CLIMATE AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE
2018-2019 Theme for the EHI
A NEARLY CARBON-NEUTRAL REMOTE LECTURE SERIES
ABSTRACTS & BIOGRAPHIES
Telling the Right Story: a Working-Class Ecology (WCE) Narrative
Stefania Barca
Butte’s Berkeley Pit: Towards Posthumanist Environmental Justice in the Anthropocene Era
Louise Economides
In November of 2016, the Berkeley Pit in Butte, Montana, made national headlines when thousands of migrating snow geese died after landing on its waters. Since its closure on Earth Day in 1982, this mile long, half-mile wide and 1,700 feet deep former cooper mine has steadily filled with rain water, producing a lake of heavily acidic water laced with heavy metals such as copper, arsenic, cadmium and zinc. The pit has become a paradigmatic Federal Superfund Site due to concerns that once water in the lake rises to a critical level Butte’s groundwater will become contaminated by toxic run-off from former mine shafts. For the last 20 years, Butte’s human residents have been lobbying for an accelerated clean-up schedule due to fears of such contamination, and in February of this year it was announced that Montana Resources received EPA approval to begin treating water from the pit as early as this year, ahead of earlier projected dates for clean up to begin in the 2020’s.
My presentation will explore the Berkeley Pit’s history of toxicity, community activism and ecological intervention as an example of how new, properly “posthumanist” concepts of environmental and climate justice are emerging in Anthropocene politics. Inspired by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s idea of “latent commons” (in The Mushroom at the End of the World) as a model for this new political consciousness, I will examine how more-than-human agency has shaped public perception of the pit, and mobilized political action. I’ll be discussing climate-change’s under-reported impact upon geese-migration to the lake, and the significant role that geese mortality has played in narratives which first denied, and later acknowledged (with horror) the degree of pit water toxicity. Moreover, I’ll also be addressing ways that extremophile microbes thriving in the pit’s contaminated waters function as figures of hope that are (miraculously) being used in medical research for their cancer-fighting abilities. On the whole, I’ll be arguing that the Berkeley Pit’s most lasting legacy may not be ways that it reflects what Tsing calls “progress” narratives (those celebrating the mine as a generator of wealth and/or of large-scale technological power) but rather ways it shows that networks of “collaborative survival” between human and non-human agents can – unexpectedly – arise in the wake of capitalist ruination. Such collaborations form a “latent commons” that can be mobilized to achieve positive political change.
Biography:
Louise Economides is a Professor of English and the Director of the Literature and Environment Program at the University of Montana. She has published many articles that examine Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century literature through an ecocritical lens, and a recent book titled The Ecology of Wonder in Romantic and Postmodern Literature (Palgrave-Macmillan 2016). Currently, she is working on a new book titled Anthropocene Dreams that argues literature inspires radical re-thinking of human and more-than-human agency as a response to global anthropogenic environmental change, constituting an important alternative to techno-managerial visions of our eco-political future.
Improve Your Habitat to Survive in the Long Run
Derrick Jensen
Biography:
Parasitic Geostories: Rabies and Multispecies Precarity in Bali
Phillip Drake
Ubiquitous in our world, parasites are characterized by their metabolic commitment to their respective hosts, usually at some cost to the host. For the parasite, the host is merely a vector – a food source, means of transport, habitat, and/or nanny – that makes life possible. In other words, exploitation is essential to life in the world of parasites. This project examines expressions of parasitism in the Indonesian island of Bali, focusing on a recent rabies outbreak that has killed dozens of humans and thousands of dogs, and has led to nearly 500,000 dogs being killed in a government-run effort to control the disease. In the background of the rabies controversy is the ongoing development and expansion of the tourism industry, which not only puts pressure on health officials to control the spread of disease but also contributes social forms of parasitism via the exploitation of human and nonhuman resources on the island. By raising questions about the nature of exploitation in both biological and social contexts, I suggest that parasites offer alternative “geostories” – using Donna Haraway’s term – to those invoked by the anthropocene or capitalocene. Parasitic geostories call attention to the production and distribution of precarity among multispecies communities, prompting difficult ethical questions about who has a claim to safety and who does not when exploitation and violence are necessary to life.
Biography:
Feminist Resources for Addressing the Emotional Dimensions of Climate Change
Lesley Head
In my book Hope and Grief in the Anthropocene I discussed various manifestations of loss and mourning around climate change. I argued that it is difficult to talk about grief and associated negative emotions because of strong cultural pressure in the west to be optimistic and positive. A study of how climate change scientists engage with the future demonstrated the emotional labour they invest in distancing themselves from negative emotions and emphasising positive ones. In this presentation I revisit this example and develop further the argument, commenced in the book, that feminist approaches to emotion offer important and underutilised resources in our response to climate change.
