The Goose

Volume 16 | No. 2 Article 18

2-1-2018 Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene by Serpil Oppermann and Serenella Iovino Pamela Banting University of Calgary

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Recommended Citation / Citation recommandée Banting, Pamela. "Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene by Serpil Oppermann and Serenella Iovino." The Goose, vol. 16 , no. 2 , article 18, 2018, https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol16/iss2/18.

This article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Goose by an authorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Cet article vous est accessible gratuitement et en libre accès grâce à Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Le texte a été approuvé pour faire partie intégrante de la revue The Goose par un rédacteur autorisé de Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Pour de plus amples informations, contactez [email protected]. Banting: Environmental Humanities by Serpil Oppermann and Serenella Iovino

Thinking about and Thinking with the anthologies. Fair enough, though: there can Environmental Humanities be only so many pages in a book, and editors are free to make their selections as Environmental Humanities: Voices from they see fit. the Anthropocene by SERPIL OPPERMANN As the title suggests, Environmental and SERENELLA IOVINO Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene Rowman and Littlefield, 2017 $57.95 is roughly divided between articles on the discipline of the environmental humanities Reviewed by PAMELA BANTING and articles more particularly about responding to the challenges of the I offered to review this anthology of Anthropocene. primarily critical-theoretical essays in the Scott Slovic’s thoughtful meta- hope of learning what European ecocritics reflection, “Seasick among the Waves of were thinking about the Anthropocene, Ecocriticism: An Inquiry into Alternative compared with their Canadian counterparts Historiographic Metaphors,” usefully charts in such anthologies as Liza Piper and Lisa the stages of development of the field of Szabo-Jones’ Sustaining the West: Cultural environmental humanities while Responses to Canadian Environments, Rob simultaneously self-reflexively interrogating Boschman and Mario Trono’s Found in the metaphors—stages, phases, waves, Alberta: Environmental Themes for the palimpsests, fractals, and (my personal Anthropocene, and Ashlee Cunsolo and favourite) “a vast intellectual drainage Karen Landman’s Mourning Nature: Hope at system or watershed” (109)—by which the Heart of Ecological Loss & Grief. The co- academics tend to set up such chronologies editors, Serpil Oppermann and Serenella and trendlines. His essay, one of five in Iovino—from Turkey and Italy, “Part I: Re-Mapping the Humanities,” respectively—are very active voices in exemplifies what this anthology does best, European and material ecocriticism. To my mapping orientation points and networks of surprise, though, most of the contributors scholarly advance: how far have we come, to Environmental Humanities: Voices from where are we now, and from where are the the Anthropocene live in the United States, voices coming? the UK, Europe, and Australia. Greta Gaard reminds us that ‘the Given the predominance of the personal is the political’ and that ecocritics, North American presence in the book, the feminists, and ecofeminists alike must keep fact that there are no Canadian voices in it a bead on the risk inherent in the is a bit odd, overlooking as it does the universalizing tendencies of Anthropocene important contribution Canadian bitumen scholarship, namely, of losing sight of the makes to the world’s carbon budget; our activist work of constituencies such as the internationally-prominent activist-writers, Black Lives Matter and the #IdleNoMore such as David Suzuki, Naomi Klein, Maude movements. She also draws attention to the Barlowe, Andrew Nikiforuk, and Margaret investments of institutional environments in Atwood, and the scholarship of the editors suppressing or even eradicating powerful and contributors to the three Canadian alternative voices; Gaard admirably anthologies listed above; as well as those interweaves into her essay her own published in related scholarly and literary personal experience of persecution in the

