Table Of ContentTIMESCALES
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis | London
TIMESC ALES
THINKING ACROSS ECOLOGICAL TEMPORALITIES
BETHANY WIGGIN, CAROLYN FORNOFF, AND PATRICIA EUNJI KIM
EDITORS
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28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
C O N T E N T S
Introduction: Environmental Humanities vii
across Times, Disciplines, and Research Practices
CAROLYN FORNOFF, PATRICIA EUNJI KIM,
AND BETHANY WIGGIN
PART I VARIATIONS AND METHODS
1. Time Bomb: Pessimistic Approaches 3
to Climate Change Studies
JASON BELL AND FRANK PAVIA
2. Earth’s Changing Climate: 27
A Deep- Time Geoscience Perspective
JANE E. DMOCHOWSKI AND DAVID A. D. EVANS
3. Deep Time and Landscape History: 39
How Can Historical Particularity Be Translated?
ÖMÜR HARMANŞAH
ETUDE 1 A Period of Animate Existence
4. Staging Climate: A Period of 55
Animate Existence and the Global Imaginary
MARCIA FERGUSON
5. A Period of Animate Existence 63
TROY HERION, MIMI LIEN, AND DAN ROTHENBERG
6. Conversations with Dan Rothenberg, 71
Director of A Period of Animate Existence
BETHANY WIGGIN
PART II VARIATIONS, FAST AND SLOW
7. Time Machines and Timelapse Aesthetics 79
in Anthropocenic Modernism
CHARLES M. TUNG
8. Fishing for the Anthropocene: Time in Ocean Governance 95
JENNIFER E. TELESCA
ETUDE 2 WetLand
9. WetLand Manifesto 111
MARY MATTINGLY
10. Figuring WetLand 115
KATE FARQUHAR
PART III REPETITIONS AND VARIATIONS
11. Vanishing Sounds: Thoreau and the Sixth Extinction 131
WAI CHEE DIMOCK
12. Hoopwalking: Human Rewilding 151
and Anthropocene Chronotopes
PAUL MITCHELL
13. Dirt Eating in the Disaster 169
IEMANJÁ BROWN
ETUDE 3 Futurity Unknown
14. The Memory of Plants: Genetics, Migration, 183
and the Construction of the Future
BEATRIZ CORTEZ
Coda 193
CAROLYN FORNOFF, PATRICIA EUNJI KIM,
AND BETHANY WIGGIN
Contributors 203
I N T R O D U C T I O N
Environmental Humanities across Times,
Disciplines, and Research Practices
CAROLYN FORNOFF, PATRICIA EUNJI KIM, AND BETHANY WIGGIN
Writing as writing. Writing as rioting. Writing as righting.
On the best days, all three.
— Teju Cole
Timescales is a coproduction of environmental researchers— academics,
including scientists and humanists, as well as artists. Writing to-
gether, “rioting” across disciplines and across the following pages,
might, “on the best of days,” also anticipate “righting,” in the homo-
phones by fiction writer, essayist, and photographer Teju Cole, whose
words we take as epigraph. Timescales provides a bound form to ex-
pansive discussions about how to represent and respond to planetary
changes whose global scope and local variations exceed the purview
of either the human or the natural sciences and are beyond the ken
of any one writer. They exist at once in the quick time of the tweet,
including Cole’s, and of the lingering stretches needed to craft a col-
lection of essays, including this one.
Animated by a creative pulse throughout, the rhythms in this vol-
ume are irregular, fast and slow, sometimes both. And necessarily so,
for so entangled are our times that they sometimes surpass the dis-
ciplinary conventions that would write them— let alone right them.
East Antarctica’s Totten glacier, for example, was formed at the
boundary between the Eocene and Oligocene epochs some 34 mil-
lion years ago. In fall 2016, it was reported that this largest source
of Antarctic ice had detached from the bedrock, melted from the bot-
tom by ocean waters warming increasingly rapidly since the launch
of the profoundly human experiment: the Great Acceleration.1 This
alarming occurrence made visible a massive temporal collision: the
fast melt of ice formed over long millennia. The literally unsettling
| vii
viii | CAROLYN FORNOFF, PATRICIA EUNJI KIM, AND BETHANY WIGGIN
implications of this human– nature imbrication also stretch far into
the future as sea level rise displaces human and other populations
along coastlines. Ongoing events such as ice melt, akin to ocean acid-
ification and species loss, are at once fast and slow, short and long,
human and more.
