The Bone Machine in the GardenListening to Tom Waits in the Anthropocene Jim Coby (bio) It’s difficult to overstate the influence of Tom Waits’s music and personality in the world of contemporary American music. With a voice that critic David Durchholz once described as “soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car” (Bianculli 2011), Waits began his career as a balladeer in the vein of Tin Pan Alley. He soon began experimenting with his own image and voice, eventually evolving into an elder statesman of the indie-rock world, venerated by the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Johnny Cash, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Joan Baez, and innumerable others. In the prefatory material for his 2011 interview with Waits, Tim Adams wrote for the Guardian that the singer-songwriter “gives the impression of being in a state both of constant startled awareness, and vague puzzlement at the world.” I suspect that Adams intended to describe Waits’s preternatural ability to absorb from the world around him, specifically to forge impressionistic images from the amalgamations of coffee shops and antique stores he frequents, and from the drifters and diner servers he chats up—in short, to present to listeners the web of humanity, warts and all, as he perceives it. Adams certainly wouldn’t be incorrect in this claim. Like the Beat poets he so admires, Waits masterfully weaves detailed tapestries of lives and places, real and imagined, throughout his catalog.1 Any given interview with Waits will highlight the artist’s acumen in “depicting low-life Americana with an exacting ear” as “he spins tall tales of hustlers, drunks, crackpots, and drifters who are never far from love or death” (Parles 1999, 244). And while it is difficult to argue with this type of assessment, it is worth [End Page 121] exploring the other modes and ideas that Waits interacts with in his songscapes. Beyond the obvious physical concerns of his songs, however, a more latent metaphysical subject emerges in his concern for the environment. And so while Adams’s commentary about Waits’s attentiveness to the world around him no doubt applies to his renderings of human subjects, it also equally relates to Waits’s ecological awareness. Especially in his apocalyptic song “The Earth Died Screaming,” Waits deftly presents a template for art in the Anthropocene and reckons with the absurdity and incomprehensibility of our near-future climate crises. The Beats, Kerouac especially, had an outsized role in Waits’s formative years. Indeed, Waits’s biographer Barney Hoskyns explains, “It was Kerouac’s America—a cityscape of displaced, marginalized street people—that hooked the teenage Waits” (2009, 37). The Beat influence can be read easily on the bulk of Waits’s early records: the pseudojazz scatting of “Pasties and a G-String,” the peripatetic longings of “Shiver Me Timbers,” and the boozy emotional candor of “Tom Traubert’s Blues.” But one need not dig even that far to locate Waits’s appreciation for the Beats, as his covering of the Kerouac-penned “Home I’ll Never Be” and his working with William S. Burroughs to produce The Black Rider clearly signal great affection. And while Waits’s catalog is a surfeit of urban ne’er-do-wells and haunted cityscapes, a second concern becomes equally apparent—that of environmental awareness. As Steven Watson notes in The Birth of the Beat Generation, Allen Ginsberg fullheartedly believed that much of the Beats’ legacy rested on their “spread of ecological consciousness” (1995, 304). And so, much like Kerouac’s deep (if deeply problematic) appreciation for itinerant Mexican laborers’ agricultural skillsets in On the Road or like the mystic admiration of a well-laid path in Gary Snyder’s “Riprap,” a latent ecological sensibility also undergirds much of Waits’s work. Especially in the “later, more challenging recordings,” environmental concerns loom large (Solis 2007, 27). A cursory reading of song titles reveals as much: “Dirt in the Ground,” “The Ocean Doesn’t Want Me,” “Green Grass,” “Make It Rain,” and on and on. Undergirding these songs are two overarching concerns: appreciation and anxiety. These two issues cannot...
Queer Resilience and Climate Catastrophe in Black Wave Cynthia Belmont (bio) Let’s get a bit playful. Timothy Morton, “What Is Dark Ecology?” In Michelle Tea’s 2016 metafictional queercore autobiographical novel Black Wave, the queer punk community of late-1990s San Francisco faces the end of the world as environmental collapse due to climate change accelerates. The protagonist, femme writer Michelle, moves to Los Angeles, hoping to leave addiction behind and renew her commitment to writing her memoir while waiting for a cataclysmic tsunami to hit California. As a dystopian historical work that immortalizes and problematizes a queer golden age without a future, Black Wave unhinges the inherent structure of the apocalyptic idea, in that cataclysm is conceived not as a rupture—not as a dualistic scenario contrasting a functional, nostalgic, or civilized “before” with a dysfunctional, terrifying, or primitive “after”—but rather as an inevitable extension of an already environmentally, institutionally, and culturally broken world in which most animals are extinct, people suffer Compound Environmental Malaise, and Michelle occupies an intensely marginalized and creative social location in the precarity of the queer punk ghetto. I argue, from a queer ecological and ecofeminist perspective, that this novel offers an inspiring vision of queer resilience in the context of climate change, a vision based in a dark ecological, “transnatural” embrace of waste and irony, empathy for marginalized Others, and a punk iteration of “queer time.” While “for those oriented toward the status quo, uncertainty and instability of existing structures and processes is [End Page 1] concerning,”1 Black Wave illustrates that, for those already living at the margins/in the ruins, uncertainty and instability are the status quo since they lack the social and material benefits of those structures—hence their potential for dark ecological resilience in the face of apocalypse. In dark ecology, recognition of the precarity of life in the Anthropocene means rejecting the romantic association of “nature” (as separate from humans) with purity, origin, and refuge and acknowledging the “monstrous” entanglement of all things, including with danger, contamination, damage, and death.2 Despite its epistemological location within “a time of planetary catastrophe,”3 a dark ecological sensibility is not a grim, dismal one but is rather imbued with “dark sweetness” and even with humor.4 Black Wave’s exploration of queer ecological “subjectivity in waste”5 generates a dark sweetness of flourishing versus fear within environmental unpredictability and risk—of resilience as “ongoingness” versus the conventional “bouncing back.”6 In contrast to a privileged approach to resilience, wherein “bouncing back” represents an investment in the status quo that does not resonate for marginalized communities that have suffered within historical systems and structures,7 Haraway’s concept of “ongoingness” means finding powerfully creative means of coexistence within ecological uncertainty8—a practice that “requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures,” but as embedment in “myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.”9 Ongoingness may then resist destructive notions of progress, presenting “a fierce reply to the dictates of both Anthropos and Capital.”10 This fierce reply echoes the “forceful . . . and undeniable” “queer temporality,” or “persistent present,” that theorists have identified at work in queer culture.11 According to Halberstam, radical temporalities such as queer time define how “all kinds of people . . . will and do opt to live outside of reproductive and familial time as well as on the edges of logics of labor and production,” including “sex workers, homeless people, drug dealers . . . the unemployed,”12 and queer subcultures, which diverge from normative constructions of futurity and expectations for maturity and success (marriage, child bearing, etc.).13 The queer punk subculture, in particular, offers ontological challenges to customary conceptualizations of time, growth, change, and meaningful action,14 potentially destabilizing the norms that depend on these concepts.15 Illustrating an apocalyptic ongoingness based [End Page 2] in the radical flexibility of queer time, Black Wave exemplifies queer resilience in its protagonist Michelle’s ability to creatively persist and imagine a life of value and integrity despite environmental upheaval and social marginality, contrary to the requirements of hegemonic institutions and norms and in line with Tsing...
