Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-10422267
Paul G. Keil
Domesticated pigs (Sus scrofa) were introduced as livestock in Australia by European settlers, and now a large population is living wild. Rather than interrogate the settler pig as co-colonizer and destroyer of Australian ecologies, this article employs Deborah Bird Rose’s concept of “unmaking”—a process that fractures relationality in service of control—to articulate the relational violence done to the free-living pig by naming it a feral animal. An examination of the nonhuman’s historical entanglement with Anglo-Australian settlers in New South Wales will trace the free-living pigs’ shifting agency and identity. Introduced pigs were modern English breeds, domesticates in nascent capitalist stages of unmaking. Yet, these animals were made anew in Australia, living largely unmediated and demonstrating remarkable adaptability to novel environments. This article analyzes how porcine bodies and identities took shape in connection to a hunting culture and wild pork economy, a practice that encouraged Sus scrofa’s transformative ability to move between wild and domestic domains. Then, in the 1950s, how farmers, veterinarians, and government actors with converging motivations sought to reductively read the free-living pig as toxic and illegitimate, and to rebrand the “wild” pig as “feral.” To be feral in Australia is to be part of a systematic process that institutes strict limitations on an animal’s relational possibilities. By problematizing all life-sustaining connections the nonhuman being has with their environment, this process endeavors to radically unmake the socio-ecologies that constitute their being. Unmaking the feral targets the relational knots that make existence possible.
{"title":"Unmaking the Feral","authors":"Paul G. Keil","doi":"10.1215/22011919-10422267","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10422267","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Domesticated pigs (Sus scrofa) were introduced as livestock in Australia by European settlers, and now a large population is living wild. Rather than interrogate the settler pig as co-colonizer and destroyer of Australian ecologies, this article employs Deborah Bird Rose’s concept of “unmaking”—a process that fractures relationality in service of control—to articulate the relational violence done to the free-living pig by naming it a feral animal. An examination of the nonhuman’s historical entanglement with Anglo-Australian settlers in New South Wales will trace the free-living pigs’ shifting agency and identity. Introduced pigs were modern English breeds, domesticates in nascent capitalist stages of unmaking. Yet, these animals were made anew in Australia, living largely unmediated and demonstrating remarkable adaptability to novel environments. This article analyzes how porcine bodies and identities took shape in connection to a hunting culture and wild pork economy, a practice that encouraged Sus scrofa’s transformative ability to move between wild and domestic domains. Then, in the 1950s, how farmers, veterinarians, and government actors with converging motivations sought to reductively read the free-living pig as toxic and illegitimate, and to rebrand the “wild” pig as “feral.” To be feral in Australia is to be part of a systematic process that institutes strict limitations on an animal’s relational possibilities. By problematizing all life-sustaining connections the nonhuman being has with their environment, this process endeavors to radically unmake the socio-ecologies that constitute their being. Unmaking the feral targets the relational knots that make existence possible.","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":"42964827","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: 10.1215/22011919-10422256
Desirée Kumpf
Under the banner of green growth, a number of theories currently promote new models that seek to decouple economic growth from excessive resource use and its adverse ecological impacts. But how exactly can one generate profit without disturbing ecologies? Drawing on ethnographic data from Indian tea plantations that are in the process of being converted to organic agriculture, this article examines specific attempts to alter the intersection of vegetal and financial growth. As a cultivation system, plantations intensify the manipulation of plant growth for monetary ends; they seek to mass produce and standardize valuable vegetal materials and radically simplify the ecologies that surround these monocrops. Taking a multispecies perspective, this article traces how green growth experiments seek to change the forms, rhythms, and ecological alliances that characterize the tea plant’s growth. The article argues that, on organic tea plantations, green growth aspires to harness the unruly aspects of nonhuman life to make monocultures more productive. In the process, the nonscalable impulses of vegetal growth, unpredictable interactions with wildlife, and even the potentially harmful metabolisms of insects and fungi become integral parts of plantation cultivation—though not always successfully. The article widens our understanding of how green production methods are envisioned not as alternatives to but rather as support for industrial cultivation systems.
