At the end of last semester, I was thinking that confronting the issues of the Anthropocene required faith: to have faith that the climate is indeed changing and that the need to reassess our own relationship to the planet is the most urgent issue of our time. I believed–and still believe–that no change can start until people embrace these realities.

There has definitely been some overlap between the things we talked about this semester and last: the insignificance of human life on geologic time scales, the “we’ve fucked up the planet and ourselves” essays/books, the critiques about the lack of climate-related/concerned literature… last semester was probably one of the most important/enlightening of my time at Ohio State. The “faith” to believe in the science behind previously bland climate change narratives awoke in me. Whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, the emerging Anthropocene is important–last semester it became important to me.

But for all the good last semester did (and don’t get me wrong, I’m so grateful that I ended up being able to take ENG 4563), it was also demoralizing. Newfound gloom accompanied the knowledge I was gaining, and the alarming problems that we would discuss were rarely coordinated with realistic solutions; I was more engaged with my schoolwork than I’d ever been, but felt more discouraged and anxious than I ever had. Even now, much of this hasn’t really changed.

---

“We live in capitalism, it’s power seems inescapable–but then, so did the divine right of kings.” -Ursula K. Le Guin

If there was one thing that’s changed since last semester, it’s that I have a much greater sense of hope; this quote has been such a sustaining force for me this semester, quelling my anxiety and guiding my newfound hope. Just because I don’t know how/if I (or anyone else) can change the way we treat this planet doesn’t invalidate my pursuit of that change. There is no guarantee that we find a way to adjust/cope with the forthcoming disasters… but there was never any guarantee that Rachel Carson would spearhead the environmental movement with one book–she did. I would much rather invest myself into improbability of hope than the inevitable doom that is birthed by a desire for comfort. I don’t mean to make this into something all about me/rife with selfish cliché… but I think I’m learning how to look at the steps toward the goal; I’m not as demoralized/paralyzed by how distant and impossible that goal seems.

It takes courage to embrace the uncertainty tied to the reality of climate change; it takes courage to treat climate change as more than an obstacle but as the defining feature of our lives. Even if governments, corporations, universities, and so many others ignore the Anthropocene, there are too many people who are working to reshape our notions of sustainability/life on this planet to make me feel like change is truly impossible: “any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings” (Le Guin).

I, along with many teachers, activists and scholars and others who toil for a better world, might never see/play a large part in a world I deem desirable. I might never see a world that really respects environmental limitations; I likely won’t see a world that rids itself of systemic oppression based on race, sex or gender identities. But perhaps what’s most important is that I have hope that I’ll never live in a world where people who contest/resist these injustices fade out. As long as there are people who resist against oppression and work toward what is right, there is always hope for change.

‘Til next time,

Paul

Revisiting In Defense of Degrowth affirms things I’ve been thinking through for the better part of a year: humans aren’t incapable of living in a world that isn’t dictated by indefinite growth. People have done it before and I don’t think “degrowing” has to mean that suddenly society and culture collapse. Capitalism has gained its power by presenting consumers with goods that they develop affective attachments toward, but I believe even this can be overcome.

Both capitalists and Marxists alike would concede to the idea that certain consumer goods (examples: phones, cheap produce/foodstuffs, clothing, oil) obtain a mystical quality that grants them a secure place in the imaginations of livability/comfort. The work of Kallis and other degrowth scholars make clear that this position can be contested though. Kallis asserts that economic models of utility (an intangible economic measure of satisfaction) bear out the fact that increased output/environmental extraction haven’t led to general increases in utility: “most people in the West, which is driving this consumerist craze, are not happier than they were 20 to 30 years ago; current living standards are actually decreasing due to the current crisis” (Kallis, 11).

So really, the association between consumerism and livability is not only a misconception, it’s an outright lie. Our attention need not turn to the violent rhetoric of “population control” (which eerily sounds more like talk of genocide and eugenics more than anything) or moving off planet to extract elsewhere; we need to think for a moment… why do we actually back consumption/extraction-based economies? What are we truly gaining?

