Tag Archives: Environmental Humanities

Final Prompt

Performative Assembly and a Revised Ethics of Doing

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I always appreciate the opportunity to read Judith Butler’s work because there is such a depth to her writing. The chapters from her recent Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly that we read for the course is one that I had not read before and am glad to have. It has helped me flesh out some theoretical issues that have been at play in my own work and shaped my thinking around the role of the humanities within the larger scope of environmental action.

At the forefront of Butler’s argument is precarity, that is, existing within the system of neoliberal capitalism wherein our bodies and identities are caught up in our ability to produce some kind of economic value. This reduction makes the exigence of much academic work focused on results that generate capital, draw investors or grants, and help market the university or department where the work is done. This model is something I think we all feel on some level, some more than others. But, in the humanities, the drive toward marketability has in recent years grown louder and louder.

This is where I feel Butler’s intervention most dearly. When she writes that, “My increasing urgent sense about speaking in public, or writing for a public, is not that it should lead us straightway to a path for action; it is, rather, a chance to pause together and reflect on the conditions and directions of acting, a form of reflecting that has its own value, and not merely an instrumental one” (124). Doing for the sake of doing or rather, critical inquiry for the sake of education, something which the humanities as a discipline took as foundational for years seems under pressure to change into a more market driven approach to knowledge production. I think this formulation can be of use in thinking about the power of the humanities and its role within global disasters. The STEM programs are not the only ones with answers to these problems.

While, “just doing something” even if it doesn’t create any discernable change may seem like a futile attempt to participate, I think Butler wants us to think about this kind of action on a deeper level of what such action can evoke in those who are a part of it—that is, what can it helps us realize about ourselves and our communities? She writes, “What does it mean to at together when the conditions for acting together are devastated or falling away? Such an impasse can become the paradoxical condition of a form of social solidarity both mournful and joyful, a gathering enacted by bodies under duress or in the name of duress, where the gathering itself signifies persistence and resistance” (123).

What she calls “Vulnerability as a form of activism” is probably the most impactful idea that I learned from this course (123).  Care and vulnerability already shape a lot of my work, especially in how we think of our relationships with the nonhuman world. But also in my interest in contemporary fiction and what some are calling a turn away from post-modern irony toward a kind of “new sincerity”.  This movement is shaped by a desire to be engaged with genuine feelings without needing to create ironic distance between the self and the object of attention while at the same time not relinquishing the self-awareness and self-referential power of the post-modern. Such a discourse benefits from Butler’s notion of vulnerability as activism because it helps to inject a politics into the otherwise aesthetically focused concept of sincerity. To be vulnerable together—to care together—about the things we like and about the things we hold dear, (our political identities and our collective interests among them), is a way to embrace the precarity of our lives and find empowerment because of it. The importance of care and vulnerability, touch on nearly all of the major topics in the environmental humanities that we covered this semester. From precarity (which Butler also helps us theorize) to an openness to the agency of the material world beyond the human that Bennett asks us to embrace, there lies a push to recognize the already vulnerable nature of our existence. To think that we are not already vulnerable is delusion. The only way forward in terms of reconciling human impact on the planet and what we can do about it while entrenched in a system that complicates and perverts collective action, is through an embrace of that vulnerability.

 

 

 

Final Prompt

Slow Violence and the Importance of Interdisciplinary Research and Communication

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Rob Nixon and his book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor provided me with a world of new information and insightful connections that really shaped my thinking about the world, specifically the importance of discussion and interaction between diverse fields of study in Environmental Humanities. As a person who enjoys studying both science and the humanities, I think having a diversity of knowledge is always important and this reading reinforced my idea of the importance of interdisciplinary study, research, and communication. In preface of the book he sites and connects the ideas of three prominent figures from different fields of academia.

First he discusses Edward Said, a professor of literature, who discusses world literature and politics, political idealism and the distribution of information. Distribution of information is how knowledge is divulged and disseminated by the rich and privileged, such as the government and monopolies, to the public. In the modern neoliberal era, hoarding knowledge and information is equivalent to hoarding natural resources and money. In addition, not sharing information could lead to information being entirely geographically-based and therefore not available to the entire world. This may lead to large scale misinformation and isolation, where “alternative communities all across the world, informed by alternate information, [are] keenly aware of environmental human rights and libertarian impulse that binds us together in this tiny planet” (Nixon X).

