Pub Date : 2015-03-02DOI: 10.1080/00045608.2014.1000948
Anna R. Davies, R. Doyle
Following the rhetoric of an impending “perfect storm” of increasing demand for energy, water, and food, it is recognized that ensuring sustainability will require significant shifts in both production and consumption patterns. This recognition has stimulated a plethora of future-oriented studies often using scenario, visioning, and transition planning techniques. These approaches have produced a multitude of plans for future development, but many valorize technological fixes and give limited attention to the governance and practice of everyday consumption. In contrast, this article presents empirical findings from a practice-oriented participatory (POP) backcasting process focused on home heating, personal washing, and eating. This process provided spaces for collaborative learning, creative innovation, and interdisciplinary interaction as well as producing a suite of ideas around promising practices for more sustainable household consumption. Further action is required, however, to explore how such ideas might be translated into action. The article concludes by outlining how collaborative experiments among public, private, civil society, and citizen-consumers, or HomeLabs, provide a means to test and evaluate the promising practices developed through POP backcasting.
{"title":"Transforming Household Consumption: From Backcasting to HomeLabs Experiments","authors":"Anna R. Davies, R. Doyle","doi":"10.1080/00045608.2014.1000948","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2014.1000948","url":null,"abstract":"Following the rhetoric of an impending “perfect storm” of increasing demand for energy, water, and food, it is recognized that ensuring sustainability will require significant shifts in both production and consumption patterns. This recognition has stimulated a plethora of future-oriented studies often using scenario, visioning, and transition planning techniques. These approaches have produced a multitude of plans for future development, but many valorize technological fixes and give limited attention to the governance and practice of everyday consumption. In contrast, this article presents empirical findings from a practice-oriented participatory (POP) backcasting process focused on home heating, personal washing, and eating. This process provided spaces for collaborative learning, creative innovation, and interdisciplinary interaction as well as producing a suite of ideas around promising practices for more sustainable household consumption. Further action is required, however, to explore how such ideas might be translated into action. The article concludes by outlining how collaborative experiments among public, private, civil society, and citizen-consumers, or HomeLabs, provide a means to test and evaluate the promising practices developed through POP backcasting.","PeriodicalId":80485,"journal":{"name":"Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Association of American Geographers","volume":"105 1","pages":"425 - 436"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-03-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00045608.2014.1000948","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"58757126","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 : 2015-03-02DOI: 10.1080/00045608.2014.1000893
Bruce Braun
Action cannot be delayed because time does not flow from the present to the future—as if we had to choose between scenarios, hoping for the best—but as if time flowed from what is coming (“l’avenir...
{"title":"Futures: Imagining Socioecological Transformation—An Introduction","authors":"Bruce Braun","doi":"10.1080/00045608.2014.1000893","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2014.1000893","url":null,"abstract":"Action cannot be delayed because time does not flow from the present to the future—as if we had to choose between scenarios, hoping for the best—but as if time flowed from what is coming (“l’avenir...","PeriodicalId":80485,"journal":{"name":"Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Association of American Geographers","volume":"105 1","pages":"239 - 243"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-03-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00045608.2014.1000893","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"58757110","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 : 2015-03-02DOI: 10.1080/00045608.2014.1001002
Kate Derickson, D. Mackinnon
Based on the need for meaningful political responses to socionatural change, in this article we develop an interim politics of resourcefulness as a strategy for addressing the limitations of postpolitical environmental governance. Drawing on political and epistemological insights of third-world feminism as well as an ongoing collaborative with environmental justice organizations in West Atlanta, we argue that visions for just socionatural futures must necessarily be generated in conversation with historically marginalized communities. We offer an interim politics of resourcefulness as one way of forging those kinds of engagements between academic researchers and communities, and describe the forms that such engagements have taken in our own research.
