John Parham

Remaindering: the material ecology of junk and composting

In 2012, Green Letters 16 displayed on its cover an arresting image from Chris Jordan’s (2011) Midway series. Jordan’s photographs, from the Midway Atoll, a cluster of isolated islands between the American continent and East Asia, document a bizarre and shameful occurrence – the detritus of human consumption in the stomachs of dead baby albatrosses. ‘The nesting chicks are fed lethal quantities of plastic by their parents’, Jordan (2011) writes, because they ‘mistake the floating trash for food as they forage over the vast polluted Pacific Ocean’. Images of dispersed or far flung or festering, mountainous layers of junk are becoming familiar – replayed, for example, in recent documentaries such as the Oscar-nominated Brazilian-American film Waste Land (2010), the Jeremy Irons narrated Trashed (2012), or the dark humour of the YouTube video hit ‘The Majestic Plastic Bag’. Terrible indictments of an international consumer culture junking a global ecosystem, these images also exemplify the other side to this dual-themed Green Letters, composting. For displayed, repeated, re-read, the idea and visual record of a ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’, and related imagery, has been slowly composting in a global cultural sphere, perhaps nourishing changes in consciousness that might be individual, social, even, one day, political. The terms – junk and composting – around which this issue pivots are considered in connection with recent developments in ecological aesthetics and philosophy that have reexamined the sticky concept of materialism. ‘New materialisms’ and their theorisation in a ‘material ecocriticism’ (see Iovino and Oppermann 2012, 448) stress the agency of all forms of matter. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost talk, for example, of ‘choreographies of becoming’ (2010, 10) to describe the way in which matter is always engaged in dynamic processes of forming and reforming; Stacy Alaimo’s ‘trans-corporeality’ (2008, 238) sees matter as constantly entering into new combinations, or, to use Karen Barad’s term, ‘intraactions’ (2008, 128), as it crosses environments and bodies. Jane Bennett, likewise, draws our attention to the ongoing vitality of material ‘things’ – not least the detritus of human activity – that remain active long after their initial function has been fulfilled (2010, 2). Such ideas direct ecocritical attention towards the interrelated subjects of trash, waste, garbage, junk. But, while material ecocriticism has highlighted the effects of humanity’s impact on the earth, arguably it has been less forthcoming in its examination of emotional affect; that is, in exploring the ways in which cultural forms might dramatise those effects or posit alternative outcomes. At one level, applying these motifs so that they might illuminate perspectives afforded by material ecocriticism, starts as a matter (sic) of semiotics. Accordingly, the essays in this volume of Green Letters variously reclaim, reframe, reposition the language of junk, composting, or upcycling, reflecting the simple truth that in their ‘intra-actions’ and combinations such words are not simply ‘re-cycled’ but altered, afforded new powers and new potentialities. And that potential power is, then, often further demonstrated by our contributors, who draw attention to intriguing, rich, sometimes little-known texts (see Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, 2014 Vol. 18, No. 1, 1–8, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2014.897071

