Steve Mentz

[Cross-posted from the U MN Press blog]

A few weeks ago in late July, a tropical rainstorm cascaded onto my home in Connecticut. During high summer in the northeastern United States, violent thunderstorms often roll through after steamy afternoons. But we weren’t prepared for the speed and volume of water that fell in a few short hours during the evening of July 22, 2019. After we spotted rising water in the basement, spreading into my teenage son’s underground lair, we frantically filled 32-gallon garbage cans and hauled them up the hill from the flooded garage. We weren’t quite successful in keeping all the water out of his room – but we did save the Xbox, not to mention his bed.

Welcome, I didn’t say to him as we each strained to pull more than one hundred pounds of sloshing water up the steep driveway, to the Anthropocene. 

According to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Programme, July 2019 was the hottest recorded month in human history. The year 2019 also saw record-breaking heat in April, May, and June. Our planet is cooking, and since warm air holds more water vapor, storms are getting wetter. The downpour we experienced might not have been unusual for the tropics. But our cozy New England home wasn’t designed to handle that much water that fast. My flood situation seems pretty tame compared to the prospects facing residents of the Maldives or Marshall Islands, but the Anthropocene touches each one of us, unevenly, unexpectedly, and sometimes painfully.

As the lived experience of climate change becomes more tangible with each storm, flood, and heat wave, we need to activate our imaginations. It’s not easy to make sense of how it feels to live through dynamic ecological change. The buzzword “Anthropocene,” coined in 2000 by Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen, has been spreading its tentacles beyond climate science to the humanities, arts, and other public discourses, but it’s not clear what the term asks of us in response. We know that climate change has a human cause and that we are living through an “Age of Man” in a basic physical sense. We also know the abstract Anthropos that drives up carbon levels in the atmosphere is not the same as the individual Humans who suffer the most drastic effects. Industrial capitalism lights the fires, but people feel the waters rise.

I wrote Break Up the Anthropocene to add more imagination to our responses to climate change. I wanted to synthesize the many ways cultural theorists and eco-philosophers are describing our moment. I also wanted – to cite my argument-by-hashtag – to #pluralizetheanthropocene. That means transforming the ominous and monolithic rise of global temperature into varied, surprising, and radical possibilities. I wanted to exchange the global paradigms of 1.5 or 2 or 3 degrees Celsius with multiple responses to plural lived experiences of catastrophic ecological changes.

I needed help, and I got lots of it. The inspiration started with a gorgeous watercolor painting that swim-artist Vanessa Daws made for me in June 2018, when I was giving a #pluralizetheanthropocene lecture in Lausanne. The image, which balances a Ship of Fools alongside a mostly-hidden sea monster and an ocean full of plastic trash, launched this book with color and turbulence. I’ve tried to stay true to that spirit as the project has moved and turned.

The book’s seven chapters comprise forays into plural perspectives. A chapter called “Six Human Postures” treats Old Man Anthropos as a physical allegory, so that various eco-theoretical approaches involve asking the Old Man’s tired body to assume new positions. Yoga for the Anthropocene! Other chapters include investigations of anachronism as positive method, a Borges-meets-Shakespeare engagement with “now, now, very now” as the time of climate change, and a reading of errancy as central to natural systems. A glossary-chapter, “The Neologismcene,” catalogs two dozen proposed names for our warming age, from “Agnotocene” to “Trumpocene.” We need them all, and more besides. A concluding encounter with the whale-swallowed prophet Jonah suggests that the climate change stories we need today include both the human perspective that counsels repentance, change, and survival, and the posthuman vision that promises shock, disorientation, and new possibilities.

When I was writing this little book, I didn’t think that I’d feel one of its conclusions in my aching back. I need a better system for keeping stormwater out of my house. We need to stop pumping carbon into the atmosphere. But living in the Anthropocene means finding floods where you don’t expect them and hadn’t encountered them before.

——-

The steel carbon-bird waits open-mouthed at the gate, and I can feel #ASLE2019 sliding away. Such a flood of imagination, energy, and collective good will spilling out all over the UC Davis campus this past week! I’ve been enjoying many different academic events shaped by Jeffrey Cohen’s deft hands for around a decade, and this year’s ASLE program, crafted collaboratively with Stacy Alaimo among many others, was gorgeous and overflowing.

I followed a series of bread-crumb trails across the green fields of Davis, including an encouragingly varied set of water-related sessions, a dazzling quartet of plenary lectures, and the double-session “Swimming into Paradise” that I co-convened with Lowell Duckert and a hearty crew of swimmer-thinkers. I also enjoyed Davis’s robust expanse of establishments named after burgers, brews, and academic institutions (“Burgers and Brew” “University of Beer” “Three Mile Brewing Co” “G Street Wunderbar” &c). It’s always hard to know how to organize one’s thoughts in the exhausted aftermath. How to swim after all the threads at once?

The question niggling at me all conference, and really for much longer than that has been the eco-dilemma of the places of small things in vast environs, the individual in human and more-than-human communities, and the impossible claims made by both sides of that duality. My talisman for this relationship, and the image with which I started and ended my own talk, is a human body immersed in salt water, but the competing pulls of local and larger human ties also framed the way I puzzled this split all weekend. Even now, drafting this blog-meditation while tucked into a window seat in a steel tube above the Rockies, I’m caught between (to repurpose the title of one of my favorite academic books) the one and the many. If we expand the circle to include nonhumans and agentic forces like winds and tides, how can we still find space for each solitary self? What does the one mean among so many many?

Like all the best questions, the choice between small and vast, one and many, shuttles between alternatives that never resolve. Solitude oppresses, as do even the most generous and supportive communal ties, such as those renewed this June amid ASLE-istas. By the time I ended up walking a serpentine path around 2:30 am Sat night after exhausting the wonders of the Wunderbar, my addled mind and tired body were reaching for home. It’s possible to crave two places at once. Or hopefully more than two.

That’s the sub-story beneath my post ASLE-musings: a dream of multiplicity, connection, exhaustion, and productive confusion in the Anthropocene.

