Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-10422333
Pieter Vermeulen
This essay argues for the deep affinities between neoliberalism and environmental thought that embraces such figures as fungi, swarms, and especially trees. While critics like Rob Nixon turn to trees to promote modes of cooperative biology and plant communication as blueprints for more symbiotic forms of sociality that offer alternatives to “hyperindividualism and hyperconsumption,” they share with neoliberalism a more fundamental ontology of what Friedrich Hayek (after Michael Polanyi) calls “spontaneous order.” Drawing on recent revisionary scholarship on neoliberalism, the first half of the essay argues that neoliberalism is less usefully thought of as an individualist anthropology than as a worldview that subordinates individuals to a nontransparent and distributed higher intelligence—that of the market. The second half of the essay illustrates the uncomfortable overlap between neoliberal and environmental imaginaries through a discussion of Richard Powers’s celebrated novel The Overstory. The overwhelmingly positive reception of the novel has praised its power to embody the arboreal life cycle it represents, but it has remained curiously blind to the way the novel’s formal choices ask its characters to submit to the powers of a superior computerized intelligence—a gesture that is conspicuously close to the way neoliberalism compels individuals’ submission to nontransparent market forces. The novel and its critical reception, like particular strands in the environmental humanities more generally, show that the opposition between the environmental imagination and neoliberalism is neutralized by a shared commitment to fictions of spontaneous order.
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Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-10422311
Hjördis Becker-Lindenthal, Simone Kotva
This article analyzes the theme of practicing for death as it has emerged in recent environmental discourse. In the first part, it situates Roy Scranton’s Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (2015) in the context of new critical approaches to death and asceticism, especially Peter Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics (2013). In the second part, it offers an environmental reading of the “remembrance of death” as it appears in John Climacus’s influential seventh-century manual, The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Here, the authors build on Sloterdijk’s remarks on Climacus while developing Sloterdijk’s analysis substantially, drawing (in part three) on ecotheological readings of Byzantine asceticism to elucidate Climacus’s environmental practice. The authors argue that what is at stake in the remembrance of death is the death not of the self but of a perception of the self that valorizes the self-possessed subject. In the final part, they compare the death of specific self-images in Christian asceticism to the death of the human qua self-possessed subject in the posthumanist ethics of Rosi Braidotti. At the same time, the authors see Climacus as deepening positions sketched out in Braidotti’s posthumanism and providing a critical perspective on the idea of resigning from care.
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Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-10422278
M. Tam
This article explores soil and the multiple pathways it has provided for the coconstitution of forms of life that might be possible following the Fukushima nuclear fallout. In Iitate, a former evacuation zone where radiation still lingers, farmers and concerned citizens deploy a coproduction framework that involves experts in making their own science. Incorporating tactile knowledge of the environment, they make life-strengthening claims on the future amid state promises of revival and progress. Soil becomes alive in madei, which emerges from the processes of separating radiocesium from topsoil, growing rice, and other improvisations for relating to soils that cascade to regenerate a livable world. This article discusses how the Japanese state utilizes temporal scales that orient its citizenry to a future associated with accelerated and intensified productivity as a sign of progress, incorporating decontamination technologies to assert control over organic lives and inorganic matter to make them productive for humans. Through madei, this article addresses how soil guides human attention to the rediscovery of interspecies temporalities, paces, and rhythms, reconfiguring radioactivity to create what I conceptualize as a regenerative time to underscore how actors reanimate the future(s) in the here and now.
