Mapping Meaning, the Journal (Issue No. 4)

Mapping Meaning, 

the Journal 

Issue N o 4 • Summer 2020

The contents of this publication are under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) unless 

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2 Mapping Meaning, the Journal

Issue N o 4 

3

About 

Mapping Meaning, the Journal 

Minidoka Project, all-female survey crew, Idaho 1918, 

Photo of the U.S. Department of the Interior, courtesy of the U.S. Bureau of 

Reclamation. 


"824 Min Surveying party of 

girls on the 

Minidoka project." 

Original caption, National Archives 

How might interdisciplinary practices promote a 

reconsideration of the role that humanity plays in a 

more-than-human world? 

In a strongly fragmented and disciplined-based 

world, Mapping Meaning offers a collective space 

to imagine, create, and propose new models in the 

face of radical global change and ecological and 

social crises. Each issue takes up a particular theme 

and is edited by different curatorial teams from a 

variety of disciplines. All issues include the broadest 

possible calls for submission and gather together 

divergent and experimental knowledge practices. 

Mapping Meaning, the Journal, is published one to 

two times per year. 

www.mappingmeaning.org 


5


Founding 

Editorial Board 

Melanie Armstrong 

Krista Caballero 

Nat Castañeda 

Sarah Kanouse 

Vasia Markides 

Jennifer Richter 

Carmina Sánchez-del-Valle 

Karina Aguilera Skvirsky 

Sree Sinha 

Trudi Lynn Smith 

Sylvia Torti 

Linda Wiener 

Toni Wynn 

Many thanks to the Honors College at 

the University of Utah, which served 

as Mapping Meaning Journal’s partner 

and initial fiscal sponsor. Consistent 

with Mapping Meaning’s mentorship 

mission, the Journal is committed to 

publishing a breadth of work from 

those at all stages of their careers. 

Artistic Director: Krista Caballero 

Visual Designer: Aliza Jensen 

Copy Editor: Corinna Cape 

Issue Editors: 

Melanie Armstrong and Jennifer Richter 


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Life After the Anthropocene 


9

Content 

12 

Introduction 

Life After the Anthropocene: Envisioning the 

Futures of the World 

Jennifer Richter and Melanie Armstrong 

Issue #4 editors 

24 

Section 1: Experiencing the Anthropocene 

Image: Shanna Merola, Xylene (C8H10), 2016 

27 

We All Live Downwind 

Shanna Merola 

34 

Rite of Spring 

Liz Ivkovich and Kate Mattingly 

53 

Field Environmental Philosophy for Post- 

Anthropocene Realities: Low Power Radio as 

Biocultural Conservation 

Rachel Weaver 

64 

Section 2: Decolonizing the Post- 

Anthropocene 

Image: Shanna Merola, Toluene (C7H8), 2018 

66 

Inefficiently Mapping Boundaries: How is an 

urban citizen? 

Linda Knight 

76 

The Europocene: A Past, Present, and Future 

Narrative of Climate Change Beginning with 

the Disruption of Indigenous Relations 

Jade Swor, Melanie Armstrong, Taryn Mead, and 

Regina Lopez-Whiteskunk 


96 

Section 3: Beyond Utopias and Dystopias 

Image: Shanna Merola, Ionizing Radiation, 2017 

98 

Tending Breadth 

Jacklyn Brickman and Heather Taylor 

111 

Violence, Apocalypse, or a Changing World? 

Re-Constructing the Climate Imaginary / 

Thinking of Doggerland 

Evan Tims 

128 

Section 4: The Past Is Not a Predictor for 

the Future 

Image: Shanna Merola, Benzene (C6H6), 2017 

130 

Gaia Rise: Myths and Politics in the 

Anthropocene 

Artemis Herber 

149 

After Animals 

Jay R. Elliott 

162 

Don’t Pave Paradise 

Rosalind Murray and Art O’Neill Mooney 

176 

The Center for Post-Capitalist History 

Leah Sandler 

Front and Back Cover Images, 

Shanna Merola, Uranium, 2017 


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Introduction to 


Jennifer Richter and Melanie Armstrong 

Life After the Anthropocene: Envisioning the 

Futures of the World 

For the past six months, scholars, activists, and 

artists have worked to continue their acts of 

production in a world that became evermore 

uncertain and chaotic. During the social unrest 

of a global pandemic, we formulated new ways 

of working even as we rearranged our kitchens 

into offices, constructed virtual classrooms, and 

consumed news reports as voraciously as we ate 

potato chips. Today, in July 2020, art spaces, the 

academy, and the broader world are substantially 

transformed from July 2019, when we issued 

the call for submissions for the fourth issue of 

Mapping Meaning, the Journal, on the theme “Life 

After the Anthropocene: Envisioning the Futures 

of the World.” We gathered contributions in 

the fall and sorted through them as our social 

norms began to unravel during the winter. We 

revised and edited as we watched a pandemic 

expand across the globe and protests against 

systemic racial injustices rise up. We chatted with 

contributors about COVID-19 and George Floyd, 

even as we dialogued about tightening a theme or 

enlivening an argument. These eleven essays and 

art pieces became a central part of the intellectual 

discourse we have used to interpret the events 

around us. Our perspectives on early 2020 have 

been shaped by this collection, none of which 

was created specifically in response to events 

of the last six months, but all of which speaks 

to those events in critical ways. Fortunately, 

the call to imagine a post-Anthropocene world 

brought to our attention an array of work that is 

simultaneously provocative and hopeful, beautiful 

and jarring, and takes a stance of imagination, 

play, critique, and action, which are proving to be 

vital tools for living in a global pandemic. 

Global events occurring in 2020 highlight the ways 

“control of nature” is both elusive and a persistent 

social ideal enacted through the management 

of human bodies. As political institutions fail to 

control the biophysical world, they turn instead 

to human subjects, managing the movement 

and positioning of those bodies to achieve the 

objectives of governance, whether the health 

of people, the security of citizens, or the growth 

of capital. The expansion of globally-dominant, 

human-centered economic and political systems 

has transformed human relations, but also 

produced significant ecological effects. The term 

“Anthropocene” is used to highlight how, in 

just a few centuries, a small subset of humans, 

beginning in Europe and North America, have 


13

The call to imagine a post- 

Anthropocene world brought 

to our attention an array of 

work that is simultaneously 

provocative and hopeful, 

beautiful and jarring, and 

takes a stance of imagination, 

play, critique, and action, 

which are proving to be vital 

tools for living in a global 

pandemic. 


ecome ever more successful at converting 

nature into capital through colonization, 

industrialization, imperialism, and financialization 

of climate risk and resilience. The ecological 

costs have been great, including exponential 

decreases in biodiversity, unpredictable and 

extreme weather, and the degradation of entire 

ecosystems and the human/more-than-human 

lifeways they support. So, too, are the social 

costs of the Anthropocene, for the accelerated 

conversion of “nature” into “resource” is not 

consistent with the long-term survival, let alone 

flourishing, of humanity—or anything else. 

The emergence of the term Anthropocene two 

decades ago has driven planetary scientists to 

critically and deeply look for markers of human 

influence in the geologic record, while humanists 

have used the term to argue for new ways of 

conceptualizing the relationship between people 

and their planet, and media deploy the word 

as a headline to bring such debates to a public 

audience. The utility of the construct of the 

Anthropocene is the way it binds our attention 

to global systems, diverse scales of capital, 

and ecological outcomes of social systems. A 

limitation is the fixation of that attention on 

human actions in the past and present, to the 

detriment of the creative visioning that will be 

needed to change global systems. 

As news spread of the emerging novel 

coronavirus, some authors argued that the virus 

was further evidence of the Anthropocene, in 

which environmental degradation, systemic 

poverty and inequality, and lack of community 

services create the precise circumstances 

needed for viruses to jump species from the 

“wild” to human bodies (De Pascale and Roger, 

Kothari et al.). Indeed, disease management 

reinforces narratives of power and control of 

nature, the standard of the Anthropocene, 

and the human relationship to microbes has 

long been characterized by the same desire 

to manage nature that has driven capitalism 

globally. Situating COVID-19 within the broad 

environmental discourse of the Anthropocene 

depicts a truly wicked problem. However, 

thinking of the coronavirus as just another 

product of the Anthropocene limits the ways 

the human/virus relationship can push us to 

think about life after the Anthropocene. As 

a species understood to be alive through its 

complete dependence upon other species, 

viruses exemplify hybridity. Viruses are in our 

DNA, and past viral infections altered the human 

genome in ways that ensure the continuance 

of our species. When the Anthropocene directs 

our attention to the disproportionate effects 

of human activities on the planet, we might 

consider that microbes have done more to shape 

the planet than any other lifeform. The most 

dramatic event on earth occurred 2.4 billion years 

ago when cyanobacteria transformed the planet 

to its present, oxygen-rich status and triggered 

the evolution of multicellularity. When looking 

at the long history of the planet, comprehending 

the interspecies relationships between humans 

and viruses requires post-Anthropocene thinking 

about hybridity, evolution, and social relations. 

The social transformations of the COVID-19 

pandemic create an opportunity to realize new 

formulations of human relations on and with 

the planet. As schools and businesses shuttered, 

people looked out from their homes at silent 

streets and marveled at how swiftly their world 

seemed to come to a halt. The constraint of 

physical touch disrupted the interactions that 


15

most make us human. Stock markets registered 

flux as the systems that transform labor into 

capital slowed. A way of living that was difficult 

to imagine a year ago rapidly materialized and 

endured weeks longer than many anticipated. 

New forms of governance emerged as public 

health officials exerted authority over businesses, 

elections, and individual behavior, and tensions 

between local, national, and global political 

institutions flared. Discourses took shape around 

“normalcy” and the desire to return to or reclaim 

something of the past. Even as the pandemic 

persisted and citizens pled for more movement— 

some through political protest, many wistfully 

in more intimate circles—that past grew more 

distant and normalcy became more elusive. This 

state of being holds within it opportunities for 

deliberation, social contemplation, and political 

imagination, perhaps most evident in the political 

disturbances that emerged during the pandemic 

in the United States, Hong Kong, and other 

nations. 

The US is currently wracked by new calls for 

recognizing and reckoning with a past built 

on violence and dispossession. Structural 

and systemic racism have defined the history 

of the Americas, and in the US specifically, 

the dispossession of land from Indigenous 

communities through displacement, settler 

colonialism, and genocide coupled with the 

enslavement of Black bodies for labor are 

the foundations of American “freedom.” The 

Anthropocene lays bare the consequences of 

capitalism built on the exploitation of land and 

labor, and of the separation of humans from their 

humanity. The systemic precarity of economic, 

social, political systems all reliant on the 

conversion of nature into natural resources is a 

defining feature of the Anthropocene, made clear 

through responses to the pandemic and the calls 

for racial justice, as Black and Brown bodies bear 

the brunt of them both. 

Calls for reparations, recognition, and change 

in current systems predicated on control and 

surveillance of Black and Brown bodies, of 

the bodies of women and the poor, force us 

to confront the inherent paradoxes of the 

Anthropocene that relies on ignoring these 

facts. The Movement for Black Lives argues 

that we need to recognize calls for “law and 

order” as rationales to increase the surveilling, 

policing, and destruction of poor communities in 

increasingly disparate and inequitable ways. The 

connections between control of racialized bodies 

and control of land and resources are inextricably 

linked historically and in the future by Black 

and Indigenous communities and experiences 

(King); in order for new relationships between 

humans and the biophysical world to come 

into being after the Anthropocene, the claims 

of communities who have been systematically 

degraded need to be acknowledged, recognized 

and addressed as fundamental issues of the 

Anthropocene. Environments (both internal and 

external to the human body) as well as capital are 

racialized (Pulido); understanding the implications 

of this racialization is critical for understanding 

why addressing climate change will fail if we 

do not make connections between all kinds of 

environments and justice (Sengupta). 

As people wrestle with the physical and social 

realities the first half of 2020 has put before 

them, they are compelled to examine anew 

their planetary relations, if only through simple 

acts like deciding to go outside or lengthening 


In 2020, the once nearly 

unimaginable ability of an 

unseen organism to disrupt 

social living has brought 

about awe, despair, and 

humility, but it has also 

demonstrated that human 

institutions can change 

abruptly and radically, even 

if temporarily, due to actions 

by people and communities. 


17

the time they spend at the sink washing their 

hands. While some point to the emergence of 

a novel coronavirus as further evidence of the 

Anthropocene and a consequence of capitalist 

pursuits (Loeb), 2020 has also seen citizens 

around the world collectively demand the 

ability to participate in imagining new futures 

and creating the societies and governments 

capable of constituting them. In 2020, radical 

actions like defunding police departments or 

voluntary stay-at-home practices have garnered 

widespread support, with biophysical effects 

such as slowing the reproduction and spread 

of viruses or potentially reducing atmospheric 

carbon emissions. While 2020 has brought awe, 

despair, and humility about the once nearly 

unimaginable ability of an unseen organism to 

disrupt social living, it has demonstrated that 

human institutions can change abruptly and 

radically, even if temporarily, due to behavioral 

changes in people and communities. What further 

opportunities does 2020 present for materializing 

the ways of living in which we have thus far only 

dared to dip our toes—imagining in our fiction, 

debating in our statehouse, speculating in our 

brewpubs, and visualizing in our galleries? 

In times of uncertainty and chaos, the ways 

human lives deeply entwine with the physical and 

social environment become apparent to more 

people. During a state of emergency, imaginative 

practices can have a powerful material effect 

in envisioning and constituting new worlds. 

Diverse visions of how humans should relate to 

the world have always existed, and audacious 

new imaginaries are still being born. These 

imaginings chart a post-Anthropocene future 

where relationships beyond control exist between 

humans and with the planet. The present course 

invites despair, which can lead to inaction. But 

other visions of how humans should relate to 

the world have always existed, and audacious 

new imaginaries are still being born. They chart 

a future in which humans are integrated with the 

world, rather than in control of it. 

Life After the Anthropocene: The Works 

This issue explores the world after the 

Anthropocene, to materialize and make 

possible future-thinking in the present, and to 

demonstrate that paradigm shifts and radical 

actions will come from imagining the futures 

we want and need. Swanson et al. have argued, 

“Somehow, in the midst of ruins, we must 

maintain enough curiosity to notice the strange 

and wonderful as well as the terrible and 

terrifying” (M7). The works that follow grapple 

with these strange and wonderful aspects 

of the Anthropocene, as well as the terrible 

and terrifying. These ideas show recognition, 

support, and appreciation for post-Anthropocene 

ecological webs, integrate knowledges that 

collapse perceived divides between nature and 

culture, and think about scales outside of human 

time and place. We gain and share insights from 

a number of perspectives and methods, including 

Indigenous thought, grassroots activism, public 

policy, and artistic interventions. These ideas 

unfold through diverse forms, including fiction, 

critical essays, performance, cinematography, and 

artworks. 

Collectively and individually, this work investigates 

the Anthropocene through four entry points. 

Experiencing the Anthropocene: As a starting 

point, these pieces define aspects of the 


experience of the Anthropocene, identifying how 

different human communities are making sense 

of the time we live in by challenging the rigidity 

of the Western human/nature divide. They also 

urge us to envision new futures built on the 

recognition of communal and collective pasts 

that were centered on deep understandings of 

local ecologies, a theme that has been central 

to Mapping Meaning as a collective. A focus on 

reclaiming taken-for-granted spaces, used and 

discarded by modern society, ignored and wasted, 

infuses these interventions into the Anthropocene 

experience. Shanna Merola’s project, “We All 

Live Downwind,” employs photographic collage 

to uncover and make manifest the polluted 

spaces of bodies and land that undergird the 

economic expansion of capitalist systems. 

Her work stresses the ways that land is made 

expendable through uncontrolled longterm 

exposure and contamination, explicitly 

linking the costs of endless extraction and 

industrialized production to the costs to health 

and environment for communities across the 

US, from Detroit, Michigan, to Love Canal, New 

York. Similarly, Kate Mattingly and Liz Ivkovich 

analyze a dance performance of Rite of Spring 

that took place in 2019 beneath an overpass 

in an economically-depressed area of Salt 

Lake City. They excavate the ways a forgotten 

industrial urban landscape is imbued with the 

history, labor, and values of the cultures and 

communities that have previously laid claim to 

the place. They link those histories to the culture 

of labor in dance, to underscore the precarity 

and risk of the dancer’s body, as well as the ways 

that dance can provoke new considerations of 

the relationships and histories we have with our 

local environments. Beyond physical spaces, 

Rachel Weaver invites us to consider aural spaces 

as sites of reclamation through her application 

of field environmental philosophy to local radio 

airwaves. Her essay allows us to see more of the 

“soundscape ecologies” that surround us, showing 

the possibility of reclaiming those spaces for 

community needs by understanding low-power 

FM radio stations as sites of resistance against 

the homogenization of radio airwaves. These 

works peer into spaces of the Anthropocene that 

epitomize the values that drive huge ecological 

changes, while also demonstrating ways of 

destabilizing and challenging the dehumanizing 

effects of the Anthropocene. 

Decolonizing the post-Anthropocene: Taking 

the call from Indigenous scholar-activists, a 

second theme recognizes the need to decolonize 

our relationships with each other and the world 

in order to address climate injustices, furthering 

practices that will lead human societies to reject 

processes of colonization and imperialization 

(Tuck and Young, Whyte). From its conception, 

Mapping Meaning has challenged scholars to 

reconsider the colonial powers inscribed in 

mapping, and indeed in all disciplinary practices, 

by creating spaces to experiment with forms 

of knowledge production as a response to the 

current state of ecological emergency. In this 

space producers who are often confined by 

discourses and methods of a discipline use 

cross- and transdisciplinary play to remake 

the tools they’ve acquired for surveying the 

world, imitating the act of resistance of an allwomen 

survey crew in 1918 who decorated their 

surveying instruments with stylized hearts and 

dashes. Changing the tools one uses to describe 

the world—or creating a new tool outside the 

spaces of capitalism—is a decolonizing practice 

that changes the world itself. Linda Knight’s 


19

Envisioning life after the 

Anthropocene forces us to 

ask difficult questions, 

in order to revolutionize 

our relationships to the 

biophysical world and each 

other. 


work in “Inefficient Mapping” rejects the colonial 

practices of mapping which give full power to the 

cartographer to bestow meaning on a landscape. 

Rather she creates alternative protocols that draw 

the creator’s gaze away from the map, connecting 

place to map through the human body itself. 

Her goal is to see the pieces of the landscape 

which have been visually overlooked because 

they don’t contribute to the work of production, 

extraction, and growth, and give them power in 

the landscape by mapping them. This creates 

new places, freed from the demands of capital. 

Jade Swor et al. propose the use of the term 

“Europocene” to draw attention to the systems of 

capital rooted in imperialism and colonialism that 

have generated and driven the Anthropocene. 

Enduring Indigenous values offer a means of 

decolonizing the Europocene and challenging 

mechanistic worldviews, to show that these 

practices are not emergent, but the cyclical and 

repeating ways of knowing that have sustained 

Indigenous cultures for generations. New 

worldviews, new governance, new discourses, and 

even new naming practices for the Anthropocene 

emerge together to forge the relationships that 

will carry over into life after the Anthropocene. 

Beyond utopias and dystopias: In soliciting 

submissions for this issue, we offered the 

particular challenge to represent a post- 

Anthropocene future in ways that go beyond 

utopias and dystopias, technofixes and fatalism 

(Haraway). As Evan Tims points to in critiquing the 

genre of climate fiction, even the creative forms 

that imagine the future in liberating ways often 

fall short of creating complex visions of future 

ecologies. Dystopian narratives tend to take place 

in degraded landscapes, a narrow view of the 

planet’s ecological future, one that may instill 

paralyzing fear in those who might otherwise 

act to influence the political systems that drive 

the Anthropocene. Tims urges those engaged in 

speculative climate fiction to present a range of 

possible futures in order to broaden our capacity 

to imagine how humans will live in a climatealtered 

future. 

The works contained here present a range of 

tools to re-envision different and co-constructive 

relationships. In a decolonized future, traditional 

ecological knowledges cyclically engage both past 

and future political, economic, and biological 

processes. Through activism, citizens might 

escape the dystopian politics of the bureaucracy 

to establish a complex multispecies citizenship. 

Science and technology transform relationships 

with animals and elements, place and community. 

Art forms invite new relationships between 

subject and object, even as they remake materials 

into imagined worlds. Such tools reify complex 

futures where human experiences endure. 

Filmmakers Jacklyn Brickman and Heather Taylor 

playfully embrace the concept of caring in the 

Anthropocene, using many tropes of the science 

fiction genre to imagine crossing into a post- 

Anthropocene world. The caregivers in “Tending 

Breadth” work in a shiny mylar world encased in 

a greenhouse, using the technological growing 

spaces of the past and present to cultivate silvery 

future worlds. The connection between care and 

world-making runs against the assumption of the 

Anthropocene that human societies are on track 

to destroy worlds, particularly our own. In 2020, 

as the global pandemic reconfigured political 

systems of care, people turned increasingly to a 

number of practices traditionally associated with 

individualistic care: bread-baking, gardening, pet 


21

adoption, and more. These intergenerational, 

interspecies practices are vibrant and generative 

of the future, but they also suggest nurturing our 

lives in the present in hopes that there will be a 

future, during a time when the character of that 

future seems more uncertain than ever. Like a 

gardener in a greenhouse, these acts speak to the 

hope of generating society anew. 

The past is not a predictor for the future: 

Envisioning life after the Anthropocene forces us 

to ask difficult questions, in order to revolutionize 

our relationships to the biophysical world 

and each other. To destabilize, challenge, 

and upend the Anthropocene, we have to 

embrace the “ghosts” and “monsters” (Gan et 

al.) of our landscapes. Gan et al. argue that, 

“Anthropogenic landscapes are also haunted 

by imagined futures. We are willing to turn 

things into rubble, destroy atmospheres, sell out 

companion species in exchange for dreamworlds 

of progress” (G2). Instead, progress as a species, 

as an ecological sphere, and as a world needs 

to acknowledge the histories by which our 

collective futures will be shaped; “progress” itself 

needs to be redefined. Leah Sandler’s “Center 

for Post-Capitalist History” fuses together the 

capitalist-driven past with the archaeology of 

the future. Her project proposes the creation 

of a fictitious museum in the unspecified future 

that will house ironic archives documenting the 

increasing precarity of existence and scarcity 

of necessities that mark the latter stages of the 

Anthropocene. The Center demonstrates the 

logical conclusion of late capitalism, but also 

points to post-capitalist possibilities where 

interpretations of our cataclysmic age will be 

met with curiosity and bewilderment, and the 

recognition that the Anthropocene cannot 

happen again. In the present, Rosalind Murray 

and Art Mooney’s activist intervention into a local 

development project reveals and challenges 

the ways environments have been and are 

currently assessed, and how political systems 

driven by economic narratives operate through 

misinformation and deceit. Their struggle to 

understand and intervene in the development of 

their local river in Ireland is a first-hand account 

that serves as a model for challenging not only 

processes of environmental degradation couched 

in terms of economic development, but also 

unveiling the roots of the value systems that 

promote long-term environmental change in 

exchange for short-term goals. 

In these post-Anthropocene places, humans 

and non-humans navigate new relationships 

with other biological life-forms, including flows 

of energy, food, and water, such that our 

entanglements with other species change and 

morph into new kinds of relationships. Values 

that reduce the natural world to resources for 

human consumption need to be challenged, 

and Jay Elliot’s essay disputes the geophysical 

grounding of the Anthropocene, looking instead 

to the biological relationships of modern life that 

characterize the current moment. He argues 

that the ways Western society uses animals 

in food production push our society into the 

Anthropocene. He interrogates the technological 

innovations around in-vitro meat to argue for 

different relationships with the fauna around 

us, to recognize how their existence is knitted to 

our own; producing animals from cells does not 

recognize their agency or right to co-exist with 

humans. 

Finally, Artemis Herber’s large-scale installation 


ings the mythic Hellenic past in line with 

alternate visions of the future. Her artwork 

employs found objects and materials taken from 

abandoned places like quarries and dumpsters, 

giving them new life in her series entitled “Gaia 

Rise.” Her pieces link the catastrophic present to 

the mythic past, to call into question the roots of 

globalized systems of capital that use and discard 

people and places, and to raise new possibilities 

for life after the Anthropocene. 

Collectively, the works presented in this issue of 

Mapping Meaning ask us to interrogate our place 

in the world, as individuals, community members, 

citizens, and global inhabitants. They articulate 

the paradoxes of the Anthropocene, challenging 

the ideal of complete human control over nature. 

Instead, they offer insights into new relationships 

with each other and other global denizens, 

resisting the totalizing and inexorable pull of 

the Anthropocene by exposing its precarious 

foundations, built on exploitation, contamination, 

colonialism, and waste. By envisioning life after 

the Anthropocene, we aim to collectively create 

new foundations, pulling on histories, presents, 

and futures based on care, compassion, and 

respect for ourselves and those to come. 

Black and Native Studies. Duke University Press, 2019. 

Kothari, Ashish et al. “Coronavirus and the Crisis of the 

Anthropocene.” Ecologist: The Journal for the Post-Industrial 

Age, 27 March 2020, https://theecologist.org/2020/mar/27/ 

coronavirus-and-crisis-anthropocene. 

Loeb, Avi. “A Sobering Astronomical Reminder from 

COVID-19.” Scientific American, 18 April 2020, https://blogs. 

scientificamerican.com/observations/a-sobering-astronomicalreminder-from-covid-19/. 

Pulido, Laura. “Flint, Environmental Racism, and Racial 

Capitalism.” Capitalism Nature Socialism, vo. 27, 3, 2016, 1-16. 

DOI: 10.1080/10455752.2016.1213013 

Sengupta, Somini. “Read Up On the Links Between Racism and 

the Environment.” The New York Times (June 5, 2020). https:// 

www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/05/climate/racismclimate-change-reading-list.html. 

Accessed 21 June 2020. 

Swanson, Heather et al. “Introduction: Bodies Tumbled 

into Bodies.” Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Monsters of 

the Anthropocene, edited by Anna Tsing et al. Minneapolis: 

University of Minnesota Press, 2017. M1-M12. 

Tuck, Eve and K. Wayne Young. “Decolonization Is Not a 

Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, vo. 

1, 1, 2012, 1-40. 

Whyte, Kyle Powys. “The Dakota Access Pipeline, 

Environmental Injustice, and U.S. Colonialism.” Red Ink, vo. 19, 

1, 2017, 154-169. 

Works Cited 

De Pascale, Francesco and Roger, Jean-Claude. “Coronavirus: 

An Anthropocene's Hybrid? The Need for a Geoethic 

Perspective for the Future of the Earth.” AIMS Geosciences, vo. 

6, 2020, 131-134. 10.3934/geosci.2020008. 

Gan, Elaine et al. “Introduction: Haunted Landscapes of the 

Anthropocene.” Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Monsters 

of the Anthropocene, edited by Anna Tsing et al. Minneapolis: 

University of Minnesota Press, 2017. G1-G14. 

Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the 

Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016. 

King, Tiffany Lethabo. The Black Shoals: Offshore Formation of 


23


SECTION 1: 

Experiencing the 

Anthropocene 


25


We All Live Downwind 

Shanna Merola 

Shanna Merola 

Uranium, 2017 

Handmade sculptural collage photographs / Archival inkjet pigment print 

Image courtesy of the artist. 

Artist Statement: 

The images in We All Live Downwind are culled 

from daily headlines—inspired by global and 

grassroots struggles against the forces of 

privatization in the face of disaster capitalism. 

In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein writes about 

the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and 

countries, saying, “the original disaster—the 

coup, the terrorist attack, the market meltdown, 

the war, the tsunami, the hurricane—puts the 

entire population into a state of collective shock” 

(20). The scenes in We All Live Downwind have 

been carved out of dystopian landscapes in the 

aftermath of these events. 

On the surface, rubble hints at layers of oil and 

shale, cracked and bubbling from the earth 


27

elow. Rising from another mound, rows of 

empty mobile homes bake beneath the summer 

sun, remnants of the bust of small towns left dry 

in the aftermath of supply and demand. In this 

place, only fragments of people remain, their 

mechanical gestures left tending to the chaos on 

auto. Reduced to survival, their struggle to exist 

against an increasingly hostile environment goes 

unnoticed. Beyond the upheaval of production, 

a bending highway promises never ending 

expansion - and that low rumble you hear to the 

West is getting louder. 

Research and Process 

Dioxin, cadmium, arsenic, lead... what happens 

over time when the human body is exposed to 

these elements, and what happens to the land? 

Since the 1960s, southeast Michigan has become 

a dumping ground for corporations looking to 

cheaply store and dispose of hazardous waste, 

often in the backyards of communities of color 

and low-income neighborhoods. From uncovered 

petroleum coke piles to expanding oil refineries, 

residents find themselves teetering on the brink 

of environmental collapse. Extraction takes what 

it needs from the earth by force, disrupting 

ecosystems and boosting economies. Industrial 

waste storage becomes its own market, in turn, 

ensuring an endless cycle of wealth production 

through the exploitation of labor and land. The 

photographs in We All Live Downwind examine 

the human cost of these extractive economies— 

across different decades and regions—from my 

own neighborhood in Detroit, MI, to Chicago’s 

Altgeld Gardens, and Love Canal, NY. 

The process for creating each collage begins 

with a visual databank. This cache of source 

images (a combination of photos I’ve taken at 

EPA designated Superfund sites and others 

pulled from the Internet) are printed, hand 

cut, assembled into the environment and rephotographed. 

There is often a chaotic violence 

to the scenes which reference industrial related 

health hazards, ecological crisis, and bodies 

for exchange in the global market. Aerial views 

of fracking fields show devastated landscapes, 

carved into the earth like veins. These 

topographies become a surgery room for the 

victims of late-stage capitalism with no option but 

to mutate or adapt. 

Works Cited 

Klein, Naomi (2008). The Shock Doctrine: The rise of disaster 

capitalism. London: Penguin. 

Bio 

Shanna Merola is a visual artist, photojournalist, and legal 

worker. In addition to her studio practice, she has been a human 

rights observer during political uprisings across the country— 

from the struggle for water rights in Detroit and Flint, MI, to the 

frontlines of Ferguson, MO and Standing Rock, ND. Her collages 

and constructed landscapes are informed by these events. 

Merola lives in Detroit, MI where she facilitates Know-Your- 

Rights workshops and coordinates legal support for grassroots 

organizations through the National Lawyers Guild. She has 

been awarded studio residencies and fellowships through the 

MacDowell Colony, the Studios at MASS MoCA, Kala Institute of 

Art, the Society for Photographic Education, the Puffin Foundation, 

and the Virginia Museum of Fine Art. Merola holds an MFA in 

Photography from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BFA from 

Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work has been published 

and exhibited both nationally and abroad. 


Shanna Merola 

Polychlorinated Biphenyl, 2017 



From the 1920s until they were banned in 1979, an estimated 1.5 billion pounds of the toxic compound 

known as polychlorinated biphenyls were produced in North America. For decades, wastes containing 

PCBs were cast off into soil-beds, rivers, and wetlands, affecting the animals and people around them. 

These industrial legacies disproportionately affect communities of color living in the shadow of heavy 

industry. In a historic housing project on the south side of Chicago, the residents of Altgeld Gardens 

have been waging an environmental justice battle against the slow violence of deregulation. Originally 

established as federal housing for Black World War II veterans, the area would later become known as 

the “Toxic Doughnut”. Engulfed by factories, landfills, and an incinerator, Altgeld had one of the highest 

concentrations of hazardous waste sites in North America. Toxicology studies (98-99’)* from the air and 

soil revealed dangerous levels of heavy metal neurotoxins causing disproportionate rates of asthma, 

birth defects, miscarriages, and cancer. 

* People for Community Recovery Archives, Chicago Public Library, Woodson Regional Library, Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection 

of Afro-American History and Literature 


29

Shanna Merola 

Uranium, 2017 



In November of 2019, a nuclear waste contaminated shoreline crumbled into the waters of the 

Detroit river, exposing residents to decades-old uranium deposits. The radioactive substance, along 

with other deadly chemicals, had been stored onsite by a WWII era weapons subcontractor for the 

Manhattan Project. Between the 1940s and 50s, this facility produced over a thousand tons of uranium 

in the development of fuel rods for the atomic bomb. During this time, factories across the country 

manufactured materials for atomic weapons to support the United States Cold War agenda. Today, 

communities from the Fort Wayne area in Detroit, MI, to Hunter’s Point in San Francisco, CA, are still 

burdened by these nuclear legacies, where government-mandated clean-up efforts range from limited 

to non-existent. Kidney disease and cancer are among the serious health effects reported by people 

with prolonged exposure to enriched uranium. 


Shanna Merola 

Dibenzodioxin, 2017 



For nearly 30 years, 20,000 tons of submerged chemical waste drums lay undiscovered beneath the 

surface of Love Canal, NY. Situated between Buffalo and Niagara Falls, this sleepy working class town 

grew out of the region’s 1950s tourism boom. By the late 1970s, Love Canal would become a household 

name, splashed across the headlines of national newspapers as the story of corporate negligence 

and environmental disaster unfolded. A citizen-led investigation into the mysterious health issues of 

neighbors impacted by dioxin poisoning incited public outcry along with lawsuits. It also ignited a major 

social justice movement at the intersection of housing and environmental rights which ultimately led to 

the creation of the U.S. Superfund program. A study of blood samples at Love Canal found significant 

chromosomal abnormalities in thirty percent of those tested. This scientific research corresponds with 

firsthand testimonials of birth defects, miscarriages, and elevated rates of cancer. 


31

Shanna Merola 

Methane, 2018 



Ruptured pipes and oil storage tanks leeched into Houston’s floodwaters after Hurricane Harvey 

devastated whole neighborhoods in the summer of 2017. As families searched for dry ground, 

factory fires in this highly industrialized city released a toxic cocktail of benzene, butadiene, and 

other carcinogens into the surrounding environments. For decades, the oil and gas industry had 

over-burdened Houston’s predominantly low income and communities of color neighborhoods with 

petrochemical waste. In addition, methane emissions from fossil fuel production can aggravate the 

lungs, skin, and eyes. On a normal day these conditions can be untenable, but in the face of climate 

change induced disaster, elevated levels of human carcinogens can become a matter of life or death. 

