The article describes an experiment in captive-bred supplementation of a highly endangered wild bird species that took place in the Norwegian Arctic a few years ago. Following the fate of a single bird, over the course of two years, the argument lays out some of the powerful conceptual, political and affective stakes involved in the experiment. The brief life of the bird, named A16, was contained almost entirely within an unresolved tension between salvific urgency and a purist biopolitics, deeply committed to the preservation of vanishing (or vanished) forms. Behind the scenes of the experiment, ornithological factions clashed over issues like genetic purity, the integrity of migration routes and the potential for behavioral contamination. Laying out the stakes of this, the argument begins to develop an account of salvific violence in conservation work—a framework for questioning the affective investments that drive purificatory biopolitics, especially during a time of planetary turmoil. What stands to be saved, what must be destroyed? What is a species, exactly, such that it can (or cannot) be saved in certain ways? What was A16?
{"title":"Requiem for a Junk-Bird: Violence, Purity and the Wild","authors":"Hugo Reinert","doi":"10.5130/csr.v25i1.6387","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5130/csr.v25i1.6387","url":null,"abstract":"The article describes an experiment in captive-bred supplementation of a highly endangered wild bird species that took place in the Norwegian Arctic a few years ago. Following the fate of a single bird, over the course of two years, the argument lays out some of the powerful conceptual, political and affective stakes involved in the experiment. The brief life of the bird, named A16, was contained almost entirely within an unresolved tension between salvific urgency and a purist biopolitics, deeply committed to the preservation of vanishing (or vanished) forms. Behind the scenes of the experiment, ornithological factions clashed over issues like genetic purity, the integrity of migration routes and the potential for behavioral contamination. Laying out the stakes of this, the argument begins to develop an account of salvific violence in conservation work—a framework for questioning the affective investments that drive purificatory biopolitics, especially during a time of planetary turmoil. What stands to be saved, what must be destroyed? What is a species, exactly, such that it can (or cannot) be saved in certain ways? What was A16?","PeriodicalId":51871,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Studies Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89159877","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}
Drawing on the work of Albert Camus this paper offers a critique of certain discourses around ‘novel ecosystems’. These new species ‘assemblages’ are frequently defended, or even celebrated, as exemplifying resilience and adaptability to the environmental repercussions of a global situation inaccurately glossed as ‘The Anthropocene’. Here the increasing prevalence of economically generated changes, including the accelerating translocations of species, are set against earlier conservation values emphasizing protection of ‘natural’ and ‘native’ ecologies. The proliferation of novel ecosystems, together with an instrumental emphasis on their functional, ‘pragmatic’, and economic benefits, appears to make environmentalists’ ethical concerns about the loss of endangered others seem ‘absurd’ and frames conservation as a Sisyphean task. Yet Camus early work provides arguments for ethical / political resistance in just such absurd and extreme circumstances.
{"title":"(A)wake for ‘the Passions of this Earth’: Extinction and the Absurd ‘Ethics’ of Novel Ecosystems","authors":"M. Smith","doi":"10.5130/csr.v25i1.6448","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5130/csr.v25i1.6448","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing on the work of Albert Camus this paper offers a critique of certain discourses around ‘novel ecosystems’. These new species ‘assemblages’ are frequently defended, or even celebrated, as exemplifying resilience and adaptability to the environmental repercussions of a global situation inaccurately glossed as ‘The Anthropocene’. Here the increasing prevalence of economically generated changes, including the accelerating translocations of species, are set against earlier conservation values emphasizing protection of ‘natural’ and ‘native’ ecologies. The proliferation of novel ecosystems, together with an instrumental emphasis on their functional, ‘pragmatic’, and economic benefits, appears to make environmentalists’ ethical concerns about the loss of endangered others seem ‘absurd’ and frames conservation as a Sisyphean task. Yet Camus early work provides arguments for ethical / political resistance in just such absurd and extreme circumstances.","PeriodicalId":51871,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Studies Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84729136","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}
In September 2011, a delicate cargo of 24 Nihoa Millerbirds was carefully loaded by conservationists onto a ship for a three-day voyage to Laysan Island in the remote Northwest Hawaiian Islands. The goal of this effort was to establish a second population of this endangered species, an “insurance population” in the face of the mounting pressures of climate change and potential new biotic arrivals. But the millerbird, or ulūlu in Hawaiian, is just one of the many avian species to become the subject of this kind of “assisted colonisation.” In Hawai'i, and around the world, recent years have seen a broad range of efforts to safeguard species by finding them homes in new places. Thinking through the ulūlu project, this article explores the challenges and possibilities of assisted colonisation in this colonised land. What does it mean to move birds in the context of the long, and ongoing, history of dispossession of the Kānaka Maoli, the Native Hawaiian people? How are distinct but entangled process of colonisation, of unworlding, at work in the lives of both people and birds? Ultimately, this article explores how these diverse colonisations might be understood and told responsibly in an era of escalating loss and extinction.
