{"title":"Climate Collections and Photosynthetic, Fossil-Fueled Atmospheres","authors":"F. Cameron, B. Dibley, D. Ellsworth","doi":"10.1215/22011919-10422289","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10422289","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Historical, cultural, and technological collections are routinely put to work to illustrate narratives of progress, history, and identity. They can also convey new stories that articulate how cultural objects might serve as material expressions of climate change embedded in climate processes. This article considers the oldest surviving largely unaltered Boulton and Watt rotative engine, housed in the collection of the Science Museum, London, as an example to examine how objects are at once the material expression of carbon economies and cultures that have generated them and the material archives of the climate histories in which they are enmeshed. It draws on insights from the environmental humanities and the critical posthumanities and augments these with other knowledge practices from the biogeochemical sciences. Specifically, it utilizes stable carbon dating, whose methods provide the opportunity to locate particular cultural objects in relation to the deep time of planetary climate change. In doing so this paper develops the proposition that, articulated as such, these objects are complex climatic ecological compositions, and so understood, they can serve as cultural carbon mitigation strategies that occasion possibilities of new material and climatic attunement that can complement climate mitigation policies and programs. This proposition is trialed in relation to Object No. 1861-46—the Boulton and Watt “Lap” Engine.","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":"45614868","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":"Snake Oil and Gaslight","authors":"Michael E. Staub","doi":"10.1215/22011919-10422300","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10422300","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article seeks to sidestep the dilemma of restricted access to oil company archives through a close examination of a heretofore underutilized source base: the fossil fuel industry’s own trade journals and magazines. These oil and gas industry trade publications have served to envelop their readership in what we would now call an information bubble. Still, it is important to highlight the contradictory tactics that trade industry publications effectively test-marketed in the 1960s and 1970s to nullify a perception of petroleum as hazardous to public health and the natural environment. Most paradoxical was how trade publications reinvented their industry both as not a problem for the natural environment and as the solution to all and any future problems faced by that environment. Unlike any other currently available source base, Big Oil’s trade publications offer insights into the timing and triggering motivations of the industry’s shift to self-representation as stewards of nature, as well as the rapidity and multidimensional comprehensiveness of the industry’s mobilization to develop counternarratives to potential critics. And not least of all, these publications reveal the fantastical lengths to which Big Oil was willing to go in its efforts to preemptively block the research and development of electric vehicles, principally by diverting to the imaginary prospect of a gasoline-powered but nonetheless “smogless” car. This history represents an early and previously unexplored chapter in the evolution of what we have come to recognize as corporate “greenwashing.”","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":"43896225","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":"Astroenvironmentalism as SF","authors":"A. Marino","doi":"10.1215/22011919-10216140","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10216140","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The New Space Age is awash with discourses about space colonization and resource exploitation, and these happily coexist with the age-old and curiosity-driven question, “Are we alone in the universe?” Astrobiology addresses this question and, at the same time, codifies knowledge useful for protecting our planet and other celestial bodies from harmful contamination. This article critically examines astroenvironmentalism as discussed within astrobiology and attempts to rescue it from becoming a principle of border creation in otherworldly ecologies. To do so, it merges astrobiology with visions and images from feminist postcolonial and decolonial theory, STS, and science fiction, and reflects on the enduring colonial tropes that provide the building blocks of current knowledge on outer space. The same colonial cartographic imagination at play in the much-debated frontier narrative animates the concept of planetary parks. These have gained increased popularity as a mechanism of environmental protection in space, but it is important to note how they entertain a settler future in outer space and legitimize claims to territorial property and extraction. In a dialogue that is contrapuntal to the codification of this form of transplanetary environmentalism, this article traces how Lynn Margulis’s cosmic symbiosis, Donna Haraway’s sympoiesis, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest (1976) intersect with concerns of astrobiological knowledge. Crucially, they enable the blurring of three types of borders: between science and fiction; planetary inside and outside; life and matter. This border-crossing can be generative of a process of creating more-than-human relationalities beyond Earth-centric geographies.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43132317","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":"Rivers and Reconciliation","authors":"K. Lyons","doi":"10.1215/22011919-10216206","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10216206","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article presents an ethnographic and participatory action research project to reconstruct the “socioecological memory” of the Mandur River watershed in the Colombian Amazon. The objective of this project was to create conditions for community dialogues over the territorial ordering, recovery, and conservation of the watershed in the midst of ongoing socio-environmental conflicts. The author introduces the proposal to engage in what grassroots organizations call “profound reconciliation” along with the ethical stakes of reconciliatory processes that tend to human and more-than-human relations damaged by the interconnected dynamics of structural violence and decades of war. The author presents the environmental humanities-based methodologies that emerged in the collective process to elaborate the memory of the Mandur. The article also discusses the importance of fostering spaces for bettering conflict and offers reflections about the challenges posed for public engaged scholarship when a post–peace accord transition shifts toward the perpetuation of violence and militarized forms of conservation. Scientific and arts-based practices provided distinct evidentiary and speculative tools for analyzing the current conditions of the watershed and imagining future reparative strategies. The article argues that these methods allowed communities to not only diagnose the problems at hand but also hesitantly ask “What else is possible?” in a context of economic precarity, chronic insecurity, and institutional omission.