What efforts have been made on behalf of private corporations to safeguard against future industrial 

catastrophes as oceans swell and rising sea levels alter the coastal landscapes? 



33

The Anthropocene and the 

Rite of Spring: Performances 

of Labor 

Kate Mattingly and Liz Ivkovich 

June 22, 2019. Walking to the elevated stage 

beneath an overpass in Salt Lake City, I noticed 

my unfamiliar surroundings: railroad tracks, 

gravel, chain link fence, and abandoned factories. 

This was not the typical setting for a performance 

of contemporary dance, but NOW-ID, a Utahbased 

interdisciplinary company, prides itself on 

finding unusual places to set their performances. 

The company, co-directed by choreographer 

Charlotte Boye-Christensen and architect Nathan 

Webster, created a one-time performance of Igor 

Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, held on June 22, 2019. 

The platform of uneven risers that served as 

the stage was set in a landscape of concrete, 

brick, and asphalt. Folding chairs surrounded 

the sides of this elevated stage, so that watching 

the show gave us a view of fellow audience 

members; approximately 250 people attended. 

The choreography was exacting and relentless, 

generating a series of images, rather than a 

narrative. 

The performance began with the four dancers 

seated on stools at the corners of the stage. 

Evoking boxers waiting on the edges of a ring, 

they seemed focused and primed. Jo Blake stood, 

as if to signal the beginning of a ritual, and slowly 

walked by the other dancers (Sydney Sorenson, 

Liz Ivkovich, and Tara McArthur) to greet opera 

singer Joshua Lindsay as he stepped onto the 

stage and began singing. 

When Lindsay had finished singing and exited, 

the dancing began. Each of the four performers 

presented distinct qualities––power, extension, 

expansion, and speed––while also maintaining a 

sense of camaraderie. During unison sections, the 

women generated a sense of solidarity, bounding 

across the stage with a loping gait that seemed 

to gain momentum as they moved. At other 

times, the four performers divided into pairs that 

suggested rival tribes: Ivkovich and McArthur 

wore reddish pants that contrasted with Blake’s 

and Sorenson’s attire. In partnering sections, 

they seemed to engage in combat, like wrestlers 

grappling. 

The costumes by Mallory Prucha added to the 

rough and exposed environment: pants were 

made of heavy cotton (“monk’s cloth”) but 

shredded at the hems and stained with dark 

streaks. Make-up and hair designs enhanced 

this sense of roughness and severity with body 


paint and spiky hairstyles. As the performance 

continued, the body paint disintegrated, leaving 

traces of colors just as the surroundings 

presented traces of former industries and 

communities. 

Later I would learn that one of the four dancers 

had split open her toe on a gap in the stage 

panels during the rehearsal before the show. 

Smears of blood combined with the sweat 

from previous runs and the dust from the 

underpass, none of which had been mopped off 

the stage. The blurring of this dust, blood, and 

sweat left traces and residues, much like the 

patina that covers most of the surfaces under 

the overpass and surrounding buildings. This 

layering motivated our analysis of this production 

as a site that makes visible the dancers’ labor 

and exhaustion, as well as the limits of artistic 

practices, labor relations, and capitalism in the 

Anthropocene. 

This introduction was written by Kate, a dance 

scholar who attended the performance and who 

studies dance criticism and its impacts. The rest 

of the article is co-written with Liz, a dancer in this 

Rite who studies performances as contributions 

to critical sustainability through corporeal 

perspectives. 1 Our approach is both (auto) 

ethnographic and theoretical, offering an analysis 

of the performance as a way of elucidating how 

tenets of the Anthropocene are made visible in 

choreographic production. Such choreographies 

present a worldview that is characterized by 

“human-centered economic and political systems 

that have had significant ecological effects so as 

to alter the course of earth history” (Armstrong 

1 

We chose to use our first names here to emphasize the 

friendship, familiarity, and collaboration that underpin and 

influence this project. 

and Richter). Performance also holds the potential 

to reveal post-Anthropocentric worldviews, 

since it is an indeterminate practice, one that 

is different each time it is presented, and can 

dismantle assumptions about human domination 

while imagining new futures. 

Prior to the June 22, 2019 performance of Rite 

of Spring, Liz and Kate collaborated on a series 

of blog posts, at the request of NOW-ID, that 

appeared from April 12 to June 20, 2019 on their 

company’s website. These 10 posts speculated on 

the political and social messages of the project, 

and through this writing process, we discovered 

that the human-centric worldview imposed by 

the Anthropocene finds a haunting parallel in 

hierarchies of labor that are favored in making 

performances. 

Drawing from this writing and from our 

experiences of the performance, we analyze how 

and why dance can be used to challenge the 

Anthropocene, and why these ideas are critical to 

thriving in the post-Anthropocene. To articulate 

these ideas, we incorporate three theoretical 

frameworks: first, the concept of entrainment, 

which describes how music’s meter is internalized 

by a listener, second, ecofeminism, which 

connects critiques of patriarchy and capitalism, 

and third, decolonizing methodologies, which, as 

explained by Linda Tuhiwai Smith, “pose, contest 

and struggle for the legitimacy of oppositional or 

alternative histories, theories and ways of writing” 

(40). For us, decolonizing our existing frameworks 

means that we address and challenge separations 

between humans and our ecologies, and we 

recognize labor in dance differently. Ultimately, 

we argue that interrogating existing logics of 

performance and creative process reveals the 


35


Image 1 | Left to right: Tara 

McArthur holds Sydney 

Sorenson’s shoulders, Jo Blake 

holds Liz Ivkovich. Liz’s black body 

paint has cracked and peeled 

away at this point, near the end of 

the performance. Photographer: 

Jeffrey Juip, Image courtesy of 

NOW-ID. 


37

ways capitalist regimes have become naturalized, 

and that performance holds the potential to 

reconfigure how we value labor in dance, as 

well as how we value the interconnectedness of 

humans and ecologies. 

The Rituals of the Rite of Spring 

The Rite of Spring (1913) was a landmark 

performance in dance and music canons, bringing 

together Igor Stravinsky as the composer, 

Vaslav Nijinsky as the choreographer, and set 

and costume designs by Nicholas Roerich. At 

its premiere in Paris on May 29 at the Theatre 

Champs-Élysées, the Rite of Spring was performed 

by dancers of the Ballets Russes, a company 

directed by Sergei Diaghilev. The performance 

caused a riot, with audience members shocked 

by Stravinsky’s pounding score and Nijinsky’s 

contorted and awkward choreography. The 

intensity of the production and its references 

to pagan sacrifice created a stark contrast to 

the other performances on the program that 

evening, namely Michel Fokine’s choreography 

of Les Sylphides and Le Spectre de la Rose. Both 

of these ballets exemplify the demure and 

romantic characters that were familiar to balletgoers. 

The Rite of Spring was shocking in its sonic 

and kinetic angularities, and the brutality of the 

woman’s murder. Since that fateful evening, 

there have been numerous re-envisionings of the 

performance, by choreographers like Pina Bausch 

(1975), Glen Tetley (1974), and Wayne McGregor 

(2018), as well as the filmmaker Walt Disney 

(1940). 

The indelible impression of these productions is 

a sense of being drawn into the musical score: as 

we listen to Stravinsky’s music, we internalize its 

meter. This connection is called “entrainment.” 

Music scholar Pieter C. van den Toorn explains, 

“[L]isteners entrain to meter, which in turn 

becomes physically a part of us. Entrainment is 

automatic (reflexive) as well as subconscious (or 

preconscious). Like walking, running, dancing, 

and breathing, meter is a kind of motor behavior” 

(172). In other words, when we listen to music, 

its meter infiltrates our eardrums, brains, and 

nervous systems. Listening is an embodied and 

interactive process: it changes us. 

In Rite of Spring, disruptions of meter generate a 

sense of displacement and irregularity. Scholar 

van den Toorn attributes the “effect” of Rite on 

listeners, to “the raw, relentless character of the 

dissonance” (172). The fourth section, “Ritual 

of the Rival Tribes,” introduces Stravinsky’s 

massive stratification. One of several reasons 

why the first performance of the Rite of Spring 

provoked such a riotous response was because 

these stratifications were unprecedented in 

the art music of Russia and the West, yet the 

polyrhythms and ostinatos in Stravinsky’s score 

are also found in African music. 

Music that compels us to move may be the 

best evidence of entrainment theories, but 

it also points to a more sinister reality. If we 

entrain to meter, what else do we internalize? 

Thoughts and messages that become part of 

our subconscious, also known as implicit bias, 

propel our judgments and assumptions. Just as 

we internalize music’s meters, we also operate 

with internalized value systems that are activated 

involuntarily, without awareness or intentional 

control. Much of the social inequities perpetuated 

in our world today can be traced to implicit biases 

and their activations in educational, political, 


and legal settings. Systems like capitalism and 

consumerism appear “natural” because we have 

habituated to their norms and their ubiquity. The 

fortunate aspect of implicit associations is that 

they can be gradually unlearned, and this is how 

performances contribute to decolonization: they 

rewire our bodies and brains. In other words, 

performances shape our perceptions of the 

world because they invite us to feel and think 

differently. 

When we began writing blog posts prior to the 

performance in 2019, we were faced with a 

Sisyphean task: we were adding to more than a 

century of discourse about a performance that 

is considered genre-changing in both dance 

and music histories (see Brandstetter; Eksteins; 

Neff). We envisioned the role of our writing 

as three-fold: expanding perspectives on the 

functions of dance criticism, on this production 

and its distinct location in Salt Lake City, and on 

its contributions to themes of environmental 

sustainability, which were also at the core of 

the 1913 Rite. We view performances as always 

imbricated in social, political, cultural and 

economic systems that cannot be separated 

from their analysis as creative events, and looked 

forward to highlighting the ways that pre-show 

blog posts could offer a reflective platform, a 

sounding board, and a container for ideas that 

would inform and respond to the choreographer’s 

process. By situating this performance outdoors, 

NOW-ID created a distinct opportunity to 

emphasize the fraught relationships between 

urban development and displacement, and the 

narrative of the Rite of Spring is a rich site to 

investigate questions about the patriarchy, critical 

sustainability, and environmental justice. 

These themes are particularly apparent in the 

third section of Stravinsky’s score, called the 

“Ritual of Abduction,” which signals the violence 

that is the centerpiece of the production. In fact, 

Stravinsky originally intended the Rite to be called 

The Great Sacrifice. According to the libretto, in 

order for spring to arrive and humanity to thrive, 

a Chosen Maiden must dance to death. A sense 

of “abduction,” meaning to forcibly take someone 

against their will, exists in many versions of Rite: 

by Vaslav Nijinsky, Maurice Bejart, Pina Bausch, 

and Anne Bogart & Bill T. Jones. Each of these 

performances is characterized by violence and 

aggression. As we dug deeper into connections 

between violence and patriarchy, we questioned 

the ongoing need for a woman to die in order for 

the production to come to close. This is the crux 

of many versions (by Nijinsky and Bausch) as well 

as canonical ballets: La Sylphide, Giselle, Swan Lake, 

to name a few. If we go to these performances, 

and if they continue to be popular more than 

a century after their premieres, what does this 

indicate about the value of women in today’s 

society? We wondered if a re-envisioning of the 

Rite could alter this narrative, and by extension 

the value we place on women’s rights. In spite 

of our questions and writing, the production by 

NOW-ID ended with one of the women collapsing 

and the audience applauding, motivating our 

analysis of the internalized narratives and implicit 

biases that pervade dance performance. 

The Chosen Maiden and the Chosen Site 

The site of the performance by NOW-ID amplified 

these connections between its plot and women’s 

rights: about a mile from the stage stands 

the Utah State Capitol. A month prior to the 

performance, on May 21, 2019, more than 300 


39

people gathered to protest the growing numbers 

of bans on abortions. A large banner, held by 

three people at the top of the stairs inside the 

rotunda, stated “Stop the War on Women.” In 

2019, there were 16 abortion restrictions or 

bans passed in states, including two in Utah. 

Representative Angela Romero was quoted in 

the Salt Lake Tribune about her opposition to the 

ban’s infringement on women’s choices: “We 

have no business making that decision for them” 

(Rodgers). 

In her exemplary book, One Place After Another, 

Miwon Kwon writes about “site specificity as the 

cultural mediation of broader social, economic, 

and political processes that organize urban life 

and urban space" (3). Kwon is interested in “new 

site-oriented practices” that “accommodate and/ 

or trouble the construction and commodification 

of urban identities” (4). Kwon’s work is predicated 

on the fact that there is no such thing as “empty 

space,” and every environment is a negotiation 

between power and resources. 

Debates over abortion demonstrate the 

persistence of a patriarchal system, where 

men make decisions for women, and in spite of 

decades of marches, court cases, and elections, 

women are still underrepresented in politics 

(127 women now in Congress, less than 25%), 

and women’s rights seem neither secure nor 

protected. We hoped this new version of Rite 

would be an opportunity to address and challenge 

the traditional narrative. We saw an opportunity 

to move the production away from a story of 

patriarchy and tribalism to an event that offers a 

different perspective and perhaps a less violent 

outcome. Situating this version of Rite in a location 

that was rife with memories, associations, and 

possibilities, seemed to us a crucial decision. 

Like a protest, performances leave their imprints 

in the environment, and our surroundings hold 

traces of events, in such a way that entering a 

certain building or crossing a certain street can 

recall a memorable experience that occurred 

years before. This is one of many reasons why 

there has been heightened attention brought to 

the term “site-specific art” over the last decade. 

Artists who create site-specific work have a choice 

to engage or ignore these layers of histories. 

Like Kwon, choreographer Joanna Haigood 

acknowledges these negotiations of sites, politics, 

and communities. In her performances of Invisible 

Wings, she excavates the history of Jacob’s 

Pillow, an iconic outdoor dance venue, to make 

visible the site’s connection to the Underground 

Railroad. Asked about the motivation for the 

project, Haigood spoke about “our social need 

to recognize and celebrate our histories, to 

illuminate and enrich our present with our past” 

and “to encourage us all to look at our history and 

connect it to the current social and political trends 

as they relate to race, class and international 

relations” (Haigood). Like Haigood and Kwon, we 

view performances on site as opportunities to 

“reveal and preserve an important part of our 

national heritage” (Haigood). 

Not all choreographers share this view of working 

with site. The chosen location for the 2019 

performance of the Rite contained multiple and 

conflicting histories, but the choreographer, 

Charlotte Boye-Christensen, said in an April 

2019 conversation with us, that she selected 

the location because it was a “raw and off the 

radar space… It was so obviously right as a 

setting for our interpretation of the work. We 


Image 2 | Tara McArthur (foreground) with Sydney Sorenson (middle) and Jo Blake (back) under the sharp lined ceiling of the 

Interstate 15 highway overpass. Photographer: Jeffrey Juip, Image courtesy of NOW-ID. 

loved the industrial yet sensory nature of the 

space: the patina, the sounds of the trains, traffic, 

neighboring businesses, the rhythmic structure 

above, and the historical references.” Looking 

back on this statement, the verb “love” stands 

out next to its objects, namely the site’s aesthetic 

properties and “references,” as if these were 

scenic elements waiting to be activated. In an 

Anthropocentric worldview, natural resources 

are “up for grabs,” available to be consumed 

for the benefit and profit of certain people. In a 

photograph taken at the site, Boye-Christensen 

clasps a large iron ring, curving her torso to 

mimic the round shape of the structure and 

lunging in her heeled shoes to get closer to the 

object. This piece of equipment is treated like a 

sculpture or prop, as Boye-Christensen detaches 

the equipment’s function from her use of it as 

decoration. 

This extraction of resources and their purposes 

extended to the site itself: NOW-ID’s Rite relegated 

the space to a backdrop, instead of engaging with 

the historical and ecological context of the space. 

Rather than a “raw and off the radar” space, the 

industrial scene at 600 North stands on top of 

long-gone communities and activities. Less than a 

mile from the site of the performance, and dating 

back centuries, hot springs offered respite and 

rejuvenation to Shoshones, Utes and Paiutes. In 

the twentieth century, Wasatch Springs Plunge 

was a popular recreation spot for decades, with 


41

water piped in from surrounding hot springs, until 

the building closed due to lack of attendance in 

1976. As real estate prices in Salt Lake County 

increase, and the median price for a single-family 

home hit an all-time high of more than $381,500 

in 2019 (Semerad), this site for Rite seems to 

be a rare place in Salt Lake City that feels more 

deserted than oversaturated. 

obsolete, and how to denaturalize capitalist 

regimes that make this system seem logical. The 

Rite of Spring is a particularly conducive site for 

these inquiries because the performance centers 

physical exhaustion and suggests that people are 

disposable. 

Ecofeminism and Environmental Sustainability 

The site used to be a flourishing center for 

industrial activity, specifically metal casting. The 

May Foundry, located at 454 West 600 North, 

was established in 1912 by Ruben May, and 

lasted more than 100 years before recently 

shutting down. Mike May, great-grandson 

of Ruben, was the general manager in 2014 

when he told Company Week that foundries 

are “misunderstood” as relics and irrelevant 

(Peterson). May Foundry produced 80 types of 

metal, including super-duplex stainless steel 

and ductile iron. Their client roster included 

companies like Caterpillar and Barnes Aerospace. 

In addition, they worked with military, automotive, 

industrial, and agricultural clients. 

But the company couldn’t survive the economic 

downturns and technological advances of 

recent years, and its machinery now stands 

unused. Such devastation, especially for a 

family-owned business, can take a toll on 

individuals. Tragically, Mark May ended his life 

and his wife’s life in a murder-suicide two years 

ago (Reavy). In 2019, the site looks more like a 

museum than a factory, evidence of just how 

quickly industries can change. To situate a Rite 

of Spring in its vicinity should raise concerns 

about how we sustain communities in the midst 

of changing economies, how people transition 

when vocations that were once needed become 

Ecofeminist scholar Theresa May connects the 

oppression of women to exploitations of natural 

resources. In her article entitled “Toward a 

Dangerous Ecocriticism in Theatre Studies,” May 

probes the potential of productions in creating 

environmental change by creating a list of “Green 

Questions” to ask a performance. In our preshow 

blog posts, we applied these inquiries to 

interrogate how the show might complicate the 

effects of technology on people, animals, plants, 

and the land, while also subverting or propagating 

master narratives that sanction human 

exploitation of the land. We inquired into how the 

spatiality of performance could inform reciprocity 

among spectator, performer, and environment, 

as well as how it may inform notions of ecological 

“community.” Instead of a woman’s sacrifice 

for the survival of a community, how might the 

performance disconnect patriarchal domination 

from ecological survival? We looked to Stravinsky’s 

original title, “The Great Sacrifice,” as suggestive 

of the Anthropocene’s sacrifice of our planet 

and its resources. Highlighting relational rather 

than transactional interactions, we envisioned 

a community of performers and audience 

supporting and sustaining one another as well as 

the plants, animals, and environments they live 

within and alongside. We sought to challenge a 

reductive view of nature in the Anthropocene that 

Donna Haraway describes succinctly as “only the 


aw material of culture, appropriated, preserved, 

enslaved, exalted, or otherwise made flexible 

for disposal by culture in the logic of capitalist 

colonialism” (592). 

A post-Anthropocentric vision of environmental 

sustainability finds commonality with Indigenous 

epistemologies as described by scholar Charles 

Sepulveda, who uses the Tongva word for guests, 

Kuuyam, to theorize a “decolonial possibility based 

on culture and tradition in which settler relations 

to land can be reformed.” Sepulveda writes: 

Kuuyam can assist in the abolition of white 

supremacist logics that demand domestication 

and submission. These relationships, of guest and 

host, are formed outside of western conceptions 

of property and hierarchies between wilderness 

and civilization. Decolonization through 

Indigenous theory, such as Kuuyam, is not based 

in going back to a former time but a decisive 

resolve for a future in which everyone recognizes 

our lands and our water as sacred sources of 

life. Kuuyam, as I am theorizing, is not an open 

invitation for settler possession of Native land. 

Instead, it is a defiant act of love for our lands; 

placing them above the needs of humans. (55) 

Sepulveda contributes to our understanding 

of sustainability in the post-Anthropocene by 

emphasizing the importance of non-hierarchical 

relationships among humans, animals, 

plants, and environments, rather than human 

domination. When applied to a performance, 

Kuuyam challenges assumptions about a 

performance dominating a site, or the submission 

of dancers to the dominance of a choreographer. 

Reconfiguring these relationships directly 

links performance to the possibility of social 

change: it is a site to destabilize and challenge 

Anthropocentric, patriarchal, and settler colonial 

approaches. 

The performance of NOW-ID’s Rite presented a 

narrative and relationship to site that aligned with 

patriarchal, settler colonial, and Anthropocentric 

priorities, and these relationships extended to 

its creative process. In other words, the themes 

of domination and exhaustion that existed 

in the choreography aligned with traditional 

choreographic processes of white modern dance 

that depend on a choreographer who uses 

transactional instead of relational encounters: 

the choreographer produces movement phrases 

that are taught to dancers who are told to 

perform the movement to her specifications. 

In a relational or collaborative process, dancers 

engage with the choreographer in co-creating 

and discussing the movement. The traditional 

process aligns with Anthropocentric worldviews 

that depend on human domination over others, 

while the relational approach connects to 

post-Anthropocentric values that foreground 

interdependencies. 

Scholar Tria Blu Wakpa theorizes these relational 

interactions as “interconnected individualism,” 

a concept that emphasizes interdependence 

which “transcends human-to-human interactions 

and presents an alternative to Western 

epistemologies, which hierarchize humans above 

plants” (119). Interconnected individualism is a 

challenge to settler colonialism and capitalism 

which seek to obliterate Indigenous peoples. In 

many ways, these theories, which “illuminate 

the importance of reciprocal relationships for 

sustainable living and the survival of Native and 

non-Native peoples and non-human animals and 


43

plants” (119), predate the post-Anthropocene 

and influence more ethical approaches to labor, 

politics, and economic systems. If we consider 

performances, and writing about performances, 

to be opportunities to challenge these dominant 

narratives of individualism and the Anthropocene, 

then we need to center relational rather than 

transactional encounters, to work with natural 

processes rather than striving to control them. 

To create this performance of Rite, the dancers 

had to translate Boye-Christensen’s instructions 

into 40 minutes of non-stop choreography across 

bodies and different studio spaces. This was 

particularly complicated given the gaps between 

a well-controlled studio environment at a local 

private school where the choreography was 

created, and the uneven and dust-covered stage 

where it was performed. The four dancers––Tara 

McArthur, Jo Blake, Sydney Sorenson and Liz 

Ivkovich––built The Rite over an intensive three 

weeks in the studio in Sandy. Taking time off of 

jobs and families, three of the dancers came from 

out of state and stayed with friends, borrowing 

cars and rides to get from Salt Lake City and 

Provo to the studio. Boye-Christensen created 

nearly all the movement on-site on the dancers’ 

bodies, a feat of choreographic birthing. Her 

work is distinguished by its exhausting intensity, 

intricate partner work, lots of floorwork, and 

the use of tight unison. As movers in the studio, 

dancers were rehearsing these steps in a short 

amount of time, which is challenging since it takes 

time with choreography to understand where and 

how to move your body efficiently and conserve 

energy. They experienced a number of minor 

injuries during the process, all managed through 

physical therapy and massage, paid for by the 

dancers personally. After three weeks of building, 

the dancers moved to the site, where a stage was 

constructed of a series of platforms next to each 

other. The uneven surface dropped off abruptly to 

the gravel underpass, and the intense bright lights 

and an unseasonal cold snap added another layer 

of translation for the movers in situ. 

Precarious Labor 

The increased precarity and risk in moving from 

studio to site that the dancers absorbed finds a 

haunting parallel in the disposable labor of the 

site’s metal castings factory. NOW-ID’s projectbased 

way of working is rapidly becoming the 

norm across the field, yet, without the support 

of a traditional company structure that offers 

physical therapy, benefits, per diem for tours, 

and consistent paychecks, each production 

depends on the dancers’ perseverance. Injuries 

and challenges are outsourced onto the dancer’s 

bodies. In Boye-Christensen’s process, dancers 

are instruments of her vision, rather than 

onsite collaborators. Like factory workers’ labor, 

the dancers’ labor is under-valued and easily 

replaced. 

Dancers’ labor is further devalued by dance critics 

who rarely acknowledge or name the dancers in a 

work that they review. This was especially visible 

in a review of NOW-ID’s Rite that was published 

and circulated in SLUG magazine and online as 

representative of the production: it was selected 

by NOW-ID to represent the performance in the 

newsletter for their subscribers. The review began 

by referring to NOW-ID as “the international 

dance company in Salt Lake City” (Kubarycz), a 

statement that makes invisible the many other 

choreographers and dancers that make up Salt 

Lake City’s dance scene. The writer went on to 


praise Boye-Christensen’s turn to “the abstract,” 

and “how this production seemed blissfully 

unconcerned with instigating any sort of riot or 

scandal” (Kubarycz). 

If our pre-show writing probed the intersections 

of performances and contexts, of the 

impossibilities of separating humans from 

landscapes, histories, and non-human beings, this 

critic praised the company’s ability to ignore its 

surroundings: “NOW-ID’s Rite adopts modernist 

abstraction as a temporary refuge from the 

current (not to say postmodern) technological 

landscape” (Kubarycz). The statement suggests an 

apt summation of the Anthropocene’s worldview. 

Even the overpass became a resource for this 

human-centric approach, its “steel undercarriage 

served at once as both a ceiling and a sky” 

(Kubarycz). 

attends to the disproportionate power of dance 

critics and the artists they champion, noting 

the importance of seeing their perspectives as 

partial, “situated knowledges” that are reflective 

of “politics and epistemologies of location, 

positioning, and situating, where partiality and 

not universality is the condition of being heard 

to make rational knowledge claims” (Haraway). 

By erasing dancers’ labor and creative process, 

the traditional approach to dance criticism 

reproduces the hierarchies of the Anthropocene 

that eliminate considerations of interdependent 

ecologies and histories. For people who did 

not see the performance, the SLUG review 

circulates as a representation of a show that has 

no recording or other documentation, beyond 

photos. The critic’s voice becomes the voice of all 

the audience members, no matter how different 

their perspectives and interpretations. 

Within this same review, none of the dancers 

were named. While not an uncommon approach 

to dance criticism, this decision by the writer 

underscores the transactional nature of the field 

in regard to the labor of the dancing body. By 

representing the “daring creative strategy” of 

the production as lying completely with Boye- 

Christensen, the writer erases the knowledge, 

artistry, and perseverance of the dancers. In the 

SLUG review, the narrative arc generated by the 

dancers, the one that kept audience members 

interested in the performance, is rendered 

invisible. 

As a kind of archival material, dance criticism 

has a long history of determining the success of 

certain artists and propelling their careers, while 

distorting and misrepresenting performances 

by other dancers (Mattingly). Recent scholarship 

Decolonizing Dance Criticism 

In our pre-show blog posts we attempted to 

introduce a form of criticism that is about 

recognizing positionality and expanding the 

performance beyond the confines of a stage and a 

show. 2 This was our effort to decolonize criticism 

by honoring relationships between artists and 

writers, and dismantling the hierarchy that makes 

archival material (writing) more important than 

embodied knowledge (dancing, performance). 

We sought to include perspectives and histories 

that inform our ways of seeing and engaging. This 

interdisciplinary approach, we hoped, would exist 

in synergistic dialogue with the choreographer’s 

and dancers’ processes. At the outset of this 

2 

Liz made this clear in her statement about our blog posts 

as “analyses of the ways race, class, and gender influence the 

distribution of environmental goods and bads, and why these 

issues are among our most pressing concerns:” http://www. 

now-id.com/blog/2019/4/12/13-statements-on-rite-of-spring-1 


45

Image 3| Jo Blake performs a solo with the May Foundry in the background. Photographer: Jeffrey Juip, Image courtesy of NOW-ID. 

project we envisioned writing as a way of opening 

up dialogue and conversation. We sought to pose 

questions more than dictate narratives. We are 

keenly aware of the fraught relationships between 

writing and power, as well as the ways that writing 

has come to stand in for embodiment, and has 

equated embodied epistemologies with “lesser” 

forms of knowledge (Taylor). 

We took inspiration from Rebecca Solnit, who 

advocates for a “counter-criticism” that “seeks to 

expand the work of art, by connecting it, opening 

up its meanings, inviting in the possibilities. A 

great work of criticism can liberate a work of 

art, to be seen fully, to remain alive, to engage 

in a conversation that will not ever end but 

will instead keep feeding the imagination. Not 

against interpretation, but against confinement, 

against the killing of the spirit” (Solnit). Looking 

back, we realize that the conversation was 

more one-sided than we had hoped, and we 

missed an opportunity to collaborate with 

the choreographer and dancers. Instead of 

our blog posts encouraging a relational and 

interconnected process, the roles of writers and 

artists remained separate and disconnected. If 

a post-Anthropocentric worldview emphasizes 

interdependencies, we sought a similar exchange 

and reciprocity between the writing and artistic 

processes. Without this relational and dialogic 

approach, we were subsumed by the trope of a 

choreographer as sole inventor and director, and 

unclear as to why we were asked to produce our 

writing and discursive frameworks. 


There is a similar silo effect that occurs in 

approaches to dance criticism wherein one 

writer’s review is taken to be representative of 

a multifaceted and heterogeneous audience 

response. The harm caused by this approach to 

criticism, visible in the SLUG review, stems from 

the writing’s inability to account for the biases or 

criteria of the writer. In other words, what one 

critic values, for instance, human domination over 

a landscape, another finds deeply problematic. In 

the SLUG review, dancers’ identities are omitted, 

exacerbating the way their labor is subsumed by 

the choreographer’s “daring” vision. In her preshow 

writing, Liz attended to these complexities: 

“I am curious about a … relationship of performer 

to choreography. I think it is often true that for 

dancers, our own experience of being in the 

studio learning from a choreographer is often 

substituted by the artifact of stories from friends 

or friends of friends. Though most of us won’t 

work with most choreographers, we may still feel 

like we know about it, even though we’ve never 

had an embodied experience. The choreography 

has been framed for us by the circulating material 

of dancer stories.” (Ivkovich). 

This circulating information is a kind of secret 

resource that dancers share with each other 

to protect and warn friends against harmful 

creative processes or predatory choreographers. 

Rarely are dancers’ voices given platforms such 

as this article to publicly share these narratives. 

The dynamics in the studio echo those of the 

boardroom, with the person identified as the 

choreographer or director holding power. 

Dancers seem to simultaneously look out for 

each other and keep each other silent by the 

pressure to be “easy to work with” in the hopes of 

getting more gigs. The written memory of a show 

generally remains the perspective of a reviewer 

and words from the director. 

In a NOW-ID blog post written two years ago, 

Charlotte Boye-Christensen asked dancers 

the question, “Can you tell us a little bit about 

your creative process - how do you learn new 

choreography?” (Ivkovich). Each of the dancers 

involved in Rite was part of the conversation and 

their responses ranged from Ivkovich’s “I almost 

have no answer here -- I am embarrassingly 

bad at learning new movement… it takes me so 

much mental labor to retain choreography…” 

to Jo Blake’s “Do I LOVE the creative process in 

the studio with the choreographer and dancers? 

HELL YEAH!! I live for the creative process!!” 

Tara McArthur answered, “When learning 

new movement I get really curious about the 

transitions between movements, shapes, or 

concepts, not only as a way to string it together 

and solidify it in my mental and physical memory, 

but also to find my own creative voice within a 

certain structure.” Sydney Sorenson responded, 

“I try to be as pure of a dancer as possible for the 

choreographer. I desire to serve their vision.” The 

significance of this sharing of perspectives lies in 

the lacunae between each response: Sorensen 

seeks to “serve” while McArthur finds her “own 

creative voice.” Together this cast produced a 

riveting and beautifully danced performance, but 

their ability to generate a collective vision remains 

under-documented. 

As their responses to creative process 

demonstrate, there is no dominant or allencompassing 

view among the dancers, and 

at times their perspectives run counter to a 

choreographer’s interpretations. This was seen 

most vividly in Boye-Christensen’s comments 


47

about the costumes, designed by Mallory Prucha. 

As Boye-Christensen created the choreography, 

she was inspired by the voluminous pants 

designed by Prucha: “The costume designs are 

feeding the choreography. When I saw the pants 

I started creating these low walks that made the 

costumes look like a skirt.” 3 She adds that she 

loves how the costumes suggest both dresses and 

warriors’ garments. Instead of making the dancing 

look smooth or streamlined, Boye-Christensen is 

intentionally keeping the movement “awkward.” 

She likes how this alludes to pagan rites that 

are performed by a community of people rather 

than by trained artists. Yet, her intricate and 

demanding choreography requires an incredible 

level of stamina, even without heavy costumes 

that hinder the ability of dancers to execute the 

steps. In the final dress rehearsal, one of the 

dancers––normally the picture of humor and 

equanimity––ended up in tears after her foot 

caught on a stray hem and twisted to the point of 

pain. “This is so dangerous. Someone is going to 

get hurt!” she sobbed. 

For Boye-Christensen, the body paint contributes 

to this idea of ritual action by disintegrating 

as the dancers perform: in other words, the 

ritual generates its impact by being lived and 

experienced. The performers, however, worried 

about how this ritual would be interpreted: 

would body paint and braids read as cultural 

appropriation or blackface and if so, how could 

the dancers address that with Boye-Christensen 

in a constructive way that wouldn’t hinder her 

creative process? Ultimately, the dancers felt 

the elements worked together and they let go of 

concerns about appropriation. 

3 

Quote from Boye-Christensen in article by Kate Mattingly on 

costume design for NOW-ID’s blog: http://www.now-id.com/ 

blog/2019/6/11/ritual-action-dark-beauty 

Conclusion 

When we agreed in April of 2019 to write about 

this production of Rite of Spring for NOW-ID’s blog, 

we viewed the project as a rich site to investigate 

questions about the patriarchy, reconstruction, 

critical sustainability, and environmental justice. 