Zoonotic AffinitiesWoman-Dog Sickness and Multispecies Becoming in Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment and Virginia Woolf ’s Flush Phillip Drake (bio) Elena Ferrante’s depictions of women, family, and gender politics appropriately have received considerable attention from the media and her fervent readers. In her second novel, the devastating Days of Abandonment,1 these issues are inflected by a fraught woman-dog relationship. After her husband deserts her and their two children to live with his young lover, Olga, the narrator, becomes increasingly unhinged, culminating in a daylong hallucinatory fugue that threatens the safety of everyone in the household. It is during the height of Olga’s delirium that Otto, the family’s beloved German shepherd, suffers an excruciating death from an apparent poisoning. In the moments preceding this death, Otto and Olga dwell alone together in momentary kinship through shared abjection and shame. Exposed to Otto’s frail and degrading body, Olga’s thoughts drift out of a self-obsessed haze. Suddenly, she begs forgiveness as she caresses Otto’s head, and Otto responds by opening his eyes and staring back with “the look of the friendly dog who, instead of accusing me, asked forgiveness for his condition.”2 The plea for forgiveness is met with another plea, her shame with his shame. This transitional moment of shared suffering and shame, which finds Olga suddenly regaining the mental clarity to initiate the restoration of her world, lends itself to plural readings. In activating Olga’s transformation, Otto’s death betrays shades of human exceptionalism, as his nonhuman life becomes instrumental, disposable to some extent, in service to the restoration of order for the novel’s human characters. At the same time, the death scene presents an intense moment of [End Page 69] “face-to-face, body-to-body subject making,”3 a Levinasian encounter that expresses the alterity, dignity, and ethical claims of both Otto and Olga. But while the “face” discloses the alterity of discrete individuals in Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics, multispecies accounts of cobecoming offer a more “contaminated” reading of this scene that disturbs the integrity of “self-contained” individuals in moments of encounter. Contamination is fundamental to life, insists Anna Tsing: “Staying alive—for every species—requires livable collaborations. Collaboration means working across difference, which leads to contamination. . . . The evolution of our ‘selves’ is already polluted by histories of encounter; we are mixed up with others before we even begin any new collaboration.”4 We are “born pre-polluted,” notes Alexis Shotwell, “our bodily boundaries are penetrated and traversed by viruses, chemicals, and microbes.”5 Using Donna Haraway’s phrasing, contamination can manifest as interspecies “sharing suffering,” in which humans “learning to share other animals’ pain nonmimetically [becomes] an ethical obligation, a practical problem, and an ontological opening. Sharing pain promises disclosure, promises becoming.”6 Through embodied, empathetic procedures, sharing suffering produces novel avenues for relation and transformation that are generated via an impulse not simply to represent or replace but to foster understanding with contaminating and contaminated others. Through readings of Days of Abandonment along with Virginia Woolf ’s Flush: A Biography—another novel that features an intimate, face-to-face death scene involving a dog and a sick and potentially infectious woman—this article explores interspecies contamination in the form of zoonotic threat. Zoonoses typically are defined as diseases that are capable of passing from nonhuman animals to human animals, but I use the term more loosely to identify infectious agents that move in either direction between the interconnected bodies of any animal species, like various strains of influenza, Lyssavirus (rabies), and Toxoplasma gondii (toxoplasmosis).7 I prefer this looser definition because it decenters the human animal in chains of infection to prompt more expansive consideration of precarious bodies in ecological communities. Importantly, actual zoonotic organisms never explicitly manifest in either novel, but both novels feature biosocial threats that operate zoonotically their capacity to move disease between human and nonhuman bodies. These biosocial threats, from poisons and fleas to gender-based [End Page 70] inequity and experimental medicine, “infect” both woman and dog, diminishing the health, dignity, and comfort of both in a state of shared precarity. In these two novels, the...
“Up from Dirt”Excavating Geologic Energy Potential in Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers Cassandra Galentine (bio) At the end of Anzia Yezierska’s novel Bread Givers, about the coming of age of Sara Smolinsky, a Jewish American immigrant raised in the tenements of Hester Street on the Lower East Side of New York, Sara describes her desire for a clean space all her own: “If I could ever tear myself out of the dirt I’d have only clean emptiness.”1 This desire, as other scholars have argued, is a response to the ability of dirt and other dark substances to act as a racializing force, restricting Jewish immigrants like Sara, whose whiteness is “probationary,” from accessing the privileges of clean, white, American nationhood.2 By the end of the novel, Sara has seemingly achieved a hygienic state by securing a clean, clutterless apartment of her own outside the collective community of the dirt-ridden environment where she was raised. Yet when faced with the task of finding a home for her aging father, she describes the “Old Men’s Home” as “Clean. Cold. Choking with orderliness. Beds all in a row, spotless, creaseless, like beds in an orphan asylum.”3 She is disturbed by the cleanliness of the elderly care facility and its frigid inhumanity, which is starkly juxtaposed by her memories of her father studying the Talmud in the dirt-filled, cramped, and cluttered Lower East Side tenements. She cannot allow herself to condemn her father, who “gave me the fire, the passion to push myself up from dirt,” to such a sanitized existence.4 Although Sara, like her family, devotes time and resources toward sanitation and personal hygiene on the path to escape the darkness of dirt and poverty, something about that same cleanliness is unnerving to her. [End Page 93] Throughout the text, Sara makes choices to maintain contact with cluttered and dirty abject materials associated with the Lower East Side tenements, the Polish shtetl from which her family immigrated, and the racialized working-class roots from which she came. I borrow the term “abject” from Julia Kristeva, who explains that “what is abject . . . is radically excluded and draws me towards the place where meaning collapses.”5 For Kristeva, abject materials include waste—such as bodily fluids, feces, and most prevalently, the corpse—and in the case of my argument, dirt, mud, and coal residue, which “cause abjection” not by infringing on “cleanliness or health” but rather by representing “what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.”6 Dirt and grime can, of course, have dangerous material consequences for one’s health, but Yezierska’s novel focuses most intimately on the social implications of dirty material regardless of whether it is harmful or simply aesthetically unpleasant. When working-class Jewish characters in Bread Givers are exposed to dirty material, they are often met with or internalize what Ronit Berger calls a “racist discourse of hygiene,” or an expression of disgust toward any material or person that resists the boundaries of the domestic sphere and the human body.7 Sometimes Yezierska’s characters respond through attempts to clean themselves and their home to stake their claim to and reassert the boundaries of middle-class whiteness. However, for Sara, dirty material also serves as a source of empowerment in unexpected ways. Sara uses the transgressive mutability of abject materials to disturb the system and order—to use Kristeva’s words—of popular white, homogenous conceptions of ethnoracial identity.8 As a Jewish immigrant woman, Sara’s identity, much like the abject material that surrounds her, already rejects borders, existing in the betweenness of her old-world Jewish heritage and the New World of America. Reading Sara’s interactions with abject material like coal, dirt, and mud—which also defy the borders of the city, home, and body— illuminates the liminality of her identity and the irresolvable tension of being in both, neither, and in-between worlds.9 This mutability and boundary defiance creates discomfort for similar reasons to the disgust evoked by dirty, abject material. It forces individuals to confront the reality of a nonhomogenous and enigmatic...
