Question 3. How does environmental devastation, and nuclear disaster in particular, challenge received human time scales?
Time scale is an arrangement of events used to measure the relative or absolute duration of a period of time. There are several different time scales that are used to describe different events and phenomena. We use geological time scale to describe the history of the earth, often in millions or billions of years. However, historic or human time scale is the one to describe the events of humans; it is usually described in days, months, years, decades, and/or centuries. This is very short compared to other time scales, seeming almost insignificant. To humans a year is a long time and a decade is even longer; humans can barely fathom what an entire century entails, without looking to their parents or grandparents.
Technology has changed or received notion of time scales, with innovations of transportation, construction, and distribution of information, travel and construction is done at a much faster rate. Thus environmental disasters that could disrupt the channels of transportation, construction and information could alter our current notions of human time scale. This is the precariousness of modernity and futurity. Assuming technology will always be there to make our lives easier creates precariousness that we do not even consider. Environmental disasters are always going to exist and affect the lives of humans and this creates a pervasive sense of precariousness. These effects compound and our modernist reliance on technology results in an even more precarious life.
The dangers of environmental devastation of ordinary fossil fuels are starting to be understood rather than ignored. Greenhouse gases, melting of the polar ice caps, acidification of the oceans are all things that are finally being discussed on a transnational scale. Their effects on the world challenge our notion of time because of how slowly they change the earth, over decades and centuries. Since humans cannot see this happen in their daily lives it is often dismissed as a problem for others, so scholars came up with the term “slow violence” to describe things that affect our lives but are not seen or felt in our everyday lives. Rob Nixon describes slow violence as, “gradual, out of sight, delayed destruction across space and time.”
Nuclear technology is a source of energy for many developed nations in the world. It is powerful, efficient and uses less natural resources than the technology of fossil fuels. It often seems like the source of energy of modernity, futurity, and neoliberalism. Unfortunately this technology has dangers that are not as obvious as smog, greenhouse gases, and the bleaching of coral reefs. The dangers of nuclear technology come from the radioactive materials used in the creating of the energy and the waste that is left over afterwards. One form of the technology is used for making bombs of devastating destruction. Besides the obvious devastation of the bomb itself, there is another dangerous form of violence that is left long after the bomb has detonated. Rob Nixon describes this “slow violence” by talking about the Marshall Islands after 67 nuclear bomb “tests” between 1948 and 1958: “In 1956 the Atomic Energy Commission declared the Marshall Islands ‘by far the most contaminated place in the world’, a condition that compromise independence in the long term.” This is a perfect example of how nuclear disasters, such as constant nuclear bomb “tests” can challenge our notions of human time scales. By simply testing our technology in a foreign country, we set back another nation’s entire independence for decades.
Cesium-137, the result of the fission between uranium and plutonium, has a half-life of about 30 years and is very common in nuclear technology. It has been released into the air from the accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima. Cesium-137 also spreads quickly in nature because of its high water solubility. Before nuclear technology Cesium-137 was not present on earth in significant quantities for around 1.7 billion years, again challenging our notion of human time scale. We know from Little Voices From Fukushima of how it would take over 40 years to clean Japan of Cesium-137. In Precarious Japan Anne Allison describes how the events of 3/11 in Fukushima reintroduced the stigma of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, terms like genpatsu nanmin (nuclear-refugee) and hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors). Showing how nuclear devastations can span decades, generations, and even centuries further challenges our notion of human time scale.
The convenience of technology and the precariousness it creates, especially from nuclear technology, fundamentally challenges our notion of a human time scale. While technology enhances development of moving, building, and learning more efficiently over the course of decades and centuries, environmental devastation can take all of that away in a few minutes or hours and leave us with repercussions that last years, decades or even longer.
Jordan Foster
I really liked your post, Jordan. Specifically the way you focus on the troubling of human time scales that result from nuclear testing and the radioactive particles that remain. The way you close your post, with the focus on the precarious ability of technology to offer solutions to as well as complicate environmental futures, is something I want to focus on in my response. One aspect of kin making that Donna Haraway notes is care. How we expand our circle of care to include not just the human, but the rest of the world is crucial to how we make kin. Reminding us of the affinity between kin and kind, she writes “the kindest were not necessarily kin as family; making kin and making kind (as category, care, relatives without ties by birth, lateral relatives, lots of other echoes) stretch the imagination and can change the story” (103).
Part of this care and kin-making is in how we act as stewards in containing/marking/warning others of both the intentional and accidental release of radioactive materials we are responsible for, especially for kin who may be around thousands and thousands of years in the future. If we are to take Haraway seriously and act in a mode of kin-making that takes into account futures beyond our own horizons. Some of this kind of thinking has already been done. Maybe most famously in 1993, Sandia National Laboratories, a National Nuclear Security Administration research and development lab, asked teams of scientists to design site-specific earthworks to warn future humans (or other kinds of kin) about the dangerous places we store our nuclear waste and to have these sites last at least 10,000 years into the future, when the sites would finally be safe to approach. Their report, in its entirety, can be found here
If you want a focused chunk of the piece to read, check out pp. 99-106 in the PDF or F-10 through F-17 in the document.
There are also creative reworkings of the report, for example this one from Claire Vaye Watkins published in the Kenyon Review in 2013.
And for a good summary of the project and its history, there’s a podcast episode here
I highly recommend this one, especially if you’re pressed for time and can’t read the others.
The second half of the sentence, “If we are to take Haraway seriously and act in a mode of kin-making that takes into account futures beyond our own horizons” should have been “then we have to try and conceive of futures that exist beyond the scope of our current systems of meaning-making” But, I lost it in trying to format and so am appending it here.
Marion Lindstrom
1. Sarah Ensor and Donna Haraway propose modes of thinking about futurity and relationality that are not grounded in the primacy of biological reproduction within the nuclear family. How do you respond to these modes? Your answer should highlight Ensor’s and Haraway ’s preferred vocabularies for envisioning the future and engage with their specific critiques of received environmental discourse.
Ensor quotes Lee Edelman in her essay about Spinster Ecology as arguing “’that politics is predicated on a reproductive futurism embodied by the figure of the child, a fact that “preserv[es] … the absolute privilege of heteronormativity‘ and leaves the queer structurally outside the bounds of both politics and social belonging”. I have to agree that a lot of our politics are centered around the nuclear family, but the nuclear family is, as research has proven, the best environment for raising children. I am quoting Jane Anderson in her article “The impact of family structure on the health of children: Effects of divorce”: “Nearly three decades of research evaluating the impact of family structure on the health and well-being of children demonstrates that children living with their married, biological parents consistently have better physical, emotional, and academic well-being.” There is plenty of other research out there that ought to not be ignored. It is in the best interest of a society to make sure children have the best environment to grow up in. This does not mean that everyone needs to have children, but we do need some children to carry out the tasks necessary for a society to function in the future. Anything else is unrealistic and would eventually leave us with a humanity older than 70…and then what? According to Ensor, “much recent queer theory insistently resist[s] futurity, marked….by heteronormative imperatives.” In order to develop a queer ecocriticism she suggests not to make it heteronormative, which in my understanding would deemphasize the nucleus family. However, this contradicts the research mentioned above that urges society to protect the nucleus family. It does not mean that other groups of society who are not part of this nuclear family structure are not part of the society or somehow “structurally outside the bound of both politics and social belonging”. Just because you are not part of a group in society that has the important role of guaranteeing that children have the best environment to grow up in and you might feel excluded does not mean that that group has to be deemphasized. The nucleus family has to be protected, because any couple who raises children is more vulnerable to the problems and pressures of live than a single adult or a childless couple. Wars have proven this. Having said that, a society has to give all of its groups an equal space to live and thrive, but at the same time has to protect the most vulnerable and children are definitely on the top of that list. This is exactly the message the mothers in the film “little voices from Fukushima” were sending. They were asking that society protects the most vulnerable and provides a safe environment for them to thrive in. This movie shows that it is much easier for a single person to pick up move out of a contaminated area than an entire family. Therefore, the government should especially assist families to be able to move away from danger.
2. In “Tentacular Thinking,” Donna Haraway interrogates the term Anthropocene, positing two other epochal names to complicate a number of the Anthropocene’s underlying assumptions. Please describe what Haraway argues are the crucial and meaningful interventions of deploying those alternative terms and articulate your own position regarding these epochal names.
Haraway talks about Chthulucene, which is a compound of khthon and kainos that “together name a kind of timeplace for learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying in response ability on a damaged earth. Kainos means now, a time of beginnings, a time for ongoing, for freshness. Nothing in Kainos must mean conventional pasts, presents, or futures.” (page 2)
I like her general idea of making the best of what we have left of nature, but that we have to “stay with the trouble” in the now, not in some future. “Staying with the trouble” to her means that we “reworld”, to use her term, that we reimaging the future and the present of this planet as a very delicate ecosystem in which humans just play one part and other living beings play their equal important part and that we should not rely on technology to solve all of the environmental problems, but that we live respectfully on this planet giving all other living beings the space and ability to survive that they need. This quote from her: “nobody lives everywhere; everybody lives somewhere. Nothing is connected to everything; everything is connected to something (p 31)” is a key idea of staying with the trouble. She emphasizes that we are all connected somehow and therefore dependent on each other. This means we need to take care of each other and she includes all living beings. She is not suggesting that we create humanless spaces everywhere and drive natives from these spaces, but she is suggesting that we can share the space with other living beings as long as we do not destroy this space. She is suggesting that we change our “human exceptionalism and bounded individualism” (page 30) thinking about the environment.
“The Capitalocene is terran; it does not have to be the last biodiverse geological epoch that includes our species too. There are so many good stories yet to tell, so many netbags yet to string, and not just by human beings.“ (page 49). She sees the capitalocene as a distinct period within the Anthropocene and defines it as the time of the exploitation of the earth by humans, but at the same time hopes that it will not be the last human era. According to Haraway “deep-sea mining and drilling in oceans and fracking and pipeline construction across delicate lichen-covered northern landscapes are fundamental to accelerating nationalist, transnationalist, and corporate unworlding” and are typical phenomena in the Capitalocene period. The mothers and children of The little voices from Fukushima are a product and victims of the capitalocene just as much as the coral reefs.
Plantationocene is another era within the Anthropocene. According to Haraway, “The Plantationocene continues with ever greater ferocity in globalized factory meat production, monocropagribusiness, and immense substitutions of crops like oil palm for multispecies forests and their products that sustain human and nonhuman critters alike.” The planationocene has the same underlying principles and systems at work behind the scenes than the Capitalocene. It is run by greed, suppression and selfishness and the end product is the same: the destruction of the earth.
Her reasoning for using these two terms is that the human existence on this planet became problematic as soon as he considered himself to be superior than all the other living beings and from that assumptions started to subdue the earth.
3. How does environmental devastation, and nuclear disaster in particular, challenge received human time scales? Your answer should reflect on course readings from weeks three and four.
According to Haraway, human time should not be seen as on a scale from past to present to future: Kainos means now, a time of beginnings, a time for ongoing, for freshness. Nothing in Kainos must mean conventional pasts, presents, or futures.” (page 2) Time to change is now, not in the future. Staying with the trouble is the only way of thinking about the time. In Greek there are two words for time: Kairos and Chronos. Thinking in the chronos way is thinking in chronological happenings like past, present and future, but Haraway is arguing that we need a new way of looking at time and we need to see the urgency of staying with the trouble to not miss our Kairos time, the critical moment to do something, to be active. In the film The Little Voices from Fukushima the Kairos to move was as soon as the explosion happened and the Kairos to voice concerns about future plans of nuclear power plant construction is now.
Bibiography
Jane Anderson (2014) The impact of family structure on the health of children: Effects of divorce, The Linacre Quarterly, 81:4, 378-387, DOI: 10.1179/0024363914Z.00000000087