{"title":"“Skin of the Earth”","authors":"M. Tam","doi":"10.1215/22011919-10422278","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10422278","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article explores soil and the multiple pathways it has provided for the coconstitution of forms of life that might be possible following the Fukushima nuclear fallout. In Iitate, a former evacuation zone where radiation still lingers, farmers and concerned citizens deploy a coproduction framework that involves experts in making their own science. Incorporating tactile knowledge of the environment, they make life-strengthening claims on the future amid state promises of revival and progress. Soil becomes alive in madei, which emerges from the processes of separating radiocesium from topsoil, growing rice, and other improvisations for relating to soils that cascade to regenerate a livable world. This article discusses how the Japanese state utilizes temporal scales that orient its citizenry to a future associated with accelerated and intensified productivity as a sign of progress, incorporating decontamination technologies to assert control over organic lives and inorganic matter to make them productive for humans. Through madei, this article addresses how soil guides human attention to the rediscovery of interspecies temporalities, paces, and rhythms, reconfiguring radioactivity to create what I conceptualize as a regenerative time to underscore how actors reanimate the future(s) in the here and now.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44252087","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 : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-10422377
M. Krawczyk
As an environmental humanist, I grab a camera to mediate the world around me. The short film LAND/SCAPE (2020), cocreated by two donkeys (Dondolo and Giorgiana), fellow PhD candidate Giulia Lepori, and me, was filmed on the Mediterranean island of Sicily in the Valley of Sagana. As part of our doctoral projects, we were involved in managing the land in that valley and in undertaking caring performances among this lively meshwork. Simona Trecarichi and Danilo Colomela, the two permaculture designers behind this project, have been redesigning their landscape over the past fifteen years. In walking through the paths paved by the donkeys Dondolo and Giorgiana, I was slowly understanding other-than-human relations in the biome. I was becoming-with donkeys in their becoming-with land. Through my experimental aesthetic intervention in mediating the donkeys’ becoming-with land, I strapped the camera to Dondolo. In this article, I combine ethnographic multispecies vignettes from my fieldwork with my artist’s statement about my practice. I reflect upon cinema’s unique affinity with the Anthropocene—that double bind between the media and nature—and how the biogeomorphic qualities found in the film diffract the world back to us, enabling the viewers to feel the cinematic land affect. This is not the filmmaker’s gaze nor his story. It is a film world’s landsoundscape filled with more-than-human bodies; as such, this story belongs to the land and the earth others. Please watch the film LAND/SCAPE first, and only then engage with the written word.
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Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-10422322
Teresa Shewry
This essay builds on environmental humanistic scholarship about the night in a study of arts associated with the Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve, a lighting-regulated locale in Aotearoa / New Zealand, that is part of an international network of places intended to protect the night sky. Chris Murphy’s time lapse, South Celestial Pole from Mt John (2016), shot in Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve, hastens time and utilizes a star tracker so that the city and lake of Takapō turn sideways against stars. The film connects relative darkness and highly visible celestial phenomena to startling perceptual change. The film is less evocative of how darkness and other nocturnal processes are interwoven with colonial histories and interconnected socio-environmental injustices. Robert Sullivan, a poet whose ancestral lands include the Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve, is attentive to such concerns in the collection Star Waka (1999). Sullivan uses karakia (chants, incantation) to frame how stars and darkness nurture Māori practices like navigation but also to evoke precariousness woven into the night, from colonial astronomy to socially uneven policing and lighting. This essay, then, argues for critical caution regarding arts and narratives that only emphasize night’s wondrous qualities and its endangerment. Rather than framing night simply as a good phase to be protected, we might participate in night by addressing both the injustices and the varied dreams and struggles that it bears.
