Contemporary Ecocriticsm and the Weather

C AR EN I RR Contemporary Ecocriticsm and the Weather Stacy Alaimo, Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. 256 pp. $94.50; $27.00 paper. Ashley Dawson, Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change. London: Verso, 2017. 378 pp. $29.55. Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. 196 pp. $15.00 paper. Ursula K. Heise, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. xiii + 280 pp. $82.50; $27.50 paper. Shelley Streeby, Imaging the Future of Climate Change: World-Making through Science Fiction and Activism. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. x + 157 pp. $85.00; $18.95 paper. ear the end of his first three months as the President of the United States, Donald Trump tweeted: “In the East, it could be the COLDEST New Year’s Eve on record. Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming.”1 Commentators from Congress to the Weather Channel rushed to correct him, stressing the difference between weather and climate. Foundational to any discussion of climate change (which many consider a more accurate phrase than “global warming”), this opposition distinguishes between short-term weather events and N 1. @realdonaldtrump, “In the East, it could be the COLDEST New Year’s Eve on record,” Twitter, 28 Dec. 2017, 4:01 p.m., twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/946531657229701120. Contemporary Literature 59, 2 0010-7484; E-ISSN 1548-9949 / 18 / 0002-0261 © 2018 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System 262 • C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R E long-term climatic trends. “The difference between weather and climate,” the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) explains, “is a measure of time.”2 Whereas weather is measured in minutes, days, or months, climate variations occur over years, decades, or geologic eras. The longer time frame is necessary because climate measurements express average weather conditions, paying especial attention to atmospheric indicators such as temperature, air pressure, precipitation, and humidity. Climate is in essence weather on an epic scale, and conventional wisdom holds that mistaking weather for climate amounts to an inability to distinguish an episode from the narrative, a sentence from the story. By this logic, Trump seemed not to understand that singular weather events may well run contrary to the climatic trend, just as particular phrases may express ironies or reversals internal to a text. Climate scientists situate any counter-cyclical weather events in relation to climatic conditions over a longer period of time, and their analyses abstract from the particular to average and general trends. The same tactic of extrapolating from average local conditions toward the planetary is used by novelists addressing climate change in the emerging genre of climate fiction or cli-fi. Local events (especially floods and storms) signal looming catastrophes in J. G. Ballard’s Drowned World (1962), Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009), and Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow (2013). The protagonists of cli-fi learn to stop trying to outrun the storm and start adapting to new conditions. Similarly, in Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 (2017), children learn to enjoy surfing down the waterways of a flooded Manhattan while polar bears are transported to cooler locales and real estate is renovated above the water line. Shifting to new grounds is pointless in this city novel, because the high sea levels in New York City typify those worldwide. In these climate fictions, weather serves as a synecdoche for climate, and readers are alerted to climate change through the texts’ imaginative investment in a particular but typical weather crisis. 2. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, “What’s the Difference Between Weather and Climate?,” www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/noaa-n/climate/climate_ weather.html, 1 Feb. 2005. I R R • 263 When considering this literature and the associated problems of representing climate, some ecocritics have aspired to the grand scale of the global. A leading advocate for this planetary turn is Lawrence Buell. In an influential essay entitled “Ecoglobalist Affects: The Emergence of U.S. Environmental Imagination on a Planetary Scale,” Buell asserts that “the prospect of global warming . . . has reinforced a tendency to think of environmental belonging and citizenship in planetary terms” (227).3 Examining the paradoxical status of national cultural traditions in this emergent planetary vision, Buell advocates for an ecocriticism that overturns the default nationalist tendencies of the humanistic disciplines by explicitly adopting scientistic approaches. “The average contemporary geologist or ecologist or environmental economist,” Buell writes, “is better equipped to operate on a global scale than is the average sociologist or historian, and the average ethicist more so than the average literary critic.” Buell’s approach has been critically assessed from a number of directions, including by scholars in postcolonial studies who note the embeddedness of putatively global knowledge within institutions that impose one-directional forms of economic and political power.4 In a similar spirit, although certainly sharing Buell’s commitment to advancing humanistic knowledge of climate issues, a new crop of ecocritical scholarship disavows (to varying degrees) the weather/ climate synecdoche and in so doing attacks the abstractions of climate science, as well as the planetary ambitions of scientific authority. Often drawing on sociological interrogations of scientific norms, such as Bruno Latour’s, these ecocritics depict climate science as a universalizing discourse insufficiently attentive to the specificities of culture, gender, race, class, empire, and species. They displace globalizing generality with thick description of particular sites and events—shifting the terms, we may say, back to the immediacy of weather and expressing a need for cultural forms that engage with the particularities of weather events. This turn toward weather 3. Lawrence Buell, “Ecoglobalist Affects: The Emergence of U.S. Environmental Imaginary on a Planetary Scale,” Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature, edited by Wai-Chee Dimock and Buell, Princeton UP, 2007, p. 227. 