Ocean Literacy and Marine Environmental NarrativesInterpretations of Sustainability in the Deep Sea Susanna Lidström (bio) Ocean Literacy for Sustainable Development Policies for ocean protection are increasingly centered on the concept of sustainability. Sustainable marine development was established as a shared international aim as early as 1982 in the preamble to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), proclaiming the convention’s intention to facilitate “the equitable and efficient utilization of [the seas’ and oceans’] resources, the conservation of their living resources, and the study, protection and preservation of the marine environment.”1 The assumption that resource extraction and environmental protection can occur alongside each other, and questions of how to balance them, have been at the center of ocean governance ever since. Efforts to reconcile them have intensified in the twenty-first century. Agenda 2030 and specifically sustainable development goal number 14 (SDG 14) repeats the aim to “conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development.”2 The same ambition is reiterated in the new legally binding instrument under UNCLOS, for the “conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction” (BBNJ Agreement), as well as in the title of the ongoing United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021–2030).3 The assumption that resources can be extracted and preserved at the same time is not unique to the ocean but intrinsic to the notion of sustainable [End Page 43] development.4 The concept of sustainability is widely accepted as a guiding principle for environmental and natural resource management. However, it does not have a precise definition but is open to interpretation, with regard to both what is sustainable and what counts as development.5 Defining marine sustainable development requires consideration of multiple normative questions about for whom and for what purposes the ocean should be “sustainable” and for whose gains it may be “developed.” Different answers to these questions can motivate a range of different and possibly conflicting governance measures, labeled as conservation, protection, restoration, or exploitation. The deep sea—the parts of the ocean that are more than two hundred meters deep—is central to Earth systems, including beyond the specifically marine realm.6 The vast volumes of water provide the majority of Earth’s habitable space, and both the water and its biodiversity play a key role in climate regulation. The deep sea is also the least known part of the planet. Many deep-sea species and ecosystems are as yet unknown and undescribed, and new species are routinely discovered. While the general formation of the seafloor is mapped, including submerged mountain ranges, seamounts, hydrothermal vents, and abyssal plains, only a small percentage of the bottom of the ocean has been studied in detail.7 Most of the deep sea, and two-thirds of the total surface of the ocean, is outside national territory, in areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ). Many UN conventions have limited jurisdiction outside national borders, including the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which means that the applicability of these agreements to the international water column and seabed (referred to as “the high seas” and “the area,” respectively, in UNCLOS) is contested. Historically, the international ocean has mostly been treated as “free for all” under the principle of “mare liberum,” or freedom of the seas, established in the seventeenth century. The aim of the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development is to support development of marine scientific knowledge and to use that knowledge to establish environmental protection; in other words, marine science should ideally be conducted in a way that allows it to directly inform decisions and actions that increase ocean sustainability. This is captured in the mission statement of the IOC’s [End Page 44] implementation plan, which foregrounds “transformative ocean science solutions for sustainable development,” or more concisely put in the plan’s tagline, “the science we need, for the ocean we want.”8 Advancing ocean literacy, defined as societywide recognition of recognition of reciprocity between people and the sea, is seen as central in these efforts:9 Ocean Literacy contributes to capacity development...
From Watershed Colonialism to HydroredemptionRiver Restoration, Care, and Collective Action in River Documentary Sigma Colón (bio) Betzabé García’s documentary Los reyes del pueblo que no existe (2015) begins with a boat ride amid hauntingly picturesque views of San Marcos, Mexico. The slow quality of the film conveys an aesthetic of stillness that echoes the Presidio River being halted to create a reservoir. Amid the breathtaking scenery, tranquility, and dominating sounds of birds and wildlife, García immerses us in the daily lives of the three remaining families who stay and experience most of San Marcos partially submerged in water for nearly half the year. Not until the end, do we learn that San Marcos was one of six villages inundated when the Picachos Dam was built on the Presidio River in 2009.1 The film offers us testimony of the intimate reaches of extractive capitalism, the diminishing effects of disinvestment that have rendered this place a sacrifice zone, and the elaborate webs of multispecies care that form to sustain families after the flood. Even before learning that García dedicates Los reyes del pueblo que no existe to the memory of Atilano Román Tirado—who was murdered for advocating that people displaced by Picachos Dam be fairly compensated for lost land—the film gives us a visual unfolding of what Macarena Gómez-Barris theorizes as “submerged perspectives and counternarratives” that oppose and critique “extractivismo . . . an economic system that engages in thefts, borrowings, and forced removals.”2 Rivers reveal ongoing extraction and occupations; and as Nick Estes, Melanie K. Yazzie, and Cutcha Risling Baldy point out, they have also been integral to decolonizing struggles.3 [End Page 15] “Dam building and river diversion” were key elements of Paul Crutzen’s first formulation of the Anthropocene.4 This periodization by Western climatologists and geologists of the natural world as an archive of human responsibility obscured the multiple geographies, historical contexts, and scales of ecological transformation. Gómez-Barris writes against the Anthropocene’s “universalizing idiom and viewpoint that hides the political geographies embedded within the conversion of complex life.”5 For Dipesh Chakrabarty, the age of the Anthropocene, in which humans act as “geological agents,” coincided with the expansion of freedom, understood as the ability to exercise “autonomy and sovereignty.” According to Chakrabarty, “the mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use. Most of our freedoms so far have been energy-intensive.”6 Similarly, Vaclav Smil asserts that “civilization’s advances can be seen as a quest for higher energy use.”7 River documentaries like García’s film complicate correlations between energy and freedom by portraying the uneven geographical distribution of dam development and power. For people who are not the recipients of enhanced water supplies and hydroelectricity but who suffer the externalities of its engineering, the notion of freedom requiring immense flows of energy takes on new meaning—particularly given the human energy required to protect life and the water and land on which life depends. If river use revealed the destructive potential of the Anthropocene, river documentaries point us to the spatial and economic divisions of that impact; and they periodize a time of reckoning between the eliminating forces of extractive capitalism and the generative care-based human-river relations that can carry us into the future. In response to the dilemma of securing a future with clean water, river documentaries confront centuries of “watershed colonialism”—systems of injustice that have degraded rivers, including settler colonization, colonial hydrology and engineering, extractive capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and the loss of community control over sustainable environmental planning and decision-making—and they contribute to community-based approaches necessary to sustain rivers.8 They capture the consequences of river degradation worldwide and highlight the need for just and sustainable energy transitions. A long tradition of river documentaries flourished in the twenty-first century that call on viewers to witness the crisis in human-river relations and reevaluate the cultural and political practices that govern [End Page 16] river use and exploitation. In his explanation of the rise of environmental documentaries in the early twenty-first century, film historian Charles Musser argues that...
The Environmental Humanities Beyond Planetary Crisis Allison Carruth (bio) “We can now see more clearly than ever how life’s intricate complexity is essential for our own survival. But biodiversity is collapsing, and our climate is changing.”1 Narrated by David Attenborough, so opens a recent documentary released on Netflix titled Breaking Boundaries (2021). The film is unflinching in cataloguing the evidence for and ramifications of anthropogenic climate change, interweaving geological records and computational projections with scenes of congested highways, melting glaciers, and wildfire-devastated forests. In the same breath, Attenborough tells the viewer to feel alarm and eschew nihilism. To advance that narrative, the film holds up scientific research and technological innovation as the twin levers for “re-stabilizing” the atmospheric conditions that “built the modern world,” to quote one of the film’s featured scientists.2 Breaking Boundaries thus illustrates a predominant imagination of climate change as a planetary crisis. This narrative template has profoundly influenced what communication scholars term “the public of understanding of science” around climate change since the 1990s, and in turn has shaped a popular discourse that mass media and entertainment industries have advanced.3 In short, stories crafted in this mold connect data about large-scale, long-range planetary changes (changes to global mean temperature, atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, glaciation, biodiversity, and so on) with spectacular images of disaster. In 1989 Bill McKibben published one of the first books in English about global warming intended for a broad audience. Its title is The End of Nature. The book serves to make apprehensible what was then an emerging scientific consensus that one species, over just a few centuries, had “changed the atmosphere,” and so, as McKibben poignantly puts it, [End Page 10] “will change the weather.”4 The End of Nature is also a work of mourning for nature imagined “as a separate and wild province,” an idea integral to a wilderness-centered strain of American environmentalism.5 McKibben’s narrative of global warming is at once thick with climatic data (elucidating dozens of studies from places like the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the Mauna Loa CO2 monitoring station) and full of grief for a vision of nature as wild and separate from people. In this, The End of Nature illustrates what Ursula K. Heise calls the “declensionist narrative,” in which modern forces of industrialization, urbanization, and technological innovation bring about not social progress but ecological decline and cultural loss.6 Elegiac rather than optimistic, narratives like McKibben’s share with stories like Breaking Boundaries a conviction that the whole Earth is in crisis and an attendant belief that heroic individual actors—principled activists in the case of The End of Nature, scientists and engineers in the case of Breaking Boundaries—must bring the planet back from the brink. Put differently, big data science and eco-apocalypse have become entwined in the most-read and most-watched climate change narratives—from The End of Nature and Greta Thunberg’s Our House is on Fire (2020) to the blockbuster film The Day after Tomorrow (2004) and Leonardo DiCaprio’s documentary Before the Flood (2016).7 Nor is this narrative template found only in books and movies. It also pervades centers of environmental decision-making and climate action, such as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) or activist organizations like 350.org and Extinction Rebellion. However compelling, data-based, disaster-fueled narratives crowd out other ways of knowing, conveying, and addressing pressing environmental problems. In How Climate Changes Comes to Matter, Candis Callison shows that whether and how differently-situated groups—from Inuit leaders to science reporters—“become engaged” with a problem like climate change has to do with how the problem “becomes meaningful—by the forms of life it assumes.”8 By “forms of life,” Callison means not only expertise nor only firsthand experiences but also the values, institutions, epistemologies, and practices that the problem both stems from and draws into relief. More pointedly, Callison shows that climate change comes to matter when it “promiscuously inhabit[s] the spaces of ethics, morality, and other community-specific rationales for actions” with which scientific findings and projections [End Page 11] alone cannot...