Within a couple weeks of writing posts about 

the project, what we envisioned as dialogue and 

collaboration with the choreographer felt more 

like a one-sided conversation. Our posts reflected 

on questions and theories that intrigued us but 

seemed irrelevant or uninteresting to the design 

team. We began to question the limits of creative 

processes: in a traditional model of choreographic 

production, dancers are seen as the “instruments” 

or “paintbrushes” of the choreographer. For 

instance, Charlotte Boye-Christensen would 

deliver the steps and phrases to the cast of four, 

and they would master and repeat them. In 

more progressive and perhaps more sustainable 

models, choreographers, dancers, and writers 

work collaboratively to create, reshape, and 

discuss the material being generated. This is a 

relational instead of a transactional process, as 

each entity influences and informs the others. 

We see parallels between this process and 

environmental justice in the post-Anthropocene. 

Interrogating existing logics of performance 

and creative process opens analysis of the ways 

capitalist regimes that rely on the disposability 

of land and labor have become naturalized and 

these systems are made to seem logical. We 

seek to honor the interconnected ways that 

dancers’ labor, creative processes, performance 

environments, and dance criticism can work 

collaboratively to re-pattern habitual thinking and 

to challenge systems of globalized capital and 

resource extraction. 


Image 4 | Liz Ivkovich (foreground), Sydney Sorenson (middle), and Tara McArthur (background) in a trio. 

Also seen here are the bright lights along the edge of the stage, pointed upwards towards the dancers’ 

faces. Photographer: Jeffrey Juip, Image courtesy of NOW-ID.

In Decolonizing Methodologies, Linda Tuhiwai 

Smith writes about the importance of centering 

Indigenous theories in a settler colonial world. 

She writes that we search for ways to “pose, 

contest and struggle for the legitimacy of 

oppositional or alternative histories, theories and 

ways of writing… This means “struggling to make 

sense of our own world while also attempting 

to transform what counts as important in the 

world of the powerful” (40). If we aspire to 

decolonize performance and dance criticism, then 

we need to investigate the creative processes, 

implicit assumptions, and relationships with 

environments that are activated by performances. 

Most importantly, to challenge dominant 

narratives of individualism and the Anthropocene, 

we need to center relational rather than 

transactional encounters, to work with natural 

processes rather than striving to control them, 

and to recognize the valuable work that dance 

criticism and performances can do to motivate 

different ways of seeing, thinking, and living. 

Works Cited 

Armstrong, Melanie and Jennifer Richter, “Life After the 

Anthropocene: Envisioning the Futures of the World,” 

Mapping Meaning Call for Submissions, 2020, http://www. 

mappingmeaning.org/call-for-submissions-issue-4. Accessed 

July 8, 2020. 

Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question 

in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist 

Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, Autumn, 1988. 

Ivkovich, Liz. “Procession of the Sages,” NOW-ID blog, May 23, 

2019, http://www.now-id.com/blog/2019/5/23/7-procession-ofthe-sages-liz-ivkovich. 

Accessed July 8, 2020. 

Kubarycz, Brian. “NOW-ID Dance Presents Stravinsky’s Rite of 

Spring,” SLUG Magazine, June 26, 2019. https://www.slugmag. 

com/performance-theatre/now-id-dance-presents-stravinskysrite-of-spring/. 

Accessed January 3, 2020. 

Kwon, Miwon. One Place After Another: Site-specific Art and 

Locational Identity, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. 

Mattingly, Kate. “Digital Dance Criticism: Screens as 

Choreographic Apparatus,” International Journal of 

Screeendance (2019). 

May, Theresa. “Toward a Dangerous Ecocriticism in Theatre 

Studies,” Theatre Topics, vol. 17, no. 2, September 2007, 95-110. 

Neff, Severine, ed. The Rite of Spring at 100. Bloomington, IN: 

Indiana University Press, 2017. 

Peterson, Eric. “May Foundry & Machine Co,” Company Week, 

Dec. 1, 2014, https://companyweek.com/article/may-foundrymachine-co. 


Reavy, Pat. “Sugar House couple found deceased,” 

Deseret News, July 17, 2017, https://www.deseret. 

com/2017/7/17/20615923/sugar-house-couple-founddeceased-in-their-home. 


Rodgers, Bethany. “Utah House passes bill banning elective 

abortion,” Salt Lake Tribune, February 27, 2019, https://www. 

sltrib.com/news/politics/2019/02/26/utah-house-passed-bill/. 


Blu Wakpa, Tria. “Culture Creators and Interconnected 

Individualism,” Dance Research Journal, vol. 48, no. 1, April 

2016, 107-125. doi:10.1017/S0149767715000509 

Brandstetter, Gabriele, ed. Sacré 101: An Anthology on The Rite 

of Spring, JRP|Ringier/Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, 

2014. 

Eksteins, Modris. Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of 

the Modern Age, HMH Books, 2000. 

Haigood, Joanna. “Invisible Wings,” Zaccho Dance Theatre, 

http://www.zaccho.org/?event_invisiblewings. Accessed June 

1, 2020 

Semerad, Tony. “Home prices in Salt Lake County reach an 

all-time high,” Salt Lake Tribune, November 19, 2019, https:// 

www.sltrib.com/news/2019/11/19/home-prices-salt-lake/. 


Sepulveda, Charles. “Our Sacred Waters: Theorizing Kuuyam as 

a Decolonial Possibility,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & 

Society, vol. 7, no. 1, 2018, 40-58. 

Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and 

Indigenous Peoples, London: Zed Books, 2012. 

Solnit, Rebecca. “Woolf’s Darkness: Embracing the 

Inexplicable,” New Yorker, April 24, 2014, https://www. 

newyorker.com/books/page-turner/woolfs-darkness- 


embracing-the-inexplicable. Accessed June 1, 2020. 

Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire. Durham: Duke 

University Press. 2003. 

Van den Toorn, Pieter C. “The Rite of Spring briefly revisited: 

Thoughts on Stravinsky’s Stratifications, the Psychology of 

Meter, and African Polyrhythm,” Music Theory Spectrum no. 39, 

2017, 158-181. 

Bios 

Kate Mattingly is an Assistant Professor at the University of 

Utah. She received her doctoral degree in Performance Studies 

with a Designated Emphasis in New Media from the University 

of California, Berkeley. Her Master of Fine Arts degree in Dance 

is from New York University and her Bachelor of Arts degree 

in Architecture is from Princeton University. Her writing has 

been published in the International Journal of Screendance, 

Performance Research, Convergence, Dance Chronicle, Dance 

Research Journal, the New York Times, the Village Voice, Dance 

Magazine, loveDANCEmore, and many other publications and 

websites. She currently teaches courses in dance histories, dance 

studies, and dance criticism. 

Liz Ivkovich hails from rural Michigan. She is the Development 

Director for UtahPresents, the multidisciplinary arts presenter 

at the University of Utah, where she oversees all fundraising 

and contributes to dance and environmental programming. 

Her research explores dance and environmental justice, with 

articles in the Journal of Environmental Studies & Sciences, Local 

Environment, and loveDANCEmore. Liz received her Bachelor of 

Science in Sustainable Business and International Studies from 

Aquinas College and her Master of Fine Arts in Modern Dance from 

the University of Utah. She is finishing up her Interdisciplinary 

Graduate Certificate in Sustainability from the University of Utah. 


51


Field Environmental Philosophy 

for Post-Anthropocene 

Realities: Low Power Radio as 

Biocultural Conservation 

Rachel Weaver 

Introduction 

The scales of current industrialized processes 

continue to lead to an increasingly unpredictable 

future. We, as humans, need to develop 

imaginative processes and experiments to 

grapple with the strange, wonderful, and 

terrifying aspects of the Anthropocene. Integrated 

knowledges and situated imaginations enhance 

the possibilities of a post-Anthropocene beyond 

binaries of utopias and dystopias. Exercising the 

environmental imagination and making ourselves 

receptive to experimentation makes possible 

an understanding of a wider range of future 

possibilities and sustainable realities. 

Our engagement with future ecologies and 

post-Anthropocene realities can be playful 

and transformative with a currently persistent 

technology: radio. Our environmental 

imaginations and electronic communications via 

radio, specifically local and low power community 

radio, are living, breathing time capsules of 

our past, present, and future possibilities, 

simultaneously. Community radio enthusiasts 

and producers examine possibilities to re-vision 

and co-construct post-Anthropocene realities to 

materialize and make possible future-thinking in 

the present, through historical technology. Radio 

is both material in its processes and ephemeral 

as it permeates the vast space through which air 

travels. 

This essay uses local radio as a case study 

for applying Field Environmental Philosophy 

as an analytical framework. This analysis is 

further enhanced by concepts of environmental 

imagination, and allows us to understand local 

radio as biocultural conservation. Community 

radio projects benefit from philosophical analyses 

that clarify the transformative abilities radio 

can play in human imaginations, and these 

concepts can be applied to the development, 

implementation, and training of local radio 

stations, organizations, and producers. Local radio 

can be understood as a tool for enriching cultural 

and ecological conservation projects, and can 

be utilized as a platform for post-Anthropocene 

realities to be broadcast. 


53

Environmental Imagination and Field 

Environmental Philosophy 

physical reactions to environmental issues in the 

Anthropocene. 

The concept of the environmental imagination 

is initially applied to literature, to organize 

and outline how environmental interactions 

guide human perception (Buell). This essay 

understands the environmental imagination 

as operative and situational (Klaver). It arises 

out of the interplay between individuals and 

environments, and people can operate their 

environmental imagination in order to perceive 

ecological happenings and environmental issues. 

When we experience moments of wildness, or 

seek to conceive of the impacts of environmental 

degradation, we are accessing our environmental 

imaginations in particular situations to help us 

understand patterns and implications that can 

be further expanded. In order to have a fuller 

understanding of environmental connections and 

impacts, our environmental imaginations operate 

“within embedded practices and events [where] 

we imagine our future, present and past” (Klaver). 

Within diverse environments and historical 

understandings, we may begin to comprehend 

the effects of the Anthropocene, as well as 

possibilities of post-Anthropocene scenarios. 

The maieutic process helps us to find, uncover, 

and construct new knowledge systems, develop 

arguments, and imagine multiple possibilities 

while critically assessing our positions. Those 

practicing their environmental imagination may 

explore maieutic processes and learn to bring 

latent ideas into clear consciousness in order 

to imagine co-constructive relationships and 

realities. Environmentally-oriented maieutic 

processes help us acknowledge and comprehend 

a range of emotional, psychological, and 

This essay employs a Field Environmental 

Philosophy (FEP), to explore new possibilities 

in the Anthropocene. It is an ethically- and 

environmentally-oriented methodology that 

“emphasizes ecologically and philosophically 

guided field experiences in local habitats, 

sociocultural communities, and regional 

institutions and is designed to stimulate the 

perception of and valuation of biological and 

cultural diversity in specific places and moments” 

(Rozzi, 2012). This four-step cycle allows for 

an open-ended research-experience to guide 

one’s actions within environments that support 

communities of life. 

The four-step FEP cycle involves: 1) 

interdisciplinary ecological and philosophical 

research, 2) poetic communication through 

metaphors and narratives, 3) field activities with 

an ecological and ethical orientation, and 4) in 

situ biocultural conservation. Field experiences 

create situations for direct encounters with the 

living and non-living entities of a community. 

Initial perceptions can transform “into a deeper 

experience” as well as “conservation actions 

and to an ethical relationship of co-inhabitation” 

(Jiménez, 2014). 

FEP allows us to integrate knowledges in order 

to collapse perceived divides between nature 

and culture. One way FEP has been utilized is 

in developing ethical biocultural conservation 

programs around the world. For instance, it 

was implemented and advanced in the Sub- 

Antarctic region of southern South America, 

in order to develop sustainable research and 


conservation practices that are inclusive to the 

indigenous communities and native species 

of the Sub-Antarctic rainforest. In this study, I 

employ a FEP methodology to empower people 

in understanding the ecological connections of 

low-power FM radio and the abilities of a local 

community radio station in North Texas to create 

spaces that playfully participate in biocultural 

conservation. 

Applying a Field Environmental Philosophy 

Approach to Local (Low-Power) Radio: Slow 

Radio, Soundscape Ecology, and Biocultural 

Conservation 

FEP is rhizomatic, in that “it always has multiple 

entryways” and is “open and connectable in all 

of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, 

susceptible to constant modification” (Deleuze 

and Guattari 12). The four steps in FEP may occur 

simultaneously, influence each other, and steps 

may ebb and flow from the focus and perception 

of the practitioner at various times in the 

process. The cycle is not necessarily a complete 

experience in itself, but enhances our imaginative 

and transformative capabilities. Discovering 

maieutic processes, exercising our environmental 

imagination, and applying FEP to conservation 

practices requires observations and perceptions 

of specific instances and issues in environments. 

As Donna Haraway has observed, “The only way 

to find a larger vision is to be somewhere in 

particular” (Haraway 590). 

In the following section, I discuss how the four 

steps of FEP can be applied to multiple scales of 

Low-Power Frequency Modulation (LPFM), and 

also relate them to a general understanding of 

LPFM radio, the experiences of a local North 

Texas LPFM community radio station, and a 

particular program on the North Texas LPFM 

radio station. 

Step 1: Interdisciplinary Ecological and 

Philosophical Research 

Interdisciplinary ecological and philosophical 

research involves multiple interconnected 

and intersectional disciplines, and becomes 

transdisciplinary as it expands to nonacademic 

considerations. Understanding radio leads to 

research in history, technology, sociology, policy, 

science, telecommunications, music, ecology, 

aesthetics, mechanics, and electronics, along 

a vast spectrum of disciplines and research 

categories. 

Understanding the origins of a local station is 

enhanced by knowing the technological and 

regulatory processes that shape radio in the 

United States. To begin with it is useful to have 

a general understanding of processes of radio. 

Music, speech, and sounds are sent by means of 

radiated energy that is transmitted through the 

air. Radio stations provide the necessary energy 

source, high-frequency oscillator, and equipment 

to transmit speech, music, and sound. 

The energy source produces a high voltage. The 

oscillator causes a stream of electrons to vibrate 

back and forth at high frequencies…, to vibrate, 

or oscillate. Similarly, vocal cords in a person’s 

throat cause a stream of air to vibrate. The 

rapidly oscillating movement of electrons causes 

energy to be radiated, or sent through the air, in 

the form of electromagnetic waves. (Schmitt) 


55

Carrier waves convey speech and music from 

the radio station transmitter to radio receivers, 

where “[m]odulation allows the carrier wave to 

carry information from one place to another by 

electromagnetic energy” (ibid.). 

Radio experimentation flourished in the 

nineteenth century, and by 1891 wireless 

telegraph radios began to appear on ships at sea. 

The importance of radio for public safety and 

necessary communications, as well as its ability 

to be constructed by amateurs, led to the spread 

and development of radio spectrum and uses. 

Definitive of the Anthropocene, humans assert 

dominance upon the airwaves. As an example, 

the U.S. Radio Act of 1912 mandated that all 

radio stations in the United States be licensed by 

the federal government, and declared the entire 

broadcast spectrum to be governmental property. 

The current government agency that regulates 

radio, the Federal Communications Commission 

(FCC), was established in the Communications 

Act of 1934 as the sole entity for regulating the 

airwaves for radio, television, wire, (and later, 

satellite and cable) in the public interest. The 

second half of the twentieth century saw the 

increasing deregulation and homogenization of 

radio, leading to the growth of radio and media 

conglomerates across the nation. In 2003, the 

FCC voted to repeal and change various crossownership 

rules, which allowed for the mergers of 

several large telecommunications companies and 

the buyout of over 4,000 radio stations (KUZU). 

In response to the disappearance of local voice, 

grassroots radio organizations began lobbying 

the FCC at the end of the twentieth century for 

communities to gain access to local airwaves. 

After decades of lobbying, the FCC enacted 

the Local Community Radio Act of 2010, which 

established LPFM stations with a cap of 100 watts 

and a radius of 3 miles. LPFMs must be owned 

and operated by nonprofit organizations. The 

FCC only accepted LPFM applications for a few 

years beginning in 2013 (ibid.). Radio enthusiasts 

in a modest North Texas town leaped at the 

rare opportunity, and in 2015, Real Waves Radio 

Network was granted permission by the FCC to 

manage KUZU 92.9 LPFM in Denton, Texas. 

Real Waves Radio Network is a nonprofit 

organization whose purpose is to operate a noncommercial, 

non-sectarian, LPFM community 

radio station by broadcasting terrestrially and 

digitally to provide “a designated public arena 

for artistic expression, music, debate, discussion, 

announcements, and other public affairs and 

services” (KUZU). KUZU broadcasts on local FM 

radio and streams online with over 60 producers 

contributing to unique show programming 

featuring a variety of music genres, literature, 

mixed media, sound art, local information, 

discussion, and experimentation. I have been 

a supporter, advocate, and volunteer for KUZU 

since 2015. I was voted onto the Real Waves Radio 

Network Board of Directors in 2017, and I have 

hosted a KUZU program since 2018. I help train 

producers, maintain the station and operations, 

and interact with the community on behalf of 

KUZU. 

KUZU was created by and for the North Texas 

community it serves, and is maintained by 

volunteers. KUZU brings together hundreds 

of community members from a variety of 

backgrounds as volunteers, producers, supporting 

members, underwriters, and community 


to a wider society. Slow radio is “an antidote to 

today’s frenzied world… [and] a lo-fi celebration 

of pure sound” (BBC). It is “basically [radio] 

programming that moves at a very casual 

pace. It immerses you in sound to help you 

stay grounded in the present” (Entenmen). IN 

FORMED, seeks to cultivate spaces to sincerely 

discuss and purposefully express philosophical, 

social, and environmental issues through radio 

programming. IN FORMED Radio broadcasts 

philosophy, literature, field recordings, discussion, 

poetry, found sounds, mindful observation, 

nonfiction, and more, in a playful and welcoming 

environment. 

Step 2: Poetic Communication Through 

Metaphors and Narratives 

Image 1 | “Records” 

A color photo of the KUZU radio mixing board table/ 

producer station with microphones, laptop, records, record 

players, and supplies for producer shows. Image courtesy of 

Peter Salisbury, 2020. 

partners. Community members identify with 

KUZU and connect with each other through their 

shared care for local airwaves. KUZU producers 

spend numerous volunteer hours every week 

providing ever-changing, interesting, and diverse 

programming that is transmitted through radio 

signals. 

One of the producer-generated programs 

on KUZU is a “slow radio” program called IN 

FORMED Radio that asks listeners to recognize 

the genuine nature of the questions presented 

to our creative and local communities, as well as 

Narrative and poetic communications are a 

critical aspect of FEP. These arise in producers’ 

communal storytelling through broadcasted 

music, playlists, topics, and shared sounds. 

Local radio is the heartbeat of a locale. LPFM 

and community radio stations rely upon local 

producer-generated programming that is 

imaginative and expresses community emotions 

on varieties of topics. LPFMs are community 

oriented and become a social art practice by their 

very existence. Low-Power is participatory radio, a 

tool for social justice movements and community 

expression (Prometheus Radio Project). 

Diverse and unique programming is a 

foundational philosophy for KUZU. Local 

producers are challenged to abide by FCC rules 

and regulations, such as using language that 

excludes profanity and calls to action, and shows 

that follow all copyright rules. Producers also 

have a space for radio experimentation, and 


57

inherently express their individual voice, tastes, 

curation, and process with each program. They 

interconnect their own stories, memories, and 

feelings into their shows, and share them into 

the homes, vehicles, and spaces airing KUZU. 

The producers and listeners connect through 

community airwaves. 

In addition to the wide spectrum of music genres 

showcased and informational topics aired on 

KUZU, other programming offers additional 

alternatives. Late night experimental sound 

art programs such as WOODS offer “Extreme 

Miscellaneous…for those who accidentally 

stumble upon it” and who become entranced 

by the layering of sounds featuring archival 

speeches, field recordings, found sounds, and 

song collage (KUZU). Spiderweb Salon’s Radio 

Poets Live airs on various music programs to 

showcase the work of a local art collective and 

provide an intermission for listeners. These 

shows, as well as IN FORMED Radio, are examples 

of slow radio on KUZU. 

A growing list of locally produced shows on KUZU 

offers a spectrum of opportunities for listeners 

to “step back, let go, immerse yourself” (BBC). IN 

FORMED seeps into artistic spaces and resonates 

through airwaves in order to share uncivilized 

philosophy in a free form. By hosting IN FORMED 

Radio, I am attempting to undo concepts of 

civilized, rigid, academic philosophy and share 

information in atypical ways. The task is to 

present imaginative, educational, and academic 

information in an accessible way for a general 

audience. The stories and playlists shared on 

KUZU are presented freely to listeners with no 

expectations, no requirements, and no objective. 

Producers simply aspire to share the music, 

stories, and heartsongs of our town with others. 

Step 3: Field Activities with an Ethical and 

Ecological Orientation 

Field activities occur in the direct action of 

radio broadcast. Ethical considerations are 

made explicit, and ecological considerations 

are necessary. LPFMs are required to be less 

than 100 watts and operate on small scales 

compared to the hundreds-of-thousands of watts 

used by larger radio stations. These restrictions 

necessitate a local orientation for community 

radio stations. Managing a LPFM radio station 

requires we abide by FCC guidelines and laws, 

respect community expectations, and work 

each day to maintain equipment, status, and 

programming. Our field activities for radio require 

consistent maintenance, and constant vigilance 

to remedy occurrences of “dead air” radio silence, 

encroachment from larger stations, and technical 

difficulties. Due to their small size, LPFMs are also 

more likely to be affected by local geography and 

environmental occurrences. 

KUZU has a small antenna attached to a larger 

tower, and this small antenna is where our 

signal is sent to the public. Changes in the local 

topography, such as hills and highways, create 

physical barriers for carrier waves and can 

affect the listener’s signal. Internet streaming 

connection can be affected by storms and times 

of high internet traffic. At KUZU, we have a story 

growing in our own narrative: the jitter tree. We 

began to notice a jitter or glitch would occur 

at random times during songs and shows. We 

investigated the tower area and determined the 

cause. During the Texas springs and summers, a 

tree located near the tower blooms and expands 


its greenery. As the tree blooms and North Texas 

winds dance with the leaves, our signal is briefly 

interrupted with a jitter sound that pulses into 

the programs. Rather than remove the tree at a 

time of increased urbanization and deforestation, 

or even trim various limbs, KUZU decided to 

embrace the tree as part of our community 

narrative. When you hear the jitter tree, it is 

dancing with us, and we are lucky enough to hear 

this on the radio. 

of the public and reproduced for their individual 

works. Additionally, IN FORMED seeks to embrace 

local resources for programming, and these 

field activities connect our communities. Local 

artists, creatives, and active community members 

have opportunities to discuss and present 

their work on the radio. Soundscape ecology 

and field recordings are also incorporated into 

programming, offering listeners natural sounds 

and wonders through electronic communications. 

KUZU also makes its ethical orientation explicit 

in development and organization, and its ethical 

statement is part of its guiding mission. “KUZU 

will not accept or air programming that incites 

hatred against, or serious contempt for, or severe 

ridicule of, any person or group of persons 

because of age, ethnicity, nationality, race, 

gender expression, sexual orientation, religion, 

transgender status, or disability” (KUZU). This 

policy helps guide decision making, and creates 

space for community members who are often 

not granted air time or space within community 

organizing. KUZU makes explicit its desire to 

provide space, both physical and via airwaves, 

for a greater percentage of diversity with local 

producers providing a deeper knowledge of the 

various voices in our community. Through its 

youth producer program, hands-on producer 

training, and community outreach, KUZU aspires 

to give more opportunities for community 

members to strengthen their voices and share 

them continuously. 

IN FORMED Radio presents information from 

the public domain as well as local community 

resources. Public domain sources are available 

to the public as a whole, no longer held in 

copyright, and can be used freely by members 

Inspired by the spontaneity of creative 

communities, soundscape ecology is an integral 

aspect of IN FORMED Radio. Soundscape ecology 

is made up of 1) Geophony, which are nonbiological 

audio signal sources coming from 

different types of habitats, whether marine or 

terrestrial, 2) Biophony, the collective sound 

that vocalizing animals create in each given 

environment, and 3) Anthrophony, the general 

sources of human sounds/noise that occur within 

a soundscape. Because “every soundscape that 

springs from a wild habitat generates its own 

unique signature, one that contains incredible 

amounts of information,” soundscape ecologists 

gather field recordings in various environmental 

conditions to capture the geophony, biophony, 

and anthrophony of a particular place, time, 

scene, situation, or occurrence (Krause). 

Personally-acquired and public domain 

soundscapes are embedded throughout IN 

FORMED programs in order to enhance listeners’ 

environmental imagination and maieutic 

practice. These examples of environmentally and 

community oriented actions for LPFMs in general, 

KUZU in particular, and individual programs 

illustrate the possibilities for ethical and ecological 

field activities in local radio. 


59

Image 2 | “Jitter Tree” 

A black and white photo of the community tower where KUZU rents space for our 

L P F M a n t e n n a ; t h e j i t t e r t r e e i s t h e o n l y g r e e n / c o l o r e d t r e e , s h o w i n g i t s l o c a t i o n . 

Image courtesy of Peter Salisbury, 2020. 

. 


Step 4) In situ Biocultural Conservation: 

possibilities, simultaneously. 

This final step of FEP is obtainable through 

biocultural community care, and the conservation 

and preservation of local culture and airwaves. 

In situ means “in its original place”, and 

conservation in situ of the memory (in the site 

of one’s memory) perpetuates the open-ended 

FEP discovery process. In situated memories are 

the thoughts, feelings, reflections, and responses 

of transformative conservation processes. 

These “situated knowledges” demonstrate 

how “politics and epistemologies of location, 

positioning, and situating…are claims on people’s 

lives” (Haraway 589-590, 1988). LPFMs are sitespecific 

local stations that provide glimpses of a 

community’s situated knowledges, memories, and 

imaginations. 

KUZU is site-specific in Denton, Texas, and 

persists in part because of the concentrated local 

music and art scene that is cultivated through 

multiple universities and colleges, persistent 

“DIY” spaces, and ever-changing responses to 

counter status quo. Local programming on 

KUZU gives airtime to local artists, musicians, 

and community members in a public arena 

that circulates around us. A KUZU talk show, 

Attention Denton, “is an informative radio space 

where members of the Denton community talk 

about and connect important events, people, 

and ideas from yesterday, today, and tomorrow” 

(KUZU, 2017). In addition to its radio mission 

and education programs, KUZU preserves an 

archive of music, shows, interviews, ephemera, 

and programs of local music and culture. KUZU 

also has intergenerational potential, and creates 

opportunities for multiple generations to interact 

with and cultivate past, present, and future 

Researching public domain sources creates a 

time machine to investigate the cultural and 

historical occurrences of the Anthropocene where 

literature, philosophy, poetry, and texts of the 

past are read and heard in contemporary context. 

In 2020, public domain works are works published 

in or before 1924. Currently, literature, movies, 

and other works released 96 years ago will enter 

the public domain every January 1st until 2073. 

Public works and federally released information 

are in the public domain, as well. IN FORMED 

Radio searches the public domain for sources 

that present ecological, artistic, and philosophical 

information, as well as viewpoints from 

historically silenced voices in literature, fiction, 

and poetry. Examples from shows focusing on 

traditionally unheard voices have featured literary 

works such as: the essays of early 20th century 

Lakota writer and activist Zitkála-Šá; the poems of 

the first published African American poet Phillis 

Wheatley of the 18th century; the essays and 

poems from 20th century Harlem Renaissance 

poet, journalist, and activist for African American 

and women’s rights, Alice Ruth Moore. The 

information and stories are curated so that 

listeners may experience a maieutic reaction that 

brings their latent ideas into clear consciousness. 

Soundscape ecology archives “the signature 

voices of the natural world, and as we hear 

them, we’re endowed with a sense of place and 

the true story of the world we live in” (Krause, 

2013). IN FORMED Radio archiving and airing 

field recordings in its soundscape ecology praxis 

necessitates devotion and evokes maieutic 

memory. In situated memories retain placespecific 

transformative conservation, education, 


61

and discovery processes through subjective 

experiences. Rather than selfish subjective 

experiences, in situated memories have the ability 

to create a sense of solidarity with the biocultural 

diversity and mosaics of forms in environments. 

In situ conservation protects native habitats and 

interactions, and fosters a sense of responsibility. 

In situated memories call forth the essential 

sense one develops through direct interactions in 

meaningful environments. 

Conclusion 

Sound is vibration of the air—it is something 

that is not only heard, but also felt (perhaps 

otherwise sensed, too). Radio waves are a type 

of electromagnetic radiation that transmit sound 

and energy through physical space, and are only 

made intelligible to humans through technology. 

Humans have transformed physical and aerial 

environments in order to broadcast and receive 

radio, yet rarely acknowledge these alterations to 

land and air. The anthropocentric view tends to 

render invisible the human impact on landscapes, 

climate change, and biophysical alterations. 

Homogenization and dominance of the 

environment to human ends are characteristics of 

the Anthropocene. KUZU’s stewardship of LPFM 

radio, and the very existence of local stations 

challenge the homogenization of airwaves, 

sound, music, and media. The industrialization, 

corporate ownership, and conglomeration of 

radio have become an “air grab” where the 

commercialization of sound supersedes the 

community voices previously flourishing on radio. 

Encroachment from radio conglomerates silences 

and overpowers local stations. Listeners adapt to 

the homogenization and experience loss without 

realization. 

LPFM radio conserves and preserves local 

airwaves and sounds. This form of environmental 

stewardship is essential to transform 

towards a sustainable post-Anthropocene. 

Soundscape ecology provides a deeper, fuller, 

all-encompassing approach to nature, and 

directly competes with homogenization and the 

sensations of industrialization. It may also be 

understood beyond sound because many of the 

encompassing sounds of nature correlate with 

other senses that resonate through us and allow 

us to imagine a more sustainable and eco-centric 

approach to nature and society. 

Field Environmental Philosophy offers a playful 

methodology to integrate knowledges and 

situate memories. Moments in low-power and 

slow radio collapse perceived divisions between 

nature and culture. Progressing through the 

FEP methodology adds layers of interpretation 

that help stimulate environmental perceptions 

and discover nuanced understandings of our 

biocultural interactions. LPFM radio offers a 

glimpse of the post-Anthropocene: to re-vision 

different and co-constructive relationships, to 

think about scales outside of human time and 

place, to become conscious of latent sensations. 

The stewardship of KUZU for low-power radio 

and local airwaves is not one of dominance, but a 

nurturing and caring preservation of an essential 

biocultural environment. Low-power radio 

materializes and makes possible future-thinking, 

and future-sensing, which can be cultivated for a 

post-Anthropocene beyond human dominion. 


Works Cited 

Bio 

BBC. BBC Radio 3 - Slow Radio. 1 January 2019. 1 February 

2019. . 

Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, 

Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. 

Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1995. 

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: 

Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of 

Minnesota Press, 1987. 

Entenmen, Elizabeth. I listened to 'slow radio' for a week, and 

now I don't think I'll ever stop. 26 October 2018. 1 February 

2019. . 

Haraway, Donna. "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question 

in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective." Feminist 

Studies 14.3 (1988): 575-599. 

Jiménez, Jaime and Rozzi R.. Magellanic Sub-Antarctic 

Ornithology: First Decade of Long-Term Bird Studies at the Omora 

Ethnobotanical Park, Cape Horn Biosphere Reserve, Chile. Ed. 

Ricardo Rozzi and Jaime E. Jiménez. Denton: University of 

North Texas Press, 2014. 

Rachel Weaver is a community organizer, agrarian, and creative. 

They hold degrees in Social Sciences (B.A.) and Philosophy 

(M.A.), focusing on environmental issues. Rachel advocates 

for environmental health, local resilience, and developing our 

environmental imaginations. They seek to build strong community 

relationships and foster opportunities for growth through 

transdisciplinary environmental education and creative learning. 

Rachel has worked as a director of a nonprofit creative reuse 

center, managed an art and farmers market, taught college 

courses, managed small farm crews and community gardens, 

and coordinates local zine and art events. They are a board 

member and producer on KUZU 92.9 LPFM in Denton, Texas. 

Rachel has works published in The Greenhorn’s New Farmer’s 

Almanac (Volumes 2 – 4) and The Black Earth Institute’s About 

Place journals (May 2018 and May 2020), and presented at 

the International Long-Term Ecological Research – All Scientists 

Meeting of the Americas in 2015. KUZU information found at kuzu. 

fm 

Klaver, Irene J. "Environmental Imagination Situation." Linking 

Ecology and Ethics for a Changing World: Vlaues, Philosophy, and 

Action (2013): 85 - 105. 

Krause, Bernie. "The voice of the natural world." TED Global 

2013. Edinburgh : TED, 2013. 

KUZU. kuzu.fm. 20 July 2017. 23 June 2019. . 

Prometheus Radio Project. Low Power Radio. 1 January 2019. 

26 June 2019. . 

Ricardo Rozzi, et al. "Integrating Ecology and Environmental 

Ethics: Earth Stewardship in the Southern End of the 

Americas." BioScience 62 (2012): 226 - 236. 

Rozzi, Ricardo. "Biocultural Ethics: From Biocultural 

Homogenization Toward Biocultural Conservation." Linking 

Ecology and Ethics for a Changing World: Values, Philosophy, and 

Action (2013): 9 - 32. 

Schmitt, Peter Buban and Marshall L. Understanding Electricity 

and Electronics. Ed. Chris H. Groneman. 4th Edition. New York: 

McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1982. 


63


SECTION 2: 

Decolonizing the Post- 

Anthropocene 


65


Inefficiently Mapping 

Boundaries: How is an urban 

citizen? 

Linda Knight 

This project uses an inefficient mapping 

methodological protocol to explore urban 

citizenship in and beyond the Anthropocene, in 

order to study how posthuman urban citizens 

might be mapped as they move through the city. 

Anthropocene citizens cannot be thought of as 

distinctly human. These citizens are transversal: 

non/in/human, not singly identified, but 

composite, more than a single entity permeated 

by chemicals, micro-organisms and viruses that 

invade bodily boundaries, and technologically 

permeated by manufactured materials including 

medical aids such as bone and joint replacements 

and pacemakers. The urban citizen in the 

Anthropocene is chimeric, bio-speculative, 

beautiful and monstrous. As Haraway (30-38) 

declares, citizenship in the Anthropocene is 

Chthulic; a cluster of creatures and lifeforms that 

live with, in, and amongst us. 

