Undercurrents: Journal of Critical Environmental Studies

UnderCurrents journal of critical environmental studies } Issue 18 } end times and beginnings UnderCurrents is a collectively and student-run journal based out of the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University. UnderCurrents explores the relations among environment, culture, and society, and publishes one thematic issue per year. All back issues are available, free of charge, on the UnderCurrents website. We are committed to publishing a variety of scholarly, creative, and activist work that critically engages with conceptions of the environment. orders & UnderCurrents correspondence c/o Faculty of Environmental Studies 277 Health Nursing and Environmental Studies Building 4700 Keele Street, York University Toronto, ON M3J 1P3 [email protected] http://www.yorku.ca/currents reviewers Michael Classens, Amanda Di Battista, Natali Downer, Oded Haas, Tania Hernández Cervantes, Aedan Hoar, Sonja Killoran-McKibbin, Dana Kandalaft, Sarah Lindsay, Andrew Mark, Michaela McMahon, Elana Santana, Madison Van West layout and design Michael Classens, Amanda Di Battista, Oded Haas, Tania Hernández Cervantes, Jonathan Kitchen, Madison Van West distribution Michael Classens, Madison Van West graduate assistants Aedan Hoar, Crystal Lamont, Madison Van West printer Incredible Printing 30 St Regis Crescent North North York, ON M3J 1Z2 T: 416-630-5200 funding support Faculty of Environmental Studies & PhD Environmental Studies Student Association special thanks to Frances Chan, Dana Craig, Ling He, Jonathan Kitchen, Dr. Catriona Sandilands, and Dr. Peter Timmerman single hard copies $10 back issues available see http://www.yorku.ca/currents for digital archive of all volumes UnderCurrents © 2014. All rights reserved. The copyright in and to the individual texts and artwork in UnderCurrents is owned by the contributors as credited. Back cover image by Kayla Flinn. Laying More Pipe JOEL WEISHAUS* With pick and shovel, find the broken cast iron pipe, pry out old lead, knock off rusty joints. 20’ of 4” 40-schedule ABS sawed and coupled with rubber collars with stainless steel braces, joined to pipe at next stream crossing, joined to terra cotta pipe under tea house site, joined to three lengths iron pipe cut three poems ago. 1 lb brick of dull lead melted in a pan becomes silver liquid poured into iron bell-collars. Black cement smeared over all connections is a waterproof coating. Taps turned and draining, toilets flushed... Give it all back. * More poems from Joel Weishaus on UnderCurrents website http://www.yorku.ca/currents/ 2014 | UnderCurrents 18 1 Table of Contents 1 Laying More Pipe Joel Weishaus 3 End Times and Beginnings: A Retrospective and Relaunch Amanda Di Battista and Michael Classens 7 (Mis)reading Revelations Michael Young 9 Augury : Elegy Jessica Marion Barr 18 Witnessing the Wasteland OJ Cade 25 My Nobel Prize Gary Barwin 27 Quark for Wyatt Gary Barwin 28 The End of the Beginning Conrad Scott 30 inVoice Portia Priegert 34 the outside Frank Frances 38 “The Poem is the World” Sarah Nolan 45 The Imaginations of Humanitarian Assistance Omer Aijazi 51 Book Reviews 59 Contributors With images by Kayla Flinn, Darren Patrick, and Elana Santana. 2 UnderCurrents 18 | 2014 End Times and Beginnings: A Retrospective and Relaunch AMANDA DI BATTISTA AND MICHAEL CLASSENS1 In the Beginning... at the University of British Columbia was becoming radicalized and re- In 1988, a group of intrepid graduate students in the Faculty of Environmental dedicating himself to environmental Studies, at York University in Toronto, Canada, conceived and launched UnderCurrents. issues, and eventually, the David Suzuki The founders’ main objective was to provide a space for alternative, critical, and Foundation. The inaugural Earth Day creative explorations of environmental issues, thinking, action, and scholarship. was observed in 1970. Greenpeace Although many of the theoretical and conceptual tools to enable such a project were launched in Victoria, British Columbia in only in embryonic form, the founding editors sought to destabilize the ontological and 1971. DDT was banned in the US in 1972. epistemological moorings of some stubbornly persistent signifiers, including “nature,” By the mid-1970s, environmentalism “wilderness,” and “environment.” Direct action environmentalism of previous decades, had moved substantially away from though visceral, corporeal, and essential, had proven insufficient in the heady days of the first wave of conservationism and Reagan’s culture wars. The founding editors understood this implicitly, and launched the long hangover of the garden city movement. The spatiality of Nature UnderCurrents as both a material and a casual phrase, “there is no alternative,” was being subtly recast, and along with discursive salvo. This