{"title":"Toward an Interim Politics of Resourcefulness for the Anthropocene","authors":"Kate Derickson, D. Mackinnon","doi":"10.1080/00045608.2014.1001002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2014.1001002","url":null,"abstract":"Based on the need for meaningful political responses to socionatural change, in this article we develop an interim politics of resourcefulness as a strategy for addressing the limitations of postpolitical environmental governance. Drawing on political and epistemological insights of third-world feminism as well as an ongoing collaborative with environmental justice organizations in West Atlanta, we argue that visions for just socionatural futures must necessarily be generated in conversation with historically marginalized communities. We offer an interim politics of resourcefulness as one way of forging those kinds of engagements between academic researchers and communities, and describe the forms that such engagements have taken in our own research.","PeriodicalId":80485,"journal":{"name":"Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Association of American Geographers","volume":"105 1","pages":"304 - 312"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-03-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00045608.2014.1001002","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"58757178","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 : 2015-02-06DOI: 10.1080/00045608.2014.988099
R. Lave
Many have observed the decline of scientific authority over the last three decades, for reasons ranging from the toxic legacies of Cold War science (Beck 1992), to the current commercialization and privatization of knowledge production (Mirowski 2011), to the success of social constructivist critique (Latour 2004). Whatever the cause(s), it seems clear that the relationship among academia, the military, and state and economic elites is shifting once again. A new regime of knowledge production is emerging (Pestre 2003) in which academia carries significantly less clout than it has over the previous half-century, and broadly legitimate knowledge claims are increasingly developed outside of the academy. These changes carry obvious implications for the future of academic legitimacy and institutions. The implications for environmental and social justice are less obvious, although perhaps even more important, as the ways in which knowledge is vetted and the questions investigated (or ignored) shift. In this article, I use exploration of the changing relationship between academic and extramural knowledge producers to lay out potential futures for the production of environmental knowledge. I argue that although academics have been notably unsuccessful in challenging private-sector, commercialized environmental knowledge claims, we are increasingly successful in leveraging our remaining authority to enable the democratization of knowledge production to intellectually and politically progressive ends.
{"title":"The Future of Environmental Expertise","authors":"R. Lave","doi":"10.1080/00045608.2014.988099","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2014.988099","url":null,"abstract":"Many have observed the decline of scientific authority over the last three decades, for reasons ranging from the toxic legacies of Cold War science (Beck 1992), to the current commercialization and privatization of knowledge production (Mirowski 2011), to the success of social constructivist critique (Latour 2004). Whatever the cause(s), it seems clear that the relationship among academia, the military, and state and economic elites is shifting once again. A new regime of knowledge production is emerging (Pestre 2003) in which academia carries significantly less clout than it has over the previous half-century, and broadly legitimate knowledge claims are increasingly developed outside of the academy. These changes carry obvious implications for the future of academic legitimacy and institutions. The implications for environmental and social justice are less obvious, although perhaps even more important, as the ways in which knowledge is vetted and the questions investigated (or ignored) shift. In this article, I use exploration of the changing relationship between academic and extramural knowledge producers to lay out potential futures for the production of environmental knowledge. I argue that although academics have been notably unsuccessful in challenging private-sector, commercialized environmental knowledge claims, we are increasingly successful in leveraging our remaining authority to enable the democratization of knowledge production to intellectually and politically progressive ends.","PeriodicalId":80485,"journal":{"name":"Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Association of American Geographers","volume":"408 1","pages":"244 - 252"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-02-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00045608.2014.988099","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"58758072","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 : 2015-02-06DOI: 10.1080/00045608.2014.988103
H. Hawkins, S. Marston, Mrill Ingram, Elizabeth R. Straughan
This article uses two artistic case studies, Bird Yarns (a knitting collective engaging questions of climate change) and SLOW Cleanup (an artist-driven environmental remediation project) to examine the “work” art can do with respect to socioecological transformations. We consider these cases in the context of geography's recent interest in “active experimentations and anticipatory interventions” in the face of the challenges posed by the environmental and social uncertainties of the Anthropocene. We propose two dimensions to the force of art with respect to these concerns. First, it provides a site and set of practices from which scientists, artists, and communities can come to recognize as well as transform relations between humans and nonhumans. Second, it encourages an accounting of the constitutive force of matter and things with implications for politics and knowledge production. Through these two dimensions, we explore how the arts can enable forms of socioecological transformation and, further, how things might be different in the future, enabling us to explore who and what might play a part in defining and moving toward such a future.