I designed inefficient mapping (Knight, 

Playgrounds 22) (Knight, Playing 142) as a 

research-creation project (Loveless 39; Manning 

97-100) for working with speculative, immanent, 

and posthuman theories. The exacting rules of a 

protocol encourage creative problem-setting and 

problem solving (O’Rourke 48-55). In the case of 

inefficient mapping, the protocols are to not look 

at the drawing surface while mapping, to hold the 

drawing tool in a fist grip to disengage the wrist 

and gesturally engage the elbow and shoulder 

in driving the mark making, and to randomly 

layer mappings. The “inefficiency” of inefficient 

mapping productively undermines colonial 

approaches to mapping that assumes a landscape 

devoid of meaning or value until being brought 

into being by the cartographer (Eades 80-81). 

The How is an urban citizen? project maps 

shadows and movement of urban detritus 

including rubbish bins, litter, building materials, 

food scraps, trash, animals, oils, cigarettes, 

and commercial waste. Mapping the shadows 

and movements of diverse citizens such as oil 

spills, water scum, insects, wind, chewing gum, 

garbage, and chopped, discarded concrete 

counters the attention of colonial cartographies 

that omit/erase what does not bear relevance to 

capitalist interests in farming, mining, forestry, 

and manufacturing. As the maps are created, 

posthuman theories remain foregrounded. This 

creates mappings, that, through their subject 

matter and markings, critique the impacts of a 

mainstream politics and culture on conceptions 


67


Linda Knight 

Mapping, 2018 

Pencil and ink on tracing film, 297 x 420 mm 



69

Linda Knight 


Ink on tracing film, 210 x 297 mm 

Images courtesy of the artist. 

View video documentation here: https://vimeo.com/403143116 


Linda Knight 


Pencil on tracing film, 210 x 297 mm 


of rights, belongings, nationhood, and asserting 

who/what/how are in/non/human citizenships. 

The attention to shadows and movement gives 

presence and substance to all manner of matter 

and bodies and visualizes a cosmopolitical 

(Stengers 997) civics and how different energies 

and matters “come to be constituted, co-exist or 

interfere with each other” (Farias and Blok 9) as 

posthuman urban dwellers. 

Inefficient mapping is a non-representational 

methodological protocol that keeps theories 

centrally located throughout the artistic 

production process. Representational schematics 

are avoided in favour of marks of partial details. 

Partiality emphasises the total incapacity for 

the human to capture everything and remain 

centrally important in the milieu, and more 

widely, in the effects, impacts, and responses 

to the Anthropocene. Inefficiently mapping 

shadows and movement in How is an urban 

citizen? non-representationally attunes to the 

alternative genealogies of sites and places. 

The protocol is to mark snippets of shadows of 


71

Linda Knight 


Charcoal and pencil on Fabriano, 1500 x 600 mm 




73

things in the milieu. In How is an urban citizen? 

the scratches and marks create mappings that 

visually and conceptually remain in the chaos 

and help prompt different ways of thinking about 

urban populations. The drawn mappings are a 

geontologic practice (Povinelli 18) for theorizing 

on citizenships in the Anthropocene, the ethics of 

place and land and for troubling the hierarchies 

and privileges that underpin the urban design of 

cities. The maps geontologically interrogate how 

the term “population” might be rethought and 

what impact that might have on our conceptions 

of designing architectures and urban planning 

for non/in/human populations. For example, 

what could cities look like if we acknowledge 

rain, ants, microbes, and plastics as citizens? 

Mapping these seemingly insignificant citizens 

through the shadows they generate literally 

and politically marks the presence of things and 

beings usually not recognized and omitted. The 

inefficient mapping of their shadows creates a 

geontologic, cartographic record of a citizenry 

that far exceeds the conceptual parameters of 

citizenship established by and for humanist, 

colonial interests. 

How is an urban citizen? prompts speculative 

wonderings about cosmopolitical ethics and 

the precarious, monstrous future cities that are 

emerging all around us. Inefficient mapping 

requires thinking differently about the world 

and how community becomes “SF”: an uberacronym 

developed by Haraway (Staying 2-4; 

Species 92-93; Modest_witness 233-236) to describe 

science fiction, speculative fabulation, string 

figures, speculative feminism, science fact, so far. 

The speculative, more-than-human ontological 

orientation of the project commits to gesturally 

marking affective and relational imprints of 

colonisation, industrialisation, appropriation, 

histories, futures, exclusions, privileges, neglect, 

survival, and persistence. Inefficiently mapping 

urban communities beyond the human helps to 

“see” the vast number of transversal communities 

that are also living in cities and urban centres, and 

how our understandings of civics and citizenship 

must shift in these times of great change. 

Works Cited 

Eades, Gwilym Lucas. Maps and Memes: Redrawing Culture, 

Place, and Identity in Indigenous Communities. McGill-Queen’s 

UP, 2015. 

Farias, Ignacio and Anders Blok. “Introducing Urban 

Cosmopolitics.” Urban Cosmopolitics: Agencements, Assemblies, 

Atmospheres, edited by Anders Blok et al., Routledge, 2016, pp. 

1-22. 


Chthulucene. Duke UP, 2016. 

Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. U of Minneapolis Press, 

2008. 

Haraway, Donna. “Modest_witness@second_millenium.” The 

Haraway Reader, edited by Donna Haraway, Routledge, 2004, 

pp. 223-250. 

Knight, Linda. “Playing: More-Than-Human Irreverences in 

Urban Spaces.” Feminist Research for 21st Century Childhoods, 

edited by B. Denise Hodgins, Bloomsbury, 2019, pp. 139-148. 

Knight, Linda. “Playgrounds as Sites of Radical Encounters: 

A Mapping of Material, Affective, Spatial, and Pedagogical 

Collisions.” Pedagogical Matters: New Materialisms and 

Curriculum Studies (Counterpoints Series), edited by Nathan 

Snaza, et al., Peter Lang, 2016, pp. 13-28. 

Loveless, Natalie. How to Make Art at the End of the World: A 

Manifesto for Research-Creation. Duke UP, 2019. 

Manning, Erin. Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy. MIT 

Press, 2009. 


O’Rourke, Karen. Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers. 

MIT Press, 2013. 

Povinelli, Elizabeth A. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. 

Duke UP, 2016. 

Stengers, Isabelle. “A Cosmopolitical Proposal.” Making Things 

Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, edited by Bruno Latour et al., 

MIT Press, 2005, pp. 994-1003. 

Bio 

Linda Knight is an artist and academic who specializes in critical 

and speculative arts practices and methods. Linda devised 

“Inefficient Mapping” as a methodological protocol for conducting 

fieldwork in projects informed by “post-” theories. In her role as 

Associate Professor at RMIT University, Australia Linda creates 

transdisciplinary projects across early childhood, creative practice, 

and digital media. Together with Jacina Leong, Linda is a founding 

member of the Guerrilla Knowledge Unit, an artist collective that 

curates interface jamming performances between the public and 

AI technologies. 

Linda has exhibited digitally and physically in Australia, the U.K., 

the U.S.A., Canada, New Zealand, and South America and has 

been awarded arts research grants and prizes with international 

reach and impact, most recently including an Australian Research 

Council Discovery project that designs novel technologies for 

framing and enabling young children’s active play. 

Website: https://lindaknight.org/ 

Inefficient mapping IG: @lk_inefficient_urban_maps 

GKU: https://guerrillaknowledgeunit.com/ 


75

Jade Swor 

hohojin, 2 0 1 9 

Color photograph (printed on paper or displayed on a 

screen with visual sonification) 



The Europocene: A Past, 

Present, and Future Narrative 

of Climate Change Beginning 

with the Disruption of 

Indigenous Relations 

Jade Swor, Melanie Armstrong, Taryn Mead and Regina Lopez-Whiteskunk 

Introduction 

The term Anthropocene points to how a small 

subset of humans, beginning in Europe and North 

America, have become ever more successful 

at converting nature into capital through 

colonization, industrialization, imperialism, and 

financialization of climate risk. Adopting the 

naming conventions of the geological sciences 

has the effect of underscoring the scale and scope 

of these actions and the lasting imprint they will 

have on the planet. While the date of when this 

ecological shift began is debated, ranging from 

the rise of agriculture 8,000 years ago (Ruddiman 

261), to the industrial revolution of the eighteenth 

century (Crutzen and Stoermer 17), to the peak 

in radionuclides in the 1950s (Anthropocene 

Working Group), the favored term and its 

“anthro” prefix unilaterally assign responsibility 

to all humans (Todd and Davis 763). In reality, 

European colonization created deleterious effects 

on Earth’s climate, which disproportionately affect 

Indigenous peoples today. We propose the term 

“Europocene” to highlight how climate change 

has been constituted through acts of colonial 

dispossession, genocide, and ecocide ongoing 

since the European colonization of the Americas, 

work that deeply relied upon transforming the 

physical landscape and exploiting human labor, 

from slavery to industrialization. 

Contemporary logics of the Anthropocene give 

attention to the human, but in ways that distract 

from the injustices and violences of colonialism. 

With colonialization, the global minority of 

European colonizers ruptured Indigenous 

relationships to land, elements, language, and 

spirituality, violently destroying Indigenous 

identities and livelihoods. Indigenous peoples and 

the interconnected biosphere have been adapting 

to these changes for 400 years. Acknowledging 

the roots of the climate crisis in European 


77

colonialism is needed to create the possibility for 

actions radical enough to generate new futures 

for humanity, culminating in an audacious new 

imaginary where Indigenous relations are the 

foundations of just and sustainable societies with 

revived ecological worldviews. 

To develop a socio-political system that can act 

upon climate change, we must decolonize the 

Europocene, an act of justice that will make 

possible the global shift necessary for humanity’s 

continued existence upon this planet. Davis and 

Todd argue that “the Anthropocene continues 

a logic of the universal which is structured 

to sever the relations between mind, body, 

and land” (761). Such ideological separation 

makes capitalism possible. In turn, the climate 

crisis emerges through “proto-capitalist logics 

based on extraction and accumulation through 

dispossession” (Davis and Todd 764). Recognizing 

how the Anthropocene operates as an ideological 

construct, Davis and Todd point to the value 

of aligning the term more fully with European 

colonial practices to highlight the ongoing 

ecological effects of colonial violence. We offer 

the term Europocene to realize that alignment 

through the powerful act of naming. 

Donna Haraway proposes the need for many 

names for this moment that rests between the 

past we know and a future unlike the present, 

names that acknowledge the myriad entities 

entangled with humans in the work of worldmaking. 

Indeed, scholars and creatives have 

playfully and earnestly presented numerous 

names as alternatives to the Anthropocene, 

seemingly as a way to comprehend wicked 

problems and identify opportunities for change, 

or as Haraway proposes, to “gather up the 

complexities and keep the edges open and 

greedy for surprising new and old connections” 

(160). The Homogenocene was a precursor to 

the Anthropocene, pointing to global decline 

in biodiversity (Samways 65). The Capitalocene 

has been favored among some cultural scholars 

for its attention to impacts of capitalism and 

industrialization (Moore xi). Haraway offers the 

Chthulucene to shift time and make kin of the 

biological, cultural, political, and technological 

(160). In this article, to imagine life after the 

Europocene, we also consider Shyam’s Biocene, 

where looking deeply at the biological world 

prompts ingenuity to overcome the harmful acts 

of humans during the Anthropocene. 

These “‘cenes,” including the Europocene and 

the Biocene, keep attention on human actions 

and effects—not surprisingly, as humans are 

only capable of seeing the world from a human 

perspective—but even if we widen the circle or 

change our perspective, humans remain at the 

core. The Europocene does not undo the dualisms 

reinforced by the Anthropocene, but it points 

to specific ways that systems of social power 

entwine with the management of ecological 

systems. Creating a livable environmental future 

requires dismantling the social systems that make 

the present unlivable for many people. 

To imagine life after the Europocene, this 

multidisciplinary project explores the past, 

present, and future of the planet through the 

tensions of settler colonialism and Indigenous 

relations. Three documentaries, each less than 

15 minutes in length, explore short- and longterm 

strategies for climate action that enhance 

and support tribal communities, intending to 

bring Indigenous scholarship on climate change- 


elated issues to a wide public audience through 

film. “Climate Change in Tribal Nations” illustrates 

how colonialism entwines with climate disruption 

(Part 1), shows the impact of these forces on 

the current context (Part 2), and then considers 

a future created through climate actions that 

enhance and support tribal communities (Part 

3). Film as a creative medium invites the viewer 

to reframe the persisting historical narrative, 

enabling audiences to shift their sense of 

what they know for certain in ways that allow 

theoretical ideas to take hold (Ginsberg). Both 

scholars and artists create new practices to 

supplant past ideologies that sustain injustice in 

the present. Creating a future where Indigenous 

peoples and all cultures flourish as we collectively 

meet the current climate challenges will unveil 

more generative possibilities of human agency. 

In this article, we contextualize the film project 

using divergent lenses. From a design perspective, 

we explore how a mechanistic worldview, which, 

expanded as an enabling aspect of colonialization, 

defines the Europocene. We apply an ecological 

worldview and living systems science to challenge 

the dominant mechanistic worldview as the 

basis for building systems. A political ecology 

lens proposes that reframing the concept of the 

Anthropocene might generate new knowledge 

of the climate crisis that can become the basis 

for more just political systems, which can in 

turn transform the material outcomes of the 

Anthropocene. And, with insights from an 

indigenous activist, we use a direct-action lens 

to envision how human relationships to the 

ecological world might shift by writing a narrative 

of climate change that begins with the disruption 

of indigenous relations. 

Part 1: The Beginning of the Europocene: The 

Orbis Spike Apocalypse 

(Click here: VIDEO PART 1: Past) 

“Consider for a moment that instead of a line, 

time moves in a circle, or from another angle, a 

spiral. Consider all the actions you have made 

in your life, all of the thoughts you have had, 

all of the relationships you have nurtured, all 

of the loved ones you have lost. Now, consider 

how all of this, every aspect of your life and 

everything you consider to be yourself, exists 

within the context of the land which is currently 

beneath your feet. The air you breathe, the bed 

in which you sleep, the last food you ate; all of 

this exists in complete interdependence with the 

land that supports you even now. Naturally, this 

interdependence extends both backwards and 

forwards along the direction of time, spiraling in 

both directions, weaving this current moment into 

a tapestry of interlocking moments, which all give 

context to one another. 

“While this way of understanding space and time 

might be very different from how you see things, 

this is fundamental for many people around 

the world. And this way of seeing changes our 

relationships to one another, to our environment 

and to ourselves. For some people, there is little 

separation between the three. These different 

ways of experiencing the world have led to the 

major differences with how we remember the 

past, see the present, and imagine the future. 

From here we can also see how we find ourselves 

in the current climate crisis.” 

Distinct shifts in the Earth's geological state are 

chronicled in the rocks and minerals that form 


79

our planet. Geologists look to the rock itself to 

understand change throughout planetary time, 

marking transitions through measures such as 

periods, eras, and epochs. When in May 2019 

the Anthropocene Working Group voted to mark 

the 1950s as the start date of a new epoch called 

the Anthropocene, coinciding with the “Great 

Acceleration” of humanity’s impact, they asserted 

the notion that humans have, through their use of 

technology, physically transformed the planet and 

become a force of planet-wide nature. Thus, what 

began with a pushing away or separation from 

nature has culminated in a conceptualization 

of human society as a natural force, capable of 

transforming the planet using Earth’s own scales, 

mechanisms, and processes. 

The Orbis Spike, which shows a major decrease 

in carbon dioxide levels around the time of 

European arrival in the Americas, exemplifies 

how cultural shifts may be recorded on the Earth 

itself. Geographers Lewis and Maslin suggest 

a major reshaping of ecosystems through the 

global exchange of animals and plants brought 

the carbon decline, or the genocide of Indigenous 

peoples in the Americas which led to regrowth 

of forests and other plant life. In 1492, there 

were an estimated 54 to 61 million people in 

the Americas, and by 1650, there were 6 million 

(Lewis and Maslin 175). The deaths of around 50 

million people (and some researchers believe that 

estimate is low) substantially altered relationships 

between land, water, and people. The rapid 

erasure of human bodies from the American 

continent created a new landscape—one with 

more trees—which within a few generations 

would fuel industrial expansion and free-market 

capitalism. The Orbis Spike is a physical marker 

of the onset of a cultural moment that is defined 

by free-market capitalism and industrialization, 

both of which have accelerated climate change. 

As settlers remade the landscape once again 

with timber mills, plows, and roadways, they 

accelerated yet another transformation of the 

landscape and further climate effects, one 

divorced from long-term understanding of 

ecological cycles. 

The term “Anthropocene” recognizes humanity's 

impact on the earth's tenuous state (Steffen et 

al. 842). The “anthro” prefix attached to words 

like “anthropogenic” and “anthropocentric” 

lumps together the generative acts of all human 

cultures, suggesting that all human engagement 

in the biosphere has caused ecological change. 

Our current climate crisis, however, is rooted in 

the mechanistic worldview perpetuated through 

colonial settlements globally (Capra and Luisi 

4). Colonialism, “a form of domination in which 

at least one society seeks to exploit some set of 

benefits believed to be found in the territory of 

one or more other societies” (Whyte, Indigenous 

Climate Change Studies 154), established a 

trajectory of human development which altered 

human perception and treatment of the animate 

versus inanimate and sentient versus insentient. 

The physical domination and exploitation of 

both humans and nature during European 

colonization parallels the reductionism of the 

Scientific Revolution which overwhelmed the 

animistic beliefs that were previously common 

across Europe. In addition to the overt oppression 

of these beliefs, the influence of the mechanistic 

worldview was evident in the metaphors of the 

universe and natural systems inspired by the 

engineering feats of the time. Non-human beings 

were reduced to non-sentient, passive resources, 


experimental instruments, and capital, while 

Indigenous cultures were categorized as simply 

another component of an expiring ecological 

worldview that needed to be replaced and 

modernized with European ingenuity (Merchant 

xvi; Capra and Luigi 25). Indeed, the industrial 

revolution depended upon “seeing nature quite 

clearly and even coldly as a set of objects, on 

which men could operate” (Williams 77). This 

reductive and hierarchical understanding of 

non-human nature was embedded in emerging 

technologies, social systems, and the land 

that sustained the colonial-industrial-capitalist 

complex. Moreso, cultural depictions of 

Indigenous peoples as primitive, close-to-nature, 

and even “savage” enabled colonial societies to 

exploit Indigenous bodies as they did nature—as 

resource and capital for the expansion of Western 

society. 

For many people, cultural identity stretches 

for millennia through their creation stories; in 

Indigenous societies, these creation stories often 

encompass relationships between animals, 

elements, and also the future. For example, Watts 

describes the phenomenon “Place-Thought,” 

stemming from Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee 

histories in which place and thought were never 

separated. “Place-Thought is based upon the 

premise that land is alive and thinking and 

that humans and non-humans derive agency 

through the extensions of these thoughts” (Watts 

21). This is radically different from surviving 

European histories which abstract these relations, 

concluding “society” to be human-centered and 

non-human beings to be judged solely on their 

contributions. Unlike cultures where identity 

is centered in the individual, cultures where 

identity and thought itself is rooted in land are 

particularly vulnerable to disruption when the 

environment is degraded. Although people and 

knowledge systems are adaptable to changes in 

the environment, rapid and catastrophic change 

to Indigenous ways of life have necessitated a 

tremendous amount of resilience. Given that 

90-95% of Indigenous societies were destroyed, 

some say if we were to ask Indigenous ancestors, 

they would say their descendants alive today 

are already in post-apocalyptic times (Whyte 

“Indigenous science (fiction),” 227). In spite of this 

world-ending violence, Indigenous communities 

persist, enduring “post-apocalyptic stress 

syndrome” (Gross 33), as climate destabilization 

is framed as the new apocalypse (Todd and Davis 

773). 

The collapsing of human/nonhuman and past/ 

present in Indigenous creation stories creates 

a pathway for new responses to climate crisis 

through the inclusion of diverse knowledge 

systems, such as Traditional Ecological Knowledge 

(TEK). Also known as Indigenous or local 

knowledge, these are epistemological frameworks 

that: 

...broadly refer to indigenous communities’ ways 

of knowing that both guide and result from their 

communities members’ close relationships with 

and responsibilities towards the landscapes, 

waterscapes, plants, and animals that are 

vital to the flourishing of indigenous culture.… 

Accumulated through experience, relationships, 

and upheld responsibilities towards other living 

beings and places, [they] are passed down 

generationally from elder to youth through 

oral histories, stories, ceremonies, and land 

management practices. (Norton-Smith et al. 13) 


81

Jade Swor 

masho naman, 2019 

Digital Watercolor and 

Color Photography 

(printed on paper or 

displayed on a screen 

with visual sonification) 

Image courtesy of the 

artist. 

As a framework, TEK is difficult to integrate with 

Western epistemological ways of knowing that 

dominate climate science and define the narrative 

of change in biophysical terms, as TEK is nontheoretical, 

place-based, and localized. 

Knowledge is not static and cannot be isolated 

from the context in which it is created and 

received. TEKs make these connections evident, 

as they are unified with the land and waters in 

which they are made and learned. As extensions 

of the ecosystem, traditional forms of knowledge 

are vulnerable to climate change. The Europocene 

illuminates how the ongoing destruction of the 

ecosystem continues the colonial act not only 

by harming the landscape but by destroying 

Indigenous knowledge systems that are deeply 

entwined with place. Thus, changing the 

environment changes traditional knowledge. 

The mechanistic worldview marginalized the 

environment and consequently those whose 

knowledge was bound to it. 

Using explicitly Indigenous perspectives to 

frame the challenges faced by Indigenous 

communities makes it easier to understand 

this interdependence. Wildcat coined the term 

Indigenuity—indigenous ingenuity—as “the ability 

to solve pressing life issues facing humankind 

now by situating our solutions in Earth-based 

local indigenous deep spatial knowledge” (39). TEK 

provides narratives of socioecological systems 

that are distinct to the storyteller’s culture and 

its experiences. It challenges the dominating, 

mechanistic worldview that accompanied the 

European mind around the globe, changing the 

biosphere in ways that are recorded upon the 

earth itself. For this reason, we propose that 

the Europocene is the appropriate title for this 

geological epoch, limiting its inclusion to the 

widespread damage proliferated in the context of 

a particular scientific and cultural paradigm. 


Part 2: Navigating the Europocene: Bracing for 

the Next Apocalyptic Change 

(Click here: VIDEO PART 2: Present) 

and loss of connections to homeland and social 

networks (Willox et al. 21). Indigenous youth 

especially suffer from climate change-related 

mental health issues (MacDonald et al. 133). 

“Climate change has affected and is affecting 

Indigenous peoples first. The challenges faced 

by Indigenous communities are continually 

being framed from a non-Indigenous perspective 

making it hard to see the interdependent 

changes. At the present, the current impacts 

experienced by Tribal Nations are far-ranging, 

and, as we’ve learned, cannot be separated from 

colonialism, industrialization, and capitalism. 

The broad range of issues is difficult to put 

into context without seeing the people and 

communities being affected.” 

Colonial narratives perpetuate the myth that 

Indigenous peoples and cultures are in the 

past; however, in the United States alone, there 

are 573 federally recognized tribes and 245 

additional unrecognized tribes, many of whom 

are petitioning for federal recognition. Climate 

change has affected and is affecting Indigenous 

peoples directly and disproportionately, 

exacerbating intersectional problems stemming 

from colonialism, industrialization, and capitalism. 

Public health complications include losing 

traditional food and medicine, infectious disease 

spread, contamination of water and food sources, 

heat-related illnesses, degraded air quality, and 

reactions to extreme weather. Historical grief and 

trauma are worsened by climate change as well as 

structural issues rooted in poverty, inequality, and 

discrimination (Norton Smith et al. 33). In terms of 

mental health, the intensity of climate change has 

been associated with higher rates of mood and 

anxiety disorders, strong emotional responses, 

Tribes’ varied governance structures enable a 

range of nimble reactions to climate threat. Many 

tribes have environmental departments working 

on climate change-related issues, but tribal 

nations also use tribal law to move past federal 

environmental laws. While tribes may exercise 

authority in environmental decision-making, 

without true sovereignty they often lack the 

capacity to act on decisions. Despite this, tribal 

nations can function as climate change adaptation 

and mitigation laboratories, testing the impacts of 

climate initiatives on a small scale. Such actions 

include inter-tribal declarations on climate 

change, tribal environmental justice groups, 

summits and symposia on climate change, tribal 

law and treaty rights focusing on environmental 

issues, and youth-led climate change education. 

The case studies that follow illustrate approaches 

for adaptation and environmental regulation 

that combine innovative and transdisciplinary 

strategies to effect change (Kronk Warner 427). 

Iñupiat Communities (Arctic Alaska): The Good 

Music 

For Indigenous Arctic Alaskan residents, climate 

change alters their ancestral territory, hindering 

access to animals and influencing physical and 

spiritual well-being. Near the coastal areas 

where Iñupiat communities are located, the 

ocean environment is getting too warm for 

the bowhead whale to survive. Iñupiat whalers 

now go out 50 miles into open waters, using 

motorized boats and other technology rather 


83

than traditional whaling techniques. The Iñupiat 

people are spiritually and physically tied to the 

whale through traditional music making; in their 

lore, the whale brings them music. When Iñupiat 

villages are out looking for whales, whales are 

looking for the villages with the “good music” 

of the drums (Sakakibara 290). Physically, 

Iñupiat people use the whale hide for drums, 

so if there is no whale, there is no music, no 

celebration. Iñupiat have responded to this 

environmental change by replacing the whale skin 

with plastic. By modifying drums and adapting 

hunting patterns, Iñupiat people reinforce and 

reaffirm their cultural relationship with the 

bowhead whale, allowing them to better cope 

with an unpredictable environment and future 

(Sakakibara). During times of environmental 

uncertainty, Iñupiat communities reaffirm cultural 

traditions to survive. 

Ojibwe (Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan): 

Tribal Adaptation Menu 

The Bois Forte Band, Fond du Lac Band and 

Grand Portage Band created a Climate Change 

Adaptation Plan and a Tribal Adaptation Menu 

for the Ojibwe’s 1855 Ceded Territory of 6.4 

million acres in Minnesota. In the Climate 

Change Adaptation Plan, an adaptive capacity 

and sensitivity chart prioritizes culturally 

important species for their adaptive capacity 

and sensitivity, including paper birch, wild 

rice, moose, and water (Stults et al. 11). For 

generations, wild rice (Manoomin) has been 

gathered for food and cultural practices, taking 

a central role in Ojibwe cultural and spiritual life. 

Climate stressors that threaten wild rice would 

not just harm the physical health of an Ojibwe 

member but also have mental, spiritual, and 

sociological ramifications. The Ojibwe Climate 

Plan argues that “preparing for climate change 

is a process, not an outcome” and institutes an 

iterative process to fully implement strategies 

(Stults et al. 146). The Tribal Adaptation Menu is 

a living document that invites each user to add 

language, words, concepts, strategies, approaches 

and tactics to customize the menu to fit their 

community. 

Salish-Kootenai (Montana): Climate Change 

Strategic Plan 

The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes 

(CSKT) include the Salish, Kootenai, and 

Pendd'Oreilles Tribes. Today, the Flathead 

Reservation is 1.317 million acres, of which just 

over 790,000 acres are owned and managed by 

the tribes and their members. The three tribes 

are culturally unique and have different belief 

systems, yet have in common a profound respect 

for and knowledge of the natural environment, 

which has been vital to the tribes’ survival. 

Developed through an adaptive management 

process, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai 

Tribes Climate Change Strategic Plan’s mitigation 

and adaptation strategies are guided by local 

impact assessments. The plan also includes Tribal 

Elders’ observational data spanning back 150- 

250 years through their lineages (CSKT Climate 

Plan). The recollection of tribal and global change 

through oral histories offers a holistic account 

of the impacts of colonialism and climatic shifts 

without distinguishing between the causes of 

each. CSKT member Stephen Smallsalmon recalls: 

I remember Uncle Pete Beaverhead and I used 

to hear him talking. They say it's going to be 

changing—just like our language, our life, the 


Jade Swor Climate Change on Turtle Island, 2020. 

Watercolor and color photograph (printed on paper or displayed on a screen with visual sonification) 



85

snowpack. It seemed like they knew. I don't know 

how they knew. I guess they were wise. Maybe, 

they learned it from their folks. Handed it down 

generation-to-generation, then to me. I started 

to realize [the climate] is changing. The life is 

changing. The world is changing. Everything is 

changing. (CSKT 32) 

For Indigenous communities, addressing climate 

change requires integrating adaptation strategies 

from their post-apocalyptic mechanisms of 

resilience. 

Karuk Communities (Northern California): 

Knowledge Sovereignty and Cultural Burning 

The Karuk Tribe located in Northern California 

has conducted a Climate Assessment, adopted 

a Climate Adaptation Plan, and drafted fire 

management plans based on Traditional 

Ecological Knowledge and Knowledge Sovereignty. 

The introduction to the Climate Adaptation 

Plan describes climate change as a strategic 

opportunity for tribal and non-tribal peoples 

around the world to engage in efforts to halt fossil 

fuel production, move to renewable energy and 

transportation systems, document the current 

impacts from climate change, and plan for the 

future. On using TEK as living practice in a climate 

changing world, Karuk Eco-Cultural Restoration 

Specialist William Tripp explains, 

We need to get people back onto the landscape 

and learn what is going on. In looking at this 

trajectory, TEK indicates we could find ourselves 

in an opposite situation...Re-learning from our 

ceremonies and revitalizing Karuk practices 

and belief systems should lead us to solutions 

regardless of the particular way the climate is 

going. People need to be noticing these things 

for themselves this is how we teach and learn 

in Karuk culture. It is based on observation and 

practice. (Karuk Tribe 203) 

Laws established in the early 1900s prohibiting 

cultural uses of fire came at great cost to Karuk 

practices. Fire is critical for restoring grasslands 

for elk, managing food sources including tanoak 

mushrooms and black oak acorns, maintaining 

quality basketry materials, and producing smoke 

that shades the river for fish (Karuk Tribe 55). 

As fewer burns happened, more vegetation 

grew, and now as climate change brings warmer 

temperatures and droughts, California faces 

catastrophic fires every year. The Karuk Tribe is 

leading the way in reestablishing traditional fire 

regimes as an important tool to change the land 

for cultural sustenance and well-being. 

Diné (Navajo) (Arizona): Climate Change 

Adaptation Plan 

The Navajo Nation is located on the Four Corners 

of the Colorado Plateau, which extends into 

Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. There are over 

300,000 enrolled tribal members and around half 

live on the reservation. Many tribal members are 

concerned about losing traditional ceremonies 

and dances due to climate stress, even as 

those cultural ties bring tension to ecological 

governance. For example, Diné consider horses 

to be both powerful and sacred beings, making 

it difficult to resolve the overpopulation of feral 

horses in the Navajo Nation. Known as the “great 

gift of the Holy People,” one legend describes 

how Sun bearer created the horse with elements 

from father God in mother Earth (Mose 1). 

Some members argue that the horse precedes 


European introduction, as evidenced in Diné song 

and historical narratives (Stumpff 1). 

Feral horses top the priority lists of the nation’s 

Climate Change Adaptation Plan due to damage 

to natural resources, as well as the loss of grazing 

management knowledge when there is a lack of 

transfer between old and new livestock owners 

(Navajo Nation 11). The line between what makes 

a horse “feral” or “wild” is as blurred as the federal 

and tribal policies that continue to fragment 

the issues. In response, the plan reiterates the 

need for traditional knowledge to be adopted 

within policy plans and management. As recently 

as 2018, the Navajo Nation Department of 

Agriculture has implemented a voluntary horse 

sale and equine reward program, paying $50 

for each horse (AP). One strategy aligned with 

the Tribe’s Climate Change Adaptation Plan, 

management objectives, and TEK education is to 

establish “eco-sanctuaries” for Navajo horses on 

the properties of large landowners, supporting 

research initiatives and tourism centers (Vandoor 

6). 

The Isle de Jean Charles band of Biloxi- 

Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe (Louisiana): Can’t Stop 

the Water 

The Isle de Jean Charles is a very small ridge of 

land located in southern Louisiana. For over 

170 years, it has been the historical homeland 

and burial ground of the Isle de Jean Charles 

Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians, 

whose ancestors moved to the island to escape 

the Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears. 

The island comprised more than 22,000 acres 

in 1955, but has since lost 98% of its land due 

to offshore drilling projects, dredging activities, 

dams, oil pipelines, and hurricanes. In the early 

2000s, only 25 families remained on the island, 

as people who could afford to had moved away. 

For tribal members, resettlement is seen as the 

best way to reunite displaced tribal members 

and rekindle traditional lifeways. In 2016, after 

nearly two decades of gradual displacement, the 

tribe received federal funding for resettlement to 

safer ground. The relocation includes plans for 

networks of care, a community center, museum, 

oral teaching educational spaces, a library, a 

seed-saving program, traditional plant gardens, 

and a market (Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw). The 

Isle de Jean Charles Band relocation models how 

to provide safe and sustainable housing while 

recognizing the importance of community and 

rekindling traditional lifeways. 

These examples demonstrate how the 

repercussions from climate change-related issues 

have quickly evoked responses from Indigenous 

peoples. Through climate planning processes, 

many North American Tribal Nations have 

prioritized species vulnerable to climate change 

and those that affect the self-determination and 

cultural integrity of tribal traditions. They have 

developed adaptation strategies that include 

knowledge sovereignty and the exchange of 

traditional knowledge. By refusing to forget their 

culture and traditions, Indigenous peoples take 

a stand to remember that human agency can 

benefit the world, while also recognizing the 

importance of preserving and acting upon local 

ecological knowledge. 

