Earth and Beyond in Tumultous Times: a Critical Atlas of the Anthropocene

Gál, Löffler (Eds.) Earth and Beyond in Tumultous Times EARTH BEYOND GÁL LÖFFLER Earth and Beyond in Tumultuous Times Future Ecologies Series Edited by Petra Löffler, Claudia Mareis and Florian Sprenger Earth and Beyond in Tumultuous Times: A Critical Atlas of the Anthropocene edited by Réka Patrícia Gál and Petra Löffler Bibliographical Information of the German National Library The German National Library lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie (German National Bibliography); detailed bibliographic information is available online at http://dnb.d-nb.de. Published in 2021 by meson press, Lüneburg, Germany www.meson.press Design concept: Torsten Köchlin, Silke Krieg Cover image: Mashup of photos by Edgar Chaparro on Unsplash and johndal on Flickr Copy editing: Selena Class The print edition of this book is printed by Lightning Source, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom. ISBN (Print): 978-3-95796-189-1 ISBN (PDF): 978-3-95796-190-7 ISBN (EPUB): 978-3-95796-191-4 DOI: 10.14619/1891 The digital editions of this publication can be downloaded freely at: www.meson.press. This Publication is licensed under the CC-BY-SA 4.0 International. To view a copy of this license, visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/. Contents Series Foreword: Future Ecologies 9 Caucho 13 Mátyás Sirokai [ 1 ] Introduction 15 Réka Patrícia Gál and Petra Löffler Plant-time 45 Kornélia Deres [ 2 ] Memory Regimes and the Anthropocene: Tracing Causes and Responsibilities under Flood Risk Scenarios in Ancash, Peru 47 Tomás J. Usón Archipalego 73 Anna Zilahi [ 3 ] Writing the longue durée: Foundational Fictions and the Anthropocene 75 Jörg Dünne Tectony 99 Kinga Tóth [ 4 ] Genealogical Liquefaction: Epistemic Formations of the Anthropocene 101 Jakob Claus Echolocation 123 Anna Zilahi [ 5 ] NAVI / GATED / GAZE: Google Earth’s Narrative of the Earth and the Privatization of Gaze 125 Marie Heinrichs Ant-Colonial Consciousness & Planetary Consciousness 153 Kornélia Deres [ 6 ] A Laboratory for Living Off-World: Re-Narrating Biosphere 2 155 Hannah Schmedes Oktopus 183 Kinga Tóth [7] Colonizing the Ocean: Coral Reef Histories in the Anthropocene 185 Petra Löffler Authors 215 Series Foreword: Future Ecologies Edited by Petra Löffler, Claudia Mareis, and Florian Sprenger The future of life on Earth has generated ongoing debates in academia, through which the concept of ecology has gained status by being able to connect disciplines across the natural sciences, humanities, arts, design and architecture. Criticism of the effects of climate change, which exacerbate existing inequalities in our global population, has spread from academia to the political and public spheres. At a time when the future of life on this planet is more uncertain than ever, the urgency of exploring other ways of thinking, acting and dwelling together is evident. This book series investigates emerging ecologies in uncertain worlds—ecologies that are open to the interests of other-than-humans and that care for plural modes of existence. By providing a platform for these topics and debates, we hope to contribute to a nature contract with the Earth as the shared common ground of water and minerals, air and birds, earth and woods, living and non-living, active and passive matter. Future Ecologies is about a “time-space-mattering” that calls into question common knowledges about the relationship between space, place, territory, and the linearity of time in light of the circulation of matter, energies, and affect. It also questions the meaning of past ecologies and unsustainable futures for emergent ecologies, while problematizing the ambivalent histories of environmental knowledge, especially in the interplay of modernity and coloniality. Reading research in the Future Ecologies series allows you to take the many facets of past ecological thinking into account, to reveal its differentiated and often contradictory political implications and effects—and to criticize its, sometimes, naïve promises. Studying Future Ecologies means not taking for granted what ecology means. The series promotes a relational thinking that is aware of the environmental, economic, social, and individual complexities of 10 such a pluriverse driven by equally complex technologies and infrastructures. As Donna J. Haraway said, in a shared world “nothing is connected to everything, but everything is connected to something”. This connection generates and discloses different scales of responsibility. We dedicate this book series to all earthly critters who want to invent and try out new forms of life and styles of cohabitation, who ask which risks we want to and are able to take, and which futures we dream of. We invite contributions that address the geopolitical inequalities of climate change