— A diligent sub-sub-librarian might also note that plurality is not coincidentally also the burden of a little book of mine that, after some in-press delays, was published during this year’s ASLE: Break Up the Anthropocence, from U Minnesota Press’s Forerunners series. Read it online via their open-access Manifold platform or order the inexpensive paperback if you like! More on this project elsewhere, probably soon —

But first, ASLE’s plurality and excess —

Deep Waters (I-II) Two post-colonial sessions organized by Ned Schaumberg showed me on my first full conference morning how lively and varied blue humanities work is becoming across many discourses. I might have wanted to stand up a bit more for Allan Sekula as writer and film-maker, because his vision of historical transition and its human cost in the modern maritime world has been inspiring to me. But the great joys of these two sessions were learning new things, from the recent Australian novel Carpenteria by Alexis Wright to comparative perspectives from Indigenous cultures from Taiwan to North America. So many seas as yet unknown! I’m excited to learn more about this work.

Plenary I: Nnedi Okorafor’s Utopian Futures

Nnedi Okorafor’s blend of African-futurism and Marvell comics was mostly outside my ken before I heard her opening plenary, though I’ve now got her lively alien encounter novel Lagoon on my kindle app. I loved her description of writing Black Panther graphic novels, and I also valued her self-aware decision to choose optimism, to some extent in conscious contrast with the tragic vision of her mentor Octavia Davis, whose novel Wild Seed she is in the process of bringing to the small (mini-series) screen.

Swimming I: Immersion

The “Swimming into Paradise” panel that I co-organized with longtime swimming and thinking collaborator Lowell Duckert started with a panel on immersion that was as wet as even a water-glutton like me could want. We lost one presenter to the perils of CA freeways at the last minute (no serious injuries, except to an aging car), so I smuggled in Vanessa Daws’s short film Psychoswimography: Santa Barbara to give us a water’s eye view. All three presentations joined her in both hospitable and hostile waters: Lowell in the cold Atlantic surf during a Polar Plunge in his new home of Delaware, Marianna Dudley in a heroic crossing this past weekend in frigid San Francisco Bay from Alcatraz Island back to the shore, and Jeremy Gordon in the spring-fed waters of the Crystal River in central Florida, where floating with manatees he imagined slower and less directed forms of engagement. In every case, the physical encounter with water spurred thought. We imagine differently in touch with our world’s salt water skin.

Plenary II: Melissa Nelson’s Radical Kinship

My favorite phrase from Melissa Nelson’s deeply collegial plenary is “radical kinship,” though the feeling of listening to her was less radicalizing than welcoming. A professor and activist based in San Francisco State University, her talk wove together indigenous environmental teachings with practical community-building wisdom. The radical part of her stance was its inclusiveness: all manner of humans and nonhumans thinking and living together in respect and professed acknowledgment. I’m often a bit nervous in enveloping communities — perhaps defensively, I’m always thinking too critically, eager to poke and pick and quibble, in an academic’s way. But it was hard to find much to quibble about here. (Unless…in my own perverse inversion…I would quibble about not have enough to quibble about?)

The Oecologies Epic-Romance

I can’t run through all the sessions I saw, or the many others that I chatted about and was sad not to have been able to see in full — but I will talk briefly about the triple-threat panels on premodern eco-thinking sponsored by the Oecologies research group. I’m always drawn to the water works, especially a pair of Humber-centered papers, one by Tom White about 21c energy politics and another by Liza McIntosh about Lyly’s Galatea and early modern floods and fenlands. It was great to hear so much new work by young scholars making use of the premodern environmental humanities in innovative ways, including on early modern women writers. I was also glad to hear new work by Allan Mitchell, whose thinking about medieval mathematics and navigational instruments always amazes me; Tiffany Werth, whose ongoing work will I suspect come to re-frame our understanding of Spenser as eco-poet; and Vin Nardizzi, who regaled us with a strange and wonderful tale of archival sleuthing. (I was sorry to have missed Fran Dolan’s paper, which I am sure was brilliant and lively.) Oecologies is a great collective and resource for premodern ecological scholarship, which all of us are lucky to have.

Swimming II: Representation

The second half of “Swimming into Paradise” turned from physical to intellectual encounters. My St. John’s colleague Elizabeth Albert explored the wonderfully weird career of 19c French caricaturist J. J. Grandville, whose most arresting image was a version of Noah’s Ark which only the animals board, leaving the supposedly dominating humans on shore to die in the flood. Luis Rodriguez-Rincon described the sea-god Triton from Camoes’s Lusiads, the greatest maritime epic between Virgil and Moby-Dick, in ways that have me reconsidering the place of undersea depth in the poem. Chris Holmes was pressed for time, but his elaboration of oyster-thinking from Jack London’s Tales of the Fish Patrol to the Billion Oyster Project by way of Karl Steel’s writing on oystermorphism made a great conclusion to a session that connected oceanic experience to various forms of intellectual and social production. If we built the oyster-reefs in New York’s harbor in advance of the next big storm, will that be our twenty-first century sea epic?

Plenary III: Ursula Heise’s Multispecies Justice

Ursula Heise presented from her current project on urban ecology and multispecies justice in the context of urban biodiversity. Her tale of Mexican parrots who are endangered in their home range but thriving in Los Angeles poses a compelling riddle about “native” and “invasive” species. Surely what we want is more life and more kinds of life, even if some are out of place? I don’t want that to be a call to celebrate invasives such as the ocean’s jellyfish future — though it does remind me that one creature I heard mentioned very seldom these past few days were jellies. We gestured toward them briefly in the swimming sessions — but I tend to think that jellyfish are signature Anthropocene critters, oceanic analogues to Anna Tsing’s mushrooms or perhaps the rats that love New York and coyotes that thrive in LA. More jellyfish-thinking, please!

Swimming III: Histories of Feeling

In my two recaps of “Swimming into Paradise” I’ve skipped over my own talk so far, which bridges the “immersive” cluster of Lowell, Marianna, and Jeremy and the “representation” group of Elizabeth, Luis, and Chris. I more or less fit in that messy middle, because I was half writing about “feeling” the water in a deeply physical sense, starting off in dialogue with Charles Sprawson. (Marianna afterwards sent me this great BBC radio interview from earlier this year, interviewing Sprawson as he struggles with his cognitive decline.) In my second half I turned textual, working with the Elizabethan learn-to-swim manual of Everard Digby and thinking about what a “history of swimming” might entail.