The Intergroup Foundations of Climate Change Justice
Janet Swim
Climate change is a global problem that is caused by humans and must be solved by humans, and while differences exist, many theories and research on prejudice and discrimination have direct connections to the psychological processes involved in climate change. Climate change is not only a geophysical issue, but an intergroup issue with justice implications. It impacts people who are most vulnerable to environmental degradation as well as social injustices. Arguably it not only violates human rights but also the rights of animals and nature. Thus, the study of group processes and intergroup relations is critical to understanding the myriad of barriers to addressing this large-scale problem. We explore influences on cognitive steps in perceiving climate change as a justice issue, using social psychology to understand minimization of harms and responsibilities for addressing climate change, and draw from the prejudice and discrimination literature to find ways of moving forward.
Kate Rigby
This talk brings a transpecies justice perspective to disaster risk reduction in the era of anthropogenic climate change. Focussing on Australia’s catastrophic ‘Black Saturday’ firestorm that burnt out large swathes of the state of Victoria on Feb. 7, 2009, I consider some of the salient socio-cultural factors that exacerbated the deadly impact of this disaster. Among these are persistent deficits in the non-indigenous Australian population’s understanding of their fire-adapted environs. These arise both from inadequate ecological literacy and from failures of historical memory. To redress the latter would entail gaining a better understanding of pre-colonial fire ecologies, as recorded in Aboriginal narratives, and shaped by Aboriginal land use practices. However, this has been rendered extremely difficult as a consequence of the depredations of colonisation, which were particularly severe in Victoria, destroying communities, leaving local languages in tatters, and fragmenting cultural memories. In addition, climate change is already altering the conditions in which firestorms take hold, and appears likely to increase the frequency and severity of bushfires. In this context, I highlight a key contribution of historical and cross-cultural research in disaster mitigation: namely in historicising, and hence denaturalising, the very categories through which we frame those calamities that have misleadingly been termed ‘natural disasters’ within euro-western modernity. The title of this talk comes from a poem by Melbourne author Jordie Albiston, which responds to Black Saturday with recourse to the Hebrew book of Lamentations, and I will conclude by arguing for the role of literature and the arts in helping to disclose the complex entanglement, both moral and material, of variously situated human and other-than-human actors and factors in the genesis, impact, and potential mitigation of such calamities.
Biography:
Professor Kate Rigby FAHA is Director of the Research Centre for Environmental Humanities at Bath Spa University and Adjunct Professor at Monash University (Melbourne). Her research lies at the intersection of environmental literary, philosophical, historical and religious studies, with a specialist interest in European Romanticism, ecopoetics, and eco-catastrophe. A founding co-editor of the journal Philosophy Activism Nature (http://www.panjournal.net/ ), she is co-editor of the University Press of Virginia book series, Under the Sign of Nature, and her books include Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism (2004), Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches (co-edited, 2011) and Dancing with Disaster: Environmental Histories, Narratives, and Ethics for Perilous Times (2015). A key researcher with the Humanities for the Environment Mellon Australia-Pacific Observatory, she was the inaugural President of the Association for the Study of Literature, Environment and Culture (Australia-New Zealand), and the founding Director of the Australia-Pacific Forum on Religion and Ecology.
Protecting the Power to Pollute: Identity Co-Optation, Gender, and the Public Relations Strategies of Fossil Fuel Industries
Shannon Bell
(presentation based on a paper-in-progress with Jenrose Fitzgerald and Richard York)
The environmental health risks associated with the production and use of fossil fuels have sparked a great number of grassroots resistance efforts across the United States and throughout the world, efforts that have led to stricter regulations, lawsuits, defeated pipelines, and bans on hydraulic fracturing and wastewater injection in certain municipalities, states, and nations. In addition, large environmental organization-driven divestment efforts, such as 350.org’s campaign to push institutional and individual investors to remove their holdings from fossil fuel companies, have also had notable impacts. Arguably, the hegemony that fossil fuel industries have long maintained is under threat, whereby the “pass” that they have long received to externalize environmental and public health costs onto society is increasingly being contested. How have fossil fuel industries responded to these challenges? Through an analysis of the public relations materials of three fossil-fuel-energy front groups, this study seeks to identify the strategies used by fossil fuel industries in their efforts to retain hegemony in the face of increasing threats to power and profits. We find that a central strategy of these public relations efforts is a process we term Identity Co-optation, which entails appropriating and rebranding the identities of fossil fuel industries’ fiercest opponents: concerned women and mothers.
