Reading Environments series - Sydney Environment Institute
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Reading Environments series

Reading Environments is a new series of gatherings sponsored by the Sydney Environment Institute and open to staff and students from across the University of Sydney.

Our common focus is the developing, diversified, and interdisciplinary field of the Environmental Humanities. Key concerns will be drawn from environmentally-engaged philosophy, art, literature, history, and so forth. Exemplary topics may include cultures of climate change; bioethics; animals; nonhuman temporalities; ecology and biodiversity; posthumanism; planetarity; etc.

In our first term, we sampled a variety of works – academic and otherwise – that represent significant, but by no means exhaustive, features and futures of the field. Future selections will reflect the interests of salon members. Our method encompassed readings, structured discussions, free conversations, field trips, and other endeavours besides. Our materials will be drawn from sources critical and creative; textual and ephemeral; visual and other-sensory.

After a memorable 2018 series, Reading Environments returns to extend our discussion of key concerns in the Environmental Humanities.

Our four meetings of 2019 engage diverse matters and diverse methods, in Australian and international contexts. Aesthetics, fiction, ethics, the plastic arts, ecofeminism, photography, environmental education, and radical hope: these and more will intermingle in manners productively conversant, and productively discordant.

This series was held at the University of Sydney from March 2018 - June 2019.

The series

This month’s material:

Amitav Ghosh – The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (U of Chicago 2016)

For some thinkers, climate change, and the processes it metonymically invokes, pose critical challenges for imagination, representation, and narration. In this text, Ghosh describes how “literary” fictions and conventional histories have proven insufficient interpreters of climate crisis. The Great Derangement touches questions of story, form, event, individualism, and individualism’s alternatives.

Proposed materials:

Wanuri Kahiu – Pumzi (Inspired Minority 2009)

Kahiu’s short film inhabits a placed called Maitu, East African Territory, a few decades after World War III (“The Water War). It is preoccupied by climate change, scarcity, the instrumentalization of bodies, utopian possibilities, and much more besides.

Michael Marder & Anaïs Tondeur – The Chernobyl Herbarium: Fragments of an Exploded Consciousness (Open Humanities 2016)

This formally ambitious work gathers thirty “fragments” – text and image – generated, so to speak, by the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986. These fragments analogize “an exploded consciousness,” a term that reflects both the disorienting and disempowering consequences of disasterand the potential to “think the unthinkable and represent the unrepresentable.”

Nnedi Okorafor – “MOOM!” (Hartmann 2012)

“MOOM!” is one of several stories in Okorafor’s oeuvre to engage the environmental and social consequences of petroleum extraction and transportation in West Africa. It was inspired by a 2010 Reuters headline, “Swordfish Attack Angolan Oil Pipeline.” It would become the opening chapter of her 2016 novel Lagoon.

Philip Samartzis – A Surrender to Wind in 9 Parts / Éloge du Vent en 9 Mouvements(France Culture 2017); David Dunn – “Acoustic Ecology and the Experimental Music Tradition” (NewMusic 2008)

“What is wind and how does it shape the way we listen?” For a recent radio series with France Culture, Samartzis, co-founder and Artistic Director of the Bogong Centre for Sound Culture in Victoria, attended to wind-sounds to access “new knowledge” of circumstances like Antarctic blizzards and Australian wildfires.

This month’s material:

Wanuri Kahiu – Pumzi (Inspired Minority 2009)

Kahiu’s short film inhabits a placed called Maitu, East African Territory, a few decades after World War III (“The Water War”). It is preoccupied by climate change, scarcity, the instrumentalization of bodies, utopian possibilities, and much more besides.

View the film here.

Reference Material

Science fiction has ancient roots in Africa. Why shouldn’t it also have a future there? in Quartz (2016)
Is Africa Ready for Science Fiction? by the novelist Nnedi Okorafor (2009)
Cli-fi, Petroculture, and the Environmental Humanities: An Interview with Stephanie LeMenager, from a brand-new issue of Studies in the Novel (50.1, Spring 2018).

This month’s material:

Michael Marder & Anaïs Tondeur – The Chernobyl Herbarium: Fragments of an Exploded Consciousness (Open Humanities 2016)

This formally ambitious work gathers thirty “fragments” – text and image – generated, so to speak, by the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986. These fragments analogize “an exploded consciousness,” a term that reflects both the disorienting and disempowering consequences of disaster and the potential to “think the unthinkable and represent the unrepresentable.”

Elizabeth Povinelli & Peter Cho – Digital Futures 

Elizabeth Povinelli & Peter Cho’s Digital Futures  expresses an awareness of the ways that archives pertaining to indigenous and other communities have sometimes reproduced colonial power, and indeed colonial violence. Digital Futures attempts something different, choosing not to make archival information “immediately available to the user; rather, it unfolds piece by piece, asking that the user undertake a principled engagement with representations of lived spaces and embodied histories.”

This month’s suggested material:

Nnedi Okorafor – “MOOM!” (Hartmann 2012)

“MOOM!” is one of several stories in Okorafor’s oeuvre to engage the environmental and social consequences of petroleum extraction and transportation in West Africa. It was inspired by a 2010 Reuters headline, “Swordfish Attack Angolan Oil Pipeline.” It would become the opening chapter of her 2016 novel Lagoon.