Part of the (private) joke of my talk was my attempt to discuss the oceanic “feeling” with no reference to Freud or the psychological tradition that his legacy calls up — though in some ways Sprawson’s Romantic individualism, which he focalizes through figures such as Byron and Swineburne, might be hard to disentangle from Freudian depth psychology. But to get to the self’s ocean by way of the feel of salt water on skin — that’s what I’m after!

Plenary IV: Cherrie Moraga’s Native Country of the Heart

The closing plenary was writer Cherrie Moraga reading from her recent memoir, Native Country of the Heart. The sections she read deftly narrated the painful onset of her mother’s cognitive decline — it resonates interestingly with the BBC Sprawson interview that I listened to Sunday morning at SFO — and also with queer, indigenous, and Mexican-American identities. She spoke compellingly about her ambivalence toward Stanford, where she was writer in residence for over 20 years, and her hopes for Las Maestras Center, which she recently has created at UC Santa Barbara.

Paradise on Fire – in Water – Together

Some of the communities that will stay with me from Davis are the more fleeting gatherings the circulated outside the formal presentations. I remember many flashes of collecting and dispersing, including me sneaking silently away from the crowded G Street Wunderbar Thursday night because karaoke’s not my thing. (“But we have songs coming,” Lowell insisted. I didn’t stay.) I recall the bright California sunlight away from which a quartet of us edged ourselves while eating sandwiches on Saturday between sessions. My feet recall many long walks between the Segundo dorms, the conference center, and Davis’s small downtown. A mostly silent community formed during my hour’s negotiation with two swimmers I’ve never met and won’t see again, as we shared a lane in the Rec Pool at 7 am on Friday. Conversation flowed during lively dinner with two of my St John’s students, one present and one former, and several other eco-colleagues. Thursday night the generous staff at Yeti, a Nepalese place, left us to drink another round of Mustang beer and talk well after we’d inhaled plates of saag paneer and naan. I’ve not always been an automatic every-two-years ASLE-goer, but I’m getting there. The conference’s early modern presence is clearly growing, supported this year by a great contingent from UC Davis. But even more than old poems, what I love about this conference is its open generosity and imaginative warmth. I got to the point where I welcomed long lines for beer or ice cream as chances to chat with whoever was standing next to me in line.

And yet even in such happy company, I sometimes felt the niggling overwhelm rolling over me. Like many academics, I’m only intermittently social & enjoy spending lots of time alone reading and writing. Conferences are endless opportunities — there are lots of people I didn’t catch up with or meet for the first time, I missed the Whitman panel and the talk on dolphins blowing bubbles and many other things I would have loved to see — but after a few days & late nights I feel other rhythms calling.

The back and forth tug between joyful community and cherished solitude suggests that an oscillating model might help re-frame the “utopia or dystopia” choice Okorafor explored in the first plenary, or other stark binaries we frame and want to trouble in environmental thinking. What if we don’t have to choose just one? What if the nearest we can get to utopian living — ie, what if the living we really want — also contains dystopian frictions, bad coffee at the student dining hall, a hangover that doesn’t go away until after the first slow thousand yards in the sunlit pool?

In the new book I make this a slogan and hashtag: #pluralizetheAnthropocene!

As my late night connection to Hartford takes off from Atlanta, I’m thinking about ASLE as temporary autonomous zone (in Hakim Bey’s phrase) and also, like the ocean, a place you love partly because you can’t stay.

I’m still working on how best to situate and narrate the back-and-forthness of being an individual in communities, a creature in ecosystems, a passenger on a plane, a swimmer in a crowded pool or an inhabited ocean. But I’m grateful to be thinking these things with the goodwill and good cheer of ASLE!

Before I scatter the still-smoldering fragments of the co-created Lexicon of #CreatingNature, I want to make a stab at what I’m taking away with me. The hours since the conference community dispersed from DC have been wonderfully intense. The maelstrom of my son’s high school graduation produced overflowing cross-currents of family, friends, and worlds in the process of changing. What are the things that last, as everything changes and ripens? What do we get to keep?

So, quickly and incompletely assimilated: this weekend’s events have created in me a phrase I hope never to forget: Everybody’s infrastructure all the time. The mash-up buzzed into my mind’s ear sometime after Ian received his diploma on Sunday morning. It’s been rattling through my imagination ever since.

Conference-goers and twitteristi may recognize the terms I’m combining. Lindy Elkins-Tanton, the scientist who took some time out from her project of sending a spaceship to the metal asteroid Psyche and building the Interplanetary Initiative at ASU to co-deliver our keynote, gave us the core: “Everybody is invited all the time.” To build things, and to rise to planet-sized challenges, she reasons, we need everybody together. It’s an audacious, inspiring, wonderfully plural vision.

The added word infrastructure comes from another of the conference’s distinguished guests, Michael Dove from Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Sciences. He talked about cultural infrastructure: the protocols, practices, stories, and conceptions of order through which human societies manage proximity to environmental danger. His example unspooled the cultural logic of small Javanese villages high on the slopes of the very active Merapi volcano, but the larger implications for a hotter and more violent global climate resonated powerfully, especially when we saw young climate protesters stretch out their bodies on hot concrete in front of the Supreme Court. We need new cultural infrastructure to live in the Anthropocene. Volcanos, Michael said, are “world making.” I wonder what cultural worlds are being made and destroyed today.

The last bit, all the time, also comes from Lindy. The words speak to collective action in the face of the multiply moving and disjunctive time scales of the Anthropocene. Can we imagine “all the time”? What sorts of futures and pasts and abrasive presents get collectivized in that phrase? Lindy also spoke about a 30-year project, like her mission to Psyche: what’s the thing you want to do in and for the world, especially if it takes you the rest of your professional life? I don’t yet have a good answer to that one yet. But I’m looking!

Everybody’s infrastructure all the time. I keep circling around the idea. We want infrastructure for everybody, and also everybody is and must be that infrastructure.

But first, before the fire cools, some more on/from/with #CreatingNature.