Climate planning requires studying and 

assessing the present in ways that can make new 

futures possible. Decolonizing the Europocene 

and re-indigenizing the future will generate 


87

Jade Swor 

kaye, 2019 

Digital Acrylic and Color Photography (printed on paper or displayed on a screen with visual sonification) 


abundant and varied mechanisms of knowledge 

production, materializing those ways of knowing 

through management and planning actions 

as well as cultural interactions and social 

exchanges. Similarly, terms like “Europocene” 

and “Anthropocene” make new ways of knowing 

possible. They bring seemingly-oppositional 

forces into conversation, even pushing forward 

the unspoken opposite: the power of nature 

emerges through an emphasis on the human 

in the Anthropocene; naming the colonizer 

in the Europocene underscores the necessity 

of indigenous knowledge to shape a resilient 

future. Both terms turn us toward the human 

relationship to the landscape, but the power of 

the Europocene emerges when we acknowledge 

how controlling another group or individual’s way 

of living in the world has been and continues to 

be an act of domination and a source of social 

inequality. Empowering Indigenous peoples, 

on the other hand, not only will generate new 

knowledge, but also will bring about new ways 

of thinking about how knowledge production 

informs climate adaptation and mitigation. 

Part 3: Post-Europocene: Future Imaginings of 

a Reinvigorated Ecological Worldview 

(Click here: VIDEO PART 3: Future) 

“Cultural movements come in many shapes and 

forms. Some are large, others small, some are 

slow, others fast, some are planned and others 

are seemingly spontaneous. The movements 

that are broadcasted on the media tend to be 

the ones that are large, occur relatively fast, and 


are seemingly spontaneous. In terms of climate 

change and Tribal Nations, the most recent of 

these movements are the Dakota Access Pipeline 

protests and Thirty Meter Telescope protests at 

Mauna Kea. As these movements draw attention 

to issues Indigenous peoples are facing, they 

are not isolated events and are expressions of 

the greater movement, bubbling up below the 

surface. 

The movement of tribal nations to “decolonize” 

aspects of our lives and experiences is relatively 

slow, planned, and starts very small, beginning 

with individuals choosing to decolonize their 

own choices. People can decolonize their diets 

by choosing to eat foods that are native to the 

land they are on. People can decolonize their 

gender-normative mindsets by supporting 

genderqueer and two-spirit identities as well 

as non-monogamous relationships. People 

can decolonize their spending by supporting 

Indigenous-owned businesses and also 

decolonize economies by choosing alternatives 

to money by swapping goods and services. 

People can decolonize their education by 

reading and listening to Indigenous scholars, 

thinkers, and artists. And people can decolonize 

the environmental movement and climate 

change adaptation and mitigation by supporting 

Indigenous-initiated policies and programs and 

supporting Indigenous sciences.” 

The word “apocalypse” has Greek roots which 

translate to “becoming uncovered,” or “to 

reveal.” The current apocalypse is revealing the 

diverse ways people have valued—or failed to 

value—other humans, cultures, and ideologies, 

particularly through actions that degrade the 

environment in pursuit of capital. If time is not 

a linear conception, but rather a spiral, humans 

are always returning towards the past. We need 

to return, differently. We must alter our narrative 

of the past to be able to create a narrative of 

Indigenous futurism. The responses of Inupiat 

communities and Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw 

Tribe to climate catastrophe demonstrate that 

cultural practices are the source of resilience in 

climate change adaptations. The future-vision of 

the post-Europocene is a place of survivance, a 

state of “critical active presence and resistance, 

over historical and cultural absence, nihility and 

victimry” (Vizenor Survivance xlvii). Survivance 

stories do not emerge sequentially from the 

rubble of colonialism; they are not a reversal, 

but a timeless sense of presence, active tradition 

and thought. Storytellers, says the writer Elias 

Canetti, make “a living from unpredictable leaps 

of transformation and an inexhaustible supply 

of breath” (Vizenor Literary Chance 13), which is 

precisely what humans need now to generate 

new livelihoods that sustain the environment 

beyond the Europocene. 

Because a mechanistic worldview brings a 

separation of thought and location, an ecological 

focus such as TEK is closer to the reality all Earth 

dwellers experience. Once severed from our 

connection to place, we lose a vital sense of 

positioning. In an ecologically-focused framework, 

our experience of being cannot be separated 

from the effect of our local geographies, and 

our experience of time changes depending on 

which part of ecology we are paying attention 

to. Comparing calendars exemplifies how this 

difference manifests in daily life. The solar 

Gregorian calendar emphasizes important 

religious dates. The phenological calendar, one 

that many Indigenous societies and contemporary 


89

land-based peoples have in common, such as 

the Potawatomi peoples of which Professor 

Kyle Whyte is a member, is based on lunar 

cycles as well as seasonal biological events 

such as flowering, migrations, and fall foliage. 

Disrupting ecological cycles through climate 

change is changing an Indigenous knowledge of 

time and, consequently, the calendar (Whyte Is it 

colonial 90). A calendar exemplifies an ecological 

technology, relatively unconscious to most 

of us, that must be normalized as part of reindigenization. 

Kerber argues that re-indigenization is more 

than a “naïve return to the land … in which 

settler culture plays out fantasies of ecological 

primitivism” (16). Rather, it weaves Indigenous 

realities into the social fabric, questioning 

how “our stories and practices respectfully 

acknowledge and enable the continuance of the 

life forces that underlie our dwelling in … places” 

(16). Indigenous writers and artists are rewriting 

colonial narratives that place Indigenous peoples 

in the past, without technology and on the 

brink of being forgotten, a myth that has been 

used throughout history to rationalize colonial 

practices. In her analysis of Indigenous science 

fiction, gender and futurism, Medak-Saltzman 

writes that “Indigenous futurist work can and does 

also explore a variety of dystopian possibilities, 

which allows for critical contemplation about the 

dangerous ‘what ifs’ we might face and, more 

pragmatically, can aid us in our efforts to imagine 

our way out of our present dystopian moment 

to call forth better futures” (143). Facing the 

dystopian present gestures toward an intentional 

future. 

On the podcast “Metis in Space,” Molly Swain 

proposes the notion of the “dystopian now,'' 

which Nixon uses in an online essay in Guts 

Magazine to characterize the current moment: 

“Armed with spirit and the teachings of our 

ancestors, all our relations behind us, we 

are living the Indigenous future. We are the 

descendants of a future imaginary that has 

already passed; the outcome of the intentions, 

resistance, and survivance of our ancestors. 

Simultaneously in the future and the past, we 

are living in the ‘dystopian now.’” By seeing 

the wholeness of time, rather than just its 

linear tendencies, we see how our stories are 

interwoven with the stories of those who came 

before us and those who are yet to come. 

What would a reimagined role for humans be 

like in a post-apocalyptic climate narrative in 

which humanity is again deeply embedded 

in a cyclical sense of time, space, and nature? 

Such a shift reveals opportunities to utilize TEK, 

ecological science, and systems thinking to 

reimagine a role for humans grounded in many 

worldviews, both local and global. This emerging, 

novel scientific paradigm would include both 

the interdependence and interconnectivity 

of ecological knowledge empowered by the 

specialized mechanical knowledge gained in the 

last 400 years. A new post-Europocene era may 

be emerging in multiple places simultaneously. 

For instance, the use of strong biomimicry (when 

coupled with an ecological consciousness, rather 

than further domination and enslavement 

of nature) provides modern innovators and 

problem-solvers with paths forward derived from 

models found in the natural world (Blok and 

Gremmen 1). Shyam, describing this new period 

as the Biocene, writes: 


The Biocene is the period of new life. When our 

descendants look back at this period in time, they 

will see evidence, in the geologic and electronic 

record, of anthropic climate change, growing 

population, and scarcity of resources. But they 

will also see the rebirth of human ingenuity as we 

overcame the challenges that faced us through 

nature inspired exploration. 

By using the principles of living systems as the 

definition of sustainability, biomimicry provides 

a future vision of sustainable societies based 

“not on what we can extract from nature, but on 

what we can learn from it” (Benyus 2), introducing 

a wholly novel epistemology (Dicks 1). In this 

framing, nature is the model and source of ethical 

behavior, the standard measure for sustainability, 

and the model of responsible human design 

(Mead and Landrum 212). The proposition of the 

Biocene presents a future where the knowledge 

gained from the Scientific Revolution combines 

with TEK and re-indigenizes the human species as 

a whole in a post-carbon future. 

The powerful concept of indigenuity invites 

humans to become indigenous to our places in 

light of the new climate realities that will unfold 

in the decades to come. As a biological species in 

the context of a constantly evolving biosphere, 

humans might be afforded the same opportunity 

for ecological “naturalization” we give non-native 

plant species that have found suitable habitat 

outside of their native range. The human species 

may have the opportunity to come to know an 

unfamiliar habitat with the same intimacy that the 

plant species adapts to its new microclimate. For 

humans, this naturalization is an act of cultural 

learning as much as physical adaptation. Through 

our stories, politics, and creative practices, 

humans use the knowledge that is rooted in who 

we are intrinsically to grapple with an unfamiliar 

future. By coupling the intuitive approach to 

observation and adaptation found in TEK with 

the tools and methods that drive scientific 

discovery, humans are well-positioned for novel 

epistemologies only knowable in the emerging 

Biocene. Bringing deep knowledge of biophysical 

systems to bear on the structural issues of the 

Europocene imagines a materiality for the post- 

Europocene where the extractive processes 

that drive capitalism have been supplanted by 

integrative practices that sustain human society 

without the exploitation of human bodies or 

ecological landscapes. 

The Europocene brings into focus the political 

systems that shape human activities in enduringly 

inequitable ways. While the Anthropocene centers 

on all humanity uniformly, the Europocene vitally 

points out that the tools of governance that 

enable the colonization of humans also enable 

the colonization of nature. Human impacts on 

the biosphere emerge from political systems and 

the politics of colonization have shaped those 

systems globally for centuries. Imagining life after 

the Europocene demands that humans enact 

politics to dismantle unjust colonial systems 

in order to materialize the futures known now 

in stories and TEK. Shifting from a mechanistic 

to ecological worldview, or giving space to 

multiple divergent worldviews, is one such act 

of decolonization. In a post-Europocene future, 

social interventions to respond swiftly and 

effectively to climate threats are made possible by 

political systems enacted through just practices 

towards humans, non-human species, and the 

physical world alike. 


91

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reduced-size_final-karuk-climate-adaptation-plan.pdf. Accessed 

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Environmentally. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2010. 

Kronk Warner, Elizabeth Ann. “Looking to the Third Sovereign: 

Tribal Environmental Ethics as an Alternative Paradigm.” Pace 

Environmental Law Review, vol 33, no. 3, Spring 2016, pp. 397- 

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Lewis, Simon L., and Mark A. Maslin. “Defining the 

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socscimed.2015.07.017. 

Blok, Vincent, and Bart Gremmen. “Ecological Innovation: 

Biomimicry as a New Way of Thinking and Acting Ecologically.” 

Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, vol. 29, no. 2, 

Springer Netherlands, 2016, pp. 1–15. 

Capra, Fritjof, and Pier Luisi. The Systems View of Life: a 

Unifying Vision. Cambridge University Press, 2018. 

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Reservation (CSKT). “Climate Change Strategic Plan,” 2013, 

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Davis, Heather, and Zoe Todd. “On the Importance of a Date, 

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780 

Ginsburg, Faye. “Embedded Aesthetics: Creating a Discursive 

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3, 1994, pp. 365-382. 

Mead, Taryn L., and Nancy E. Landrum. “Bioinspiration as a 

Guide for Responsible Management.” Research Handbook of 

Responsible Management, edited by Oliver Laasch et al., Edward 

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Medak-Saltzman, Danika. “Coming to You from the Indigenous 

Future: Native Women, Speculative Film Shorts, and the Art of 

the Possible.” Studies in American Indian Literatures, vol. 29, no. 

1, 2017, pp. 139–71. 

Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and 

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Moore, Jason W., editor. Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, 

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Gross, Lawrence William. Anishinaabe Ways of Knowing and 

Being. Ashgate, 2014. 

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Final-July_2016-optimized(1).pdf. 

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Intersectional Lens: Gendered Vulnerability and Resilience 

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Northwest Research Station, 2015. 

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Narratives of Native Presence, edited by Gerald Vizenor, 

University of Nebraska Press, 2008, pp. 1-23. 

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Survivance. Universitat de Valencia, 2007. 

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Many Horses? T’ooahayoo Nihilii?.” Evergreen State College, 

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Humans and Non-humans (First Woman and Sky Woman Go 

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Education & Society vol. 2, no. 1, 2013, pp. 20-34. 

Whyte, Kyle. “Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the 

Anthropocene: Ancestral Dystopias and Fantasies of 

Climate Change Crises.” Environment and Planning E: 

Nature and Space, vol. 1, no 1-2, 2018, pp. 224-42, doi. 

org/10.1177/2514848618777621. 

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Notes, vol. 55, 2017, pp. 1-2. 

Whyte, Kyle. “Is It Colonial Deja Vu? Indigenous Peoples and 

Climate Injustice.” Humanities for the Environment: Integrating 

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93

Bios 

Melanie Armstrong is faculty in the Master of Environmental 

Management Program at Western Colorado University. Her 

research embodies principles of engaged scholarship and 

interdisciplinarity, and is grounded in the study of how societal 

systems are built around shifting ideologies of nature. She is 

author of Germ Wars: The Politics of Nature and America’s 

Landscape of Fear (University of California Press, 2017) and 

coauthor of Environmental Realism: Challenging Solutions 

(Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). In 2018, Armstrong founded the 

Center for Public Lands, a hub for cross-boundary work and study. 

The Center aims to infuse a new generation of land stewards 

with talent, vision, and energy to meet the challenges of a rapidly 

evolving social and ecological climate. As a 2020 National 

Geographic Explorer, she investigates how Native American treaty 

rights influence resource management, hosting a field school on 

co-management of public lands at Bears Ears National Monument. 

Taryn Mead is a sustainability, innovation, and management 

scholar whose research focuses on the interface between 

corporate strategies and conceptualizations of nature. This 

includes subjects such as sustainability-oriented innovation, 

biomimicry, circular economy, the integration of planetary 

boundaries into corporate strategy, and the role of corporations 

in sustainable development. She also has expertise in creativity 

for sustainability among design and engineering professionals in 

interdisciplinary settings. Before pursuing her Ph.D., Taryn worked 

as biologist, sustainability strategist, and certified biomimicry 

professional consulting, with over 30 corporate, municipal, and 

non-profit clients. 

Jade Swor has most recently worked as an Environmental 

Technician with the Potter Valley Tribe in Pomo Country, Ukiah, 

California. While working there, Jade’s main focus was to cultivate 

fungi for medicine, food, and exchanging traditional knowledge 

in partnership with the Potter Valley Tribe. Through Western 

Colorado University, Jade has successfully started a mushroom 

growing and knowledge exchange operation for the Tribe and is 

continuing this work through meekology, an organization that 

explores projects at the interface of tribal relations, mycology, 

and biomimicry. Jade currently lives in the Pacific Northwest at 

the intersection of the Nisqually, Coast Salish, Stl’pulmsh (Cowlitz), 

and Squaxin ancestral territories. 

Regina Lopez-Whiteskunk was born and raised in southwestern 

Colorado and is a member of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe of 

Towaoc. At an early age, Lopez-Whiteskunk began to advocate 

for land, air, water, and animals, and strongly believes that the 

inner core of healing comes from the knowledge of our land and 

elders. In October 2013, she was elected to serve as a member of 

the Ute Mountain Ute Tribal leadership. She is a former co-chair 

for the Bears Ears Intertribal Coalition and education director 

for the Ute Indian Museum in Montrose. She currently is seeking 

a Master of Environmental Management from Western Colorado 

University. Lopez-Whiteskunk has traveled extensively sharing 

Ute culture through song, dance, presentations, and is honored 

to continue to protect, preserve and serve through education, 

building understanding of our resources, culture, and beliefs—a 

great foundation for a better tomorrow. 



95


SECTION 3: 

Beyond Utopias and 

Dystopias 


97


Tending Breadth 

Jacklyn Brickman and Heather Taylor 

What would it mean to have interspecies familial 

relationships that translate human behaviors to 

plants in a post-anthropocentric future? What if 

humans could harness the wisdom, science, and 

magic of plants to cultivate new planets? 

Left | Jacklyn Brickman and Heather Taylor 

Tending Breadth, 2 0 1 9 

Film Still 

Following | Jacklyn Brickman and Heather Taylor 

Tending Breadth, 2 0 1 9 

Film Stills. 

All images courtesy of the artists. 

View film here: 

https://vimeo.com/342057606 

Tending Breadth is a film by Jacklyn Brickman 

and Heather Taylor that attempts to tease out 

these questions through the amplification of 

and challenge to the human hubris. It is an 

assertion that through a nurturing, maternal and 

interspecies collaborative approach to working 

with biological systems, people will possess the 

capability to form new planets. 

A response to the ideology of the Anthropocene 

and its apocalyptic forms, Tending Breadth 

was filmed in a greenhouse, a structural 

representation of the human propensity toward 

cultivating nature for capital. Where one would 

expect to encounter a world of verdancy, the 

frame is filled with the synthetic sheen of mylar. 

As mirrored spheres expand and contract in a 

mimesis of human breath, they press against 

one another and the glass panes in which they 

are contained. Two figures don golden, hooded 

suits as they move through the scene continually 

performing motions of care, with emphasis on the 

value of touch. 

Touch forges vital interspecies bonds. In Staying 

with the Trouble (2016), Donna Haraway implores 

the importance of such bonds. “Staying with 


99

the trouble requires making oddkin; that is, we 

require each other in unexpected collaborations 

and combinations, in hot compost piles. We 

become-with each other or not at all. That kind of 

material semiotics is always situated, someplace 

and not noplace, entangled and worldly” (4). 

To build a sustainable future, one must begin 

grounded in the now, with actions generated from 

the highly personal, even maternal. The eventual 

presentation of a dried black walnut provides a 

new context in the film’s progression. Its gloved 

insertion into a large metallic sphere displays a 

reversal of the mother earth paradigm, suggesting 

that instead of earth as mother, humans may 

parent a new planet into being. How would such 

pseudo-procreation and subsequent birth force 

reevaluations of interspecies relationships? 

As a challenge to the typical hierarchal 

relationship humans hold with plants and 

inanimate objects, Tending Breadth also pulls 

inspiration from Jane Bennett’s book Vibrant 

Matter (2010), in which she aims to “…present 

non-human materialities as bona fide participants 

rather than as recalcitrant actants, objects, social 

constructs, or instrumentalities” (62). Bennett’s 

assertion that all varieties of matter are vibrant 


Issue N o 4 101



and full of life is displayed throughout the 

demonstrative processes performed in Tending 

Breadth. From the careful movements between 

the expanses of breathing mylar spheres, to 

the gentle handling of a single, precious walnut, 

dried with its husk intact, to assisting in the 

eventual delivery of a silver neonate planet, the 

suited figures offer all matter their attention, 

ministrations, and touch. 

While Tending Breadth was filmed in early 2019, 

this statement was composed in April of 2020, 

amid a Stay-At-Home order issued around the 

globe as a result of COVID-19. In a world called 

home during a pandemic, the ability and action 

to turn inward, be still, and focus energies on 

one’s cohabitants, be they human, plant, animal 

or other vibrant matter, is a radical act, with 

unknown effects that could reverberate for years 

to come. 

Indoor and outdoor living spaces have become 

microhabitats in which a bourgeoning reignition 

of co-habitation and interspeciesism has 

come to fruition. Emergent experimentation 

or reacquaintances with domestic acts and 

collaborations with living systems are now 

ubiquitous. 





As in Tending Breadth, in homes across the globe, 

the hand, a multi-fingered appendage and 

conveyor of human care, delivers the tenderness 

of its touch. Essential interpersonal relationships 

are fulfilled by unexpected organisms, within 

the niche defined by one’s residence. The hand 

moves through nutrient rich soil, teeming with 

microbes, earthworms and rotifers, the push and 

pull of kneading sourdough culture alive with 

wild yeast. It holds the watering can gently tilted 

to hydrate house plants, caresses the furry or 

feathered creature newly acquainted to its digs 

and offers companionship and repairs or replaces 

the vibrant matter that composes the structures 

which house these actions. 

These practices recall a tradition of caring, 

whose reemergence is radicalized by the nature 

of necessity and newly defined circumstances 

they exist in. It has become clear that no one will 

return to “normal”—on the contrary, each person 

is a reactant, involved in a change both at home 

and abroad. This waiting in individual dwellings 

for the benefit of others who are at risk or on the 

front lines of fighting the illness is a lesson in care, 

empathy and respect that one hopes will last far 

beyond the political and financial ramifications of 

the coronavirus. It’s a lesson in relationships, the 

power of the unknown and the generation of a 

new social reality. 

Working within a pre-established structure, 

Tending Breadth, with the tenderness and care 

of a parent, enforces an altered approach 

of movements that nurture into being new, 

imaginative possibilities. It offers a speculative 

future that ponders the evolution from plant to 

planet. 

Text by Jacklyn Brickman 

Tending Breadth is a collaborative film by Jacklyn Brickman and 

Heather Taylor. It was filmed in March of 2019 in The Ohio 

State University Biological Sciences Greenhouse in Columbus, 

Ohio. Special thanks to Greenhouse Director David Snodgrass 

and Superintendent Emily Yoders-Horn. 

Works Cited 

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, 

Duke University Press, 2010. Print. 

Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin 

in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, 2016. Print. 

Bios 

Jacklyn Brickman is a multidisciplinary artist whose work 

entangles science fact with fiction to address social and 

environmental concerns by employing natural objects, processes, 

and technology. She explores relationships between people and 

their environments to blur the natural and fantastical through 

performance, sculpture, installation, video, and photographs, 

with a special interest in cross-disciplinary collaboration and 

social engagement. Fellowships include the National Academy 

of Sciences, Chaire arts et sciences, Livable Futures, Jentel 

Foundation, Popps Packing, the National Endowment for the 

Arts, the Erb Family Foundation, and the Greater Columbus Arts 

Council. She has screened and exhibited her work in the U.S., 

Canada, France, India, and Slovenia. Brickman resides with her 

partner and their children in Columbus, Ohio. 

Heather Taylor is an interdisciplinary artist and curator who 

works primarily in photography, filmmaking, and sound. Inspired 

by natural patterns and phenomena, she explores palpable and 

corporeal materials through the phantasma with experimental 

sound and lens-based media. A self-taught drummer, beat and 

rhythm influences the flow of her multimodal work. She often 

works collaboratively with institutions, artists, and musicians to 

produce multimedia events. Taylor is the Founder and Editor of 

Hiss Magazine, which ran three issues and provided a space for 

femme, non-binary, and LGBTQIA artists to share their work and 

engage in contemporary art and culture. She is the recipient of a 

Greater Columbus Arts Council Media Arts Fellowship (2015) and 

a Cart Pushers Studio Residency (2019). Her films have screened 

in the United States and India. Taylor is a news videographer and 

editor in Columbus, Ohio. 




Violence, Apocalypse, or 

a Changing World? Re- 

Constructing the Climate 

Imaginary / Thinking of 

Doggerland 

Evan Tims 

Climate change is a redefinition of the world’s 

imaginable futures. As material realities shift 

and a regime of predictive institutions articulate 

the ecological crisis with growing urgency, a new 

genre of literature is developing in response. 

Climate fiction, first named in 2007 (Ullrich), 

produces a network of imagined landscapes 

and futures that play a major role in the political 

and social dimensions of environmental change. 

However, climate change remains a somewhat 

fringe theme in contemporary literature, and the 

examples that do exist tend to repeat tropes of 

hopelessness, disaster and suffering. 1 Given the 

wide crossover between authors, readers, and 

the environmentally-concerned public, it should 

be expected that fiction would minister to the 

deep anxieties experienced by many over the 

occurring and imminent catastrophes associated 

with a global rise in surface temperature. Even if 

1 

See Meagan Hunter, Helen Simpson, and Claire Vaye Watkins 

for literary examples of these themes. 

mainstream fiction might prefer to steer clear of 

the speculative or dystopian elements suggested 

by narratives that deal with the future, there 

ought to be a wealth of work that navigates the 

particular stresses and cultural responses to 

contemporary discourses about the ecological 

crisis. As Amitav Ghosh notes in The Great 

Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, 

this is not the case. While works by several major 

authors such as Lydia Millet, Barbara Kingsolver, 

and David Mitchell have contributed to the genre, 

the majority of contemporary literature evades 

the subject, and there are few authors who 

center their work on the issue (Ghosh 17). The 

climate fiction that does exist tends to employ 

apocalyptic narratives and aesthetics of disaster 

in depicting climate change as a catastrophe that 

denies the possibility of hope, or what Gregers 

Anders calls the “social collapse” model of climate 

fiction. Matthew Schneider-Mayerson found that 


111

while reading climate fiction offers inspiration 

for environmental activism and for imagining 

the future possibilities of climate change, it also 

spurs “intense negative emotions” (473). This 

negative reaction may outweigh any political 

reflection provoked by the genre because it could 

prompt intellectual and political distancing from 

the issue. I argue that the repetition of certain 

themes throughout climate fiction evokes the 

counterproductive responses of many readers. 

I further explore the role of climate fiction in 

representing the broader climate imaginary, and 

propose alternative narratives that may expand 

our capacity for conceptualizing a changing world. 

imaginaries of technological and scientific futurity. 

Therefore, works such as Paolo Bacigalupi’s The 

Wind-Up Girl and Oryx and Crake by Margaret 

Atwood—which explore genetic editing—were 

left out of my analysis. Works of climate fiction 

are numerous and span multiple broader 

genres, geographies, and social structures. 

Therefore, this article cannot be considered 

a comprehensive survey of the entire genre. 

Instead, I explore several major works frequently 

cited as representative of the genre and conduct 

an analysis of their themes and what they might 

indicate about the contemporary Western climate 

imaginary. 

In selecting works of fiction representative of 

the genre, I reference articles that list Englishlanguage 

literature considered to be canonical 

climate fiction. 2 These articles describe cli-fi 

as distinct from science fiction, as the genre 

speculates about the character of a future that 

is overwhelmingly likely, as opposed to more 

fantastical topics such as artificial intelligence 

(Ullrich). I also rely on the scholarly articles 

referenced throughout this work in order 

to determine which stories and novels are 

considered most representative of the genre by 

other researchers. I further narrow my analysis 

by focusing on works of literature that deal 

primarily with environmental change and its 

impact on social relationships and individual 

perceptions, while excluding titles that give 

primary narrative weight to technological 

development. Works of speculative climate fiction 

that contend with technological change are major 

contributions to the genre and often appear in 

the aforementioned lists; however, here I focus 

on navigating the Western literary imagination 

of material climate change as opposed to 

2 

For these lists and guides, see Megan O’Grady and J.K. Ullrich. 

Climate fiction often relies on a sense of things 

remaining the same, or of society regressing to 

an imagined “natural” state. In David Mitchell’s 

The Bone Clocks, a novel that spans a century 

of interwoven stories, a protagonist comments 

that the future looks much like the past. This 

makes sense within a narrative that depicts 

armed conflict and the retreat of organized 

government as climate change causes massive 

resource shortages and unpredictable weather. 

It also makes sense in Nathaniel Rich’s Odds 

Against Tomorrow, where a Wharton graduate and 

successful businesswoman is faced with physical 

danger caused by social upheaval after a massive 

storm ravages the Northeast, causing her to 

witness groups of men battling for control over a 

commune in Maine. In both of these novels, one 

kind of control—bureaucratic and technological— 

recedes and is replaced by more fragmented and 

heavily gendered forms of social organization. 

Climate degradation forces the state to retreat, 

and a more inherent, violence-based social 

system rises to fill the vacuum. Existing climate 

fiction also often involves protagonists with 


particular experiences—namely, white women 

and their vulnerabilities in a dangerous world. In 

“Diary of an Interesting Year,” by Helen Simpson, 

a world ravaged by climate change turns to 

violence and extreme suffering. A baby dies inside 

of a pregnant woman, causing her death. Toxic 

rivers, sewers spreading disease in the streets, 

dangerous refugees; the story layers tragedy 

upon tragedy, building a world defined by human 

pain. The protagonist’s husband, an academic, is 

murdered by a foreign assailant. The foreigner, 

likely a climate refugee, rapes her repeatedly 

and keeps her captive. Eventually she murders 

him, and successfully ends her pregnancy before 

setting off with a rucksack and a gun, discovering 

that her only way forward is to embrace the 

violence inherent to a new world. In The End We 

Start From by Megan Hunter, another woman also 

deals with the trials of pregnancy, motherhood, 

and male domination in the context of a climatedestroyed 

England. In Gold Fame Citrus by Claire 

Vaye Watkins, a woman relies on a male cult 

leader while she struggles to care for her adopted 

child on a future West Coast replaced by vast 

deserts. Finally, in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight 

Behavior, the protagonist’s struggle to navigate 

family and marriage becomes intertwined with 

the disruptive migratory patterns of butterflies. 

These stories reveal several characteristics of the 

current climate imaginary. The first is that our 

visions of the future, as in The Bone Clocks, tend 

to rely on a conceptual framework of the past as 

a male-dominated environment wherein women 

are commodities, threats, or excess baggage. The 

second is that literary imaginings of the future 

tend to focus on themes of life and death—for 

which birth is often a convenient motif—by 

contrasting individual survival with civilizational 

collapse. The third is that most of these works 

situate narratives of climate apocalypse within 

the experiences of white, Western women, to 

the exclusion of other subjectivities. As Kendra 

Strauss writes of two examples of climate fiction, 

“Both are U.S.-centric, and both largely ignore 

issues of race…Thus, although contemporary 

utopias and dystopias and their geographical 

imaginations are vital to the imperative to imagine 

radical alternatives to existing social orders, 

geographers also have a role to play in mapping 

their exclusions, or what they fail to dream” 

(348). As Strauss rightly identifies, an exploration 

of existent climate fiction must contend with 

the “exclusions” within popular narratives and 

consider how these exclusions reflect broader 

hierarchies. This critique is not intended as a 

dismissal of these works, because they deal with 

valuable themes relating to bodily harm, women’s 

rights, and environmental change. Rather, the 

homogeneity of their thematic content is an 

indication of repetitive themes that populate a 

broader understanding of climate change and the 

threat it poses to a particular form of human life. 

Further, the uniformity of the protagonists 

leads to a climate imaginary that prioritizes 

the victimhood of those who are beneficiaries 

of a global system of racial hierarchy that 

is inescapably bound up with the economic 

structures and colonial histories responsible 

for climate change. These dynamics offer a 

responsibility-avoidant model for thinking 

through climate change. The almost exclusively 

white female characters are sufferers of male 

violence and victims of a hostile environment, but 

they are rarely considered to be responsible for, 

or beneficiaries of, the economic conditions that 

lead to global environmental destruction. Climate 


The consistency of narratives 

of white suffering in the 

context of a crisis that 

disproportionately impacts 

non-white communities suggests 

that the climate imaginary has 

yet to fully contend with the 

role of race in environmental 

harm, even as it defines the 

suffering of these characters 

along gendered lines. 


change, and its subsequent social failings, is a 

series of things that happen to them¬—a new 

social context in which old forms of dominance 

re-emerge, rather than itself being an actionable 

problem or cause for social reflection. The 

consistency of narratives of white suffering in the 

context of a crisis that disproportionately impacts 

non-white communities suggests that the climate 

imaginary has yet to fully contend with the role 

of race in environmental harm, even as it defines 

the suffering of these characters along gendered 

lines. 

These stories advance a cultural belief that the 

loss of civilization as a social regulatory body 

and technological framework allows for the 

resurgence of behavioral traits inherent to human 

beings—namely, male domination and violence. 

Civilization in these stories is a steward that saves 

us from ourselves, and once it collapses there is 

little left except for the brutality of human nature. 

Ironic, then, that industrialized civilization is 

also the very threat that causes the catastrophe 

in the first place. Thus, both the protagonists 

themselves and the systems around them escape 

significant culpability. If climate literature can be 

taken as both a representative and producer of 

the broader Western climate imaginary, then the 

repetition of this theme in many recent works 

of climate fiction is a concerning indicator of our 

current capacity to imagine our way through 

a changing world. One possible counterpoint 

to this narrative is Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water 

Knife, a novel centered on the corruption and 

governmentality involved in water rights in a 

future American Southwest. In The Water Knife, 

climate change serves as the backdrop and 

impetus for dystopia, and while the villains 

are not responsible for global climate change 

per se, they are actively engaged in worsening 

the material conditions of many communities 

vulnerable to drought and disaster. These villains 

clearly bear responsibility for material conditions, 

as a contrast to the characters in the other works 

I reference, who—even when they are defined as 

villains—have nothing to do with environmental 

destruction. 

In the face of the climate crisis, not only do 

we as readers, writers, and members of the 

environmentally-destructive public frequently 

find our footing in stories that replicate many 

pre-existing assumptions about human nature, 

we also find ourselves cozying up to the broader 

frameworks that are associated with so much 

environmental damage in the first place— 

namely, the technological state and consumer 

capitalism. The danger of this kind of fiction is 

that it conveys a singular message: fix this, or it 

all ends. While there are realistic claims that the 

most extreme emissions scenarios might result in 

truly apocalyptic futures, it seems more likely that 

the twenty-first century is witnessing a variety 

of changes to ecologies and built environments 

that, while impactful and potentially catastrophic, 

do not immediately result in the extinction of 

civilization. 3 At the very least, if apocalypse is 

the ultimate result, then there are quite a few 

steps between now and then, and countless 

contemporary and historical examples of 

climate change, which are worthy of imaginative 

consideration. As Strauss writes of dystopian 

climate fiction, “We are, it seems, transfixed by 

visions that enact, literally, Jameson’s maxim that 

it is easier to imagine the end of the world than 

the end of capitalism” (342). There are many 

3 

For the extensive work on different environmental futures 

based on scientific parameters, see Intergovernmental Panel 

on Climate Change. 


alternatives to the American consumer’s ideal 

life of owning two cars, building a house, and 

maintaining a career in an office somewhere. The 

fact that the only alternative considered by this 

kind of fiction is one of destruction and anarchy 

is a revealing tendency, one that reflects both 

an uncritical faith in the necessity of statecraft in 

its modern iteration and a perception of climate 

change as yet another science fictional disaster 

relegated to the ranks of nuclear warfare, alien 

invasions, and apocalyptic viruses. 

