This site requires Javascript to be turned on. Please enable Javascript and reload the page.

Micro-Landscapes of the Anthropocene

Postcard 3 - Gemma

In reading about the idea of the eco-complex, it occurred to me that this concept is aboslutely necessary to apply to any reading or writing about our planet. More specifically, we need to draw our attention not just to the global, but to the specificity of the local. As our close reading of "The World’s Biggest Membrane” suggests, there is a significant problem of scale when it comes to interpreting, understanding and even empathising with aspects of our natural world. This issue of 'situatedness' that the close reading discusses is certainly also an issue when looking at how we might empathise with our ocean. The eco-complex is definitely an powerful way of re-situating and contextualising our reading and knowledge.

The problem of scale for the human brain has a strong scientific backing. The concept of 'statistical numbing' illustrates that when presented with information on a large scale, the human mind ceases to identify on an emotional level with the statistics, however harrowing they may be. This points to a flawed logic in the human brain - we believe ourselves to be logical, and even go as far as to call ourselves 'rational animals', but at our core we are fundamentally irrational beings. Far from being all bad news, what this research reveals is a way to maintain an awareness of the limits of our own cognition. It is for this reason that a focus on the specificity of the local is imperative in any endeavour we may have to elicit empathy for our planet.

- Gemma Collard

This page is referenced by:

Watery Worlds: Critical Reflections 30 Compilation of Watery Worlds Critical Reflections plain 2018-11-02T01:13:01-07:00
Critical Reflection and Bibliography – Eva Caley and Ella Howe

In our critical and creative engagements with Watery Worlds, we (Eva Caley and Ella Howe) have explored how mankind’s experiences with water and the narratives we tell about water interact. We have investigated this on a broad spectrum, from the smallest impacts of water to the largest.

There is an impulse in some nature writing to attempt to write humanity out of nature narratives. This style of writing calls for literature that imagines the voices of nature and seeks to represent it in its most authentic form, free from the lenses of prejudice, ignorance, and superiority through which human beings view their natural surroundings. As well-intentioned as this may be, we believe it to be both an unfeasible and an unethical goal. Any attempt to completely divorce human perspectives from human narratives is impossible: everything from the linguistics to the history with which the nature is viewed informs the styles of representation. From the earliest narratives humans have engaged with water, shaping tropes of representation and ways of thinking over generations that are impossible to escape from. Equally, there is a moral element to this issue: how ethical is it to seek to represent or analyse natural systems divorced from humanity when humanity, at this stage of late capitalism, has exploited and affected water on every level? Climate change is affecting sea levels and rainfall, and pollution is changing the chemical compositions of oceans and rivers and making them uninhabitable. Historically, too, oceans and rivers have been the original and ultimate scenes for globalised capitalism including industrial and colonial domination. Therefore, we see the attempt to divorce human impact from our perspectives on water as impossible both on a practical and moral level.

We argue, conversely, for a holistic analysis to occur when producing both critical and creative works surrounding water. Hereafter, we promote the term eco-complex to refer to work that looks at all contributing factors in representing nature. To engage with literary texts from an eco-complex viewpoint, the anthropocentric aspects should not, by any means, be at the centre of discourse surrounding water, but nor should it be ignored. Bodies of water should be studied in an environmental sense on both the broadest global scale and the most specific local one, but human understanding and human impact should also come into this analysis, or should be considered in the production of creative works. An eco-complex understanding would therefore be to understand the complexity and variance in nature symbols in human narratives, and to therefore be able to extrapolate beyond them, and to understand nature’s ability to exist beyond the binary.
```
Human engagement with water has always contained this eco-complexity, and bodies of water have long been the sites of a multitude of experience and understandings. An eco-complex understanding of oceans and rivers, for instance, should engage with all rhetorical, symbolic, and literal power that the oceans contain. 
```
In her work on trans-corporiality, Stacy Alaimo implies an inherent link between human bodies, the bodies of sea-creature, and seawater itself as a source for this fascination, and Astrid Neimanis engages in a feminist reading of human relationships with the sea, citing moon-cycles and water as inherently female experiences, which tie women specifically to water. While these theories may well come into play, an eco-complex viewpoint would seek to investigate how these specific ideas interact with the huge range of associations and power dynamics humanity brings to its engagements with water. For example, the ocean remains a point of fascination for humanity for its sheer size and its inherent unknowability. Oceans can be studied for their unknowability, for their sheer size, for our spiritual associations such as cleansing and funeral rituals and our working relationships such as shipping or pollution. The study of oceans allows for one to engage with human-water interactions on the largest possible scale: as it surrounds all cultures, humanity as a whole must negotiate its relationship to it, and therefore one could use Nick Dyer-Witheford’s theory of species-being to examine humanity’s relationship to water on the largest scale. Rivers, on the other hand, provide sites of profound knowability that comprise what Janne Drangsholt calls the critical setting for scenes of locality. Given the specificity of their borders, rivers are inherently knowable places of connections, and spiritual symbols for fluidity, change, and a perpetual flow of time in one steady direction. They are civilisation building forces, while also bearing a multitude of symbolism, while also existing long before or after humans. To study this variety of perspectives on water, at a global and local level, is to think with eco-complexity, and it is to engage with this power-relationship that humans have with water.