这篇文章建立在一项与奥拉基·麦肯齐国际夜空保护区有关的艺术研究中关于夜晚的环境人文奖学金的基础上。奥拉基·麦肯齐国际夜空保护区是新西兰奥特罗阿的一个照明管制地区，是一个旨在保护夜空的国际网络的一部分。克里斯·墨菲的《约翰山的南极天极》(2016)是在奥拉基·麦肯齐国际黑暗天空保护区拍摄的，它加速了时间的流逝，并利用了一个恒星追踪器，使takapki的城市和湖泊在星星的衬托下转向一边。这部电影将相对黑暗和高度可见的天体现象与惊人的感知变化联系起来。这部电影较少唤起人们对黑暗和其他夜间活动如何与殖民历史和相互关联的社会环境不公正交织在一起的回忆。诗人罗伯特·沙利文(Robert Sullivan)的祖籍包括奥拉基·麦肯齐国际黑暗天空保护区(Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve)，他在《星瓦卡》(Star Waka, 1999)中关注到了这些问题。沙利文用karakia(圣歌、咒语)来描绘星星和黑暗如何滋养Māori航行等活动，但也唤起了编织在黑夜中的不稳定，从殖民时期的天文学到社会上不平衡的治安和照明。因此，这篇文章认为，对于那些只强调夜晚奇妙的品质及其危险的艺术和叙事，应该持谨慎的态度。与其将夜晚简单地定义为一个需要保护的好阶段，我们不如通过解决不公正以及夜晚承载的各种梦想和斗争来参与夜晚。
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Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-10422344
Yanbing Er
This article critiques current theories of the commons as having been produced and sustained by human-centered paradigms of intellectual reasoning. It develops a commons beyond the human in response, which offers another way to envisage the commons and its pledge to the construction of better, alternate futures. Rather than advance yet another definition of the commons, this article examines how its means of knowledge production might ensue differently by dislocating the concept from its existing points of epistemological orientation. At the heart of this inquiry lies an attempt to rethink the commons concept beyond its regulating logics of liberal humanism, a radical reconsideration of the kinds of politics it should and might still enable beyond the lure of progressive reason. Turning to a reading of Alexis Wright’s 2013 novel The Swan Book, the article argues that a commons beyond the human gathers in the text through the more-than-human existence engendered between a young Aboriginal girl, Oblivia, and a flock of black swans. The novel presents neither the disavowal of the inherited knowledges of the commons nor a concrete policy to herald its appearance in a conjectural future, but a critical expansion of its transitive acts of worlding. This is made feasible by its insistence on upholding an Indigenous Australian ontological reality as the structuring provision for its narratives—one that has long stressed its dissonance from dominant Western genres of thinking and being.
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Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-10422366
Hannah Fair, M. Mcmullen
This provocation asks what it could mean to recuperate the concept of species-being from its anthropocentric origins and expand it beyond the human by placing an emergent nonhuman labor literature in dialogue with recent rearticulations of Marx’s work on alienation. There is increasing interest in different modes of nonhuman labor, recognizing how animals are put to work to produce value for capitalism. This provocation advances these debates by asking: If nonhuman animals can be recognized as laboring, and as alienated laborers, can they, like humans, be alienated not just from the activities and products of their labor, but from their species-being? What would it mean to recognize forms of nonhuman species-being in which animals engage in world-making practices on their own terms? Could this reify the bounded notion of species or encourage a recourse to nature as a moral authority? And at a time of significant anthropogenic environmental transformation, are some modes of nonhuman species-being permanently foreclosed? This article explores these questions, tentatively working toward a theory of nonhuman species-being, considering its possibilities and political affordances.
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Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-10422355
Tobias Skiveren
In recent years, the critical vocabulary of the environmental humanities has shifted. After a decade burgeoning with new materialist explorations of intra-active entanglements and nonhuman vitalities, scholars are today becoming increasingly interested in the environmental effects of capitalism, its ecological rifts, fossil economy, and omnipresent wastescapes. Driving this shift is a reinvigoration of eco-Marxist thinking, which not only offers new focus points but also launches philosophical polemics against the field’s longstanding turn to matter. Facing these polemics, scholars in the environmental humanities are currently facing a difficult choice: should we opt for an “old” or a “new” materialism? This essay argues that this confrontation between new materialism and eco-Marxism pivots not on ontological differences, as is often assumed, but on diverging attitudes toward critical methodologies. It claims specifically that many of the recent polemics practice a kind of philosophical shadowboxing that blurs a more fundamental disagreement about the role and status of “critique.” Staging an encounter between Andreas Malm’s The Progress of This Storm (2018) and Jane Bennett’s Influx and Efflux (2020), the essay makes its case by demonstrating, first, how an attachment to critical methodologies drives eco-Marxists to polemicize against ontologies that, in fact, resemble their own. It then shows how new materialists advance such ontologies to supplement these critical methodologies with more affectively engaged modes of scholarship. By framing the debate in this way, the essay ultimately aims to push back against the methodological dogmatism of eco-Marxists who take critique to be the only legitimate mode of inquiry.
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