These narratives also tend to imagine that 

contemporary values, especially those of 

human rights and community entitlements, 

are civilizational products rather than cultural 

tendencies. If protections and social entitlements 

are nothing but legal infrastructures restraining 

the violent nature of humanity, then they collapse 

as soon as stable environments begin to dissolve. 

This theme suggests that caring for others can 

only exist on institutional scales, rather than 

emerging within multiple forms of community. 

As Andersen writes, “…global warming is still 

represented here as a phenomenon that has not 

only reversed technological development and 

reduced socio-political complexity, but has also 

reduced human empathy” (34). In The End We 

Start From, for example, the efforts of the state 

to maintain refugee camps is always contrasted 

to the fully anarchic and individualistic life on 

the road. The duality between anarchy and 

government is thus also a contrast between 

institutional protection and pure chaos. However, 

to extrapolate these fictional settings into an 

argument or ideology is to come up against the 

inaccuracy of such a position. To claim that the 

contemporary ideation of statecraft is the only 

legitimate manifestation of care is to ignore 

the endless examples of community and social 

existence that exist within, and have existed long 

before and outside of, the modern state. 

The biophysical world itself is also depicted as a 

realm of hostility and destruction in the context of 

a climate-changed world. The End We Start From, 

Gold Fame Citrus, and “Diary of an Interesting 

Year,” all take place in semi-desert environments. 

With the exception of J.G. Ballard’s 1962 novel The 

Drowned World, which takes place in an explosion 

of life and vitality in the context of accelerated 

evolution, most of the speculative climate 

fiction I examined explores arid and apocalyptic 

wastelands. While some incorporate flooding 

as an impetus to migrate, the environment is 

nevertheless stripped of life and often beauty. 

In Gold Fame Citrus, for example, when a male 

cult leader makes sketches in ecological field 

notebooks depicting beautiful and strange new 

forms of life in the desert, his work is revealed as 

a fraud, cementing the notion that the desertified 

wasteland is one devoid of life. Deserts occupy a 

particular place in the apocalyptic imaginary. They 

are often associated with nuclear catastrophe, 

from the realities of nuclear testing and waste 

disposal in American deserts to the imagined 

post-war irradiated wasteland (Kuletz). Though 

deserts are rich with ecological diversity, 

nuclear imaginings have remade deserts into 

wastelands, a theme repeated in climate fiction 

which imagines a destruction of biological life in 

a similar vein as that of nuclear war. While these 

imagined landscapes depict the basic destruction 

of biological existence, climate change remakes 

environments into a variety of new ecologies, 

including ones that are not necessarily devoid of 

life. 


Climate change is portrayed within fiction 

as a negation of contemporary existence, a 

reversal of both social and ecological norms. In 

such works, it causes pure death—of humans, 

ecosystems, and social formations. What little 

life persists continues in forms that are not 

evolved or changed but regressed. Schneider- 

Mayerson’s findings, that such works spur 

negative feelings and perhaps even fatalism, 

might relate to the extent to which climate fiction 

deals with a presumptive ultimate worst case 

scenario rather than the countless possibilities 

of life in remade environments. But what are 

the alternatives to a collection of imaginaries 

that portray climate change as a universal 

catastrophe? After all, climate change will indeed 

probably cause immense suffering and loss. 

The novels mentioned here depict undeniably 

possible futures. However, these futures are 

based in frameworks of race, gender, and the 

logic of government that inhibit imaginaries which 

could, as Manjana Milkoreit writes, “shap[e] our 

collective imaginations of possible, plausible, 

desirable, and undesirable futures, thereby 

helping us reflect not only on the nature of 

climate change, but on the meaning of human life 

and social existence in a changing climate” (177). 

Perhaps work that is best suited for invigorating 

the climate imaginary is situated outside of 

racially and culturally homogenous frameworks. 

In Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, a young 

black woman navigates a post-climate change 

American West, in which violence and religious 

extremism have taken root. After her family 

is killed, she begins a journey for survival that 

mirrors events in many of the aforementioned 

works. However, in Butler’s novel, the protagonist 

develops a new set of beliefs she refers to as 

Earthseed. These beliefs offer a radical alternative 

to the destructive landscape. As a counterpoint 

to the narratives of individual survival replete in 

climate fiction, Butler’s novels offer a reframing of 

the ultimate purpose and meaning of humanity’s 

destiny to explore other worlds and reach 

maturity among the stars. Perhaps Butler’s work 

points to a compromise between portraying 

destruction and offering a sense of hope; amid 

unprecedented violence, wholly new ways of living 

become possible. While the novel depicts a return 

to the past in the same vein as other works, the 

characters invent ways of counterbalancing that 

process and imagining a hopeful, unique way of 

life. 

Radical alternatives to the climate imaginary 

also emerge in forms of narrative outside of the 

norms of the Western novel. Chie Sakakibara 

explores a different form of climate storytelling 

within the Iñupiat community of Point Hope, 

Alaska. The Iñupiat community exists at the 

forefront of climate change, facing rapidly 

rising sea levels and signficant changes to local 

landscapes. In 1970, the community was forced 

to relocate from their homeland, referred to as 

“Old town,” to its current home, “New Town,” 

located some distance away. As the world around 

them has shifted, so has the content of their 

stories. Sakakibara writes: “…Environmental 

change is culturally manifest through tales of the 

supernatural, particularly ‘spirit beings’ or ‘ghosts’ 

that confirm human ties with a place” (459). In 

Iñupiat stories, different kinds of “spirit beings” 

have gone extinct or changed their behavior as 

a reflection of the changing environment. As 

one of Sakakibara’s interlocutors recounts of a 

species of spirit being, “Oh, I heard their lagoons 

drained and they lost their water, they became 

homeless and died out or decided to leave” (469). 


Climate change impacts the drainage of arctic 

lakes, leading to a disappearance of habitat for 

the aforementioned species. Fictional worlds 

have thus merged with material ones, producing 

stories that have adjusted to the realities of 

climate change. Further, these stories serve to 

mediate broader sensibilities of identity and 

connection: “For [the Iñupiat], stories and the 

very act of narrating them help connect people to 

places, people to people, and ultimately people 

to the environment” (459). These stories thereby 

enact a form of interconnectivity between people 

and the environment, a counterpoint to Ghosh’s 

characterization of the Western novel as being 

focused on human drama with landscape as a 

mere backdrop. 

As Donna Haraway writes, “How can we think in 

times of urgencies without the self-indulgent and 

self-fulfilling myths of apocalypse, when every 

fiber of our being is interlaced, even complicit, 

in the webs of processes that must somehow 

be engaged and repatterned?” (39). Stories 

and imagined landscapes are intertwined with 

the kinds of inaction and fatalism that often 

defines modern environmental politics. When 

stories do engage with climate change, they fall 

into apocalyptic imaginings–the “self-indulgent 

and self-fulfilling myths” that compose much 

of climate fiction. The intervention I make here 

is to claim that climate change is a fruitful 

imaginative space, and that it can be used to think 

through shifting social dynamics and ecologies 

in the context of the remaking of the human 

and nonhuman world. I extend this argument 

by offering a story that takes place in climatechanged 

environment. My hope is ultimately 

that by navigating the imagined terrain of future 

climate change through fiction, we can contribute 

to an alternative climate change imaginary, one 

that considers not merely the possibilities of 

destruction but also the opportunities for life in a 

remade world. 

Works Cited 

Andersen, Gregers. Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis: A New 

Perspective on Life in the Anthropocene. Routledge, 2020. 

Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake. McClelland and Stewart, 

2003. 

Bacigalupi, Paolo. The Windup Girl. Night Shade Books, 2009. 

Bacigalupi, Paolo. The Water Knife. Alfred A. Knopf, 2015. 

Ballard, J.G. The Drowned World. Berkley Books, 1962. 

Butler, Octavia. Parable of the Sower. Four Walls Eight Windows, 

1993. 

Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the 

Unthinkable. The University of Chicago Press, 2016. 

Haraway, Donna J. “Staying with the Trouble: Anthropocene, 

Capitalocene, Chthulucene.” Anthropocene or Capitalocene? 

Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, edited by Jason W. 

Moore, PM Press, 2016, 34-76. 

Hunter, Megan. The End We Start From. Grove Press, 2017. 

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Emissions 

Scenarios, edited by Nebojsa Nakicenovic and Rob Swart, 

Cambridge UP, 2000. 

Kingsolver, Barbara. Flight Behavior. Harper Perennial, 2012. 

Kuletz, Valerie L. The Tainted Desert: Environmental and Social 

Ruin in the American West. Routledge, 1998. 

Mitchell, David. The Bone Clocks. Random House, 2015. 

Milkoreit, Manjana. “The Promise of Climate Fiction: 

Imagination, Storytelling, and the Politics of the Future.” 

Reimagining Climate Change, edited by Paul Wapner and Hilal 

Elver, Routledge, 2016, 171-190. 

O’Grady, Megan. “10 Cli-Fi Novels for the Dark Days Ahead.” 

Literary Hub, 22 Oct. 2018, https://bookmarks.reviews/10-cli-finovels-for-the-dark-days-ahead/ 


Rich, Nathaniel. Odds Against Tomorrow. Picador, 2014. 

Sakakibara, Chie. “Our Home is Drowning: Iñupiat Storytelling 

and Climate Change in Point Hope, Alaska.” The Geographical 

Review, vol. 98, no. 4, 2008, 456-475. 

Schneider-Mayerson, Matthew. “The Influence of Climate 

Fiction: An Empirical Study of Readers.” Environmental 

Humanities, vol. 10, no. 2, 2018, 473-500. https://doi. 

org/10.1215/22011919-7156848 

Simpson, Helen. “Diary of an Interesting Year.” I’m With the 

Bears: Short Stories From a Damaged Planet. Edited by Mark 

Martin. London: Verso, 2011. 

Strauss, Kendra. “These Overheating Worlds.” Annals of the 

Association of American Geographers, vol. 105, no. 2, 2015, 342- 

350. 

Ullrich, J.K. “Climate Fiction: Can Books Save the Planet?” 

The Atlantic, 14 Aug. 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/ 

entertainment/archive/2015/08/climate-fiction-margaretatwood-literature/400112/ 

Watkins, Claire Vaye. Gold Fame Citrus. Riverhead Books, 2015. 



Thinking of Doggerland 

The apartment was closer to the ocean every year. When they’d bought it 

forty years earlier, the water’s edge was a brisk walk away, and the young Ruth 

was always out of breath by the time she returned from what she called her 

“sunset strolls.” Although she had turned limp and squishy in many parts, 

ballooning in one or two places and becoming bony in others, she could make 

the trip more easily now. 

“You just have to get out of this place. You can’t believe what you’re 

missing. It’s all different now,” she said to her wife. 

“The difference is what frightens me.” 

“It’s not that different. But there are all kinds of new things out there. You 

won’t know until you look at it. Won’t you go?” 

“There’s nowhere to go.” 

“There’s everywhere to go.” 

“Not anymore.” 

This was a ritual, one of the many they’d fallen into after fifty years 

together. Her wife’s response varied–sometimes a grunt, sometimes an 

extended debate–but the end result was the same: Ruth took her walks alone. 

They both knew she preferred it that way. 

A few blocks down from their moldering building on what was once a 

very well-to-do avenue, the apartments were dissolving. That was the best word 

she could think of. Their edges were blurring–brick crumbling into dust, thick 

roots penetrating walls, and roofs studded with grass. They were turning from 

hard lines and crisp colors into cracked borderlands that allowed the world to 

creep inside. Younger folks lived in these places. They played loud music from 

the windows and stood huddled in mysterious collections on the broken 

pavement. 

They rarely noticed Ruth. She was a fixture, and like many fixtures she 

blended into her surrounding environment. The young people paid no mind to 

the flickering streetlights or the broken cars, rotted with saltwater, and there was 

no particular reason to pay attention to her either. If a young man or woman 

decided to walk down the street, they became targets of attention, or new 


members of the old groups. Either way, they called for a response, whereas Ruth 

was more like an empty space between more important things. 

Being old, it seemed to Ruth, was primarily a condition of being left out of 

things. There were years when she had been catcalled or robbed, and strangers 

had struck up conversations with her. Above all, she was seen—she was studied, 

looked at. That had been replaced with a more distant spectatorship around the 

time her stomach began to truly descend toward her knees and her face grew 

deep wrinkles. Piece by piece she was remade into one of the countless 

forgotten gray-haired people of the world. 

Her own separation did not discourage her from wanting to take action. 

For Ruth, action was the only possible response. The ailing buildings had to be 

dealt with, for starters. Colonies of mold and even mushrooms had invaded their 

own block, and the basement–once a serviceable laundry room–had been filled 

with a kind of living brown slime and the door permanently locked. The sea now 

crept through the sewers and abandoned subway tunnels when the tide rose or 

a storm came, and ocean poured into sub-basements and platforms. These were 

fixable problems–they required money, and time, but there were solutions. The 

issue came with trying to grab the attention of a world that was distracted by 

more dramatic issues. Floods were everywhere, no longer abnormal events. Now 

they were routine for the coastal dwellers. They fled to upstairs rooms and 

packed fresh water in the attic, and waited for the sea to subside. That was 

another thing Ruth decided–the new world was one of waiting and seeing. She 

preferred to act. 

“It can’t be helped. The basements are flooded, the mold is just creeping 

up the walls. No one will buy these old wrecks. Something ought to be done, you 

know it? Something just ought to be done,” she often repeated to her wife. 

Ruth’s letters and phone calls to her senators and council members of 

choice were ignored. The politicians were elsewhere, building new housing 

projects and debating machines that Ruth didn’t understand—great traps to pull 

carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, or rockets to send people to Mars. None of 

these made any sense to Ruth, not when her avenue had once been lined with 

magnolias and was now decorated with abandoned stoves, and especially not 

when her wife’s retirement fund from the university had shrunk to a trickle with 


no explanation. 

The sunsets had also changed. When she was younger, they stayed 

generally orange and yellow, comforting colors that bathed the steel and glass 

and turned everything golden. Orange had become a deep and dangerous red, 

and unnatural violet had begun creeping in. Now even shades of blue and the 

occasional hint of green stained the clouds that hovered over the sea. 

There was dust—that was what the news-people said. It came from the 

Midwest, the once-fertile lands turning into a thin mist of chemical laden soil. 

Smog, too, had been collecting over the sea, brought by some kind of wind 

pattern. She used to watch these reports obsessively, taking notes and bringing 

them to her wife’s study before bed. 

“Look at this,” she would say, “look what it’s all come to. It’s falling to 

pieces, the whole world is breaking apart.” 

Her wife kept a number of maps pinned to her wall, the edges curled and 

torn. One of them showed a series of images of the English Channel morphing 

over time. The first was modern and the others showed a bloated France and 

finally no channel at all. 

The last map was what she pointed to. 

“Doggerland,” she said. “Fifteen thousand years ago this was all land, and 

people lived there in tribes. Then the glaciers melted, and a tsunami came, and 

by ten-thousand years ago the whole thing was ocean. The trawlers haul up 

stone arrowheads sometimes. Look it up.” 

“But what happened to the people?” 

“They left, or died. We’ll never know. Point is, the world has always been 

breaking apart. We just fooled ourselves for a while. It was always a scam.” 

That night the sunset was especially alien, a mixture of blue-green and 

red. The clouds were low on the horizon and even the stars were invisible in the 

darkness behind her. The lights of a passing ship were visible as the sunlight bled 

away, and she thought it must’ve been one of those new nuclear container ships 

larger than whole cities. 

“This isn’t my town anymore,” she said out loud. There was movement 

near her and she froze. 

It was a stray dog–its snout began poking around at the dirt near her 


feet. It was seemingly unaware of her presence. 

“Did you live out there?” she asked it. 

There were rows of apartment buildings crumbling into the sea, missing 

chunks of wall but largely whole above the waterline. On some nights she saw 

lights in the upper windows, small and insistent despite the scale of the ocean. 

People lived in them still, and she had no idea who they might be—people so 

desperate they would throw themselves at the feet of the sea, instead of running 

the other way as most people now did. 

The horizon only gave her more questions. That was the problem with 

her wife, she suspected. She liked answers, solutions, and the cosmos of the 

apartment had only those. It was full of known things, familiar contours. It was 

easy to ask questions to. The ocean and the sunset and the crumbling buildings 

insisted on questions, demanded that kind of curiosity, but it refused to provide 

information. The beauty of the sunset was simply a trick to conceal that basic 

fact. 

Her wife had once occasionally gone for walks, but now she refused to 

leave the apartment altogether. Ruth argued with her often. 

“There’s just a lot going on out there. You should see it, the way the 

plants have overtaken everything. It’s interesting.” 

“Plants are taking over in here too.” That much was true–vines from the 

outside were curling through the broken bathroom windows, and tiny gray 

mushrooms had sprouted from the rotten sills. 

“You should just see it.” 

“I can see from the windows, thank you very much.” The view from the 

apartment was limited, however–at the upper edge of the marshy zone, they 

couldn’t see much. If she squinted at it, her wife could almost pretend nothing 

had changed at all. 

Health didn’t convince her, either. 

“If you don’t go outside you’ll be dead before eighty, and what will I do 

then?” 

“You’ll go for walks, I expect.” 

Despite their arguments, Ruth loved her. Her hair had only grown more 

beautiful as it grayed, and it now frizzed around her head in a sparkling cloud. 


Her eyes seemed to grow in size and depth with each passing year, even as her 

vision faded and she couldn’t read the cramped texts she once relied on for 

purpose and employment. She cleaned instead, rearranging useless little 

objects–a ceramic cat here and a bowl there–and fighting an extended campaign 

with the fungi in the windows. 

Whenever Ruth returned home she brought something new. This was a 

personal rule, and it didn’t matter how many times the objects ended up in the 

trash. From the broken concrete of the shoreline she brought strange fusions of 

metal and plastic and sand, like stones made from unnatural materials. 

Occasionally she found a piece of well-rounded sea glass that had somehow 

survived the hard beach and been deposited above the tide. From the city at 

large she brought new flowers that bloomed in the dark crevices between 

skyscrapers, or frilly little plants that clung to the sides of buildings without soil 

or water. If she was out shopping, she would buy something she hadn’t seen 

before, experimental new fruits and vegetables. She wanted to bring home the 

rats that sat fatly in little corners and holes, but she had no way of catching them 

and she didn’t care for the idea of capturing a living animal. 

Her wife didn’t like any of the new things she brought home. Ruth hoped 

that they would accumulate as proof that the outside world still held beauty, but 

her wife refused to look at them, packing them away or flushing the soft plants 

down the toilet. 

One day she saw an air conditioner fall from the window of a nearby 

apartment. She watched the whole thing. It slowly tipped out of an upper story 

and came spinning down, shattering on the pavement. The brutality of it was a 

shock. The sound echoed through the quiet buildings and a nearby group of 

people paused to look. Ruth stood in the same place for a long time as the sky 

turned black. She’d been on her way to view a sunset, and this was the first one 

she’d missed in many years. 

Instead of turning directly home when the stars appeared, she started 

walking through the forest of buildings to the east of her apartment. Her feet 

took her away from the central area of the city, where she usually went shopping 

once every week or so. There the city seemed to be fighting to stay normal. The 

stores were air-conditioned, the windows were washed, and men and women 


wearing tight suits used the offices. Newness only crept in at the edges–in the 

vast sweat stains on the nice gray suits, in the way that people looked at each 

other, as if everyone else was a threat. 

The east quickly turned into a place she didn’t recognize. The streets 

were narrow and choked with cars and haphazard constructions. There were 

outgrowths to these buildings, stalls and sheds that were attached to the sides. 

Weeds grew from the potholes, and she passed a sewer drain that burbled with 

seawater. She thought she should probably feel nervous, but she felt nothing at 

all. 

People were on the streets, more so than during the daytime. A few 

crowds stood in the pools of light that fell from open windows, and strangers 

walked with purpose. They hurried past as though appointments and interviews 

had been scheduled for midnight and they were running late. 

The hulks of brick towers and metal skyscrapers loomed above, and 

many of their windows were dark. Closer to the ground, they were lit with 

colorful bulbs, and the gentle glow spilled onto the streets, illuminating faces in 

every possible color. 

Soon Ruth reached a part of the city that she was certain she had never 

been to before. At least, it was so changed by the night and the sea that she 

could never hope to place it in her memory. This was another shock to her, the 

fact that she had spent years in a place while the unknown was waiting just a 

mile or so away. And this was not the kind of unknown that lived in the ocean. 

This was the unexpected. 

The constructions on the sides of the buildings–the tumors, as she was 

starting to think of them–grew thicker the further she walked. They turned into 

stalls with roofs and open windows. Through them she could see people 

displaying rows of objects, things for sale. Some of it was scrap metal, as far as 

she could identify in the dim light. It was probably salvage from the sunken parts 

of the city, worth very little. The realization that this was a kind of black market 

gave her pause, but only for a moment. 

The crowds were denser, and Ruth herself simply became a member of 

the public. No one was really paying attention to her. She was used to that, but it 

had been some time since she’d last felt like she had blended into a crowd. There 


was shouting and even laughing, and she saw young children sneaking 

underfoot. These were dead streets during the daytime, streets resigned to their 

fate. Hospice streets. Now they were reborn. 

The storefronts at street level were mostly broken, and new doorways 

had been constructed. When she saw what was inside she finally came to a stop. 

What had once been superstores and shopping plazas were now markets, 

labyrinths of stalls and people. There were brightly colored objects lined up in 

rows, men sitting in folding chairs, families with children walking and picking up 

products for sale. All of it stretched into the guts of the buildings until her failing 

eyesight could pick out nothing but vague movements. 

She walked into one of the markets, a store she had chosen at random. 

The smell of cooking food drew her through the gaping doorway and soon she 

stood inside of a narrow hallway, choked by piles of stuff and the people viewing 

it all. 

“Ma’am?” A loud voice seemed directed at her. Ruth turned around and 

found herself facing a young man, probably in his forties. 

“Yes?” she said, uncertain. 

“You’re looking for the best cookware, aren’t you? It’s right around the 

corner here, and you won’t believe the kinds of discounts we’ll give you.” 

She was overwhelmed. The information around her was a blank wall. 

There was too much of it to interpret, and she didn’t know how to respond. 

“I don’t know,” she answered honestly. 

“You look like you’ve been in this city a long time, you know it?” 

“Yes.” This was slightly offensive to her, although it used to be a point of 

pride. “I’m just old.” 

“Sure, sure,” the man continued. “You know what the good stuff is, so no 

need to trust me. Just come and have a look and judge it for yourself. No harm 

no foul, what do you say?” 

She found herself led toward a large space that had been carved from 

the surrounding stalls. Tables and chairs and shelves were covered in pots and 

pans, all of it completely ordinary. It was strangely relieving. She picked up a 

teakettle, one that looked just like the kettle at home. 

“How much?” 


“For you? Not much at all.” 

The price was low, and she paid. She half-expected him to look up at her 

with confused eyes when she handed her bills to him, as if she were a trespasser 

in another country and she didn’t have legal tender. But she did, and she began 

walking again after making her purchase. The kettle clanked against her thigh 

every few seconds. 

The encounter had given her new confidence. She belonged here, that 

much was clear. She walked toward a young woman who was standing in a 

teetering pile of books. 

“Hello,” Ruth said. 

“Anything in particular?” the girl asked. She looked bored, but her clothes 

were a light orange color that Ruth liked. 

“Just looking.” 

She chose a book called Indoor Gardening, mostly just for the picture. It 

showed an old couple in an apartment filled with plants, mostly vegetables and 

bright red tomatoes. They were smiling. 

She turned and began walking back out of the building. It had been 

hours, she was certain. Her wife would have no idea where she was. She might 

be worried sick, if she hadn’t already fallen asleep. 

A man behind a stall selling small red fruits waved at her. 

“Forty five cents for these! You can’t beat that.” 

After hearing the man’s voice she started walking quickly. She began to 

feel like if she stayed for another moment, had one more conversation with 

these people from another world, she would never find her way home. 

The crowds thinned as she worked her way down the street, and the 

stalls began to turn back into tumors. There was one more vendor, a man she 

hadn’t seen before. He had a dozen cages lying around on the pavement. It was 

too dark to see what he was selling, but there was the suggestion of movement. 

She hurried past, trying not to ask questions. 

The narrow streets took her in the general direction she thought was 

west. The moon rose overhead, transforming the black sky into a deep navy and 

illuminating the jagged towers above her. The color of her memory was fading as 

she walked across the cracked pavement. If it weren’t for the teakettle banging 


against her thigh and the book in her hand, it would be easier to deny what had 

happened. But even with that evidence, it began to feel like a series of events 

that happened to someone else, or a story she’d been told. 

Eventually, she came out onto the street near her home. There was the 

air conditioner that had fallen from the building; those were the trees that had 

taken root in the apartment building near hers. Ugly music slammed from the 

windows and someone was laughing nearby, but otherwise the street was 

empty. The young people, she imagined, were back at the night-market, or party, 

or whatever it had been if not a dream. 

Roots caught her feet as she walked over pavement that had become 

unfamiliar during her absence, and it took her some time to reach her block. 

When she caught sight of the entrance to her building she stopped. In the silver 

glow of the moon and the emptiness of the street, her wife was standing outside, 

waiting for her return. 

Bio 

Evan Tims is a researcher and climate fiction writer who focuses on anticipatory politics, futurity, and 

cultural frameworks surrounding the climate crisis. Tims’ fictional work seeks to complicate our imaginings 

of the imminent reality of climate change. Tims holds a B.A. in Human Rights and Written Arts from Bard 

College, and has worked with the Center for Experimental Humanities and the Difference and Media 

Project. Tims is a two-time recipient of the Critical Language Scholarship for Bengali, and he received the 

Bard undergraduate Written Arts Prize and the Christopher Wise Award for his honors thesis on climate 

fiction. Tims is currently based in New York City, where he investigates police misconduct for a civilian 

oversight organization. 



SECTION 4: 

The Past Is Not a Predictor 

for the Future 



Gaia Rise: Myths and Politics 

in the Anthropocene 


POLIT-MYTH 

Left | Artemis Herber 

Gaia’s Memory, 2 0 1 9 - 2 0 2 0 ( d e t a i l ) 

Acrylic and mixed media (marble, honeycomb, 

rusted rail nail, corrugated cardboard), 85x10x95” 

Image courtesy of Tom Petzwinkler. 

I explore the entanglement of deep-time 

and human impact through the lens of the 

Anthropocene by examining how human 

intervention, exploitation, and metabolic 

regimes have shaped the use of land and the 

environment. 

As an example, recent news about the setting of 

politically-motivated fires in the Amazon indicate 

further and ongoing anthropogenic changes of 

our biosphere, creating a scorched Earth through 

extortion, exhaust, mining, monoculture, and 

neglect caused by neoliberal political decisions. 

Indeed, "the ends today are clearly endless” 

(Nancy 90-91). 

I propose polit-myth as an artistic strategy to 

create a paradigm shift towards political decision 

making that is motivated by environmental 

concerns of climate change caused by human 

activity rooted in myths and histories. Politmyth 

involves interrogating the borders of 

the entangled fringes of sciences, politics, and 

myths to examine the impacts of deep time, its 

myths and narratives, on human interactions 

that compress time, revealing how the rise of 



Gaia Raise - Cycle, 2020 

Installation view, Landscape in an Eroded Field, Katzen Art Center of the American University, Washington DC. 


autocratic, male-dominated, and colonial-infused 

ideologies have impacted the entire world. 

We can observe events from the past through 

myths, archaeology, and philosophy to 

understand the consequences for today and the 

outlook for future societies. In order to do so, I 

explore how shifts in our landscapes have been 

shaped by our tectonic activities and underscore 

the need for further artistic investigations in the 

era of the Anthropocene in order to create new 

possibilities for the future. 

With a sense of urgency, my large-scale paintings 

from recycled cardboard employ polit-myth as 

an artistic strategy. Focusing on the deliberate 

use of selected materials (such as coal, 

marble, concrete, clay, and dust), I compose 

a metaphorical language that connects the 

political status quo embedded into dys/utopian 

motives with underlying myths concerning 

the current condition on Earth, promoting a 

directional change from economics towards 

ecologies for critical political guidance. I am 

inspired by the use of global positioning systems 

in the field of experimental geography, where 

utopian/dystopian visualizations of urban and 

natural landscapes result in cartographies, 


personal memories, or field trips that magnify 

contemporary life problems. My paintings 

are a result of findings in maps, mappings, 

and personal memories of my field trips and 

excursions focused on urban settings and nonlandscapes, 

articulating concerns about presentday 

society in light of technological change, 

environmental degradation, or political turmoil. 

My recent works examine how geopolitical 

volatility is embedded in motifs of landscapes 

in precarious conditions. As an example, 

“Polyphemus-After Casting the Rocks” addresses 

geo-economic and -political issues within the 

entanglement of deep time and ancient myth 

in intersections between time, the use of 

land and global settings. It is a metaphor for 

current and ongoing issues of global migration 

worldwide resulting from climate change and 

wars. I investigate how land use reflects societal, 

political, or geo-terrestrial concerns, and how 

time is interlaced between human histories and 

myths and geological events sedimented into the 

Earth's strata. My works incorporate references 

and reinterpretations of mythologies of ancient 

civilizations into contemporary findings. Those 

fables resonate across time, embodying new 

forms and components. They help to explain 

the association between myths, historical, and 

archaeological evidence to find meaning through 

artistic discourses within interdisciplinary 

practices towards decolonizing the Anthropocene. 

Those interconnections could be understood 

as engravings, patterns, and traces in our 

landscapes, compositions of "songs of energies" 

and the "epics of metabolic regimes" (Sloterdijk). 

In the 19th century, exploitation of humans by 

humans shifted to methodical exploitation of the 

Earth, which can be understood as narratives of 

metabolic regimes affecting both humans as well 

as natural resources. Against this background, 

Sloterdijk puts forward the thesis that all stories 

of changing the conditio humana are narratives 

about the changing exploitation of energy 

sources or metabolic regimes that redefine 

the Anthropocene as the Capitalocene, the 

“peak” agent of mass destruction that fuels the 

elimination of the common grounds we share 

globally as the dominant Euro-centered culture 

(Haraway). Enforcing powers of ecologies, I 

expand from a social-economic historical review 

of man to explore the compression of time in the 

landscape that defines our human and planetary 

condition. At the same time, I sympathize with our 

mythological counterparts or narratives where we 

can find oneself. “Compressing time” in my work 

means that past, present, and future merge into 

paintings that explore issues of disappearance, 

loss, power, and neglect in our environment by 

interlacing deep time, myth, and today's practices 

in land use and abuse. 

As an example, "Melancholia" presents an 

outrageous Gaiastory between geologies and 

a coal filled hole in the sky as reference to our 

disturbed biosphere including extortion and 

exhaust of Earth and atmosphere since the 

Industrial Revolution. I agree with Haraway’s 

suggestion that we "give way to geostories, to 

Gaiastories, to sym-chthonic stories” (52). 

My works incorporate references and 

reinterpretations of mythologies of ancient 

civilizations into contemporary findings. Those 

fables resonate across time, embodying new 

forms and components. They help to explain 

the association between myths, historical, and 


archaeological evidence to find meaning through 

artistic discourses within interdisciplinary 

practices towards decolonizing the Anthropocene. 

I find inspiration in ancient myths, research on 

histories, archeology, and literature along with 

various adaptations from the text. Earlier series, 

engaged in questions of redefining concepts of 

landscapes and nature informed by multiple 

aspects of the Anthropocene/Capitalocene, 

employ a comprehensive metaphorical 

language borrowed from Greek myths and their 

transformed and updated versions throughout 

history. These works are inspired by aspects 

of female powers in ancient Greek myth such 

as those of Gaia, Demeter, Persephone, and 

Medusa, that superimpose the delicate ecology of 

the world juxtaposed against cataclysmic events. 

Paintings such as "Gaia's Memory," "The 

Perseids," and "Chaos" refer to political volatility 

embedded in motifs of landscapes in precarious 

conditions. They are an attempt to create a 

metaphorical language that conveys aesthetic 

praxis confronting the problem of temporalities, 

and they offer an ongoing consideration of 

interconnections between art, politics, and 

environment. They transform into parables and 

metaphors of man’s intervention, underscoring 

the formation of a movement between subjects 

in the vast field of land-seizure, exploitation, and 

separation over deep time up to the present. 

GAIA RISE 

My recent project, Gaia Rise, explores the political 

volatility embedded in motifs of landscapes 

in precarious conditions. The ongoing project 

started in 2019 during the London UK residency 



Polyphemus – After Casting Rocks, 2018 

Mixed media (acrylic, coal pigments coal chips) on multilayered corrugated cardboard; torn, ripped surface, re-using tattered 

scraps applying sculptural layers. The partially broken sphere built of paper scraps or from torn off elements. Inside the sphere: 

accumulated coal wood chips, 95x12x100” 




The Perseids, 2019 

Acrylic on corrugated cardboard, mixed media (molded hand 

in-prints, gold embellished, incorporated into multilayered 

corrugated cardboard and packing paper ), 90x100” 



Melancholia, 2017 

Mixed media on corrugated cardboard, glued together and partially hammered out 

digging holes into the accumulated material, washed paint, filled coal pigments, 

continuous collaging/de-collaging, disintegration and reconstruction, 90x10x100”. 

Following | Artemis Herber 

Melancholia, 2017 (detail) 

Images courtesy of Tom Petzwinkler. 




"Body and Place" with TheCoLAB and most 

recently continued as an artist residency at the 

Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, DC. 

Gaia Rise attempts to create a metaphorical 

language that conveys aesthetic praxis 

confronting the problem of temporalities in the 

Anthropocene and argues for the importance 

of creating an ongoing consideration of 

interconnections between art, politics, and 

environment. 

Gaia's map is extending globally. As a chthonic 

deity, Gaia’s origin lies in the geological strata 

of Delphi in Greece. Delphi was considered the 

center of the world for the ancients. According to 

the myth, Zeus had an eagle rise from each end of 

the world, meeting at Delphi. Gaia was combined 

with the mud left over from the world after the 

end of the Golden Age and gave birth to Python, a 

winged serpent with clairvoyant abilities that lived 

in the place that was later to be called Delphi. 