4. See Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s contribution to The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, edited by Greg Garrard, Oxford UP, 2014, pp. 320–40. 264 • C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R E offers a host of proposals for situated readings of environments. While such methodological innovation makes a welcome contribution to ecocriticism, the political benefits of a renunciation of climate in favor of weather are more difficult to determine. Of the works considered in this review, the three essays that comprise Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable are likely to have the greatest impact. Not only are they the work of a distinguished novelist, they are also engagingly written and well suited to the classroom, as befits their origin in lectures delivered at the University of Chicago. The first, longest, and most original essay, “Stories,” opposes a literature of the probable and the statistically normal to narratives that explore the “environmental uncanny” (32). Ghosh argues that the modern realist novel perpetuates a nineteenth-century bourgeois view of nature as a uniform, predictable, and self-regulated system—a view profoundly challenged by the irregular effects of climate change. To begin to comprehend the “freakish weather events of today,” Ghosh argues, humans need to reckon with the unnerving, ghostly, and catastrophic world we occupy, a world haunted by the terrifying consequences of misguided consumption habits. We need narratives adequate to the “forces of unthinkable magnitude that create unbearably intimate connections over vast gaps in time and space,” and we can no longer retreat into local hidey holes that we imagine to be isolated from these changes (63). Vastness of scale and an animated world populated by nonhuman agents, as well as deep attention to humanity in its aggregate form, are necessary ingredients for a fiction that Ghosh hopes will counteract the power of the static image in artistic efforts to address the Anthropocene, the term designating a proposed geologic age defined by the indelible marks left on the earth by the human species. Whereas a number of other ecocritics (as we shall see) locate the greatest literary potential for new environmental writing in science fiction, Ghosh distinguishes himself in his commitment to a reformulated realism. Aligning himself with Margaret Atwood, he notes an affinity between science fiction and wonder tales that seek refuge in another world. Against this trend, Ghosh expresses his preference for works that “are set in a time that is recognizable as our own” and that “communicate, with marvelous vividness, the I R R • 265 uncanniness and improbability, the magnitude and interconnectedness of the transformations that are now under way” (73). In other words, Ghosh makes a case for an uncanny realism, a this-worldly narrative open to the strangeness of the present; he illustrates this approach with a lengthy aside on cyclones—a weather event that features prominently in his own realist eco-fiction, The Hungry Tide (2004). Building on this example, he envisions a transformed realism informed by contemporary science, a mode of writing that allows readers to see and feel the planetary changes that trigger unpredictable weather rather than rationally understanding the abstract normality of long-term climate changes. In the second half of The Great Derangement, Ghosh connects the national and political limitations of climate activism to the deep inequalities of an imperial order before turning in his final pages to the force of religious rhetoric and organizations. Like postcolonial scholars, he notes the Eurocentric focus of discourses surrounding climate and asserts the necessity of examining climate through the lens of empire while positioning Asia at the center of climate discussions. For Ghosh, advancing a more rigorously global understanding of climate requires examining the issue from the point of view of its disproportionate impact on Asian populations. He also proposes that a distinctive politics of climate activism may arise from Asian cultures. Religious worldviews of the continent in particular, Ghosh asserts, present an inherently global, long-term, and nonlinear account of the planet, since they commonly employ a logic of restraint and stewardship necessary to oppose economic growth models. “Religious worldviews,” Ghosh proposes, “transcend nation-states, and they all acknowledge intergenerational, long-term responsibilities; they do not partake of economistic ways of thinking”; they also accept “limits and limitations” in a manner that is “intimately related to the idea of the sacred, however one may wish to conceive of it” (160–61). For Ghosh, the uncanny climate stories of the Anthropocene would be well served by opening themselves to theological modes. Rather than repeating the pointed criticism of JudeoChristian assertions of a divinely authorized dominion over nature advanced by a number of Western environmentalists, Ghosh’s proposals open up a host of new political questions at the same time that they introduce some promising narrative possibilities. 