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48519699","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":"Sense and Consent in Cocreating with Earth Others","authors":"H. Morehouse, Cheryl E. Morse","doi":"10.1215/22011919-10216151","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10216151","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Recent debates around multispecies communities emphasize collaboration across difference for fostering intimate relations with the world. The basic premise is simple: a richer understanding of the ways in which we are connected to the world will yield greater care for the world. However, while collaboration across difference might close conceptual and material gaps between self and other, and nature and society, it is not always clear whether or how collaboration should take place. Indeed, largely absent in these debates are matters concerning cross-species consent. It can be challenging to obtain consent or ascertain agreement in the absence of straightforward communication. To address the whether and how of collaboration across difference, this article draws on ethnographic research on dowsing—a traditional method for finding underground water and other invisible or intangible resources—in the United States and the United Kingdom. This research shows how dowsers establish dialogue by attuning to Earth Others (e.g., water, plants, spirits) using various tools, such as dowsing rods, pendulums, and their own bodies. This article addresses how practitioners apply dowsing as a technique for communicating across human and more-than-human divides through ethical inquiries that tend to the agency and seek the consent of Earth Others in matters concerning land use. This research suggests that dowsing offers a reciprocal and dialogic strategy for collaborating with that which is often unseen, unheard, or ignored.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43856280","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 Palliation for Extinction and Climate Change","authors":"Julia D. Gibson","doi":"10.1215/22011919-10216250","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10216250","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Even with the advent of climate change, mainstream environmentalism lacks a robust death ethics, that is, ethical theories and practices for attending directly to what is owed to the unjustly dead and dying. This article draws on Indigenous, Afrofuturist, and feminist science fiction narratives and their correlating lived practices to explore how death ethics for those driven extinct by climate change and other environmental injustices can and ought to go beyond affect, symbolism, and abstraction. It puts forward environmental palliation as an alternative framework for grappling with the injustice of extinction as and in publics. Far from a glorified form of euthanasia, palliation is an ethic and a practice geared toward providing good or better deaths for particular entities under specific conditions of injustice. In death, palliation cedes to remembrance, an ethic and practice for keeping the dead alive in memory so that they can be cared for. When done right, these death ethics are inextricably linked with climate justice for the living and those yet-to-be.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43026882","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":"Sacrifice Zones","authors":"Ryan Juskus","doi":"10.1215/22011919-10216129","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10216129","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article provides a genealogy and analysis of the concept of a sacrifice zone. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, the article traces the origins and transformation of sacrifice zones from (1) a livestock and land management concept into (2) a critical energy concept during the 1970s, (3) an Indigenous political ecology concept in the 1980s, and, finally, (4) an environmental justice concept in the 1990s and beyond. The article identifies the concept’s core content and argues in favor of calling sites of concentrated environmental injustice sacrifice zones, over alternatives such as “fenceline communities” or “dumping grounds,” in part because the concept of sacrifice, derived from the Latin “to make sacred,” is polysemous, signifying both violent victimization and sacred life. This explains why some activists have employed the sacrifice zone concept to generate a positive vision for transforming sacrifice zones into sacred zones. This analysis of the concept’s development through time, social friction, and geographic mobility advances efforts to broaden environmental justice theory from a focus on distributive justice to critical and constructive engagement with culture and religion. The article pursues one implication of this study by suggesting an amendment to the concept of “slow violence”: environmental injustice is better theorized as “slow sacrifice”—a political ecology of life and death, the goal of which is to concentrate death in some places so that other places might experience full, sustainable life. Such a theory makes visible a wider set of existing cultural and religious responses to environmental injustices.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49227096","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}
Michelle Westerlaken, Jennifer Gabrys, Danilo Urzedo, Max Ritts
{"title":"Unsettling Participation by Foregrounding More-than-Human Relations in Digital Forests","authors":"Michelle Westerlaken, Jennifer Gabrys, Danilo Urzedo, Max Ritts","doi":"10.1215/22011919-10216173","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10216173","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The question of who participates in making forest environments usually refers to human stakeholders. Yet forests are constituted through the participation of many other entities. At the same time, digital technologies are increasingly used in participatory projects to measure and monitor forest environments globally. However, such participatory initiatives are often limited to human involvement and overlook how more-than-human entities and relations shape digital and forest processes. To disrupt conventional anthropocentric understandings of participation, this text travels through three different processes of “unsettling” to show how more-than-human entities and relations disrupt, rework, and transform digital participation in and with forests. First, forest organisms as bioindicators signal environmental changes and contribute to the formation and operation of digital sensing technologies. Second, speculative blockchain infrastructures and decision-making algorithms raise questions about whether and how forests can own themselves. Third, Amerindian cosmologies redistribute subjectivities to change how digital technologies identify and monitor forests within Indigenous territories. Each of these examples shows how more-than-human participation can rework participatory processes and digital practices in forests. In a time when forests are rapidly disappearing, an unsettled and transformed understanding of participation that involves the world-making practices of more-than-human entities and relations can offer more pluralistic and expansive forest inhabitations and futures.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42646923","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}
D. Nelson, Nhenety Kariri-Xocó, Idiane Kariri-Xocó, Thea Pitman
{"title":"“We Most Certainly Do Have a Language”","authors":"D. Nelson, Nhenety Kariri-Xocó, Idiane Kariri-Xocó, Thea Pitman","doi":"10.1215/22011919-10216239","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10216239","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article proposes that languages should be embraced by the field of extinction studies while at the same time being mindful of the imbrication of colonialism in both the assignation and terminology of extinction and attempts to revive or reclaim endangered and extinct languages. It thus argues for a decolonizing approach to discourses of both language extinction and reclamation. The article starts by contextualizing the complementary extinction crises facing both species and languages. It then moves on to explore the links between colonialism and the extinction crisis for languages as well as the colonialist underpinnings of many attempts to document and revive endangered and extinct languages. The article then looks to a particularly unique case of decolonial language reclamation, focusing on the work of members of the Kariri-Xocó Indigenous community in present-day Northeast Brazil. It concludes that, by reclaiming their language in a way that is both agentive and coconstructed, the Kariri-Xocó bring together language, culture, and spirituality as tools for resistance.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49035515","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}