From Toxic Narratives to Narrative JusticeAn Environmental Humanities Perspective on a Local Green New Deal David N. Pellow (bio) It is now crystal clear that the fight for the future of our communities and biosphere in the face of global anthropogenic climate disruption will not be decided on the merits of climate science. It will not be decided based on how strong or impressive any scholar’s statistical correlations, complex mathematical formulas, or multicolored charts and graphs might be. The wonderful “convenient truth” about climate change/disruption is that we have always had the tools for moving toward an ecological healthy, equitable, and just climate reality: narratives and stories reflect our lived and embodied experiences with climate and environmental injustices and they offer deep, transformative solutions. In this essay I consider the importance of such narratives and offer an exploration of a case wherein community members produced a framework for environmental and climate justice rooted in the power of story, reflecting the deep value of an environmental humanities approach to addressing our intersecting socioecological crises. In addition to facing a myriad of public and ecological health threats, communities experiencing environmental and climate injustices also have to confront “toxic narratives.” Toxic narratives are those stories produced by dominant or mainstream institutions that seek to impose official truths on marginalized communities, excluding or minimizing alternate explanations for environmental injustices, naturalizing these forms of violence, and often blaming residents for the contamination of their own neighborhoods (Armiero et al 2019). As Armiero et al note, [End Page 76] the environmental humanities are well-positioned to address and “sabotage” those toxic narratives because it is a multidisciplinary field that deploys the power of creative and critical thinking and narrative. One particularly useful way of articulating this idea is Barca’s (2014) concept of “narrative justice”—those efforts to expose the harm of toxic narratives on our communities while coproducing more just narratives that explore pathways and visions of transformation that have largely been ignored. One example of the possibilities and promise of narrative justice is emerging from Green New Deal efforts in various parts of the US. In 2019, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey introduced the Green New Deal resolution, a framework that seeks to address the daunting challenge of global climate change by building a green economy that is inclusive of all people through a process that offers a fair and just transition for workers otherwise negatively impacted by that shift. The main goal of the Green New Deal is to bring US greenhouse gas emissions down to net zero and meet 100% of power demands through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources by 2030. This policy framework would also include a series of social programs to ensure that people have access to high quality healthcare, housing, and education. In April of 2021, Ocasio-Cortez and Markey reintroduced the Green New Deal into the congressional record. Since the federal Green New Deal is a resolution rather than a law, it may productively be thought of as a canvas upon which communities around the country can paint their respective and unique visions of change. And they have done just that. There are too many examples of local Green New Deals to name, but they are proliferating from the West Coast to the East Coast and the Midwest where we are seeing local activists come together to propose their own Green New Deals that address key concerns in their specific communities. We see youth movements (like Sunrise); senior citizens (like the Society of Fearless Grandmothers); BIPOC-led groups focused on Indigenous sovereignty, environmental and climate justice, and food justice; labor unions (like the AFL-CIO, SEIU, and IBEW); and folks from all walks of life defining what their Green New Deal should look like in order to meet their unique local and regional needs. Some common themes we see in Green New Deal proposals throughout the US include: a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions; the need for major [End Page 77] investments in renewable energy; and the creation of “green” jobs that pay a living wage and are available to people who might be thrown out of work when we...
Post-Critical Affordances of Environmental Humanities Bethany Wiggin (bio) Teachers are not performers in the traditional sense of the word in that our work is not meant to be a spectacle. Yet it is meant to serve as a catalyst that calls everyone to become more and more engaged, to become active participants in learning. –bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress “Imagine,” a 2015 writing assignment for undergraduate students prompted, “that your book review will appear in a publication with an audience not unlike that for The New York Review of Books (we read two book review essays from its pages earlier in the term).”1 It instructed, “Click over to their website to refresh your memory. Get a feel for who The Review is written,” and continued, “This audience, while clearly knowledgeable about some things, may not be familiar with ‘ecocriticism’ or ‘cli-fi.’” It also reminded them, “You, on the other hand, have just read Heise’s ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Ecocriticism,’”2 and “earlier in the semester, you read and discussed articles by Gillen d’Arcy Wood,3 Stephanie LeMenager and Stephanie Foote,4 and Steve Mentz5 (whom some of you also met)—all more or less devoted to ecocrit and its intersection with sustainability studies.” The class, “Sustainability and Utopianism,” was widely cross-listed and the students were pursuing majors including biology, business, chemistry, communication, Earth and environmental science, English, German, health and society, psychology, and others. The humanists in the class were few, and the assignment asked them to engage in that most central humanistic activity, critique, nudging them along, “Your [End Page 124] review essay will itself be an example of ecocriticism.” The prewriting prompts posed the critical question, “What is it?” and offered the crib note, “Please recall that ‘criticism,’ in this context, means the work of contextualizing, analyzing, interpreting, and discussing the significance (be it artistic, intellectual, political, social etc.) of a text, book, work of art, film, installation, project, etc.” Students completed sentences that began, “Ecocriticism is . . . ,” “Ecocriticism can . . . ,” “At its worse, eco-criticism . . . ,” “At its best, ecocriticism . . .” Their detailed and thoughtful answers were illuminating. After nine weeks into our semester, I respected their intellect and commitments. For me—then an early-midcareer literary and cultural historian for whom new historicism6 and Atlantic history7 remained touchstones even as I recognized how they often perpetuated metropolitan prestige and needed continued decolonizing and provincial resituating8—the students’ answers were deflating and disturbing. While they, like me, hailed the ability of criticism to decode and estrange and trouble and similarly saluted successful criticism’s knack for illuminating the contingent, they, unlike 2015 me, were deeply troubled by the limits of criticism’s intended audience: chiefly other critics. Perhaps students’ dim view of criticism’s potential stemmed from reading “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?”9 and its prescient worry about the disturbing ease with which the hermeneutics of suspicion could be co-opted in the service of climate denialism. Perhaps it also arose from the near-certain knowledge that we were living in the last year that atmospheric CO2 would average under 400 ppm.10 In any case, their tepid embrace of criticism’s potential to do meaningful work in the world catalyzed my engagement with “post-critical” research methods and outputs. It made me a more “active participant in learning,” in bell hooks’s words, and this short article’s epigraph.11 I collaborated with students to establish the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities (PPEH, ppehlab.org) where we continue to endeavor to explore the implications of environmental humanities as inhabiting the difficult space between critique and action12 as constituting a contact zone13 in which environmental researchers who work within diverse epistemological frames14 can collaborate. We have learned from methods and practices of the sustainability sciences and community science. The work of Public Lab,15 for example, has helped us imagine how a university-based research group might work with [End Page 125] community-based researchers to address enduring and emergent environmental harms. As we continue to explore the affordances of environmental humanities after critique, we also probe how affective stances beyond suspicion might...