266 • C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R E Resolving—or, better, dissolving—some of the well-known tensions between an inanimate world of scientific rationality and an uncannily vital earth is one of the projects that Stacy Alaimo takes on in her distinguished monograph Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times. Rejecting an elevated perspective associated with mainstream climate science, the abstraction of human activity as a force, and a joyless paradigm of sustainability, Alaimo advocates instead “performances of exposure, and imaginative dissolves [that] diverge from the predominant paradigm of sustainability by staying low, remaining open to the world, and becoming attuned to strange agencies” (173). Dissolution of an alienated human subjectivity into a state described as “disanthropocentrically” “ecodelic” (8, 166) is a pleasure-oriented ethical project that Alaimo defines and illustrates throughout her study. This condition mainly occurs when perceiving subjects who inhabit edge zones meet, interact, and meld, triggering processes that transform human consciousness. Alaimo argues that embracing this condition of dissolution “can help us resist the narrow scripting of our lives in which we tread the well-worn paths of work and consumerism” because it triggers new forms of ecstatic pleasure (38). This is a pointedly ethical project that Alaimo describes as merging with the political. Alaimo substantiates her argument through a set of intentionally eclectic and disorderly case studies. Individual chapters explore the language of domestication in several literary texts with ecological themes; document the polymorphous sexuality of animals (mainly mammals) in zoological studies; closely read images of naked human protest art; offer a critique of masculinist values in climate change discourse and energy consumerism; interrogate concepts of agency in anti-plastic activism; and propose the image of the submersed and dissolving shell as a figure for the subject of the Anthropocene. Several of these “modest and mundane sites, texts, and performances” are presented by means of the reproducible (especially photographic) image, a point that suggests Alaimo’s partial alignment with Ghosh, at least on the question of the difficulty that current modes of narrative realism seem to present for environmental concerns (7). For instance, in her chapter on the naked body, Alaimo describes the “abundant pleasure” (84) of La Tigresa’s Striptease to I R R • 267 Save the Trees, and she explains how the “skin of the human extends to the skin of the animal—erod[ing] individualist notions of the self as well as transcendent notions of the human” (78) in a Hong Kong PETA protest. It is difficult, though perhaps desirable, to imagine how such effects might be achieved in literary terms. A deeper commonality between Ghosh’s and Alaimo’s work, however, derives from their shared distaste for “the distant and abstract quality of climate change in Western societies”; like Ghosh, Alaimo defends weather—drawing on an essay by Astrida Neimanis and Rachel Lowen Walker to establish a continuity between her concept of exposure and the embeddedness and permeability of weather (82). Where Ghosh associates the abstractions of climate science primarily with Western imperialism, though, Alaimo presents a queer feminist critique that decries the enclosure of femininity within the bounds of nature, as well as criticizing the gender dualism and heteronormativity characteristic of environmentalist discourse. In place of Ghosh’s emphasis on unpredictability, however, Alaimo describes a “planet becom[ing] incredibly queer” and exhibiting “strange agencies of natural-cultural processes” (107). Weather here presents for Alaimo a figure for a trans-species and non-dualistic sexuality, while the “low” position of exposed erotic bodies disturbs the Platonic idealism of god’s-eye abstractions. Although Alaimo’s concept of erotically particular weather is appealingly surprising, it is not entirely clear how or why it provides more pleasure than, say, a sustainability project. Mastery and, for that matter, masculinity surely involve pleasures, too, and these pleasures may have something to do with their persistence. A more forceful dislodging of repressive or dominant pleasures may be required if queer ecocriticism is to flourish. One also wonders how the largely contemplative project of ecodelia might translate into various forms of public, social, and/or multispecies action. These questions also arise in Ursula K. Heise’s Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. While not devoting a great deal of attention to gender, “heterosexuality, the nuclear family, or male aggression” (forms of cultural projection that she describes as “easy to see”) throughout her study, Heise makes a case for treating culture in general as a limit for environmental thought (234–35). Gender norms, along with the other phenomena listed, 268 • C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R E reinforce cultural difference for Heise, and she advocates a comparatist approach that “make[s] explicit the cultural values that underpin our conservation priorities and procedures” (235). Aligning her project with environmentalists in the global south, Heise criticizes “environmentalists’ gloomy forecasts and nature nostalgia” as wishful longing for a pristine nature corrupted by modernity (11). Her analysis of the limitations of elegiac and epic extinction narratives concludes with a call to shift toward multicultural and multispecies ethnographies that depict the workings of a largely domesticated nature. A work she sees exemplifying this eco-cosmopolitanism is Orson Scott Card’s Ender series. Heise’s reading stresses the “careful negotiations” that Card’s humans must make in an ecological context that erodes distinctions among plant and animal kingdoms as well as among species (233). She presents the novel’s breeding programs as part of a project of future-oriented