{"title":"The Art of Socioecological Transformation","authors":"H. Hawkins, S. Marston, Mrill Ingram, Elizabeth R. Straughan","doi":"10.1080/00045608.2014.988103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2014.988103","url":null,"abstract":"This article uses two artistic case studies, Bird Yarns (a knitting collective engaging questions of climate change) and SLOW Cleanup (an artist-driven environmental remediation project) to examine the “work” art can do with respect to socioecological transformations. We consider these cases in the context of geography's recent interest in “active experimentations and anticipatory interventions” in the face of the challenges posed by the environmental and social uncertainties of the Anthropocene. We propose two dimensions to the force of art with respect to these concerns. First, it provides a site and set of practices from which scientists, artists, and communities can come to recognize as well as transform relations between humans and nonhumans. Second, it encourages an accounting of the constitutive force of matter and things with implications for politics and knowledge production. Through these two dimensions, we explore how the arts can enable forms of socioecological transformation and, further, how things might be different in the future, enabling us to explore who and what might play a part in defining and moving toward such a future.","PeriodicalId":80485,"journal":{"name":"Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Association of American Geographers","volume":"105 1","pages":"331 - 341"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-02-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00045608.2014.988103","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"58758741","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 : 2015-02-06DOI: 10.1080/00045608.2014.988100
Franklin Ginn
In this article I suggest that fantasies of apocalypse are both a product and a producer of the Anthropocene. Although images and narratives of contemporary environmental apocalypse have usually been understood as politically regressive and postpolitical distractions, I demonstrate that a more hopeful reading is possible. Apocalypse tells us that the human as currently configured in the Anthropocene—an ideal universal subject who is energized through fossil fuels and who has been elevated to a position of ecological mastery—cannot continue indefinitely. This article therefore considers what apocalyptic imaginaries reveal about the limits to being human and the future of human life after the Anthropocene. It does so by analyzing a critically acclaimed film, The Turin Horse (2011). In this film an old farm horse refuses to eat, drink, or leave its stall, while a daughter and her father struggle on through an unspecified disaster, gnawing on raw potatoes as their world slowly unravels. The Turin Horse discloses the earth forces that have made Anthropocene humans along three lines: the geological, the biological, and the temporal. The film also hints at three challenges to be overcome to make humans differently: the need to surpass carbon humanity, the need for nonhuman allies, and the need to affirm agency against the inevitability of deep time. I suggest that contemporary apocalyptic visions are a core aspect of how geographers should understand socioecological transformation, as they challenge those who view them to feel the condition of the Anthropocene, and pose the question of how to respond well to unruly earth forces.