A Crisis Discipline? The Task of the Environmental Humanities to Come (Results of a Personal Study) Imre Szeman (bio) 1. Are the environmental humanities a ‘crisis discipline’? If not, should it conceive of itself in these terms? What are the implications—critical, analytic, and political—of imagining the environmental humanities in this way? And what are the implications of not doing so? The term ‘crisis discipline’ was introduced by scholar and activist Robert Cox in the inaugural issue of Environmental Communication.1 It was intended to help the readers and contributors of this new journal ask themselves whether the study of communication about the environment brought with it specific political and intellectual commitments. Could the field of environmental communication imagine itself as just another field of academic study, i.e., a specialized subfield with its own journals, conferences, and programs of study? Did it make sense to think of it, in the main, as doing what disciplinary fields have done over (let’s just say) the past half-century—patiently and carefully producing knowledge, animating learned discussion, and recording and archiving research results? Or did the subject of the field demand that scholars working in it understand their task differently than scholars working on other topics? For anyone working in environmental studies writ large, Cox’s answer is perhaps an obvious one. In his view, environmental communication has an ethical duty to “enhance the ability of society to respond appropriately to environmental signals relevant to the well-being of both human civilization and natural biological systems.”2 The study of a crisis demands the creation of knowledge geared towards its resolution. Anything else misses the point. [End Page 108] In much the same way as environmental communication, the environmental humanities is a field attuned to crisis. While it would be reductive to say the field is only concerned about climate change (since the terrain of the environment extends beyond issues defined by greenhouse gas emissions) it would be hard to argue that its scholarly and political imaginaries have not been shaped profoundly by climate crisis. Still, a field whose questions and logics are tuned by a crisis is not automatically a crisis discipline, at least not in the terms named by Cox; it need not be governed constitutively by an imperative—ethical or otherwise—that guides sites, themes, topics, and methods of inquiry. Does research in the environmental humanities enhance our ability to respond to climate change, with the speed, vigor, and focus demanded by the crisis? Does it help amplify society’s ability to generate responses to climate change to safeguard the well-being of living systems? Environmental humanists might quibble with the language Cox uses in describing his understanding of a disciplinary duty (e.g., who decides what is “appropriate” or determines “well-being”? Which signals are “relevant”? What is meant by “enhance”? And what about the well-being of the nonhuman, too?). Such attention to the way in which words and concepts shape our understanding of all things environmental is one of the things environmental humanists do best. But I wonder: can those working in this field really point to places where—to be blunt and analytically crude—humanistic discourse on the environment enhances the capacity of society to act quickly to right the sinking ship of the global environment? These questions, if seen as little more than rhetorical ones, might be taken as an indictment of the environmental humanities and its capacities to make a true difference in the climate crisis. They are not intended to do so. Nor is the point to celebrate the achievements of environmental communication in contrast to those of environmental humanities. Even if communication studies more often spills over into the extant practice of governments and NGOs, the latter are comfortable making use of existing technocratic discourses of problem identification and problem solving, and, in my experience, seldom need or want environmental communication to help them out. The questions I’ve raised here are ones I find myself asking more and more about my own critical labor and are ones I use to remind myself just what is at stake in producing [End Page 109] knowledge about the environment. They’re...
Resilience . . . Priscilla Wald (bio) From re (back) and salire (to jump, leap), “the act of rebounding or springing back; rebound, recoil”—The Oxford English Dictionary sets the first usage of resilience in the seventeenth century and in the nineteenth adds “elasticity; the power of resuming the original shape or position after compression, bending, etc.” Less common usages include: “revolt, recoil from something,” and “repugnance, antagonism.” Although largely fallen out of usage, the less common meanings make sense: to leap back suggests an act of recovery, but also of repugnance; we leap back in disgust. The richness of the word with all of its meanings captures the ambivalence the West in particular has expressed toward the organic world throughout recorded history. It may offer a way to think forward in what Martin Luther King calls “the urgency of now” (1963). The tenth anniversary of Resilience, coinciding as it does with a time of breathtaking (or perhaps breathless) uncertainty, seems an opportune moment to contemplate—and reclaim—the full meaning of the word. Human history offers a record of that ambivalence. Ancient myths manifest what the early-twentieth-century theologian Rudolf Otto calls the numinous, “the hushed, trembling, speechless humility of the creature in the presence of . . . that which is a mystery inexpressible and above all creatures” (Otto, 1958, 13)—the irrational and unpredictable world at once bountiful and sustaining and terrible in its destruction. Food sources drown in floods and dry up in droughts; shelters give way to earthquakes or tornadoes. In classical times the gods spoke through weather events, rewarding and punishing accordingly. Charles Darwin’s Nature likewise presides over a world equally brutal and magical. He writes, “[T]he face of nature bright with gladness” [End Page 119] masks the harsh reality of survival, how “the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life” and how “these songsters, or their eggs, or their nestlings, are destroyed by birds and beasts of prey . . .” (Darwin 62). Conversely, this zero-sum game makes us forget the mutual sustenance of life, how “plants and animals, most remote in the scale of nature, are bound together by a web of complex relations,” how “cattle absolutely determine the existence of the Scotch fir” and “insects determine the existence of cattle” (Darwin 72). In many ways, the lessons of science hearkened to as they updated the lessons of the classical world: the weather alternately punishing human-kind for their transgressions or showing its favor through blessings. For Darwin’s contemporary the American diplomat and philologist turned amateur Naturalist George Perkins Marsh, inspired, as Darwin was, by the German philosopher-scientist Alexander von Humboldt, the desiccated landscape of humanity’s earliest settlements bore witness to a war of human aggression. “[W]e are, even now, breaking up the floor and wainscoting and doors and window frames of our dwelling for fuel to warm our bodies and seethe our pottage,” he warned, “and the world cannot afford to wait till the slow and sure progress of exact science has taught it a better economy” (Marsh [1864] 2003, 52). The floods, winds, and fires, the trembling ground and raging winds that inspire Otto’s terrible awe are, for Marsh, expressions of a merited vengeance and disdain: forces unleashed against careless and even wanton human usage and ill-conceived human encroachments. Sometimes, in more docile moments, Nature “mocks the cunning and power of man by spontaneously performing, for his benefit, works which he shrinks from undertaking, and the execution of which by him she would resist with unconquerable obstinacy,” as in her “fettering” the encroaching dunes or “guard[ing] well the chains by which she connects promontories with mainlands, and binds continents together” (Marsh [1864] 2003, 438). Not as inscrutable as a god, perhaps, but just as unpredictable. Looking back, Sigmund Freud would label mid-nineteenth-century evolutionism the second of “three severe blows from the researches of science” to “the universal narcissism of men, their self-love” (Freud, 139). Maybe it was the idea of descent from slime dwellers rather than the more Romantic expulsion from a Garden that made the earth seem like a prison. Or maybe...