Creating

Academic symposia generate crossings and crossroads, and we pass through them to discover ideas that spring up like the Spontaneous Urban Plants Nancy Nowacek described caring for in post-industrial Brooklyn. Riding the train north on Saturday morning, sleepy and disoriented from after midnight Dark ‘n Stormies with Jeffrey, Lowell, and Erin, I felt the overflow. So many flickerings dancing through my head!

Some of the lexicon has already been e-immortalized via the twitter hashtag #creatingnature, but I also want to frame these words and thoughts in dialogue with our Shakespearean title and the Nature that’s creating us as we are creating and re-creating Nature.

The great goddess Natura and English word Nature conceal powerful tensions and fantasies, from natural philosophy to human nature to the interlocking structures of influence that gave rise to the word “ecology” in the nineteenth century. Nature is an imagined unity with which (some say) we must dispense, since Nature should not be separate from culture or Art or other human-generated phenomena. Thinking Nature points us into physical space, toward objects in spaces, spread out across and around our physical worlds. Nature produces the frictions and feelings that we worked so hard to represent last week.

But as I tried to catch in words during the Closing Roundtable, the Shakespearean modifier “creating” also hurls Nature into time. It’s the disorienting meeting of place and time, Nature and creation, that generates shared and shareable narratives. “Creating” as agentive principle asks us to recognize that the things we love will change, that they will graduate high school and leave our shared homes. Things we fear or hate or struggle against will also change. Change underlies and unsettles and makes uncertain. Creating cultivates the feeling that the ground under our feet may open up or is always opening up, so that falling into novelty is more norm than exception. “Creating” as first principle of errancy, in this sense, connects to a post-sustainability or dynamic ecology, something that I first wrestled my way into thinking about by writing almost a decade ago on this conference’s favorite literary touch stone, Lear in the storm.

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!

Creating Nature, says the mad old homeless king, hurts and confuses and wets us “to the skin.” He responds with a lyric howl. In response to that inhuman abrasion, we (academics and teachers and word-people more broadly) need lexical tools.

Here are some of the tools we gathered at the Folger last week, and some thoughts about how we might use them. Apologies for taking a bloggy and sloppy attitude toward citations in what follows!

Being a list of lexical tools for/from Creating Nature, including some fantasies about their future Uses

Session 1: Sustenance

Karen Raber opened us up with the proper ambivalence toward food for the body and narratives to sustain imagination. What sustains? At what cost? Who’s listening? Who’s eating what?

Counter-pedagogy: Right from the start I had the sense that the things we were seeking wouldn’t move in only one direction. Julian Yates described Lear’s response to the Noah story as counter-pedagogy of dislocation and alienation, which turned the idea of narrative as sustenance toward less comforting places. “Survival is insufficient,” he quoted from Station Eleven, suggesting that we worry ourselves beyond simple preservation toward things slippery and monumental. To create an Ark entails preservation through radical isolation — just so many pairs of creatures and no more. Julian and Jeffrey’s refuge-focused re-reading of Noah pushes us into the rain, where counter-stories flourish and, at least for a time, swim.

Parasitic opportunism We were a bit nervous as nine o’clock struck and we were still one speaker short, but Dagomar Degroot successfully navigated both cross-town traffic and the volatile sleeping habits of his newborn baby to offer a brilliant tool-word via his reading of the Dutch Republic’s Frigid Golden Age, which leveraged the Little Ice Age to the small nation’s advantage. During his fantastic talk, I had the queasy sense that the geopolitical advantages of today’s climate crisis may also support Arctic nations, through increased access to fossil fuels, trade routes, and agriculture — which may somewhat explain Russia’s recent resurgence, though in fairness the community of Arctic exploiters also includes Canada and the USA. To seize the opportunities of parasitism sounds both enticing and likely corrupting.

Aquaculture Maritime environmental lawyer Robin Craig’s great overview of how fishing has created (or re-created) the modern ocean gave rich context to the “shifting baselines” problem in environmental history, in which each generation’s scarcity gets reimagined as a new normal. Thinking about her gestures toward a global history of aquaculture, I was struck by “culture” as both physical and conceptual substrate, a medium in which things and ideas grow. Might the vertical oyster cultivation that thrives on a local scale on the other side of my little Connecticut town presage aqua-cultural changes yet to come?

“To ark the ocean” Building (I think) on Jeremy Jackson’s keynote at the Oceans Conference she had co-hosted in Utah this past February, Robin performed the interdisciplinary move the conference was designed to facilitate when she spliced her thinking about fishery management into Julian’s ark-visions. I loved this moment because the great hope I had (and have) for #creatingnature is precisely this sort of crossing, in which a marine environmental lawyer jumps on board with a literary project and thinks together about (to borrow one of Lindy’s phrases) the biggest things we can do. Why shouldn’t the ocean be our Ark?

Session 2: Storms

Joe Campana offered three poetic storm-aphorisms on which I’m finding much post-storm sustenance:

Storms endure.

Storms create ( or”write”).

Storms expose (systems).

Storm Time Kellie Robertson may not have known it but the clock was ticking and the storm heading our way as she outlined a series of “geostories” regarding a fatal lightning strike on an English church in 1652. Each successive account opened up new gaps from first-hand experience and titled toward new ideological warnings and calls to action. “All things come by Nature,” wrote one post-storm recap, including perhaps the Anglo-Dutch Wars and perhaps even the English Civil War. Storm Time and narrative time represent, in Kellie’s intriguing metaphor, a setting which frames, displays, and perhaps (mis-)interprets the jewel of experience. Storms are story-makers, writers, exposers, witnesses, Joe had already reminded us.

“Shipwreck years” Valerie Trouet’s triple archive of trees rings from the Florida keys, meteorological data from the eighteenth century, and the records of shipwrecks from the Spanish flota enabled a deeply persuasive story about shipwreck years punctuating the variable climates of the Little Ice Age in the early modern North Atlantic. I’ve loved this project ever since it was described to me by my cousin-in-law Noah Diffenbaugh, a paleoclimatologist at Stanford who knew about my literary work on shipwreck and wondered how it might interface with Valerie’s analysis. It’s not a simple fit. She uses the collected records of Spanish shipwrecks as a proxy for water temperatures in the Caribbean, while I explore individual tales as narrative responses to environmental hostility. There’s a numbers problem: I explore a lot of fictional and real shipwrecks in my book, but not nearly enough to draw statistical conclusions. But in some ways even more intriguing to me were Valerie’s reading practices, not of texts but of trees. Her tree-ring lab in Arizona comprises a practice of technical close reading, an engagement with natural codes and patterns legible in the trees that she does not harm in her practice, as she was careful to remind us. Like many humanists, I sometimes feel swamped under all the books I don’t have time to read. But what about texts that aren’t obviously books? How much remains to be read in what was once called the Book of Nature? I want to open my whale’s throat to learn all the languages of all the creating creatures.