{"title":"When Horses Won't Eat: Apocalypse and the Anthropocene","authors":"Franklin Ginn","doi":"10.1080/00045608.2014.988100","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2014.988100","url":null,"abstract":"In this article I suggest that fantasies of apocalypse are both a product and a producer of the Anthropocene. Although images and narratives of contemporary environmental apocalypse have usually been understood as politically regressive and postpolitical distractions, I demonstrate that a more hopeful reading is possible. Apocalypse tells us that the human as currently configured in the Anthropocene—an ideal universal subject who is energized through fossil fuels and who has been elevated to a position of ecological mastery—cannot continue indefinitely. This article therefore considers what apocalyptic imaginaries reveal about the limits to being human and the future of human life after the Anthropocene. It does so by analyzing a critically acclaimed film, The Turin Horse (2011). In this film an old farm horse refuses to eat, drink, or leave its stall, while a daughter and her father struggle on through an unspecified disaster, gnawing on raw potatoes as their world slowly unravels. The Turin Horse discloses the earth forces that have made Anthropocene humans along three lines: the geological, the biological, and the temporal. The film also hints at three challenges to be overcome to make humans differently: the need to surpass carbon humanity, the need for nonhuman allies, and the need to affirm agency against the inevitability of deep time. I suggest that contemporary apocalyptic visions are a core aspect of how geographers should understand socioecological transformation, as they challenge those who view them to feel the condition of the Anthropocene, and pose the question of how to respond well to unruly earth forces.","PeriodicalId":80485,"journal":{"name":"Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Association of American Geographers","volume":"105 1","pages":"351 - 359"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-02-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00045608.2014.988100","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"58758679","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 : 2015-02-06DOI: 10.1080/00045608.2014.988101
R. Fincher, J. Barnett, S. Graham
Local residents, businesspeople, and policymakers engaged in climate change adaptation often think differently of the time available for action. Their understandings of time, and their practices that invoke time, form the complex and sometimes conflicting temporalities of adaptation to environmental change. They link the conditions of the past to those of the present and the future in a variety of ways, and their contemporary practices rest on such linking explicitly or implicitly. Yet the temporal connections between the present and distant future of places are undertheorized and poorly considered in the science and policy of adaptation to environmental change. In this article we address this theoretical and practical challenge by weaving together arguments from social and environmental geography with evidence from small coastal communities in southeastern Australia. We show that the past conditions residents’ imagined futures and that these local, imagined futures are incongruent with scientific, popular, and policy accounts of the future. Thus we argue that the temporalities of adaptation include incommensurate and unacknowledged ways of knowing and that these affect adaptation practices. We propose that strategies devised by governments for adapting to environmental change need to make visible—and calibrate policies with—the diverse temporalities of adaptation. On this basis, the times between the present and the long-term future can be better navigated as a series of short and negotiated policy steps.
{"title":"Temporalities in Adaptation to Sea-Level Rise","authors":"R. Fincher, J. Barnett, S. Graham","doi":"10.1080/00045608.2014.988101","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2014.988101","url":null,"abstract":"Local residents, businesspeople, and policymakers engaged in climate change adaptation often think differently of the time available for action. Their understandings of time, and their practices that invoke time, form the complex and sometimes conflicting temporalities of adaptation to environmental change. They link the conditions of the past to those of the present and the future in a variety of ways, and their contemporary practices rest on such linking explicitly or implicitly. Yet the temporal connections between the present and distant future of places are undertheorized and poorly considered in the science and policy of adaptation to environmental change. In this article we address this theoretical and practical challenge by weaving together arguments from social and environmental geography with evidence from small coastal communities in southeastern Australia. We show that the past conditions residents’ imagined futures and that these local, imagined futures are incongruent with scientific, popular, and policy accounts of the future. Thus we argue that the temporalities of adaptation include incommensurate and unacknowledged ways of knowing and that these affect adaptation practices. We propose that strategies devised by governments for adapting to environmental change need to make visible—and calibrate policies with—the diverse temporalities of adaptation. On this basis, the times between the present and the long-term future can be better navigated as a series of short and negotiated policy steps.","PeriodicalId":80485,"journal":{"name":"Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Association of American Geographers","volume":"105 1","pages":"263 - 273"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-02-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00045608.2014.988101","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"58758690","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 : 2015-02-06DOI: 10.1080/00045608.2014.988102
R. Holifield, N. Schuelke
Urban political ecology (UPE) has become an important and influential paradigm for the geographic analysis of socioecological transformation. Despite considerable progress in its empirical and theoretical sophistication, however, what it means to analyze the specifically political dimensions of change in UPE accounts remains largely unspecified and underdeveloped. One option receiving attention is to confine analysis of the “properly political” to the disruption of prevailing orders by egalitarian challenges. As an alternative, we propose and elaborate a pragmatist approach to political analysis that has emerged in science and technology studies. Through accounts of two efforts to imagine the socioecological future of an urban river, we aim to demonstrate the potential of such an approach. We argue that in addition to local variation and the deployment of knowledge, analyses of the political trajectories of issues should address historical variation and the mobilization of desire. We contend that such an approach provides a methodology for tracing connections between conventional political processes and extraordinary moments of disruption and that it is also compatible with multiple perspectives on the “political” within UPE.