After Python's execution, Delphi wrested control 

of Gaia and was henceforth under the protection 

of Apollo. 

“Gaia Rise” undergoes an exploration into 

critical zones (Latour) of our living conditions 

on Earth: With an emphasis on the urgency of 

environmental, political, and social instability, 

the depiction of Gaia and other mythic figures 

such as Prometheus or Medusa, represents not 

only deities from deep time, but the evolution 

of crisis in our times, evidenced in outbreaks, 

catastrophic powers, or hybrid landscapes, where 

all who are Earth-bound are at risk through an 

ongoing cataclysmic event of climate change and 

extinction. 



Chaos - Birth of Gaia, 2020. 

Acrylic on corrugated cardboard, mixed media (vine, coal, cable), 90x120” 



The triptych of "Prometheus" connects visually 

between folded landscapes, the empty shell of an 

elevated, but ephemeral human (using a female 

model to underscore human nature) figure filled 

with ashes, coal, and dust incorporated into the 

layers of a mundane and industrial material 

made from raw corrugated cardboard. In terms 

of polit-myth, I question human mastery through 

his disappearance and dissolution. As mankind's 

creator, "Forethinker," and personification of 

civilization and quest for scientific knowledge, I 

suggest his death in my work. 

I extensively explore ancient myths and localities 

to raise awareness for Gaia, a concept that is not 

just defined as just a search for the clichéd idea of 

loss of nature or the traditional but problematic 

and essentialized sense of "caring mother earth." 

Gaia and her non-western and western relatives 

(Terra, Medusa, Incan Pachamama, Egyptian 

Gorgones, Wiccan Terra, Yoruban Oya, Navajo 

Spider Old-Woman) are chthonic entities to be 

excavated from rock strata. As Lucy Lippard 

(10) has noted, “[N]egative space can be more 

important than what’s constructed from its 

deported materials elsewhere. The gravel pit, like 

other mining holes, is the reverse image of the 

cityscape it creates—extraction in aid of erection.” 

Moreover, the concept of Gaia offers access to 

what Latour has referred to as the "critical zone" 

of our planet. Similarly, I suggest a completely 

different perception of our planet that is 

animated, inhabited, or distorted by other-worldly 

environments. They are re-launched by hybridmythical 

landscapes or multi-species creatures 


Prometheus Triptych, 2018-2020 

Acrylic and mixed media (layers of water-logged, wrung out, and unfolded sheets of corrugated cardboard). 

Images courtesy of Tom Petzwinkler. 


that remind us of friendly (or not so friendly) 

Gaia-related versions as a response to humanmade 

tectonic activities as new geological strata. 

I deliberately include narratives of extended Gaia 

versions and her remote relatives in my work— 

past and present. 

Divine deities (Gaia, Medusa) and "heroes" such 

as Perseus (in "Perseids") or "Prometheus" are 

embedded into metaphors of political landscapes 

concerning male authority, forcing a reading of 

the landscape (such as the disfiguring effects 

of culling natural and picturesque), thereby 

re-familiarizing the overlooked details of their 

everyday experience. 

As Haraway proposes with her analogies of 

"playing string figures" and the practice of 

"tentacular" figures, my large-scale formats allow 

me to experiment with mythic metaphors using 

generous painterly gestures, abrasive operations 

of destruction, disintegration, and reconstruction. 

I combine tattered textures of torn, shredded 

and crusted layers from corrugated cardboard 

combined with reclaimed man-made found 

objects from our top anthropogenic layer 

(concrete, cables, wires, industrial cleaning mops, 

as well as natural materials from geological strata 

(marble, clays, plaster, eggshells, gold). This forms 

an experimental tapestry of endless attempts 

of knitting between artistic practice, myth, and 

politics to produce a fabric of the world that can't 

or can be worn. 

In staged scenes filled to the brim with barren 

and lost spaces devitalized by multifaceted 

entanglement between other-worldly deities 

or science-fiction (post-) apocalyptic scenarios, 


Urban Layers - New York City explorations 

in my environments - photo of documented 

“findings”, dismantling housing, concrete blocks 

made from aggregate of mountain-top removal. 


I connect stories from the past to the ongoing 

extinction engraved into the Anthropocene 

era, by making kin and becoming friends with 

mythological creatures, revealing and excavating 

those who need to be revitalized and engaged— 

or buried—for change. 

Latour and Davis suggest that looking at earth 

from a different angle of ecologization creates 

a new perspective, different from opposing 

views between neo-conservatism and globalist 

modernism. Inspired by that idea, I excavate Gaia 

as an ecologically-relevant entity that connects 

with distinct mythological themes into a tapestry 

of either devastated, neglected, or exploited 

landscapes animated by ancient deities and myth. 

I find ways to understand Gaia as a delicate, 

vulnerable sphere that we collectively occupy. 

My adaptable approach reveals the collective 



Rape of Medusa, 2019 

Acrylic on corrugated cardboard, mixed media (commercial cleaning mop heads, 

incorporated into multilayered corrugated cardboard and packing paper), 

90x15x100” 



coherence with constant re-figurations of multigestures 

and layers that seemingly merge into a 

cohesive body of work as a metaphor of shared 

values and responsibilities. As a result, magic 

appears with a multi-leveled expression that 

emphasizes the vulnerability, preciousness, and 

urgency towards living and postponing ends to 

the future. 

My work exposes an underlying tale of 

environmental concerns embedded in 

tectonic activities that shape and change 

our landscapes over time and create a new 

geological Anthropocenic layer on top of all other 

strata, both human and geologic. In the 21st 

century, we are facing extortion, extinction, and 

environmental degradation paired with passive 

ignorance. We are responsible as collective 

players and must realize that all humans and nonhumans 

must be re-bound to Earth, aware, and 

take care of Earth with responsibility. I understand 

Gaia as local issues multiplied on a global level, 

informed by my travels to various places to 

experience and increase the complexity of the 

Gaia Rise concept. 

While constantly turning our planet into a cloaca, I 

sense the entanglement between dirty businesses 

and the planet's precarious condition in the 

specific environment. We experience Gaia as 

fragile and entirely out of balance, along with all 

atmospheric formations of climate change as an 

outrageous result of human activity. In history, 

Hesiod also describes Gaia as a very prolific, but 

also dangerous, fragile, and a violently cataclysmic 

power. Certainly, Gaia rises from deep time and 

history as a global phenomenon now in existence 

everywhere on Earth, requiring local and sitespecific 

explorations to understand the nature 

of Gaia. Using polit-myth to engage in "climate 

responsibility" and "ecologization" (Latour and 

Davis) and “composting” (Haraway and Kenney), 

my works are an attempt to decolonize the 

Anthropocene by unraveling time and place. By 

juxtaposing paintings of distinct mythological 

themes into a tapestry of either devastated, 

neglected, or exploited landscapes animated 

by Gaia and her close/far relatives, I reveal the 

humanity of both ourselves and our planet rooted 

in the deep past, in order to envision different 

futures after the Anthropocene. 

Works Cited 

Haraway, Donna, and Martha Kenney. “Anthropocene, 

Capitaloscene, Chthulhucene: Donna Haraway in Conversation 

with Martha Kenney.” Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters 

Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies, 

edited by Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, Open Humanities 

Press, 2015, 256-270. 

Haraway, Donna. “Staying with the Trouble: Anthropocene, 

Capitalocene, Chthulucene.” Anthopocene or Capitalocene? 

Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, edited by Jason 

Moore, PM Press, 2016, 34-76. 


Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016 

Latour, Bruno. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climate 

Regime. Polity Press, 2017. 

Latour Bruno, and Heather Davis. "Diplomacy in the Face 

of Gaia: Bruno Latour in Conversation with Heather Davis.” 

Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, 

Environments and Epistemologies, edited by Heather Davis and 

Etienne Turpin, Open Humanities Press, 2015, 43-56. 

Lippard, Lucy. Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land Use, 

Politics, and Art in the Changing West. The New Press, 2014. 

Nancy, Jean Luc and John Paul Ricco. “The Existence of the 

World is Always Unexpected: Jean Luc Nancy in conversation 

with John Paul Ricco.”Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among 

Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies, edited by 

Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, Open Humanities Press, 

2015, 85-92. 


Sloterdijk, Peter. “The Anthropocene: Process-State at the 

Edge of Geohistory?” Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among 

Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies, edited by 

Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, Open Humanities Press, 

2015, 327-340. 

Sloterdijk, Peter. Was geschah im 20. Jahrhundert?: Unterwegs 

zu einer Kritik der extremistischen Vernunft. Suhrkamp, 2016. 

BIO 

German-born artist Artemis Herber has exhibited in the U.S., 

Germany, the U.K., Italy, Portugal and Spain. Highlights include 

Kunstverein Paderborn, Munich Airport, Goethe-Institut, 

Spartanburg Art Museum, San Jose Museum of Art, National 

Trust’s Newark Park, Cheltenham Museum, and Albright-Knox 

Gallery. Solo exhibitions include Erratic Landscapes, MPA, 

Autochthon, Arlington Arts Center, Shifting Identities/Humanity 

in Nature, Montgomery College and Liminal States, Delaplaine 

Arts Center. Herber has also accomplished public art projects 

in Baltimore and Washington D.C. and engages in International 

Cultural Relations with NRW KULTURsekretariat. As Transatlantic 

Cultural Projects curator, Herber created Micro-Monuments, 

Center for Hellenic Studies of Harvard University, and Micro- 

Monuments II – Underground, International Arts&Artists at Hillyer. 

As former president of the Washington Sculptors Group, Herber 

created concepts for Art in Nature and land-use projects. Her 

research on the Anthropocene, embedded in the field of politmyth 

and experimental geography, has been deepened through 

residencies at Rensing Center, theCoLAB, London, and Skopelos 

Foundation of Arts, Greece. 




After Animals 

Jay R. Elliott 

The origins of the term “Anthropocene” lie in 

geology. Beginning in the 1980s, earth scientists 

argued that the eighteenth century inaugurated 

a distinct period in the history of our planet. 

They define this period by the massive humaninduced 

transformations witnessed over the past 

two centuries in the Earth’s planetary systems, 

including air, land, water, and climate. Similar 

definitions identify the Anthropocene in terms of 

the ongoing mass extinction and redistribution 

of plant and animal species; or in terms of 

the appearance of synthetic materials such as 

aluminum, concrete, and plastic that will persist 

in geological strata. 1 All of these definitions 

capture something of great importance about life 

in the Anthropocene, but they are constrained by 

the origins of the term in geology. They model 

the Anthropocene on earlier geologic eras, and 

define it by signatures analogous to those we 

use to define those eras, such as a reduction in 

biodiversity in the fossil record or the presence of 

novel elements in rock formations. In what may 

or may not be a hopeful fantasy, these definitions 

invite us to imagine paleontologists of the future 

uncovering our era, much as we have uncovered 

past eras of life on Earth, and discerning its 

boundaries geologically. 

1 

For an accessible introduction to the origins of the concept 

of the Anthropocene in geology, see Kolbert. Waters et al. provides 

a review of recent geological research on the Anthropocene. 

Elizabeth Povinelli criticizes geological conceptions of the 

Anthropocene on the grounds that they tend to reify oppositions 

between humanity and nature: see Povinelli 9-14. 

More recently, many have come to think of 

the Anthropocene rather differently: not as a 

geological stratum to be uncovered by future 

scientists, but rather as a condition we are 

living through here and now. 2 Yet the standard 

geological definitions aren’t well-suited to 

capturing the character of the Anthropocene as a 

lived experience. To craft a definition that comes 

closer to what living through the Anthropocene 

feels like, we might look to the transformation 

that recent centuries have wrought in the quality 

of human-animal relationships. Attending to our 

lives with animals in the Anthropocene shifts our 

attention away from the grand planetary scale of 

the geological definitions and toward the more 

intimate transformations that recent centuries 

have created in our daily lives. 

As a mascot to represent some of these 

transformations, I nominate in-vitro meat (IVM), 

the emerging technology in which animal cells 

are cultured in laboratories to create meat 

products in the absence of whole, living animals. 

This technology may strike us as bizarre, but it is 

a logical extension of our current relationships 

with animals. IVM lies at the end point of a 

process of transformation in human-animal 

relationships that began in industrializing 

Europe and the Americas, and then spread 

throughout much of the world over the course 

of the twentieth century. In this process, the 

2 

See Ghosh, Purdy, Vogel, Wakefield and the essays collected 

in Tsing et al. 


151

Attending to our lives with 

animals in the Anthropocene 

shifts our attention away from 

the grand planetary scale of 

the geological definitions 

and toward the more intimate 

transformations that recent 

centuries have created in our 

daily lives. 


lives of the domesticated animals we eat, in 

particular, have been radically altered: once at 

home with humans (as the term “domesticated” 

suggests), they have been isolated, confined, 

and subjected to ever-increasing demands of 

efficiency in industrial production. 3 Those of us in 

industrialized societies live with the effects of this 

transformation every day, and yet its character 

is obscure to us, because the memory of any 

other way of being with animals is becoming 

increasingly remote. But if we can regain 

something of this memory, we may enrich our 

understanding of the distinctive character of the 

Anthropocene as a lived experience, and clarify 

some of what would be required in order for us to 

imagine life beyond it. 

In recent decades, philosophers such as Peter 

Singer and animal advocacy organizations such as 

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) 

have framed influential critiques of the treatment 

of animals in industrial agriculture. Yet these 

critiques have too often failed to fundamentally 

contest the terms of the Anthropocene, as is 

shown by their full-throated advocacy of IVM. In 

order to resist the domination and manipulation 

of animal bodies at work in IVM, we need to 

move past these familiar modes of critique and 

recognize the ways they remain confined within 

the standpoint of the Anthropocene. With that 

aim in mind, I contrast Singer’s conception of 

animals as sentient beings entitled to moral 

consideration with alternative modes of thinking 

about human-animal relationships found in 

pre-modern and non-Western traditions. In 

these alternative modes, the central moral 

concept that shapes human attitudes toward 

3 

For an introduction to the legal and economic history of this 

process, see McLeod-Kilmurray. For a vivid literary depiction, 

see Highsmith. 

animals is not that of sentience but rather that 

of companionship. From this standpoint, the 

decisive fact about our relations with non-human 

animals is not that they are like us in certain ways 

(as Singer suggests), but rather that they are with 

us as our companions. It is this latter outlook that 

we need to cultivate, I propose, if we are to have 

an ethical ground on which to resist IVM and the 

logic of the Anthropocene more generally. 

In his 1980 essay “Why Look at Animals?,” John 

Berger wrote that the past two centuries have 

witnessed a process “by which every tradition 

which previously mediated between man and 

nature was broken.” “Before this rupture,” Berger 

writes, “animals constituted the first circle of 

what surrounded man… They were with man at 

the center of his world” (Berger 3). This intimacy 

between humans and animals, Berger reminds 

us, was not exclusively or even primarily a matter 

of utility in such matters as milk, meat, clothing 

and labor. To assume that animals have always 

appeared to human beings primarily as sources 

of useful products is to project a rather novel 

and parochial attitude onto other societies. In 

most civilizations throughout human history, 

animals have first of all “entered the imagination 

as messengers and stories” (Berger 4). In these 

stories, animals appear as kin, as teachers, and as 

mediators between humans and the wider world. 

In societies that are not captive to the modern 

divide between human beings and nature, 

animals appear as the close kin of human beings 

and as vital carriers of meaning through which 

the world becomes intelligible. Among the Nuer 

of South Sudan, for example, the ox is recognized 

not merely as a source of milk and meat but as 

“mother,” “sister,” and “friend.” 4 According to 

indigenous Hawai’ian tradition, humans know 

4 

From E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer, quoted on Berger 4. 


the ways of beaver, bears, and salmon because 

“our men were once married to them, and they 

acquired this knowledge from their animal 

wives.” 5 In Homer, Odysseus approaches the 

underworld through the ritual slaughter of 

animals, cutting their throats, burning their bodies 

and mixing their warm blood with the earth: 

Then I addressed the blurred and breathless 

dead, 

vowing to slaughter my best heifer for them 

before she calved, at home in Ithaka, 

and burn the choice bits on the altar fire; 

as for Teiresias, I swore to sacrifice 

a black lamb, handsomest of all our flock. 

Thus to assuage the nations of the dead 

I pledged these rites, then slashed the lamb and 

ewe, 

letting their black blood stream into the wellpit 

(Odyssey XI. 31-39). 6 

Only through animal sacrifice does Odysseus gain 

access to the ghosts below and their knowledge 

of his fate. 7 Even in this act of slaughter, ancient 

Greek culture expressed a profound form of 

respect: in the deaths of animals, the secrets of 

human life and death were revealed. The bodies 

of animals, with their blood, bones, skin, and hair, 

are recognized as sacred objects, and the killing of 

animals is practiced as a sacred act. 

Today this ancient experience of animals as 

messengers and mediators comes down to us in 

forms we often take for granted, from the signs 

of the zodiac to the lessons of animal fables 

5 

From Claude Lévi-Straus, The Savage Mind, quoted on Berger 

4. 

6 

Fitzgerald 186 

7 

For a history of human-animal relationships centered on the 

practice of animal sacrifice, see Bulliet. 

and proverbs. It persists above all in children’s 

literature, where our first lessons in how to be 

human, and even how to speak human languages, 

almost invariably come from animal characters. 

The roles that animals continue to play in our 

imagination remind us that human-animal 

relationships were not (and, in other societies, 

are not) so hierarchical and exploitative. Yet in 

societies dominated by industrial agriculture, 

these animal messengers have become wholly 

removed from the living reality of the animals we 

kill and eat; the animals on whom we rely every 

day occupy our imaginations less and less. 

As Berger explains, animals function as 

messengers to human beings fundamentally 

because human-animal relationships combine 

intimacy with difference. The possibilities of this 

relationship are revealed in the human-animal 

gaze, that is, when a human being and an animal 

are looking at each other. This reciprocal gaze 

occurs in a literal sense when human beings and 

animals live together in domestic intimacy. But 

it also takes a more metaphorical, though no 

less important, form in societies where stories 

about animals are among the basic ways in 

which human beings understand themselves 

and their world. In being seen by the animal, 

“man becomes aware of himself returning the 

look.” (Berger 5) Thus the human gaze onto the 

world discovers itself to be companionable in a 

particular way: “when [the human] is being seen by 

the animal, he is being seen as his surroundings 

are seen by him.” (Berger 5) In being seen by the 

animal, we human beings become aware that 

we are also seen, and seen by creatures who 

are other than us, yet radically proximate to us. 

As Berger puts it, the animal thus represents “a 

companionship offered to the loneliness of man 


as a species.” (Berger 6) This companionship 

is essentially different from that offered by 

any human individual or group; for the animal 

reveals humanity as such to stand in need of 

companionship. 

The more recent history of human-animal 

relationships in industrialized societies has 

been one of the gradual erosion of this original 

companionship. As Berger puts it, “In the last two 

centuries, animals have gradually disappeared.” 

(Berger 11) This claim might sound surprising: the 

numbers of animals raised and slaughtered every 

year remain mind-bogglingly large. According 

to the United Nations Food and Agriculture 

Organization, in 2017 the global population of 

chickens alone was approximately 22.8 billion. 

Yet in Berger’s sense, animals have indeed 

been disappearing in the eyes of many human 

societies: that is, their lives occupy less and less 

of our consciousness. Through the methods 

of modern factory farming, animals have been 

reduced to machines for the production of animal 

products. Their lives and deaths are hidden 

from view, their products presented to us neatly 

wrapped with scarcely a whiff of blood. We eat 

these animals, but their gaze is not on us, and we 

find in them no companions. 8 

I propose that we think of the Anthropocene as 

marked precisely by the absence of this sort of 

companionship, and by the resulting loneliness 

of the human as a species. In the equivocal 

triumph of the Anthropocene, humans have 

broken their dependence on everything that once 

seemed to constitute their natural and inevitable 

8 

For a range of attempts to articulate the idea of human-animal 

companionship in a contemporary context, see Cavell, Coetzee, 

Derrida, Diamond, Haraway, and Hearne. These writers 

tend to find companionship in pets or working animals such as 

horses, or even in wild animals, but not in the animals we eat. 

world, including other animals. We have instead 

come to believe in our ability to dominate and 

manipulate the elements of this given world as 

so much raw material for our capitalist fantasies. 

For all its power and success, this project has left 

humanity profoundly isolated, at the center of 

a shapeless world in which everything outside 

of human consciousness appears equally 

remote, manipulable and dead. 9 In a break with 

the historical experience whereby the human 

recognized the animal as a companion “at the 

center of his world,” in the Anthropocene (as the 

name itself suggests) the human is alone. 10 

Today our societies are saturated with 

discourses of animal consciousness, animal 

welfare and animal rights. Yet the irony is that 

these discourses do not show us a way past 

the limitations of the Anthropocene; instead 

they serve to confirm them. Peter Singer is 

among the most prominent modern advocates 

for animals; he argues that animals possess 

consciousness, can feel pleasure and pain, and 

therefore deserve moral consideration. In his 

1975 classic, Animal Liberation, Singer argues 

that “all animals are equal” (Singer 1) insofar as 

they all possess “the capacity for suffering and 

enjoyment” (Singer 7). He begins from human 

consciousness, taken as an evident fact, and then 

infers from certain analogies between humans 

and animals (behavioral, physiological, and 

genetic) that animals must also share at least 

9 

The canonical formulation of this worldview is Descartes, 

parts 4 and 5. 

10 

From Berger’s perspective, we can see this name as ironic: 

the way of life it names, far from representing a fulfillment of 

the human, involves a diminishment of it, since the fullness of 

human being involves acknowledgment of the animal gaze. 

Compare this criticism of the term “Anthropocene” with that 

in Haraway, who objects to the term on the grounds that our 

present crisis requires a radical decentering of the human. By 

contrast, Berger reminds us that the human can be (and historically 

has been) both at the center of its world and in need 

of animal companionship. 


some aspects of this human consciousness. “If 

a being suffers,” Singer argues, “there can be 

no moral justification for refusing to take that 

suffering into consideration. No matter what 

the nature of the being, the principle of equality 

requires that its suffering be counted equally with 

the like suffering… of any other being” (Singer 8). 

For Singer, human beings and other animals are 

analogous, in the sense that both are capable of 

suffering. If we are committed to seeing human 

suffering as morally significant, then, Singer 

argues, we are required in consistency to regard 

animal suffering as morally significant also. If 

we do not, then we are speciesists, by which 

Singer means that we arbitrarily take difference 

of species into account in choosing to care about 

the suffering of humans but not that of other 

animals. On this basis, Singer has argued that we 

should boycott and resist many forms of human 

domination over animals, including factory 

farming as well as animal testing in science and 

industry. 

Singer’s argument appears to show us a way out 

of the Anthropocene. By affirming the fact of 

animal consciousness and its moral significance, 

Singer seems to set limits to the human 

domination of other animals, and to reject the 

idea that humans occupy a unique, isolated place 

in the universe. But this appearance is deceptive, 

as we can begin to see by comparing Singer’s 

way of thinking with the traditions described by 

Berger. In the way of thinking Berger describes, 

the animal appears as the companion of the 

human. The significance of animals for humans 

is thus seen as a basic fact about human life. By 

contrast, for Singer the animal is analogous to 

the human. Humans and animals are alike in 

certain respects, but this similarity has nothing 

to do with intimacy. Their lives are essentially 

parallel, precisely as our lives might be parallel 

to those of a sentient Martian. Singer’s type of 

argument could proceed in exactly the same way 

if it were being made about Martians, or indeed 

if it were being made by Martians. 11 In other 

words, the long and intimate companionship 

between humans and animals plays no role in 

these arguments; it is displaced in favor of an 

abstract idea of similarity or genetic kinship. 

The fact that animals see us, and that we take 

their gaze as addressed to us, has no work to 

do here. From Singer’s point of view, animal 

consciousness appears as an addition alongside 

human consciousness, but not as an essential 

companion of the human species. As a result, 

Singer’s conception of animal sentience provides 

no essential relief to the loneliness at the heart of 

the Anthropocene. 

The emergence of IVM throws the difference 

between these two attitudes toward animals 

into stark relief. 12 There are currently thirtythree 

companies, based primarily in North 

America, working to develop lab-based meat. 13 

By separating the production of meat products 

from the lives of animals, IVM promises to vastly 

increase the efficiency of meat production and 

to vastly decrease its environmental impact. 

Advocates of IVM also argue that it would greatly 

decrease the animal suffering involved in meat 

production. In order to secure these benefits, IVM 

would have to essentially replace the production 

of meat via whole animals; as a result, the 

11 

I owe this analogy to Diamond. 

12 

Berger did not explicitly comment on IVM. But he anticipated 

it in his observation that in advanced forms of factory farming, 

animals were becoming not even machines in the processes 

of generating animal products, but merely “raw material” for 

those processes. (Berger 13) 

13 

See Friend. 


domesticated animals currently used in meat 

production would simply cease to exist, at least 

in anything remotely resembling their current 

numbers. As Tad Friend notes in a recent article 

chronicling the emerging IVM industry, “meat is 

wildly inefficient. Because cattle use their feed 

not only to grow muscle but also to grow bones 

and a tail and to trot around and to think their 

mysterious thoughts, their energy-conversion 

efficiency—the number of calories their meat 

contains compared with the number they take 

to make it—is a woeful one per cent” (Friend 45). 

By removing these inefficiencies, IVM promises 

to reduce the threats that a meat-intensive 

diet poses to human health, animals and the 

environment. 

According to industry analysts, IVM may occupy 

as much as thirty-five percent of the total market 

for meat products by 2040. 14 For now, the 

project of IVM remains largely a fantasy. It is still 

technologically dependent on the conventional 

meat industry, since its favored nutritional bath 

for culturing animal cells involves fetal bovine 

serum (FBS), which is extracted from pregnant 

cows during slaughter. One of the most advanced 

companies, Just, Inc., has successfully developed 

an IVM chicken nugget, but it is hardly competitive 

with animal-based meat production: each IVM 

nugget currently costs around $50 to produce. 

Thus far IVM researchers have succeeded in 

reproducing only the texture of ground meat 

products, such as chicken nuggets or hamburger. 

The technology required to truly displace the 

conventional meat industry, which would require 

replicating the full range of familiar cuts of meat, 

from steak and pork chops to rib roast and leg of 

lamb, may be decades away. 

14 

See Friend. 

But as a fantasy, IVM captures the spirit of the 

Anthropocene with remarkable clarity. It responds 

to the multitude of threats posed to human 

beings and the Earth by industrial agriculture. 

But it does so by doubling down on the habits of 

mind that created those threats to begin with: 

the tendency to isolate human consciousness 

from the world and to render more and more of 

that world into a resource to be manipulated and 

controlled. In place of the “inefficient” process of 

producing meat via whole animals, it proposes to 

extract the parts of animals that are of greatest 

value to human beings, such as their muscle 

tissue, and to render them wholly subservient 

to human purposes. At the same time, it makes 

the scope of human consciousness smaller and 

smaller, by separating the act of eating meat from 

any attempt to imagine animal life. Only such a 

reduced consciousness could look at the bones, 

tails, and “mysterious thoughts” of cows and 

see merely a “wildly inefficient” mechanism for 

the production of meat. In IVM, the business of 

producing meat is separated even from the act of 

killing. 15 Nothing could be further from Odysseus’s 

sense of the animal’s death as a sacred event 

that brings us closer to the mysteries of human 

life and death. Even if widespread use of IVM in 

place of factory farming would reduce animal 

suffering, it would do nothing to restore our sense 

of animals as messengers and companions. 

The desolation at the heart of modern animal 

advocates’ conception of animal consciousness is 

laid bare by their wholehearted embrace of IVM. 

Singer has heralded IVM as “all pluses and no 

minuses” (Specter). His advocacy of IVM is not the 

product of momentary thoughtlessness; it flows 

15 

I speak here of the fantasy of IVM, not the reality, which, as 

noted above, remains tied to slaughter in the extraction of 

FBS. I thank Melanie Armstrong for pointing this out. 


from the fundamental logic of his argument. Since 

IVM lacks consciousness, for Singer it raises no 

ethical problems. Nor is Singer’s advocacy of IVM 

idiosyncratic in the context of the contemporary 

animal-rights movement. PETA has offered a 

million-dollar prize to the first group that creates 

“an in-vitro chicken-meat product that has a taste 

and texture indistinguishable from real chicken 

flesh.’’ (Specter) Without a trace of irony, Ingrid 

Newkirk, President of PETA, calls the group’s 

support for IVM a “no-brainer.” She explains her 

support of IVM as follows: “If people are unwilling 

to stop eating animals by the billions, then what 

a joy to be able to give them animal flesh that 

comes without the horror of the slaughterhouse, 

the transport truck, and the mutilations, pain, 

and suffering of factory farming” (Specter). In 

the language of advocates such as Newkirk, the 

fantasy of IVM combines vast optimism about 

human technical prowess with pitifully low 

expectations for human moral imagination. In the 

name of animal welfare, she invites us to dream 

of a future in which we continue to eat “animal 

flesh,” while doing away with animals and their 

“mysterious thoughts” altogether. The eating of 

meat is thus finally, completely decoupled from 

human-animal companionship. For thinkers and 

activists in the mold of Singer and Newkirk, IVM 

is justified – indeed, imperative – as a way to 

reduce animal suffering. Their reasoning may 

seem to represent a brake on the Anthropocene’s 

devastation of human-animal relationships, but 

in fact it intensifies it. Rather than affirming the 

value of animals’ lives, it reinforces the idea that 

animals – with their bones, tails and mysterious 

thoughts – are an inconvenient and ultimately 

dispensable stage in the processing of meat 

products. In the fantasy of IVM – a fantasy 

shared by animal advocates such as Singer and 

Newkirk – human life, including meat-eating, can 

carry on just as it is, without animals. If animal 

consciousness seems to present an impediment 

to meat-eating, then the obvious solution is 

simply to do away with animal consciousness. 

Thus the fact of animal consciousness becomes 

an invitation to human ingenuity rather than a call 

for ethical reflection. 

Attempts such as Singer’s to alleviate the ravages 

of the Anthropocene instead end up repeating it. 

Is there any way past it, then? We have reasons to 

doubt it that go beyond the failure of Singer and 

company. Berger invites us to recall alternative 

ways of imagining human-animal relations. But 

he also presents them as essentially distant 

and lost: for him, these ways of thinking reside 

in traditions that, among those of us living in 

industrial societies, have been irreparably broken. 

It might seem, then, that we are left with two 

unappealing alternatives: on the one hand, the 

techno-optimism of IVM, or, on the other, the 

pessimism of mourning and nostalgia for lost 

modes of human-animal intimacy. In reality, these 

alternatives represent two sides of the same coin: 

neither imagines a meaningful future for humananimal 

relationships. 

I myself do not see a clear way forward. But 

it does seem to me that, as we try to imagine 

such a way, we might begin by renewing some 

of the wisdom at work in the traditions that 

Berger describes. I suggest two ways in which 

we might profitably revive for our moment the 

idea of animals as companions and messengers. 

First, Berger suggests that we understand the 

idea of human-animal companionship in terms 

of the thought that humans see themselves in 

being seen by animals. Can we once again come 


Can we once again come to 

see ourselves as animals see 

us? If we try, here is what 

I imagine we might see: a 

sibling, a partner, a friend, 

but one who has become oddly 

estranged; one who still 

depends as much as ever on 

daily communion with animal 

bodies, but whose imaginative 

feel for the meaning of that 

communion has become more and 

more impoverished and dim... 


to see ourselves as animals see us? If we try, 

here is what I imagine we might see: a sibling, a 

partner, a friend, but one who has become oddly 

estranged; one who still depends as much as 

ever on daily communion with animal bodies, 

but whose imaginative feel for the meaning 

of that communion has become more and 

more impoverished and dim; an animal with a 

terrible passion for freedom that has led it to 

withdraw into increasing isolation; one who, in 

its loneliness, vainly consoles itself with fantasies 

of power, fantasies it plays out in the theatres it 

calls “science” and “technology.” This is the sort of 

bitter and sobering self-knowledge that I suspect 

we might encounter in the gaze of animals today. 

is increasingly alienated from our bodies and 

world. Just as we have reduced the animal to 

pure body, so also we have reduced ourselves to 

pure consciousness. This pure consciousness is 

confident in its ability to think, to manipulate and 

to engineer its world: it needs no companions. 

But it is also disembodied, ghostly, homeless 

and lonely. We have been torn by the diremption 

of mind from body and world just as much as 

animals have, and by the very same processes. 16 

If we can come to see ourselves as sharing the 

fate of animals in this way, we might begin to hear 

the message that animals still carry for us and to 

rediscover the meaning of companionship: that 

their fate is our fate as well. 

If we restore the idea of animals as companions 

in this sense, we might see that they reveal 

ourselves to ourselves in another way as well. For 

if the animal is indeed “together with man at the 

center of his world,” then we are companions not 

merely in being alike in certain ways, but more 

so in sharing a fate. Over the past two centuries 

of capitalism and industrialization, what has 

been the fate of animals? An ever-increasing 

subordination of their lives to the demands of 

production, beginning with confinement and 

proceeding through the manipulation of their 

reproduction, growth, movement, rest, diet, 

habits, relationships, and ecologies. We can think 

of this process as one of the increasing separation 

of the animal body from consciousness, a process 

that now culminates in IVM and the promise 

of animal flesh with no consciousness at all. 

Our fate over the same period has not been so 

different: we find ourselves increasingly subject to 

routines artificially determined by the demands of 

productivity. We suffer an inverse process to the 

one animals have undergone: our consciousness 

Acknowledgment 

This essay is deeply indebted to conversations 

with many people, especially Hunter Robinson 

Efrat, who has been a student, friend, and partner 

in conversations about animals and IVM for 

much of the last decade. As interlocutors, critics, 

and companions in thinking about animals and 

human-animal relationships, I also owe special 

thanks to Zed Adams, Thomas Bartscherer, 

Daniel Berthold, Krista Caballero, Alice Crary, Lori 

Gruen, Susan Merriam, Melanie Nicholson, Yuka 

Suzuki, Chiara Ricciardone, Kari Weil, and all of 

my students in PHIL 140 and 328. Many helpful 

suggestions for revisions to the manuscript 

came from the members of the Bard History of 

Capitalism Working Group as well as Melanie 

Armstrong, Jennifer Richter and the editors at 

Mapping Meaning. 