{"title":"The Organic Monocrop","authors":"Desirée Kumpf","doi":"10.1215/22011919-10422256","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10422256","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Under the banner of green growth, a number of theories currently promote new models that seek to decouple economic growth from excessive resource use and its adverse ecological impacts. But how exactly can one generate profit without disturbing ecologies? Drawing on ethnographic data from Indian tea plantations that are in the process of being converted to organic agriculture, this article examines specific attempts to alter the intersection of vegetal and financial growth. As a cultivation system, plantations intensify the manipulation of plant growth for monetary ends; they seek to mass produce and standardize valuable vegetal materials and radically simplify the ecologies that surround these monocrops. Taking a multispecies perspective, this article traces how green growth experiments seek to change the forms, rhythms, and ecological alliances that characterize the tea plant’s growth. The article argues that, on organic tea plantations, green growth aspires to harness the unruly aspects of nonhuman life to make monocultures more productive. In the process, the nonscalable impulses of vegetal growth, unpredictable interactions with wildlife, and even the potentially harmful metabolisms of insects and fungi become integral parts of plantation cultivation—though not always successfully. The article widens our understanding of how green production methods are envisioned not as alternatives to but rather as support for industrial cultivation systems.","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":"46081393","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: 10.1215/22011919-10422289
F. Cameron, B. Dibley, D. Ellsworth
Historical, cultural, and technological collections are routinely put to work to illustrate narratives of progress, history, and identity. They can also convey new stories that articulate how cultural objects might serve as material expressions of climate change embedded in climate processes. This article considers the oldest surviving largely unaltered Boulton and Watt rotative engine, housed in the collection of the Science Museum, London, as an example to examine how objects are at once the material expression of carbon economies and cultures that have generated them and the material archives of the climate histories in which they are enmeshed. It draws on insights from the environmental humanities and the critical posthumanities and augments these with other knowledge practices from the biogeochemical sciences. Specifically, it utilizes stable carbon dating, whose methods provide the opportunity to locate particular cultural objects in relation to the deep time of planetary climate change. In doing so this paper develops the proposition that, articulated as such, these objects are complex climatic ecological compositions, and so understood, they can serve as cultural carbon mitigation strategies that occasion possibilities of new material and climatic attunement that can complement climate mitigation policies and programs. This proposition is trialed in relation to Object No. 1861-46—the Boulton and Watt “Lap” Engine.
{"title":"Climate Collections and Photosynthetic, Fossil-Fueled Atmospheres","authors":"F. Cameron, B. Dibley, D. Ellsworth","doi":"10.1215/22011919-10422289","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10422289","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Historical, cultural, and technological collections are routinely put to work to illustrate narratives of progress, history, and identity. They can also convey new stories that articulate how cultural objects might serve as material expressions of climate change embedded in climate processes. This article considers the oldest surviving largely unaltered Boulton and Watt rotative engine, housed in the collection of the Science Museum, London, as an example to examine how objects are at once the material expression of carbon economies and cultures that have generated them and the material archives of the climate histories in which they are enmeshed. It draws on insights from the environmental humanities and the critical posthumanities and augments these with other knowledge practices from the biogeochemical sciences. Specifically, it utilizes stable carbon dating, whose methods provide the opportunity to locate particular cultural objects in relation to the deep time of planetary climate change. In doing so this paper develops the proposition that, articulated as such, these objects are complex climatic ecological compositions, and so understood, they can serve as cultural carbon mitigation strategies that occasion possibilities of new material and climatic attunement that can complement climate mitigation policies and programs. This proposition is trialed in relation to Object No. 1861-46—the Boulton and Watt “Lap” Engine.","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":"45614868","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: 10.1215/22011919-10422300
Michael E. Staub
This article seeks to sidestep the dilemma of restricted access to oil company archives through a close examination of a heretofore underutilized source base: the fossil fuel industry’s own trade journals and magazines. These oil and gas industry trade publications have served to envelop their readership in what we would now call an information bubble. Still, it is important to highlight the contradictory tactics that trade industry publications effectively test-marketed in the 1960s and 1970s to nullify a perception of petroleum as hazardous to public health and the natural environment. Most paradoxical was how trade publications reinvented their industry both as not a problem for the natural environment and as the solution to all and any future problems faced by that environment. Unlike any other currently available source base, Big Oil’s trade publications offer insights into the timing and triggering motivations of the industry’s shift to self-representation as stewards of nature, as well as the rapidity and multidimensional comprehensiveness of the industry’s mobilization to develop counternarratives to potential critics. And not least of all, these publications reveal the fantastical lengths to which Big Oil was willing to go in its efforts to preemptively block the research and development of electric vehicles, principally by diverting to the imaginary prospect of a gasoline-powered but nonetheless “smogless” car. This history represents an early and previously unexplored chapter in the evolution of what we have come to recognize as corporate “greenwashing.”