Biography:
Shannon Elizabeth Bell is Associate Professor of Sociology at Virginia Tech and is also an affiliated faculty member in Women’s and Gender Studies, the Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention, and the Global Forum on Urban and Regional Resilience. Before joining the faculty at Virginia Tech in 2017, she was Associate Professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies at the University of Kentucky. Dr. Bell’s research spans a number of sub-disciplines, including environmental sociology, social movements, gender, and rural sociology. Her research is broadly focused on issues of environmental justice and injustice, with a particular interest in the ways that environmentally destructive industries manipulate and mobilize gendered, classed, and racialized identities to maintain power in the face of increasing public awareness of the risks associated with their practices. Professor Bell’s research also examines the challenges that people face to speaking out against environmental injustices, and her work seeks to identify strategies for increasing the political participation and civic engagement of those most affected by environmental hazards. Dr. Bell is author of two award-winning books. Her first, Our Roots Run Deep as Ironweed: Appalachian Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice, was published by University of Illinois Press in 2013 and received the Association for Humanist Sociology Book Award and a silver medal from the Nautilus Book Awards. Her second book, Fighting King Coal: The Challenges to Micromobilization in Central Appalachia, was published by MIT Press in 2016 and is winner of the Association of American Publishers PROSE Award and a gold medal from the Nautilus Book Awards. Professor Bell is the 2017 recipient of the Rural Sociological Society’s Excellence in Research Award, and she has also received the Environmental Sociology Practice & Outreach Award, the Robert Boguslaw Award for Technology & Humanism, and the University of Kentucky College of Arts & Sciences Outstanding Teaching Award.
Guerrilla Narrative in the Wasteocene
Marco Armiero
Biography:
Marco Armiero is the Director of the Environmental Humanities Laboratory (EHL) at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, where he is also an Associate Professor of Environmental History. He has published two monographs, one handbook, five edited volumes, and numerous articles and book chapters. His research interests span from environmental justice to climate change, from migration to the nationalization of nature. In five years he has made the EHL in Stockholm one of the key global players in the Environmental Humanities field. Marco Armiero is a senior editor of Capitalism Nature Socialism (T&F) and associate editor of Environmental Humanities (Duke UP). He also serves on several boards of journals, centers, and professional associations.
Climate Justice and Material Ecocriticism
Serpil Oppermann
Climate justice is essentially a human centered social movement that addresses the disproportionate impacts of climate change on disempowered and marginalized communities, and is committed to rectify social and economic inequalities, as well as gender and race based injustices. The movement is predominantly focused on the human dimension of environmental problems, emphasizing a more socially equitable and sustainable future for humanity.
The present socio-economic and political systems, however, subjugate not only disenfranchised humans but also all nonhuman species and everything else that is exploitable. This is of particular interest to material ecocriticism, which claims that biotic or not, matter in every form is a meaning producing embodiment of the world and the world’s phenomena are full of stories. Embodied in material formations these stories compel us to envision the physical world as storied matter teeming with countless narrative agencies that make the world intelligible and expressive. If all biological species, elements, and minerals are agentic and expressive, then they have a right to be included in the climate justice movement which, I argue, can be more effective if it ensures respect and protection for all life forms recognizing their natural right to exist and express their sense of being in the world.
Biography:
Serpil Oppermann was Professor of English at Hacettepe University, Ankara until she retired in March 2018. She is the current President of EASLCE (European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and Environment). She is also an active member of ASLE: The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, serving on ASLE Translation Grants Committee in support of work in ecocriticism from international scholars to expand exchanges across cultures and traditions, as well as ASLE graduate student Mentoring Program in the USA. She has presented keynote speeches and invited talks on material ecocriticism, the Anthropocene, and ecocritical theory in Taiwan, China, Sweden, Poland, Italy, and Turkey.
She serves on the editorial and advisory boards of several international journals, publication series on environmental topics, and international organizations including ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment; Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment; Relations: Beyond Anthropocentrism; PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature; “Ecocritical Theory and Practice” series of Lexington Books; the Seedbox: A Mistra-Formas Environmental Humanities Collaboratory in Sweden; She is also Ambassador of Turkey at SLSA.eu: European Society for Literature, Science and the Arts (Sister Organization of the International, USA-based Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts).
Oppermann has published widely on postmodern, feminist, material, and posthuman ecocriticisms, and ecocritical theory. Her more recent edited collections include International Perspectives in Feminist Ecocriticism (with Greta Gaard and Simon Estok, Routledge, 2013), Material Ecocriticism (with Serenella Iovino, Indiana University Press, 2014), and Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene (with Serenella Iovino, Rowman& Littlefield, 2017). She has also edited Ekoeleştiri: Çevre ve Edebiyat (Phoenix, 2012) and New Voices in International Ecocriticism (Lexington Books, 2015).
Her recent work is focused on the influence of the Anthropocene discourse in the environmental humanities.