This relationship between water, nature, and humanity is a relationship primarily of power. When humans use bodies of water for capitalist or colonial domination, or as sources of food, or pollutes it, the power rests with humanity. Inversely, our relationship with water is, at its core, one of utmost surrender. Without our consent, water can be the source of widespread death and destruction through floods, erosion, tsunamis, and rising sea levels. With all of this in mind, it is clear that any representation of water cannot be divorced from subjective narrative nor subjective narration.

With an awareness of these associations and ideas that humanity already has about water, one could engage in an eco-complex analysis of both literary works dealing with water, and the bodies of water themselves. We have, therefore, produced work in this Micro-Landscapes project that models such thinking. In our film we used footage primarily borrowed off the internet to investigate the ways humanity chooses to depict water in its news media, both that which is produced by news corporations and filmed for personal use. The film acts as a meditation on the tension between humanity and the ocean. The soundtrack of the film is a recording of the Sea Organ, a structure in Zadar, Croatia that converts the kinetic power of waves and wind to music. Our photo essay worked to engage with the slow power of water on all scales possible through the examination of erosion. We sought to include examples of micro and macro erosion, as well as finding non-human (Grand Canyon), human centric (the king tide washing away the houses) and human-incidental (the sea glass) examples. In all these examples is an exchange of power: for the larger scale instances of erosion the water clearly holds the power, and yet the sea-glass example is more nuanced. Humanity has polluted the ocean with glass, and yet the ocean is able to enact change on this pollution through time. Finally, our close reading of the opening chapter of Mireille Juchau’s The World Without Us allowed us to invert this analysis and turn eco-complexity inwards to examine literature about water. Juchau’s text exemplifies what Sally Evens calls psychoecology, “where the human and nonhuman environment around the characters is directly implicated in their emotional development and vice versa” (Evans 260). In the text, the characters and their respective relationships to the river allows for exploration of a complex set of power dynamics in the intricate relationships between place, self, and others. Evangeline and Jim perform this relationship as they meet on the riverbank, and when it is established that Evangeline has a close personal affinity with the river, her status in the scene increases thanks to her awareness of the complex spiritual and physical aspects of the river. We have therefore, using the techniques of eco-complex thinking, examined how the relationship between water and its surroundings, including its interactions with humanity, are negotiations and exchanges around power.

Works Cited

Alaimo, Stacy. “States of Suspension: Trans-Corporeality at Sea.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary
Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 19, no. 3, 2012, pp. 476-493. Oxford Academic

Drangsholt, Janne S. “Homecomings: Poetic Reformulations of Dwelling in Jo Shapcott, Alice
Oswald, and Lavinia Greenlaw.” Nordic Journal of English Studies, vol. 15, no. 1, 2016, pp. 1-23.

Evans, Sally. “Unsettlement: Psychoecology and Absence in Mireille Juchau’s The World
Without Us.” Southerly, vol. 75, no. 2, 2015, pp. 260-264. Informit.

Neimanis, Astrida. “Feminist Subjectivity, Watered.” Feminist Review, vol. 103, no. 1, pp.
23-41. JSTOR.