Red DustMigration and Labor as Seismic Fractures to the Anthropocene Nancy Pérez (bio) Here they will be happy, he thought as he grabbed another handful of red earth. Hundreds of people fell from his hand. —Alejandro Morales, The Brick People Dust crosses the boundaries between the living and the dead, plant and animal matter, the earth and the sky, the inside and the outside, you and the world . . . what does it smuggle in each of these crossings? —Michael Marder, Dust I arrive at this essay through the story of my family. I spent much of my childhood visiting my tía Hermelinda who rented a unit tucked between a strip of apartment complexes on Greenwood Avenue, a heavily trafficked main street in southeast Montebello once considered the industrial heart of the Western United States. The sounds that would filter into her home reflected the busy, dusty surrounding landscape—a nearby railroad ran adjacent to Telegraph Road where trains regularly announced their way through a web of distribution warehouses, a Home Depot, and a large cluster of truck-driving businesses where we could see drivers being dropped off by loved ones, or sitting on the curb having lunch. My aunt’s home always felt busy, not just because of the nearby machinery but because it was also frequented by neighbors, friends, and family who visited to catch up or buy food she would vend on the weekends. As a ritual, every Sunday we would always gather on the back steps of her home after dinner and listen to my mother and aunt share stories of their lives in Mexico while children played on the [End Page 14] long narrow driveway that separated the apartments from the speeding engines nearby. My interactions in that space with my family were not that distant from the memories that Frank “Kiki” Baltazar shared of his time living in this same community in the mid-1900s. In his blog, he writes, “One memory that comes to life when I close my eyes is when we had retired for the night, I would be lying in bed in my dark bedroom listening to the big rigs as they roared up and down Telegraph Road. Will never forget those months we lived in ‘El Rancho.’”1 It wasn’t a surprise, then, that when my aunt received an eviction notice in 2016, a major whirlwind of events began. The sights and sounds of Telegraph Road would stir memory across the boundaries of space and time, generating a multilayered communal history. In that moment, I had not known who Kiki was, or that the community that my aunt was forced to leave behind had formerly been called Simons. As a way to process the displacement in my family, I turned to writing. It was that journey that led me to obsessively research the Indigenous history of that land, of the violent dispossession of the Tongva-Gabrielino people, of Mexican land grants that gave it the name of Rancho Laguna. I learned that it was later called Simons (after the Simons brothers) who owned Simons Brickyard No. 3, considered one of the largest brickmaking companies in the nation at its peak in the early 1900s. At the time, brick was seemingly destined to replace adobe and was considered the more “progressive” building material for the construction of a “modern Los Angeles.”2 In response to this high demand of building material, the Simons brothers recruited an overwhelmingly Mexican labor force and created a company town that housed the brickworkers and their families. The fundamental plan was to sustain operations nonstop with a labor force that would keep the company booming for a very long time. Incentives were given to families who had more children. The LA Times admiringly called it the “model industrial town,” but according to historian William F. Deverell, “Simons was different, an industrial village that put home right up against work. All beneath the authoritative gaze of a company and a patriarch with the same name, segregated by ethnicity and geography.”3 When Walter Simons grabbed “another handful of red earth,” as Morales wrote in The Brick People, the “hundreds of people that fell from...
Unsung Heroes or Exploited Workers? Latino Migrant Day Laborers in Post-Harvey Houston and Critical Environmental Justice Daniel Olmos (bio) In August 2017, Hurricane Harvey devastated the Houston metropolitan area and caused approximately $125 billion in property damage, becoming one of the most costly storms in US history. Media outlets and observers attended to the serious socioeconomic plight of homeowners by highlighting the flooding of 150,000 homes and over 60,000 displaced people living in shelters and hotels, as well as featuring the historic role that social media played in connecting first responders to victims when emergency call systems overloaded.1 The storm acutely devastated lowlying areas of Houston, which is home to many disinvested and disadvantaged communities of color—the flooding and the lackluster state response led many to evoke the dramatic scenes of racialized abandonment during Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans in 2005.2 As global warming increasingly intensifies tropical storm systems along coastal regions in the US, climate justice movements insist that the most vulnerable and marginalized communities—also the least responsible for deeply-rooted systemic inequities—are also the most negatively impacted by the effects of global warming.3 While much scholarship has emphasized post-hurricane recovery efforts from the vantage point of Houston residents and businesses, little attention has been paid to the incorporation of Latino migrant day laborers as veritable “second responders” and, even less, as subjects of climate injustice and agents of environmentalism.4 Hurricane Harvey, a Category 4 storm, dumped fifty inches of rainfall and thirty-three trillion gallons of water into major commercial, [End Page 46] industrial, and residential corridors of the Houston region. The spectacles of evacuation and rescue that dominated media representation of the storm during the four-day news cycle obscured the eventual arduous process of recovery, in particular the prevailing mode of disaster recovery based on the exploitation of precarious racialized migrant labor. In the aftermath, unregulated small contractors and individual homeowners recruited mostly Latino day laborers to clear out moldy dry walls, replace rotted flooring, demolish dilapidated structures, and clean hazardous facilities, often with little or sometimes no pay and frequently without proper workplace safety equipment and conditions. “People don’t analyze it. They don’t see the consequences,” Martin Mares, a Mexican immigrant day laborer who has lived in Houston since 1995, noted during the recovery efforts. “They go to work without knowing whether the business will even pay them.”5 The erasure of day labor exploitation was extended by the mass-mediated appeals to resilience and grit in the face of a non-responsive state, namely through hashtag campaigns like #houstonstrong that promoted a neoliberal “rebuild above all else” model of recovery.6 In this context, this essay posits that the devastation wrought on the greater Houston area in the wake of Hurricane Harvey revealed not only the increasing vulnerability of US coastal regions to catastrophic weather patterns as a result of accelerated climate change, but also the socioeconomic relations and structures of racialized exploitation necessary for post-disaster reconstruction. I focus on the role of Latino migrant day laborers in greater Houston’s post-Hurricane Harvey rebuilding efforts and the environmental injustice implications, including the situatedness of day laborers in the face of ecological devastation. In the spirit of what Sarah Wald, David Vazquez, Priscilla Solis Ybarra, and Sarah Jaquette articulate as emerging “Latinx environmentalisms,”7 and drawing on a critical environmental justice framework through a qualitative sociological approach, I examine the conditions under which Latino migrant day laborers experienced racialized, economic, and ecological injustice following Hurricane Harvey, and finally how their subjection and struggle for dignity embodies a critical environmental justice politics in a moment of profound ecological crisis. [End Page 47] From the Anthropocene to Critical Environmental Justice The recruitment and exploitation of Latino day laborers in post-Harvey Houston was structured within the anthropocene era. In 2000, Paul Crutzen and Eugene Strermer introduced the concept of the anthropocene to explain a new stage of geohistorical development characterized by human activity as a “major geological force” and influence on climate patterns.8 While the anthropocene has become a buzzword with many different meanings, the category has fundamentally identified humanity as...