wasn’t their had, by the late 1980s, become doctrine. this came the seismic realization that if parents’ environmentalism. Fukuyama’s 1989 essay, “The End of Nature wasn’t out there somewhere, it Such a project was necessary given History?” added punctuation to the end must be here. The environment was no the socio-political, cultural, and socio- of a regressive decade, and a certain kind longer only a national park, but instead ecological impasse faced by critical of authority to Thatchers’ indictment imbricated with everyday life. scholars and activists in the West. With on imagination. A lesser-summoned, “Hey farmer, farmer, put away that the post-war consensus in tatters given though as egregious Thatcherism DDT now. Give me spots on my apples, the persistent, though waning, storm put a fine point on the state of affairs: but leave me the birds and the bees,” sang of cold war politics, a scattered system “There is no such thing” as society, she Joni Mitchell in her 1970 hit, “Big Yellow was consolidating around an even more proclaimed. Certainly bad news for Taxi.” On the one hand, the song clearly regressive constellation of cultural, society. But where did this leave the resonated with listeners in the global economic, social, and environmental environment? north, making prolonged appearances politics. A new era of neoliberal on the pop charts in Canada, the US, revanchism was rolling out across the Evolution of ‘The Environment’ and Europe. On the other hand, this globe, and that infamous tripartite of was Carson’s thick scientific analysis Reagan, Thatcher, and Mulroney was Rachel Carson’s breathtaking squeezed through the thin politics of making it rain. work, refracted through the broader hippie utopianism. The song might Thatcher, the Queen of the cultural politics of Paris, 1968, set the also be cast as the thin edge of a rapidly neoclassical epigones, seemed stage for a decade of relatively robust encroaching wedge of bourgeois, particularly confident in her environmental politics. By the start of consumer politics that would reduce clairvoyance. The serendipitous rise of the 1970s, a young professor of genetics second wave environmentalism to a 2014 | UnderCurrents 18 3 A. Di Battista & M. Classens | End of Times and Beginnings caricature of itself in decades to come. Mulroney’s environmental bona fides, it when UnderCurrents was launched. And Slightly blemished produce is, after all, is worth noting that his environmental although our brief retrospective of the once again de rigueur—a consumer- politics were of the high ecological context in which UnderCurrents has driven short hand for enlightened urban modernist variety—not at all surprising developed incorporates only western progressivism, broader machinations then that the organization to crown him perspectives and remains grossly of the industrialized and exploitative as the greenest Prime Minister was the incomplete, we believe that the broad organics sector be damned. Corporate Knights cabal, champions strokes of mainstream environmental And yet, Mitchell’s paved themselves of so-called “clean politics established in the 1980s remain over paradise also hints at a more capitalism.” Environmentalism would doggedly rooted in the contemporary substantive shift in the environmental emerge through the machinations of period—having changed little in kind, politics of the 1970s in the global north. 1980s Reaganomics a transmogrified though significantly in magnitude. The leaky ontological corners of the version of its 1970s self: in tact, though Yes, scholars, activists, and others “environment” box had been exposed, with a substantive and genuinely continue to struggle for justice, and and were rapidly disintegrating. incompatible capitalist caveat in tow. yes, our efforts have occasionally been Environmentalism now shot through The academy was scrambling to punctuated by success. Yet, as we write, contemporary life—it was legislative make sense of this emerging world, the continuation of state sanctioned, and regulatory politics; it was mass and the founding editorial collective of corporate complicit violence against movement; it was, as the spotty apple UnderCurrents did not, in 1988, have the human and more-than-human indicates, even ingested. Intimately rich body of conceptual and theoretical environments in both the global north internalized. And perhaps, most interventions that constitute the and south is difficult to ignore. distinctively, environmentalism was a historical legacy of the intervening massified, pop cultural touchstone. In years. Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg The Environment Evolving this latter respect, we might have good Manifesto” was still being digested. As reason to be nostalgic about the good was Neil Smith’s Uneven

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