{"title":"Moving Birds in Hawai'i: Assisted Colonisation in a Colonised Land","authors":"T. Dooren","doi":"10.5130/csr.v25i1.6392","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5130/csr.v25i1.6392","url":null,"abstract":"In September 2011, a delicate cargo of 24 Nihoa Millerbirds was carefully loaded by conservationists onto a ship for a three-day voyage to Laysan Island in the remote Northwest Hawaiian Islands. The goal of this effort was to establish a second population of this endangered species, an “insurance population” in the face of the mounting pressures of climate change and potential new biotic arrivals. But the millerbird, or ulūlu in Hawaiian, is just one of the many avian species to become the subject of this kind of “assisted colonisation.” In Hawai'i, and around the world, recent years have seen a broad range of efforts to safeguard species by finding them homes in new places. Thinking through the ulūlu project, this article explores the challenges and possibilities of assisted colonisation in this colonised land. What does it mean to move birds in the context of the long, and ongoing, history of dispossession of the Kānaka Maoli, the Native Hawaiian people? How are distinct but entangled process of colonisation, of unworlding, at work in the lives of both people and birds? Ultimately, this article explores how these diverse colonisations might be understood and told responsibly in an era of escalating loss and extinction.","PeriodicalId":51871,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Studies Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89561026","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}
This essay discusses how coral is becoming a kind of charismatic megafauna and a cultural icon for extinction in the Anthropocene. Until recently, most of the cultural associations around coral emphasized the strangeness and exotic qualities of coral that combines animal, mineral, and vegetable bodies. Darwin studied coral as a robust maker of atolls, while Melville wrote about coral stringing the Pacific Islands as ‘marine gardens.’ More recent theorizing on coral from Eva Hayward and Stefan Helmreich has been keen to emphasize how coral is transbiological and queer in the multi-species kinships it enables. However, in recent decades, as evidence of bleaching and mass coral die-offs have been registered by marine scientists, coral is also fast becoming a barometer for the sixth mass extinction. I look at how contemporary cultural representations of coral are straining to reconfigure the life of coral as caught between associations of fragility and resilience, seeing coral as capable of supporting indigenous island civilizations while not being able to survive ocean warming of less than one degree Celsius. I examine the work of recent artists (Courtney Mattison and Alison McDonald) whose coral-themed work combines science and spectacle. These artists return to older visions of coral figured fantastically as both living and dead, yet updating this view for today, as we find coral to be a primary figure for life and death in the Anthropocene. I finish with a discussion of the recent documentary film Chasing Coral (2017) as negotiating multiple simultaneous visual tropes and coral conditions. This film aims to provide viewers with a sense of time constraints for scientists, filmmakers, and for coral reef colonies under extreme stress in areas including the Great Barrier Reef. The film tries to articulate a pathway between scientific documentation, environmental activism, and visual drama, ultimately composing these perspectives into a work that suggests that the imbalance and overlap of these ways of engaging with coral will provide a model for how to form a global coral culture movement.
{"title":"Coral Cultures in the Anthropocene","authors":"Joshua Schuster","doi":"10.5130/csr.v25i1.6405","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5130/csr.v25i1.6405","url":null,"abstract":"This essay discusses how coral is becoming a kind of charismatic megafauna and a cultural icon for extinction in the Anthropocene. Until recently, most of the cultural associations around coral emphasized the strangeness and exotic qualities of coral that combines animal, mineral, and vegetable bodies. Darwin studied coral as a robust maker of atolls, while Melville wrote about coral stringing the Pacific Islands as ‘marine gardens.’ More recent theorizing on coral from Eva Hayward and Stefan Helmreich has been keen to emphasize how coral is transbiological and queer in the multi-species kinships it enables. However, in recent decades, as evidence of bleaching and mass coral die-offs have been registered by marine scientists, coral is also fast becoming a barometer for the sixth mass extinction. I look at how contemporary cultural representations of coral are straining to reconfigure the life of coral as caught between associations of fragility and resilience, seeing coral as capable of supporting indigenous island civilizations while not being able to survive ocean warming of less than one degree Celsius. I examine the work of recent artists (Courtney Mattison and Alison McDonald) whose coral-themed work combines science and spectacle. These artists return to older visions of coral figured fantastically as both living and dead, yet updating this view for today, as we find coral to be a primary figure for life and death in the Anthropocene. I finish with a discussion of the recent documentary film Chasing Coral (2017) as negotiating multiple simultaneous visual tropes and coral conditions. This film aims to provide viewers with a sense of time constraints for scientists, filmmakers, and for coral reef colonies under extreme stress in areas including the Great Barrier Reef. The film tries to articulate a pathway between scientific documentation, environmental activism, and visual drama, ultimately composing these perspectives into a work that suggests that the imbalance and overlap of these ways of engaging with coral will provide a model for how to form a global coral culture movement.","PeriodicalId":51871,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Studies Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85484083","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}