{"title":"Snake Oil and Gaslight","authors":"Michael E. Staub","doi":"10.1215/22011919-10422300","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10422300","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article seeks to sidestep the dilemma of restricted access to oil company archives through a close examination of a heretofore underutilized source base: the fossil fuel industry’s own trade journals and magazines. These oil and gas industry trade publications have served to envelop their readership in what we would now call an information bubble. Still, it is important to highlight the contradictory tactics that trade industry publications effectively test-marketed in the 1960s and 1970s to nullify a perception of petroleum as hazardous to public health and the natural environment. Most paradoxical was how trade publications reinvented their industry both as not a problem for the natural environment and as the solution to all and any future problems faced by that environment. Unlike any other currently available source base, Big Oil’s trade publications offer insights into the timing and triggering motivations of the industry’s shift to self-representation as stewards of nature, as well as the rapidity and multidimensional comprehensiveness of the industry’s mobilization to develop counternarratives to potential critics. And not least of all, these publications reveal the fantastical lengths to which Big Oil was willing to go in its efforts to preemptively block the research and development of electric vehicles, principally by diverting to the imaginary prospect of a gasoline-powered but nonetheless “smogless” car. This history represents an early and previously unexplored chapter in the evolution of what we have come to recognize as corporate “greenwashing.”","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":"43896225","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 : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-10216140
A. Marino
The New Space Age is awash with discourses about space colonization and resource exploitation, and these happily coexist with the age-old and curiosity-driven question, “Are we alone in the universe?” Astrobiology addresses this question and, at the same time, codifies knowledge useful for protecting our planet and other celestial bodies from harmful contamination. This article critically examines astroenvironmentalism as discussed within astrobiology and attempts to rescue it from becoming a principle of border creation in otherworldly ecologies. To do so, it merges astrobiology with visions and images from feminist postcolonial and decolonial theory, STS, and science fiction, and reflects on the enduring colonial tropes that provide the building blocks of current knowledge on outer space. The same colonial cartographic imagination at play in the much-debated frontier narrative animates the concept of planetary parks. These have gained increased popularity as a mechanism of environmental protection in space, but it is important to note how they entertain a settler future in outer space and legitimize claims to territorial property and extraction. In a dialogue that is contrapuntal to the codification of this form of transplanetary environmentalism, this article traces how Lynn Margulis’s cosmic symbiosis, Donna Haraway’s sympoiesis, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest (1976) intersect with concerns of astrobiological knowledge. Crucially, they enable the blurring of three types of borders: between science and fiction; planetary inside and outside; life and matter. This border-crossing can be generative of a process of creating more-than-human relationalities beyond Earth-centric geographies.
{"title":"Astroenvironmentalism as SF","authors":"A. Marino","doi":"10.1215/22011919-10216140","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10216140","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The New Space Age is awash with discourses about space colonization and resource exploitation, and these happily coexist with the age-old and curiosity-driven question, “Are we alone in the universe?” Astrobiology addresses this question and, at the same time, codifies knowledge useful for protecting our planet and other celestial bodies from harmful contamination. This article critically examines astroenvironmentalism as discussed within astrobiology and attempts to rescue it from becoming a principle of border creation in otherworldly ecologies. To do so, it merges astrobiology with visions and images from feminist postcolonial and decolonial theory, STS, and science fiction, and reflects on the enduring colonial tropes that provide the building blocks of current knowledge on outer space. The same colonial cartographic imagination at play in the much-debated frontier narrative animates the concept of planetary parks. These have gained increased popularity as a mechanism of environmental protection in space, but it is important to note how they entertain a settler future in outer space and legitimize claims to territorial property and extraction. In a dialogue that is contrapuntal to the codification of this form of transplanetary environmentalism, this article traces how Lynn Margulis’s cosmic symbiosis, Donna Haraway’s sympoiesis, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest (1976) intersect with concerns of astrobiological knowledge. Crucially, they enable the blurring of three types of borders: between science and fiction; planetary inside and outside; life and matter. This border-crossing can be generative of a process of creating more-than-human relationalities beyond Earth-centric geographies.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43132317","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 : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-10216151
H. Morehouse, Cheryl E. Morse
Recent debates around multispecies communities emphasize collaboration across difference for fostering intimate relations with the world. The basic premise is simple: a richer understanding of the ways in which we are connected to the world will yield greater care for the world. However, while collaboration across difference might close conceptual and material gaps between self and other, and nature and society, it is not always clear whether or how collaboration should take place. Indeed, largely absent in these debates are matters concerning cross-species consent. It can be challenging to obtain consent or ascertain agreement in the absence of straightforward communication. To address the whether and how of collaboration across difference, this article draws on ethnographic research on dowsing—a traditional method for finding underground water and other invisible or intangible resources—in the United States and the United Kingdom. This research shows how dowsers establish dialogue by attuning to Earth Others (e.g., water, plants, spirits) using various tools, such as dowsing rods, pendulums, and their own bodies. This article addresses how practitioners apply dowsing as a technique for communicating across human and more-than-human divides through ethical inquiries that tend to the agency and seek the consent of Earth Others in matters concerning land use. This research suggests that dowsing offers a reciprocal and dialogic strategy for collaborating with that which is often unseen, unheard, or ignored.