Experience Henry Turner was one of several English professors who noted his own critical identity on the margins of a rising tide of self-professed eco-profs — and then Henry, like Debapriya and Liza later, contributed some of the most potent ideas and terms of the event. Henry came to experience via John Dewey’s pragmatism, and also via a line I quoted some years ago from the early modern French mariner Samuel de Champlain: “Experience is better than knowledge.” The original French is better:

L’experience passe science.

I ventured my semi-coherent French vowels to Valerie during one of the many breaks, suggesting that the mariner’s language values the claims of experience’s practiced hands over science’s rational head. “I don’t know about that,” Valerie said, in a very reasonable defense of science.

Of course we want and need and use both experience and science, the rational claims of thought and the instinctive feel of a skilled hand on the tiller. But I take Champlain’s point, and I think also Henry’s, to indicate a mystery at the heart of experience that hyper-rationalism, including the rationalism of all academic practices, occludes. It’s very hard to (in another of Henry’s phrases that I hope I’m not garbling) “feel what it feels like to be thinking.” Thinking about experience asks us to feel that thinking.

INTERRUPTION: TORNADO WARNING! Melville’s Ahab insists on being, in the middle of the personified impersonal, a personality. We experienced, in the middle of the session on storms and time and experience, a storm. Huddling in the basement and the room where they store theatrical costumes jerked us out of the formal conference. It suddenly re-assembled us into unplanned conversations, responses to proximity and anxiety and not-knowing what the storm was doing outside, except via the glowing proxies of our phone-radars. I always want to run out into storms, Lear-like, and encounter their vastness with my body. I’m glad I’ve learned to listen to wiser voices at such times.

Distraction In Henry’s reading of Dewey, experience struggles against distraction. Thee disjunctive side-step of the tornado was both distraction and jump-start. “Did we just experience climate change,” Henry asked as we filed back into our seats. Single events are only weather, not climate, several people noted — but what if climate change was not the tornado but the warning, not the storm but its over-writing and infiltration of our professional event? Does what we know about a post-Natural climate or “no analogue state” provide an interpretive tool with which to read the tree-ring accumulations of weather into a new human/inhuman language?

Co-Plenary: Climate / Weather / Feeling

Aspirational humanism We eco-humanists have been worrying about the human for some time, and ideas of the post-human and even post-humanities have staked out meaningful claims in our discussions. That’s all the more reason to value Lindy and Jeffrey’s co-plenary declaration of hope and aspiration for human accomplishments. I suppose if you’re leading a multi-year space mission to the asteroid Psyche it pays to thing expansively — Psyche is something like 200 million miles away — but I also appreciated the invitation inside my favorite library. What is the big thing we want? I love conferences and books and phrases and brilliant lectures in the Paster Reading Room. But maybe there are bigger things?

“Everyone is invited all the time” Lindy’s marching orders about inclusion emerge from her Interplanetary project, and I suspect also from her collaborations with Dean-Gandalf interlocutor Jeffrey Cohen. I love the audacity. Everyone! All the time! In a world of universities with scarce resources and academic cultures that value selectivity, aggressive access has the flavor of myth. What if we can build a spaceship Ark Ocean big enough to invite everyone? What do you call an Ark without an outside? Can we think insides without outsides?

Session 3: Shelter

Jen Munroe and Rebecca Laroche re-started us on day 2 with an OED-fueled exploration of shelter as military technology and, surprisingly, tool for conflict. They also pointed us toward the International Climate march that was happening that morning in front of the Supreme Court and elsewhere around the globe.

Cultural infrastructure Michael Dove, who was heroically struggling with a cold, presented his research on the cultural life of Javanese villages high up on the slope of the violent Merapi volcano. In his telling, the imagined “spirit village” that lives inside the crater and mirrors the human village on the slope represents a fictional stability, a way of living close to destructive forces. Volcanos, which are among the most consequential forcing agents in pre-industrial climate change, also generate fertile soil and, perhaps because of their danger, a partial respite from the “hydraulic state” that controlled the labor and lives of lowland Javanese peasants. To domesticate the volcano and transform it from threat to “world-making agent” and “interlocutor” represents a cultural gambit, a making-legible of a fiery violence that makes even trees and the ocean seem relatively tame.

Surrender Debapriya Sarkar’s moving evocation of shore as partial shelter in early modern literary romance balanced Michael’s reading of the volcano. Sea against mountain, water against fire: both hostile elements that lure, destroy, and stimulate the imaginations of those who live alongside them. Like many, I was especially struck by the last word of her talk, “surrender,” which upon discussion spoke to many our own memories of the experience of coastal storms, as well as to Debapriya’s personal response to the recent elections in India. Both talks in this session worked to “culturize” climate (to adapt a phrase of Michael’s) in the sense of recognizing the interstitial work that cultural forms, mythic and narrative, do whenever humans live near hostile environments they know to be violent but yet remain deeply desired.

EXCURSION: CLIMATE PROTEST

The young protesters lay on the hot sidewalk in front of the Supreme Court:

“You will die of old age / We will die of climate change.”

“The seas will rise, and so will we!”

I was glad to be there to see them.

Session 4: Spirits & Science

Anne Harris introduced our final session on “Spirits & Science” with a nod toward plurality and a celebration of the possibilities of slippery surfaces and encounters.

Slippage We all held our breath as Lowell Duckert told the tale of Balmol (sp?), a 17c Dutch explorer whose glissade launched him off the glacier into the Arctic Sea — though he seems in the end to have surfaced and returned to his ship. Nancy Nowacek elaborated the slippery path of her Citizen Bridge project, about which she wrote from Oceanic New York back in 2015. So many slippery surfaces! So many fortunate and frightening encounters!