The Work of Futures Stephanie LeMenager (bio) Some ten years ago, Stephanie Foote and I met at the University of Illinois during a conference about sustainability. At the time, we were associate professors of literature working on our second books—hers about garbage and mine about fossil fuels. Together, we wondered if it was possible to create a journal where work like ours could be effectively reviewed by bringing together readers from various disciplines. For example, could someone who has expert knowledge on the histories of oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico review my work alongside a scholar of the novel? I knew that I needed to be fact checked, and I wanted to be assured that what I wrote could travel a little distance from the relatively small readership of English and American literary criticism. With all that we both wanted to say, and do, it seemed the disciplinary worlds we knew, in departments, conferences, and professional journals, were no longer adequate. Meanwhile, our respective departments struggled with student attrition and funding cuts and varied impositions upon tenure, from administrative attacks on freedom of speech to the diminishment of tenured lines in favor of temporary, contract labor. Neoliberalism had set upon the universities, and tuitions soared as empty rhetoric about “excellence” and “innovation” accelerated. Through furloughs and redistributions of campus space, we scrambled to sustain our research and to maintain material classrooms. New, glitchy software systems demanded hours of our time, week upon week. The same old hierarchies of patriarchy, racism, homophobia, and transphobia ensured assumptions about who could lead (or think) that worked both for and against ourselves—both of us are queer, cis, white women. With stalled salaries and growing service loads, we faced down the possibly eternal status of [End Page 53] associate professorship. Still, we knew we were lucky: We had tenure, we had jobs! Barack Obama was president of the US, which made hope seem tenable, even as his presidency grew disappointing. Then, as now, white supremacy reigned, and the climate was going haywire. Into this context circa 2010, Stephanie and I imagined an academic journal that we hoped would summon ways of thinking and writing more radically interdisciplinary—or even undisciplined—than our own. As we wrote then, intending to address the entangled failures of climate, economic globalization, and higher education, “We began this journal as a way to address the interconnectedness of the crises at hand, to create a common space in which the humanities broadly defined could speak to its own investments in the multiple damaged ecologies that structure our world.”1 Already, transdisciplinarity was a buzzword—meaning multidisciplinary approaches to explicit, real-world problems, like climate change. Already, the fledgling discipline of the environmental humanities competed with the posthumanities, which jettisoned both humanism, with its racist and colonialist implications, and anthropocentrism. We were excited by these developments. We also yearned for more joyous modes of scholarly practice, for genuine, noncompetitive communities. “What would it look like to practice as thinkers, scholars, writers, artists, and citizens the art and labor of building a commons in which we can and must be generous, even boisterous, rather than frugal and parsimonious, with our desire to talk about the ecologies of our planet, our institutional lives, and our local worlds?”2 Looking back, I see that we were young. Fortunately, the project of Resilience has always been one of many voices, which increased the possibility that the journal really might imagine, if not encourage, changes in institutional priorities, intellectual communities, and disciplines. That first issue is determinedly multivocal, with ten short manifestos on the meaning of “resilience” that differ wildly, including a brilliant critique of “resilience” as a handmaiden to the liberal status quo by postcolonial scholar Susie O’Brien. The journal’s first corps of co-editors (Allison Carruth, Jay Fiskio, Julia Christensen) offer compelling and distinct paths for knowledge-practice, from new media to critical environmental justice studies. In a featured interview with Fiskio, David Naguib Pellow and Joni Adamson speak about their groundbreaking books Garbage Wars and American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism, forecasting the ways in which [End Page 54] both economic dignity and Indigenous thought have become...
Happy anniversary to Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities! A decade is an impressive duration for an academic journal to flourish, a testament to the community of editors, writers, and readers who support its work— as well as to the continued relevance of rigorous ecological thinking in the face of relentless catastrophe. The vision statement for Resilience observes that the “vibrant interdisciplinary field” of environmental humanities was coming into being about five years before the journal was launched.1 Its authors articulate the discipline’s missions in a way that continues to resound powerfully.
In Defense of Play Alenda Y. Chang (bio) I suspect that many of the authors in this issue will suggest that it’s time to double down on serious, environmentally minded (or even better, environmentally accountable) scholarship, and similarly, that it’s also time to use any and all platforms available to us to get our work into circulation, with the aim of improving the public discourse around climate crisis, biodiversity loss, environmental justice, and so on. This means, of course, that in addition to publishing, teaching, and giving talks, we are expanding our typical audiences to those outside the academy. I am all for following such recommendations; in fact, my own work has gone in those directions since my first book on ecology in video games came out.1 I have the advantage of having opined on a topic that is terribly current in not one, but two ways: video games are a relatively recent and influential media form, not to mention hugely profitable, and the world is barreling past a series of checkpoints indicating a kind of collective environmental insanity. This means, in practice, that I get more than my fair share of journalists seeking my opinion on whether or not we can “play for the planet” (the name of a UN Environment Programme initiative looking to create green “activations” in the video game industry),2 but also interest from educators, mental health organizations, artists, museum curators, and tech entrepreneurs. But perhaps in a version of the “all work and no play” adage, I am going to propose here that along with ratcheting up the intensity of our moral and hermeneutic outrage, outreach, and activism, we also need to nurture our capacity for play and its many cousins—joy, comedy, pleasure, diversion, even, dare I say it, fun. This is likely why I have always felt an affinity for Nicole Seymour’s longstanding work on queer ecology, camp humor, and irony that gently points to the drudgery and [End Page 15] naïve earnestness bedeviling a great deal of contemporary environmental affect.3 Games in Novels Before detailing some of my rationale for the continued importance of play—whether as recreation or a mode of inquiry or a tactic for resistance—allow me a brief detour into my literary roots, if only to gesture to the environmental humanities’ largely textual foundations and the ongoing need for critical attention to visual and interactive media, like games. At certain risk of making an untenable generalization, I want to get an old gripe off my chest; namely that the games that novelists imagine are just awful. Despite marvelous prose, imaginative worldbuilding, and admirable character interiority, stories like Richard Powers’s The Overstory, Cixin Liu’s Supernova Era, and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAdam trilogy all feature games with narrative importance that otherwise fall flat in their depiction.4 I have come to dread these timely inclusions and see them more as clumsy nods to the prominence of games in culture than as revealing of games’ own constitutive affordances. For Atwood, it’s juvenile online and offline fare like Extinctathon, Intestinal Parasite, Barbarian Stomp, and Painball, suitable for encrypting messages and turning convicted criminals into televised battle royale spectacles but little else. Liu’s Supernova Era makes games more central but with a decidedly anarchic and patriotic flavor. Liu imagines a world upended by the radiation emitted by a massive supernova in Earth’s neighboring space that dooms anyone over the age of thirteen to death within a year. This precipitates a frenzied push for all adults, from garbage truck drivers to world leaders, to train children to run the world in their eventual absence. In this morbid scenario, according to Liu, once the adults perish, their children eventually turn to games both as a refusal of adult duties and as a means of resolving international tension. In a bloodthirsty version of the Olympics or maybe Prussian kriegsspiel, the children of the world willingly engage in a type of macabre World Games conducted on the Antarctic continent between nations, using tanks, bayonets, missiles, and so on, but less so naval ships and other equipment requiring extreme technical coordination and physical strength. The children...
Sanctuary without a State, or, “Dear Friend” Sonya Posmentier (bio) Dear Friend, I’ve been reading interviews, essays, poems, and letters that the Caribbean American poet Audre Lorde wrote after surviving Hurricane Hugo in St. Croix in 1989 (she had moved there recently to recover from treatment for cancer). I am learning from Lorde about practices for what I’m thinking about as environmental sanctuary, practices of refuge in community that take into account the heightened vulnerability of the planet and our place in it. Hurricanes, after all, don’t respect a border or a distinction between “territory” and “mainland,” “state” and “citizenship.” “Sanctuary” has historically referred to the faith-based movement for migration justice that began in the 1980s in response to migration primarily from Central America. The movement and the word have experienced a resurgence, expansion, and secularization over the last fifteen years, so the network now also includes unions, nonprofits, and universities. Sanctuary has included, but never been limited to, the physical housing of migrants. It is also a practice and a network of material support, mobility, witness, accompaniment, and refuge, and it is in this sense that I take it up here. It might be especially urgent to think of environmental justice and sanctuary together insofar as we recognize that anthropogenic climate change and various forms of environmental racism join other forms of state-sponsored (and interstate-sponsored) violence as reasons for migration. The current exodus from Central America would be one case in point. Changing weather patterns and drought have brought about [End Page 84] devastating crop failures and food insecurity in Honduras, for example. As migrants from Honduras reach the Northern border with Mexico, they encounter the many forms of US State violence used to erect and maintain a border wall: cyclone fencing, troops, detention centers, tear gas, all projected across the land and into the ocean. And yet, in the US and elsewhere, environmental disaster remains largely unrecognized as a basis for asylum or refuge. These examples highlight the need for approaches to climate justice that are at once global and attentive to the particularly uneven effects of climate change. Yet in the US, in the popular media and beyond, we continuously make recourse to the language of citizenship and the state as the basis for emergency aid and attention to infrastructure in the wake of climate-based disasters. After the federal government’s failure to address or even acknowledge destruction and loss of life in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands after Hurricane Maria, everyone from the NY Times to Lin-Manuel Miranda reminded the president, the country, and the people that the people of Puerto Rico are US citizens. They echoed a discourse that had emerged after Hurricane Katrina in which liberal writers, activists, and politicians recoiled at the tendency of the media to describe survivors of that storm in New Orleans as “refugees.” But beyond or in addition to claiming belonging within the borders of a nation state, what would it mean to challenge the way in which those borders have become the limits of mutual care in the first place? Lorde’s writings from St. Croix, a US Territory, reveal the limits of statehood and citizenship as rubrics for care. Take, for example, her lengthy interview with Charles Rowell in Callaloo conducted a year after the hurricane. Here, Lorde lays bare how the imperatives of the mainland overdetermine the economic and environmental circumstances of the island. The point is, what happens on these islands is directly involved with what is going on with Black people on the mainland and all over the world. I am speaking politically and economically as well as socially. For example, how many people are aware that on this tiny Caribbean island is the largest oil refinery in the Western hemisphere, Hess Oil of the Virgin Islands? Larger than their refinery in Jersey, larger than the one in Texas. What does that mean? What does it mean that two days after Hugo leveled St. [End Page 85] Croix, when there was no electricity, no telephone, no water, no food, no diapers, when 98 percent of the dwellings on this island were totally destroyed, the...