These chilling simultaneities throw up a series of questions about
time that the scholarly essays and creative interventions in this collec-
tion variously consider: What modes of understanding can help ren-
der multiple temporalities legible, and write- able? How might the grip
of modernity’s temporal regime, “the terrors of Progress,” be loos-
ened?2 How quickly or slowly do environments toxify, adapt, trans-
form, or heal? When will we exceed concentrations of atmospheric
CO that render life as we know it unsupportable? How might we rec-
2
oncile the temporalities of biological, material, and social networks
within a single environment?
While we humans have sometimes quickly responded to spectacu-
lar environmental catastrophes, we have more often failed to address
local and global circumstances produced by imperialist structures of
racism and species ism developed in the longue durée. Faced in late
2016 with national election results in the United States that gave cli-
mate change deniers access to the levers of federal power, and with
the rise of populism laced with an antiscience, white supremacist
ideology in liberal democracies across the West and beyond, these
questions seem more intractable than ever. They demand alternative
and experimental modes of temporal engagement and visualization
at the intersection of the arts, humanities, and natural and social sci-
ences, and they suggest the need for more publicly engaged research.
The environmental humanities, an emergent space for interdisci-
plinary knowledge production, is a response to the fact that these
concerns are not adequately addressed by current institutional struc-
tures and may indeed be exacerbated by them. Experimenting across
and within environmental ways of knowing, environmental humani-
ties pick up the interdisciplinary charge that fuels environmental and
sustainability studies and adds to them the recognition that environ-
mental challenges from climate change to species loss are primarily
cultural issues, questions of “what we value and what stories we tell,
and only secondarily issues of science.”3
We, the coauthors of this Introduction, have been talking to-
INTRODUCTION | ix
gether for several years while piloting a nascent, highly experimental
environmental humanities program at the university level. With the
contributors to Timescales, we have sought to articulate and embody
a future- oriented practice of environmental humanism, all the while
mindful of the difficult legacies and inhuman exclusions in each of
those terms, in environment no less than in humanism. Writing to-
gether has sometimes been a riot. We have talked— and cajoled, and
argued, and cried in frustration, and shrieked with laughter— about
how to write and about how our writing might relate, if at all, to
righting. In thinking about ecological timescales, we have inevitably
thought about the temporal disciplines of our individual humanistic
fields— ancient Mediterranean and Middle East (Kim), contemporary
Latin America (Fornoff), and the early modern Atlantic (Wiggin). In
attempting to multiply and connect open- ended forms of ecological
knowing, we have also articulated practices for the environmental
humanities. They are experimental, devised performances, inspired
by our collaborations on Timescales with artists with whom we made
several etudes in preparation for A Period of Animate Existence, a hy-
brid musical and devised performance that had its world premiere in
Philadelphia in September 2017. The names of the volume’s sections,
“variations,” “etudes,” and a “coda” bear witness to our sustained
“chitchats” with artists whose practices arise in dialogue with the
European classical music tradition. We borrow the term “chitchat”
from Jason Bell and Frank Pavia’s opening chapter in the first varia-
tion. Another chitchat, between Wiggin and theater director Dan
Rothenberg, concludes the volume’s second interlude, recording just
one of the thousands of conversations between the artists and aca-
demics who collaborated to create Timescales. And a final chitchat
gives us, the editors, time and space to say goodbye to the period of
this volume’s making amid wonderfully animated collaborations.
The volume’s origins lie most immediately in a conference held
in 2016 that included scholarly papers, a theatrical etude, and an in-
stallation that aimed to marry art and science so as better to think
through ecological timescales— including, but also before and be-
yond, the time of humans.4 The conference was the brainchild of
student fellows in our environmental humanities program, and the
program itself was born of students’ desire for sustained environ-
mental inquiry across disciplines.5 Timescales, coedited by two former