Habitat compensation Nancy’s depiction of Habitat Compensation Island, built outside the industrial port of Dubai, got us thinking about what “compensation” means in cultural terms. Robin reminded us that compensation describes a legal remedy, and also that marine environments tend to repair themselves more efficiently than terrestrial ones.

“Nature has no end” Liza Blake’s reading of dramatic stoicism in George Chapman’s plays sounded out a bass note of inhuman affinity: what if the ecologically just thing to want is to become soil, to feed the grasses that feed the cows? Much of the two-day event strained us beyond the literary context that brings many of us to the Folger Shakespeare Library. Liza’s wonderfully suggestive reading of Chapman’s stoic poetics and physics suggested ways that the literary speaks to the sciences, social sciences, and more public and political discourses.

Slimy Agitation Chris Pastore’s bottom-up history of the ocean and its “thousand thousand slimy things” provided the perfect ending to our gathering because its vision of a material, foamy, slimy experience-filled ocean allowed us to see, or perhaps better to feel, the world into which we were heading. I’ve been thinking about jellyfish for a long time, and what it will be like as an ocean swimmer to learn to live with their slimy sting. Chris didn’t make that prospect seem more comfortable — but he did suggest that slime is less the exception than the rule in ocean history.

Closing Roundtable: Interlopers and invitations

I had probably too much to say at the closing roundtable, as perhaps this too-long blog post shows that I still have too much to say. But the thing I want to remember now was about interlopers and invitations.

Several people, mostly humanists who don’t identify as ecocritics, but I think also the scientists and non-Folger natives, spoke about the challenge of feeling like an interloper among Shakespeareans. I understand that feeling, and I often feel it too. But since I was the one who issued the #creatingnature invitations, I want to re-emphasize Lindy’s wisdom: “Everybody is invited all the time.” If you think about that phrase, it’s a challenge both to the invited and the hosts. All the time!

We feel like interlopers. We can, in fact, interlope, moving into conversations in which we’re not expected.

But to build a new infrastructure adequate to the Nature our culture has created needs all of us. Everybody’s infrastructure all the time. That’s what we need, and we need it now.

Looking forward to the next gatherings, wherever they will be!

The final event at “Creating Nature” on Fri 5/24 will be a roundtable featuring the chairs of all four sessions, the two co-plenarists, and me. We’ll be trying to put everything together and generate something like a rough lexicon of shared terms, competing ideas, and avenues for future thinking.

The session chairs, who in an eco-terminological twist we are calling “conversation stewards,” will help us bring into dialogue the central insights of each panel. Karen Raber will discuss “Sustenance,” Joe Campana “Storms,” Rebecca Laroche and Jen Munroe “Shelter,” and Anne Harris “Spirits & Science.” Co-plenarists Jeffrey Cohen and Lindy Elkins-Tanton will return to and extend their thinking about Weather / Climate / Feeling.

My own role at the end of what I’m sure will be an exhausting and intense two days will be to weave some of our shared words together.

How do the threats posed by Storms challenge our need for Shelter? (In a fantasy world we might finish this conversation by all taking the train to New York to see Glenda Jackson rage against the weather in King Lear.)

How can the ornate systems of meaning we label Spirits & Science provide conceptual and material Sustenance for human bodies in threatening weather?

What new terms do we need in a lexicon to bring together the premodern humanities with the sciences, the social sciences, and the creative arts?

We’re also looking forward to the questions and insights provided by a fully booked house of 60-odd audience members.

Hoping to see you in DC soon! Please also follow along on the #creatingnature hashtag!

The fourth panel session of the conference will complete a circle by looking at how early modern and medieval ideas of science and nonhuman causation can speak to discourses of the environmental humanities as well as to ideas from modern scientists we will have been introduced to the day before. In premodern cultures, boundaries we assume to be clear between the spiritual and the scientific blurred. This panel explores those blurry in-between spaces and ideas.

The chair of this session is Art Historian (and soon-to-be Dean) Anne Harris, who explores ecomateriality in medieval art and is the person in the world in whose response to the Notre Dame fire I’m most interested. (Her amazing essay on the ecologies of fire, “Pyromena, Fire’s Doing” appears in Jeffrey Cohen and Lowell Duckert’s Elemental Ecocriticism. And I remember when those ideas started as a dazzling talk in Tuscaloosa!) I wonder if she’ll splice in a few quite comments on fire, stained glass, and historical memory into her presiding over this panel.

One special feature of the last of these four sessions will be a collaborative paper jointly presented by the artist Nancy Nowacek, inventor of New York harbor’s amazing “Citizen Bridge” project, and literary ecocritic Lowell Duckert. These two have collaborated in the past, in my open-source collection Oceanic New York, and I look forward to hearing them think together about environmental questions and forms of knowledge.

They will be joined on the panel by maritime environmental historian Christopher Pastore, who does fantastic work on marine science and knowledge practices, and by Liza Blake, a literary scholar who works across the discourses of poetics and physics, with special interest in the wonderfully elaborate poetic physics of seventeenth-century writer Margaret Cavendish, of some of whose poems she’s produced a great online edition that I’ve used in the classroom.

As we wind our way toward the final sessions of “Creating Nature,” we will be combining our shared lexicons, thinking about how we can best speak to each other and to our shared concerns with the nonhuman environment. How might the discourses of spiritualism and religion speak to and with the sciences, both in historical research and in today’s world of skepticism and denialism? What shared projects of meaning-making seem possible, both in the past and today?

Spending an afternoon with my eco-theory grad students at Dead Horse Bay was the ideal way to pregame the ambitious, wayward, and sometimes overwhelming production of King Lear that’s currently at the Cort Theatre on 48th St. Dead Horse Bay’s particular flavor of #trashpastoral shows off fragments of ruined nature, the leeched detritus of more than a century’s urban waste. But it’s also — as I’ve shared with students before in relation to King Lear — a place of strange posthuman beauty.

