{"title":"Casual Planetarities","authors":"Andrea Ballestero","doi":"10.1215/22011919-10746134","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10746134","url":null,"abstract":"Planetary awareness has become synonymous with awareness of large-scale temporal, geographic, and geologic events. Given the scalar multiplicities and instabilities of life on earth, concepts such as planetarity, the Anthropocene, and even the global have provided analytic reprieve. They name that which is difficult to objectify: the geographic and historical vastness of geological presence. But those concepts grow from knowledge habits inherited from imperial and Cold War logics and can presume the existence of an all-encompassing observer who can grasp the unity of the planet as such. This article explores alternative assumptions. It asks how other practices of the earth deal with planetary scales of sense-making. It conceptualizes those practices as forms of casual planetarity that, instead of drawing on preexisting scales such as the planet or the Anthropocene, produce senses of closeness and/or distance between everyday life and the geological implications of human presence. It follows the work of geologists in Costa Rica who rely on a 3D physical model to bring about scalar oscillations that connect human experiences with the vastness of underground worlds. This association is made possible by focusing on the movement of water as a hydro-geo-social choreography of everyday life. The article shows how the resonant power of the 3D model geologists use to enact these choreographies opens pathways for people to come to terms with their geological presence without having to see the planet as a whole or presume the capacity for total observation.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":"61 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139297249","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}
{"title":"Of Geosocial Relations and Separations","authors":"Zeynep Oguz","doi":"10.1215/22011919-10746067","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10746067","url":null,"abstract":"How might an attention to the role that the geologic plays in everyday social and political formations help reveal and politicize the geographically, temporally, and stratigraphically distributed forms of violence in the Anthropocene? Building on recent work in environmental humanities, anthropology, geography, and feminist geophilosophy that aims to rethink racialized forms of violence alongside planetary forces and earthly formations, this article explores how geosocial relations and exclusions register distributed forms of violence that are often kept separate from each other. Through an ethnographic account of a state-led oil shale exploration project in southwestern Turkey during the eruption of war between Kurdish freedom fighters and the Turkish state in southeastern Turkey in the summer of 2015, the article traces the links and disjunctures between the everyday disavowal of resource exploration and colonial warfare. It explores how the disavowal of war and hydrocarbon exploration forecloses political and ethical possibilities. It further examines how emergent geosocial relations between people and rocks carry the possibility of reckoning with anti-Kurdish war and violence. In doing so, the article invites environmental humanities to rethink methodological and analytical ways of rendering violence visible. The article concludes by speculating about the possibility of geosocial solidarity, or a mode of relation with geological formations and humans that forges connections between racialized forms of othering and planetary scales of time, space, and materiality. As a mode of earthly praxis, geosocial solidarity is what might come after the unfinished task of detangling distributed forms of violence in the Anthropocene.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":"20 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139292608","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}
{"title":"Planetary Rifting and the Paleogeography of Care","authors":"Nigel Clark, Rebecca Whittle","doi":"10.1215/22011919-10746100","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10746100","url":null,"abstract":"With their specter of intergenerational betrayal, global environmental crises increasingly entangle politics with matters of care, attachment, and love—especially the unconditional bonds we are so often assumed to share with our offspring. As a contribution to the nascent field of paleoenvironmental humanities, this article’s approach to questions of care and responsibility turns from future horizon-scanning to the realm of human origins. It focuses on two broad sets of paleo stories that share a concern with rifts or stress points that complicate originary events and scenes. The first of these is a family of hypotheses which propose that pivotal evolutionary developments took place in the climatically variable and tectonically active terrain of the East African Rift. The second is the cooperative breeding hypothesis, which contends that communally distributed childcare arrangements are a definitive characteristic of the genus Homo, while also highlighting the conditionality and precariousness of human intergenerational care. Taken together, these approaches point to deep-seated fault lines running through both our home planet and our own psychosocial being. Confronting these rifts might help loosen the hold of notions of ontological reconciliation between humans and nature that risk exacerbating the very problems they seek to resolve, while also helping us to seek attachments that are more conducive to living with and through earthly volatility.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139295121","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}
{"title":"Desktop Prospecting and Extractivism at Home","authors":"Tom Özden-Schilling","doi":"10.1215/22011919-10746089","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10746089","url":null,"abstract":"Government-run geological surveys have increasingly facilitated exploration for potential mines by inviting novice prospectors to sift through old datasets prior to visiting physical sites, a process known colloquially as desktop prospecting. In northern British Columbia, Canada, some novices have developed sophisticated techniques for analyzing promising signs in these data and narrativizing their own desktop prospecting labor within broader environmental and economic shifts playing out across rural Canada. This article examines how efforts to vernacularize simulation-based geological expertise into new forms of work-from-home labor is transforming the ways settler entrepreneurs articulate attachments to rural areas. This growing interdependence of entrepreneurial web-based prospecting and extractivism writ large underscores a fundamental transition in how government ministries and developers relate the development of mines to the making of homes. Computer modeling tools have transformed prospectors’ relations with people and places by altering where and how they conduct day-to-day work. The valorization of model-work as an accessible, democratizing practice has also shaped how prospectors discern what kinds of homes bear the risks of mineral exploration labor. With free maps and simple analytical software in hand, BC-based geotechnical institutions insist, individual prospectors might yet play critical roles in luring mineral exploration companies back to the region after a decades-long decline in mining activity. As climate change renders regional timber extraction uncertain and mining industry restructuring continues apace, settler prospectors’ homemaking aspirations are turning inward toward domestic spaces of labor—some of the few spaces where precariously employed resource workers can still maintain illusions of control.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":"192 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139305925","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}
{"title":"Geopoetics","authors":"A. Bobbette","doi":"10.1215/22011919-10746112","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10746112","url":null,"abstract":"This article presents an alternative political history of recent planetary thought through an examination of geopoetics rooted in the colonial politics of Indonesia and Cold War geosciences. This history reveals how geopoetics has not been marginal or critical of dominant scientific narratives but has been central to the development of modern theories of the earth. The article traces the roots of that history in colonial Indonesia through debates between geologists, Theosophists, and orientalists, and in colonial endeavors to suppress Javanese Islam through new geological narratives. It considers the work of Johannes Umbgrove, his theory of geopoetry, and its influence on Harry Hess and the theory of plate tectonics. Acknowledging this history shows us just how deeply connected geopoetics is to much longer religious, cosmological, and political conversations about narrating the earth. The article examines how geopoetics has long been preoccupied with understanding the connectivity of nature and catastrophic histories and points to contemporary possibilities for rethinking the relationship between humans, the earth, and cosmos.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":"195 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139294795","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}
{"title":"The Economy in Mind","authors":"Richard McNeill Douglas","doi":"10.1215/22011919-10745990","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10745990","url":null,"abstract":"This article applies thematic analysis to the discourse of the environmental countermovement, focusing primarily on the mutually referencing contributions of Julian Simon, Friedrich von Hayek, and Ronald Reagan. Utilizing a close reading of these texts, it aims to describe how the subscribers to this discourse picture the human relationship with the natural world, and how this in turn enables them to believe that the market can overcome environmental limits indefinitely. This analysis brings to the fore a belief apparently underlying their faith in unending growth: that humankind is able to progressively convert nature into economic reality, whose essence is the limitless quality of the human mind.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139305062","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}
{"title":"Minding the Gaps","authors":"Linda Shenk, K. Franz, William J. Gutowski","doi":"10.1215/22011919-10746001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10746001","url":null,"abstract":"Increasingly, researchers share climate information as narratives to support decision-making and public action. In these contexts, however, scientists remain the focal storytellers. This article offers our methodology for researchers and communities to share narratives with each other and then to engage in collaborative storytelling. At the center of this work is how the humanities embrace the importance of narratives having gaps—narrative lacunae into which individuals can insert their experiences, needs, and values. Our storytelling- and gaps-based methodology allows communities and researchers to enter and transform each other’s stories. We offer a simulation model that fosters collaborative storytelling and give examples from the storytelling and social-environmental action projects that have emerged over three years of partnership with communities and university students.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":"35 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139297554","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}
{"title":"When Gods Drown in Plastic","authors":"Aike P. Rots, Nhung Lu Rots","doi":"10.1215/22011919-10745957","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10745957","url":null,"abstract":"Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the category animism has seen a remarkable resurgence in Western scholarship, capturing the interest of many anthropologists, scholars of religion, and philosophers. Some authors have argued that animism can provide a model for a new environmental ethics that acknowledges more-than-human agencies and interdependencies. However, the question remains as to how so-called animist ontologies can transform not only individual moralities, but also the extractivist economic-political structures underlying the current crisis. In this article, we assess some of these claims by examining an Asian ritual tradition that is arguably animistic, while also containing elements of Buddhism, Daoism, and ancestor worship: the worship of whales, widespread along the coast of South and Central Vietnam. Fishing communities here believe that whales are divine beings, incarnations of the maritime god Ông Nam Hải (Lord of the South Sea)—also known as Cá Ông (Lord Fish)—who rescue people in distress at sea. When fishers find beached whales, they offer them elaborate funeral ceremonies and enshrine their bones in local temples. Whale worship constitutes a way of relating to the physical environment, and rituals help people respond to problems such as coastal erosion and overfishing. However, there is no evidence suggesting that this particular animistic belief system has given way to environmentalist action, let alone induced systemic change. Animistic ontologies certainly have ethical dimensions, and they may provide ways for people to make sense of and cope with Anthropocenic crises, but that does not mean they teach people how to act sustainably. At the very least, that would require an active process of translation and adaptation.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":"266 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139297568","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}
{"title":"Waiting in Petro-Time","authors":"Heather Davis","doi":"10.1215/22011919-10745979","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10745979","url":null,"abstract":"To describe the multiple, colliding temporalities of climate change I put forward the concept of petro-time. Petro-time asserts that time itself has been compressed through millennia to become fossil fuels, and then burned, resulting in climate chaos. In this essay, I take up one aspect of petro-time, the feeling of waiting. I articulate this feeling of waiting through the opera Sun & Sea (Marina) by Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė, and Lina Lapelytė, which explores the affective dimensions of climate change for those of us with the wealth and privilege that, so far, mostly shelters us from its worst effects. But climate change is always there, on the horizon, looming. This reality sits at the back of the brain, emerging in moments of relaxation as a “nagging malaise,” depicted in the opera through “insidiously pleasant melodies.” The tension that many of us experience in relation to climate change, where it cannot be sustained as the crisis that it is, instead blends into a background anxiety. I argue that waiting (for adequate policies, for climate relief) is felt differentially across the globe but that it also might provide a pause to recommit to climate solutions that don’t repeat the injustices of the past.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":"194 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139294281","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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