Nixon next considers Rachel Carson, a science writer who discusses the military industrial complex, socio-environmentalism, and environmentalism of the poor. Nixon explains that she emphasizes the problems of compartmentalizing expertise and information, bloated corporate funding and the privileged feigning objectivity and interest in humanitarian efforts.

Finally Nixon examines Ramachandra Guha a sociologist. He explains how Guha focuses on how environmentalism is connected to global distribution of justice, militarization and unequal rates of consumption. Guha also strongly rejects the ideas of sentimentalizing “traditional” cultures and ecology, as he thinks ecology is a rather stagnant field of study because it does not properly consider sociopolitical factors.

In the introduction to his book, Rob Nixon discusses a multitude of different ideas and examples to really describe the idea of slow violence. The first example that really reached me was the dumping of chemical, nuclear, and other hazardous waste to Africa by first-world countries to appease their own environmentalism. This idea was advocated by Lawrence Summers, the president of the World Bank who thought it would “help correct an inefficient global imbalance in toxicity” (Nixon 1). The idea that you can balance “toxicity” in the world by sending it somewhere else, rather than reducing output or making less toxic, is obviously absurd and self-serving. In addition to decimating these lands for natural resources, both in the past and present, we are now sending them toxic materials that we have no real idea how to manage. This will lead to a world wrought with irreversible environmental, social, political and economic calamity.

Nixon describes slow violence as “gradual, out of sight, delayed destruction across space and time” and also as “neither spectacular or instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive” by giving examples like climate change, toxic drift, deforestation, acidifying oceans, and the aftermath of war. The average person, sadly myself before this class, considers these topics every now and then, when the media deems it devastatingly interesting enough. We always learn that they have been occurring for a constantly and for a long time and now it is too late to actually help. When I heard these environmental tragedies listed one after another and how they are all examples of slow violence, it dawned on me how they are all connected in a horrible ways. Nixon explains how the media and public only respond to sensational and visceral events and they ignore the ones that you cannot see or feel. This made me immediately think of distribution of information because if the rich and privileged control the media and information they control what the public understands and how they feel. This creates a public that merely respond to tragedy as inevitable because they are fed regulated information, which Edward Said deems aptly as “the normalized quiet of unseen power” (Nixon 6). This really made me think about how social media and the internet almost seem to promote this concept by the mindless “retweeting” and “liking” of other people’s ideas. This creates a culture of using and promoting media-approved information, rather than researching your own information and sharing your own ideas. Although promoting and disseminating information is an invaluable part of academia and the media, it must be done with diligence and integrity and be available to all people. Otherwise environmental problems, along with a slew of other problems, will never be properly considered and solved.

Although it has nothing to do with the environment or nuclear futures, the concept of slow violence has always made me think of the issue of concussions and CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) in sports. I enjoy sports and frequently watch the ESPN channel on television. A topic that always arises every football season is CTE and how it affects so many former athletes. Recent research shows that multiple and consecutive concussions slowly damage the brain beyond repair and that it can start early as little league tackle football. The result has been an increase in funding for research and a lot of former athletes donating their brain to science. Tragically Dave Duerson, a former professional football player, ended up shooting himself in the chest so his brain could be donated and researched for CTE and other brain injuries. The result of this information has also led to a decreased participation in little league tackle football and many former and current professional football players saying they would not allow their kids to participate in tackle football at a young age. This damage is slowly accumulating, the results of the tackles aren’t as gruesome as broken limbs, and can only be seen until the damage is beyond repair. This is a version of slow violence would rarely be considered because CTE of athletes is outside the scope of conventional academia. Consequently those who know of the CTE problem would not have much of an opportunity to hear about a term like slow violence because it is a term used mostly in environmental-related areas of study. This damage is eerily similar to nuclear radiation, it is slow, invisible and irreversible. The only way to ease this damage is to prevent it from happening. Like the nuclear industry, football and other sports have monopolized regulations that favor monetary gain over proper safety. The public has begun to see the problems in both of these industries and many are advocating overhauling changes to both. Only time will tell if this will lead to safer regulations and practices in either sports or the nuclear industry.

 

Related articles:

Decreased Participation in Youth Football

http://www.espn.com/espn/otl/story/_/page/popwarner/pop-warner-youth-football-participation-drops-nfl-concussion-crisis-seen-causal-factor

CTE Found in Nearly All of the Brains Donated by NFL Players

https://www.npr.org/2017/07/25/539198429/study-cte-found-in-nearly-all-donated-nfl-player-brains

Prompt 8

The Challenges of Writing Nuclear Futures

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“Nuclear Futures in the Post-Fukushima Age Conference” was an amazing opportunity to see the topics of nuclear time, nuclear risk, and especially writing about nuclear futures from a variety of professors from the fields of both Japanese and Germanic studies. A topic that I noticed was a theme in many of the presentations was the difficulty of writing about nuclear futures. The obvious choice when writing about anything to do with nuclear technology is to choose a desolate post-apocalyptic world with no government or social order. Although it can send an effective message about the dangers of nuclear technology, it rarely offers any way of preventing the disaster, dealing with disaster as it happens or recovering from the disaster. Usually the only solace in these stories is either overthrowing a tyrannical ruler or finding a hidden oasis of natural resources, neither of these solutions are realistic nor even a long-term solution. So creating a myth narrative that does not solely rely on a doomsday or apocalypse scenario proves to be both important and difficult. The importance of dealing with the problems of a nuclear disaster, both during and afterwards, is the myth narrative the scholars in the field of nuclear futures wants to emphasize. Donna J. Haraway calls it “Staying with the Trouble” and the “Chthulucene,” i.e. not relying on the future to fix our problems and instead focusing on the here and now.

Professor Suzuko Mousel Knott offered some incredible insight on the idea of writing nuclear futures as a myth narrative, about which she suggests “myth is a narrative of the past and also explains the present and tries to illuminate the future.” She suggests another problem for the doomsday narrative for nuclear futures is that the idea of an apocalypse is mostly a western and Christian-toned construct. Japanese myth and religion do not really have a doomsday or an apocalyptic event that ends the world: it has a more cycle of life and death, which is a more eastern ideal. She highlights the “untranslatability of catastrophe” as a challenge of writing about nuclear futures. Slow violence, changing time-scales and temporalities are very difficult concepts to explain or visualize in writing. She explains changing time-scales and temporalities of myth through the novel The Emissary by Yoko Tawada. Time-scales are challenged from the start by the two main characters, Yoshiro and Mumei. Yoshiro is over 100 years old and still rather naive and active, and Mumei the sickly child is wise-beyond-his-years. The temporalities of myth come into play as well, both di-temporality and synchronicity, when Mumei views the world map for the first time and passes out. He awakes around 10 years in the future, where he is in a wheelchair and his grandfather is still alive. He goes on to have a wonderful date with the girl he met outside his house wearing the strange suit, who has also aged around 10 years. He is allowed to experience a “normal life” for this short period of time, only to again pass out and awakens as a child again only to die shortly after. His last thought being “I’m all right. I had a really nice dream,” a rather fitting end for this child stuck between shifting temporalities. Dr. Knott stated it best that disasters “ruin known time-scales and temporalities,” as well as “make cyclical time seems impossible,” and “make untold futures seem more likely.” We have to face these problems and many others when trying to write about nuclear futures and environmental humanities.

Image result for the emissary yoko tawada

(https://www.ndbooks.com/book/the-emissary/)

Professor Bradley Boovy also offered fascinating concepts on the transcorporeality and transtemporality of nuclear radiation. He describe the boundaries between living organisms and the surrounding ecosystem as a “thin and permeable membrane,” through which radiation can easily pass. Relating this idea to human life may be difficult or confusing, so many authors use animals to describe the thin and permeable membrane between living organisms and their ecosystems. Professor Boovy uses the famous three-eyed fish Blinky from The Simpsons, who is mutated by waste from the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant. He suggests the fish depicts how the water systems and fish are more susceptible to radiation and contamination, that the membrane between sea life and their ecosystem is an incredibly thin and invisible membrane. By using animals as an analogy or even as a whimsical lens helps us understand how the borders between our lives and ecosystem are thin, even if we try to ignore it with science and technology. While at the same time providing some relief with some of the difficulties of writing about nuclear futures. Professor Boovy also cites the book Bad Environmentalism and suggests that nuclear futures writers “reject the doomsday aesthetic.” He further suggests that nuclear disasters and radiation “transcend space and time,” and that there is “no ‘outside’ the contamination zone or death zone,” which are concepts that challenge conventional temporality and time-scales. These final suggestions, along with the difficulties of nuclear future writing, stood out to me as one of the most significant challenges facing the environmental humanities as a field of study.

Image result for blinky fish simpsons

(http://www.sfweekly.com/news/is-blinky-the-simpsons-three-eyed-fish-headed-for-san-francisco/)