On Tuesday afternoon the tide was high enough to keep us pinned to the upper half of the beach, where we poked around amid the collection of nineteenth-century glass and leather as well as plastic of more recent vintage. A breeze from off the Rockaways kept the air fresh, and a fisherman’s arrival showed how even old landfills remain part of living ecologies. King Lear gives us Shakespeare’s greatest vision of apocalypse and inhospitable nature, which is the reason I’ve long been convinced that this play is essential art for the Anthropocene. Dead Horse Bay hits us with the same alien pressure, and reminds us that living persists amid decay. I love this ugly place, and it provided the best answer ever to Julio Cortazar’s perfectly-phrased question about the role of iconic literary art in modern lives:

If I get so carried away by a spider-web covered with dew, what will I do in the evening when we are going to see King Lear?

(Around the Day in Eighty Worlds)

Sam Gold’s inventive staging of Lear mostly eschewed local references, though the Fool did show off American flag socks when chanting Merlin’s prophecy of misrule after the storm. The glittery-golden set located almost all the action indoors, with the storm and hovel scenes of act 3 somewhat oddly placed on the liminal space in front of the lowered curtain. (It worked for me, since I was in the front row and about five feet from the mad king raging at thunder — but I wondered about confining this outward-facing moment.) Many of Gold’s more radical stage gambits did not hit their marks, and not all the performances were strong — but at the center of the production a trio of brilliant actors shouldered the play’s massive weight.

I was especially looking forward to John Douglas Thompson’s Kent, having seen his stunning star turns as Tamburlaine and as Louis Armstrong in “Satchmo at the Waldorf.” Kent is the play’s conscience, and Thompson’s easy charisma and perfect clarity were a good fit for the role. He was especially winning when disguised as Caius, wooing and serving the increasingly mad old king. I wasn’t absolutely sure I bought his final despair — he seemed more like someone who would pick the kingdom up and put it back together — but it was a great performance by one of our greatest actors. I look forward to him in the title role!

The surprise break-out for me was Elizabeth Marvel as a bossy, gleeful, sexy, and thoroughly-in-charge Goneril. Very much her father’s daughter, Marvel’s Goneril nudged her youngest sister forward when she spoke “nothing” in act 1, enthusiastically consummated her relationship with Edmund amid the rubble of a shattering kingdom, scoffed at Dion Johnstone as her husband Albany, and nearly stole every scene she was in. Matched against her father and his curse of sterility in 2.1, she was the only figure on stage who could almost face the big man down. I’ve seen some compelling performances of Goneril, and I think a case can be made for this character’s practicality and willingness to speak political untruths, as opposed to Cordelia’s sullen idealism. No figure on this production’s stage seemed better suited to rule competently than Marvel’s Goneril.

But really — as all the reviews have noted — this was a one-woman show. Glenda Jackson’s Lear was gorgeously realized and thoroughly captivating, She radiated power. Like Kent, I saw “authority” in her diminutive bearing. Perhaps she was not as physically regal and superhero lithe as Ian McKellan’s King, and maybe not quite as searing in his need as Adrian Lester in his final turn as Ira Aldrige playing Lear in Red Velvet, but Jackson’s King was incessantly fascinating. Her capacity for varied facial expression is unmatched; I don’t remember any performance, not even other stars at the center of this star vehicle play, in which I’ve spent such a large amount of my attention focused on and captivated by a single actor.

The pinnacle of Jackson’s performance came during the storm, when she balanced on the lip of the stage, staring up at the lights and into imaginary rain. “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!” she roared with painful joyous release. I’ve written about this scene repeatedly, and I’m convinced it’s one of the essential scenes in Shakespeare to help us understand living in an increasingly hostile environment. I’ve never seen a better performance than Jackson’s, human in her desperation and regal in her poetic authority. Makes me want to write about it all over again! She had other good stage moments too, including defending her hundred knights against Goneril’s slander and engaging with Ruth Wilson as the Fool. (Wilson, double-cast as Cordelia in a way that recalled Gold’s similar double casting of Claudius and Old Hamlet at the Public in 2017, also performed powerfully, though perhaps not quite with the stage presence of Thompson, Marvel, and Jackson.)

Weaker performances in other roles, especially Sean Carvajal as a tepid Edgar and Aisling O’Sullivan a shrill Regan, marred the production. Gold’s imagination sometimes ran away with him. But really everyone was there for Jackson’s King. The standing ovation has become a bit de rigeur on Broadway — are we standing in deference to the prices we paid for our seats, or simply because after three and a half hours we can’t bear to sit any longer? — but I was happy to give Glenda her due. It’s tempting to pay to sit near that fire one more time before the production closes in early July.

Kicking off the second day of “Creating Nature” will be a session on “Shelter” co-chaired by distinguished ecofeminists and Shakespeareans Rebecca Laroche and Jennifer Munroe. After having recently shared a stage with them on an Ecofeminism panel at the Shakespeare Association of America, I’m especially keen to have their guiding voices and insights to move our conversation into its second and final day.

One of many reasons that I choose Rebecca and Jen to co-chair a session at “Creating Nature” is the model for collaboration and exchange that they provide. They co-wrote their recent book Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory in part through a mutual pedagogical exchange, in which students in Colorado and North Carolina worked together (virtually) alongside their professors. Their model of mutuality, dialogue, and keen analysis will help all of us at “Creating Nature” begin our second morning.

The “Shelter” panel also features Michael Dove, an anthropologist from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. He’ll be sharing the results of his field work on volcano-vulnerable communities on the Indonesian island of Java. Alongside Michael will be Debapriya Sarkar, a professor of English and Maritime Studies who works up the shoreline from me at UConn’s gorgeous Avery Point campus, and Phillip Usher, who teaches in the French department at NYU.

I’m looking forward to seeing how these three different scholarly modes, Anthropology, English, and French, will respond to cultural and physical desires for shelter in hostile environments. I’m also looking forward to the challenge that Michael’s Asian-based work will bring to our often Eurocentric discourses in the premodern humanities.

Does the human need for shelter require that we treat our environment instrumentally? Might human attempts to imagine cultures of shelter also embrace the more-than-human? These and other questions may come up as we continue on our second day of “Creating Nature.”

The rousing conclusion of the first day of “Creating Nature” on May 23 will be a two-headed public lecture in the Paster Reading Room featuring Lindy-Elkins Tanton and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen.

