Roots & Routes

Heise, Ursula K. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet. The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford University Press, 2008.

 

Modern environmentalisms have cultivated our sense of place. But the challenges ahead also require connecting this to a new sense of belonging – a sense of planet. This is how I read the central argument of Ursula Heise’s ‘Sense of Place and Sense of Planet. The Environmental Imagination of the Global’ (2008).

Heise develops a cultural theory for addressing the effects of globalisation, the  imaging technologies which are its tools, and elaborates on risk theory. The outcome of these are to give directions towards what she labels as “eco-cosmopolitanism”. Eco-cosmopolitanism is environmentalism gone virtual, where wireless fibre is as much part of the fabric of nature as the air breathed where in your immediate locality. It is about allowing us to sense risk at different scales, from local to global, and to share that risk.

Risk theory, developed by Ulrich Beck (1992), is by Heise given more cultural and environmental connotations by referring to works on the human condition in emerging risk society. Of these I found Christa Wolf’s ‘Störfall’ and Gabriele Wohmann’s ‘Der Flötenton’ discussion of the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986 as interesting for exploring experiences and mixtures of risk, place and daily routines.

Taken together, Heise’s readings exemplify how globalisation exposes people to new types of risk, making it apparent that connections in our lives stretch far beyond the immediate concerns of the locale. Chemicals travel downstream; Chernobyl fallout drift across national borders; CO2 emissions changes climate everywhere (p. 150). What is the sense of place of the Maldives when its islands have been submerged under rising sea-levels?

Environmentalism is then, Heise argues, not one but several strands of thought, and has from its emergence in the 1960 been concerned with different types of risks. Most of its proponents have sought to uphold and protect the local against global forces imposing change, or deterritorialisation, upon it. Although many environmentalists have relied on imaging technology, like ‘Earthrise’ 1968 or ‘Blue Marble’ 1972, for rationale and sense of place, the movement have remained anti-technological.

Hostility towards deterritorialisation and technology is according to Heise misrepresentative of actual risks to environment and society. Risk is something that is formulated and adressed depending on what sense of place one have, or in the words of Simon Levin “the world looks very different, depending on the size of the window you are looking through” (p. 205).

When technology became digitized and data could be gathered from satellites and updated daily, the scales at which Earth was depicted made transition between global and local scales effortless, like in the software of Google Earth. Perhaps transcendence, or collapse, of scales is a better word than transition as this both implies:

1. a user,
2. a power relation,

But this is another topic than what Heise engages with.

The sources used by Heise relate not to technology itself but to the cultural employment of technology as an indicator of the emerging risk society. In the late 20th century, risk has shifted its emphasis from the local to the global scale. Of importance here is how cultural tropes shape the perception of previous risks when new, still larger, menaces may be of greater concern.

The dangers of nuclear disasters that reach across geographical, national, and social borders continue to reconfigure themselves in the cultural imagination, as the more recent image of an entire planet undergoing climate change superimposes itself on the older risk scenarios (p. 156).

Since new concerns shaped and reshape modern environmentalism, risk is a means for resituating place, relating it also to a sense of planet. Part of this involves harmonisising theories of sensing and belonging, like Heise’s, to the fieldwork (or activism) of environmental justice movements. It is by learning about the uneven effects of globalisation on communities and nature worldwide that new communities may be formed, and new meanings such as eco-cosmopolitanism, emerge. In this way, Heise sees globalisation not as a deterministic force for a risk society – but as enabler of new meanings, of risk sharing in the eco-cosmopolitan future.

Heise is clear about her assumptions: Communities are, in the words of Benedict Anderson, imagined (1983). And the sense of belonging, and risks, can be understood and read as cultural strategies of contemporary literature, like the appropriation of Chernobyl for weaving together daily life and risk in ‘Störnfall’ and ‘Der Flötenton’. Although these works support Heise’s theory and choice of sources to develop eco-cosmopolitanism, it would be interesting to see how “Sense of Place and Sense of Planet” for sake of argument could engage with historians like Oliver Zimmer (2003) whose critique of Anderson questions the ‘modernist’ idea of communities (e.g. nationalism) as imagined. Perhaps this is the topic for a future discussion (the next book!)?

What I find most provocative about Heise argument is the potential she sees in technology and globalisation. The cultural outcome of their development is still in the balance. Imaging technology are tools in the hands of users, or activists, who from their deterritorialised and destabilised nations may grow a new interconnected world. Roots, environmentalist sense of place, is useful for risks against local issues. But the risk society is a global world, where we must choose our routes, of what risks we are willing to share with others (p. 10, 147). That if your roots are cut, then choose your route all the more freely.

