NE2019 P7: Re-Placing Climate Studies
NEXT EARTH: TEACHING CLIMATE CHANGE ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES
A NEARLY CARBON-NEUTRAL CONFERENCE
Panel 7: Re-Placing Climate Studies
“Centering Indigenous Perspectives on Climatic Change”
Beth Rose Middleton (Associate Professor, Department of Native American Studies, University of California, Davis) and Chris Adlam (PhD Candidate, Ecology, University of California, Davis)
“Resilience and Renewal in the Marshall Islands: A Place-Based Analysis of Climate Change Response”
Laura M. Hartman (Roanoke College)
“Teaching the Great Pacific Garbage Patch”
Garth Sabo (Department of English, Michigan State University)
Thank you very much for these important contributions. I’d love to hear more from the panelists in the first two talks about what you’ve found to be especially effective teaching tools for teaching indigenous approaches to climate change. I know the Western environmental canon better and would like to be less clueless about the alternatives, especially in the context of teaching. I can look up standard options and I know some, but I would love to hear your favorites, or what you find especially significant or powerful. What gets your students to really hear the importance of indigenous perspectives?
– Eugene Chislenko
Eugene, thanks for your comment.
As much as possible it’s important to teach indigenous approaches to climate change using actual voices of indigenous people, rather than interpretations that come from colonial or other cultures. In my talk, I’ve shared some of my favorite resources specifically from people indigenous to the Marshall Islands.
I also really like Linda Hogan’s book Solar Storms, the documentary Awake A Dream from Standing Rock, and the short film Nuuca, about sexual violence and the Bakken oil boom. I know students respond well to these. None are directly about climate change but they do relate to flooding of indigenous homes and the effects of fossil fuel infrastructure.
It’s also worthwhile to have guest speakers who can offer indigenous perspectives. Voices like these are rarely heard by most college students; getting them in person is extremely valuable.
I absolutely agree with Laura, in terms of foregrounding voices (both written, media, and in-person) of Indigenous people, and of course compensating people for their time and sharing, and looking for ways for students and the institution to “give back” to and contribute to Indigenous movements. I appreciate the resources Laura shared, and I will be sharing many of my favorites on the forthcoming KAN/NxTerra website, including Dan Wildcat’s “Red Alert,” and work by Kyle Powys Whyte, Ron Goode, Jared Aldern, Frank Lake, Jonathan Long, Don Hankins, Julie Maldonado, Winona LaDuke, Greg Cajete, and others.
Hi Garth, I appreciated your engaging analysis of language and multimodal representations used to characterize and make vivid the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. I think it’s interesting to consider the exigences of carbon vs. plastic (temporarily bracketing that the two are connected in that plastic production and its breakdown produce greenhouse gas emissions). The visceral materiality of plastic seems to better enable entry into people’s consciousness and imagination. Recently, I saw “Viewpoint – Ocean plastic pollution: A convenient but distracting truth?” (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308597X1830681X?via%3Dihub) in which Stafford and Jones discuss how the focus on plastic may be somewhat counterproductive in that it lends itself to a neoliberal individualizing response (e.g. modified consumption practices like reusable cups and bags) that distracts from the structural change needed (190). I’m curious how your rich insight into plastic representations speaks to the question of more effectively representing climate change.
Emma, thanks for a great question!
Thanks as well for the link to the Stafford and Jones essay. Their description of plastic pollution as “a relatively convenient environmental issue on which we are focusing, at the expense of neglecting other more pressing concerns” seems especially relevant to the conversation we’re after in this conference (190). By way of responding to your point about neoliberal individualized responses to plastic pollution rather than structural changes, I’ll first mention that it is difficult to write/talk about Allison’s graphic novel without running into images of/links to the Anya Hindmarch reusable tote that got hot in 2007 and bore the same phrase Allison used as her title (several years before her novel was published) on its canvas side, which surely shows that your/Stafford and Jones’ concern is valid; whether or not we see Allison’s use of the same phrase as an uncritical embrace of the messaging of the tote is likely up for debate.
One thing I’ll note about the alternate representations of the GPGP that interested me in my talk is that they all seem to succeed when the garbage patch itself is less/least visible, which I’ll offer here as perhaps a sign that the best, or at least a better, use of these representations is as a backdoor into representations of the structural issues that undergird the easy spectacle of plastic visibility. I’m thinking in particular about the ways the garbage patch makes possible a reflection on anthropocentric systems like trade and global consumption patterns, and planetary/ecological features like ocean currents. Ozeki’s novel, for instance, does its best work when it focuses less on the specifics of the plot-driving trash than on the general, quantum/zen entanglement of material practices that mutually compose Ruth and Nao’s entwined futures.
This is all to say that one way I hope the constellation of works I described here might have some value in the type of curriculum we’re here to imagine is by making possible a turn away from the convenient truth of plastic into systemic issues that typically resist representation. Part of the appeal of the Stephens editorial that I tried to react to in my talk was that it showed how easily a certain type of plastic pollution narrative feeds the neoliberal beast; I think in this point I’m at least swimming in the same pool as Stafford and Jones. The works that I offered in response might be best understood as hybrid or gateway climate change narratives, pivot points that make use if the plastic spectacle for narrative purposes but then slip toward the spectral presences of deeper threats circling beneath.