Belated Futures Stephanie Foote, Anthony Lioi, and Dana Luciano Last year, the Resilience collective—Stephanie Foote, Anthony Lioi, and Dana Luciano—asked a range of environmental humanists to speculate about the state of the field for this double issue marking the tenth anniversary of the journal’s publication. In part, we imagined this as a call-back to the journal’s first issue. Resilience 1.1 was entirely dedicated to a suite of manifestos about the environmental humanities. Some of those essays described the state of the field, some argued for the value of how the humanities could contribute to ongoing conversations about environmental policies, histories, and philosophies, and still others pointed out the work the humanities had yet to do in order to address the knotted questions of materiality and textuality. Despite their differences, all of the first issue’s pieces were short, punchy, and written in accessible language. They sought to provoke rather than to persuade, to stake out positions rather than to meticulously gloss a textual passage or a theoretical idea. They asked readers to imagine scholarship that could have an effect on real-world problems and made a brief for the humanities as the site of generative intellectual potential. But ten years ago, there were many fewer environmental humanists than there are now and fewer publications where such positions could be advanced. Now, the field is growing more quickly than anyone can keep up with it, splintering into distinct areas of inquiry like energy humanities, posthumanism, blue humanities, ecomedia, waste studies and so on. Even over the ten-year span of the journal, a surfeit of good work, a plenitude of scholars, a wealth of new modes of inquiry has emerged. If we can judge by the amount of work being produced in academia, the brief for the humanities as a core contributor to environmental [End Page 1] thinking seems to have succeeded. But as our contributors argue in this issue, there’s still work to do to imagine how the humanities can survive, as well as how they can make meaningful connections to the world as it is experienced by social actors structurally excluded from such conversations. It seems odd to think about plenitude and wealth in a field that emerged in part from an increased awareness of the scarcity of resources and the massive redistribution of wealth that followed from the triumph of global capitalism over the last three centuries. Seen that way, environmental humanism (EH) as a discipline has parasitically benefitted from the ongoing climate disaster. There’s so much to study and talk about; the cascade of failures is overwhelming. But perhaps a better way to think about it, as some of our contributors argue, is to slow down and ask again how the field of EH can create ethical scholarly relationships around core issues of access to information and access to basic rights. In this vein, our contributors have tasked themselves with asking what the world as it is needs from humanists. In the first issue of Resilience, the question that underwrote many of the contributions was how to even define EH. That is, the question that subtended the manifestos was about how and why the humanities mattered in the study of environmental decline and crisis. What would interdisciplinary thinking look like if organized around the category of environmental crisis? But the contributors who accepted our invitation to speak open-endedly about the field in this issue are concerned with what work our work—the work called for in these earlier writings—has already done, as well as what it might yet do. Looking over the essays included here, what we see, and we hope you see too, is that the humanists speculating about the future of the field are now imagining different ways to increase access to humanistic work, pushing humanists to think about different publics. As they do so, many of them caution us about our own fantasies about how we approach our work and its core presuppositions. Lawrence Buell, Stephanie LeMenager, Priscilla Wald, and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen offer us lessons in uncertainty and faith. Wald, who tracks the word “resilience” etymologically, asks us to consider what it might...
Contesting Western ExceptionalismFrom Slowing Down to Slow Thinking Gisela Heffes (bio) In the Museum of Ethnography (Etnografiska Museet) in Stockholm, Sweden, there is an ongoing exhibition entitled “Human/Nature.”1 The order in the title is important because Nature is written upside down in a suggestive shape that allows us to visualize through the lexicographic order the burden of the former over the latter. Not only does the vertical hierarchy denote the “supremacy” of Human over Nature but also the inverted nature of “Nature” implies a bewildered, puzzled, and stunned Nature as if Order reigned over Confusion. As one enters the exhibition, the first installation is set up in a bright vestibule organized conceptually around consumerism. A grocery cart full of useless objects greets the spectator and invites the crowd (at that moment absent) to walk along a corridor where different screens are mounted to address our relationship with unnecessary objects. The products include a new baby “perfume” to avoid the stink odors of poop, the mass production of beauty products (and whose plastic packaging mostly ends up in the oceans), and a new product called STRESSFREE being advertised by a woman speaking to the camera. The woman is typing on a laptop at a very high speed, alternating between her work and the audience. Against the backdrop of what is supposed to be a crowded office, the woman, wearing a white shirt and black blazer, addresses the camera to illustrate in an advertising mode the indisputable benefits of stressfree: “I can now perform at 100% around the clock. With stressfree I stay balanced regardless of stress level!” [figure 1]. The woman swings repeatedly from the laptop to the camera, hysterically typing with her eyes full of horror (figure 2). When she gazes at [End Page 30] the camera again, she exclaims, “Calms you down when you’re stressed and peps you up when you’re tired. The ultimate solution when you don’t have time to rest or sleep” (figure 3). Of course, biocapitalism cannot do its job without the magical help of the pharmaceutical companies. The “ultimate solution” to indistinguishably become, as humans, the raw material that from the onset of the Industrial Revolution initiated its fateful itinerary towards mass production. The final intervention of the woman (figure 4) closes with a warning: “Say no to slowing down!” The caution is however introduced in a different tone. Unlike the smiley face she disclosed before, the woman’s eyes have now acquire a more ominous look. It is not so much a graceful caution as a reprimand. The subtext is clear: notwithstanding how much rest or sleep you need, do not slow down because there will be repercussions. As I am trying to write about the future of the field of environmental humanities and exploring my own relation with Nature or nature––no matter which one we refer to––I realize that I am also sitting at a desk, typing frenetically on my computer, reflecting on “slowing down” while I hasten to wrap up and submit my own work before the deadline; I am, like the woman in the video, rushing to complete projects and to start out new ones at the same time that I juggle work and family, as well as responsibilities and leisure. I am embedded in the greater machinery of production and consumption not so differently from the woman on the screen who wants to sell magic potions so we don’t fall off the cliff. And by this, I mean collapse. In other words, I am situated like her in the ongoing mechanics of the capitalist sponsored state that, by way of Foucault, not only regulates us but also ensures that our bodies and minds continue to operate at their highest productivity. To make it more marketable (or at least attractive), the woman on the screen should have added, not without amusement: “No side effects!” From our own capacities as environmental humanists, thinkers and writers, how can we de facto slow down? Of course, the word “slow” has become crucial in the context of contested economies through the notion of “slow growth” or “degrowth.” But what about slow thinking? Can we slow down...