Neimanis, Astrida. Bodies of Water. 2008. York University, PhD dissertation. ProQuest.

Dyer-Witheford, Nick. “Species-Being and the New Commonism: Notes on an Interrupted
Series of Struggles.” The Commoner, vol. 11, no. 1, 2006, pp. 15-32. Commoner

~~~

Critical Reflection and Bibliography – Amelia Loughland and Bridget Moyle

Our chapter of the Watery Worlds Living Book has shifted subtly over time and taken on new conceptual dimensions as we have approached each task. In this way, it has mirrored the hydro-logics that have inspired our project, by being fluid, able to absorb new critical inputs while developing a distinct communicative capacity.

When we first started developing our conceptual ideas for the project, we were both drawn (most likely as a result of our similar educational experience and politics) to the utility of water in developing feminist subjectivity and thought that we might critique the anthropomorphic tendency to ‘feminise’ water as the locus for understanding female body and experience. However, as we expanded our critical reading, we came to move away from the conceptualisation of water solely by reference to the human experience. Instead, we came to be interested in the distinct materiality of water and its fascinating contradictions. For example, while one of the known physical qualities of water is that it ‘finds its own level’ and will fill any space it is contained in, this is only true when we consider water as a resource for human consumption; whereby it needs to be contained in order to be visible and thus available for commodification. This aspect of our thought was particularly influenced by our reading of authors such as Zwarteveen, who critiques the patriarchal control over ‘expert’ thinking on irrigation, noting how women’s distinct experience of water and voice in these spaces is continually marginalised. This argument drew our attention to the intersection of politics in the human capitalisation of water, wherein patriarchal dominance is instated in the desire to harness and control water for mercantile interests such as damming and irrigation.

In order to distance ourselves from this anthropocentric perspective, we sought to unlock the unique hydro-logics of water and its communicative power outside the paradigm of human capital. Moreover, through reading a news article on how old diseases from hundred of years ago are re-infecting humans as permafrost melts in the Arctic (Fox-Skelly), we were reminded that due to its ability to transform into different forms of matter, the vast global network of water becomes a repository for human misuse of the environment. By releasing old diseases or carrying the remnants of an oil spill for thousands of kilometres, water ‘speaks back’ to humans through its own dialect, that transmutes across form and time.

This conceptualisation influenced our own e-concept: the equirium. Etymologically, the equirium is an appropriated derivative of the Latin word ‘aquarium’ (of water). Whilst the suffix -rium, meaning to ‘to live’ (Latin: vivarium) is retained, equi- is affixed to the beginning of the word in reference to a sense of equality and evenness (Latin: aequus). A linguistic riff initially inspired by the seemingly-immersive glass architectures of the contemporary aquarium, the equirium embodies an arcing and distorted perspective of place. Motivated to review the way in which architectures of water are engaged with and within by O’Grady’s pool lecture series, we aimed to de-locate water from any necessary landscape of containment. Rather the equirium comes to embody a hybridised all-over place, and in doing so constructs a rhizomatic passageway through which to access and observe relational communities. Our e-concept questions representations and perceptions in which water may seem to be bordered by glass, held within a body, a bath or a shore. As Australian academic Dr Lucinda McKnight in O’Grady’s thesis is quoted as poetically musing , “can you feel your edges in a pool at 29 degrees?” (22). Instead, a recognition of the equirium reflects and repositions water’s dialectical and material qualities. In doing so, we attempt to make salient a life-liness of water that transcends concepts of time and space, as they are reified as relative to a human-scale. The equirium does away with the binary of dry and wet/ human and non-human that pervades the entertainment spectacle of aquarium displays. In doing so, we have participated in a form of ‘quireering’ and aspired to consistently refuse the anthronormative standards that paradigmatically differentiate human and non-human identities.
We believe that this eco-diegetic understanding of water is essential if humans are to tackle the global challenge of restoring the ‘health’ of various ‘bodies’ of water. Rather than perceiving water as an entity that is so vast and unknowable so as to assume that it is necessarily impervious to human activity (Alaimo 2011), we recognise its quality as an agent that refuses to simply wash away generations of pollution, misuse and over-capitalisation. In this manner, the concept of the equirium is important in creating an inter-dependent awareness of human impact on the environment and reinforces a ‘species-being’ consciousness.

We explored and deepened our understanding of this eco-concept through a close literary analysis of the ‘Dry Salvages’ by T S Eliot. Eliot uses an extended metaphor of an ocean and river to explore the possibility of existing outside bounded human temporality. Through this tropology, Eliot offers a strikingly new materialist vision of water’s agency by noting its pervasive and constitutive presence in human existence beyond the capitalist paradigm as a mere conveyor of commerce. Eliot poetically muses on a powerful oceanic voice – one with transcendent and multifarious dimensions that relegate the poetic voice to a humbled observer. At the same time, we noted how Eliot’s materialist conception of water was partial; as water was by the end of the poem demarcated to the primacy of land and soil, and disappeared with the surrender of his dream for an a-temporal connection to the world. This made us consider new possibilities for watery borders, and how water’s transmutation of form defies human understandings of material architectures and time.