Thanks so much for your thought-provoking response, Garth. In particular, your eloquent notion of “a backdoor into representations of structural issues” and of “the spectral presences of deeper threats circling beneath.” I look forward to reading some of the works referenced in your talk!
I’m thinking a lot about the title of our panel and the thoughtful ways my fellow panelists engage with the role of place in climate studies.
Beth Rose and Chris, you mentioned that “climate change is never only an ecological problem,” and also suggested some ways that a perspective on the personhood of the landscape might help to expand our response to climate change disasters and blur place-based distinctions. I’m curious if you can expand on ways you’ve implemented or built on that type of perspective in your classes in order to think about the types of justice that Laura points to throughout her talk.
Laura, your emplacement framework seems to suggest that we see this notion of “re-placing climate studies” as inherently limited, and I’m interested to hear anything more you can share about the model, the characteristics of emplacement, etc.
Thanks all!
– GJS
Hi Garth,
Thanks for your comment. Yes, I think the strength of the emplacement framework is its ability to speak of place in a more dynamic way, a way that can involve ethical analysis. It’s easy to see place as a static thing, and we sometimes see indigenous perspectives on the land as unchanging and eternal.
But of course this is not the case: human and non-human factors that comprise a place certainly change over time, especially when they are colonial forces or are responding to colonial forces, and these changes are not neutral – they can be more or less well suited to the situation.
As we developed the emplacement framework we were looking for ways to describe the dynamic changes in place as well as ways to express an ethical valence to those changes; hence words like displacement and misplacement. Obviously, every change in a place is complex and can’t be boiled down to one dimension of analysis but we hope that these terms can help the conversation by adding precision and vitality to a concept that can be somewhat too static.
Hi Beth and Chris.
Thank you for a fantastic presentation. Drawing attention to Indigenous ecological knowledge is surely among the most important means to support not just combatting colonialism but also developing means to heighten climate and ecological resilience under adverse conditions. Along with Wildcat’s work, I’ve found the work of Kyle Powys Whyte to be invaluable in this respect.
As a member of settler culture, one concern I have is that seeking to draw on Indigenous knowledge can end up being just one more form of colonial violence. Some settlers regard Indigenous knowledge as a “resource” to be “mined” (I’m thinking of Baird Callicott here). Even without such invasive language, Indigenous peoples are sometimes regarded among allies as existing largely for the benefit of wayward settlers. Tribal autonomy and the individual and collective agency of Indigenous peoples is treated as an afterthought, if it’s considered at all.
This phenomenon is not knew, of course. I’m curious, though, regarding whether you have good sources to explore for how settlers can best serve as allies with Indigenous peoples–on terms spelled out and endorsed by Indigenous peoples. It’s my sense here that respecting Indigenous agency and autonomy while also drawing (in a welcomed manner) on Indigenous knowledge can provide a particularly salient means to combat both the erosion of cultural diversity and widespread environmental injustice.
Thanks in advance for whatever thoughts you see fit to provide.
Hi Laura:
Thank you for what I humbly consider the presentation of the conference! This is so interesting … and devastating. I plan to use these films in my Environmental Philosophy course as a means to give my students a sense of how fellow humans are engaging in acts of civil resistance against environmental justice.
I’m very much looking forward to your article coming into print. I’ve been thinking a lot about place in relation to a book project I’m currently working on and have felt as if my own understanding of place is not nearly well enough developed. This presentation has already been incredibly helpful in this respect.
Thank you again.
Thanks so much for your kind comments! I agree that this topic is both fascinating and devastating. I think that Jetnil-Kijiner in particular wants us to be devastated, and wants us to keep finding ways to “tell them.”
Thanks, everyone, for your work! Garth, I am working on microplastics, and happen to live in Long Beach CA where Charles Moore and his Algalita org are based, and so was particularly struck by your presentation. I’m wondering if you could speak to the term “gyre”–how and why has this supplanted “patch” (or “island”)? Is it now the preferred term? And what different work does that term do? Thanks!! –Nicole
Hi Nicole –
Thanks for this! The sociologist Max Liboiron, whose name I butcher in the talk but whose essay “Redefining Pollution and Action: The Matter of Plastics” forms an integral part of the thinking I’m doing in this project, tracks a progression of terminology “from island to confetti to soup to smog to miasma” (16), which strongly suggests that, while I may prefer “gyre,” it is not THE preferred term; Liboiron’s work suggests that there is likely no single preferred term.
My use of gyre borrows partially from Ruth Ozeki’s novel, where she shows an interest in the accumulation of oceanic plastics but focuses instead on the currents that bring them into contact from disparate points of origin. One of the benefits of using “gyre” more prolifically in thinking about the GPGP is that it points our attention more to the ecological processes and long webs of relation that are caught up in these issues; unlike “patch,” gyre is more an event than an object, and as such keeps our attention on the tension between planetary and anthropocentric forces that come into contact in this way.