But one could stress more fervently that globalisation and technological development are not neutral instruments or by whom they are used. One such case is where national locality, and interests, control which patch of the internet you may use. Google Maps depict Krim as part of Ukraine vis-á-vis Russia depending on if your wi-fi connection is in Kiev, or Moscow. Who influences the imaging technologies we use for sensing the world? Technological literacy and ownership are also part of our sense of place and sense of planet.

In this way, roots are not cut but contaminated; while routes may restricted to recommended trips. Where Heise end with analysing the effects of globalisation and technology, we should complement by studying its causes – the chain of events preceding the uprooting of roots, and when routes first were trodden.

 

References

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, London 1983.

Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society. Towards a New Modernity. Sage Publications, 1992.

Heise, Ursula K. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet. The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford University Press, 2008.

Zimmer, Oliver. Nationalism in Europe, 1890-1940. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

 

Challenging the Status Quo: Research, Writing & Activism

Workshop on Writing and Activism at KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory, Stockholm, 8 April 2014. Organisers: Marco Armiero and Isabel Pérez. Presenters: Rob Nixon, Salvatore Paolo de Rosa, Stefania Barca and Rauna Kuokkanen. Workshop held in relation to the film-festival Tales From Planet Earth.

 

The workshop in Stockholm concerned writing and combining research with activism. The forum was academic, and it may have been for this reason that Marco Armiero began by describing Rob Nixon’s “Slow Violence (2011) as an ambition to encapsulate Foucalt’s tension between telling the truth and proving the truth. Another paraphrase was made to to Carl Ginzburg (1991) on the relevance of studying “non-existent events”, i.e. to find things not recognised in society’s everyday story of what belongs to history.

Another piece by Ginzburg that excellently exemplifies this is The Cheese and the Worms (1980), but we had plenty of readings as it were for this workshop to reach further. In “Dancing with Professors” (2001) Limerick argues that academic prose is neither stimulating nor competitive in reaching larger groups of readership.

Does discussion need to be closed? And must communication have jargon? – Patricia Nelson Limerick

A change in language could allow greater access to academia. But it seems also that Limerick goes after the disciplines (and disciplining of writing). It is inadequate to describe this as a branch to which academics become wired – it is just as much a nest in which scholars are hatched and acquire wings to fly. What young scholars need is not to eat ones parents (professors) but to find platforms  (labs?) for trial-and-error writing.

If moving on from what is “competitive” towards what is “meaningful” in academia, we touch upon activism and research – two areas tied together in a Gordian knot. On the one hand, you need adress matters of concern; On the other hand, research should be original and be able to follow problems and questions wherever curiosity leads it. And if you needs must push an agenda then there is always politics.

Nixon’s way of cutting this knot is instead by threading his research through it – “situating” his position (coming from a white working-class family in apartheid South Africa. Indeed, his current career as middle-class scholar had its foundations laid by his frugal parents. In “Barrier Beach, Nonfiction” (forthcoming, 2014), Nixon explores how topography is layered with social behaviours and memories of people. This would also explain why certain groups are restricted in certain topographies and argues that a move from dispossession towards self-possession requires stories of places to dig into its sediments. Writing is in this sense a means to remake topographies, and hence the choice of soil and what text to plow into it is very much about activism. Any literary critique would rejoice at having such powers.

But why does a person seek to appropriate or represent a collective? And if writing for groups, you need rely on simplification and double-viewpoints of audience. Words are words in context. Here there are many common mistakes.

Do not overestimate what your audience knows, but do not underestimate what your audience understands – Rob Nixon

Similarly, do not disregard the opinions of the community you are writing for – this is to impose ones analysis on the community. Rauna Kuokkanen, writing on Indigenous peoples in Canada and Scandinavia, underlines that academic papers can, and need dare to, explore new ideas. For one thing, a community is not homogenous and in this sense the scholar may legitimately bring new perspectives into it. This does require a sense of humility on part of the scholar.

Another is to mistake activism and public writing – these overlap but are not synonymous. One aspect of this, perhaps showing how myopic academia can be, is that we neither learn to distinguish nor practice different types of writing than those promoted by education systems. Great Britain used to value public writing, but metrication of academia segregated Journalism and Academia – the former becoming less informed; the latter less engaged.