{"title":"Sense and Consent in Cocreating with Earth Others","authors":"H. Morehouse, Cheryl E. Morse","doi":"10.1215/22011919-10216151","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10216151","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Recent debates around multispecies communities emphasize collaboration across difference for fostering intimate relations with the world. The basic premise is simple: a richer understanding of the ways in which we are connected to the world will yield greater care for the world. However, while collaboration across difference might close conceptual and material gaps between self and other, and nature and society, it is not always clear whether or how collaboration should take place. Indeed, largely absent in these debates are matters concerning cross-species consent. It can be challenging to obtain consent or ascertain agreement in the absence of straightforward communication. To address the whether and how of collaboration across difference, this article draws on ethnographic research on dowsing—a traditional method for finding underground water and other invisible or intangible resources—in the United States and the United Kingdom. This research shows how dowsers establish dialogue by attuning to Earth Others (e.g., water, plants, spirits) using various tools, such as dowsing rods, pendulums, and their own bodies. This article addresses how practitioners apply dowsing as a technique for communicating across human and more-than-human divides through ethical inquiries that tend to the agency and seek the consent of Earth Others in matters concerning land use. This research suggests that dowsing offers a reciprocal and dialogic strategy for collaborating with that which is often unseen, unheard, or ignored.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43856280","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 : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-10216206
K. Lyons
This article presents an ethnographic and participatory action research project to reconstruct the “socioecological memory” of the Mandur River watershed in the Colombian Amazon. The objective of this project was to create conditions for community dialogues over the territorial ordering, recovery, and conservation of the watershed in the midst of ongoing socio-environmental conflicts. The author introduces the proposal to engage in what grassroots organizations call “profound reconciliation” along with the ethical stakes of reconciliatory processes that tend to human and more-than-human relations damaged by the interconnected dynamics of structural violence and decades of war. The author presents the environmental humanities-based methodologies that emerged in the collective process to elaborate the memory of the Mandur. The article also discusses the importance of fostering spaces for bettering conflict and offers reflections about the challenges posed for public engaged scholarship when a post–peace accord transition shifts toward the perpetuation of violence and militarized forms of conservation. Scientific and arts-based practices provided distinct evidentiary and speculative tools for analyzing the current conditions of the watershed and imagining future reparative strategies. The article argues that these methods allowed communities to not only diagnose the problems at hand but also hesitantly ask “What else is possible?” in a context of economic precarity, chronic insecurity, and institutional omission.
{"title":"Rivers and Reconciliation","authors":"K. Lyons","doi":"10.1215/22011919-10216206","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10216206","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article presents an ethnographic and participatory action research project to reconstruct the “socioecological memory” of the Mandur River watershed in the Colombian Amazon. The objective of this project was to create conditions for community dialogues over the territorial ordering, recovery, and conservation of the watershed in the midst of ongoing socio-environmental conflicts. The author introduces the proposal to engage in what grassroots organizations call “profound reconciliation” along with the ethical stakes of reconciliatory processes that tend to human and more-than-human relations damaged by the interconnected dynamics of structural violence and decades of war. The author presents the environmental humanities-based methodologies that emerged in the collective process to elaborate the memory of the Mandur. The article also discusses the importance of fostering spaces for bettering conflict and offers reflections about the challenges posed for public engaged scholarship when a post–peace accord transition shifts toward the perpetuation of violence and militarized forms of conservation. Scientific and arts-based practices provided distinct evidentiary and speculative tools for analyzing the current conditions of the watershed and imagining future reparative strategies. The article argues that these methods allowed communities to not only diagnose the problems at hand but also hesitantly ask “What else is possible?” in a context of economic precarity, chronic insecurity, and institutional omission.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48519699","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 : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-10216250
Julia D. Gibson
Even with the advent of climate change, mainstream environmentalism lacks a robust death ethics, that is, ethical theories and practices for attending directly to what is owed to the unjustly dead and dying. This article draws on Indigenous, Afrofuturist, and feminist science fiction narratives and their correlating lived practices to explore how death ethics for those driven extinct by climate change and other environmental injustices can and ought to go beyond affect, symbolism, and abstraction. It puts forward environmental palliation as an alternative framework for grappling with the injustice of extinction as and in publics. Far from a glorified form of euthanasia, palliation is an ethic and a practice geared toward providing good or better deaths for particular entities under specific conditions of injustice. In death, palliation cedes to remembrance, an ethic and practice for keeping the dead alive in memory so that they can be cared for. When done right, these death ethics are inextricably linked with climate justice for the living and those yet-to-be.