Julio Cortázar – “Axolotl” (1956)

 In this short fiction, Cortázar’s narrator encounters a group of reptiles living in a tank at the Jardin des Plantes, in Paris. What proceeds is a tangle of recognition, identification, “sensibility,” and metamorphosis.

Elisa Aaltola – “Empathy, Intersubjectivity, and Animal Philosophy” (Environmental Philosophy 10.2 (2013); 75-96)

 Aaltola considers the possibilities of intersubjectivity, and problematizes the place of “propositional language” in human-more-than-human relations. Inspired in part by Simone Weil and Barbara Smuts, Aaltola describes a practice – and ethic – of “attention.”

Eduardo Kohn – “Runa Puma” (Introduction to How Forests Think (2013))

 Kohn’s text derives from work conducted in the Upper Amazon. It discovers and seeks novel “conceptual tools” for thinking, writing, and practicing beyond an anthropocentric anthropology.

This month’s suggested material:

Philip Samartzis & Daniela d’Arielli – A Futurist’s Cookbook (Galaverna 2018)

This project involves sonic and photographic engagements with Pollinaria, a large farm in Italy’s Abruzzo region. The work affords new ways of thinking about relations among land and sound, agriculture and environment, urban and rural, industry and the countryside, and so on.

Matthew Burtner – “Climate Change Music: From Environmental Aesthetics to Ecoacoustics” (South Atlantic Quarterly 116.1 (2017):145-61)

As a composer and a critic, Burtner is interested in how “changing environmental conditions” might be enlisted “as instruments and procedures” for making and performing music. The article articulates “a new musical tonality” which emerges at the intersections of ecoacoustic technique and climate change.

Max Ritts, Stuart H. Gage et al. – “Collaborative research praxis to establish baseline ecoacoustics conditions in Gitga’at Territory” (Global Ecology and Conservation 7 (2016): 25-38)

This paper explains the results, as well as the practice, of establishing an “acoustic baseline” in Gitga’at Territory (British Columbia, CA). It’s an explicitly ecological study, but the paper opens numerous philosophical, methodological, and other concerns which have relevance for our group. These include the significance of nonvisual sense, collaborations among indigenous and non-indigenous methods knowledges, and the nature of “vernacular” science.

Environmental-humanist work, and environmental speech more generally, frequently explore relations of critique, resistance, and grief. Late last year, the ecopoetry journal Plumwood Mountain orchestrated an “online day of action” to oppose the Adani Group’s planned mine and rail project in Queensland. Part of that action involved assembling “Poets Speaking up to Adani,” a mustering of more than forty poems. In this meeting of Reading Environments, on November 20th, we’ll discuss these poems and the project they collectively comprise, as well as broader relations between activism, creative practice, and scholarship. How does this collection model a polyvocal, multi-directional way of thinking and responding? What worlds do these poems address and open?

The poems can be found here: https://plumwoodmountain.com/poets-speaking-up-to-adani/

In the words of Plumwood Mountain, from October 2017: “Poets, in the spirit of Judith Wright and Val Plumwood, are joining a groundswell of resistance that the Wangan and Jagalingou Defence of Country and the related Stop Adani campaigns represent. Follow along as we post poetry today, some protest, some dystopia, some speaking simply to a world view different from a corporate mining one.”

We’ll also discuss, Audre Lorde’s “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” and Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Aka Niviâna’s “Rise: From One Island to Another,” and as usual, we’ll be thinking about the ways that these texts resonate in and around our own work.

This month's Proposed Readings:

  1. Jill Gatlin, “Toxic Sublimity and the Crisis of Human Perception: Rethinking Aesthetic, Documentary, and Political Appeals in Contemporary Wasteland Photography,” ISLE 22.4 (2015): 717-41.
  2. Tony Birch, “The ghost river,” Griffith Review 42 (2013) (link)

This month's Proposed Readings:

  1.  John Broome, “The Public and Private Morality of Climate Change,” The Tanner Lectures on Human Value, talk delivered at the University of Michigan, March 16, 2012.
  2. Néle Azevedo, “monumento mínimo: arte como emergência” (2005-present), artwork: https://www.neleazevedo.com.br/minimum-nonument-art-as-emergency

Optional accompaniment: 

  1. Santiago Zabala, “Turning to Art’s Demands”, e-flux conversations (June 1, 2017): https://conversations.e-flux.com/t/santiago-zabala-onemergency-aesthetics-and-the-demands-of-art/6688.

This month's Proposed Readings:

  1. Eva Giraud, Greg Hollin, Tracey Potts and Isla Forsyth, “a feminist menagerie,” feminist review 118.1 (2018): 61-79.
  2. Laura Aguilar, photographs: from Michelle Hart, “A Mexican-American Photographer’s Body, On Display and Invisible,” The New Yorker, November 29, 2017 (link); and Giselle Defares, “The Authenticity of Laura Aguilar,” BESE, April 27, 2018 (link).

This month's Proposed Readings:

Inspired by The Radical Hope Syllabus 2018: Kieko Matteson, “Planting seeds of hope: environmental education for the present & future”.

  1. Selections from Brian Wattchow and Mike Brown, A Pedagogy of Place: Outdoor Education for a Changing World (Monash University Publishing, 2011).
  2. Trish O’Kane, “What the Sparrows Told Me,” The New York Times, August 17, 2014 (link).

Header image: by Georg Herman, 'Small Motifs of Insects and Plants' (1596) via The MET.