Solutions may be to fill the gaps, of collaborative science and public experiences relating to the research topic. No, what was discussed was not to increase the amounts of surveys but the forums of discussing the research and topics at hand. I recall Habermas having proposed something similar, so probably this has already been tried to less success than hoped for (the world is not a seminar room).

Another is to not waste your ignorance. Sverker Sörlin once advised me and colleagues to write the introductions of dissertations straight away. The same is probably true for any text or argument. The point is to remember ones ignorance – to treasure and dramatise it. Like Virgil with Dante, escorting your reader through an arch of discovery. To share confusion, and bit by bit guide ones way out of the Inferno.

This probably involves accepting that the body of work will be impersonal. But to use, again as Nixon suggests, the personal as counterpoints to blend personality with methodology – voice and idea.

And lastly, to make things concrete – to write a 1000 words is to stop at 999 words. Pieces of work can be rewritten to “public versions” and tried out in group. “Am I hooked in the first sentence?” This question, coming back to Limerick, what academics could afford spending more time on.

Stepping back a bit, why is this important (I believe it is)? Many researchers coming to environmental issues have had their fair share of troubled thinking.

How can we understand this problem? What would humanity and life on Earth be like if we do not? What means and solutions are available?  – Environmental humanist (pretty much every monday morning)

 

Despite the vast input on activism, the most rewarding component of the workshop “Challenging the Status Quo” was to actually practice new types of writing. This was lead by Isabel Pérez, and I re-post the outline in its entirety for reproduction (do try this at home):

Writing exercise

• 2 minutes. Write to describe the room, with your senses.
• 2 minutes. Re-use three of the words written and write about anything
• 1 minute. Relate to your our work: how would you describe your research with 5 adjectives.
•  3 minutes. A politician wants to change the world using your research. Select 3 of the 5 adjectives, use them to summarise your research for her to use in a campaign
• 3 minutes. A popular science magazine holds competition for most interesting dissertation. Write a “first sentence” to submit to this competition.

 

References

Ginzburg, Carlo, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, London: Routledge, 1980.

Ginzburg, Carlo, “Checking the Evidence: The Judge and the Historian”, in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 18, No. 1, Autumn, 1991.

Limerick, Patricia Nelson, “Dancing with Professors: The Trouble with Academic Prose”, in Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West, W. W. Norton & Company, 2001.

Nixon, Rob, “Barrier Beach Nonfiction in Greg Garrard, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, Oxford Handbooks (forthcoming 2014).

Nixon, Rob, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Harvard University Press, 2011.

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the end of an orbit

Parks, Lisa. Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.

 

This is not the history of satellites. Rather, Lisa Parks is using the remote position of satellites to complicate what we know about television. And to show that orbiting around us are (Western) cultures.

Along with this purpose, ”Cultures In Orbit” opens with some central questions that are then expanded upon using various source: ”How many satellites are there? What do they do? Who controls them? What can they see?” (9-10).

What constitutes the cultures orbiting Earth is the convergence of interdependent industries and interests in the making of ”the televisual”. Parks seeks to differentiate between these interests in order to backtrack how the convergence came about. One part of this is the process of gradual change, quoting Raymond Williams and Langdon Winner, in which satellite television is the derivative of previous technologies.

Since the convergence is related but not necessarily planned, my reading is that Parks consider it more relevant to speak of technology as enabler rather than as determinant. Satellites was developed in the West, and made social norms of the West into global commons. But this does not exclude the possibility of other groups adopting these global tools for other aims. For example, the Aborigine channel ”Imparja” used a satellite’s downtime (the network’s sign-off hours) to broadcast Indigenous knowledge and connect communities worldwide (63).

And literally, Imparja (Aboriginal word meaning ”tracks”) is what Parks’ methodology is about:

to study who leaves tracks in the globalisation process. Where does the satellite signal fall? What cultural territory is also the site for up- and downlinking satellite data?

Following the tracks of the satellites, we see that footprints are unequally distributed on the face of the Earth), where some patches have much activity and where some users are in proximity and others at a distance from them.

 

With this rather long detour, I return to discuss how Parks studies this process primarily as an aesthetic-phenomenological process – how satellite data is circulated, displayed or concealed.

Sources range from how television programs were aired, war zones presented and ancient gender constructed. US satellite monitoring of genocides in the 1990s Balkan wars did not only report on the events but also framed Yugoslavian’s as the ”other”, hence hindering the killings to cease. Archaeological findings of Cleopatra’s ancient Egypt were selected based on tropes of a femme fatale as described by Roman, later Christian and Renaissance commentators. Satellites and GIS were part of reinforcing these gender ideas when they could have been used to portray other aspects of Egyptian society and of its queen.