judicial decision-making in an environment already domesticated by the human—that is, in the Anthropocene. However insightful Heise’s reading of the novel may be, further explanation is necessary before we take her word that that “Card’s long history of antigay rhetoric and his widely publicized opposition to same-sex marriage in 2013, which may derive from his lifelong commitment to Mormonism, stand in jarring opposition to this vision of mutual acceptance and painstaking political negotiation” (231n12). Card’s Mormon commitment—with its distinctive visions of planetary space and the afterlife—may well orient his novelistic treatment of interspecies relations, as well as his treatment of gender norms. Throughout her study, Heise makes a strong case for cultural comparison, and, as Ghosh reminds us, religious discourse surely plays a vital role in culture. This syllogism suggests that religious orientations ought to be as relevant to a discussion of culturally different practices regarding nature as are gender, empire, race, or class. The source of many of the world’s most enduring tales concerned with the origins, end, and imagined purpose of biological life, religious—and more broadly, theo-philosophical—narratives merit serious consideration by ecocritics. One model for the comparatist approach that Heise advocates and might extend to theological rhetoric appears in her useful chapter on conservation law. Simple in premise, this chapter weighs the I R R • 269 assumptions underlying the U.S. Endangered Species Act of 1966 against those grounding German federal nature protection laws, European Union biodiversity conservation laws, and the constitutional rights granted to nature in the Bolivian constitution. Heise demonstrates the consequential differences among legal regimes focusing, respectively, on species, landscapes, habitat, and an ecosystem conceived as “a legal superperson via a detour through indigenous cosmology” (117). She concludes that applying a “U.S. yardstick on laws conceived in different legal, political, and cultural frameworks” distorts evaluations of the effectiveness of various systems (126). The clear implication here is that acknowledgement of competing cultural norms (especially in an imminent postAmerican world order) shifts the goals and processes of the political wing of environmentalism toward a more cosmopolitan direction. An ethics of cultural comparison thus supersedes any flatly universalizing politics. In this discussion, Heise’s primary target is Marxist universalism, an approach she considers insensitive to culture. Her account follows Dipesh Chakrabarty in asserting that the crisis of the Anthropocene requires a deep time species-consciousness incompatible with the historicism characteristic of critiques of capitalist modernity as a motor of climate change. Heise finds the concepts of class and exploitation in particular inadequate to the Anthropocene, arguing that “we need a new universalism,” one that allows humans to perceive and identify themselves as a species embedded in “lived, existential relations with other species and with the inanimate environment (soil, water, atmosphere, weather patterns)” (222, 225). Bypassing historical and economic (not to mention racial and gendered) inequities of power in favor of culture and species, Heise’s cosmopolitanism shares with Alaimo’s a focus on transforming human perception (especially in relation to animals). Despite their marked disagreement in other registers, both scholars offer visions of the political that downplay state or international action in favor of forms of justice that prioritize ethical, hermeneutic, or expressive forms. In this respect, Heise’s and Alaimo’s work is directly at odds with Ashley Dawson’s project in Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change. Dawson’s thorough, detailed, 270 • C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R E and crisply written study is the least explicitly literary of the projects considered in this review. Dawson explores “conditions of uneven development and disaster in cities around the globe”—with a particular focus on New York City, the “capital of capital” (13). Taking political process as his topic, Dawson identifies key challenges that climate change (especially rising sea levels) present for the management of urban life; he also skillfully extracts portable concepts and memorable anecdotes that summarize these issues. He documents, for instance, the concentration of financial resources for urban environmental protections into capital sinks such as ambitious but impractical seawalls, and he describes how these projects exacerbate economic inequalities and leave racial and ethnic minority communities unprotected. Careful attention to water issues in Miami, New Orleans, Rotterdam, and New York City’s Jamaica Bay wetlands also keeps Dawson’s narrative anchored in particular sites. Like Alaimo, Heise, and Ghosh, Dawson is sharply critical of “organizations attempting to address the impending climate emergency” by means of a “view [of] the planet as a total system to be engineered and optimized”; he objects to the trend in which “[s]uch views completely gloss over the complex ways humans interact with our surroundings, either natural or built up” (75). In Dawson’s case, however, the site specificity necessary for rich environmental analysis and active green politics moves by way of communities—especially “working-class people and communities of color [active] in producing urban nature” (74). Dawson understands and describes environmental politics occurring in public, communal contexts such as urban planning commissions rather than in artistic texts, personal perceptions, or consciousness raising. For Dawson’s project, a realist literary sensibility is not an endangered or dated effect of climate change. Instead, Dawson brings his considerable