This post-human possibility, as embodied by the equirium, was the driving consideration behind our photo essay, in which we explored the interaction between human architectures (both bodily and artificial) and the hydrologic and dialects of water. For example, Bridget’s picture of the Vinales Valley reflects on the human desire to harness water despite geological impossibility. This is echoed in the historical image of Arrowrock Dam from 1916, in which water is only permitted to exist through monumentally engineered human architecture, but the immense power and defiant material quality of water is exposed through a valve’s release. Similarly, in Bridget’s image of Aoraki National Park, human and natural pathways mirror one another; both in fluid and frozen form. We also reflect on the communicative power of water through the oily fluid capturing a turtle in the Gulf of Mexico; refusing to ‘wash away’ the consequences of human pollution and negligent misuse of the ocean.

Finally, these ideas crystallise in our short film, in which we explore the timeless quality of water and its transmutation across form, as inspired by the various states of being that water occupies on Earth (as solid, liquid and gas). This is represented by the sculptural human resemblance of water that was stored, and subsequently frozen, in latex gloves. Ultimately the solid ‘hands’ defy humanly-tangible borders and melt into a puddle. This process of transmutation and shape-shifting is further embodied by our looped and layered voice-over that narrates an allegory of a frozen waterfall melting at the start of summer to illustrate how water’s various forms operate as a timeless ecological receptacle of experience. This was further convoluted and ‘melted into’ a watery soundscape gathered from personal underwater GoPro footage and various collated samples downloaded from the online open-source archive ‘Freesound’ (a bubbling creek, and melting ice sheets in Greenland). Other vignettes additionally move in amongst the soundscape and visions of corporeal-icy dissolution; their entrance crafted to embody the movement of waves that equally approach shores with gentle forewarning and with the suddenness of indeterminable appearance. Symbolically embodying this is the image of three warped projector sheets, across which a beam of light moves to superimpose and distort the content written and drawn on the plastic in a fluid shadow-play. Each cylinder represents an element of interest that we encountered on our way to developing the e-concept of the equirium. One is scrawled with various written passages, a line from T S Eliot reads “the river is within us, the sea is all about us” whilst a poignant warning from Neimanis is capitalised in smaller lettering below. “The body of water as figuration risks becoming complicit in the erasure of certain subjectivities and oppressions”, is a warning that we carried through and continually heeded in our conceptual and creative exploration of ‘watery worlds’. Below that again, in a cursive and indistinct typeface is the word Equirium. Another cylinder features a geographic cross-section of the engineering behind the Snowy Hydro-Electric Scheme. Dams and pipes fill in the dimples of simplified mountain graphics, whilst a diagram of a concrete gravity dam (a style of dam that is utilised by engineers in the Snowys) is drawn in thick, dominant strokes. This cylinder in particular features briefly in the film, embedded in snow on the ski fields of Perisher, snow that was once liquid water drawn from one of the area’s dams. The third cylinder attempts to represent some of the organism and material that is drawn up into watery bodies; that of bacteria and plastic flotsam. A sound waveform ripples through the centre of the image, a visual representation of the aurality of the slow melt of Greenland’s ice-sheets. Ultimately, the video encapsulates the key conceit of our equirium. In that it enacts architectures of sound and visuals that subsequently become surplus to the inevitable totality, and all-over place in which watery states reside, permeate through and undermine.

Works Cited

Alaimo, Stacey. “New Materialisms, Old Humanisms, or, Following the Submersible”. Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, vol. 19, no. 4, 2011, pp. 280–284.

Fox-Skelly, Jasmin. There Are Diseases Hidden in Ice, and They Are Waking Up. http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170504-there-are-diseases-hidden-in-ice-and-they-are-waking-up. Accessed 30 Aug. 2018.

Haas, Lynda. “Of Waters and Women: The Philosophy of Luce Iragaray”. Hypatia, vol. 8, no. 4, Fall 1993, pp. 150–159.

Neimanis, Astrida. ‘Feminist Subjectivity, Watered’. Feminist Review, vol. 103, no. 1, Mar. 2013, pp. 23–41. Springer Link, doi:10.1057/fr.2012.25.

O’Grady, Aubyn. Swimming Lessons - Developing a Water Pedagogy to Examine the Entangled, Material, and Intra-Active Enmeshments Between Water, Bodies, and Knowledges. University of Toronto (Canada), 2018. ProQuest, http://search.proquest.com/docview/2026743856/abstract/B76C240D7B24C40PQ/1.

Prominski, Martin. “Andscapes: Concepts of Nature and Culture for Landscape Architecture in the “Anthropocene”’. Journal of Landscape Architecture, vol. 9, no. 1, Jan. 2014, pp. 6–19. primoa.library.unsw.edu.au, doi:10.1080/18626033.2014.898819.

Zwarteveen, Margreet. “A Masculine Water World: The Politics of Gender and Identity in Irrigation Expert Thinking”. Out of the Mainstream. Water Rights, Politics and Identity, edited by Rutgerd Boelens, David Getches and Armando Guevara-Gil, Routledge, 2010, pp. 75–96.