{"title":"Practicing Palliation for Extinction and Climate Change","authors":"Julia D. Gibson","doi":"10.1215/22011919-10216250","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10216250","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Even with the advent of climate change, mainstream environmentalism lacks a robust death ethics, that is, ethical theories and practices for attending directly to what is owed to the unjustly dead and dying. This article draws on Indigenous, Afrofuturist, and feminist science fiction narratives and their correlating lived practices to explore how death ethics for those driven extinct by climate change and other environmental injustices can and ought to go beyond affect, symbolism, and abstraction. It puts forward environmental palliation as an alternative framework for grappling with the injustice of extinction as and in publics. Far from a glorified form of euthanasia, palliation is an ethic and a practice geared toward providing good or better deaths for particular entities under specific conditions of injustice. In death, palliation cedes to remembrance, an ethic and practice for keeping the dead alive in memory so that they can be cared for. When done right, these death ethics are inextricably linked with climate justice for the living and those yet-to-be.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43026882","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 : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-10216129
Ryan Juskus
This article provides a genealogy and analysis of the concept of a sacrifice zone. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, the article traces the origins and transformation of sacrifice zones from (1) a livestock and land management concept into (2) a critical energy concept during the 1970s, (3) an Indigenous political ecology concept in the 1980s, and, finally, (4) an environmental justice concept in the 1990s and beyond. The article identifies the concept’s core content and argues in favor of calling sites of concentrated environmental injustice sacrifice zones, over alternatives such as “fenceline communities” or “dumping grounds,” in part because the concept of sacrifice, derived from the Latin “to make sacred,” is polysemous, signifying both violent victimization and sacred life. This explains why some activists have employed the sacrifice zone concept to generate a positive vision for transforming sacrifice zones into sacred zones. This analysis of the concept’s development through time, social friction, and geographic mobility advances efforts to broaden environmental justice theory from a focus on distributive justice to critical and constructive engagement with culture and religion. The article pursues one implication of this study by suggesting an amendment to the concept of “slow violence”: environmental injustice is better theorized as “slow sacrifice”—a political ecology of life and death, the goal of which is to concentrate death in some places so that other places might experience full, sustainable life. Such a theory makes visible a wider set of existing cultural and religious responses to environmental injustices.
{"title":"Sacrifice Zones","authors":"Ryan Juskus","doi":"10.1215/22011919-10216129","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10216129","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article provides a genealogy and analysis of the concept of a sacrifice zone. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, the article traces the origins and transformation of sacrifice zones from (1) a livestock and land management concept into (2) a critical energy concept during the 1970s, (3) an Indigenous political ecology concept in the 1980s, and, finally, (4) an environmental justice concept in the 1990s and beyond. The article identifies the concept’s core content and argues in favor of calling sites of concentrated environmental injustice sacrifice zones, over alternatives such as “fenceline communities” or “dumping grounds,” in part because the concept of sacrifice, derived from the Latin “to make sacred,” is polysemous, signifying both violent victimization and sacred life. This explains why some activists have employed the sacrifice zone concept to generate a positive vision for transforming sacrifice zones into sacred zones. This analysis of the concept’s development through time, social friction, and geographic mobility advances efforts to broaden environmental justice theory from a focus on distributive justice to critical and constructive engagement with culture and religion. The article pursues one implication of this study by suggesting an amendment to the concept of “slow violence”: environmental injustice is better theorized as “slow sacrifice”—a political ecology of life and death, the goal of which is to concentrate death in some places so that other places might experience full, sustainable life. Such a theory makes visible a wider set of existing cultural and religious responses to environmental injustices.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49227096","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}
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