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Desiring Devastated Landscapes: Love After Ecological Collapse

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Desiring Devastated Landscapes: Love After Ecological Collapse Syracuse University SURFACE Dissertations - ALL SURFACE May 2019 Desiring Devastated Landscapes: Love After Ecological Collapse Courtney Eleanor O'Dell-Chaib Syracuse University Follow this and additional works at: https://surface.syr.edu/etd Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Recommended Citation O'Dell-Chaib, Courtney Eleanor, "Desiring Devastated Landscapes: Love After Ecological Collapse" (2019). Dissertations - ALL. 1045. https://surface.syr.edu/etd/1045 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the SURFACE at SURFACE. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations - ALL by an authorized administrator of SURFACE. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ABSTRACT This dissertation examines arguments within religion and ecology, particularly within the ecospiritual movement and methodology called the new cosmology, that humans should cultivate and sustain emotional relationships with nature by caring for nonhuman others as our evolutionary kin. Focusing on the U.S. Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Rita, and the British Petroleum oil spill, I argue that new cosmology affords few opportunities to think about intimacies with severely damaged and toxic environments. I consider how to rethink common themes in religion and ecology, like sacrality, kinship, and hope, within the context of encounters with toxic creatures and damaged ecosystems. I argue that cultivating affinity and attachment with/in ecological destruction requires thinking through how so-called “negative” affects like fear, disgust, revulsion, melancholy, shame, and despair can be an important part of ecological theory and activism. Furthermore, I contend there are other avenues for theorizing desire and kinship at the theoretical intersections of social marginalization and environmental decline that are more helpful for speaking to intimacies with and in damaged environments. Desiring Devastated Landscapes: Love After Ecological Collapse by Courtney O’Dell-Chaib B.A. Baylor University, 2004 M.A. Texas Woman’s University, 2007 M.T.S. Brite Divinity School, 2009 M.Phil. Syracuse University, 2015 DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Religion Syracuse University May 2019 Copyright © Courtney O’Dell-Chaib 2019 All Rights Reserved ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS To the Gulf and her communities whose voices and challenges I am sure I did not do justice, but they remain the reason to keep trying. I want to thank all the folks in the Religion department for making my time at Syracuse so special. Particularly, my advisor M. Gail Hamner for her fierce advocacy for her students and our projects. Thank you to my mentor William Robert for all the patient conversations that always make me feel more capable than I imagined. Thank you to Biko Grey for the incredibly helpful coffee chats and Ann Gold for her readings and thoughtful comments. My thanks to Deb Pratt and Jackie Borowve for all the care they put into keeping this boat afloat particularly because I was writing so far from Syracuse. And all my love to my colleagues especially my cohort brothers, the women of our prospectus writing group, and everyone in the CIP and affect reading groups. Thank you to the other-mothers in the department, Seren and Dana, for the playdates, advice, and empathy. Much thanks to Terry Reeder for her readings, steadfast championing, and practical assistance. And to our beloved neighbors Seren, Pedro, and Romy, thank you for making it really hard to move back to Texas. These chapters came out of numerous conference presentations and I want to thank all the people whose comments and questions reshaped this project in so many ways. Particularly, thank you to Lisa Sideris who I was lucky enough to meet one AAR and whose work is obviously so formative for this dissertation. Thank you to Christopher Carter and the Religion and Ecology group and to Donovan Schaefer and Gail Hamner for all their service and great conversations with the Religion, Affect, and Emotion group. All my gratitude to the child-care professionals and other-mothers whose care for my sons allowed me the time and energy to work on this project. Endless thanks to Liz Halligan, Jessie Hernandez, Hannelore Brun, Amanda Balcom, Bekah Borowve, Kimberly Chaib, and Lindsay O’Dell. Graduate education would be an impossibility without the continual material and emotional support of my big family. Ellie, Tony, Lindsay, and Chelsea make the impossible possible for so many humans and I am proud to inherit their commitments. Thank you for being your offbeat, generous, and passionate selves. And thank you to Dr. Varshana Gurusamy, who through our cross-country relocations and combined seven graduate degrees still makes eighteen years of friendship seem like a forever/instant. Finally, I want to dedicate all this work to my little family. To Oliver, who brought us shimmer and shine. To Conell, who sets the world on fire for its own good. And to Joe. I love you. In the Eros way. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Religion and Ecology 6 Dark Green Religions 10 Affects 14 Negotiating Methodologies 17 Chapters 20 Chapter 1: Sacred Evolutionary Epics: Awe, Reverence, Kinship 27 Evolutionary Epics 30 Sacred Natures 39 Evolutionary Kinship 48 Affective Investments 54 Chapter 2: Disasterscapes: Depletion, Abandonment, Toxicity 65 Landscapes of Depletion: Erosion, Super Storms, Spills 72 Unnatural Disasters and Disposability 75 Displacement and Dispossession 83 Stormy, Oily Forecasts 88 The Sacred and the Human 90 Silt Traces 105 Chapter 3: Disastrous Intimacies 107 Material Feminisms 109 Cultural Emotions 122 Encounters and Impressions 129 Affective Economies 132 Affective Mapping 135 Chapter 4: Affecting Environmental Imaginaries 147 Toxic Inheritance 165 All Together Now 178 Chapter 5: The Shape of This Kinship 182 What Must Be Cut 186 What Must Be Tied 201 For Multispecies Flourishing 212 Chapter 6: Kinship of Remainders 217 Environmental Mourning 221 Trauma, Haunting, and Melancholic Kin 240 Unspeakable Muck and Queer Melancholy 260 Chapter 7: Queer Love for Devastated Landscapes 278 Apocalyptic Futures 281 Disability, Illness, and Environment 284 v Desiring Eco-Crip Futurity 293 What the Water Gave Me 300 Bibliography 303 Vita 316 vi 1 Introduction Late April 2010, another “storm” is brewing in the Gulf of Mexico. Still in recovery from the devastation of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Gulf residents painfully returned to the national spotlight as reports slowly revealed that a British Petroleum (BP) drilling rig, Deepwater Horizon, exploded killing eleven workers and leaving a sea-floor oil gusher. BP’s public relations quickly jumped on the offensive claiming they had the plans and resources to stop the spill. But, as days passed, it became frustratingly evident that no such plans and protections were in place. Live feed cameras placed near the destroyed wellhead depicted in real time what looked like a volcanic eruption spewing clouds of ash. This eruption was an estimated 53,000 barrels of crude oil per day gushing from the well. Despite numerous attempts to cap the wellhead, and mounting anger and frustration at the seeming inability of anyone to stop the spill, it was not until July 15th, 2010 that the wellhead was capped. Media reports depicted tar ball littered beaches, rainbow-slick seas, gasping wildlife, struggling residents, and transnational corporations juggling the blame in an endless loop. The nearly five million barrels of crude oil spilling into the waters, plus the approximately 1.07 million gallons of toxic Corexit dispersants used to sink the oil, continues to result in extensive damage to marine habitats, marine industries, and the health of Gulf-residents, human and non-human. At the time of the spill my days were spent in a neonatal intensive care unit in southeast Texas. I'd given birth to a "micro preemie," a child so small and underdeveloped he looked more like a piece of overripe fruit than a human. He could not breathe or eat on his own. Some surgeries removed pieces of his anatomy and others added synthetic solutions. He was sustained by machines and donated breast milk from a facility. The crisis in the Gulf formed a strange 2 backdrop for the crisis unfolding in our NICU room with its incessant alarms, dry air, and pressing panic. While the unstoppable gush of oil garnered palpable local anxiety, it remained as background to the hourly pressures of the NICU. The spill seemed too close and too far— an overwhelming disaster that fashioned a certain lingering sourness. My partner and I were just beginning to learn all that could harm our son in that hospital and glimpses into the risks outside its protective walls seemed cruel. Two years later, feeling more confident in mothering my remarkable son and starting my graduate research, I came across the Aljazeera anniversary special report on sea life impacted by the BP disaster. In these interviews marine scientists Darryl Felder, Jim Cowan, and Andrew Whitehead detailed a list of disturbing after-effects including: crabs lacking claws and dying from within, fish with oozing sores and without eye sockets, and shrimp without eyes, with large tumors, and with their dead young still attached to their bodies.1 Even now, seeing the accompanying images of these mutations I feel an unsettling mix of what I can best describe as horror, revulsion, dread, and grief. I feel empathy for these tiny creatures that is difficult to articulate. They haunt me. It is risky to begin a project with personal experience. As a feminist, I recognize that while the personal may be political it is also easily dismissed as irrational, arbitrary, unscholarly, confessional. Nevertheless, this project originated from and is shaped by unexpected personal encounters—namely my evolving relationships with the daily entanglements of living on an environmentally precarious coastline while mothering a disabled child. My response to the images of ill and disabled sea life is, in part, a desire for conversations that do not yet exist on the intersections of social difference, particularly race, sexuality, illness, and disability, within the field of religion and ecology.
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