城市政治生态学(Urban political ecology, UPE)已成为社会生态转型地理学分析的一个重要而有影响力的范式。然而，尽管在经验和理论的复杂性方面取得了相当大的进展，但分析UPE帐户变化的具体政治层面的意义在很大程度上仍未明确和不发达。受到关注的一种选择是，将对“适当政治”的分析局限于平等主义挑战对现行秩序的破坏。作为一种替代方案，我们提出并阐述了一种实用主义的政治分析方法，这种方法已经出现在科学和技术研究中。通过两种设想城市河流社会生态未来的努力，我们的目标是展示这种方法的潜力。我们认为，除了地方差异和知识的部署，问题的政治轨迹的分析应该解决历史差异和欲望的动员。我们认为，这种方法提供了一种方法，用于追踪传统政治进程与中断的特殊时刻之间的联系，并且它也与UPE内部“政治”的多种观点兼容。
{"title":"The Place and Time of the Political in Urban Political Ecology: Contested Imaginations of a River's Future","authors":"R. Holifield, N. Schuelke","doi":"10.1080/00045608.2014.988102","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2014.988102","url":null,"abstract":"Urban political ecology (UPE) has become an important and influential paradigm for the geographic analysis of socioecological transformation. Despite considerable progress in its empirical and theoretical sophistication, however, what it means to analyze the specifically political dimensions of change in UPE accounts remains largely unspecified and underdeveloped. One option receiving attention is to confine analysis of the “properly political” to the disruption of prevailing orders by egalitarian challenges. As an alternative, we propose and elaborate a pragmatist approach to political analysis that has emerged in science and technology studies. Through accounts of two efforts to imagine the socioecological future of an urban river, we aim to demonstrate the potential of such an approach. We argue that in addition to local variation and the deployment of knowledge, analyses of the political trajectories of issues should address historical variation and the mobilization of desire. We contend that such an approach provides a methodology for tracing connections between conventional political processes and extraordinary moments of disruption and that it is also compatible with multiple perspectives on the “political” within UPE.","PeriodicalId":80485,"journal":{"name":"Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Association of American Geographers","volume":"105 1","pages":"294 - 303"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-02-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00045608.2014.988102","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"58758730","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 : 2015-01-28DOI: 10.1080/00045608.2014.985628
J. Rice, B. Burke, N. Heynen
Whether used to support or impede action, scientific knowledge is now, more than ever, the primary framework for political discourse on climate change. As a consequence, science has become a hegemonic way of knowing climate change by mainstream climate politics, which not only limits the actors and actions deemed legitimate in climate politics but also silences vulnerable communities and reinforces historical patterns of cultural and political marginalization. To combat this “post-political” condition, we seek to democratize climate knowledge and imagine the possibilities of climate praxis through an engagement with Gramscian political ecology and feminist science studies. This framework emphasizes how antihierarchical and experiential forms of knowledge can work to destabilize technocratic modes of governing. We illustrate the potential of our approach through ethnographic research with people in southern Appalachia whose knowledge of climate change is based in the perceptible effects of weather, landscape change due to exurbanization, and the potential impacts of new migrants they call “climate refugees.” Valuing this knowledge builds more diverse communities of action, resists the extraction of climate change from its complex society–nature entanglements, and reveals the intimate connections between climate justice and distinct cultural lifeways. We argue that only by opening up these new forms of climate praxis, which allow people to take action using the knowledge they already have, can more just socioecological transformations be brought into being.