hermeneutic skills to bear on his readings of the rhetoric, jargon, and points of narrative closure in urban planning discussions, ably demonstrating the imaginative constraints of dominant accounts of urban responses to climate change. Dawson’s chapter on the so-called jargon of resilience is a case in point. In a manner reminiscent of Alaimo’s sharp critique of the language of sustainability and Heise’s assault on the apocalypticism of extinction stories, Dawson traces both the confused conceptual underpinnings I R R • 271 and the inequitable institutional effects of the concept of urban resilience, consistently pointing out how “resilience seems to offer adaptive solutions without addressing the political roots of contemporary social risk and disaster” (171). Dawson suggests discarding the notion of a stable equilibrium assumed by the concept of resilience in favor of a more direct address to political crises, such as the creation of huge populations of climate refugees and a global system of climate apartheid. He describes in detail episodes of socalled disaster communism in which urban residents discover new forms of solidarity in the face of crisis, and he outlines a program for planned adaptation of resource-hungry urban environments to climate chaos. Dawson’s study, in other words, engages in political critique before proceeding to document movements capable of converting extreme cities into ecocities. Returning throughout his study to responses to the specific weather event of Hurricane Sandy (rather than more general shifts in climatic conditions), Dawson treats politics in a direct, commonsense manner, and in so doing he not only renders the titular “peril and promise of urban life” in realistic detail. He also identifies already visible steps being taken toward a viable urban future. In both its future orientation and its concern with communities of color, Dawson’s project converges with some of Shelley Streeby’s concerns in Imagining the Future of Climate Change: World-Making through Science Fiction and Activism. In three chapters, Streeby’s succinct volume makes the case for reading speculative fiction, especially works by writers of color, as “visionary fictions” that “conceive of worlds that diverge from dominant narratives of power and privilege” (31) and describes artistic and activist projects that develop a forward-looking climate justice aesthetic responsive to disasters in the present. The first chapter pairs a discussion of Dakota water rights activism with the indigenous futurism of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991). Making ample use of archival sources, the second chapter persuasively demonstrates the centrality of climate concerns to the fiction of Octavia Butler, while the third contrasts the intersectional direct action strategies advanced by the activist and speculative fiction writer adrienne maree brown to the more limited plans of international NGOs. Streeby pointedly criticizes the “narrower frameworks for imagining the future of climate 272 • C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R E change shaped by international bodies dependent on nation-states in thrall to the global fossil fuel economy,” but prizes the “broad understandings of climate justice as inseparable from decolonization, the redistribution of wealth, and the decentralization of power, insisted upon by movements led by Indigenous people and people of color” (105). Like the other scholars discussed in this review, in other words, Streeby extracts a visionary futurism in the literary realm from a compromised mainstream environmentalism, preferring weather to climate. Like Dawson, Streeby understands politics in activist and collective terms, and she aligns the literary imagination with resistant communities of color engaging in site-specific struggles. Like Ghosh, she also stresses the need for new types of narrative, although unlike Ghosh, Streeby clearly anticipates these emerging from speculative genres rather than realism. Examining this set of contributions to the environmental humanities all together, one notes the recurrence of three questions: How do ecocritics understand the political? What role does cultural difference play in environmental action? Which literary genres might be best suited to environmental (especially climate) matters? The answers to these questions distinguish the reigning positions in the field. That said, all of these studies share a common commitment to differentiating themselves from a dominant form of environmental discourse—one that abstracts to statistical and global scales, reinforces a dislocated scientific authority, and further marginalizes already disempowered populations. Through criticism of key terms such as sustainability, resilience, extinction, and probability, the authors considered in this review unravel climate truisms in favor of an aesthetically eclectic set of weather narratives. Taking weather seriously as a figure for local, immediate, and collective events perceptible on a human scale, these ecocritics develop an approach to the literature of the Anthropocene that shows promise for linking this writing to citizen science projects, everyday responses to disaster management, and new types of action and activism responsive to shared conditions. Whatever their internal quarrels over method (or against method), the weather stories unifying this new batch of ecocritics all begin from the premise that Earth’s climate has already changed and that increasingly vivid and appealing narratives I R R • 273 are necessary to address this condition because a climate science uninformed by cultural and political history quickly falls prey to forces it is unprepared to combat. From the battle-scarred humanities, these scholars propose, arrive allies equipped to reinforce a more openly activist environmentalism. Brandeis University