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academy, a situation in which an important, Indigenous people everywhere are on the hardworking, politically engaged front lines, resisting environmental racism ecofeminist voice very nearly got eliminated and heading up environmental justice from the academic chorus. movements—trying to halt the construction The chart and the testimonial, of mega-dams or have old dams removed, however, are not our only modes of self- to stop gold mining and nuclear dumping, expression in these times. As Jeffrey Jerome to revive indigenous agriculture and food- Cohen writes, carbon is “our newest mode ways, to slow down further tar-sands of autobiography” (25), our Anthropocene contamination of air, water, and soil, and signature. In order for the earth and us to prevent the construction of yet more have half a chance, we need to shift our pipelines. awareness away from our selves and So, it is pretty odd that, to the best toward a posthuman ecomateriality by of my knowledge, not one of the twenty- attending to the agency of what we four contributors is Indigenous. I realize normally regard as merely inert objects or that the work of indigenous scholars is in things. In “Posthuman Environs,” Cohen high demand; that they may choose not to persuades us to reawaken to the materiality publish in such an anthology; and that the and agency of stone, because “[w]ithin its Anthropocene, as we now commonly native temporality the geological is just as deploy the term, began for indigenous restless as the arboreal” (29). people not in the mid-twentieth century, The impress of the material world which seems to be the best candidate for upon us is also in play in Stefan Helmreich’s the commencement date (127), but 400- lovely essay on “Nature/Culture/Seawater: 500+ years ago with the arrival in the Theory Machines, Anthropology, Americas of Europeans. Nevertheless, if the Oceanization,” in which, as he argues, anthology consisted solely of European culture is “often imagined in a land-based contributors writing about the idiom” (217), leaving water and the global Anthropocene in Europe, I would ocean adrift as mere floating abstractions. understand such an omission, but the fact His interest is in how to “employ water as a that there are contributors from the US and theory machine, when useful, and to treat Australia, where there are many indigenous both water and theories as things in the scholars publishing insightful books and world” (227), how to submerge water into articles, the absence of indigenous work the world again. reads like a colonial blind-spot and seriously In addition to these essays, I am also lessens the value of the book for research grateful for the inclusion of geologist and and teaching purposes. This is not to say Chair of the Anthropocene Working Group, that indigenous influence is not lovingly Jan Zalasiewicz’s essay on “The incorporated in Juan Carlos Galeano’s Extraordinary Strata of the Anthropocene,” writerly “On Rivers” or Thom van Dooren for his overview of what is at stake in the and Deborah Bird Rose’s richly evocative deliberations of the Working Group. “Lively Ethography: Storying Animist Within the pages of this anthology, Worlds,” in which they delineate the notion though, one place from which of ecological animism as “an opening into a Anthropocene voices are not coming is mode of encounter” (259) with a indigenous scholars, artists, or activists. multiplicity of perceiving, striving, desiring,

https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol16/iss2/18 2 Banting: Environmental Humanities by Serpil Oppermann and Serenella Iovino

sensing, adapting, and responding Others Art, literature, and scholarship in the (258). However, the conspicuous absence of environmental humanities have a crucial indigenous contributors in person only role to play in thinking about and thinking proves that there can be no averting the with, for example, seawater, dogs, fungi, effects of the Anthropocene without grandfather stones, sediments and strata, simultaneous decolonization. plastic, bacteria, and much more, and I read the essays in Environmental forestalling or coping with the kinds of Humanities gradually over a few months, problems and catastrophes we are ranging in no particular order across the witnessing and experiencing, as the table of contents. This was, in part, an stronger essays in this book illustrate. attempt to avoid the typographical errors and, in one case, the translation effects that PAMELA BANTING’s recent teaching and plague this text like mosquitoes. After being publications are in the areas of assailed by veritable clouds of typos (often petrocultural studies, geopoetics, literature in prepositions), in so many of the essays, I of the Anthropocene, psychogeography, came to feel as if the editors and publisher and animality. Recent articles include were not dealing in good faith with readers, “Ecocriticism in Canada” in The Oxford as if the exigencies of the Anthropocene Handbook of Canadian Literature (2016); had taken a back seat to the economy of “Walking Through Lightning: A Peripatetic the neoliberal academy’s incentives to rush Bioregional Reading of a Novel,” PAN: work into print. Maybe the publisher’s or Philosophy, Activism, Nature (2016); printer’s software ran amok at the last and “Anim-Oils: Wild Animals in minute and created all these typos after it Petrocultural Landscapes,” On Active had been assiduously proofread. Whatever Grounds, Rob Boschman and Mario Trono, the reason for their preponderance, the eds., WLUP, in press. overall effect on this reader is to shift the focus away from the ‘wicked problem’ of the Anthropocene and toward the necessity of wading through a wicked thicket of poorly edited, albeit often insightful, scholarship.

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