These are all parts of how satellites constitute a culture in orbit, and the examples serve as case studies for Parks’ argument. But both the oppressive aspects of Western ideas and the resistance are so to speak chosen, and what I would like to see are the components of the televisual going on before the dispersion and display come into question. Namely the connections between military and industrial interests, the linkage to aerial photography. There is some discussion regarding the traditions of espionage technology in the 1960s Corona programme and the natural resource usage of Landsat in 1970s, later by SPOT in the 1980s. Parks also suggest that digitization have dramatically increased the means by which imagery is processed (78). Parks elaborates on William Mitchell’s notion that since 1962, Earth ”ceaselessly shed skins”. Old satellites become space garbage and new ones fill their place. Meanwhile, the data-sets amassed become larger, more detailed and frequent in updates (137). This skin is both path and text, written all over and around the face of the Earth.

Parks’ sources and research touches not the beginning, but at the end of an orbit. It explains little of interests behind satellite technology, except through secondary literature. Again, Mitchell has given an exposé of how digital imagery came about and implications of digitization for politics, news, culture (Mitchell, 1992).

Parks gives little regard for  innovation, visions or visioneers of satellites. An example of how it could have been done is Granqvist and Laurila (2011) who methodologically outlined how to identify and measure (quantify) the impact of visions, futurists and fiction on emergence of innovation (in this case concerning nanotechnology). A similar approach regarding the emergence of satellites would easily have found its full share of futurists, to name only Arthur C. Clarke who as early as 1945 envisioned satellites to one day form a global infrastructure for communication:

The science fiction and magic of today are the science and technology of tomorrow.

Again, this is not part of Parks story; neither is that her claim. What Parks does instead is to analyse the dissemination of the televisual, and the injustices connected to whose knowledge this concerns. We find such processes at the end of the chain of events in making and using satellites.

This presents the cause and impact of the televisual in a somewhat abstract mode. It concerns the hegemonic ideas of the West to be, as Denis Cosgrove suggested, to see and use globe as means for modernism, control and empire (Cosgrove, 1994). In Apollo’s Eye he elaborates further on this idea:

The Apollonian view is omniscient, detached but never disconnected from the Earth – the knowledge is never separated from earthly powers – Cosgrove, 2001

Parks continues this narrative of how the shadow of Enlightenment remains towering over the world by increasingly panoptic tools of power. But with the caveat that those same tools also enable resistance.

What strikes me at this point is that ”global” has little meaning phenomenologically unless the infrastructure of satellite communication is maintained. It is precisely because satellite orbit can outdo Earth’s axis-rotation that news and events can be connected within the same day. This makes our perception similar. Parks’ critical comment of this globalisation is that we may be one, but we are not the same.

Underpinning Parks work is an assumption that what is visual and mobile also holds power over knowledge. This sounds close enough to Latour’s notion of immutable mobiles (Latour, 1987), though no reference is made to the Gaulish giant, which in itself might be refreshing but left me puzzled.

Coming across another writer on aesthetics of satellites, Trevor Paglen, one could discuss the  culture of geostationary satellites (fixed in an equatorial orbit at 35,786 kilometres distance from Earth). Geostationary pictures and satellite presence would likely be the last, and lasting, cultural trace of humanity (Paglen & Weisberg, 2012).

Parks is not this aloof in her reasoning but challenges us to gaze back at satellites as were they mirrors. What is portrayed depends on the gaze. And although the odds are in the favour of Western(ized) power groups, tracks and footprints could be trodden differently. Imparja is enabling, not determining.

 

References

Cosgrove, Denis, Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

——— Contested Global Visions: One-World, Whole-Earth and the Apollo Space Photographs, in Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Volume 84, Issue 2, June 1994.

Granqvist, Nina., Laurila, Juha, Rage against Self-replicating Machines: Framing Science and Fiction in the US Nanotechnology Field, in Organization Studies 32, 2011

Latour, Bruno, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society, Harvard University Press, 1987.

Mackenzie Donald A. and Wajcman, Judy, eds., The social shaping of technology, Open University Press, 1985.

Mitchell, Williams J, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, MIT Press, 1992.

Paglen, Trevor and Weisberg, Joel M, A Temporal Map in Geostationary Orbit: The Cover Etching on the Echostar XVI Artifact, in Astronomical Journal, August 2012.

Parks, Lisa, Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual, Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.