~~~

Critical Reflection and Bibliography – Christa Jessica Tulong and Raymond May

In our critical engagement with Watery Worlds, we chose to explore the power of water and its symbolic traits to that of a woman in our chapter of The Living Book. Our chapter was heavily centered on the poem ‘The Woman Who Was Water’ (2010) by Enid Dame. We delved into the notion of the anthropocene and how in the poem this notion was diluted through the strength of water. The nature concept that we chose to utilise was naturecultures. Naturecultures “questions the notion of ‘Nature’ as a constructed category designed to support a false division relation between the so-called social, cultural and animate human world, and the material, inert, natural world.” Malone and Ovenden state that it interrogates the “dualisms that are deeply embedded within the intellectual traditions of the sciences and humanities (e.g., human/animal; nature/culture).” It deconstructs hierarchies and reverts any ontological, epistemological and representational biases to more egalitarian premises. Through this concept, we came to understand how human and water interact and co-transform one another.

The overall theme that was present in our chapter of The Living Book was the strength that water has, its power but also its fragility and passiveness. This theme was inspired by our critical reading of Enid Dame’s ‘The Woman Who Was Water’ where she speaks about the passiveness of water, its ability to foster life and protect it, but at the same time destroy it, using a woman as a symbolic figure. Malone and Ovenden (2016) defined naturecultures as a concept which is based on questioning pre-existing dualism within “intellectual traditions of the science and humanities”, and also rethinking the existing boundaries/divisions in “scholarly fields” that have the tendency to dissociate mankind and nature (1). Plumwood (1993) described how naturecultures was coined by Donna Haraway as a way to address “gendered power imbalance” in theory, language, politics, and society (quoted in Merrick 102). This leads to naturecultures being considered as Haraway’s method of criticising how scientific knowledge emerges and also rejecting the phallocentric perspective in scientific knowledge (Merrick 102). Hence, this became a central theme that influenced our photo essay and short film. Naturecultures requires us to consider the pre-existing hierarchies, and we need to ask “who made these hierarchies and who do they benefit?”. Furthermore, it aims to decentre humans from ontological, ethical, political and cultural narratives, whilst simultaneously questioning the construction of the category ‘human’. This is the question that influences our approach to the close reading and photo essay because both of them emphasises on the strength of women in challenging the hierarchies/societal expectations. Challenging and questioning the hierarchies is crucial when we also want to look at environmental issues such as water usage. This is demonstrated in studies done by Cleaver and Elson (1995) and Zwarteveen (1997) where they state that when discussing the challenges faced in water usage and conservation, the notion of “women working with water in the home” is considered as oversimplified and it fails to recognize certain needs for water, specifically for “increasing commodification and allocation of water for ‘productive’ purposes such as irrigation” (quoted in Thompson 1290). Also, the deconstruction of “gendered organizational hierarchies” is important when we think about we look at water institutions because these structures limit the participation of women and also how “gender initiatives are operationalized” (Cleaver 1997; Regmi 2005; Wallace and Wilson 2005, quoted in Thompson 1290).