{"title":"Knowing Climate Change, Embodying Climate Praxis: Experiential Knowledge in Southern Appalachia","authors":"J. Rice, B. Burke, N. Heynen","doi":"10.1080/00045608.2014.985628","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2014.985628","url":null,"abstract":"Whether used to support or impede action, scientific knowledge is now, more than ever, the primary framework for political discourse on climate change. As a consequence, science has become a hegemonic way of knowing climate change by mainstream climate politics, which not only limits the actors and actions deemed legitimate in climate politics but also silences vulnerable communities and reinforces historical patterns of cultural and political marginalization. To combat this “post-political” condition, we seek to democratize climate knowledge and imagine the possibilities of climate praxis through an engagement with Gramscian political ecology and feminist science studies. This framework emphasizes how antihierarchical and experiential forms of knowledge can work to destabilize technocratic modes of governing. We illustrate the potential of our approach through ethnographic research with people in southern Appalachia whose knowledge of climate change is based in the perceptible effects of weather, landscape change due to exurbanization, and the potential impacts of new migrants they call “climate refugees.” Valuing this knowledge builds more diverse communities of action, resists the extraction of climate change from its complex society–nature entanglements, and reveals the intimate connections between climate justice and distinct cultural lifeways. We argue that only by opening up these new forms of climate praxis, which allow people to take action using the knowledge they already have, can more just socioecological transformations be brought into being.","PeriodicalId":80485,"journal":{"name":"Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Association of American Geographers","volume":"9 1","pages":"253 - 262"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00045608.2014.985628","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"58758030","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 : 2015-01-28DOI: 10.1080/00045608.2014.985625
Elizabeth R. Johnson, Jesse Goldstein
The growing field of biomimicry promises to supplant modern industry's energy-intensive models of engineering with a mode of production more sensitively attuned to nonhuman life and matter. This article considers the revolutionary potentials created by biomimicry's more-than-human collectives and their limitations. Although biomimicry gestures toward a radical reontologization of and repoliticization of production, we argue that it remains subject to entrenched onto-political habits of social relations still dominated by capitalism and made part of a “terra economica” in which all is potentially put to profitable use and otherwise left to waste. With reference to Marx's notions of general industriousness and the general intellect, we find that this universalizing tendency renders myriad biological capacities and ways of knowing invisible. Drawing a comparison with the reworkings of life and knowledge explored in Shiebinger's work on nineteenth-century abortifacients, we show how biomimicry's more recent ontological remakings reproduce some forms of knowledge—and life—at the expense of others. Reflecting on biomimicry's inadvertent erasure of nonindustrial ways of knowing, we advance the notion of a pluripotent intellect as a framework that seeks to take responsibility for the cocuration of forms of life and forms of knowledge. We turn to Jackson's Land Institute as a grounded alternative for constructing more-than-human techno-social collaboratives.
{"title":"Biomimetic Futures: Life, Death, and the Enclosure of a More-Than-Human Intellect","authors":"Elizabeth R. Johnson, Jesse Goldstein","doi":"10.1080/00045608.2014.985625","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2014.985625","url":null,"abstract":"The growing field of biomimicry promises to supplant modern industry's energy-intensive models of engineering with a mode of production more sensitively attuned to nonhuman life and matter. This article considers the revolutionary potentials created by biomimicry's more-than-human collectives and their limitations. Although biomimicry gestures toward a radical reontologization of and repoliticization of production, we argue that it remains subject to entrenched onto-political habits of social relations still dominated by capitalism and made part of a “terra economica” in which all is potentially put to profitable use and otherwise left to waste. With reference to Marx's notions of general industriousness and the general intellect, we find that this universalizing tendency renders myriad biological capacities and ways of knowing invisible. Drawing a comparison with the reworkings of life and knowledge explored in Shiebinger's work on nineteenth-century abortifacients, we show how biomimicry's more recent ontological remakings reproduce some forms of knowledge—and life—at the expense of others. Reflecting on biomimicry's inadvertent erasure of nonindustrial ways of knowing, we advance the notion of a pluripotent intellect as a framework that seeks to take responsibility for the cocuration of forms of life and forms of knowledge. We turn to Jackson's Land Institute as a grounded alternative for constructing more-than-human techno-social collaboratives.","PeriodicalId":80485,"journal":{"name":"Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Association of American Geographers","volume":"105 1","pages":"387 - 396"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00045608.2014.985625","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"58757957","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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