Micro-Landscapes of the Anthropocene

Subcide: An E-Concept in Images


Blueberry farms cut ordered topographies on the hills of Gumbaynggir country. However, beneath the appearance of order, just a few kilometres downstream, is rampant disorder. The soil in this hilly region sits atop a clay base that limits the absorption of water, leading to significant runoff when short bursts of rain fall. Where blueberry farmers use pesticides to protect their crop, nitrite and nitrate levels stream through the nearby creeks and feed into the nearby Hearnes Lake catchment where these toxins are found to reach 695 times higher during high rainfall events than in dry weather. The Hearnes Lake is freshwater source for all that lives in the region, and it is currently being diluted by these toxins.
Farmers spray the aphids and moths that feed and hide in the blueberry bushes with pesticides that are too dangerous (and mostly banned) for domestic use in Australia. But the deaths do not stop there; the poisoned insect bodies become food for birds. Take the tawny frogmouth, a nocturnal species of frogmouth whose earliest fossil evidence on this landmass dates back to the Eocene (about 56 to 33.9 million years ago in human time). It is prone to eating insects sprayed with organochlorine pesticides; a particularly sinister chemical which stores as fat deposits in these birds and gradually increases over time. When food is scarce or the birds experience a change in their environment, these fat stores are metabolised, discharging the poison into their blood streams and initiating the tawny frogmouth’s slow internal death.
When I think of pesticides tainted a sickly blueberry blue, I think of Joan Mitchell’s Les Bluets (1973). In an attempt to ‘read’ Mitchell’s work, Lydia Davis wrote about how she discovered the painting borrowed its name from a small shaggy cornflower that grows rampant in New England. Upon her discovery, Davis wrote: 

'the painting abruptly went beyond itself, lost its solitariness, [and] acquired a relationship to fields, to flowers.’

The impressionist painting may very well have an external referential field. Perhaps, the swirls of blue become the pesticides that bursts into the blood streams of tawny frogmouths, or the unbelievable darkness of the blue screens are the Hearnes Lake diluted with poison. But an eco-critical reading might ask us to look ‘within’ the painting and consider the spillage at play here; the varied colours of oil paints share the same base, the threads of the linen canvas form a microscopic patchwork of grids and lines (much like the topographies of the blueberry farms), the fine hairs on the paint brush are plastered across the immense canvas. Ultimately, if the painting goes beyond itself, so too does the human want of eating blueberries.

E-Concept Generation

What connects these images is our inability to see the unending chain of deaths that pesticides cause. Like scrutinising Mitchell’s painting for meaning, we might begin to truly see a monoculture farm or the slowing waddle of a tawny frogmouth in a process of human-initiated destruction if we shift our perspective.

To borrow from Deconstruction theory, signs are generated from the difference it has from other signs. Yet the sign itself will always contains a trace of what it does not mean. If we think of the word pesticide whose root word 'cida' means to kill, we might think of farmers protecting their crop by killing insects. However, pesticides imply a whole chain of destruction; they pollute waters, harm plants, and kill birds. If we are to truly see the deaths we have caused around us, we must take on all these consequences loaded in the word 'pesticide', to see the hidden deaths beneath or beyond our passing gaze. So, I propose the e-concept subcide.

The original word ‘subside’ means to become less intense or violent like a receding storm or lowering water levels. However, in a Derridean turn, I have replaced the second ‘s’ with a ‘c’ to make what sounds like a calming tide returning to equilibrium as something more pernicious; to subcide is to see what humans have killed ‘beneath’ their anthropocentric gaze.

While the prefix ‘sub’ implies a hierarchy which positions humans above the deaths below it, I deliberately use 'sub' to destabilise the human subject whose literal foundations become shakeable as a consequence of their destruction (think about the groundwater rivers that sustain the soil beneath us, carrying with it our pesticides and waste). Like Derrida’s ‘différance’, the difference between subside and subcide produces another destabilising effect since its difference cannot be heard but only seen in writing. This emphasis on seeing is central to the notion of subcide, which asks us to see the Hearnes Lake and the tawny frogmouth not as idealised versions of the Australian bush but in their protracted deaths as a direct consequence of human action. 

George Raptis (z5206747)

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