Our photo essay essentially aims to tell a short story that revolves around the central idea of water being powerful and attributing these qualities to that of a woman. In Dame’s poem, this idea of power is seen through each stanza. In the photo essay, we explored one of the roles of water as having the ability to sustain life for other beings. This is illustrated in one of the sections of our photo essay where we describe water as “safe abodes for the living nature” and fostering life unconditionally, in which these traits can be linked with the domestic role that a woman serves. This concept can be linked to the characteristic of water where Linton and Budds (2014) describe as not only independent from society “as conceptualized in the water cycle”, but also involved historically and intimately with social life in a ‘hydrosocial cycle’ (quoted in Thompson 1288). On the other hand, in our photo essay we associate the power of women in breaking down conventions/traditional roles in society and can also be tied to women having the power to shatter foundations because of the aspects that are linked with the biophysical traits of water. These traits are what separates water from other substances such as having the ability to adapt by changing states (Strang 2004, quoted in Thompson 1289) and also water being seen as having agency (Bakker and Bridge 2006; Linton and Budds 2014; Strang 2014a, 2014b; Swyngedouw 2004, quoted in Thompson 1289).

To conclude, our living book is based on the concept of the strength of women in questioning and challenging traditional roles in society and standing up for their right of expressing themselves, just like how water also has the strength to shatter foundations in the form of strong waves/currents. However, it is important to take into account that there are intersections of identity which cannot be overlooked. This is supported by the Swyngedouw’s (2004) view on political ecology which states that water is not the only one that flows downhill but also social power and capital (quoted in Thompson 1288). Furthermore, Thompson’s research on the relationship between water and society, there needs to be inclusion of “ecological dimensions” alongside intersectionality theory when addressing the “interlocking structures of power and human experiences of inequality” (1297). According to Neimanis’ (2013) concept of the feminine as a body of water, the flow of water takes up questions on aspects other than environmental degradation which includes language, coloniality, and labour mobility (38). Neimanis (2013) adds that the feminine subject is depicted as a body of water infused with “political and ecological context”, and it implies that the author herself and also the feminine subject is not just affected by issues based on the intersections of identity but they have the power to either support or limit the “flows of power courses” (39). Therefore, we should also think about the intersections of identity in the feminine subject and have the ability to decide whether we want to uplift certain voices or limit the progress of another group.

Works Cited

Archer, Emily. “The wells are drying up: water & women in ghana.” Off Our Backs, vol. 35, no. 3, 2005, pp. 23-27

Bulajich, Borjana. (1992). “Women and water.” Waterlines, vol. 11, no. 2, 1992, pp. 2-4.

Hayman, Ruth Eleanor. “Shaped by the imagination myths of water, women, and purity.” RCC Perspectives, no. 2, 2012, pp. 23-34.

Krishnaraj, Maithreyi. “Women and water: issues of gender, caste, class and institutions.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 46, no. 18, 2011, pp. 37-39.

Kulkarni, Seema. “Women and decentralised water governance issues, challenges and the way forward.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 46, no. 18, 2011, pp. 64-72.

Merrick, Helen. "NATURECULTURES AND FEMINIST MATERIALISM". Routledge Handbook Of Gender And Environment, Sherilyn MacGregor, 1st ed., Routledge, 2017, pp. 101-112, https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781134601530. Accessed 14 Aug 2018.

