work. In each of the three books, Serres explores the preconditions for, and the emerging sense of, a contract between humans and the rest of the natural world.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":"2 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41250750","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 : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-9320233
N. Castree
This article suggests that global environmental assessments (GEAs) may be a potent means for making the environmental humanities more consequential outside universities. So far most GEAs have been led by geoscientists, with mainstream social science in support. However, there is no reason why the concept of assessment cannot be elasticated to include the concerns of interpretive social science and the humanities. Building on the forty-year history and authority of GEAs as a means to bridging the gap between the research world and the wider world, this article identifies the potential that reformatted assessments hold for more impactful work by environmental humanists. It suggests some next steps for rethinking the means and ends of assessment toward a new paradigm that bridges geoscience, mainstream social science, and humanistic thinking about the nonhuman world. This paradigm would explore the human dimensions of environmental change fully. The timing is propitious: independently GEAs are undergoing change at the very moment that the “What next?” question is being asked by many environmental humanists. This article is intended to inspire debate and, ultimately, action. It both makes the case for more humanistic GEAs and offers examples of potential work packages.
{"title":"Making the Environmental Humanities Consequential in “The Age of Consequences”","authors":"N. Castree","doi":"10.1215/22011919-9320233","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9320233","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article suggests that global environmental assessments (GEAs) may be a potent means for making the environmental humanities more consequential outside universities. So far most GEAs have been led by geoscientists, with mainstream social science in support. However, there is no reason why the concept of assessment cannot be elasticated to include the concerns of interpretive social science and the humanities. Building on the forty-year history and authority of GEAs as a means to bridging the gap between the research world and the wider world, this article identifies the potential that reformatted assessments hold for more impactful work by environmental humanists. It suggests some next steps for rethinking the means and ends of assessment toward a new paradigm that bridges geoscience, mainstream social science, and humanistic thinking about the nonhuman world. This paradigm would explore the human dimensions of environmental change fully. The timing is propitious: independently GEAs are undergoing change at the very moment that the “What next?” question is being asked by many environmental humanists. This article is intended to inspire debate and, ultimately, action. It both makes the case for more humanistic GEAs and offers examples of potential work packages.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45482890","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 : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-9320178
Luísa Reis-Castro
The Aedes aegypti mosquito, known as the vector for Zika, dengue, chikungunya, and yellow fever viruses, has historically been targeted by public health campaigns as an enemy to be eliminated. However, new strategies, such as the transgenic approach, biologically modify the A. aegypti so that they can be deployed to control their own population—here, mosquito breeding and mating is operationalized as an insecticide. In this case, the insect must be simultaneously a friend and an enemy, cared for and killed, and it must establish encounters and nonencounters. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at a “biofactory” in the northeast of Brazil dedicated to mass-producing these transgenic mosquitoes, this article investigates the new forms of labor and value produced through these contrasting human-mosquito relations. The author also examines how the project is implemented within broader geopolitics of experimentation and more-than-human gendered conceptions. Analyzing the multispecies relationships engendered under the premise that it is possible to produce nonencounters, she identifies the historical conditions and promissory claims of transforming the A. aegypti ’s reproductive capacity into labor for killing. Such recasting yields what the author calls the “nonencounter value” within the scientific remaking of mosquitoes, their becoming and being.
{"title":"Becoming Without","authors":"Luísa Reis-Castro","doi":"10.1215/22011919-9320178","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9320178","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The Aedes aegypti mosquito, known as the vector for Zika, dengue, chikungunya, and yellow fever viruses, has historically been targeted by public health campaigns as an enemy to be eliminated. However, new strategies, such as the transgenic approach, biologically modify the A. aegypti so that they can be deployed to control their own population—here, mosquito breeding and mating is operationalized as an insecticide. In this case, the insect must be simultaneously a friend and an enemy, cared for and killed, and it must establish encounters and nonencounters. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at a “biofactory” in the northeast of Brazil dedicated to mass-producing these transgenic mosquitoes, this article investigates the new forms of labor and value produced through these contrasting human-mosquito relations. The author also examines how the project is implemented within broader geopolitics of experimentation and more-than-human gendered conceptions. Analyzing the multispecies relationships engendered under the premise that it is possible to produce nonencounters, she identifies the historical conditions and promissory claims of transforming the A. aegypti ’s reproductive capacity into labor for killing. Such recasting yields what the author calls the “nonencounter value” within the scientific remaking of mosquitoes, their becoming and being.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47121616","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 : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-9320189
R. Nixon
Why have millions of readers and viewers become magnetized by the hitherto arcane field of plant communication? The article argues that the contemporary appeal of plant communication is rooted in a quest for alternative modes of being to neoliberalism, modes more accommodating of the coexistence of cooperation and competition in human and more-than-human communities. This ascendant understanding of plant communication and forest dynamics offers a counternarrative of flourishing, a model of what George Monbiot has called, in another context, “private sufficiency and public wealth.”
{"title":"The Less Selfish Gene","authors":"R. Nixon","doi":"10.1215/22011919-9320189","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9320189","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Why have millions of readers and viewers become magnetized by the hitherto arcane field of plant communication? The article argues that the contemporary appeal of plant communication is rooted in a quest for alternative modes of being to neoliberalism, modes more accommodating of the coexistence of cooperation and competition in human and more-than-human communities. This ascendant understanding of plant communication and forest dynamics offers a counternarrative of flourishing, a model of what George Monbiot has called, in another context, “private sufficiency and public wealth.”","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46429789","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}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：