16 

Consideration of the shared fate of humans and other 

animals under capitalism should also lead us to see points of 

intersection between the abuse of animals in industrial agriculture 

and the degradation of labor: see Blanchette 2020. 


Works Cited 

Henry Holt and Company, 2014. 

Berger, John. “Why Look at Animals?” About Looking, Vintage, 

1980. 

Blanchette, Alex. Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized 

Life, and the “Factory” Farm, Duke University Press, 2020. 

Bulliet, Richard W. Hunters, Herders and Hamburgers: The Past 

and Future of Human-Animal Relationships, Columbia University 

Press, 2005. 

Cavell, Stanley. “Companionable Thinking.” Philosophy and 

Animal Life, edited by Cary Wolfe, Columbia University Press, 

2008. 

Coetzee, J. M. The Lives of Animals, edited by Amy Gutmann, 

Princeton University Press, 1991. 

Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am, edited by 

Marie-Louise Mallet, translated by David Wills, Fordham 

University Press, 2008. 

Descartes, René. Discourse on the Method. The Philosophical 

Writings of Descartes, volume 1, edited and translated by 

John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, 

Cambridge University Press, 1985. 

McLeod-Kilmurray, Heather. “Commoditizing Nonhuman 

Animals and Their Consumers: Industrial Livestock Production, 

Animal Welfare and Ecological Justice.” Bulletin of Science, 

Technology and Society vol. 32, 2012, 71-85. 

Povinelli, Elizabeth A. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism, 

Duke University Press, 2016. 

Purdy, Jedediah. After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene, 

Harvard University Press, 2015. 

Specter, Michael. “Test-Tube Burgers.” New Yorker, May 16, 

2011, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/23/testtube-burgers 

Tsing, Anna and Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan and Nils 

Bubandt, editors. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and 

Monsters of the Anthropocene, University of Minnesota Press, 

2017. 

Vogel, Stephen. Thinking Like a Mall: Environmental Philosophy 

after the End of Nature, MIT Press, 2015. 

Wakefield, Stephanie. Anthropocene Back Loop: Experimentation 

in Unsafe Operating Space, Open Humanities Press, 2020. 

Diamond, Cora. “Eating Meat and Eating People.” Philosophy 

vol. 53, 1978, 465-479 

Fitzgerald, Robert, translator. Homer: The Odyssey, Farrar, 

Straus, and Giroux, 1961. 

Friend, Tad. “Can a Burger Help Solve Climate Change?” 

New Yorker, Sept. 23, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/ 

magazine/2019/09/30/can-a-burger-help-solve-climate-change 

Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the 

Unthinkable, University of Chicago Press, 2016. 

Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto, Prickly 

Paradigm Press, 2003. 


Chthulucene, Duke University Press, 2016. 

Hearne, Vicki. Adam’s Task, Skyhorse Publishing, 1986. 

Highsmith, Patricia. “The Day of Reckoning.” The Animal-Lover’s 

Book of Beastly Murder, William Heineman, Ltd, 1975. 

Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, 

Waters, C., et al., “The Anthropocene is Functionally and 

Stratigraphically Distinct from the Holocene.” Science vol. 351, 

no. 6269, 2016, 137, DOI: 10.1126/science.aad2622 

Bio 

Jay R. Elliott is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bard College, 

where he is also an affiliated member of the Classical Studies and 

Medieval Studies programs, and director of the Thinking Animals 

Initiative. He is the author of Character (Bloomsbury, 2017) and an 

editor of The Norton Anthology of Western Philosophy, After Kant: 

The Analytic Tradition (Norton, 2018) and Diogenes Laertius: The 

Lives of Eminent Philosophers (Oxford, 2018). He is also a regular 

contributor to revenantquarterly.org. Topics he has taken up in 

recent work include: the concept of character in ethics, psychology, 

and literature; problems of realism in ethics and aesthetics; the 

future of human-animal relationships; and the place of history 

and biography in philosophy. He is currently working on a book 

that recovers Aristotle’s conception of character as an alternative 

to modern theories of agency and the self. 



Don’t Pave Paradise 

Rosalind Murray and Art Mooney 

Left | Information Campaign gets up 

and running in 2014. 

Image courtesy of the artists. 

The following article is an adaptation of a 

conversation presented at Walking’s New 

Movements Conference at University of 

Plymouth, Plymouth, U.K. between the artists 

Rosalind Murray and Art Mooney about our 

collaboration to try turn the system against itself 

to protect the River Barrow SAC (Special Area of 

Conservation) in Ireland. Our work led a Planning 

Inspector from An Bord Pleanála, the Irish 

Planning Board, to walk the River Barrow six times 

between 2018-2019 before making a final decision 

on a development called the Barrow Blueway 

Proposal. This article in-cludes comments from 

the Planning Inspector’s Report. 


RM: (Singing) 

Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what 

you’ve got ‘till it’s gone 

Big Yellow Taxi, 1970, Joni Mitchell 

C-BUG, or the “Carlow Barrow Users Group,” is 

an artists’ collaboration between Art Mooney and 

myself, Ros Murray. We began to work together 

and with our community in 2014, to advocate 

against development plans being proposed by the 

Irish cross-border State agency called “Waterways 

Ireland” for the country’s second longest river, the 

River Barrow. 

AM: The Planning Inspector’s Report ABP 301245- 

18 REF1718 came on the 5th of April 2019 and 

refused planning for the development along the 

river. During the last five years of really hard work 

on the part of C-BUG, people’s general attitude 

to the environment and the environmental crisis 

has really taken center stage. This controversy is 

part of a larger question of whether we can view 

ourselves as part of nature and whether we can 

have an economy that works in harmony with our 

environment rather than trying to dominate our 

environment, a question which is more in play 

than ever. 

RM: Now, in July 2020, the value of our efforts 

to engage in a process of envisioning the future 

is paying dividends, because the life of the River 

Barrow is flourishing as it offers a calm yet wild 

escape during the pandemic. 

AM: In 2014, Ros and I went to a meeting called 

by Carlow man Michael Whelan to discuss his 

concerns about the plans launched to develop the 

50 miles of towpath along the River Barrow into a 

gravel cycle track to attract tourists. 

I went to a Waterways Ireland open day, run by 

the people who look after the inland waterways 

in Ireland. They were promotors of this 

development called the Barrow Blueway Proposal 

which was aimed at attracting National and 

European bicycle tourists as the new gold. As I 

talked to the Waterways Ireland team, it was quite 

clear that there were numerous flaws in both the 

engineered proposal that they outlined and also 

the logic behind the development. When I saw the 

technical drawings, I could tell I was being lied to, 

as the details couldn’t possibly match the reality 

that I knew on the ground. That firmed up my 

decision to get involved. 

RM: I got involved in protecting the river because 

I grew up a field away and spent my time playing 

on the towpath, dipping in the water, and 

collecting wildflowers. These days I reflect and 

make art there, so it’s like my studio. My initial 

feeling was that I didn’t want to put my head 

above the parapet. I went for a walk and thought 

about how I feel in the intimate environs of the 

river, and about the magic of seeing a kingfisher 

or an otter. It’s my home! I realized if I didn’t get 

involved, it would be gone; I would not be able 

to complain about it afterwards if I didn’t engage 

with the politics of the situation. 

Joni Mitchell’s lyric, “Don’t it always seem to go 

that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘till it’s gone” 

about the horrors of unnecessary development 

came to mind, and we adopted the slogan 

“Don’t Pave Paradise,” adding “Repair, Protect, & 

Maintain The Barrow Track” and “Market What We 

have.” We went from there. 


C-BUG Survey the Barrow Track in Carlow, 2016. Image courtesy of the artists. 

AM: Our idea of paradise was not an untouched 

place, however; we recognized the river was 

already a highly-mediated site for human 

recreation and industry. From 1700-1794, a huge 

investment of labor and finance transformed the 

River Barrow into a navigation system to link the 

South East of Ireland with Dublin using a series 

of 26 lateral canals and a towpath 50 miles in 

length. The Barrow Track or Barrow Line was in 

use as an industrial navigation until the 1960s. It 

was considered sophisticated technology in its 

day during the first Industrial Revolution, but now 

it’s a local walkway designated as a Special Area 

of Conservation, or SAC, under the EU Habitats 

Directive. 

RM: The main trick that Waterways Ireland 

were trying was to say that the pathway itself 

wasn’t part of the SAC; instead, it was just the 

access path to the SAC. The Special Area of 

Conservation was on each side of the path, but 

did not include it. So the walk wasn’t actually 

part of that ecosystem at all, it simply allowed 

humans and machinery access to the SAC. This 

rhetorical trick moved beyond separating people 

from nature, to further segment what would be 

defined as “nature”. More importantly, such a 

narrative would allow the developers to say that 

the protective umbrella of policies which applied 

in the SAC did not apply to the path, and identifying 

this part of the problem led us to find ways to 


show the towpath was not separate. 

AM: One strategy was to highlight that 50 miles of 

path translates to 281,653 cubic meters of grass 

habitat, as a planning consultant pointed out to 

us. On each side of the path there is a riparian 

verge which should be the same size again; this 

would amount to 563,306 cubic meters of habitat 

forming the life blood of the river. The riparian 

way is the connective tissue that allows migration 

of species along the river corridor, and this is 

where the bugs live. 

These bugs feed the fish, birds, and mammals 

that make up the ecosystem of the river. The 

plants that are treated as weeds elsewhere in 

our environment are allowed to flourish along 

the path, and they are the real bug hotel. This 

development reflects the wider attitude that 

humans have to our environment, that it is 

separate from and lesser than our needs. This 

calls into question much bigger questions of the 

Anthropocene. We know there’s no environment 

which is not affected by humanity anymore, just 

like the river and towpath, but can we allow space 

for the rest of nature to flourish along with us? 

RM: Continuing to plan the future in ways that 

make hard distinctions between humans and 

nature, as if our actions are without consequence 

to the whole web of life, is a problem. One of the 

first things we did was write submissions to the 

Carlow County Development Plan to make the 

River Barrow a priority in the plan and to note the 

impact ecological crisis might have on our locality. 

These additions to the policy for our county 

became important later as we went through the 

planning process. 

AM: After making posters, a petition, and starting 

to lobby politically, we worked out that the main 

barrier was lack of accessibility in the planning 

process. We had to learn a new language, the 

language of planning, development, and policy, to 

become part of that conversation. 

RM: We ended up being called C-BUG as a 

strategy to get into Carlow Council chamber to 

talk about the discrepancies we had seen in the 

proposal. One of our main concerns was that 

the Council adjudicating the planning of the 

development had also been involved in the idea 

for the development, which was a conflict of interest. 

We were refused a request to present our 

research because another group with a name 

similar had already presented. The Acting Chief 

Executive of Carlow County Council said we had 

already been heard. To get around this I came up 

with the name “Carlow Barrow Users Group,” a 

really memorable name! A Councilor advocated 

for our request and we got in to present our 

information to the council. Shortened to C-BUG, 

our name also has a relationship to gaming 

language, where “C-Bug” is a move which allows 

the player to aim, crouch, and shoot faster; this 

was apt as it reflected our tactical approach from 

the start. 

AM: However, we were worried that if we just 

got into direct protest we were not going to stop 

the development, as we had seen the Occupy 

movement entering the conversation too late, and 

failing to achieve tangible outcomes with protest 

only. We decided instead to use our research 

skills that we had developed in art college 

with our accumulated local and professional 

knowledge to try turn the system against itself. 

As the Carlow Barrow Users Group, or C-BUG, we 


anded ourselves gently and as unmemorably as 

possible so the construct of an advocating group 

could remain fluid. We researched hundreds of 

documents, shared them with other groups and 

asked those groups and community members 

to share their information with us. We ended up 

getting this open framework going, hoping that 

we would be able to affect the planning process at 

the decision stage. We were not going to win this 

fight by chaining ourselves to trees but we could 

by influencing policy. 

RM: We met a man at an event organized to 

raise some money and he told us how to go 

about doing proper Freedom of Information 

(FOI) letters. He explained that we had to FOI 

everybody who was involved, all the County 

Councils, Waterways Ireland, The Irish Tourist 

Board, and any state bodies who might be 

involved. We did this and got back a huge volume 

of information. We had to go through the lot and 

cross-reference the documents and find the bits 

people deliberately left out of their FOI returns. 

particularly in relation to the environment. 

RM: It wasn’t only local knowledge that was 

being ignored. In the FOI material, one County 

Council had included an engineer’s report from 

the steering committee that none of the other 

County Councils or State Agencies involved had 

included. This engineer said “The project uses 

the U.K. provision for cyclists which is generally 

taken as the worst benchmark in Europe. It 

seems somewhat bizarre that the worst in Europe 

rather than the best should be the model for 

Ireland.” The engineer was an avid cyclist, and he 

flatly said German cyclists aren’t going to come 

to use a substandard cycle track, based on U.K. 

Sustrans specifications, and this development 

will not increase use by general cyclists either. He 

particularly highlighted that data on the habits of 

female cyclists show they want to cycle side-byside, 

and this development wasn’t wide enough. 

It really questioned the premise of accessibility 

being touted for the development, leading us to 

question what the actual goal of the project was. 

AM: Through the FOI process, we got the 

feedback from the surveys Waterways Ireland 

had carried out at their open days and online 

questionnaires from interested parties. 

Waterways Ireland had published in the newspapers 

that the local community were fully in 

support of their plan. When we studied the raw 

survey responses we could see that 83% of the 

people surveyed online and questioned at the 

open days had put in negative comments about 

the plan. These surveys were just a tick box 

exercise rather than any kind of influential collection 

of data that would alter the development. 

This type of tick box was repeated again and 

again when it came to the planning document, 

AM: There were many problems that were 

highlighted in the engineer’s documents, from 

the surface proposed to the cost of maintaining 

this surface. Further, it would take the ecosystem 

seven years to recover from installing a surface 

that would at a maximum survive 10-12 years. 

Moreover, it would only last that long if the 

river didn’t wash it away when flooding. In our 

presentation to Carlow County Council, we made 

graphs and showed photos of these flaws and 

of the false survey information from the public 

engagement process but got little reaction from 

the Council Executive. 


Above | The River Barrow towpath 2020. Image courtesy of the artists. 

Planning Inspectors Report: “[I]t cannot be 

concluded beyond reasonable scientific doubt that 

sections of the proposed development proposed to 

be developed with an unbound surface within an 

identified flood zone, individually or in combination 

with other plans or projects, would not have an 

adverse effect on the integrity of the River Barrow.“ 

RM: I found the original specifications for the 

towpath in the local library, in a book written by 

the engineer William Chapman in 1789, titled 

“Ways of Perfecting the Barrow Navigation”. It 

detailed the trials and tribulations of engineering 

and building the navigation system, specifically 

the towpath, which took one hundred years 

to complete. It was designed so that even if it 

flooded a number of times a year, the surface of 

spit sod would survive. The grass surface was an 

engineering decision to mitigate against flooding, 

and it also held the banks together, which were 

made of a special clay called “puddle.” It obviously 

worked, as the towpath was there 250 years later 

with little maintenance. 

Our research showed that the change of surface 

from grass to gravel that Waterways Ireland’s 

plan advocated wasn’t just an aesthetic change, 

it would adversely affect the integrity of the 

structure. Technical experts say you shouldn’t 

put a gravel-type of surface in an area prone to 

flooding; it gets dirty and slippery when it rains, 

and it will wash out into the river when it floods. 

We were able to show the problems created 

by documenting a section of gravel path that 

Waterways Ireland had laid one year previously, 

which had to be maintained and changed a 

number of times; it was still in bad shape. Apart 

from cutting, grass doesn’t need heavy maintenance, 

and it recovers quickly after flooding. 

Planning Inspectors Report: “The submissions 

by Art Mooney and Rosalind Murray note how the 

original design of the towpath was undertaken to 

take account for the flooding and was designed 


with a 12” spit sod surface that is hardwearing and 

resilient to flooding. The design is contended to be 

optimal in terms of a durable hardwearing finish.” 

AM: Importantly, Waterways Ireland said redlisted, 

or endangered, species like otters and 

kingfishers did not live in the bank of the towpath, 

but we compiled the data from the community 

showing where they lived along the path, facing 

the river or the back drain. Waterways Ireland 

said that the river did not flood often, that canals 

did not flood at all, and when it did flood the 

current wasn’t strong enough to wash out the 

surface. We got photographs and video from 

the public of flooded canal sections where the 

fast-flowing water gobbled up the banks in 

frighteningly short time. Ironically, at one point 

during their work to fix a test stretch of their 

gravel surface which was barely installed a year 

before, their large equipment got flooded in. 

RM: During the process, Waterways Ireland said 

and wrote that they were the experts with the 

information that this proposal should be judged 

by. They circulated information bites called 

“Barrow Facts” on their own social media. They 

also put these “facts” out through the local tourist 

board. Barrow Fact #1 said “The Barrow Way has 

a manmade surface” and this was accompanied 

by an old black and white photograph to prove 

the towpath was always paved. However, one 

local sat up all night searching provenance for 

the image online and found it was not a historic 

photograph of the River Barrow, it was a recent 

photograph of a historic re-enactment taken 

on Devon’s Great Western Canal in the U.K. and 

doctored to look old. This debacle ended up in the 

national and international press. 

One thing we did as C-BUG was to issue a 

rallying cry that community knowledge should be 

counted as “expert” data; “We are the experts!” 

For four years people sent us photographs 

and information through a Facebook page that 


Michael Whelan set up called “Save the Barrow 

Track.” We received documentation of flooding, 

path widths, potholes, wash outs and breaches 

along the towpath, species that were present and 

their numbers, and a whole range of information 

which we re-shared, and also compiled it in our 

numerous planning objections. We also digested 

the quality of information and provided planning 

language for people to include in their own 

planning objections to development. 

AM: Waterways Ireland tried to say that 

objections in the community were coming 

from an “elite” group, but the truth was very 

different. The river is a truly democratic space, 

used more by people who may not be in regular 

employment, the elderly or retired, people 

recovering from illness, old and new nationals, 

as well as visitors, fishers, boaters, cyclists, and 

people who love walking. The fact that we as 

C-BUG were able to make connection between 

different users was the reason we were able to 

win. 

RM: C-BUG worked with “Save the Barrow Track” 

in the north of the county with a large online 

community through Facebook, “Save the Barrow 

Line“ with Olivia O’Leary, Cliona O’Connell and 

a whole community in the south of Carlow, and 

with many others inside and outside our own 

county. With the work of all the groups, we got 

over 700 objections lodged into our local County 

Council, which is the highest recorded number of 

Right | The River Barrow towpath 

flooded at Carlow Town, 

Ireland, 2018. 





objections to any plan in the county, by far. 

AM: At one stage, we also needed to get support 

from experts to verify the local knowledge. We 

managed to get planning consultants who helped 

us highlight what was relevant and gave very 

important game-playing advice and insights. 

We were helped by hydrologists, environmental 

scientists, and ecologists, locally and nationally. 

“Save the Barrow Line” had another group 

of experts, and we were able to cross-pollinate 

information in the objections. 

RM: Scott-Cawley, who are considered one of the 

top environmental consultants in the country, 

came on board to help us with a report. The 

ecological details in this report backed up the 

information that local people said, regarding the 

many endangered species in the SAC, including 

red-listed species like the otter, whorl snail, pearl 

mussels, and the kingfisher. 

The ecological report also highlighted 

that Waterways Ireland’s surveys for the 

Environmental Impact Statement were not 

sufficient. Parts of the river system had not been 

surveyed, some were desktop or old surveys, 

some had been done at the wrong time of year, 

and they did not use correct methodologies. 

Their surveys were the foundations of claims 

that red-listed species were not abundant, and to 

deliberately deny that most of the non-human life 

Left | Piles of stone in the SAC 

intended for resurfacing the River 

Barrow towpath at Carlow, 

Ireland, 2017. 



Above | Resurfacing of the Barrow Track by Waterways Ireland without planning permission or 

Appropriate Assessment at Rathvinden Lock Carlow, 2017. Image courtesy of the artists. 

that locals encountered daily was hardly present. 

The report clarified a number of other important 

issues, including the potential negative impact on 

aquatic life from abundant particle wash off from 

the path entering the waterway. The proposed 

plan was particularly hard on the red-listed otter. 

Scott-Cawley highlighted that the Barrow Blueway 

plan specified otter holts would be dug out of the 

bank of the towpath as a way to protect otters. 

This is a huge issue because otter have extra 

protection in a SAC, but they have to have the 

right address to make use of it. Digging out otter 

homes and moving them outside of a SAC is a 

direct violation of SAC policy and the EU Habitats 

Directive. 

Planning Inspectors Report: “The impact on 

otter during construction is likely to be localized but 

intense and the loss of couch sites and disturbance 

and the loss of cover vegetation may force otters 

to move to less optimum resting sites that could 

impact on breeding success. Disturbance during 

the operational phase could result in the species 

moving outside of the SAC and failing to meet the site 

objectives.” 

AM: There were clearly other deficits between 


the desktop study and the reality of what was on 

the ground. Ros and I went out with measuring 

tapes and measured a section along the 50 miles 

of towpath for widths and compared them to 

the maps Waterways Ireland had entered with 

their planning submission. They were saying 

parts of the towpath were six meters wide, but 

by our direct measurements, those same places 

were only three meters wide. This may seem 

trivial but the point was that they needed 4.8 

meters of width to fit in the riparian ways on each 

side and a track to accommodate all users. The 

Barrow Blueway Proposal deliberately fudged the 

numbers because the heritage walkway wasn’t 

able to meet this development standard. We 

were able to give this information to our expert 

for reports because we couldn’t fund them to 

do surveys. We knew that if we could highlight 

this the planning inspector could not ignore the 

deficit. The final decision acknowledged this as 

a major issue that would cause conflict between 

users. 

Planning Inspectors Report: “it is considered that 

the development as proposed has the potential to 

result in significant negative impacts on population 

and human health arising from potential conflicts 

between users.” 

RM: In their plan, Waterways Ireland said a 

gravel path would have minimal impact on the 

visual amenity, but they didn’t include renders 

of visual impacts for the important views. Using 

photoshop, we showed the impact on these 

views. I also added a gravel path to a painting 

by William Constable from 1816, called “Flatford 

Mill Suffock, Scene on a Navigable River,” to 

further visualize the EU Landscape Directive’s 

idea that all “landscape” has value whether it is 

considered ordinary or outstanding, and that this 

value is both living and cultural, thus bound with 

memory and time. Asking if the addition of this 

gravel path to the Constable painting changed our 

estimation of its value was a way to show that the 

entire proposed plan was a farce. The Planning 

Inspector’s report acknowledged the gravel path 

would be a huge change in visual amenity. 

Planning Inspectors Report: “In my opinion, 

the analysis contained in the revised EIS under 

represents the impact that would arise on views… 

this under representation derives particularly from 

what I consider to be an under representation of 

the magnitude of the change that would be likely to 

arise...” 

AM: After the planning inspector’s decision 

on this project, the Irish government is now 

suggesting we should not allow the public to 

make submissions about the planning of strategic 

infrastructure developments. The argument is 

that only experts should make those decisions, 

without the public’s involvement. This idea is 

of course supported by experts. What would 

have happened if the experts employed by the 

State were allowed to make this decision? Our 

democratic system is now coming under threat, 

which further threatens our local ecosystems and 

social processes. 

The idea of the Anthropocene is daunting, which 

makes it hard to tackle on a global scale. It makes 

people feel powerless. We have advocated for our 

environment locally and can only hope that other 

citizens around the globe try to advocate for their 

environment. This is one of the few ways we have 

of re-empowering ourselves. 


Planning Inspectors Report: “[W]here there are 

issues regarding enforcement or alleged breaches 

of the planning and development legislation, the 

relevant enforcement authority is the Planning 

Authority…..From the information presented it is 

noted that a significant number of locations on the 

route have been the subject of resurfacing works 

undertaken by Waterways Ireland. The undertaking 

of these works and the basis under which they were 

or were not authorised is a matter for the relevant 

Planning Authority.” 

RM: The River Barrow towpath is already 

acknowledged as a top off-road cycle track in 

Europe, and with the media coverage, it has more 

visitors than ever. Despite the April 2019 planning 

decision against the Barrow Blueway Proposal, 

recent Carlow County Council documentation 

suggests that plans are afoot to develop the river 

for profit again. I felt despondent thinking that 

this situation may yet end up in a European Court, 

so I went for a walk by the river. I raised my head 

out of my thoughts in time to see a kingfisher 

flying a low line along the water. Later I lucked 

out and found a wild bee hive in the riparian, 

a rare find. C-BUG’s work makes it possible for 

wild honey bees to nest in this place which offers 

protection, and we can encounter them as they 

go about their business. I don’t envision a future 

for human beings as separate from the earth, so 

as the song goes, we won’t know what we got ‘till 

it’s gone; for me it’s important to keep at it. 

Planning Inspectors Report: “There is no record 

on file of actions undertaken by Carlow County 

Council with regard to the impact of maintenance 

activity on the towpath.” 

RM: I’ve learned that envisioning the future 

includes becoming involved in the creation 

of policy and planning, and making sure that 

protective policy is implemented. The State isn't 

dealing with the critical issues of survival, so 

tactical advocacy is part of my being a citizen 

now. We need to treat the earth with respect, to 

maintain and protect it, and in doing so we will 

give the same care to ourselves. 

Walking’s New Movements Conference at 

University of Plymouth, Plymouth, UK. was 

organized by Helen Billinghurst, Claire Hind, and 

Phil Smith, November 2019. 

Works Cited 

An Bord Pleanala. The Planning Inspectors Report ABP 301245-18 

REF1718, Waterways Ireland Barrow Blueway Proposal, April 

2019. 

Chapman, William. The Means of Navigating the River Barrow 

from St Mullins to Athy, 1789. 

Save the Barrow Track. https://www.facebook.com/Save-the- 

Barrow-Track-333743290118418/ 

SUSTRANS, https://www.sustrans.org.uk/for-professionals/ 

infrastructure/ 

Bios 

Rosalind Murray meditates on consciousness through a 

conceptual image-making and interdisciplinary art practice, and 

makes live works for the streets of New York, the River Barrow 

Track in Ireland, and many places in-between. She has exhibited 

and performed at The Bowlby International Memorial Conference 

(London), New Movements in Walking (Plymouth University 

U.K.), Mapping Meaning at the Taft Nicholson Environmental 

Humanities Centre (USA), Itinerant Arts Festival (NYC), and at The 

Pari Centre for New Learning (Italy), with physicist David Peat. 

She was commissioned by the Cambridge Arts Council (MA, USA), 

for the project “Lateral Canal Ahead”, and exhibited in selected 

shows at venues in the USA, Ireland, Northern Ireland, the U.k. and 

Norway. She is an alumna of Rhode Island School of Design (MFA 

Painting), Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, the Cooper 

Union Residency, and the National College of Art and Design 

Ireland (BDes Visual Communications). Rosalind has received 


awards from Rhode Island School of Design, the Arts Council of 

Ireland, Carlow County Council, and ARTLINKS. She is Secretary to 

the Board of the Carlow Art Collection and is curating a series IDIR 

(Between) with Art O’Neill Mooney and CAC for 2021. 

Art O’Neill Mooney holds a degree in Industrial design and an MA 

in Art in the Contemporary World from the National College of 

Art & Design Ireland, where he focused on bio-economics and its 

potential in art. Art is also specialist in navigation and wayfinding 

and is a founder and director of Artisan a company that designs 

and produces wayfinding. He has built numerous art pieces over 

the years both nationally and internationally. Art is the Chair of 

the Carlow Art Collection, a publicly-owned collection of art held in 

trust for the people of Carlow Ireland. 


The Center for Post-Capitalist 

History 

Leah Sandler 

Left | Leah Sandler 

Helping Hand, 2017 

Digitally manipulated image. 

Following | Steve Gula, Leah Sandler 

The Center For Post-Capitalist History 

Remains, 2017 

Color photograph. 


By positing a future catastrophe extrapolated 

from our contemporary state of environmental 

and political turmoil and presenting a believable 

scenario in which capitalism is no longer the 

dominant geopolitical order, the Center for 

Post-Capitalist History offers a performative 

critique of capitalist epistemologies and modes 

of production (both economic and political) and 

attempts to pierce the veil of believability of 

capitalist dreamwork by invoking and subverting 

signs of authority established within capitalism 

itself. 

Existing through conceptual and performative 

practices, the Center for Post-Capitalist History 

presents the viewer with a thoroughly branded 

corporate identity implying the existence of a real 

institution dedicated to the study of history and 

material culture after the collapse of capitalism. 

This groundwork of reality is established 

through conceptual and material world-building, 

which creates a historical and social context in 

which the imagined institution exists—a postcapitalist 

United States where itinerancy is the 

dominant condition of life due to environmental 

and economic catastrophes. According to the 

Center’s parafictional handbook document, 




The Center for Post-Capitalist History, Introductory Video 

View here: https://vimeo.com/248067988 

which describes the organization’s functions, “The 

Center for Post-Capitalist History seeks to develop 

a methodology of archiving and recording history 

that will survive the Great Collapse. While we 

are no longer able to actively hold and preserve 

collections in a traditional sense, our efforts 

are focused on developing alternative modes 

of recording and understanding history. Our 

subsidiary institution, the Archive of Scarcity, is 

responsible for the development of a theoretical 

foundation to ground our practices in the 

concerns of today’s world.” 

The material elements that establish this world 

include an introductory video with voiceover 

narration that describes the institution and its 

mission, a detailed handbook explicating a theory 

of archiving under exigency, a series of brochures 

that explain the function of the institution in 

greater detail, and a lab coat wearable that 

functions as a multi-tool for a migrant researcher. 

At times, these materials belie the universe 

of exigency in which they are alleged to exist 

within the project’s established narrative—for 

instance, the slickness of brochures printed with 

colored inks on high quality paper, the presence 

of electricity powering a 45” monitor to display 

a video, or the abundance of printed collateral 

would likely not be produced in a post-collapse 

world. This contradiction of materiality serves a 

dual purpose: it establishes a voice of authority 

through the language of corporate capitalism 

itself, and it encourages criticality of the 

inconsistencies between our use of resources as a 

society and our knowledge of the effects of these 

behaviors on the environment. 


Above | Steve Gula, Leah Sandler, Here's Our Card, 2017. Color Photograph. Image courtesy of the artist. 

The Center for Post-Capitalist History takes on 

the appearance of a corporate institution and 

its subsidiaries, with bureaucratic management 

and a somewhat nebulous mission: to transform 

the body into the medium for archival storage 

through forensic interpretation as well as the use 

of tattoos and other forms of body modification, 

in a practice that I refer to as “embodied 

archiving.” This proposed reconsideration of 

historical archiving attempts to de-center a 

narrativized approach to history. 

In Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, 

Chtulucene, Donna Haraway provides a series of 

arguments criticizing the use of “anthropocene” 

as a paradigm through which to view our shifting 

ecological epoch. Haraway suggests: 

“Species Man does not make history. Man plus 

Tool does not make history. That is the story of 

History human exceptionalists tell.” 

Haraway’s statements are a recognition of 

the prioritization of technocratic innovation in 

historical narratives produced under the cultural 

hegemony of capitalism. These are histories 

that amplify certain voices and suppress others. 

“That History must give way to geostories, to 

Gaia stories, to symchthonic stories; terrans do 

webbed, braided, and tentacular living and dying 

in sympoietic multispecies string figures; they 

do not do History.” Haraway’s view makes room 

for an interpretation of the concept of history 

that isn’t limited by human understanding of 

geological, cosmic, and other events that don’t fit 

into a particular narrative of history. Maybe these 

are events that are invisible to human perception, 

yet still affect human society, development, and 


Above | Leah Sandler, Britta Seizums, Survive and Remember, 2017, Digital image (printed on 

paper or displayed on a screen with visual sonification) Images courtesy of the artist

Above | Leah Sandler, Britta Seizums, Carry History With You, 2017, Digital image (printed on 

paper or displayed on a screen with visual sonification) Image courtesy of the artist

ehavior. How can a narrative view of history 

account for these types of events? The Body 

Archive might be a place to start: a repository of 

information that functions more as a core sample 

than as an archive, or a storyteller. Maybe the 

unintentional documents of experience are the 

more accurate ones. 

Perhaps we are being forced to contend with the 

idea of this epistemological switch in a very real 

and physical way as we become more aware of 

our place within an interconnected web of living 

organisms. Haraway has asked, “What happens 

when human exceptionalism and the utilitarian 

individualism of classical political economics 

become unthinkable in the best sciences across 

the disciplines and interdisciplines? Seriously 

unthinkable: not available to think with.” What 

happens when we have to rebuild the ways in 

which we understand the world and our place in 

it? 

Graphic design by Leah Sandler & Britta Seizums 

Photographs by Steve Gula 

Voice acting and audio engineering by Jared Silvia 

Works Cited 

Haraway, Donna. “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, 

Capitalocene, Chthulucene.” E-Flux. Journal #75. September 

2016. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/75/67125/tentacularthinking-anthropocene-capitalocene-chthulucene/. 

Accessed 7 

June 2020. 

Bio 

Leah Sandler is an interdisciplinary artist and writer based in 

Orlando, Florida. Her work explores knowledge production and 

the end of capitalism through conceptual practices, sound, video, 

and text. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Rollins 

College in 2014 and a Master of Fine Arts from University of the 

Arts in 2017, and is a contributing Arts & Culture writer to the 

Orlando Weekly. 

Website: cargocollective.com/leahsandler 

Contact: msandler@uarts.edu 

The embodied approach to archiving as proposed 

by CPCH’s parafictional handbook might allow 

for a view of humans as both conscious writers 

of history, as well as inadvertent repositories 

of historically important information. As the 

global Covid-19 pandemic continues to stop us 

in our tracks, threatening to end our existence 

as we know it, perhaps a consideration of the 

interconnectedness of all living organisms as 

instigators of history and experience is a relevant 

place to begin. 

This project was created through a collaborative 

effort and non-monetary skill trades between the 

artists. 




Life After the Anthropocene

Mapping Meaning, the Journal (Issue No. 4)

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