Tunc, Tanfer Emin. "Rivers Of The Body: Fluidity As A Reproductive Metaphor In American Feminist (Post)Confessional Ecopoetry". Women's Studies, vol 42, no. 2, 2013, pp. 113-139. Informa UK Limited, doi:10.1080/00497878.2013.747378. Accessed 14 Aug 2018.

~~~

Critical Reflection and Bibliography – Sophie McGing and Caitlin

Through our engagement in Reading Natures, we were exposed to many concepts surrounding ecological thought and eco-criticism in literature. However, the fundamental idea that emerged from our studies which sparked our interest was the concept of anthropocentrism and “human racism”. Anthropocentrism can be defined as the human-dominated approach to living, whereby human kind is placed at the centre of all being, as a result of their possession of a moral standing that is exclusive to their kind. As Donahue (2010) posits, “Anthropocentrism holds that the only things valuable in themselves are: human beings, their desires and needs, and the satisfaction of those.” (p.51) Over the semester we have encountered various “worlds” and landscapes and in each of these we have witnessed the way in which the human and non-human co-exist. Initially we were drawn to the watery worlds, primarily due to an interest in the ocean and our interaction both with the water entity in itself and the creatures that inhabit it. From our own experiences which include, but are not limited to, scuba diving in the Great Barrier Reef and snorkeling with sea turtles in Hawaii, we developed an admiration for the plethora of life that exists in the depths of the ocean. Arguably, our interest in the watery worlds also developed from an interest in the unfamiliarity and mystery often associated with the ocean. As humans, we primarily inhabit terrestrial land where we view ourselves as the apex of living organisms. Therefore, we believed an interesting area of exploration would be the place of humans in the oceanic landscape. This is reflective of Alaimo’s (2012) concept of Trans-corporeality, whereby all bodies are interconnected and essentially function within the “flows of substances and agencies of environments” (2012, p. 476).

The allocated reading by Astrida Neimanis, ‘Feminist Subjectivity, Watered’, focused on the comparisons between the female body and water bodies more generally. Although we found this reading extremely interesting, our reasoning for initially choosing watery bodies was a result of an interest in the notion of the human impact of devastation that takes place on the sea. Following an exploration of emergence in the emerging worlds lecture and tutorial, we began to consider whether our interest related more so to the innate human reliance on sea bodies for their creation and sustainability. However, although we considered emergence, we realised that our main interest was not the place of water in sustaining us, but our role in engaging responsibly within the watery world.

After selecting and analysing our close reading Rime of the Ancient Mariner, we noticed strong links between the message Coleridge was attempting to portray and the notions referred to by Sigi in the marginal worlds lecture and tutorial. An examination of the marginal worlds led us to consider how the human and non human interact within the seascape. In Rime of the Ancient Mariner the protagonist can be viewed as reflective of humanity more generally struggling to recognize and respect their place within the natural world. Although we could see strong links between the marginal world and our close reading we decided that within the watery worlds we could examine a multitude of themes without being restricted by the notion of marginality. Although we shifted through a few of the worlds ultimately we decided that the watery worlds chapter in our living book is where our components best fit.

In the close reading of Samuel Coleridge’s Romantic poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, we focused on two main themes; the innate human desire to bring the natural world under its control, and the strength and beauty of the natural world, which remains vast and unable to be tamed. We selected this text as it examines some of the major themes we have encountered in the course, namely anthropocentrism, as the protagonist, the Mariner, commits the atrocity of the unjustified murder of an Albatross. This senseless killing of a non-human species is representative of what Rigby (2004) terms “human racism,” an extreme form of Anthropocentrism. (p.427) This poem can be read through an Ecocritical lens as an example of Ecomimesis, whereby Coleridge is harnessing the human language to represent the otherwise entirely natural watery world of the ocean, presenting us with a world that would otherwise exclude us from it. Significantly, this poem encourages its readers to reconsider the notion of a human dominated ecological hierarchy, and instead posits a perspective most clearly aligned with “flat ontology”, whereby non-human living beings are regarded as inherently equal as opposed to occupying a subservient, inferior role in our world. Moore (2017) argues “the notion that all living things are kindred and that we are thus bound together is not a feel-good sentiment or wishful thinking but an ethical statement based on ecological and biological science, though, again, many writers suggested this idea long before the rise of modern science” (p.ix) Coleridge is undoubtedly representative of these “writers” who implored humanity to consider revising the anthropocentric approach to being, and instead adopt a biocentric understanding of life. In his work, The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger (1954) introduced the term “gistell”, referring to humanity’s tendency to view all entities as resources available for self-serving exploitation. Heidegger (1954) suggests art is imbued with a “saving power” whereby humans can escape the “gistell” and Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner certainly addresses these issues.