Degrowth is something that I’ve tried to push among my peers in the economics department (unsurprisingly, with very little success) because I think it could absolutely be a viable alternative to our current systems; and though it’s getting awfully late in the game, the urgency to increase it’s visibility/use shouldn’t be lost. As Kallis clarifies, “sustainable degrowth is not equivalent to economic recession or depression” (12). Our current understanding of economics/use of utility models don’t need to be completely scrapped–I just believe that there needs to be serious revisions/reconfigurations. As one of my professors in the department always preaches, “never be afraid to revise models–they are there to be revised”.

Again, I’m not saying that our understanding of economics haven’t produced egregious misconceptions–it absolutely has and these misconceptions are playing a huge role in accelerating the end of humanity. All I’m saying is that the things that the make up our idea of satisfaction for our current models aren’t completely misinformed (goods produced, leisure allowed, livability); the models just need to begin, as Kallis states, prioritizing “sufficiency over efficiency” (10). We need to consider the affect we attach to consumption goods and try to satisfy those while still respecting nature’s limits; infinite consumption is not and never has been necessary for this aim.

---

Future Plans (maybe…)

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the kind of work I’d want to do in the future (I am set to graduate soon), and the more I’ve been thought through it I’ve become more open to the idea of continuing my study of economics. If possible, I’d like to be able to contribute in some capacity to the ongoing process of revising/changing our current economic models because I don’t think it’s entirely unimaginable that sustainable degrowth is possible. There are diminishing returns to increased consumption and I think if we can really bring this to the forefront of how we use/propagate our economic models, we can begin to establish limits–limits that will give us some chance to truly enjoy the wealth of this planet while still being consistent with the the desires of people.

‘Til next time,

Paul

“Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human being” (Le Guin, 335).

In a lot of ways, Shevek’s story represents a lot of the things that make me sad about the prospects of significant social change. No amount of great ideas, knowledge or desire feels capable mobilizing the structures of power when the subjugated are subject to constant violence and dispossession; whether the dispossessed try to reclaim subjectivity through civility or revolution, it seemingly doesn’t really matter.

And yet, the end of Chapter 10 presents us with something that, for me, felt so hopeful and resilient. As Shevek thinks back on the time he’s been away from Anarres and Takver, he chooses to believe that “the time was not wasted (335)”.

I want to be careful here… at this point, maybe I should have been more angry than I was: maybe this was just a really nice way of saying that Urras has broken him or saying “hey, at least I tried”, maybe I should be channeling my frustration toward the inability of the dispossessed of Anarres (even the brilliant ones like Shevek) to reclaim power… but like Le Guin, my attention and heart was with the people of Anarres. Pain and suffering doesn’t always have to mean the end of hope; “even pain counts” (335). Here, it feels right to instead recognize the moments of joy and comfort that Shevek and Takver can still share; for all the pain that Urras may have caused them (and all of the dispossessed of Anarres), Shevek can still find fulfillment and joy.

It may seem small, but I think it’s amazing the Le Guin is able to lend reason for hope even if there isn’t any sense of conventional “victory” for Anarres. We can continue “to work with time and not against it” and know that we aren’t wasting our time–even if we don’t necessarily feel any closer to our goals. The limitations of our imaginations and methods now don’t need to set a deflating precedent for all future work.

It’s unreasonable to suggest that any one person is likely going to change the way modernity interacts with the Anthropocene. That still doesn’t make it any less important that there are still people doing whatever work they can to traverse the expanses of what we can imagine. In a way, that uncertainty is actually empowering and sustaining.

---

Ranting about Post-racialism/Perverse Use of Utopia

In the wake of Ben Shapiro’s appearance on campus, I’ve been grappling a lot with how institutions (in this case, Ohio State) pursues its goals for “diversity and inclusion” and how that might figure into/pervert Le Guin’s conceptualization of utopia: “utopia is not perfection–it is process”. If utopia, for Le Guin, isn’t merely some blueprint for an ideal society, but the constant political exercise of self-critique and foresight/negation of unwanted things inside a space, then it feels like this is something that goes on all the time at this school (and this country). At OSU, my identity as an Asian-American gets tucked under the umbrella term “multicultural”. Under that same umbrella that students from different ethnic backgrounds, black students, queer identities, and everything else that doesn’t fit under white cis-gender. Obviously, cramming all these identities under “the multicultural” without any real recognition for the distinct issues they face/structural positions they occupy doesn’t make much sense, but here we are.

This whole Ben Shapiro thing is made even more frustrating when I think about something I saw a couple days before. I observed a group of black students marching through the Union, protesting the racially-charged/anti-black criminalization of drug crimes. Hostile stares, strange looks, laughter and mockery: the way these students were received by onlookers was that of absolute ridicule and fear. They received no formal platform, no university spokesperson, nothing.

How does this happen? How do those existing at the fringes of whiteness, the fringes of heteronormativity… why have distinct identities been homogenized at the fringes of white utopia?

On an institutional level, using “multiculturalism” as an instrument to achieve “diversity and inclusion” seems just seems like a convenient way of appearing progressive/politically engaged without actually having to demonstrate any actual concern for the distinct issues confronted by each group placed under the multicultural umbrella. Multiculturalism/post-racialism/color blindness feels like the political exercise of pushing out unwanted issues from societal conscience and it’s really fucking frustrating.

But I still take some solace and find hope in the fact that there still are people and groups that march, protest and aren’t perturbed by those stares. It gives me hope that even if this university refuses to stand with it’s marginalized groups, this campus won’t ever truly be defined apathy toward oppression. There are enough people (hopefully myself included) that never stop fighting/questioning.

‘Til next time,

Paul

 

I spent most all of today at a friend’s wedding. The event was lovely: all the music came from video game soundtracks, the best man (my cousin) did a kinda goofy beatbox/piano composition as they walked in, the wedding favors were these really cool bars of soap that came from a firm that hires refugees and aids in refugee relief. Of course, seeing/talking to friends I never talk to can be a pretty mixed bag–in particular, there was one conversation I had with a guy I haven’t seen since 2016 that drove me kinda crazy.

Alex (the guy) asked to sit next to me and asked what I’d been reading recently. Among the things I mentioned were some of the things we’ve been reading in class (both last semester and this semester) and I elaborated a little on our focus on the Anthropocene. He seemed really interested and recommended a book to me that he believed was relevant to this discourse… The Gravity Well: America’s Next, Greatest Mission.

I didn’t lose my shit, but dammit I couldn’t help but ask him, “hm what’s it about? The language of that title makes me a tad iffy.”

“Oh, y’know how we don’t have many years left that we can use fossil fuels? The book documents how we can mine other planets for resources and feasible ways that the U.S. can fund steady relocation.”

“I gotcha… I’ll think about checking it out.”

---

Suffice to say that book is still at the back of my reading list.

I don’t necessarily blame the guy for talking so eagerly about this book with me; it’s perfectly reasonable for people to want to continue living comfortably. But the approaches people are taking to achieve that comfort outline something Rachel Carson sharply critiqued in her seminal book regarding DDT pollution/environmental degradation Silent Spring.

The notion of progress in the last 200 years isn’t entirely fraudulent: the feedback of loop of scientific discovery + technological ingenuity has afforded so many people in the Western metropole to enjoy improvements to work efficiency, travel time, health, military power, etc. at a rate of acceleration unprecedented in recorded history. Even Carson recognizes that this is indeed, “development”. But what Carson asks her audience to direct its attention to is that the speed of tech/scientific development has outpaced humankind’s ability to understand what changes these developments are bringing to the Earth and the way we relate to it: “The current vogue for poisons has failed utterly to take into account these most fundamental considerations… so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth” (Carson, 152-153).

Carson’s powerful conclusion to Silent Spring illustrates a level of ecological understanding that I think very few people to this day still don’t seem to grasp. Our notions of progress/development are so linear and are so often described through terms of domination (ex: overcoming, conquering, pushing forward); we spend so little time considering whether or not there are other ways of thinking.

So when I ask people like Alex “why is it easier to imagine mining/extracting off-planet than living on a world without free market capitalism” (Fredric Jameson), should we just accept his response, “it’s just human nature I guess”, as truth? I don’t think so. I think that kind of thinking is just a lazy, convenient excuse used to cling on to our current politics of comfort/notions of progress. Carson understood that not only must we “get off the road that leads to disaster… we must take the road less traveled” (Carson, 144), but she acknowledges that such a future does, in fact, exist.

It’s way too early to take our parasitic attitudes (s/o to Alex) off-site–we need to find a way of re-configuring our own relation to this planet; we need to find ways of rethinking how we can thrive where we are.

‘Til next time,

Paul

Ballard lamented the lack of sincere reckoning that sci-fi engaged in with our imagined futures: “Modern American science fiction of the 40s and 50s is a popular literature of technology… [it is] an optimistic literature” (Ballard, 1968). Science fiction was–and in a lot of cases, still is–a place for writers to express optimistic proposals/imaginations of preservation and humanity’s ability to accelerate past the limitations/challenges of nature: there’s always a way out, nature can be overcome, human life always perseveres.

As Ballard points out, this kind of science fiction is more aptly described as “fantasy-fiction”. Be it in 50 years or 0.5 billion years, at some point our ability to maintain optimism for human flourishing/dominance will completely erode; our best efforts to geo-engineer our way out/innovate will eventually be overwhelmed by drastic climate change. At some point, the human dies.

But this is why I think even more than my first read-through of The Drowned World, I keep revisiting the end of the book: even if the human dies, does it really mean that the post-human can’t begin to take shape? It’s remarkable to me that Ballard, not even being immediately concerned with the Anthropocene/anthropogenic climate change, even thinks to tackle one of the emerging epoch’s most essential questions.

Still, the limitations of human imagination (or at the very least, Ballard’s imagination) become apparent at the book’s closing. As Kerans’ navigates the terrain, Ballard invokes the Abrahamic Genesis story: “Kerans left the lagoon and entered the jungle… a second Adam searching for the forgotten paradises of the reborn sun” (Ballard, 198). It’s interesting to me that the way Ballard chooses to describe Kerans post-human transformation/adaptation to the changing planet by referencing one of the most well-known human stories–and I think it raises a series of important questions:

• Q: does Ballard reference the Genesis story merely as a way of communicating the emergence of a new formation of humanity + lyrical flourish (helluva a way to end a novel)?
• Q: did Ballard recognize the implications of this story? The departure of Adam and Eve from the garden doesn’t merely entail the physical transition of leaving a place of abundance and stability (Eden) but also marks a rupture in the way Adam and Eve relate to God. It feels like Ballard attempts to reinforce that surviving in the face of catastrophic change requires a fundamental change in human understanding and humanity’s own relationality to the planet.
• Q: Is Ballard aware of his own limitations here? Does the invocation of Adam signal Ballard’s lack of awareness or does is this reference made intentionally to highlight the extent of Ballard’s (and perhaps, humanity’s) imaginative capacities?
• Q: Can human narrative forms (human stories, literature, etc.) productively manage the task of piecing together “the posthuman”? If not, which mediums offer the most potential for imagining a post-human world? Which forms might help us reconcile human cultures/growth-mentality societies with the possibility that those futures must give way to different forms?

I don’t know if Ballard was aware of his own limitations or not, but I think that’s definitely what we see here. Still, I think it’s too dismissive to say that we (people) don’t have the ability to express/imagine ideas of the “post-human”/life in the midst of the Anthropocene into something evocative, profound, affecting; I don’t believe humanity’s ability to care/imagine are bound to merely anthropocentric forms–The Drowned World really tries to push that belief forward with urgency.

---

Last thoughts…

The mood at the ending feels really important. Even though there are giant bats and alligators everywhere and the world is really wet and hot, the ending doesn’t feel hopeless; instead, everything feels uncertain (Kerans is blind, he’s lost his way). In some ways it feels like even if things aren’t great, Kerans’ is still able to speculate and anticipate a future (hope feels to strong a word, but it might be suitable here).

Conversely, the hopes to preserve (Col. Riggs) or even conquer (Strangman) have been completely lost. The increasing rain and sun eventually snuff out all places for humans to survive and re-destroy the recovered remnants of human civilization (draining London). This feels like Ballard’s direct critique of classical sci-fi’s optimism and preservation. Like, sure Kerans’ and Hardman’s fates might be uncertain, but at the very least they aren’t inevitably doomed b/c they clung on to human history/human desire to dominate–super relevant stuff to consider in the Anthropocene.

‘Til next time,

Paul

I’ve been reading a lot books and essays concerned with diaspora, colonialism and slavery recently; more specifically, I’ve been reading a lot of either imagined+real accounts of people who’ve been subjected to the violence associated with these topics, and how they respond/process through those experiences. Some of these works like those by Sam Selvon (from class), Shani Mootoo, Gabriel Garcia Marquez vividly describe the spectacular environmental violence against colonized peoples through forms such as the seizure/dispossession of land, or genocide for the sake of securing resources (in real life, think Shell, Chiquita). It’s been interesting considering the more insidious, banal forms of environmental violence in places that Ronda describes as “the areas not normally recognized as environmental fronts” (Ronda, 22), i.e. human cities and the way spaces in those areas are organized/assigned.

Ronda aptly terms the conditions illustrated in Niedecker and Brooks’ poems as “the uneven geography of capitalism” (22). Unlike the stories of bulldozers sweeping through Trinidad or MNCs tearing through Macondo, roads and neighborhoods have already been set over long-forgotten indigenous lands; the environmental violence levied against oppressed racial minorities takes on different forms. In kitchenette building, violence comes in the form of “onion fumes” (Brooks, Line 5) and “ripening garbage in the hall” (Line 7). The violence here is the way the narrator and several other black occupants have been forced to the periphery of Chicago and neglected, literally crammed into a small kitchenette space, making experiences that are normally perceived as pleasurable–such as food–into experiences associated with decay and revulsion. In the kitchenette, environmental violence occurs at the underbelly of capitalism–for the racially-privileged to have clean water, golden gardens, and even time to dream, it must be done by intentionally withholding all those things from the historically enslaved/colonized people (as Verges would put it, the “racialized chattel that made capitalism”).

---

I don’t want to make any jumps in ethical judgment here. As Ronda points out, “Brooks poems are neither sentimentalizing nor wholly redemptive in their portraits of unequal environmental conditions” (Ronda, 42); it’s not my place nor the place of suburban white people to attempt to empathize (attempts to empathize can often still be connected to having positions of power/dominance over another person + can entail disingenuous negotiation with one’s own privilege) or come to conclusions regarding the precarity of black lives and/or how racially-oppressed individuals/collectives choose to respond to environmental violence. I do think that the issues illuminated in Brooks’ poetry and Ronda’s writing demonstrate that the figuration of racialized violence and the Anthropocene continue to shape everyday life/experience for so many people. I think that reading Brooks should really challenge one to consider one’s own positionality and the privilege the accompanies it + either reignite/awaken resistance (or at the very least, skepticism) toward systems/idealogies that facilitate these unequal environmental conditions.

‘Til next time,

Paul

---

… a bit of a tangent

I don’t think it’s okay to be apolitical. And I mean, I’m not saying that I’d try and conform everyone to my forms of engagement, I’m just saying that it takes an incredible amount of privilege to even have the choice to abstain from political engagement.

Part of the reason why I and so many people don’t need to worry about having access to warm water is because so many other people never have that access.

And no, I’m not saying that going out to vote is going to spur an explosion of effective change–far from it. I’m just saying that forming political opinions and engaging in activism isn’t something as simple as picking a favorite sports team. Among many other things, politics is the negotiation of human lives, the environment, the designation of agency. If I or anyone feels that the stakes of those things are unimportant/inconsequential to our own lives, that in itself is a political position–a profoundly unethical one.

 

This is kind of a throwback to when we first started this unit, but I think it’s pretty interesting to see how Len Lye managed to so effectively communicate the “magic” of oil through his movie (Shell advertisement), Birth of the Robot. In the film, human life and oil extraction actually get tied together: when the man runs out of gas in the middle of the desert, he dies; when oil rains down from the sky, the man comes back to life. Beyond this, he is reborn as a robot (something that has transcended humanity). It’s kinda hard to blame people (especially in the 1930s) for be captivated/excited about the possibilities that oil presents for human flourishing. The movie advertises the hope humanity has to not only overcome natural limitations, but to overcome the limitations of being human itself.

To support petroleum industries (and oil extraction) means unlimited potential; oil is the promise for indefinite presence of human domination.

But Birth of the Robot, as enchanting as it is, also feels kind of oppressive and scary. Like, there’s no other future that can be imagined than one that’s shaped by oil. Near the end, the world gets partitioned by road systems, with the robot’s shadow looming over the landscape. The world gets framed in a way where its only function is to support oil. Much like supporting oil means flourishing, rejecting oil means death.

It’s pretty obvious that the coordination of the mythic with oil, while significant and pervasive in culture/politics, purports a spectacular lie. Human life/sustainability doesn’t need oil (in fact, the deteriorating conditions for human life have been largely facilitated by its industries), but the power that our imagination of oil/petrocultures have had on us has made life nearly impossible to imagine without it. The world imagined by Len Lye has, in many regions, been actualized… but instead of the promise of indefinite abundance/life, the future oil extraction has presented us has been promises of death, violence and incredible degradation.