Oil, paper, stone

Next year Green Letters will publish an issue on ‘petrofiction’ (forthcoming, 23:3). Its central concern is to explore the relationship between energy history and cultural history. Capital lies at the heart of that relationship, argues Andreas Malm in Fossil Capital. The material basis for today’s capitalist economies – road tested in Britain – was a preference for extracting energy from fossilised carbon as opposed to a less governable alternative, water. As a static energy source, coal could be collected and transported in a way that water could not, enabling manufacturing to be located in any place to which coal could be transported. Consequently, Malm continues, coal facilitated the static urban ‘agglomeration economies’ favoured by capitalists (2016, 158). An infrastructure of factories, warehouses, depots, and transportation all in one place allowed for a labour force ‘easily procured and trained to industrious habits’ (346) offering, in turn, an inbuilt market for consumer goods. Another point Malm makes concerning the intertwining of human with energy history is that, however unforeseen the consequences, the relationship was willed. It was, and is, a will to power, a historical, world-making force as embodied by Daniel Day-Lewis playing the conniving and ruthless oil prospector Daniel Plainview in the film There Will be Blood (2007). We are all living now with the force of carbon and of humans. The world as we know it will collapse if we run out of oil. Moreover, as Stephanie LeMenager argues in Living Oil (as cited in the call for papers for our petrofiction issue), we ‘experience ourselves [. . .] every day in oil, living within oil, breathing it and registering it with our senses’ (LeMenager 2014, 6). As anyone who’s has had the misfortune to attend a motor racing event might testify, that’s a horrible place to be. Yet, when held up to scrutiny we are also confronted with the fact that fossil power’s seemingly catastrophic impact on the Earth is less the consequence of an external invasive agency than of humanity’s profound material immersion on an Earth epochs-old. That is, the decidedly recent human history of fossil capital is immersed in the Earth’s profoundly deeper history which is far from governable. Such realities underlie Keith Moser’s proposition, in the first essay in this issue ofGreen Letters, for a ‘cosmic historiography’. In his extensively cited essay ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’ Dipesh Chakrabarty reflects that all of his reading, over 25 years, around globalisation, Marxist analyses of capital, and postcolonial theory had ill prepared him for making sense of a contemporary planetary crisis. Suggesting that theory and history are marked by the same sense of dualism (against ‘nature’) and exceptionalism as humanism in general, Chakrabarty argues that historians should reintegrate human history with natural history (1967, 199-201). Such a project motivates Moser’s ‘cosmic historiography’, a paradigm constructed around J.M.G. Le Clézio’s Terra Amata (1967) – an experimental narrative of prose, poetry and occasional drawings – and Michel Serres’ philosophy of, as Christopher Watkin has labelled it, the ‘Grand Récit’ (‘great story’). In his work, suggests Moser, Serres argues both for a return to a history of grand narratives and against conventional historiography which, he argues, tends to laud human ingenuity without attending to the impact of that GREEN LETTERS: STUDIES IN ECOCRITICISM 2018, VOL. 22, NO. 2, 123–128 https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2018.1497118

A Global History of Literature and the Environment

An international group of scholars illustrate the immense riches of environmental writing from the earliest literary periods down to the present. It addresses ancient writings about human/animal/plant relations from India, classical Greece, Chinese and Japanese literature, the Maya Popol Vuh, Islamic texts, medieval European works, eighteenth-century and Romantic ecologies, colonial/postcolonial environmental interrelations, responses to industrialization, and the emerging literatures of the world in the present Anthropocene moment. Essays range from Trinidad to New Zealand, Estonia to Brazil. Discussion of these texts indicates a variety of ways environmental criticism can fruitfully engage literary works and cultures from every continent and every historical period. This is a uniquely varied and rich international history of environmental writing from ancient Mesopotamian and Asian works to the present. It provides a compelling account of a topic that is crucial to twenty-first-century global literary studies.

Picturing a vacuum? Green letters from the Anthropocene

This is a wide-ranging issue of Green Letters. Six essays encompass seventeenth-century English literature, the contemporary Chinese novel, Australian literature, tales of Filipino animals, the Fre...

Fossil capital: the rise of steam power and the roots of global warming, by Andreas Malm, London and New York, Verso, 2016, 488 pp., £19.99 (paperback), ISBN 13: 978-1-78478-129-3

continuing investigation in a project whose affects have been felt by a global community of scholars. As ‘The end of cheap garbage may loom larger than the end of cheap resources,’ as frontiers and extra-human natures, as well as humans, are engulfed by the toxifying ‘worldecology’ of neoliberal capitalism (305), interdisciplinary dialogue is not a luxury, but a necessity. The question remains as to whether a radical socialist ecopolitics through a more emancipatory and liberationist technics would even be enough to prevent continuing planetary damage, or if particular technological fixes within this more advanced mode of production might actually be necessary even in the event of capitalism’s collapse. The importance of theorisation and conversation around such topics will provoke scholarly critique, and Moore’s work will remain central to the terms of the debate.

Snow in April: assessing the climate

It snowed again on the morning I began writing this editorial. Snow in April: in the temperate climate of the United Kingdom this is unusual, and ‘uncanny’, and begs precisely the kinds of questions with which ecocriticism concerns itself. Louise Chamberlain’s essay, in this volume of Green Letters, calls timely attention to the occurrence of snow in two seemingly contrasting poems by the Tyneside poet Barry MacSweeney. In each, snow is indicative of an intermingling of ‘nature’ with society. In Pearl, a human’s ‘silhouetted/limbs’ cast a shadow over the snow, which might, in turn, be mistaken for ‘distant arches and viaducts’. In Hellbound Memos, snow mixes with the city’s artificial vapour and industrial smoke: