{"title":"Consolations of the Earth","authors":"Jerome Whitington","doi":"10.1215/22011919-10746123","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10746123","url":null,"abstract":"This article looks toward nineteenth-century earth sciences with attention to their humanistic themes. In the early decades of the century, multiple lines of evidence concretized a humanistic experience of man as a finite being with a contingent and accidental planetary existence. Geological humanism refers to the way that themes of earthly existence routinely influenced the status and meaning of being human, culturally and within the sciences, with the collapse of Enlightenment aesthetics of symmetry, purpose, and order in the late eighteenth century. While earth sciences recast humanistic themes in empirical terms, by the latter half of the nineteenth century scientists also regularly articulated prophecies of secular extinction or demise that were resolved, but only partly, both with reference to a long-standing racial schema and through routine consolations that a planet modified by human activity would be a better earth. Coal played a particular role in mediating between earth and atmosphere, mineral and life, and matter and energy. This article details several of these secular consolations offered to popular audiences by prominent climate scientists to show that the earth was far from being understood as a stable domain of nature that could be taken for granted.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139305306","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":"Metabolic Strata, Corporeal Sediment","authors":"Andrea Marston","doi":"10.1215/22011919-10746056","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10746056","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the uneven geosocial traces created by transcontinental and corporeal circulations of tin ore, metallic tin, and tin cans from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Although tin has no essential relationship to human life, I argue that the extraction, circulation, and consumption of tin have nevertheless contributed to the production of metabolic unevenness across continental space. Since the early industrial era, tin has been used primarily for food preservation, in which capacity it has nutritionally supported the metabolic processes (and labor power) of workers, settlers, and soldiers, among others. Tin canning technologies relied, in turn, on the relentless labor of tin miners, whose own metabolic processes were interrupted by the accumulation of mineral dust in their lungs. These histories have been archived as geosocial strata as both discarded tin cans and pulmonary fibrosis. Drawing insights from geophilosophy and both Marxian and toxicological approaches to metabolism, this article reflects on how inhuman forces and substances subtend not only life but also its disparate energies and exposures.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":"52 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139291961","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":"Redistribute Toxicity","authors":"Caroline Ektander, Jonas Stuck","doi":"10.1215/22011919-10746012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10746012","url":null,"abstract":"Redistribute Toxicity was a commissioned art piece created by visual artist Jonas Staal in close collaboration with environmental historian Jonas Stuck and curator and researcher Caroline Ektander, and later enriched by the knowledge and practices of seed librarian, artist, and activist Zayaan Khan for the exhibition The Long Term You Cannot Afford: On the Distribution of the Toxic at SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin in 2019. Informed by historical research on the trade of hazardous waste between the two Germanys during the Cold War—with a particular focus on the landfill Vorketzin, which served as West Berlin’s primary hazardous waste disposal site during the division—the art commission asked us to consider what an act of redistribution of a toxic past could look like. Similar to other waste practices premised on systems of externalization, the one that transpired between a divided Germany resulted in an asymmetrical impact on human, animal, and plant lives populating the former East—effects that are till this day hard to account for. The research process generated a series of designs that exposed the various practical and ethical issues entangled with acts of retribution and helped shape a project that became less concerned with correcting the past and more committed to reconfiguring toxic relations in the present. The final installation design propagated seeds from the wetland vegetation surrounding the landfill. This wild vegetation had not only become implicated in Germany’s toxic history as silent witnesses but had also helped remediate the soils over time.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139298564","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":"Geology, Power, and the Planetary","authors":"Jerome Whitington, Zeynep Oguz","doi":"10.1215/22011919-10746045","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10746045","url":null,"abstract":"What conditions of possibility have emerged for learning to live on a new earth? This special section builds on scholarship in the environmental humanities, critical Black studies, and geophilosophy to explore how emergent ways of becoming human are forged in relation to powerful earth dynamics, even while earth’s powers are constitutive of contemporary forms of domination. Geologizing Sylvia Wynter’s understanding of being human as a praxis, it proposes that earth as praxis (a) provides a diagnosis of the deeply embedded forms of power that have been materialized, over several centuries, in the earthly conditions of life itself; and (b) represents a critical potential for creating new ways to live on earth through the practical exploration of geosocial relations. We highlight three modes of earth praxis. Inhuman territorializations calls attention to the landscapes and earthy matter subjected to racializing and territorializing modes of power. In turn, such practices participate in the constitution of dehumanized, racialized, and dispossessed bodies and peoples. Becoming geological refers to the ways human forms of living have become shot through with earth system dynamics, mineralogical relations, and energetic possibilities, to the extent that people cannot be who they are without these pervasive anthropogenic geologies. Finally, planetary predicaments helps diagnose the politically vital and collective but deeply unequal and nonhomogeneous conditions of the present. Earth as praxis offers an analytical grip on emerging planetary earth relations that breaks with abstract, universalizing categories, and is capable of diagnosing the wide range of today’s violent, creative, and liberatory planetary practices.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139292948","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":"Soilkin","authors":"A. R. Toland","doi":"10.1215/22011919-10746023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10746023","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing on ideas from the history and philosophy of soil science, Fluxus performance, and queer-feminist STS, this article responds to a question posed by environmental researcher Hugo Reinert: “What modes of passionate immersion—or love, or intimacy—could a stone afford?” Situated in a fluid space between environmental humanities and artistic research, the Soilkin project develops a series of relational exercises to frame three basic propositions: (1) a non-normative, animistic understanding of geologic subjectivity could trouble accepted criteria for life on earth, leading to kinship with geogenic entities; (2) soil formation (pedogenesis) could be interpreted as a performative process of learning and becoming, rather than simply weathering and aging, with appreciable ontological implications; and (3) soil kinship is situated within a dynamic interplay of resistance and consent, demanding that the terms of reciprocity between humans and soils be mutually beneficial and appropriate to the slowed-down timescale of events in which soil-beings live and operate. The article integrates theoretical provocations with performative scores to expand and sensitize soil-scientific knowledge while, at the same time, contributing to multispecies scholarship on kin-making with geogenic and pedogenic others.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":"15 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139296180","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":"Liquidity and Liquefaction","authors":"Jerry Zee","doi":"10.1215/22011919-10746078","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10746078","url":null,"abstract":"This article considers the collision of earthly and monetary phase shifts. It situates itself in Richmond, British Columbia, a seam where multiple and disparate processes of landing collaborate in the ongoing transformation and modulation of the earth’s surface. It poses a Chinese-funded construction boom on an island in western Canada as a geological formation, a physical outcropping at the collision of nineteenth-century Chinese terraforming labor and twenty-first-century flyaway Asian wealth. These collisions articulate fault lines in transpacific tectonic and geopolitical relations, even as the fluid dynamics of wealth and islands of impounded silt evince multiple figurations of Asian-ness. Through the juxtaposition of two permutations of land, economics, and racial formation across multiple centuries in the Fraser River Delta, I offer a notion of orogeny, the geological process of mountain building and crustal deformation, to attend to the earthmoving dynamisms of rivers, wealth, and Asian racialization.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139304411","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":"Sensory Co-laboring","authors":"Diana Pardo Pedraza","doi":"10.1215/22011919-10745968","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10745968","url":null,"abstract":"Demining has not been an exclusively human affair. Mine detection dogs have been indispensable in the work of detection and in the slow but essential effort to regain trust in mine-suspected landscapes. Famously renowned for their extraordinary sensory perception, physical strength, and mental traits, they are part of human-nonhuman units training and working together to perceive explosives’ odors. This article considers the role of these units, known in Colombia as binomios caninos, in the strenuous task of mine clearance. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic engagement with global and local humanitarian demining efforts in Colombia, it examines detection choreographies and daily interactions, proposing to think of their joint work in terms of sensory co-laboring. Bringing anthropological work on collaboration between worlds, sensory labor, and animal work into dialogue, this composite term foregrounds detection as labor and as a result of human-nonhuman cooperation. It also highlights the asymmetrical field in which these collaborators converge and the divergent desires, affects, and attachments that mobilize their participation in demining. Mine detection is conceptualized as a sensory task through which dogs and humans intra-act, both together and apart. Recognizing this partial connection allows us to rethink how humans and other creatures are ontologically reconstituted and how overlapping histories of warfare and humanitarianism, legacies of animal behavioral practice, and instrumental-affective interactions shape these reconstitutions.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":"29 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139305195","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":"Practicing for Death in the Anthropocene","authors":"Hjördis Becker-Lindenthal, Simone Kotva","doi":"10.1215/22011919-10422311","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10422311","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article analyzes the theme of practicing for death as it has emerged in recent environmental discourse. In the first part, it situates Roy Scranton’s Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (2015) in the context of new critical approaches to death and asceticism, especially Peter Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics (2013). In the second part, it offers an environmental reading of the “remembrance of death” as it appears in John Climacus’s influential seventh-century manual, The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Here, the authors build on Sloterdijk’s remarks on Climacus while developing Sloterdijk’s analysis substantially, drawing (in part three) on ecotheological readings of Byzantine asceticism to elucidate Climacus’s environmental practice. The authors argue that what is at stake in the remembrance of death is the death not of the self but of a perception of the self that valorizes the self-possessed subject. In the final part, they compare the death of specific self-images in Christian asceticism to the death of the human qua self-possessed subject in the posthumanist ethics of Rosi Braidotti. At the same time, the authors see Climacus as deepening positions sketched out in Braidotti’s posthumanism and providing a critical perspective on the idea of resigning from care.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48212855","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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