---

Just a few questions to think about down the line:

What happens when the veneer really comes down, when the harm our fantasies of oil have done to our real world? How do we make it clear in our writing/reading that the hopes/promises made by oil industries were never entirely true?

If the land can be worked to accommodate the workings of oil/petroculture, what solutions can effectively function to re-work the planet that isn’t figured around oil? Though the violence/destruction of oil extraction has long been there for people to see, it’s been largely ignored in favor of the rose-colored fantasy purported by Shell in The Birth of the Robot; much like imagining a world without capitalism (which, along with other economic systems, can be tied in closely with oil industries) can we imagine/embrace a world that isn’t enamored by oil?

‘Til next time,

Paul

The last couple chapters have really brought my mind back to a reading I did from my afro-pessimism class. The reading opens up with a scene that calls back to the death of Amadou Diallo, a young black immigrant from Guinea killed by 4 policemen who mistook him for a rape suspect, only here, Denise Ferreira Da Silva outlines an imagined conversation between a dying Diallo and the police who killed him. She imagines Diallo trying to reason with the cops as he dies, asking “If I stay in the ghetto, if I don’t go to a decent school… why do you need to kill me? Isn’t being white enough?” (Da Silva, xii). In his last moments, Da Silva makes it clear that “being white has never been enough; [that Diallo] was dead before [his] father was born” (xii). For Da Silva, to be black is to inhabit a structural position of precarity (specifically, death) from the moment one is born; so the fate of Amadou Diallo, while obviously devastating, isn’t really surprising.

I guess I want to think about this with some caution since anti-blackness and racism aren’t really the same thing… but I think Da Silva and Selvon are communicating some pretty similar things. It becomes pretty clear that both believe that structural position can’t be mobilized by culture/attempts to adjust. No matter what Diallo would’ve done, the blackness of his skin subjected him to unwarranted violence–in a sense, to racial fungibility. No attempt to structurally adjust or comply with the demands of American culture could have changed his position (“I was dead before my father was born”). Similarly for Tiger, these chapters is really where much of the bildung unfolds: he becomes aware of his inability to work his way into a position of wealth and privilege. No amount of reading or studying is close the proximity between him and whiteness; the closer he tries to get, the more apparent (and unchangeable) his position in relation to empire becomes.

The connection between the readings really becomes more apparent when Tiger and Urmilla’s child is stillborn. We talked a lot about how culpability was getting assigned here (Tiger kicking Urmilla in the stomach, the slow violence of American invasion into Trinidad triggering other forms of violence in the colony) that I feel we didn’t get too much time to talk about the baby itself. There’s a lot that could be said about this–one dimension that Asha and I discussed after class was that the baby seemed to represent, in one way, the position people who have experienced irreconcilable racial violence must endure. To be black, to be non-white, to be colonized; all of it means that one must suffer, to varying degrees, violence.

---

So what does this mean for the Anthropocene?

I guess I feel like I’m kind of getting into something I touched upon in a previous entry. I feel like the act of colonizing/reorganizing what gets figured into the landscape isn’t just an extremely racialized activity that fuels a capital economy; colonies/the act of dispossessing/dehumanizing people fuels a certain libidinal economy, a feature that seems just as important to understanding the history of the Anthropocene as the role capitalism has.

Even if we manage to successfully rethink our economic systems, does that necessarily mean that it resolves the chilling history of racial violence done by colonial powers? Is there something, for lack of a better term, ontological to humanity that forever entraps it to fantasize a future where humans dominate nature (and the people who get included in nature)?

‘Til next time,

Paul

The lecturer for my weather and climate disaster class (in the geology department) said something today that left me kind of dumbfounded: “global economies are currently trending toward making considerations for environmental sustainability; government programs lend hope toward a green, sustainable future for all of us.” He mentioned both large scale projects (China cutting back emissions) and smaller ones on campus (solar panels on top of the RPAC) as reasons for optimism for our planet–reasons that he said would “allow us to conquer the changing planet.”

