un/predictable environments
A space for conversation, analysis, and inquiry following the Un/Predictable Environments Conference, May 20-21, 2021
Looking at a Wildfire (Adirondack Chairs), Kaleden, British Columbia, 2020 Since 2016 I have resided in one of the most fire-prone landscapes in Canada. The Okanagan
Valley is an arid basin, east of the Coast Mountains of British Columbia, and west of the iconic Rocky Mountains. As an artist using photography and other associated media, I was intrigued by the question of what the aftermath of a wildfire looked like, and began making pictures of landscapes affected by wildfire. Through this ongoing project, I have learned a great deal about the composition of forests and the necessity of fire on the land. Many forests in the Central Interior of British Columbia are fire-adapted; they are designed to burn. Fires of low or moderate intensity would occur on a natural cycle every two to forty years, clearing the understory and regenerating berries and natural grasses. What settlers regarded upon their arrival in the 19th century as untrammeled wilderness was actually a forest that had been managed by the Syilx (ancestral Indigenous peoples of the Okanagan) for millennia. The Syilx had maintained a balance between ecological processes and human influence through cultural burning. In North America today, the traditional ecological knowledge associated with cultural burning has been adopted by provincial, state and federal agencies in the form of prescribed burns. In other words, a recognition of the importance of returning fire to the forest. While this scenario may be considered as regionally specific, there are fire-adapted landscapes on every continent (except Antarctica) accompanied by rich histories of cultural burning in order to renew the forest. For Un/Predictable Environments: Politics, Ecology, Agency, I presented a paper that positioned my photographs within the context of how wildfires are vilified in popular media. My artistic approach to this subject seeks to reveal diverse perspectives, and act as a critical foil to dominant media representations of wildfire. My goal is to create space for the consideration of practices of resiliency, including the reintegration of fire within fire-adapted ecosystems. (click read more to continue)
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One of the central issues concerning the COVID-19 pandemic is death. How can we make sense of dying in a pandemic? What meaning can be given to death? It is a reality and we know that it will happen to all living creatures on earth. Still human beings have ritualized and symbolized death in several way across different cultures. Functional interpretation of death suggests that death performs a very crucial function to maintain the society as a whole. By replacing old members in the society, it gives opportunities to the new members to enter into the shoes of their elders and take responsibilities of households and families (Srivastava and Srivastava, 1997). Within the French Structuralism one similarity among all cultures symbolizing death is that they all have some or the other ritual associated with it. This is the underlying similarity amidst the surface ritual differences related to death and dying. Robert Hertz (1960) has suggested that differences exist in terms of rituals and beliefs related to death in different cultures but there is a similarity in the underlying logic. This logic is patterned on a triangular principle where the dead body, the survivors and the place where the dead is supposed to have gone after death form three points of a triangle. It is this triangular model of death that seems to be disturbed in this pandemic. Although people are still quite sure about the place where their dead relatives have gone but their relations with the corpse underwent a change. People were not allowed to see their dead ones for the one last time. They got apprehensive about the COVID infection that might be transmitted from the dead to the living. This resulted in a total institutional takeover of the disposal of the dead body. (click read more to continue)
As a follow-up to Paper Session 4, Embodied Knowledges and Multiple Cosmopolitical Approaches to Environmental Change with Jorge P. Legoas, Heather Alberro, and Jim Igoe (May 20, 2021, 9:30-10:40 PDT), I would like to posit a question:
As part of her paper, Heather Alberro explained why she prefers the term Capitalocene to the term Anthropocene, a stance I sympathize with. As critics have noted the universal figure of the human implied by the “Anthropo”-cene is dangerous given its tendency to ignore the disproportional impact certain peoples have on the current climate crisis and who will bear the brunt of climate change impacts. In part because of such discrepancies Baskin (2015) argues the Anthropocene is “paradigm dressed as epoch” – that it is less a geological era collectively brought about and experienced by humankind than an ideology that underpins a particular (white capitalist) view of the world. He writes that in the Anthropocene, “Humanity is [wrongly] made one with modern enlightenment man, the man for whom ‘progress’, ‘growth’, and ‘development’ are the dominant goals” (16). It’s along this line Moore (2015) advocates for the Capitalocene, a title that names capitalism – not the human “species” – as responsible for the current climate crisis (see also Haraway 2016), and Mirzoeff (2016) advocates for naming it the White Supremacy Scene since the universal human implied by the Anthropocene really turns out to be “our old friend the (imperialist) white male” (123). These critiques are important, and true. (click read more to continue) |
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