The ongoing collaboration between these two brilliant scholars is one of the inspirations for this event and its hopes for building a lexicon to think together about the environment through different fields and discourses. Lindy directs the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, and Jeffrey, an ecocritic and scholar of medieval literature, is Dean of the Humanities at ASU. I first saw them speak collaboratively in the Boston BABEL conference in 2012.

Among their many projects, from founding and running a ground-breaking Humanities Institute in Washington DC to being Principal Investigator on NASA’s planned mission to the metal asteroid Pysche, these two co-wrote the brilliant little book Earth (2017), as part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series. I’m not sure that I know of a better example of imaginative collaboration between the sciences and the humanities. I blog-gushed in some detail about their (and our) shared Earth in June 2017. The book’s gnomic opening phrase remains one of my favorites —

Earth is a home, a limit, and a recurring challenge.

Their collaborative plenary lecture, titled “Climate/Weather/Feeling,” promises to show us new things about that home, press up against that limit, and provide shared tools to respond to that challenge.

I can’t wait to hear it!

Someone clever on the internet quipped that this weekend is “peak geek culture,” with the convergence of Avengers: Endgame, which I saw with the family Friday night, and The Battle of Winterfell in Game of Thrones coming tomorrow.

I’ve been thinking about how these twin mega-blockbusters embody our culture’s growing awareness of climate change. Are we beginning, as a global mass culture, to replace familiar conflicts against human evildoers with a too-big-to-comprehend struggle against impersonal forces? Or at least, highly personalized, magical, and bejeweled figures that represent impersonal forces?

Thanos, the purple God-Malthus of the Marvell Comic Universe literalizes a fairly common criticism of what environmentalists want, namely that in order to preserve ecosystems they will murder humans. (A smart essay in Yale Climate Connections elaborated the ways that Thanos caricatures environmentalism when Infinity War came out last year.) In Endgame, the Big Mean Purple guy isn’t quite as threatening, and in fact he manages to get himself killed twice, but his tag line — “I am inevitable” — follows Malthusan logic. (The quip-riposte — “I am Iron Man” — combines superhero ego-individualism with our culture’s deep love for technology.) In order to preserve the universe, Thanos must cull all populations. The grim first hour-plus of the latest movie suggests that following the Malthusan path of reducing populations to match finite resources creates, at best, a world in which Captain America facilitates a twelve-step program.

The Night King doesn’t speak about his own inevitability, but

his tag line also emphasizes the impersonal: “Winter is coming.” He may simply represent death, as hunky but not very clever Gendry tells Arya. But in environmental terms the Night King might be better understood as Thanos without the snap: he blankets the landscape as absolute privation, the exhaustion of all resources, including life and even memory. To endure in winter, as Stark family maxims recall, requires social solidarity, being loyal to the pack rather than the lone wolf. Much has been written about Game of Thrones as a semi-allegory of climate change. As it grows each week less likely that the Night King will grow a personality (unless he’s Bran Stark?), the allegorical meaning becomes almost inescapable. George R.R. Martin has apparently given the climate change interpretation authorial approval, though I’m not sure that binds the writers for HBO.

It’s not surprising that mass culture’s two most iconic villains of 2019 might assume climate change-inflected shapes, given our collective growing awareness of eco-anxiety. And too much can be made of the how much these figures have to depart from traditional models to allegorize a changing climate. Thanos first appeared in Marvell Comics back in 1973. Nonhuman super-evil bad guys have been core elements of the machinery of modern fantasy at least since Tolkien’s Sauron started Dark Lord-ing across Middle Earth. These villains work as strange attractors, inciting maximum fear and requiring maximum sacrifice to vanquish. Tolkien’s fantasy laments the loss of the pastoral Shire to proto-industrialization from Barad-Dur to Isengard, and that criticism of modernity seems compatible with today’s fear of climate change as industry’s destructive progeny.

But the now-emerging truths of climate change as global experience won’t really wear the clarifying colors of Purple Thanos or the White King. Neither the instantaneous snap of mass murder nor the visible advance of Walkers across the landscape will overwrite our world. Instead, climate change strains all levels of all systems, motivating climate refugees and authoritarian regimes, drought and civil war, wildfires and the desire of the wealthy to build futile walls. As our awareness of climactic change deepens, we are responding multiply, in our popular entertainments and our academic conferences. Climate change touches everything and can’t be separated from many other causes.

It’s no wonder we’d rather imagine that our problems are homicidal Titans or zombie hordes.

Happy watching everyone!

In the afternoon of the first day of “Creating Nature” (May 23) we’ll dig into probably the knottiest communication problem of the conference: how do environmental humanists speak with the paleoclimatologists whose work has been so crucial in understanding global climate change past, present, and future? What shared language spans ice cores and poetry, tree rings and Shakespeare? I’m looking forward to hearing some possible answers from our second panel.

When I first had the idea to try to bring a climate scientist to our party, I reached out to Noah Diffenbaugh, who teaches at Stanford and whose work appears everywhere from the IPCC report to the New York Times. I’ve known Noah for a long time because he’s married to my wife’s cousin. Based on decades of family vacations, I suspected that long discussions with humanists might not be his sort of thing, but he suggested I contact Valerie Trouet, a climatologist from the University of Arizona who works with historical shipwreck data in the Little Ice Age. To my great pleasure, she’ll be joining us in May — which leaves open the question that Noah, who knows a little bit about my work, was setting up: how might my own work with early modern shipwrecks as semi-allegories of ecological disaster connect to her use of shipwrecks as climatological markers in the Little Ice Age? I’m not sure I have a clear answer yet, which was one reason to recruit the rest of this fantastic panel.

The chair will be Joe Campana, poet and eco-Shakespearean whose work always arrives at just the right phrasing. He’ll be joined, in addition to Valerie Trouet, by medievalist Kellie Robertson, whose work has been dazzling me since we were grad students together in the former millennium, and by Shakespearean Henry Turner, who to my mind is one of our most acute and deft scholarly analysts of the terrain between early modern science and poetics.

This panel will work to bridge numbers and ideas and seek connections between computer models of climate and literary depictions of storm-threatened bodies. I often think about these questions through modes of orientation and disorientation, and also through the capacities of systems to accommodate error, in measurement and in calculation. I look forward to hearing what these four brilliant scholars will say to each other, and to us!