One of the reasons why I signed up for the class was to see how material endorsed by the department viewed/understood the economic/policy component of climate change. It’s been pretty disappointing to see that one of the departments that is so immediately concerned with the physical planet seemingly acts as an extension of the university’s attempt to save face; the lecture really reaffirms the idea that “the world cannot imagine itself without being guided by capitalism” (Bonneuli & Fressoz, 222).

The thing is… what really caught me off guard about today’s lecture wasn’t what the content of the lecture–it was the language used and the conviction/confidence exuded by the instructor. Green future, global economies… conquer: green capitalism/futurity were coordinated with terms of domination and conquest. Even for this professor (who has told us all about his research in climatology/severe weather prediction), nature seemed less like a space that we occupy and more a structure to be conquered/extracted from.

It seems like no matter where I look, the legacy of empire/colonial thought is a defining feature of every area of academic discipline/research–in my class it’s endorsed and completely uncontested! How are we supposed to point out all the issues with green capitalism (the way it allows structures of power/multinational corporations to just lean further into the Promethean, racialized/colonial thinking that Verges mentions, the ways it can actually increase waste production if widely implemented) if the scientific authorities that shape our understanding of the planet openly (or even blindly) support it?

Propaganda by both governments and academic institutions posit hope for a sustainable future for all… but who is really getting included in “all”? How do we take on the task of exposing that those excluded from “all” are not merely suffering capitalist oppression through alienation or cultural hegemony, but through dispossession, death/violence and dehumanization for the sake of upholding the Capitalocene? How do we go about showing that “green capitalism” might just be a veneer that leans even further into this system? Perhaps most importantly, how do we truly get people to care/invoke public action? …In short, how do we show that science isn’t an absolute authority that can be excused from ethical/political obligations?

 

Til next time,

Paul

A couple days ago, someone in class said something that’s stuck with me: “not every person is equally accountable in the workings of climate change.” As obvious as this might seem, I definitely placed it in the periphery of my engagement with the Anthropocene; like, as descriptive and eye-opening as a term like Anthropocene might be, it’s one that flattens the way we think of the human. Imagining humans as an undifferentiated, homogeneous species responsible for environmental degradation is not only misguided but profoundly irresponsible and dangerous. How do we begin to differentiate levels of responsibility, and as Verges proposes, what kind of stories do we tell in an attempt to recover lost (and/or muted) histories of gratuitous violence (Verges, 12)?

When Bonneuli and Fressoz posit that imagined life and capitalism have become inseparable (Bonneuli and Fressoz, 222), it really began to register to me (and clearly for Verges and many other theorists) that the world is incapable of imagining itself without the histories of violence that have shaped it. It’s important to accept that climate change is real, but how do we begin telling stories/act in a way that convinces people that not only is climate change real, but also establishes the connections it has to racially-charged exploitation and violence?

The birthplace of capitalism is empire. In empire, humans undergo an irreversible transformation where subject becomes object; the term human capital loses meaning because humans become capital–”racialized chattel were the capital that made capitalism” (15). Understanding the history of capitalism demands that we grapple with its history; for so many people, capitalist oppression hasn’t meant tacitly consenting to its cultural dominance… for so many, it means that you are not longer as important as the sugarcane you harvest, the bananas you pick. Colonial violence makes the separation of the human and the natural impossible–both becomes zones for dispossession and extraction.

So I think it’s pretty evident that the Anthropocene needs to consider the role colonialism and racial violence have had in shaping it… and it’s pretty obvious that not everyone has equal responsibility for accelerating the expiration of human habitability of the planet.

I absolutely buy that “rich countries owe a historic debt to people who have experienced environmental damage largely determined by race,” but how do you begin to do that? To me, it just doesn’t seem like a debt that can be “repaid” (not to say that empire shouldn’t attempt to repay the places it ravaged/seized resources from) because the damaged that’s been done can’t really be reversed. And even if it could, I seriously doubt that historically colonial powers would dismiss their own notions of “reason” and make an attempt at repaying areas it has violated (especially if, echoing the sentiments of Wilderson, that reconciliation can only be facilitated by the destruction of empire itself).

I’m really interested to see what might be reinforced and illuminated by reading A Brighter Sun. Selvon is always acutely aware of the way colonized people get figured into empire/respond to their position of peripheral, so I’m curious as to what might be reimagined by doing an Anthropocene reading of his work. More thoughts coming soon.

Til next time,

Paul