and capitalist extractivism, that deal with politics of (un)sustainability and (de)futuring, technologies of recycling and environing, non-anthropocentric epistemologies and practices of world-making. The Future Ecologies series advocates for interdisciplinary approaches towards the numerous aspects of ecology. We invite junior and senior scholars from various disciplines in media, cultural and literary studies, anthropology, design, architecture, and the arts to build collaborations between different voices, practices and knowledges—that is: heterogeneous communities of practice. By endorsing open access publishing, the series also aims to partake in the current transformation of the ecologies and economies of knowledge production. Caucho Mátyás Sirokai Those who work with metal resemble metal. Metals hold the power over bodies. Those who work with stone resemble stone. Stones hold things of the past. Yet if you want not power but momentum, you desire not what’s been but what’s to come, then work with flexible materials, as these are embodiments not of mineral, but organic strength. Those who take the caucho path then, do it for the pleasure of flexibility, for the bounce and for the storage of energy, for the momentum not wasted. For the hands which clapped on the caucho for the first time. For the hands which come to resemble the caucho. For the hands which first began to play with it. For the tree which can’t. And for the grievers comforted by the game. Translated by Owen Good [1] Introduction Réka Patrícia Gál and Petra Löffler Siting and Citing There is more than one “Anthropocene.” The concept was pop- ularized at the start of the millennium by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and biologist Eugene Stoermer (2000) to denote a new geological epoch characterized by unprecedented human influence over “nature,” but the varying terminology that has been used to refer to it has become subject to intense debate across the board in the sciences, humanities, and arts. The word has generated numerous corresponding and opposing neologisms—Capitalocene (Moore 2015), Chthulucene (Har- away 2016), Plantationocene (Haraway 2015), and Thanatocene (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016) among others—which focus on the importance of capitalist-colonial extractivism and racist knowledge, as well as material, production in the emergence of this proposed new geological epoch. In consequent debates, the assumption of a universal anthropos (Pálsson et al. 2013) has been criticized because of its inherent privileging of the Western subject. 16 As these debates demonstrated, confronting the Anthropocene requires a radical onto-epistemological shift that removes the Western subject (Hall and Gieben [1992] 2011) from its previously established position of standing separate from, and above, nature. The concept demands that we revise the long-established divides between humans and nature, global and local, living and inert, and that we develop new relationships with the spaces in which we live and of which we dream, from the manifold land- scapes of the Earth’s surface all the way to outer space. Breaking away from these axiomatic divides necessitates the acceptance of values and interests of diversified non-humans, as well as the rejection of traditional notions of technological progress, hierarchized knowledge systems, modes of individualization, and assumptions about human superiority. It requires that we actively work against Western anthropocentrism and the over- representation of capitalist economies and colonial knowledge production in politics as well as in science and art, while fore- grounding multispecies and dynamic material entanglements in academic debates and beyond. The aim of Earth and Beyond in Tumultuous Times is to contribute to the important work being done in this field that decenters and overcomes privileged perspectives on the planetary environ- ment and its relations with outer space. This work takes place in and responds to a time of massive ecological crisis—that is, of climate change, mass extinction, environmental degradation, and their cumulative, far-reaching causes and effects on the social, political, and economic spheres. In order to do this, our volume approaches the Anthropocene as a boundary object, the investigation of which inherently necessitates an interdisciplinary approach and sharing of knowledge. Boundary objects are used in different communities of practice simultaneously to produce a shareable understanding; they are plastic and robust at the same time, able to “adapt to local needs ... yet ... maintain a common identity” across their various sites (Star and Griesemer 1989, 393). This introductory chapter situates the timing and placing of the 17 Anthropocene in various scholarly traditions and

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