The photo essay is directly inspired by the themes and concepts explored in our close reading of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. However, it also seeks to represent examples of the exploitative nature of humankind in the modern context. The essay begins with images representing both the sublimity and beauty of the ocean, in an attempt to captivate the human audience. In an explicit link to Coleridge’s poem, we then included images of the Albatross, a water bird often understood as a mediator between humans and the ocean, due to its tendency to inhabit both terrestrial and oceanic landscapes for extended periods of time. The essay continues with images of houses perched daringly on land formations such as cliffs and mountains overlooking the water bodies. This is representative of our interest in marginal worlds, as we attempt to portray the paradox which emerges from human kind being simultaneously fascinated by nature, yet willing to relentlessly exploit it. These images are immediately followed by graphics of flooded roads, and Tsunami-devastated beach front houses, representing the mercilessness of the ocean and its place as a destructible force. Images of rubbish covered beaches and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch follow, providing examples of human indifference and selfishness as a result of consumerism and materialism. Kopnina et al (2018) suggests such indifference is an example of “speciesism” and although this ideaology “does not necessarily apply to all humanity…it is an ethical failing that ought to be resolved.” (p.122) The final images of the photo essay portray various non-human living beings impacted by humankind’s destructive force, the Anthropocene, such as a turtle whose shell has been deformed by exposure to plastic and significantly, a deceased albatross full of rubbish. The images themselves and the order in which they are presented tell a story, a cautionary tale, tracking both the indifference and senseless destruction of the natural world as a result of the self preferential anthropocentric view characteristic of humanity. This correlates with Moore’s perspective that humanity is “too hopelessly destructive and self-centered to be able to make any valid claims about the positive worth of our species.” (2017, p.ix)

Our short film includes footage of various natural settings from a multitude of different locations in South Western Sydney, The Eastern Suburbs and the Sutherland Shire. However, the majority of footage is taken at Cronulla Beach. Our video focuses on the different settings in which humans can experience and interact with water and water bodies. Considering the drought which has devastated New South Wales as a result of an uncharacteristically dry winter, Caitlin was lucky to capture some beautiful video footage of rain falling in her own backyard. Similarly, Sophie, who lives in a suburb close to Cronulla Beach filmed the ocean side footage, such as the waves crashing against the rocks and the birds flying over the water as the sun was setting. The primary theme for our living book chapter was the representation of water as the source of all life, an entity that is undoubtedly beautiful, indisputably essential and unapologetically destructive. In the film, we stress the role of humankind to reverse the damage we have inflicted on the earth, inspired by the theory of “Biocentrism” whereby our “certain moral relations” endow us with “obligations and responsibilities…with respect to the wild animals and plants of the Earth.” (Moore, 2017, p.6) We selected Fleetwood Mac’s song Albatross as a backing track, in order to link our short film to our close reading. The video footage as well as the photographs are entirely our own.

Works Cited

Alaimo, S. (2012). States of suspension: Trans-corporeality at sea. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 19(3), 476-493.

Donahue, T. J. (2010). Anthropocentrism and the argument from Gaia theory. Ethics & the environment, 15(2), 51-77.

Heidegger, M. (1954). The question concerning technology. Technology and values: Essential readings, 99, 113.

Kopnina, H., Washington, H., Taylor, B., & Piccolo, J. J. (2018). Anthropocentrism: More than just a misunderstood problem. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 1-19.

Moore, B. L. (2017). Ecological Literature and the Critique of Anthropocentrism. Springer.

Neimanis, A. (2013). Feminist subjectivity, watered. Feminist Review, 103(1), 23-41.

Rigby, K. (2004). Earth, world, text: On the (im) possibility of Ecopoiesis. New Literary History, 35(3), 427-442.

This page references:

Thomas Atmosphere of the Earth