‘Putting the right species back in the right place’: expressed in the words of Bruce Pavlik, the Head of Restoration Ecology at the Millennium Seed Bank at Kew Gardens in a fundraising clip for the Breathing Planet Campaign, the work of biodiversity repositories seems straightforward. A simple matter of renewing the colonial and capitalistic capture of nature by exhausting its diversity in collecting, and then of reinserting species, suspended in the form of genetic information, into the neat spaces their disappearance or almost-dispappearance has left in their original ecosystems, the redemptive value of biodiversity repositories seems unquestionable. ‘There is no technological reason why any species should go extinct’, the clip goes on.The cryopreservation of genetic material in seed banks and ‘frozen zoos’ is often and justifiably understood as genetic-fetishistic suspension, several times removed from animal lives in actual habitats; I propose however to read them as world-making devices in their own right too, more entangled and entangling than they might present themselves to be. Collecting and saving are two mandates that have effects both on the species whose genetic information is banked and on the natures that are made possible or impossible through the projects delineated by biodiversity repositories; but they have also been implicated in a third such mandate, the assisted adaptation of species to anthropogenic climate change (be it the plan for ‘chaperoned assisted relocation’ proposed by the Missouri Botanical Garden or the ‘cultivation of marginally hardy taxa’ proposed at the Arnold Arboretum). How are biodiversity repositories an active intervention into the shaping of natures both inside and outside, and what are the consequences of what happens within the apparatus of these repositories for wider understandings of landscapes and species under threat? How linked is the suspension of metabolic processes and evolutionary potential and the understanding of Earth as manageable, perhaps even terraformable? What do they contribute to conservation biology’s biopolitical and cultural shaping of individuals, species, ecosystems suspended and remade through the different uses for which biodiversity repositories can be put to work?
{"title":"Collect, Save, Adapt: Making and Unmaking Ex Situ Worlds","authors":"Anna-Katharina Laboissière","doi":"10.5130/csr.v25i1.6380","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5130/csr.v25i1.6380","url":null,"abstract":"‘Putting the right species back in the right place’: expressed in the words of Bruce Pavlik, the Head of Restoration Ecology at the Millennium Seed Bank at Kew Gardens in a fundraising clip for the Breathing Planet Campaign, the work of biodiversity repositories seems straightforward. A simple matter of renewing the colonial and capitalistic capture of nature by exhausting its diversity in collecting, and then of reinserting species, suspended in the form of genetic information, into the neat spaces their disappearance or almost-dispappearance has left in their original ecosystems, the redemptive value of biodiversity repositories seems unquestionable. ‘There is no technological reason why any species should go extinct’, the clip goes on.The cryopreservation of genetic material in seed banks and ‘frozen zoos’ is often and justifiably understood as genetic-fetishistic suspension, several times removed from animal lives in actual habitats; I propose however to read them as world-making devices in their own right too, more entangled and entangling than they might present themselves to be. Collecting and saving are two mandates that have effects both on the species whose genetic information is banked and on the natures that are made possible or impossible through the projects delineated by biodiversity repositories; but they have also been implicated in a third such mandate, the assisted adaptation of species to anthropogenic climate change (be it the plan for ‘chaperoned assisted relocation’ proposed by the Missouri Botanical Garden or the ‘cultivation of marginally hardy taxa’ proposed at the Arnold Arboretum). How are biodiversity repositories an active intervention into the shaping of natures both inside and outside, and what are the consequences of what happens within the apparatus of these repositories for wider understandings of landscapes and species under threat? How linked is the suspension of metabolic processes and evolutionary potential and the understanding of Earth as manageable, perhaps even terraformable? What do they contribute to conservation biology’s biopolitical and cultural shaping of individuals, species, ecosystems suspended and remade through the different uses for which biodiversity repositories can be put to work?","PeriodicalId":51871,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Studies Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85519227","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}
Extinction challenges our thinking and writing. Such overwhelming disappearance of ways of being, experiencing and making meaning in the world disrupts familiar categories and demands new modes of response. It requires that we trace multiple forms of both countable and intangible loss, the unravelling of social and ecological communities as a result of colonialism and capture, development and defaunation and other destructive processes. It brings forth new modes of commemoration and mourning, and new practices of archiving and survival. It calls for action in the absence of hope, and for the recognition and nourishment of new generativities: new modes of assemblage and attachment, resurgence and reworlding, commoning, composting and caring for country.
{"title":"Extinction: Stories of Unravelling and Reworlding","authors":"Matthew Chrulew, Rick De Vos","doi":"10.5130/csr.v25i1.6688","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5130/csr.v25i1.6688","url":null,"abstract":"Extinction challenges our thinking and writing. Such overwhelming disappearance of ways of being, experiencing and making meaning in the world disrupts familiar categories and demands new modes of response. It requires that we trace multiple forms of both countable and intangible loss, the unravelling of social and ecological communities as a result of colonialism and capture, development and defaunation and other destructive processes. It brings forth new modes of commemoration and mourning, and new practices of archiving and survival. It calls for action in the absence of hope, and for the recognition and nourishment of new generativities: new modes of assemblage and attachment, resurgence and reworlding, commoning, composting and caring for country.","PeriodicalId":51871,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Studies Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80561178","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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